Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber Part 4

On emerging from the streets of the city, I found the east in the glow of dawn. Still, and pure, and calm broke the light; and under its ray the rich plain awoke into beauty, forgetful of the fiery bolts which had smitten it, and the darkness and destruction which had so lately pa.s.sed across it. "Hail, holy light!" exclaims the bard of "Paradise." Yes, light is holy. It is undefiled and pure, as when "G.o.d saw the light that it was good." Man has ravaged the earth and reddened the seas; but light has escaped his contaminating touch, and is still as G.o.d made it, unless, indeed, when man imprisons it within the stained gla.s.s of the cathedral, and then obligingly helps its dimness by lighting a score or so of tapers. Did no monk ever think of putting a stained window in the east, and compelling the sun to ogle the world through spectacles? "The light is good," said He who created it, as He saw it darting its first pure beam across creation. Not so, says the Puseyite; it is not good unless it is coloured.

I looked with interest on the plains around Novara; for there, albeit no trace of the b.l.o.o.d.y fray remains, the army of Charles Albert in 1848 met the host of Radetzky; and there the fate of the campaign for Italian independence was decided. The battle which was fought on these plains led to the destruction of King Charles Albert, but not to the destruction of his kingdom of Sardinia,--though why Radetzky did not follow up his victory by a march on Turin, is to this hour a mystery.

Nay, though it sounds a little paradoxical, it is probable that this battle, by destroying the king, saved the kingdom. Had Charles Albert survived till the re-action set in 1849 and 1850, there is too much reason to fear, from his antecedents, that he would have thrown himself into the current with the rest of the Italian rulers; and so Sardinia would have missed the path of const.i.tutional liberty and material development which it has since, under King Victor Emanuel, so happily pursued. Had that happened, the horizon of Italy, dark as it is at this hour, would have been still darker, and the peninsula, from the Alps to Sicily, would not have contained a single spot where the hunted friends of liberty could have found asylum.

We soon approached the Ticino, the boundary between Sardinia and Austrian Lombardy. The Ticino is a majestic river, here spanned by one of the finest bridges in Italy. It contains eleven arches; is of the granite of Mount Torfano; and, like almost all the great modern works in Italy, was commenced by Napoleon, though finished only after his fall.

Here, then, was the gate of Austria; and seated at that gate I saw three Croats,--fit keepers of Austrian order.

I was not ignorant of the hand these men had had in the suppression of the revolution of 1848, and of the ruthless tragedies they were said to have enacted in Milan and other cities of Lombardy; and I rode up to them in the eager desire of scrutinizing their features, and reading there the signs of that ferocity which had given them such wide-spread but evil renown. They sat basking themselves on a bench in front of the Dogana, with their muskets and bayonets glittering in the sun. They were lads of about eighteen, of decidedly low stature, of square build, and strongly muscular. They looked in capital condition, and gave every sign that the air of Lombardy agreed with them, and that they had had their own share at least of its corn and wine. They wore blue caps, gray duffle greatcoats like those used by our Highlanders, light blue pantaloons fitting closely their thick short leg, and boots which rose above the ankle, and laced in front. The prevailing expression on their broad swarthy faces was not ferocity, but stolidity. Their eyes were dull, and contrasted strikingly with the dark fiery glances of the children of the land. They seemed men of appet.i.tes rather than pa.s.sions; and, if guilty of cruel deeds, were likely to be so from the dull, cold, unreflecting ferocity of the bull-dog, rather than from the warm impulsive instincts of the n.o.bler animals. In stature and feature they were very much the barbarian, and were admirably fitted for being what they were,--the tools of the despot. No wonder that the _ideal_ Italian abominates the _Croat_.

The Dogana! So soon! 'Twas but a few miles on the other side of the Ticino that we pa.s.sed through this ordeal. But perhaps the river, glorious as it looks, flowing from the democratic hills of the Swiss, may have infected us with political pravity; so here again we must undergo the search, and that not a mere _pro forma_ one. The _diligence_ vomits forth, at all its mouths, trunks, carpet-bags, and packages, encased, some in velvet, some in fir-deals, and some in brown paper. The multifarious heap was carried into the Dogana, and its various articles unroped, unlocked, and their contents scattered about. One might have thought that a great fair was about to begin, or that a great Industrial Exhibition was to be opened on the banks of the Ticino. The hunt was especially for books,--bad books, which England will perversely print, and Englishmen perversely read. My little stock was collected, bound together with a cord, and sent in to the chief douanier, who sat, Radamanthus-like, in an inner apartment, to judge books, papers, and persons. There is nothing there, thought I, to which even an Austrian official can take exception. Soon I was summoned to follow my little library. The man examined the collection volume by volume. At last he lighted on a number of the _Gazetta del Popolo_,--the same which I have already mentioned as given me by the editors in Turin. This, thought I, will prove the dead fly in my box of ointment. The sheet was opened and examined. "Have you," said the official, "any more?" I could reply with a clear conscience that I had not. To my surprise, the paper was returned to me. He next took up my note-book. Now, said I to myself, this is a worse sc.r.a.pe than the other. What a blockhead I am not to have put the book into my pocket; for, except in extreme cases, the traveller's person is never searched. The man opened the thin volume, and found it inscribed with mysterious and strange characters. It was written in short-hand. He turned over the leaves; on every page the same unreadable signs met the eye. He held it by the top, and next by the bottom: it was equally inscrutable either way. He shut it, and examined its exterior, but there was nothing on the outside to afford a key to the mystic characters within. He then turned to me for an explanation of the suspicious little book. Affecting all the unconcern I could, I told him that it contained only a few commonplace jottings of my journey. He opened the book; took one other leisurely survey of it; then looked at me, and back again at the book; and, after a considerable pause, big with the fate of my book, he made me a bland bow, and handed me the volume. I was equally polite on my part, inly resolving, that henceforward Austrian douanier should not lay finger on my note-book.

The halt here was one of from two to three hours, which were spent in unlading the _diligence_, opening and locking trunks,--for in Austria nothing is done in a hurry, save the trial and execution of Mazzinists.

But the long halt was nothing to me: I could not possibly lose time, and I could scarce be stopped at the wrong place; and certainly the bridge of the Ticino is the very spot one would select for such a halt, were the matter left in one's own choice. It commands the finest a.s.semblage of grand objects, in a ride abounding in magnificent objects throughout.

Having been p.r.o.nounced, in pa.s.sport phrase, "good to enter Austria,"--for my carpet-bag was clean, though doubtless my mind was foul with all sorts of notions which, in the lat.i.tude of Austria, are rankly heretical,--(and, by the way, of what use is it to search trunks, and leave b.r.e.a.s.t.s unexplored? Here is an imperfection in the system, which I wonder the Jesuits don't correct)--having, I say, had the Croat-guarded gates of Austria opened to me till I should find it convenient to enter, I retraced the few paces which divided the Dogana from the bridge, and stood above the rolling floods of the Ticino.

Refres.h.i.+ng it verily was to turn from the petty tyrannies of an Austrian custom-house, to the free, joyous, and glorious face of nature. Before me were the Alps, just shaking the cold night mists from their s.h.a.ggy pine-clad sides, as might a lion the dew-drops from his mane. Here rose Monte Rosa in a robe of never-fading glory and beauty; and there stood Mont Blanc, with his diadem of dazzling snows. The giant had planted his feet deep amid rolling hills, covered with villages, and pine-forests, and rich pastures. Anywhere else these would have been mountains; but, dwarfed by the majestic form in whose presence they stood, they looked like small eminences, scattered gracefully at his base, as pebbles at the foot of some lofty pile. On his breast floated the fleecy clouds of morn, while his summit rose high above these clouds, and stood, in the calm of the firmament, a stupendous pile of ice and snow. Never had I seen the Alps to such advantage. The level plain ran quite up to them, and allowed the eye to take their full height from their flower-girt base to their icy summit. Hundreds and hundreds of peaks ran along the sky, conical, serrated, needle-shaped, jagged, some flaming like the ruby in the morning ray, others dazzlingly white as the alabaster.

As I bent over the parapet, gazing on the flood that rolled beneath, I could not help contrasting the bounty of nature with the oppression of man. Here had this river been flowing through the long centuries, dispensing its blessings without stop or grudge. Day and night, summer and winter, it had rolled gladsomely onwards, bringing verdure to the field, fruitage to the bough, and plenty to the peasant's cot. Now it laved the flower on its brink,--now it fed the umbrageous sycamore and the tall poplar on the plain,--and now it sent off a crystal streamlet to meander through corn-field and meadow-land. It exacted nothing of man for the blessings it so unweariedly dispensed. It gave all freely.

Whether, said I to myself, does Italy owe most to its rivers or to its Governments? Its rivers give it corn and wine: its Governments give it chains and prisons. They load the patient Lombard with burdens that press him down into toil and poverty; or they lead him away to shed his blood and lay his bones in a foreign soil. Why is it that all the functions of nature are beneficent? Even the storms that rage around Mont Blanc, the ice of its eternal winter, yield only good. Here they come, a river of crystal water, decking with living green this far-spreading plain. But the inst.i.tutions of man are not so. From their frozen summits have too oft, alas! descended, not the peaceful river, but the thundering avalanche, burying in irretrievable ruin, man, with his labours and hopes. I suspect, however, that this is a narrow as well as a sombre philosophy. Doubtless the great fact of the Fall is written on the face of life. Nevertheless, we have a strong belief that the mighty schemes of Providence, like the arrangements of external nature, will all in the end become dispensers of good; that those evil systems which have burdened the earth, like those mountains of ice and snow which rise on its surface, have their uses, though as yet we stand too near them, and too much within the sphere of their tempests and their avalanches, fully to comprehend these uses. We must descend into the low-lying plains of the future, and contemplate them afar off; and then the glaciers and tempests of these moral Mont Blancs may dissolve into tender showers and crystal rivers, which will fructify and gladden the world.

In a few minutes I must leave the bridge of the Ticino. Could I, when far away,--in the seclusion of my own library, for instance,--bid the Alps rise before me, in stupendous magnificence, as now? I turned round, and fixed my gaze on the tamer objects of the plain; then back again to the mountains; but every time I did so, I felt the scene as new. Its glory burst on me as if seen for the first time. Alas! thought I, if this majestic image has so faded in the interval of a few moments, what will it be years after? A scene like this, it is true, can never be forgotten; but it is but a dwarfed picture that lives in the memory; and it is well, perhaps, it should be so; for were one to see always the Alps, with what eyes would one look upon the tamer though still romantic hills of his own country! And we may extend the principle. There are times when great truths--eternal verities--flash upon the soul in Alpine magnitude. It is a new world that discloses itself, and we are thrilled by its glory; but for the effective discharge of ordinary duties, it is better, perhaps, that these stupendous objects should be seen "as through a gla.s.s darkly," though still seen.

All too soon was the _diligence_ ready to start. From the bridge of the Ticino the scenery was decidedly tamer. The Alps fell more into the background, and with their white peaks disappeared the chief glory of the scene. The plain was so level, and its woods of mulberry and walnut so luxuriant, that little could be seen save the broad road, with its white lines of curb-stones running on and on, and losing itself in the deep foliage of the plain. Its windings and turnings, though coming only at an interval of many miles, were a pleasant relief from the sameness of the journey. Occasionally side views of great fertility opened upon us. There were the small farms of the Lombard; and there was the tall Lombard himself, striding across his fields. If the farms were small, amends was made by the largeness of the farm-house. There was no great air of comfort about it, however. It wanted its little garden, and its over-arching vine-bough, which one sees in the happier cantons of Switzerland; and the furrowed and care-shaded face of the owner bespoke greater acquaintance with hard labour than with the dainties which the bounteous earth so freely yields. The Lombard plants, but another eats.

We could see, too, how extensively and thoroughly irrigated was the plain. Numerous ca.n.a.ls, brim-full of water, the gift of the Alps, traversed it in all directions; and by means of a system of sluices and aqueducts the surrounding fields could be flooded at pleasure. The plain enjoys thus the elements of a boundless fertility, and is the seat of an almost eternal summer.

Hic Ver perpetuum, atque alienis mensibus aestas.

But the little towns we pa.s.sed looked so very old and tottering, and the inhabitants, too, appeared as much oppressed with years or cares as the heavy dilapidated architecture amid which they dwelt, and out of which they crept as we pa.s.sed by, that one's heart grew sad. How evident was it that the immortal spirit was withered, and that the land, despite its images of grandeur and sublimity, nourished a stricken race! The Alps were still young, but the men that lived within their shadow had grown very old. Their ears had too long been familiar with the clank of chains, and their hearts were too sad to catch up the utterances of freedom which came from their mountains. The human soul was dying, and will die, unless new fire from a celestial source descend to rekindle it. Architecture, music, new const.i.tutions, the ever glorious face of nature itself, will not prevent the approaching death of the continental nations. There is but one book in the world that can do it,--the Book of Life. Unfold its pages, and a more blessed and glorious effulgence than that which lights up the Alps at sunrise will break upon the nations; but, alas! this cannot be so long as the Jesuit and the Croat are there.

We saw, too, on our journey, other things that did not tend to put us into better spirits. As we approached Milan, we met a couple of gensdarmes leading away a poor foot-sore revolutionist to the frontier.

Ah! said I inly, could the Jesuits look into my breast, they would find there ideas more dangerous to their power, in all probability, than those that this man entertains; and yet, while he is expelled, I am admitted. No thanks to them, however. I rode onwards. League followed league of the richest but the most unvaried scenery. Campanile and hamlet came and went: still Milan came not. I strained my eyes in the direction in which I expected its roofs and towers to appear, but all to no purpose. At length there rose over the green woods that covered the plain, as if evoked by enchantment, a vision of surpa.s.sing beauty. I gazed entranced. The lovely creation before me was white as the Alpine snows, and shot up in a glorious cl.u.s.ter of towers, spires, and pinnacles, which flashed back the splendours of the mid-day sun. It looked as if it had sprung from under the chisel but yesterday. Indeed, one could hardly believe that human hands had fas.h.i.+oned so fair a structure. It was so delicate, and graceful, and aerial, and unsullied, that I thought of the city which burst upon the pilgrims when they had got over the river, or that which a prophet saw descending out of heaven. Milan, hid in rich woods, was before me, and this was its renowned Cathedral.

CHAPTER VIII.

CITY AND PEOPLE OF MILAN.

The Barrier--Beautiful Aspect of the City--Hotel Royale--History of Milan--Dreariness of its Streets--Decay of Art--Decay of Trade--The Cathedral--Beauty, not Sublimity, its Characteristic--Its Exterior described--The Piazza of the Cathedral--Austrian Cannon--Pamphlets on Purgatory--Punch--Punch _versus_ the Priest--Church and State in Italy--Austrian Oppression--Confiscation of Estates in Lombardy--Forced Loans--Niebuhr's Idea that the Dark Ages are returning.

It was an hour past noon when the _diligence_, with its polyglot freight, drove up to the harrier. There gathered round the vehicle a white cloud of Austrian uniforms, and straightway every compartment of the carriage bristled with a forest of hands holding pa.s.sports. These the men-at-arms received; and, making them hastily up into a bundle, and tying them with a piece of cord, they despatched them by a special messenger to the Prefect; so that hardly had we entered the Porta Vercellina, till our arrival was known at head-quarters. There was handed at the same time to each pa.s.senger a printed paper, in which the same notification was four times repeated,--first in Italian, next in French, then in German, and lastly in English,--enjoining the holder, under certain penalties, to present himself within a given number of hours at the Police Office.

It was under these conditions,--a pilgrim from a far land,--that I appeared at the gates of Milan. The pa.s.sport detention seemed less an annoyance here than I had ever felt it before. The beauteous city, sitting so tranquilly amidst the sublimest scenery, seemed to have something of a celestial character about it. It looked so resplendent, partly by reason of the materials of which it is built, and partly by reason of the sun that shone upon it as an Italian sun only can s.h.i.+ne, that none but pure men, I felt, might dwell here, and none but pure men might enter at its gates. There were white sentinels at its portals; rows of white houses formed its exterior; and in the middle of the city, floating above it,--for it seemed to float rather than to rest on foundations,--was its snow-white temple,--a place too holy almost, as it seemed, for human wors.h.i.+p and human wors.h.i.+ppers; and then the city had for battlements a glorious wall, white as alabaster, which rose to the clouds. Everything conspired to cheat the visitor into the belief that he had come at last to an abode where every hurtful pa.s.sion was hushed, and where Peace had fixed her chosen seat.

"All right," shouted the pa.s.sport official: the gensdarmes, who guarded the path with naked bayonet, stepped aside; and the quick, sharp crack of the postilion's whip set the horses a-moving. We skirted the s.p.a.cious esplanade, and saw in the distance the beauteous form of the Arco della Pace. We had not gone far till the drum's roll struck upon the ear, and a long glittering line of Austrian bayonets was seen moving across the esplanade. It was evident that the time had not yet come to Milan, all glorious as she seemed, when men "shall learn war no more." We plunged into a series of narrow streets, which open on the Mercato Vecchio. We crossed the Corso, and came out upon the broad promenade that traverses Milan from the square of the Duomo to the Porta Orientale. We soon found ourselves at the _diligence_ office; and there, our little colony of various nations breaking up, I bade adieu to the good vehicle which had carried me from Turin, and took my way to the Hotel Royale, in the Contrada dei tre Re.

At the first summons of the porter's bell the gate opened. On entering, I found myself in what had been one of the palaces of Milan when the city was in its best days. But the Austrian eagle had scared the native princes and n.o.bles of the Queen of Lombardy, who were gone, and had left their streets to be trodden by the Croat, and their palaces to be tenanted by the wayfarer. The buildings of the hotel formed a s.p.a.cious quadrangle, three storeys high, with a finely paved court in the centre.

I was conducted up stairs to my bed-room, which, though by no means large, and plainly furnished, presented the luxury of extreme cleanliness, with its beautifully polished wooden floor, and its delicately white napery and curtains. The saloon on the ground-floor opened sweetly into a little garden, with its fountain, its bit of rock-work, and its G.o.ds and nymphs of stone. The apartment had a peculiarly comfortable air at breakfast-time. The hissing urn, flanked by the tea-caddy; the rich brown coffee, the delicious b.u.t.ter, and the not less delicious bread, the produce of the plains around, not unnaturally white, as with us, but golden, like the wheat when it waves in the autumnal sun; and the guests, mostly English, which a.s.sembled morning after morning,--made the return of this hour very pleasant.

Establis.h.i.+ng myself at the Albergo Reale for this and the two following days, I sallied out, to wander everywhere and see everything.

Milan is of ancient days; and few cities have seen greater changes of fortune. In the reign of Diocletian and Maximilian it became the capital of the western empire, and was filled with the temples, baths, theatres, and other monuments which usually adorn royal cities. The tempest which Attila, in the middle of the fifth century, conducted across the Alps, fell upon it, and swept it away. Scarce a vestige of the Roman Milan has come down to our day. A second Milan was founded, but only to fall, in its turn, before the arms of Frederick Barbarossa. There was a strong vitality in its site, however; and a third Milan,--the Milan of the present day,--arose. This city is a huge collection of churches and barracks, cafes and convents, theatres and palaces, traversed by narrow streets, ranged mostly in concentric circles round its grand central building, the Duomo. The streets, however, that lead to its various ports, are s.p.a.cious thoroughfares, adorned with n.o.ble and elegant mansions. Such is the arrangement of the town in which I now found myself.

I sought everywhere for the gay Milan,--the white-robed city I had seen an hour ago,--but it was gone; and in its room sat a silent and sullen town, with an air of most depressing loneliness about it. There were few persons on the streets; and these walked as if they dragged a chain at their heels. I pa.s.sed through whole streets of a secondary character, without meeting a single individual, or hearing the sound of man or of living thing. It seemed as if Milan had proclaimed a fast and gone to church; but when I looked into the churches, I saw no one there save a solitary figure in white, in the distance, bowing and gesticulating with extraordinary fervour, in the presence of dumb pictures and dim tapers.

How can a wors.h.i.+p in which no one ever joins edify any one? I could discover no signs of a flouris.h.i.+ng art. There were not a few pretty and some beautiful things in the shop-windows; but the latter were all copies generally of the more striking natural objects in the neighbourhood, or of the works of art in the city, the productions of other times,--things which a dying genius might produce, but not such as a living genius, free to give scope to her invention, would delight to create. Such was the art of Milan,--the feeble and reflected gleam of a glory now set. As regards the trade of Milan,--a yet more important matter,--I could see almost no signs of it either. There were walking sticks, and such things, in considerable variety in the shops; but little of more importance. The fabrics of the loom, and the productions of the plane, the forge, and the printing press, which crowd our cities and dwellings, and give honest bread to our artizans, were all wanting in Milan. How its people contrived to get through the twenty-four hours, and where they got their bread, unless it fell from the clouds, I could not discover.

What an air of languor and weariness on the faces of the people! Amid these heavy-hearted and dull-eyed loiterers, what a relief it would have been to have met the soiled jacket, the brawny arm, and the manly brow, of one of our own artizans! I felt there were worse things in the world than hard work. Better it were to roll the stone of Sisyphus all life-long, than spend it in such idleness as weighs upon the cities of Italy. Better the clang of the forge than the rattle of the sabre. The Milanese seemed looking into the future; and a dismal future it is, if one may judge from their looks,--a future full of revolutions, to conduct, mayhap, to freedom; more probably to the scaffold.

I turned sharply round the corner of a street, and there, as if it had risen from the earth, was the Cathedral. As the sun breaking through a fog, or an Alpine peak flas.h.i.+ng through mists, so burst this magnificent pile upon me; and its sudden revelation dispelled on the instant all my gloomy musings. I could only stand and gaze. Beauty, not sublimity, is the attribute of this pile. Beauty it rains around it in a never-ending, overflowing shower, as the sun does light, or Mont Blanc glory. I sought for some one presiding idea, simple and grand, which might take its place in the mind, and dwell there as an image of glory, never more to fade; but I could find no such idea. The pile is the slow creation of centuries, and the united conception of innumerable minds, which have clubbed their ideas, so to speak, to produce this Cathedral.

Quarries of marble and millions of money have been expended upon it; and there is scarce an architect or sculptor of eminence who has flourished since the fourteenth century, who has not contributed to it some separate grace or glory; and now the Cathedral of Milan is perhaps the most numerous a.s.semblage of beauties in stone which the world contains.

Impossible it were to enumerate the elegances that cover it from top to bottom,--its carved portals, its flying b.u.t.tresses, its arabesque pilasters, its richly mullioned windows, its ba.s.so-reliefs, its beautiful tracery, and its forest of snow-white pinnacles soaring in the sunlight, so calm and moveless, and yet so airy and light, that you fear the nest breeze will scatter them. You can compare it only to some Alpine group, whose flas.h.i.+ng peaks shoot up by hundreds around some snow-white central summit.

The building, too, is populous as a city. There are upwards of three thousand statues upon it, and places for a thousand more. Here stands a monk, busy with his beads,--there a mailed warrior,--there a mitred bishop,--there a pilgrim, staff in hand,--there a nun, gracefully veiled,--and yonder hundreds of seraphs perched upon the loftier pinnacles, and looking as if a white cloud of winged creatures from the sky had just lighted upon it.

I purposed to-morrow to climb to the roof, and thence survey the plains of Lombardy and the chain of the Alps; so, turning away from the door, I made the tour of the square in which the Cathedral stands. I came first upon a row of cannon, so pointed as to sweep the square. Behind the guns, piled on the pavement, were stacks of arms, and soldiers loitering beside them. Ah! thought I, these are the loving ties that bind the people of Lombardy to the House of Hapsburg. The priest's chant is heard all day long within that temple; and outside there blend with it the sentinel's tramp and the drum's roll. I pa.s.sed on, and came next upon a most unusual display of literature. Four-paged pamphlets in hundreds lay piled upon stalls, or were ranged in rows against the wall. The subjects discussed in these pamphlets were of a high spiritual cast, and woodcuts were freely employed to aid the reader's apprehension. These latter belonged to a very different style of art from that conspicuous in the Cathedral, but they had the merit of great plainness; and a glance at the woodcut enabled one to read at once the story of the pamphlet. The wall was all a-blaze with flames; and I saw the advantage of an infallible Church to teach one secrets which the Bible does not reveal.

The sin chiefly insisted on was that of despising the priest; and the punishment awaiting it was set before me in a way I could not possibly mistake. Here, for instance, was a wealthy sinner, who lay dying in a splendid mansion. With horrible impiety, the man had refused the wafer, and ordered the priest about his business, despite the imploring tears of wife and family, who surrounded his bed. A glance at the other compartment of the picture showed the consequence of this. There you found the man just launched into the other world. A crowd of black fiends, hideous to behold, had seized upon the poor soul, and were dragging it down into a weltering gulf of lurid flame. In another picture you had an equally graphic ill.u.s.tration of the happiness of obeying Mother Church. Here lay one dying amid beads, crucifixes, and shaven crowns. The devil was fleeing from the house in terror; and in the compartment devoted to the spiritual world, the soul was following a benevolent-looking gentleman, who carried a big key, and was walking in the direction of a very magnificent mansion on a high hill, where, I doubt not, a welcome and hospitable reception waited both. The same lesson was repeated along the wall times without number.

Here was the doctrine of purgatory as incontestably proved as painted flames, and images of creatures with tails who tormented other creatures who had no tails, could prove it. If there was no purgatory, how could the painters of an infallible Church ever have given so exact a representation of it? And exact it must have been, else the priests would never have allowed these pictures to be hung up here, under their very eye. This was as much as to write "_c.u.m privilegio_" underneath them. The whole scenery of purgatory was here most vividly depicted.

There were fiends flying off with souls, or tossing them with pitchforks into the flames. There were boiling cauldrons, red-hot gridirons, cataracts of fire, and innumerable other modes of torment. A walk along this infernal gallery was enough, one would have thought, to make the boldest purgatory-despiser quail. But no one who has a little spare cash, and is willing to part with it, need fear either purgatory or the devil. In the large marble house in the centre of the square one might buy at a reasonable rate an excision of some thousands of years from his appointed sojourn in that gloomy region. And doubtless that was one reason for bringing this purgatorial gallery and the indulgence-market into such close proximity. It reminded the people of the latter inestimable blessing; and without some such salutary impulse the traffic in indulgences might flag.

I could not but remark, that the only person for whom these extraordinary representations appeared to have any attractions was myself. Not so the exhibition on the other side of the square. Having perused with no ordinary interest, though, I fear, with not much profit, this "Theory of a Future State," I crossed the quadrangle, pa.s.sing right under the eastern towers of the Cathedral, and came suddenly upon a knot of persons gathered round a tall rectangular box, in which was enacting the melo-drama of Punch. These persons were enjoying the fun with a relish which was noways abated by the spectacle over the way. The whole thing was acted exactly as I had seen it before; but to me it was a novelty to hear Punch, and all the other interlocutors in the piece, discourse in the language in which Dante had sung, and in which I had heard, just before leaving Scotland, Gavazzi declaim. In all lands Punch is an astute scoundrel; but, strange to say, in all lands the popular feeling is on his side. His imperturbable coolness and truculent villany procured him plaudits among the Milanese, as I had seen them do elsewhere. Courage and self-possession are valuable qualities, and for their sake we sometimes forgive bad men and bad causes; whereas, from nothing do we more instinctively recoil than from hypocrisy. On this principle it is, perhaps, that we have a sort of liking for Punch, incorrigible scoundrel as he is; and that great criminals, who rob and murder at the head of armies, we deify, while little ones we hang.

I had now completed my tour of the Cathedral, and could not help reflecting on the miscellaneous, and apparently incongruous, character of the spectacles grouped together in the square. In the middle was the great temple, in which priests, in stole and mitre, celebrated the high mysteries of their Church. In one of the angles were rows of mounted cannon, and a forest of bayonets. In another was seen the whole process of refining souls in purgatory. Strange, that if men here are shut up in prisons and hulks amid desperadoes, they come out more finished villains than they entered; whereas hereafter, if men are shut up with even worse characters, amid blazing fires, glowing gridirons, and cauldrons of boiling lead, they come out perfected in virtue. They pa.s.s at once from the society of fiends, where they have been whipped, roasted, and I know not what, to the society of angels. This is a strange schooling to give dignity to the character and conscious purity to the mind. And yet Rome subjects all her sons to this discipline for a longer or shorter period.

Much do we marvel, that the same process which unfits men for a.s.sociating with respectable people here should be the very thing to prepare them for good society hereafter. The other side of the square Punch had all to himself; and Punch, I saw, was the favourite. The inhabitants of Milan kept as respectable a distance from the painted fiends as if they had been veritable Satans, ready to clutch the incautious pa.s.ser-by, and carry him off to their den. They kept the same respectable distance from the Austrian cannon; and these were no painted terrors. And as regards the Cathedral, scarce a solitary foot crossed its threshold, though there,--astounding prodigy!--He who made the worlds was Himself made many times every day by the priests. But Punch had a dense crowd of delighted spectators around him; and yet he competed with the priest at immense disadvantage. Punch played his part in a humble wooden shed, while the priest played his in a magnificent marble Cathedral, with a splendid wardrobe to boot. Still the people seemed to feel, that the only play in which there was any earnestness was that which was enacted in the wooden box. A stranger from India or China, who was not learned in either the religion or the drama of Europe, would probably have been unable to see any great difference between the two, and would have taken both for religious performances; concluding, perhaps, that that in the Cathedral was the established form, while that in the wooden box was the disestablished; in short, that Punch had been a priest at some former period of his life, and sung ma.s.s and sold indulgences; but that, imbibing some heterodox notions, or having fallen into some peccadillo, such as eating flesh on Friday, he had been unfrocked and driven out, and compelled to play the priest in a wooden tabernacle.

To return once more to the paintings and woodcuts ill.u.s.trative of the punitive and purgative processes of purgatory, and which were in a style of art that demonstratively shows, that if Italy is advancing in the knowledge of a future life, she is retrograding in the arts of the present,--to recur, I say, to these, there rested some doubt, to say the least of it, over their revelations of the world to come; but there rested no doubt whatever over their revelations of the present condition of Church and State in Italy. On this head the cannon and woodcuts told far more than the priests wished, or perhaps thought. They showed that both the State and the Church in that country are now reduced to their _ultima ratio_, brute force. The State has lost all hope of governing its subjects by giving them good laws, and inspiring them with loyalty; and the Church has long since abandoned the plan of producing obedience and love by presenting great truths to the mind. Both have found out a shorter and more compendious policy. The State, speaking through her cannon, says, "Obey me or die;" and the Church, speaking through purgatory, says, "Believe me or burn." There is one comfort in this, however,--the present system is obviously the last. When force gives way, all gives way. The Church will stand, doubtless, because they tell us she is founded on a rock; but what will become of the State? When men can be awed neither by painted fiends nor real cannon, what is to awe them? Indeed, we shrewdly suspect, that even now the fiends would count for little, were it not for the fiends incarnate, in the shape of Croats, by which the others are backed. The Lombards would boldly face the gridirons, cauldrons, and stinging creatures gathered in the one corner of the square at Milan, if they but knew how to muzzle the cannon which are a.s.sembled in the other.

In truth, things in this part of the world are not looking up. A universal serfdom and barbarism are slowly creeping over all men and all systems. The Government of Austria has become more revolutionary than the Revolution itself. By violating the rights of property, it has indorsed the worst doctrines of Socialism. That Government has, in a great number of instances, seized upon estates, without making out a t.i.tle to them by any regular process of law. After the attempted outbreak at Milan in 1852, the landed property of well-nigh all the royalist emigrants was swept away by a decree of sequestration. The _Milan Gazette_ published a list of seventy-two political refugees whose property has been laid under sequestration in the provinces of Milan, Como, Mantua, Lodi, Pavia, Brescia, Cremona, Bergamo, and Sondrio. In this list we find the names of many distinguished persons, such as Count Arese, the two Counts Borromeo, General Lechi, Duke Litta, Count Litta, Marquis Pallavicini, Marquis Rosales, Princess Belgioso. The pretext for seizing their estates was, that their owners had contributed to the revolutionary treasury; which was incredible to those who know the difference in feeling and views which separate the royalist emigrant n.o.bles of Lombardy from the democratic republicans that follow Mazzini.

In truth, the Government of Vienna needs their estates; and, imitating the example of the French Convention, and furnis.h.i.+ng another precedent for Socialism when it shall come into power, it seized them without any colour of right or form of law. Another branch of the scourging tyranny of Austria is the system of forced loans. Some of the wealthiest families of Lombardy have been impoverished by these, and, of course, thrown into the ranks of the disaffected. The Austrian method of making slavery maintain itself is also peculiarly revolting. The hundred millions raised annually in Venetian Lombardy, instead of being spent in the service of these provinces, are devoted to the payment of the troops that keep down Hungary. The soldiers levied in Italy are sent into the German provinces; and those raised in Croatia are employed in keeping down Italy. Thus Italy holds the chain of Hungary, and Hungary, in her turn, that of Italy; and so insult is added to oppression.

The very roots of liberty are being dug out of the soil. The free towns have lost their rights; the provinces their independence; and the tendency of things is towards the formation of great centralized despotisms. Thus an Asiatic equality and barbarism is sinking down upon continental Europe. So much is this the case, that some of the thinking minds in Germany are in the belief that the dark ages are returning. The following pa.s.sage in the "Life and Letters of Niebuhr," written less than two months before his death in 1831, is almost prophecy:--

"It is my firm conviction that we, particularly in Germany, are rapidly hastening towards barbarism; and it is not much better in France.

"That we are threatened with devastation such as that two hundred years ago, is, I am sorry to say, just as clear to me; and the end of the tale will be, _despotism enthroned amidst universal ruin. In fifty years, and probably much less, there will be no trace left of free inst.i.tutions, or the freedom of the press, throughout all Europe, at least on the Continent_. Very few of the things which have happened since the revolution in Paris have surprised me."

The half of that period has scarce elapsed, and the prognostication of Niebuhr has been all but realized. At this hour, Piedmont excepted, there is _no trace left of free inst.i.tutions, or the freedom of the press_, in Southern and Eastern Europe. Nor will these nations ever be able to lift themselves out of the gulph into which they have fallen.

Revolution, Socialism, war, will only hasten the advent of a centralized despotism. We know of only one agency,--even Christianity,--which, by reviving the virtue and self-government of the individual, and the moral strength of nations, can recover their liberties. If Christianity can be diffused, well; if not, I do firmly believe with Niebuhr that, on the Continent at least, we shall have a return of "the dark ages," and "despotism enthroned amidst universal ruin."

CHAPTER IX.

ARCO DELLA PACE.

Depressing Effect produced by Sight of Slavery--The Castle of Milan--Non-intercourse of Italians and Austrians--Arco della Pace--Contrasted with the Duomo--Evening--Ambrose--Milanese Inquisition--The Two Symbols.