Изображения страниц
PDF
EPUB

of those who received him in 1848-49 with little short of divine honour.

Over these, and some other like points, Mr. Trollope has passed in silence, or with light hand. The impeachment which is to be gathered from his writing lies first against the candour and truthfulness of the Bishop of Imola; and a charge of that nature will not be likely to extract from an Italian reader more than a deprecatory shrug of the shouldersunless it be an outward movement of the hands, and perhaps the words, "Ma-ma-ma!" In later years, how far the action of the Pope has been automatic, in the simple sense of the word, and how far that of an automaton, will probably remain untold by the historian. It is a very curious fact that the Catholics of Italy attribute to the visible head of their religion that quality of which they entertain the most real and lively terror. The Pope is credited with having the evil eye. Strange things are witnessed, and stranger are told, throughout Italy, of those gifted with this goblin power. The present writer can give an instance that occurred within his own knowledge of the mode in which the belief was held in the highest society in that country. On a morning visit to a Royal person in Naples, the visible consternation and trouble which perturbed the whole circle was so great that, on receiving permission to withdraw, the writer eagerly asked his companion what was amiss. "Did you not see the Marchese come into the room? The greatest jettatore (a caster of the evil eye) in Naples !" There was a ball then pending at the Palace, to attend which all those in the room in question had received commands. By a prudent forgetfulness, the maggior-duomo

maggiore, or Lord High Chamberlain, had omitted to send cards to the nobleman in question. He wrote politely to the Chamberlain, informing him that, by some inadvertence, he had not received cards for the ball, and requesting that they might be sent. The Chamberlain, in dismay, laid the letter before the King. "We can't help it, Bisignano," said his Majesty. "He won't take a hint. Of course he has a right to be asked. You can't refuse him. You must send him his cards. But you'll see that the ball will not take place.' "Neither did it, for in the week that had then still to elapse before the day fixed, one of the gracious and amiable princesses-sisters of the King, who were so deservedly loved and respected-unexpectedly died.

It will be admitted, even by those who hold a belief in the evil eye to be a malignant superstition, that it is not one of those attributes that would very naturally be assigned to any one, especially to a high ecclesiastic, without some obvious reason. Perhaps the best outcome of the study of the subject is the opinion that a certain clumsy maladroitness is a characteristic of some people, which leads them continually to do mischief, even without any intention so to do. This is the most rational, or rationalistic, view of the case. But even this is singularly unhappy for a Pope.

Whether, however, in the words of the Gospel, and according to the belief of the Italians, the eye of Pius the Ninth was evil, or not, there can be no question that his whole career as a Pontiff has tended to confirm the imputation. Misfortune has dogged his footsteps, haunted his friends, and scrupulously avoided those smitten by his maledictions. First, in

In

deed, of his misfortunes may be ranked the period of his birth. In the Divine government of human affairs there does not occur that penury of instruments which we are accustomed to assume. the case of almost every grand step in the progress of science or of art, it has become apparent that more than one student was on the track of the cardinal discovery, although the merit has been ascribed to one fortunate name. Bearing this in mind, we may still speak of events as they occurred, and not as they might have occurred. With this reserve, we may say that the first great misfortune of Pius the Ninth was that he was born after two humble Englishmen, James Watt and George Stephenson, saw the light. For the spirit evoked by these men and their fellow workers has been the origin of a mighty material revolution in human affairs, compared to which the political revolution of 1789 was but a flash of summer lightning. Stephenson and his fellows unchained human thought. They freed the peasant from his parish bonds, the islander from his insular ignorance and prejudice. They gave man a greater freedom of range over the surface of his planet than would have been afforded him if he had been suddenly furnished with wings. By By this mighty upstirring of society from its very depths has been gradually produced a state of things with which it is impossible to deal on the old principle of quieta non movere. The waters had felt the troubling influence of a mighty wind. The bark of the Church could not be guided, either by a sleeping steersman or by one who thought that he had to contend only with an ordinary flaw of wind. It was evident to men who could see what was going on

around them that the old order of contented submission to self-pronounced authority had received a blow which, sooner or later, must be fatal. For either that authority must itself, in concord with the movement of the times, condescend to shew that its basis was firmly rooted in truth, or its duration would be only a question of time.

The traditional caution, hesitation, and timidity of the Vatican policy-timidity until it became clear where a crushing blow might be inflicted, and then perfect hardihood in its delivery-was especially needed under circumstances of such unprecedented peril; or rather, we may say, when it would have become evident to a wise statesman that such peril was undoubtedly imminent. But the spirit of counsel seems to have spread its wings, and deserted the shadowy precincts of St. Peter's, at least from the death of Gregory the Sixteenth. Mr. Trollope gives a characteristic picture of the easy-going sloth of the Austrian Cardinal Gaysruck, whose delay was the cause of the accession of Cardinal Mastai Ferretti to the Holy See. With great interest will be read the

account of the tremulous hesitation of the latter prelate himself, when it fell to him, by lot, in the Conclave, to announce the votes which gave him the right to wear the Fisherman's ring. A little more, and his chance would have been gone. In the indescribable intrigue which accompanies a Papal election, Fortune shews herself, even more than elsewhere, to be feminine. A chance thrown away is irreversible. But the bearer of the Austrian veto was too late, the fainting courage of Cardinal Ferretti was restored; and he had the rare satisfaction of announcing to the Conclave the accession of a number of suffrages which at once

made him the master of his brethren.

It was an evil choice for Rome and for the Church. It was, let us hope, one of those evils which effect good for Italy and for the world. At a moment in which the traditional counsel which had reared the Papal throne to its lofty eminence was more requisite than at any previous crisis, that throne was ascended by a man who took counsel first of his own vanity, and then of those still more dangerous advisers who flattered that master passion. In these two lines lies the clue to the disasters of the Papacy under the pontificate of Pius the Ninth.

Italy was well known to be honeycombed with secret associations. The Church, as we have learned from the careful announcements of Pius the Ninth himself, tars with the same brush the Carbonaro, the Freemason, and the subscriber to the Bible Society. A Freemason himself, Mastai Ferretti may, perhaps, have imagined that the secret societies which drew their inspiration from Mazzini, or from even more dangerous enthusiasts, were not, in real truth, more hostile to law, order, and national welfare than were the members of that most ancient and most honourable confraternity. At all events, his first actions as Pope applied the match to a train that had long been ready to explode. "The new Pontiff was exhibiting to the world," says Mr. Trollope, the startling, unknown, and significant phenomenon of a popular Pope. And Austria was beginning to realise the fact that those hours of Gaysruck's delay at Milan had been somewhat portentous in the history of the world."

We refer the reader to the pages of Mr. Trollope for the story of the change that followed. It is

told with fair knowledge of the events, and appreciation of their connexion and importance. We can only glance at the results. First was the flight to Gaetathe virtual abdication of Papal sovereignty. Under the hospitality of King Ferdinand the Second, if the Pope neither learned nor forgot much, he at least discovered on what allies he could alone lean. That portly sovereign, excelled only by the colossal Nicholas of Russia in height and stature, prostrated himself at full length on the ground before the fugitive Pope. His Holiness's residence in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies was a contínual triumph, from which he went back to impose the iron yoke of the travestied fisherman of Galilee on the Romans, by aid of the bayonets of Imperial France. The masquerade in which a tinsel Charlemagne re-conferred the rule of Rome on a mock Gregory, would have been irresistibly ludicrous, had it not been attended by so much bloodshed.

Living under the protection of the French bayonets, owing his status, if not his life, to the mystic adventurer to whose wife and child Pius the Ninth afterwards enjoyed the luxury of shewing an ingratitude eminently Papal, an unusual locus penitentia was given to the restored Pontiff. How he availed himself of the opportunity let Mr. Trollope tell. The first shock of the earthquake that overthrew the thronelets of Italy, and the antique chair-a Mohammedan. piece of art, bearing the inscription in Arabic, "There is no God but God, and Mohammed is His Prophet "-of St. Peter, made itself felt on parently trivial occasion. Conducting his semi-idiotic son, Francis, afterwards the second of that name, to meet his bright and spirited bride at Bari, King Fer

an ap

dinand the Second was stricken by the intense cold of the season in his passage over the Appenines. The road, excellent as his care had made it, was blocked with snow. The King alighted, and walked for a portion of the way. The peasants, when the Royal train came near a village, spread their cloaks and bedding for the Royal footcloth. But it was of no avail. The King never again held up his head. And the minute guns which, after his painful return to Portici by sea in the following year, announced the decease of Ferdinand the Second, pealed the knell of the royalties of Parma, Modena, Tuscany, Naples, Rome, and of their great cognate support, the Austrian Power in Italy. The French Emperor was compensating Italy for his maintenance of the Pope by his attack on the Holy Roman Empire. Of all that followed the story has yet to be told in a manner becoming the gravity, and at the same time adorned by the graces, of a great historian. It has been told by a great novelist; but the constant interposition of the claim quorum pars magna fui is enough to indispose the English reader to take his account of these stirring events from Alexandre Dumas, The advance of Garibaldi, which was more like a series of incidents from a fairy legend than those of a chapter of European history, would have come to a speedy close, over and over again, had a single frigate, or a single regiment, of the navy and army of the Two Sicilies, upheld the honour of their flag. The intervention of King Victor Emmanuel, when at last General Fanti crossed the frontier, was a sheer act of humanity forced on Sardinia, against the wishes of all the northern statesmen, and rendered necessary to prevent the Sicilian Vespers that would have

followed when the vengeance of the reaction had its course-invited as it was by the miserable incompetence of Garibaldi and his motley crew. It was the opinion of Cavour, the maker of Italy, that the incorporation of the barbaric elements composing the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies would materially thwart and delay the consolidation of the more civilised

people of the North. Events have justified the hesitation of the Italian statesman. But the one cry that rang through Italy, from the Alps to the Ionian Sea, was Viva Italia Una. The people, or rather the many distinct peoples, of that geographical expressionItaly-uttered that cry from their very hearts, with all the peculiar energy of their Southern blood. There was nothing to be done but to attempt to "make Italy," although wise men would have wished to defer the operation for another quarter of a century. And in the making of Italy the case foreseen by Machiavelli occurred. Rome was wanted-and the Pope-King had to go.

It was in the interval that elapsed between the fall of the Bourbon dynasty at Naples and the disastrous extinction of the Buonaparte comedy at Sedan, that Pius the Ninth threw away the grandest opportunity for consolidating a spiritual throne that was ever offered to a Bishop of Rome. A man who stands on the lofty eminence of sovereign power has the opportunity of throwing more far-sighted and piercing glances around him, and thus of more surely anticipating coming events, than any other human being, with the exception, perhaps, of a great minister of State. And even the greatest minister, owing to the short and uncertain tenure of office which is often more marked in constitutional than even in

autocratic governments, is but an outsider compared with a prince born in the purple. From the unique order of the Papacy, the Pope is at a disadvantage in this respect among the sovereigns of Europe. He attains power more like a minister than like a prince. On the other hand, the long and unswerving policy laid down by so many great Pontiffs had surrounded the Papal throne with a subtlety of counsel not elsewhere to be found. With this traditional wisdom, as we have said, Pius the Ninth abruptly broke. It may, therefore, well be the case that in looking from the solitary eminence of his throne when the neighbouring peaks of Italian sovereignty had been submerged by the rising tide, he could see nothing but mists, and lightings, and driving storm. But if a cool-headed and far-seeing Pope had occupied the Holy See at that critical moment, he would have seized an occasion which promised to commence a second period of twelve centuries of Papal primacy, if not of Papal supremacy. The Latin peoples love a stately rite. Nor is it the Latin peoples alone who are now displaying a strong tendency to the re-establishment of pompous ritual where it was overthrown three centuries ago. The Italians would be proud that Rome should remain the metropolis of Catholic Christendom; that the Roman Bishop should ever continue to be the Primate of the Church. The higher his spiritual claims, the greater the glory of Italy. Sweep away only the intolerable cancer of sacerdotalismthe administration, under the loftiest pretexts, of the meanest, falsest, foulest tyranny known to Europe, and the Romans themselves would respect the Pope. At the moment, then, when his temporal power was the one obstacle to the fulfilment of the

passionate desire of the Italian people-when a counsellor like Machiavelli was hardly needed to whisper from his tomb "the temporal power is doomed," the Pope had an opportunity, to seize which it was not even necessary for him to take the initiative. What he had, not to ask for, but simply to accept, was this: the neutralisation of Rome, as a sacred or pontifical city; the acknowledgment for the Pope of the rank and immunities of a sovereign; the power to accredit nuncios, and to receive ministers, with personal inviolability for him and for them; the maintenance of his splendid council of seventy-two Cardinals, each gratified, besides his episcopal revenue, with an income of £1000 a-year; and a civil lista privy purse-call it which you will, of a million sterling per annum, guaranteed by all the Catholic Princes of Europe, and perhaps of the New World. That was the position on which Pope Pius the Ninth unhesitatingly turned his back. Has he not been a sore Pope for the Papacy?

A question is hinted at by Mr. Trollope which demands a more careful and thoughtful investigation than can be lightly given ambulando. We have already spoken of the fact that a sovereign, even if not a person of the highest intellectual order, is wont to possess a keener insight into the essential necessities of his position, and to some extent of the welfare of his people, than can be attained by the ablest man of inferior birth. It is impossible to come into any close proximity to sovereign princes without being impressed with this truth, which, after all, is only accordant with human nature. But the question has before been raised (and amongst other persons by the present Prime Minister of England) whether a

« ПредыдущаяПродолжить »