have they acquired the style so finely fitted to their subject, and
the philosophy that belongs to their age? Who are the historians of
the last thirty years, of the greatest events that ever shook the
governments of the earth to their centre?—not the “_hommes de lettres_”
of France,—not her _académiciens_,—nor her ex-ministers and statesmen,
“_rompus et corrompus_,”—nor her professed authors;—they are the gallant
soldiers who witnessed the events they so eloquently describe, and who
call on cotemporary testimony to corroborate their statements. Ségur,
Rovigo, Foi, Rapp, Dumas, Montholon, De Rocca, &c. &c.—these are the
historiographers of modern France, and well worth Racine, and all the
other bland and laudatory chroniclers of church and state, who wrote
under the _surveillance_ of the Maintenons, the Montespans, and their
complaisant ministers, or influential valets and _femmes de chambre_.
INFANT BAPTISM.
Many suppose that the practice of infant baptism is derived from a Hebrew
rite; but the oriental Christians, by whom baptism was first adopted,
confined that ceremony to adults. It seems probable that the modern usage
was introduced into the western church, in imitation of the lustration of
the Romans; a ceremony performed, according to Macrobius, on the ninth
day after birth with males, and on the eighth with females.[32]
LOGIC OF FINE WRITERS.
“Chateaubriand, speaking of the variety and extent of modern
discoveries, observes ‘Le Génie de l’homme est véritablement
trop grand pour sa petite habitation; il faut en conclure qu’il
est destiné à une plus haute demeure.’”[33]
_Voyage en Italie et en Amérique_.
This is a good specimen of the logic of “fine writing,” “plenty of
eloquence, and little wisdom.” What a sweeping conclusion from one little
word (_trop_)! Man is _too_ great for this world, and therefore he
belongs to another! Never was an oratorical exaggeration worse applied.
Amidst all the magnificent results of human ingenuity, which have thus
powerfully excited the susceptible imagination of the French academician,
want, and disease, and ignorance, are still the especial characteristics
of the species. No where are the essentials of good government generally
understood; still less so the art of maintaining public liberty, when
once acquired. No where is morality independent of the executioner,—no
where is life maintained by the great bulk of the community at a
less expence, than that of constant unremitting labour. Look at that
half-starved moving mass of rags, by courtesy called an Irish peasant;
reflect upon his helpless incapacity, his physical destitution, his moral
annihilation! Yet is he the subject of an empire, in which all the powers
of the species are carried to the highest point of development, to which
man has ever reached. Might we not equally conclude, from this spectacle,
that the human animal is so ill adapted to his mundane existence,
that he must be intended for another? Stripped of all exaggeration,
the adaptation of our intellectual powers to our necessities, though
exceedingly imperfect, is still abundantly sufficient to carry
conviction, that the earth is the sojourn of man’s especial destiny:
whether, with Chateaubriand, we are to jump to a conclusion, and say,
“_therefore_ he is destined to no other,” I leave to the consideration of
those who have no better argument for determining their faith.
PHILOSOPHY.
“Donner à l’oubli le passé,
Le présent à l’indifférence,
Et, pour vivre débarrassé,
L’avenir à la Providence.”[34]
What excellent advice, if it were in every one’s power to adopt it:
but the colour of a man’s philosophy is, after all, no more at his own
disposal, than the colour of his eyebrows. Both depend upon the same
cause, the temperament of the subject. The stoics and the epicureans
have been thought to differ only in words; and, as far as mere reason is
concerned, an accurate definition would force agreement between them.
But till the stoic can be cured of his bile, and his habitually uneasy
sensations, or the constitutional indolence of the epicurean can be
broken down by disease and misfortunes, a real unity of sentiment is
impossible. There is nothing, concerning which a man is more positive
than his own sensations: and these determine the point of view from which
every one regards the nature of things. The same landscape is before us
all: but we see it through Claude Lorraine glasses—one man _couleur de
rose_, another _du plus beau noir_: and then we fall to quarrel, like the
knights, concerning the gold and silver shield! It is nearly the same
thing with religion.
CORREGIO AND JOHANNA OF PLACENTIA.
When I was at Parma (1820) the cognoscenti of the place were still
talking of the wonderful discovery of the “_piu insigne pitture_” of the
great Antonio Allegri detto il Corregio, which, after the lapse of nearly
three centuries, had been found to exist in the monastery of St. Paul,
belonging to the Benedictine sisters. The authenticity of the paintings,
and the certainty of their immortal author, were questions long set at
rest. But nothing grows old in Italy, and every thing in which the arts
are concerned serves as a thesis of disputation, to those ardent but
suppressed minds, to which all subjects of discussion are forbidden,
save such as have no intimate connexion with human interests and human
happiness. While the empty shops and silent streets of Parma exhibit
the hopeless and torpid uncertainty of its pauper inhabitants (a city
once the mart of bustling commerce), it is not unusual to see learned
disputants holding forth, with great zeal and energy, on the merits of
some rival “_maestro_,” or disputing the date or authenticity of some
picture of Mazzuolo, or Corregio, as if the emancipation of wretched
Italy, from the Austrian tyranny, depended upon the settling of the
question.
I was one morning whiling away a listless half-hour, previous to our
departure, in the noble church of San Giovanni Evangelista, from whose
aisles the fume of the morning service was not yet dispersed, when I was
attracted by the loud voices (loud for such a place) of two persons, who
were arguing with violent gesticulations before the splendid picture
of St. Paul destroying the statue of Diana of Ephesus. The one was in
a laical dress, but covered with the dust of the closet; there was no
mistaking him; he was evidently a professor of _virtù_. The other was in
the monkish habit of St. Benedict. The virtuoso seemed anxious to prove
that Diana of Ephesus was a certain Giovanna di Piacenza, abbess of
the neighbouring convent of Benedictines, two centuries back, and the
patroness of Corregio’s early efforts. The other (the monk) was denying
the allegory insinuated by the lay virtuoso—that Jane of Placentia had
been persecuted for her too liberal spirit, or that the mysterious
fresco, discovered in the long closed chamber of the neighbouring
convent, could have been painted as a fit subject for the chaste nuns of
St. Paul, and their holy mother to gaze on. The apartment so painted,
he insisted, had originally made a part of the palace of a Parmesan
noble,—and, with other neighbouring houses, had been gradually annexed to
the monastery, during the last century, when the community had become too
numerous for the original building.
I could not stop to hear the argument out, as we were on the point of
starting for Bologna, and our carriage was literally in waiting. But I
left the porch of San Giovanni Evangelista with my imagination so full
of Giovanna of Piacenza, abbess of the monastery of St. Paul, of whom
the lay virtuoso had let drop some curious anecdotes, that long before
we had reached Modena, I had made her character and patronage of the
arts, the subject of an Italian romance; giving it all the colouring
of the scenery through which I was passing—and taking down particulars,
features, and sites between Parma and Reggio (the birthplace of her
immortal protégé), which, in my veteran knowledge of novel writing, I
knew would _work up_ well.
At Bologna, where we remained much longer than we intended, and where
we lived much with the learned and the ingenious, I could only learn of
my interesting abbess, that she was a “_grande dame de par l’église_;”
but the forty languages of Mezzofanti, and the profound erudition of the
excellent Costa, could tell me nothing more. Santa Caterina, too, was
just then beginning to roll her eyes in the church of “Our Ladies of St.
Catherine,” at Bologna; and she so occupied public attention, that it
was impossible to extort a word on the subject of any other saint in the
calendar. Still, as often as I sat listening to Crescentini singing his
delicious cavatina, in the frescoed _salone_ of the beautiful Martinetti,
the idea of my Jane of Placentia came upon my mind; for whatever I have
best conceived (and even mediocrity has its degree of excellence);
whatever I have written most successfully, has all been done under the
influence of music; the whole of Salvator Rosa was composed (and composed
_à trait de plume_) in my drawing-room, in Dublin, while listening to the
master-compositions of Rossini.
It was at Florence I first obtained more precise information concerning
my charming abbess; for charming I was determined she should be. During
our delightful residence in that pleasantest of all Italian cities, I had
the good fortune to make the acquaintance of Signior Giuseppe Michali,
whose very erudite work, “_L’Italia avanti il dominio dei Romani_,” is a
monument of learned industry. The true Italian feeling of this gentleman
had led him to devote his time and attention not only to the subjects
connected with the ancient glories of the country, but to whatever
illustrates those divine arts of which it is the mother. At the very time
of my making his acquaintance, he was occupied with the subject that had
got hold of my imagination; and his account of the long-concealed and
celebrated abbess is as follows:—
A vague tradition that there existed, in the monastery of the
Benedictine sisters, at Parma, a chamber painted in fresco, by the
immortal Corregio, had got gradually into public circulation. At first
it was deemed to be nothing more than the malicious gossip of some
neighbouring convents, which represented the fresco as a most unholy
exhibition, reflecting on the memory of a certain abbess, who flourished
in the sixteenth century, and whose history had been traditionally
preserved in the district over which she had exercised considerable
sway. The fresco chamber had remained shut up for nearly two hundred and
eighty years: or, if open to the nuns, its splendid pictures were but ill
appreciated by the victims of bigotry, whose suppressed sensibility left
them incapable or unwilling to receive those fine impressions which the
works of genius are sure to impart to the cultivated and tasteful.
By degrees, however, this painted chamber began to excite the attention
of the curious; and, at an epoch when the works of Corregio had reached
their highest estimation, the celebrated Mengs, with some difficulty,
obtained permission to visit the interior of the convent, a sanctuary
usually closed against “unblessed soles.” In 1780, he published a letter
on the subject, declaring the frescoes to be amongst those _capi d’opera_
of Corregio which had secured his immortality. To this opinion Antonio
Bresciani, professor in the academy of Parma, and Batti, of Geneva, who
had obtained a similar permission, bore ample testimony. But when the
posthumous works of Mengs appeared, all reference to the frescoes was
omitted in the pages devoted to an analysis of the works of the painter
of the Graces.
The world of _virtù_ was again thrown into a vortex of doubt; and one
must have lived in Italy, and seen how bad institutions can confine the
mind to trivial subjects, to understand the commotion into which a whole
community can be thrown by such a doubt.
Tiraboschi came forward on behalf of Corregio, to claim those splendid
works, (of which the Italian public heard so much and had seen so little)
as new triumphs of his genius. He endeavoured to reconcile the silence
of Mengs with the declarations of Bresciani and Batti, by supposing that
the former had not spoken of the frescoes, because he had found them in
a state of decay and partial obliteration. Signior Michali, with more
probability, supposes that the silence of Mengs arose from the melancholy
event of his death, which occurred immediately on his return from Parma
to Rome, and which might have prevented those additions to his simple
notices of the frescoes of St. Paul, which would have set the question at
rest. But the question, so important to half the academicians and all the
virtuosi of Italy, was not set at rest until the summer of 1795, when a
commission of four artists of eminence was formed to visit the convent,
with permission of the order, and to examine the frescoes, and pronounce
a judgment by which the world of taste was resolved to abide.
From the judgment of the commission of artists there was no appeal—the
frescoes were assigned to Corregio. But their subjects—the most profane
though eminently classical subjects,—who had chosen them? Vasari declared
that Corregio had never studied at Rome—that he was ignorant of the
sublime models furnished by the genius of antiquity! and that the humble
and unfortunate disciple of the dry school of the rude Mantegna, drew
his first and only inspiration from the sight of that work of Raphael,
which extorted the celebrated exclamation of “_E sono pittore anche
io_!” Still the works of Albano are not more classical, more poetically
ideal, and more purely modelled on the antique, than those frescoes
painted by Corregio in his early youth, which were doomed to the oblivion
of two hundred and eighty years. There is one of the subjects, more
particularly, which appeared to have been more freshly drawn, from the
pages of Homer. It represents a female suspended by a cord, her arms tied
above her head, and two anvils of gold hung from her feet. This was the
punishment inflicted by Jupiter on Juno in the presence of all the gods.
It was thought that some _arrière pensée_ lurked in this representation
of the summary punishment inflicted by the old church of the antique
world upon its refractory daughters, and that it was meant to hit on the
severity with which the rebellious mothers of the Christian church, the
powerful abbesses of the fifteenth century, were occasionally treated by
the Jupiter of the Vatican. All the subjects of these pictures, indeed,
were so at variance with those usually selected by Corregio, or deemed
admissible into such holy retreats as the convent of St. Paul’s, that the
whole appeared an inexplicable mystery. The laborious efforts of Italian
_virtù_, however, at last discovered that the inspirer of the young and
ardent Corregio was Giovanna of Piacenza, whose early encouragement and
direction of a genius vainly struggling against penury, identified her
name with the history of the arts, and probably gave to Italy the most
brilliant of her artists.
At the period alluded to, the abbesses of the great and highly endowed
Italian monasteries were powerful princesses of the church, commensurate
in wealth and influence with the great lords of the conclave themselves.
Chosen for life, they not only administered the immense revenues of
their convent uncontrolled, but lived with a splendour and luxury, which
occasionally degenerated into absolute licentiousness and boundless
extravagance. The spiritual authority with which they were endowed, the
jurisdiction they possessed over the persons submitted to their rule,
extending even to life and death, the many privileges they received
during the fifteenth and sixteenth century, enabled them to take part in
all the political factions and civil feuds of the day, and to decide the
most important contests; though, like true women, they often attached
themselves to the least powerful party, and abandoned the magnificence of
their convent to share the exile of their friends and partizans. Enjoying
the greatest credit, by the talents, graces, and high birth which led
to their monastic elevation, making head against their bishops, in the
struggle for jurisdiction, resisting all attempts to subject them _à
la clôture_, availing themselves of the sanction of the convent, yet
participating in all the pleasures and passions of society, courting
fame, and alive to glory, they sought to illustrate their conventual
reign by such enterprises as were calculated to give their names to
posterity.
Among these priestesses of Catholicism, Giovanna di Piacenza was
conspicuous for taste, talent, and magnificence. Elected in the flower
of her youth and beauty to the abbess’s chair at Parma, she began her
reign by erecting a sanctuary, worthy of Cnidus, among the rude cloisters
of her monastic seclusion. For the purpose of decorating an apartment
dedicated to her own exclusive use, and intended as a monument of her
refined taste and patronage of the arts, she invited some of the most
distinguished artists of Parma and Modena, but she chose the young and
obscure Antonio Allegri of Reggio, called Il Corregio; and she herself
selected those subjects which he so beautifully executed, and which were
copied or imitated from the antique.
Here were no fearful exhibitions of human suffering, “for the love of
God,”—no martyrs broiled,—no saints agonized. Sacrifices indeed there
were; but they were innoxious sacrifices offered by young and beautiful
priestesses on the altars of Jupiter and Vesta.
Had the accomplished abbess confined the gratification of her tastes to
such representations of classical imagery, she might have been pardoned.
But she had borrowed more from the ancients than their tastes or their
arts;—she had drawn from their pages their love of liberty and noble
independence; and she had long resisted the attempts of the bishops and
pope to interfere with her jurisdiction.
After a long and noble struggle against the encroachment of the church
tyranny, she fell a victim to its resistless power. Her convent was
cloistered, and cut off from all human intercourse; and she survived her
living entombment but a short time. Her favourite apartment, the monument
of her taste, her learning, and her liberality, closed hermetically, even
against the sisters of the order, was at last forgotten. The oblivion
of near three centuries, concealed from the study and admiration of
successive generations those _chefs-d’œuvre_ which the enterprize of
modern _virtù_ finally discovered, for the benefit of a declining art,
that had long ceased to produce a Corregio.
While I resided at Rome, my head was still running on “Giovanna of
Piacenza,”—when two other subjects fell in my way, (for my work on Italy
wrote itself); one of these was Salvator Rosa, not as I have since given
it to the public, but as an Italian romance. The idea came into my head
as I was sauntering with Cardinal Fesch through the sumptuous rooms of
his superb palace, just after we had been looking at one of Salvator’s
pictures. On my return home I sketched out the first chapter of my
romance; but the genius, character, and literary works of Salvator
grew into such importance in my mind, “his times” appeared so full of
interest, that I threw aside my romance, and produced his life, one of
the most successful of all my trifling works.
Still, in the repertory of my imagination lay my Abbess of Parma, until
at last I found a niche for her, in “the O’Briens and O’Flahertys,” where
something of her character, and a literal description of her apartment,
in the monastery of St. Paul, is given; and there she figures away as the
Abbess of Moy Cullen.—“_Au reste_,” all that is said in that novel of the
foundress of the “holy heart,” is historically true: a young, clever, and
wealthy _religieuse_, acting by the agency of the Jesuits, did found that
mystic worship, which is still throughout Catholic Europe a sign and a
focus of jesuitism.
THE CAP OF LIBERTY.
The cap of liberty, which still adorned the milestones near the French
capital, in 1813, and which were to have been effaced, in order to make
way for Napoleon’s eagle, were supplanted at the restoration by the
_fleur de lis_. This is the history of the French revolution in a single
sentence.
Among the Romans, the presentation of a cap was part of the ceremony
observed in the manumission of slaves, and, therefore, perhaps, it was
adopted as an emblem of freedom. The custom is still preserved at the
investiture of a doctor in the university graduations. The circumstance
gives a strong meaning to a whimsical speech of Sir R. St. G., who, at
the celebrated Catholic dinner at the Black Abbey, at Kilkenny, got very
tipsy. During the process he had made several efforts to be as eloquent
as his neighbours, but was coughed down as often as he got on his legs.
In all the sulkiness of a fuddled man, he resolved to go away; but he
discovered that his hat had gone before him, and suddenly finding a pause
and a subject for his oratory, he exclaimed, “Gentlemen, I came here to
emancipate you, and, d—n you, you have stolen my hat.”
_À propos_ to university graduations: when the present Duke of
Gloucester took his degree, his father, who was at Cambridge to witness
the ceremony, was also complimented with an honorary doctorate. The
opportunity was seized upon by the professors to bring into the
speeches (in which they introduce their _children_, the new graduates)
an appropriate compliment to their illustrious guest. Of this the
royal visitor was duly warned; and as it was supposed that he might
not have recently “rubbed up his Latin,” as Queen Elizabeth phrased
it, he was directed to be upon the alert, and whenever he caught the
word “_principes_,” to infer a compliment and bow accordingly. With
the professors of divinity and of law, things passed as had been
pre-arranged, but Sir I. P., the Professor of Physic, was “ill at these
numbers,” and too indolent to compose a speech especially for the
occasion; so away he went with the old humdrum string of common-places,
touching the rise, progress, dignity, and importance of the art of
honestly committing manslaughter: he had not, however, travelled far,
before he arrived at a sentence beginning with “Hippocrates et Galen,
principes medicinæ,” and down went the head of the old duke, as if Galen
and Hippocrates had belonged to the House of Hanover.
PROVIDENCE.
Aristotle maintained that the barbarians were created expressly to become
slaves;—while La Fiteau, a jesuit, who wrote an history of the aboriginal
Americans, believed that none but an atheist would dare to say they were
creatures of God’s forming. In the same spirit, a modern judge had the
assurance to assert that slavery is not contrary to Christianity, because
bishops voted for it. Providence is, under all systems, the “_prête-nom_”
for the injustices of man.
Madame de Genlis (_Dictionnaire des Etiquettes_) says, “Providence has
instilled an irresistible love of the marvellous into the heart of man,
in order to predispose him for receiving without difficulty the celestial
lights of faith.” Unfortunately for the hypothesis, this capital
contrivance has been as much at the service of the “devilish darkness”
of a thousand-and-one false religions, as of the “celestial lights” of
catholicity. If Voltaire had uttered such a sentiment, it would have
been said, and with justice, that his object was to bring religion into
contempt, and to expose the roguery of priests, who trade upon the
weakness of human nature. Men love the marvellous, because they are
greedy of strong sensations; and, as this propensity hurries them into
false tastes, so it predisposes them to superstition and false creeds.
Protestantism has too little of the marvellous for the warm sensibilities
of the south; and even Madame de Genlis’s popery is not wonderful enough
for the good people of Spain and Portugal.
TAKING A SHOWER BATH.
A great senator and statesman of the “Irish nation,” being ordered a
shower-bath lately, sent to the physician, who had prescribed the remedy,
to know if he might soften the shock by wearing a brazen bason on his
head. Oh, Cruikshank! what a subject! Bath, bason, statesman, and all!!
And yet this being is a particle of the “collective wisdom” to which the
destiny of a great nation is confided. Institutions which provide for
human happiness can throw up no barricado to stem the influx of human
absurdity: that which is made for man, and by man, is inevitably exposed
to the imperfections both of the agent and object of all systems.
VIEWS OF THE CATHOLIC QUESTION.