THE DUOMO OF MILAN.
Interior Disappoints at First Sight--Expands into
Magnificence--Description of Interior--Mummy of San Carlo
Borromeo--His too early Canonization--A Priest at Mass--The Two
Mysteries--Distinction between Religion and Worship--Roof of
Cathedral--Aspect of Lombardy from thence--Ascend to the Top of
Tower--Objects in the Square--Miniature of the World--The Alps from
the Cathedral Roof--Martyr Associations--A Future Morning.
My next day was devoted to the Cathedral. Entering by the great western
doorway,--a low-browed arch, rich in carving and statuary,--I pushed
aside the thick, heavy quilt that closes the entrance of all the Italian
churches, and stood beneath the roof. My first feeling was one of
disappointment; so great was the contrast betwixt the airy and sunlight
beauty of the exterior, and the massive and sombre grandeur within. The
marble of the floor was sorely fretted by the foot: its original colours
of blue and red had passed into a dingy gray, chequered with the
variously-tinted light which flowed in through the stained windows. The
white walls and unadorned pillars looked cold and naked. Beggars were
extending their caps towards you for an alms. On the floor rose a stack
of rush-bottomed chairs, as high as a two-storey house,--as if the
priests, dreading an emeute, had made preparations by throwing up a
barricade. A carpenter, mounted on a tall ladder, was busied, with
hammer and nails, suspending hangings of tapestry along the nave, in
honour, I presume, of some saint whose fete-day was approaching. The dim
light could but feebly illuminate the many-pillared, long-aisled
building, and gave to the vast edifice something of a cavern look.
But by and by the eye got attempered; and then, like an autumnal haze
clearing away from the face of the landscape, and revealing the glories
of green meadow, golden field, and wooded mountain, the obscurity that
wrapped pillar and aisle gradually brightened up, and the temple around
me began to develope into the noblest proportions and the most
impressive grandeur. Some hundred and fifty feet over head was suspended
the stone roof; and one could not but admire the lightness and elegance
of its groined vaultings, and the stately stature of the columns that
supported it. Their feet planted on the marble floor, they stood,
bearing up with unbowing strength, through the long centuries, the
massive, stable, steadfast roof, from which the spirit of tranquillity
and calm seemed to breathe upon you. On either hand three rows of
colossal pillars ran off, forming a noble perspective of well nigh five
hundred feet. They stretched away over transept and chancel, towards the
great eastern window, which, like a sun glowing with rosy light, was
seen rising behind the high altar, bearing on its ample disc the
emblazoned symbols of the Book of the Apocalypse. The aisles were deep
and shadowy; and through their forests of columns there broke on the
sight glimpses of monumental tombs and altars ranged against the wall. I
passed slowly along in front of these beautiful monuments, and read
upon their marble the names of warriors and cardinals, some of whom
still keep their place on the page of history. It took me some three
hours to make the circuit of the Cathedral; but I shall not spend as
many minutes in describing the works of art--some of them marvels of
their kind--which passed under my eye; for my readers, I suspect, would
not thank me for doing worse what the guide-books have done better.
Below the great window in the apsis,--the same that contains what is one
of the earliest of modern commentaries on the Book of Revelation,--the
pavement was perforated by a number of small openings; and on looking
down, I could see a subterranean chamber, with burning lamps. Its wall
was adorned with pictures like the great temple above: and I could
plainly hear the low chant of priests issuing from it. I had lighted, in
short, upon a subterranean chapel; and here, in a shrine of gold and
silver, lay embalmed the body of a former Archbishop of Milan--San Carlo
Borromeo. Through the glass-lid of the coffin you could see the
half-rotten corpse,--for the skill of the embalmer had been no match for
the stealthy advances of decay,--tricked out in its gorgeous vestments,
with the ring glittering on its finger, and the mitre pressing upon its
fleshless skull. San Carlo Borromeo is the patron saint of Milan; and
hence these perpetual lamps and ceaseless chantings at his tomb. The
black withered face and naked skull grin horribly at the flaunting
finery that surrounds him; and one almost expects to see him stretch out
his skeleton hands, and tear it angrily in rags. The unusually short
period of thirty years was all that intervened betwixt the death and the
canonization of San Carlo; and his mother, who was alive at the time,
though a very aged woman, had the peculiar satisfaction of seeing her
son placed on the altars of Rome, and become an object of worship,--a
happiness which, so far as we know, has not been enjoyed by mortal
mother since the days of Juno and other ladies of her time. We do not
envy San Carlo his honours; but we submit whether it was judicious to
confer them just so soon. Before decreeing worship to one, would it not
be better to let his contemporaries pass from the stage of time?
Incongruous reminiscences are apt to mix themselves up with his worship.
San Carlo had been like other children when young, we doubt not, and was
none the worse of the castigation he received at times from the hand of
her whose duty it now became to worship him. His mother little dreamt
that it was an infant god she was chastising. "He was a pleasant
companion," said a lady, when informed of the canonization of St Francis
de Sales, "but he cheated horribly at cards." "When I was at Milan,"
says Addison, "I saw a book newly published, that was dedicated to the
present head of the Borromean family, and entitled, _A Discourse on the
Humility of Jesus Christ, and of St Charles Borromeo_."
I came round, and stood in front of the high altar. It towers to a great
height, looking like the tall mast of a ship; and, could any supposable
influence throw the marble floor on which it rests into billows, it
might ride safely on their tops, beneath the stone roof of the
Cathedral. A priest was saying mass, and some half-dozen of persons on
the wooden benches before the chancel were joining in the service. It
was a cold affair; and the vastness of the building but tended to throw
an air of insignificance over it. The languid faces of the priest and
his diminutive congregation brought vividly to my recollection the crowd
of animated countenances I had seen outside the same building, around
Punch, the day before. The devotion before me was a dead, not a living
thing. It had been dead before the foundations of this august temple
were laid. But it loved to revisit "the glimpses" of these tapers, and
to grimace and mutter amid these shadowy aisles. To nothing could I
compare it but to the skeleton in the chapel beneath, that lay rotting
in a shroud of gorgeous robes. It was as much a corpse as that skeleton,
and, like it too, it bore a shroud of purple and scarlet, and fine linen
and gold, which concealed only in part its ghastliness. Were Ambrose to
come back, he would once more close his Cathedral gates, but this time
in the face of the priests.
"Without controversy," says the apostle, "great is the mystery of
godliness. God was manifest in the flesh." "Without controversy, great
is the mystery of" iniquity. "God was manifest in the" mass. These are
the two INCARNATIONS--the two MYSTERIES. They stand confronting one
another. Romish writers style the mass emphatically "the mystery;" and
as that dogma is a capital one in their system, it follows that their
Church has _mystery_ written on her forehead, as plainly as John saw it
on that of the woman in the Apocalypse. But farther, what is the
principle of the mass? Is it not that Christ is again offered in
sacrifice, and that the pain he endures in being so propitiates God in
your behalf? Is not, then, the area of Europe that is covered with
masses "_the place where our Lord was crucified_?"
The stream can never rise higher than its source; and so is it with
worship. That worship that cometh of man cannot, in the nature of
things, rise higher than man. The worship of Rome is manifestly
man-contrived. It may be expected, therefore, to rise to the level of
his tastes, but not a hairbreadth higher. It may stimulate and delight
his faculties, such as they are, but it cannot regenerate them. At the
best, it is only the aesthetic faculties which the worship of Rome calls
into exercise. It presents no truth to the mind, and cannot therefore
act upon the moral powers. God is unseen: He is hidden in the dark
shadow of the priest. How, then, can He be regarded with confidence or
love? The doctrine of the atonement,--the central glory of the Christian
system,--is unknown. It is eclipsed by the mass. If you want to be
religious,--to obtain salvation,--you buy masses. You need not cultivate
any moral quality. You need not even be grateful. You have paid the
market-price of the salvation you carry home, and are debtor to no one.
Those who speak of the worship of the Church of Rome as well fitted to
make men devout, only betray their complete ignorance of all that
constitutes worship. Men must be devout before they can worship. There
is no error in the world more common than that of putting worship for
religion. Worship is not the cause, but the effect. Worship is simply
the expression of an inward feeling, that feeling being religion; and
nothing is more obvious, than that till this feeling be implanted, there
can be no worship. The man may bow, or chant, or mutter; he cannot
worship. He may be dazzled by fine pictures, but not melted into love or
raised to hope by glorious truths. Moral feelings can be produced not
otherwise than by the apprehension of moral truths; but in the Church of
Rome all the great verities of revelation lie out of sight, being
covered with the dense shadow of symbol and error. A single verse of
Scripture would do more to awaken mind and produce devotion than all the
statues and fine pictures of all the cathedrals in Italy.
I got weary at last of these shadowy aisles and the priests' monotonous
chant; and so, paying a small fee, I had a low door in the south
transept opened to me; and, groping my way up a stair of an hundred and
fifty steps, or rather more, I came out upon the top of the Cathedral. I
had left a noble temple, but only to be ushered into a far nobler,--its
roof the blue vault, its floor the great Lombardy plain, and its walls
the Alps and Apennines. The glory of the temple beneath was forgotten by
reason of the greater glory of that into which I had entered. It was not
yet noon, and the morning mists were not yet wholly dissipated. The Alps
and the Apennines were imprisoned in a shroud of vapour. Nevertheless
the scene was a noble one. Lombardy was level as the sea. I have seen as
level and as circular an expanse from a ship's deck, when out of sight
of land, but nowhere else. One of the most prominent features of the
scene were the long straight rows of the Lombardy poplar, which, rooted
in its native soil, and drinking its native waters, shoots up into the
most goodly stature and the most graceful form. And then, there were
glimpses of beautifully green meadows, and long silvery lines of canals;
and all over the plain there peeped out from amidst rich woods, the
white walls of hamlets and towns, and the tall, slender Campanile. The
country towards the north was remarkably populous. From the gates of
Milan to the skirts of the mists that veiled the Alps the plain was all
a-gleam with white-walled villages, beautifully embowered. A fairer
picture, or one more suggestive of peace and happiness, is perhaps
nowhere to be seen. But, alas! past experience had taught me, that these
dwellings, so lovely when seen from afar, would sink, on a near
approach, into ill-furnished and filthy hovels, with inmates groaning
under the double burden of ignorance and poverty.
When the more distant objects allowed me to attend to those at hand, I
found that I was not alone on the Cathedral's roof. There were around me
an assembly of some thousands. The only moving figure, it is true, was
myself: the rest stood mute and motionless, each in his little house of
stone; but so eloquent withal, in both look and gesture, that you half
expected to find yourself addressed by some one in this life-like crowd
of figures.
I ascended to the different levels by steps on the flying buttresses. A
winding staircase in a turret of open tracery next carried me to the
Octagon, where I found myself surrounded by a new zone of statues. Here
I again made a long halt, admiring the landscape as seen under this new
elevation, and doing my best to scrape acquaintance with my new
companions. I now prepared for my final ascent. Entering the spire, I
ascended its winding staircase, and came out at the foot of the pyramid
that crowns the edifice. Higher I could not go. Here I stood at a height
of about three hundred and fifty feet, looking down upon the city and
the plain. I had left the grosser forms of monks and bishops far
beneath, and was surrounded--as became my aerial position--with winged
cherubs, newly alighted, as it seemed, on the spires and turrets which
shot up like a forest at my feet. Here I waited the coming of the Alps,
with all the impatience with which an audience at the theatre waits the
rising of the curtain.
Meanwhile, till it should please Monte Rosa and her long train of
white-robed companions to emerge, I had the city spectacles to amuse me.
There was Milan at my feet. I could count its every house, and trace the
windings of its every street and lane, as easily as though it had been
laid down upon a map. I could see innumerable black dots moving about in
the streets,--mingling, crossing, gathering in little knots, then
dissolving, and the constituent atoms falling into the stream, and
floating away. Then there came a long white line with nodding plumes;
and I could faintly hear the tramp of horses; and then there followed a
mustering of men and a flashing of bayonets in the square below. I sat
watching the manoeuvres of the little army beneath for an hour or so,
while drum and clarionet did their best to fill the square with music,
and send up their thousand echoes to break and die amid the spires and
statues of the Cathedral. At last the mimic war was ended, and I was
left alone, with the silent and moveless, but ever acting statues around
and below me. What a picture, thought I, of the pageantry of life, as
viewed from a higher point than this world! Instead of an hour, take a
thousand years, and how do the scenes shift! The golden spectacle of
empire has moved westward from the banks of the Euphrates to those of
the Tiber and the Thames. You can trace its track by the ruins it has
left. The field has been illuminated this hour by the gleam of arts and
empire, and buried in the darkness of barbarism the next. Man has been
ever busy. He has builded cities, fought battles, set up thrones,
constructed systems. There has been much toil and confusion, but, alas!
little progress. Such would be the sigh which some superior being from
some tranquil station on high would heave over the ceaseless struggle
and change in the valley of the world. And yet, amid all its changes,
great principles have been taking root, and a noble edifice has been
emerging.
But, lo! the mists are rising, and yonder are the Alps. Now that the
curtain is rent, one flashing peak bursts upon you after another. They
come not in scores, but in hundreds. And now the whole chain, from the
snowy dome of the Ortelles in the far-off Tyrol, to the beauteous
pyramid of Monte Viso in the south-western sky, is before you in its
noble sweep of many hundreds of miles, with thousands of snowy peaks,
amid which, pre-eminent in glory, rises Monte Rosa. Turning to the
south, you have the purple summits of the Apennines rising above the
plain. Between this blue line in the south and that magnificent rampart
of glaciers and peaks in the north, what a vast and dazzling picture of
meadows, woods, rivers, cities, with the sun of Italy shining over all!
Ye glorious piles! well are ye termed everlasting. Kings and kingdoms
pass away, but on you there passes not the shadow of change. Ye saw the
foundations of Rome laid;--now ye look down upon its ruins. In
comparison with yours, man's life dwindles to a moment. Like the flower
at your foot, he blooms for an instant, and sinks into the tomb. Nay,
what is a nation's duration, when weighed against thine? Even the
forests that wave on your slopes will outlast empires. Proud piles, how
do ye stamp with insignificance man's greatest labours! This glorious
edifice on which I stand,--ages was it in building; myriads of hands
helped to rear it; and yet, in comparison with your gigantic masses,
what is it?--a mere speck. Already it is growing old;--ye are still
young. The tempests of six thousand winters have not bowed you down.
Your glory lightened the cradle of nations,--your shadows cover their
tomb.
But to me the great charm of the Alps lay in the sacred character which
they wore. They seemed to rise before me, a vast temple, crowned, as
temple never was, with sapphire domes and pinnacles, in which a holy
nation had worshipped when Europe lay prostrate before the Dagon of the
Seven Hills. I could go back to a time when that plain, now covered,
alas! with the putridities of superstition, was the scene of churches in
which the gospel was preached, of homes in which the Bible was read, of
happy death-beds, and blessed graves,--graves in which, in the sublime
words of our catechism, "the bodies of the saints being still united to
Christ, do rest in their graves till the Resurrection." Sleep on, ye
blessed dead! This pile shall crumble into ruin; the Alps dissolve,
Rome herself sink; but not a particle of your dust shall be lost. The
reflection recalled vividly an incident of years gone by. I had
sauntered at the evening hour into a retired country churchyard in
Scotland. The sun, after a day of heavy rain, was setting in glory, and
his rays were gilding the long wet grass above the graves, and tinting
the hoar ruins of a cathedral that rose in the midst of them, when my
eye accidentally fell upon the following lines, which I quote from
memory, carved in plain characters upon one of the tombstones:--
The wise, the just, the pious, and the brave,
Live in their death, and flourish from the grave.
Grain hid in earth repays the peasant's care,
And evening suns but set to rise more fair.
There are no such epitaphs in the graveyards of Lombardy; nor could
there be any such in that of Dunblane, but for the Reformation.