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 passports. 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 passenger 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 passport 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 shine,
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 worship and human worshippers; 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 passion was hushed,
and where Peace had fixed her chosen seat.
"All right," shouted the passport 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 spacious
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 nobles 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 spacious
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 gods 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 butter, 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 assembled
morning after morning,--made the return of this hour very pleasant.
Establishing 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 spacious thoroughfares, adorned with noble 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 passed 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 worship in which no one ever joins edify any one? I could
discover no signs of a flourishing 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 flashing 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 assemblage 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 buttresses, its arabesque
pilasters, its richly mullioned windows, its basso-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 flashing 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 passed 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 illustration 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 "_cum 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, passing 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 pass 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
associating 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 passer-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
mass 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 illustrative 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 assembled 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
title 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
nobles 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 furnishing 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 passage 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 institutions, 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 institutions, 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."