The Project Gutenberg eBook, Rome in 1860, by Edward Dicey This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net Title: Rome in 1860 Author: Edward Dicey Release Date: December 11, 2005 [eBook #17284] Language: English Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII) ***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ROME IN 1860***
Transcribed by from the 1861 Macmillan and Co. edition by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
Cambridge:
MACMILLAN AND CO.
AND 23, HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN,
London.
1861.
[The right of Translation is reserved.]
* * * * *
Cambridge:
printed by c. j. clay, m.a.
at the university press
* * * * *
TO
MR. AND MRS ROBERT BROWNING
My first recollections of Rome date from too long ago, and from too early an age, for me to be able to recall with ease the impression caused by its first aspect. It is hard indeed for any one at any time to judge of Rome fairly. Whatever may be the object of our pilgrimage, we Roman travellers are all under some guise or other pilgrims to the Eternal City, and gaze around us with something of a pilgrim’s reverence for the shrine of his worship. The ground we tread on is enchanted ground, we breathe a charmed air, and are spellbound with a strange witchery. A kind of glamour steals over us, a thousand memories rise up and chase each other. Heroes and martyrs, sages and saints and sinners, consuls and popes and emperors, people the weird pageant which to our mind’s eye hovers ever mistily amidst the scenes around us. Here p. 2above all places in God’s earth it is hard to forget the past and think only of the present. This, however, is what I now want to do. Laying aside all memory of what Rome has been, I would again describe what Rome is now. And thus, in my solitary wanderings about the city, I have often sought to picture to myself what would be the feelings of a stranger who, caring nothing and knowing nothing of the past, should enter Rome with only that listless curiosity which all travellers feel perforce, when for the first time they approach a great capital. Let me fancy that such a traveller—a very Gallio among travellers—is standing by my side. Let me try and tell him what, under my mentorship, he would mark and see.
It shall not be on a bright, cloudless day that we enter Rome. To our northern eyes the rich Italian sun-light gives to everything, even to ruins and rags and squalor, a deceptive grandeur, and a beauty which is not due. No, the day shall be such a day as that on which I write; such a day in fact as the days are oftener than not at this dead season of the year, sunless and damp and dull. The sky above is covered with colourless, unbroken clouds, and the outline of the Alban p. 3and the Sabine hills stands dimly out against the grey distance. It matters little by what gate or from what quarter we enter. On every side the scene is much the same. The Campagna surrounds the city. A wide, waste, broken, hillock-covered plain, half common, half pasture land, and altogether desolate; a few stunted trees, a deserted house or two, here and there a crumbling mass of shapeless brickwork: such is the foreground through which you travel for many a weary mile. As you approach the city there is no change in the desolation, no sign of life. Every now and then a string of some half-dozen peasant-carts, laden with wine-barrels or wood faggots, comes jingling by. The carts so-called, rather by courtesy than right, consist of three rough planks and two high ricketty wheels. The broken-kneed horses sway to and fro beneath their unwieldy load, and the drivers, clad in their heavy sheepskin jackets, crouch sleepily beneath the clumsy, hide-bound framework, placed so as to shelter them from the chill Tramontana blasts. A solitary cart is rare, for the neighbourhood of Rome is not the safest of places, and those small piles of stone, with the wooden cross surmounting them, bear witness to the fact that a murder p. 4took place not long ago on the very spot you are passing now. Then, perhaps, you come across a drove of wild, shaggy buffaloes, or a travelling carriage rattling and jilting along, or a stray priest or so, trudging homewards from some outlying chapel. That red-bodied funereal-looking two-horse-coach, crawling at a snail’s pace, belongs to his Excellency the Cardinal, whom Papal etiquette forbids to walk on foot within the city, and whom you can see a little further on pottering feebly along the road in his violet stockings, supported by his clerical secretary, and followed at a respectful distance by his two attendant footmen with their threadbare liveries. At last, out of the dreary waste, at the end of the interminable ill-paved sloughy road, the long line of the grey tumble-down walls rises gloomily. A few cannon-shot would batter a breach anywhere, as the events of 1849 proved only too well. However, at Rome there is neither commerce to be impeded nor building extension of any kind to be checked; the city has shrunk up until its precincts are a world too wide; and the walls, if they are useless, are harmless also; more, by the way, than you can say for most things here. There is no stir or bustle at the gates. Two French soldiers, p. 5striding across a bench, are playing at picquet with a pack of greasy cards. A pack-horse or two nibble the blades of grass between the stones, while their owners haggle with the solitary guard about the “octroi” duties. A sentinel on duty stares listlessly at you as you pass,—and you have entered Rome.
You are coming, I will suppose, from Ostia, and enter therefore by the “Porta San Paolo;” the gate where legends tell that Belisarius sat and begged. I have chosen this out of the dozen entrances as recalling fewest of past memories and leading most directly to the heart of the living, working city. You stand then within Rome, and look round in vain for the signs of a city. Hard by a knot of dark cypress-trees waves above the lonely burial-ground where Shelley lies at rest. A long, straight, pollard-lined road stretches before you between high walls far away; low hills or mounds rise on either side, covered by stunted, straggling vineyards. You pass on. A beggar, squatting by the roadside, calls on you for charity; and long after you have passed you can hear the mumbling, droning cry, “Per l’amore di Dio e della Santa Vergine,” dying in your ears. On the wall, from time to time, you see a rude p. 6painting of Christ upon the cross, and an inscription above the slit beneath bids you contribute alms for the souls in purgatory. A peasant-woman it may be is kneeling before the shrine, and a troop of priests pass by on the other side. A string of carts again, drawn by bullocks, another shrine, and another troop of priests, and you are come to the river’s banks. The dull, muddy Tiber rolls beneath you, and in front, that shapeless mass of dingy, weather-stained, discoloured, plaster-covered, tile-roofed buildings, crowded and jammed together on either side the river, is Rome itself. You are at the city’s port, the “Ripetta” or quay of Rome. In the stream there are a dozen vessels, something between barges and coasting smacks, the largest possibly of fifty tons’ burden, which have brought marble from Carrara for the sculptors’ studios. There is a Gravesend-looking steamer too, lying off the quay, but she belongs to the French government, and is employed to carry troops to and from Civita Vecchia. This is all, and at this point all traffic on the Tiber ceases. Though the river is navigable for a long distance above Rome, yet beyond the bridge, now in sight, not a boat is to be seen except at rare intervals. It is the Tiber surely, p. 7and not the Thames, which should be called the “silent highway.”
A few steps more and the walls on either side are replaced by houses, and the city has begun. The houses do not improve on a closer acquaintance; one and all look as if commenced on too grand a scale, they had ruined their builders before their completion, had been left standing empty for years, and were now occupied by tenants too poor to keep them from decay. There are holes in the wall where the scaffolding was fixed, large blotches where the plaster has peeled away; stones and cornices which have been left unused lie in the mud before the doors. From the window-sills and from ropes fastened across the streets flutter half-washed rags and strange apparel. The height of the houses makes the narrow streets gloomy even at midday. At night, save in a few main thoroughfares, there is no light of any kind; but then, after dark at Rome, nobody cares much about walking in out-of-the-way places. The streets are paved with the most angular and slippery of stones, placed herringbone fashion, with ups and downs in every direction. Foot-pavement there is none; and the ricketty carriages drawn by the tottering horses p. 8come swaying round the endless corners with an utter disregard for the limbs and lives of the foot-folk. You are out of luck if you come to Rome on a “Festa” day, for then all the shops are shut, and the town looks drearier than ever. However, even here the chances are two to one, or somewhat more, in favour of the day of your arrival being a working-day. When the shops are open there is at any rate life enough of one kind or other. In most parts the shops have no window-fronts. Glass, indeed, there is little of anywhere, and the very name of plate-glass is unknown. The dark, gloomy shops varying in size between a coach-house and a wine-vault, have their wide shutter-doors flung open to the streets. A feeble lamp hung at the back of every shop you pass, before a painted Madonna shrine, makes the darkness of their interiors visible. The trades of Rome are primitive and few in number. Those dismembered, disembowelled carcases, suspended in every variety of posture, denote the butchers’ shops; not the pleasantest of sights at any time, least of all in Rome, where the custom of washing the meat after killing it seems never to have been introduced. Next door too is an open stable, crowded with mules and horses. Those black, p. 9mouldy loaves, exposed in a wire-work cage, to protect them from the clutches of the hungry street vagabonds, stand in front of the bakers, where the price of bread is regulated by the pontifical tariff. Then comes the “Spaccio di Vino,” that gloomiest among the shrines of Bacchus, where the sour red wine is drunk at dirty tables by the grimiest of tipplers. Hard by is the “Stannaro,” or hardware tinker, who is always re-bottoming dilapidated pans, and drives a brisk trade in those clumsy, murderous-looking knives. Further on is the greengrocer, with the long strings of greens, and sausages, and flabby balls of cheese, and straw-covered oil-flasks dangling in festoons before his door. Over the way is the Government depôt, where the coarsest of salt and the rankest of tobacco are sold at monopoly prices. Those gay, parti-coloured stripes of paper, inscribed with the cabalistic figures, flaunting at the street corner, proclaim the “Prenditoria di Lotti,” or office of the Papal lottery, where gambling receives the sanction of the Church, and prospers under clerical auspices to such an extent that in the city of Rome alone, with a population under two hundred thousand, fifty-five millions of lottery tickets are said to be taken annually. p. 10Cobblers and carpenters, barbers and old clothes-men, seem to me to carry on their trades much in the same way all the world over. The peculiarity about Rome is, that all these trades seem stunted in their development. The cobbler never emerges as the shoemaker, and the carpenter fails to rise into the upholstery line of business. Bookselling too is a trade which does not thrive on Roman soil. Altogether there is a wonderful sameness about the streets. Time after time, turn after turn, the same scene is reproduced. So having got used to the first strangeness of the sight you move on more quickly.
There is no lack of life about you now, at the shop-doors whole families sit working at their trades, or carrying on the most private occupations of domestic life; at every corner groups of men stand loitering about, with hungry looks and ragged garments, reminding one only too forcibly of the “Seven Dials” on a summer Sunday; French soldiers and beggars, women and children and priests swarm around you. Indeed, there are priests everywhere. There with their long black coats and broad-brimmed shovel hats, come a score of young priests, walking two and two together, with downcast eyes. How, without p. 11looking up, they manage to wend their way among the crowd, is a constant miracle; the carriages, however, stop to let them pass, for a Roman driver would sooner run over a dozen children than knock down a priest. A sturdy, bare-headed, bare-footed monk, not over clean, nor over savoury, hustles along with his brown robe fastened round his waist by the knotted scourge of cord; a ghastly-looking figure, covered in a grey shroud from head to foot, with slits for his mouth and eyes, shakes a money-box in your face, with scowling importunity; a fat sleek abbé comes sauntering along, peeping into the open shops or (so scandal whispers) at the faces of the shop-girls. If you look right or left, behind or in front, you see priests on every side,—Franciscan friars and Dominicans, Carmelites and Capuchins, priests in brown cloth and priests in serge, priests in red and white and grey, priests in purple and priests in rags, standing on the church-steps, stopping at the doorways, coming down the bye-streets, looking out of the windows—you see priests everywhere and always. Their faces are, as a rule, not pleasant to look upon; and I think, at first, with something of the “old bogey” belief of childhood, you feel more comfortable p. 12when they are not too close to you; but, ere long, this feeling wears away, and you gaze at the priests and at the beggars with the same stolid indifference.
You are getting, by this time, into the heart of the city, ever and anon the streets pass through some square or piazza, each like the other. In the centre stands a broken fountain, moss-grown and weedy, whence the water spouts languidly; on the one side is a church, on the other some grim old palace, which from its general aspect, and the iron bars before its windows, bears a striking resemblance to Newgate gone to ruin. Grass grows between the flag-stones, and the piazza is emptier, quieter, and cleaner than the street, but that is all. You stop and enter the first church or two, but your curiosity is soon satisfied. Dull and bare outside, the churches are gaudy and dull within. When you have seen one, you have seen all. A crippled beggar crouching at the door, a few common people kneeling before the candle-lighted shrines, a priest or two mumbling at a side-altar, half-a-dozen indifferent pictures and a great deal of gilt and marble everywhere, an odour of stale incense and mouldy cloth, and, over all, p. 13a dim dust-discoloured light. Fancy all this, and you will have before you a Roman church. On your way you pass no fine buildings, for to tell the honest truth, there are no fine buildings in Rome, except St Peter’s and the Colosseum, both of which lie away from the town. Fragments indeed of old ruins, porticoes built into the wall, bricked-up archways and old cornice-stones, catch your eye from time to time; and so, on and on, over broken pavements, up and down endless hills, through narrow streets and gloomy piazzas, by churches innumerable, amidst an ever-shifting motley crowd of peasants, soldiers, priests, and beggars, you journey onwards for two miles or so; you have got at last to the modern quarter, where hotels are found, and where the English congregate. There in the “Corso,” and in one or two streets leading out of it, there are foot-pavements, lamps at night, and windows to the shops. A fair sprinkling of second-rate equipages roll by you, bearing the Roman ladies, with their gaudy dresses, ill-assorted colours, and their heavy, handsome, sensual features. The young Italian nobles, with their English-cut attire, saunter past you listlessly. The peasants are few in number now, p. 14but the soldiers and priests and beggars are never wanting. These streets and shops, brilliant though they seem by contrast with the rest of the city, would, after all, only be third-rate ones in any other European capital, and will not detain you long. On again by the fountain of Treves, where the water-stream flows day and night through the defaced and broken statue-work; a few steps more, and then you fall again into the narrow streets and the decayed piazzas; on again, between high walls, along roads leading through desolate ruin-covered vineyards, and you are come to another gate. The French sentinels are changing guard. The dreary Campagna lies before you, and you have passed through Rome.
And when our stroll was over, that sceptic and incurious fellow-traveller of mine would surely turn to take a last look at the dark heap of roofs and chimney-pots and domes, which lies mouldering in the valley at his feet. If I were then to tell him, that in that city of some hundred and seventy thousand souls, there were ten thousand persons in holy orders, and between three and four hundred churches, of which nearly half had convents and schools attached; p. 15if I were to add, that taking in novices, scholars, choristers, servitors, beadles, and whole tribes of clerical attendants, there were probably not far short of forty thousand persons, who in some form or other lived upon and by the church, that is, in plainer words, doing no labour themselves, lived on the labour of others, he, I think, would answer then, that a city so priest-infested, priest-ruled and priest-ridden, would be much such a city as he had seen with me; such a city as Rome is now.
In foreign discussions on the Papal question it is always assumed, as an undisputed fact, that the maintenance of the Papal court at Rome is, in a material point of view, an immense advantage to the city, whatever it may be in a moral one. Now my own observations have led me to doubt the correctness of this assumption, which, if true, forms an important item in the whole matter under consideration. It is no good saying, as my “Papalini” friends are wont to do, Rome gains everything and indeed only exists by the Papacy. The real questions are, What class at Rome gain by it, and what is it that they gain? There are four classes at Rome: the priests, the nobles, the bourgeoisie, and the poor. Of course if anybody gains it is the priesthood. If the Pope were removed from Rome, or if a lay government were established (the two hypotheses are practically identical), the p. 17number of the Clergy would undoubtedly be much diminished. A large portion of the convents and clerical endowments would be suppressed, and the present generation of priests would be heavy sufferers. This result is inevitable. Under no free government would or could a city of 170,000 inhabitants support 10,000 unproductive persons out of the common funds; for this is substantially the case at Rome in the present day. Every sixteen lay citizens, men, women, and children, support out of their labour a priest between them. The Papal question with the Roman priesthood is thus a question of daily bread, and it is surely no want of charity to suppose that the material aspect influences their minds quite as much as the spiritual. Still even with regard to the priests there are two sides to the question. The system of political and social government inseparable from the Papacy, which closes up almost every trade and profession, drives vast numbers into the priesthood for want of any other occupation. The supply of priests is, in consequence, far greater than the demand, and, as the laws of political economy hold good even in the Papal States, priest labour is miserably underpaid. It is a Protestant delusion that the priests in Rome p. 18live upon the fat of the land. What fat there is is certainly theirs, but then there are too many mouths to eat it. The Roman priests are relatively poorer than those in any other part of Italy. It is one of the great mysteries in Rome how all the priests who swarm about the streets manage to live. The clue to the mystery is to be found inside the churches. In every church here, and there are 366 of them, some score or two of masses are said daily at the different altars. The pay for performing a mass varies from a “Paul” to a “Scudo;” that is, in round numbers, from sixpence to a crown. The “good” masses, those paid for by private persons for the souls of their relatives, are naturally reserved for the priests connected with the particular church; while the poor ones, which are paid for out of the funds of the church, are given to any priest who happens to apply for them. So somehow or other, what with a mass or two a day, or by private tuition, or by charitable assistance, or in some cases by small handicrafts conducted secretly, the large floating population of unemployed priests rub on from day to day, in the hope of getting ultimately some piece of ecclesiastical patronage. Yet the distress and want amongst them are often pitiable, p. 19and, in fact, amongst the many sufferers from the artificial preponderance given to the priesthood by the Papal system, the poorer class of priests are not among the least or lightest.
The nobility as a body are sure to be more or less supporters of the established order of things. Their interests too are very much mixed up with those of the Papacy. There is not a noble Roman family which has not one or more of its members among the higher ranks of the priesthood, and to a considerable degree their distinctions, such as they are, and their temporal prospects are bound up with the Popedom. Moreover, in this rank of the social scale the private and personal influence of the priests, through the women of the family, is very powerful. The more active, however, and ambitious amongst the aristocracy feel deeply the exclusion from public life, the absence of any opening for ambition, and the gradual impoverishment of their property, which are the necessary evils of an absolute ecclesiastical government.
The “Bourgeoisie” stand on a very different footing. They have neither the moral influence of the priesthood nor the material wealth of the nobility to console them for the loss of liberty; they form indeed the “Pariahs” of Roman society. p. 20“In other countries,” a Roman once said to me, “you have one man who lives in wealth and a thousand who live in comfort. Here the one man lives in comfort, and the thousand live in misery.” I believe this picture is only too true. The middle classes, who live by trade or mental labour, must have a hard time of it. The professions of Rome are overstocked and underpaid. The large class of government officials or “impiegati,” to whom admirers of the Papacy point with such pride as evidence of the secular character of the administration, are paid on the most niggardly scale; while all the lucrative and influential posts are reserved for the priestly administrators. The avowed venality of the courts of justice is a proof that lawyers are too poorly remunerated to find honesty their best policy, while the extent to which barbers are still employed as surgeons shows that the medical profession is not of sufficient repute to be prosperous. There is no native patronage for art, no public for literature. The very theatres, which flourish in other despotic states, are here but losing speculations, owing to the interference of clerical regulations. There are no commerce and no manufactures in the Eternal city. In a back street near the Capitol, p. 21over a gloomy, stable-looking door, you may see written up “Borsa di Roma,” but I never could discover any credible evidence of business being transacted on the Roman change. There is but one private factory in Rome, the Anglo-Roman Gas Company. What trade there is is huckstering, not commerce. In fact, so Romans have told me, you may safely conclude that every native you meet walking in the streets here, in a broadcloth coat, lives from hand to mouth, and you may pretty surely guess that his next month’s salary is already overdrawn. The crowds of respectably-dressed persons, clerks and shopkeepers and artizans, whom you see in the lottery offices the night before the drawing, prove the general existence not only of improvidence but of distress.
The favourite argument in support of the Papal rule in Rome, is that the poor gain immensely by it. I quite admit that the argument contains a certain amount of truth. The priests, the churches, and the convents give a great deal of employment to the working classes. There are probably some 30,000 persons who live on the priests, or rather out of the funds which support them. Then, too, the system of clerical charity operates favourably for the very poor. Any Roman p. 22in distress can get from his priest a “buono,” or certificate, that he is in want of food, and on presenting this at one of the convents belonging to the mendicant orders, he will obtain a wholesome meal. No man in Rome therefore need be reduced to absolute starvation as long as he stands well with his priest; that is, as long as he goes to confession, never talks of politics, and kneels down when the Pope passes. Now the evil moral effects of such a system, its tendency to destroy independent self-respect and to promote improvidence are obvious enough, and I doubt whether even the positive gain to the poor is unmixed. The wages paid to the servants of the Church, and the amount given away in charity, must come out of somebody’s pockets. In fact, the whole country and the poor themselves indirectly, if not directly, are impoverished by supporting these unproductive classes out of the produce of labour. If prevention is better than cure, work is any day better than charity. After all, too, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and nowhere are the poor more poverty-stricken and needy than in Rome. The swarms of beggars which infest the town are almost the first objects that strike a stranger here, though strangers have p. 23no notion of the distress of Rome. The winter, when visitors are here, is the harvest-time of the Roman poor. It is the summer, when the strangers are gone and the streets deserted, which is their season of want and misery.
The truth is, that Rome, at the present day, lives upon her visitors, as much or more than Ramsgate or Margate, for I should be disposed to consider the native commerce of either of these bathing-places quite as remunerative as that of the Papal capital. The Vatican is the quietest and the least showy of European courts; and of itself, whatever it may do by others, causes little money to be spent in the town. Even if the Pope were removed from Rome, I much doubt, and I know the Romans doubt, whether travellers would cease to come, or even come in diminished numbers. Rome was famous centuries before Popes were heard of, and will be equally famous centuries after they have passed away. The churches, the museums, the galleries, the ruins, the climate, and the recollections of Rome, would still remain equally attractive, whether the Pope were at hand or not. Under a secular government the city would be far more lively and, in many respects, more pleasant for strangers. An p. 24enterprising vigorous rule could probably do much to check the malaria, to bring the Campagna into cultivation, to render the Tiber navigable, to promote roads and railways, and to develop the internal resources of the Roman States. The gain accruing from these reforms and improvements would, in Roman estimation, far outweigh any possible loss in the number of visitors, or from the absence of the Papal court. Moreover, whether rightly or wrongly, all Romans entertain an unshakeable conviction that in an united Italian kingdom, Rome must ultimately be the chief, if not the sole capital of Italy.
These reasons, which rest on abstract considerations, naturally affect only the educated classes who are also biassed by their political predilections. The small trading and commercial classes are, on somewhat different grounds, equally dissatisfied with the present state of things. The one boon they desire, is a settled government and the end of this ruinous uncertainty. Now a priestly government supported by French bayonets can never give Rome either order or prosperity. For the sake of quiet itself, they wish for change. With respect to the poor, it is very difficult to judge what their feelings or wishes p. 25may be. From what I have seen, I doubt, whether in any part of Italy, with the exception of the provinces subject to Austrian oppression, the revolution is, strictly speaking, a popular one. I suspect that the populace of Rome have no strong desire for Italian unity or, still less for annexation to Sardinia, but I am still more convinced that they have no affection or regard whatever for the existing government; not even the sort of attachment, valueless though it be, which the lazzaroni of Naples have for their Bourbon princes. It is incredible, if any such a feeling did exist, that it should refuse to give any sign of its existence at such a time as the present.
With respect to the actual pecuniary cost of the Papal government, it is not easy to arrive at any positive information; I have little faith in statistics generally, and in Roman statistics in particular; I have, however, before me the official Government Budget for the year 1858. Like all Papal documents, it is confused and meagre, but yet some curious conclusions may be arrived at from it. The year 1858 was as quiet a year, be it remembered, as there has been in Italy for ten years past. It was only on p. 26new year’s day, in 1859, that Napoleon dropped the first hint of the Italian war. The year 1858 may therefore be fairly regarded as a normal year under the present Papal system. For this year the net receipts of the Government were,
Scudi. Direct Taxes . . . . 3,011571 Customs . . . . . . 5,444729 Stamps . . . . . . . 947184 Post . . . . . . . . 111848 Lottery . . . . . . 392813 Licences for Trade . . 174525 Total 10,082670
Now the census, taken at the end of 1857, showed a little over 600,000 families in the Papal States. The head therefore of every family had, on an average, to pay about 16 sc. and a half, or £3. 7s. 9d. annually for the expenses of the Government, which for so poor a country is pretty well. Let us now see how that money is professed to have been spent,
p. 27The net expenses are,
Scudi. Army . . . . . . . . 2,014047 Public Debt . . . . 4,217708 Interior . . . . . . 1,507235 Currency . . . . . . 15115 Public Works . . . . 681932 Census . . . . . . . 88151 Grant for special purposes to Minister of Finance . . . 1,415404 Total 9,949592
Now the Pontifical army is kept up avowedly not for purposes of defence, but to support the Government. The public debt of 66 millions of scudi has been incurred for the sake of keeping up this army. The expenses of the Interior mean the expenses of the police and spies, which infest every town in the Papal dominions, and the grant for Special Purposes, whatever else it may mean, which is not clear, means certainly some job, which the Government does not like to avow. The only parts, therefore, of the expenditure which can be fairly said to be for the benefit of the nation, are the expenses of the p. 28Currency, Census and Public Works, amounting altogether to 785198 scudi, or not a twelfth of the net income raised by taxation. Commercially speaking, whatever may be the case theologically, I am afraid the Papal system can hardly be said to pay.
We all know the story of “Boccaccio’s” Jew, who went to Rome an unbeliever, and came back a Christian. There is no need for alarm; it is not my intention to repeat the story. Indeed the only reason for my alluding to it, is to introduce the remark that, at the present day, the Jew would have returned from Rome hardened in heart and unconverted. The flagrant profligacy, the open immorality, which in the Hebrew’s judgment supplied the strongest testimony to the truth of a religion that survived such scandals, exist no longer. Rome is, externally, the most moral and decorous of European cities. In reality, she may be only a whited sepulchre, but at any rate, the whitewash is laid on very thick, and the plaster looks uncommonly like stone. From various motives, this feature is, I think, but seldom brought prominently forward in descriptions p. 30of the Papal city. Protestant and liberal writers slur over the facts, because, however erroneously, they are deemed inconsistent with the assumed iniquity of the Government and the corruptions of the Papacy. Catholic narrators know perhaps too much of what goes on behind the scenes to relish calling too close an attention to the apparent proprieties of Rome. Be the cause what it may, the moral aspect of the Papal city seems to me to be but little dwelt upon, and yet on many accounts it is a very curious one.
As far as Sabbatarianism is concerned, Rome is the Glasgow of Italy. All shops, except druggists’, tobacconists’, and places of refreshment, are hermetically closed on Sundays. Even the barbers have to close at half-past ten in the morning under a heavy fine, and during the Sundays in Lent cafés and eating-houses are shut throughout the afternoon, because the waiters are supposed to go to catechism. The English reading-rooms are locked up; there is no delivery of letters, and no mails go out. A French band plays on the Pincian at sunset, and the Borghese gardens are thrown open; but these, till evening, are the only public amusements. At night, it is true, the theatres are open, but then in Roman Catholic countries, p. 31Sunday evening is universally accounted a feast. To make up for this, the theatres are closed on every Friday in the year, as they are too throughout Lent and Advent; and once a week or more there is sure to be a Saint’s day as well, on which shops and all are closed, to the great trial of a traveller’s patience. All the amusements of the Papal subjects are regulated with the strictest regard to their morals. Private or public gambling of any kind, excepting always the Papal Lottery, is strictly suppressed. There are no public dancing-places of any kind, no casinos or “cafés chantants.” No public masked balls are allowed, except one or two on the last nights of the Carnival. The theatres themselves are kept under the most rigid “surveillance.” Every thing, from the titles of the plays to the petticoats of the ballet-girls, undergoes clerical inspection. The censorship is as unsparing of “double entendres” as of political allusions, and “Palais Royal” farces are ‘Bowdlerized’ down till they emerge from the process innocuous and dull; compared with one at the “Apollo,” a ballet at the Princess’s was a wild and voluptuous orgy.
The same system of repression prevails in everything. In the print-shops one never sees a p. 32picture which even verges on impropriety. The few female portraits exhibited in their windows are robed with an amount of drapery which would satisfy the most prudish “sensibilities.” All books, which have the slightest amorous tendency, are scrupulously interdicted without reference to their political views. The number of wine-shops seems to me small in proportion to the size of the city, and in none of them, as far as I could learn, are spirits sold. There is another subject, which will suggest itself at once to any one acquainted with the life of towns, but on which it is obviously difficult to enter fully. It is enough to say, that what the author of “Friends in Council” styles, with more sentiment than truth, “the sin of great cities,” does not “apparently” exist in Rome. Not only is public vice kept out of sight, as in some other Italian cities, but its private haunts and resorts are absolutely and literally suppressed. In fact, if priest rule were deposed, and our own Sabbatarians and total-abstinence men and societies for the suppression of vice, reigned in its stead, I doubt if Rome could be made more outwardly decorous than it is at present.
This then is the fair side of the picture. What is the aspect of the reverse? In the first place, p. 33the system requires for its working an amount of constant clerical interference in all private affairs, which, to say the least, is a great positive evil. Confession is the great weapon by means of which morality is enforced. Servants are instructed to report about their employers, wives about their husbands, children about their parents, and girls about their lovers. Every act of your life is thus known to, and interfered with, by the priests. I might quote a hundred instances of petty interference: let me quote the first few that come to my memory. No bookseller can have a sale of books without submitting each volume to clerical supervision. An Italian gentleman, resident here, had to my own knowledge to obtain a special permission in order to retain a copy of Rousseau’s works in his private library. The Roman nobles are not allowed to hunt because the Pope considers the amusement dangerous. Profane swearing is a criminal offence. Every Lent all restaurateurs are warned by a solemn edict not to supply meat on fast days, and then told that “whenever on the forbidden days they are obliged to supply rich meats, they must do so in a separate room, in order that scandal may be avoided, and that all may know they are in the capital of the catholic p. 34world.” Forced marriages are matters of constant occurrence, and even strangers against whom a charge of affiliation is brought are obliged either to marry their accuser, or make provision for the illegitimate offspring. In the provinces the system of interference is naturally carried to yet greater lengths. Nine years ago certain Christians at Bologna, who had opened shops in the Jewish quarter of the town, were ordered to leave at once, because such a practice was in “open opposition to the Apostolic laws and institutions.” Again, Cardinal Cagiano, Bishop of Senigaglia, published a decree in the year 1844, which has never been repealed, to promote morality in his diocese. In that decree the following articles occur:
“All young men and women are strictly forbidden, under any pretext whatever, to give or receive presents from each other before marriage. All persons who have received such presents before the publication of this decree, are required to make restitution of them within three months, or to become betrothed to the donor within the said period. Any one who contravenes these regulations is to be punished by fifteen days imprisonment, during which he is to support himself p. 35at his own expense, and the presents will be devoted to some pious purpose to be determined on hereafter.”
I could multiply instances of this sort indefinitely, but I know of none more striking than the last.
So much for the mode in which the system is worked, and now as to its practical result. To judge fully, it is necessary to get behind the scenes, a thing not easy for a stranger anywhere, least of all here. There is too the further difficulty, that when you have got behind the scenes, it is not very easy to narrate your esoteric experiences to the public. Even if there were no other objection, it would be useless to quote individual stories and facts which have come privately to my knowledge, and which would show Rome, in spite of its external propriety, to be one of the most corrupt, debauched, and demoralized of cities. Each separate story can be disputed or explained away, but the weight of the general evidence is overpowering. In these matters it is best to keep to the old Latin rule, “Experto crede.” I have talked with many persons, Romans, Italians, and foreign residents, on the subject, and from one and all I have heard similar p. 36accounts. Every traveller I have ever met with, who has made like inquiries, has come to a like conviction. In a country where there is practically neither press nor public courts, nor responsible government, where even no classified census is allowed to be taken, statistics are hard to obtain, and of little value when obtained. Personal evidence, unsatisfactory as it is, is after all the best you can arrive at. With regard then to what, in its strictest sense, is termed the “morality” of Rome, I must dismiss the subject with the remarks, that the absence of recognized public resorts and agents of vice may be dearly purchased when parents make a traffic in their own houses of their children’s shame, and that perhaps as far as the state is concerned the debauchery of a few is a less evil than the dissoluteness of the whole population. More I cannot and need not say. With respect to other sins against the Decalogue, it is an easier task to speak. There is very little drunkenness in Rome I freely admit, but then the Italians, like most natives of warm countries, are naturally sober. Rome is certainly not superior in this respect to other Italian cities; since the introduction of the French soldiery probably the contrary. At the street corners you p. 37constantly see exhortations against profane swearing, headed “Bestemmiatore orrendo nome,” but in spite of this, the amount of blasphemies that any common Roman will pour forth on the slightest provocation, is really appalling. Beggars too are universal. Everybody begs; if you ask a common person your way along the street, the chances are that he asks you for a “buono mano.” Now, even if you doubt the truth of Sheridan’s dictum, that no man could be honest without being rich, it is hard to believe in a virtuous beggar. The abundance, also, of lotteries shakes one’s faith in Roman morality. A population amongst whom gambling and beggary are encouraged by their spiritual and temporal rulers is not likely in other respects to be a virtuous or a moral one. The frequency of violent crimes is in itself a startling fact.
To my eyes, indeed, the very look of the city and its inhabitants, is a strong primâ facie ground of suspicion. There is vice on those worn, wretched faces—vice in those dilapidated hovel-palaces—vice in those streets, teeming with priests and dirt and misery. In fact, if you only fancy to yourself a city, where there are no manufactures, no commerce, no public life of any kind; p. 38where the rich are condemned to involuntary idleness, and the poor to enforced misery; where there is a population of some ten thousand ecclesiastics in the prime of life, without adequate occupation for the most part, and all vowed to celibacy; where priests and priest-rule are omnipotent, and where every outlet for the natural desires and passions of men is carefully cut off—if you take in fully all these conditions and their inevitable consequences, you will not be surprised if to me, as to any one who knows the truth, the outward morality of Rome seems but the saddest of its many mockeries.
“Senatus Populusque Romanus.” The phrase sounds strangely, in my ears, like the accents of an unknown language or the burden of a half-forgotten melody. In those four initial letters there seems to me always to lie embodied an epitome of the world’s history—the rise and decline and fall of Rome. On the escutcheons of the Roman nobles, the S.P.Q.R. are still blazoned forth conspicuously, but where shall we look for the realities expressed by that world-famed symbol? It is true, the Senate is still represented by a single Senator, nominated by the Pope, who drives in a Lord Mayor’s state coach on solemn occasions; and regularly, on the first night of the opera season, sends round ices, as a present to the favoured occupants of the second and third tiers of boxes at the “Apollo.” This gentleman, by all the laws of senatorial succession, p. 40is the undoubted heir and representative of the old Roman Senate, who sat with their togas wrapped around them, waiting for the Gaul to strike; but alas, the “Populus Romanus” has left behind him neither heir nor descendant.
Yet surely, if anything of dead Rome be still left in the living city, it should be found in the Roman people. In the Mystères du Peuple of Eugêne Sue, there is a story, that to the Proletarian people, the sons of toil and labour, belong genealogies of their own, pedigrees of families, who from remote times have lived and died among the ranks of industry. These fabulous families, I have often thought, should have had their home in the Eternal City. Amongst the peasants that you meet, praying in the churches, or basking in the sun-light, or toiling in the deadly Campagna plains, there must be some, who, if they knew it, descend in direct lineage from the ancient “Plebs.” It may be so, or rather it must be so; but of the fact there is little outward evidence. You look in vain for the characteristic features of the old Roman face, such as you behold them when portrayed in ancient statues. The broad low brow, the depressed skull, the protruding under-jaw, and the p. 41thin compressed lips, are to be seen no longer. Indeed, though I make the remark with the fear of the artist-world before my eyes, I should hardly say myself, that the Romans of the present day were a very handsome race; and of their own type they are certainly inferior both to Tuscans and Neapolitans. The men are well formed and of good height, but not powerful in build or make, and their features are rather marked than regular. As for the women, when you have once perceived that hair may be black as coal and yet coarse as string, that bright sparkling eyes may be utterly devoid of expression, and that an olive complexion may be deepened by the absence of washing, you grow somewhat sceptical as to the reality of their vaunted beauty. All this, however, is a matter of personal taste, about which it is useless to express a decided opinion. I must content myself with the remark, that the Roman peasantry as depicted, year after year, on the walls of our academy, bear about the same resemblance to the article provided for home consumption, as the ladies in an ordinary London ball-room bear to the portraits in the “Book of Beauty.” The peasants’ costumes too, like the smock-frocks and p. 42scarlet cloaks of Old England, are dying out fast. On the steps in the “Piazza di Spagna,” and in the artists’ quarter above, you see some score or so of models with the braided boddices, and the head-dresses of folded linen, standing about for hire. The braid, it is true, is torn; the snow-white linen dirt-besmeared, and the brigand looks feeble and inoffensive, while the hoary patriarch plays at pitch and toss: but still they are the same figures that we know so well, the traditional Roman peasantry of the “Grecian” and the “Old Adelphi.” Unfortunately, they are the last of the Romans. In other parts of the city the peasants’ dresses are few and far between; the costume has become so uncommon, as to be now a fashionable dress for the Roman ladies at Carnival time and other holiday festivals. On Sundays and “Festas” in the mountain districts you can still find real peasants with real peasants’ dresses; but even there Manchester stuffs and cottons are making their way fast, and every year the old-fashioned costumes grow rarer and rarer. A grey serge jacket, coarse nondescript-coloured cloth trousers, and a brown felt hat, all more or less ragged and dusty, compose the ordinary dress of the Roman working man. Female dress, in p. 43any part of the world, is one of those mysteries which a wise man will avoid any attempt to explain; I can only say, therefore, that the dress of the common Roman women is much like that of other European countries, except that the colours used are somewhat gayer and gaudier than is common in the north.
Provisions are dear in Rome. Bread of the coarsest and mouldiest quality costs, according to the Government tariff, by which its price is regulated, from a penny to three halfpence for the English pound. Meat is about a third dearer than in London, and clothing, even of the poorest sort, is very high in price. On the other hand, lodgings, of the class used by the poor, are cheap enough. There is no outlay for firing, as even in the coldest weather (and I have known the temperature in Rome as low as eight degrees below freezing-point), even well-to-do Romans never think of lighting a fire; and then, in this climate, the actual quantity of victuals required by an able-bodied labourer is far smaller than in our northern countries, while, from the same cause, the use of strong liquors is almost unknown. Tobacco too, which is all made up in the Papal factories and chiefly grown in the p. 44country, is reasonable in price, though poor in quality. In the country and the poorer parts of the city, the dearest cigar you can buy is only a baioccho, or under one halfpenny; and from this fact you may conclude what the price of the common cheap cigars is to a native. From all these causes, I feel no doubt that the cost of living for the poor is comparatively small, though of course the rate of wages is small in proportion. For ordinary unskilled labour, the day-wages, at the winter season, are about three pauls to three pauls and a half; in summer about five pauls; and in the height of the vintage as much as six or seven pauls, though this is only for a very few weeks. I should suppose, therefore, that from 1s. 6d. to 1s. 9d. a day, taking the paul at 5d., were the average wages of a good workman at Rome. From these wages, small as they are, there are several deductions to be made.
In the first place, the immense number of “festas” tells heavily on the workman’s receipts. On the more solemn feast-days all work is strictly forbidden by the priests; and either employer or labourer, who was detected in an infraction of the law, would be subject to heavy p. 45fines. Even on the minor festivals, about the observance of which the Church is not so strict, labour is almost equally out of the question. The people have got so used to holiday keeping, that nothing but absolute necessity can induce them to work, except on working days. All over Italy this is too much the case. I was told by a large manufacturer in Florence, that having a great number of orders on hand, and knowing extreme distress to prevail among his workmen’s families, he offered double wages to any one who came to work on a “festa” day, but that only two out of a hundred responded to his offer. I merely mention this fact, as one out of many such I have heard, to show how this abuse must prevail in Rome, where every moral influence is exerted in favour of idleness against industry, and where the observance of holy days is practised most religiously.
Then, too, the higher rate of wages paid in summer is counterbalanced by the extra risk to which the labourer is exposed. The ravages created by the malaria fevers amongst the ill-bred, ill-clothed, and ill-cared-for labourers, are really fearful. Indeed it is hardly an exaggeration p. 46to say, that the whole working population of Rome is eaten up with malaria. I feel myself convinced that the misery and degradation of the Papal States are to be attributed to two causes, the enormous burden of the priesthood, and the ravages of the malaria. How far these two causes are in any way connected with each other, I have never been able to determine. It is one of the rhetorical exaggerations which have impaired the utility of the Question Romaine, that M. About, in his remarkable work, always treats the malaria as if it was solely due to the inefficiency of the Papal Government, and would disappear with the deposition of the Pope. This unphilosophical view is generally adopted by liberal opponents of the Papacy, who lay the malaria to its doors, while Papal advocates, on the contrary, always treat the malaria as a mysterious scourge which can never be removed or even palliated; a view almost as unphilosophical as the other. For my own part, I have only been able to arrive at three isolated conclusions on the subject. First, that mere cultivation of the Campagna, as shown by Prince Borghese’s unsuccessful experiments, does not at any rate immediately affect the virulence of the miasma, p. 47or whatever the malaria may be. Secondly, that the malaria can actually be built out, or, in other words, if the Campagna was covered with a stone pavement, the disease would disappear—a remedy obviously impracticable; and lastly, that though the existence of the malaria cannot be removed, as far I can see, yet that its evil effects might be immensely lessened by warm clothing, good food, and prompt medical aid at the commencement of the malady. Whatever tends to improve the general condition of the Roman peasantry will put these remedies more and more within their reach, and will therefore tend to check the ravages of the malaria. Thus, the inefficient and obstructive Government of the Vatican, which checks all material as well as all moral progress, increases indirectly the virulence of the fever-plague; but this, I think, is the most that can fairly be stated.
I trust that, considering the importance of the subject, this digression, unsatisfactory as it is, may be pardoned; and I now turn to the third curse, which eats up the wages of the working man at Rome—a curse even greater, I think, than the “festas” or the malaria—I mean, the universality of the middle-man system. If you p. 48require any work done, from stone carving to digging, you seldom or never deal with the actual workman. If you are a farmer and want your harvest got in, you contract months beforehand with an agent, who agrees to supply you with harvest-men in certain numbers, at a certain price, out of which price he pockets as large a percentage as he can, and has probably commissions to pay himself to some sub-contractor. If you are a sculptor and wish a block of marble chiselled in the rough, the man you contract with to hew the block at certain day-wages brings a boy to do the work at half the above amount or less, and only looks in from time to time to see how the work is proceeding. It is the same in every branch of trade or business. If you wish to make a purchase, or effect a sale, or hire a servant, you have a whole series of commissions or brokerages to pay before you come into contact with the principal.
If you inquire why this system is not broken through, why the employer does not deal directly with his workmen, you are told that the custom of the country is against any other method; that amongst the workmen themselves there is so much terrorism and intimidation and espionnage, that p. 49any single employer or labourer, who contracted for work independently, would run a risk of annoyance or actual injury; of having, for example, his block of marble split “by a slip of the hand,” or his tools destroyed, or a knife stuck into him as he went home at night, and, more than all, that, without the supervision of the actual overseer, your workmen would cheat you right and left, no matter what wages you paid. After all it is better to be cheated by one man than by a dozen, and being at Rome you must do as the Romans do.
It may possibly have been observed that, in the foregoing paragraph, I have spoken of the “workmen at Rome,” not of the Roman workmen. The difference, though slight verbally, is an all-important one. The workmen in Rome are not Romans, for the Romans proper never work. The Campagna is tilled in winter by groups of peasants, who come from the Marches, in long straggling files, headed by the “Pifferari,” those most inharmonious of pipers. In summer-time the harvest is reaped and the vintage gathered in by labourers, whose homes lie far away in the Abruzzi mountains. In many ways these mountaineers bear a decided resemblance to the swarms p. 50of Irish labourers who come across to England in harvest-time. They are frugal, good-humoured, and, compared to the native Romans, honest and hard-working. A very small proportion too of the working-men in Rome itself are Romans. Certain trades, as that of the cooks for instance, are almost confined to the inhabitants of particular outlying districts. The masons, carpenters, carvers, and other mechanical trades, are filled by men who do not belong to the city, and who are called and considered foreigners. Of course the rule is not without exceptions, and you will find genuine Romans amongst the common workmen, but amongst the skilled workmen hardly ever. There is a very large, poor, I might almost say, pauper population in Rome, and in some form or other these poor must work for their living, but their principle is to do as little work as possible. There still exists amongst the Romans a sort of debased, imperial pride, a belief that a Roman is per se superior to all other Italians. For manual work, or labour under others, they have an equal contempt and dislike. All the semi-independent trades, like those of cab-drivers, street-vendors, petty shopkeepers, &c. are eagerly sought after and monopolized by Romans. The p. 51extent to which small trades are carried on by persons utterly without capital and inevitably embarrassed with debt, is one of the chief evils in the social system which prevails here. If the Romans also, like the unjust steward, are too proud to dig, unlike that worthy, to beg they are not ashamed. Begging is a recognized and a respected profession, and if other trades fail there is always this left. The cardinal principle of Papal rule is to teach its subjects to rely on charity rather than industry. In order to relieve in some measure the fearful distress that existed among the poor of Rome in the early spring, the Government took some thousand persons into their employment, and set them to work on excavating the Forum. The sight of these men working, or, more correctly speaking, idling at work, used to be reckoned one of the stock jokes of the season. Six men were regularly employed in conveying a wheelbarrow filled with two spadefuls of soil. There was one man to each handle, two in front to pull when the road rose, and one on each side to give a helping hand and keep the barrow steady. You could see any day long files of such barrows, so escorted, creeping to and from the Forum. It is hardly necessary to say p. 52that little progress was ever made in the excavations, or, for that matter, intended to be made. Yet the majority of these workmen were able-bodied fellows, who received tenpence a day for doing nothing. Much less injury would have been inflicted on their self-respect by giving them the money outright than in return for this mockery of labour. Moreover the poor in Rome, as I have mentioned elsewhere, are not afraid of actual starvation. “Well-disposed” persons, with a good word from the priests, can obtain food at the convents of the mendicant friars. I am not saying there is no good in this custom; in fact, it is almost the one good feature I know of connected with the priestly system of government; but still, on an indolent and demoralised population like that of Rome, the benefit of this sort of charity, which destroys the last and the strongest motive for exertion, is by no means an unmixed one.
The amusements of the people are much what might be expected from their occupations. To do them justice, they drink but moderately; but whenever they can spare the time and money, they crowd out into the roadside “Osterias,” and spend hours, smoking and sipping p. 53the red wine lazily. Walking is especially distasteful to them; and on a Sunday and festa-day you will see hundreds of carriages filled with working people, though the fares are by no means cheap. Whole families will starve themselves for weeks before the Carnival, and leave themselves penniless at the end, to get costumes and carriages to drive down the “Corso” with on the gala days. The Romans, too, are a nation of gamblers. Their chief amusement, not to say their chief occupation, is gambling. In the middle of the day, at street-corners and in sunny spots, you see groups of working-men playing at pitch halfpenny, or gesticulating wildly over the mysterious game of “Moro.” Skittles and stone-throwing are the only popular amusements which require any bodily exertion; and both of these, as played here, are as much chance as skill. The lottery, too, is the great national pastime.
This picture of the Roman people may not seem a very favourable or a very promising one. I quite admit, that many persons, who have come much into contact with them, speak highly of their general good humour, their affectionate feelings and their sharpness of intellect. At the same time, I have observed that these eulogists p. 54of the Roman populace are either Papal partizans who, believing that “this is the best of all possible worlds,” wish to prove also that “everything here is for the best,” or else they are vehement friends of Italy, who are afraid of damaging their beloved cause by an admission of the plain truth, that the Romans are not as a people either honest, truthful or industrious. For my own part, my faith is different. A bad government produces bad subjects, and I am not surprised to find in the debasement and degradation of a priest-ruled people the strongest condemnation of the Papal system.
The idler about the streets of Rome may, from time to time, catch sight, on blank walls and dead corners, of long white strips of paper, covered with close-printed lines of most uninviting looking type, and headed with the Papal arms—the cross-keys and tiara. If, being like myself afflicted with an inquisitive turn of mind, he takes the trouble of deciphering these hieroglyphic documents, his labour would not be altogether thrown away. Those straggling strips, stuck up in out-of-the-way places, glanced at by a few idle passers-by, and torn down by the prowling vagabonds of the streets after a day or two for the sake of the paper, are the sole public records of justice issued, or allowed to be issued, under the Pontifical government. Trials are carried on here with closed doors; no spectators are admitted; no reports of the proceedings are p. 56published. In capital cases, however, after the execution of the criminal has taken place a sort of Procès verbal of the case and of the trial is placarded on the walls of the chief towns.
During the period of my stay at Rome there were three executions in different parts of the Papal territory. Whether by accident or by design I cannot say, but all these executions occurred within a short period of each other, and, in consequence, three such statements were issued almost at the same time by the Government. With considerable difficulty I succeeded in obtaining copies of these statements, not, I am bound to say, because there seemed to be any reluctance in furnishing them, but because the fact of anybody wishing to obtain copies was so unusual, that there was no preparation made for supplying them; and, at last, I only succeeded in procuring them from a printer’s devil to the Stanperia Apostolica. The facts narrated in them, and the circumstances alluded to, seem to me to throw a strange light on the administration of justice, and the daily life of this priest-ruled country. It is as such that I wish to comment on them. In these statements, be it remembered, there is no question of political or clerical bias. p. 57The facts stated are all facts, admitted by the authorities of their own free will and pleasure; and if, as I think, these facts tell most unfavourably on the judicial system of our clerical rulers, it is, at any rate, out of their own mouths they are convicted. All, therefore, that I propose to do is, having these official statements before me, to tell the stories that they contain, as shortly and as clearly as I can, adding no comment of my own but what is necessary to explain the facts in question. Let me take first the case, which is entitled “Cannara contro Luigi Bonci;” the township of Cannara, where the crime was committed, being what we should call in a civil suit the plaintiff, and the accused Bonci the defendant.
Some three years ago, then, there lived in the hamlet of Cannara, near Perugia, a family called Bonci. They belonged to the peasant class, and were poor, even among the Papal peasantry. The family consisted of the father and mother, and of their son and daughter, both grown up. Between the father and son there had long been ill-blood. The cause of this want of family harmony is but indistinctly stated, but apparently it was due to the irregular habits of the son, and to the severity of the father; while all this domestic misery was rendered doubly bitter by the almost abject want of the household. On the night of November the 9th, 1856, Venanzio Bonci, the father, Maria Rosa, his wife, and their daughter, Caterina, were at supper in the miserable room, which formed the whole of their dwelling, waiting for the return of the son, p. 59Luigi, who had been absent ever since the morning. There had been frequent quarrels before between father and son about Luigi’s stopping out late, and now it was past midnight. There was no light in the room except a faint flicker from the embers, and the feeble glimmering of the starlight which entered through the open windows. A noise was heard in the stable underneath the room, and the father, thinking it was the son, called out three or four times, but got no answer. A few minutes after Luigi entered without the lantern, which he had left below in the stable, and although his sister bade him good night he made no reply. As he entered the room his father called to him, “A fine time of night to come home.” “What then?” was the only answer given by Luigi. “You have never been home since morning,” went on the father. “What then?” was still the only answer. The father then told the son to hold his tongue, and again received the same reply. At last Venanzio, losing his temper, called out, “Be quiet, or I’ll break your head;” or, according to the story, “I’ll murder you:” to which Luigi only answered, “I may as well die to-day as to-morrow.” After that there was a short scuffle heard, and Venanzio p. 60suddenly cried out as if in pain, “My God! my God!” The mother and daughter screamed for help, but by the time the neighbours had come in with lights, Luigi had run off. Venanzio was found reeling to and fro, with blood pouring from several wounds, and, in spite of medical aid, he died in the course of a few hours. Almost immediately after the commission of the crime Luigi was found by the gendarmes in the cottage of an uncle, and arrested on the spot.
These, as far as I can learn from the very confused documents before me, are all the facts admitted without question; or, more strictly speaking, which the Government states to have been unquestioned. Luigi was arrested on the night of the murder. Such small evidence as there was could have been ascertained in twenty-four hours, and yet the prisoner was never brought to trial till the 3rd of May, 1858; that is, eighteen months afterwards. On that day Luigi Bonci was arraigned before the civil and criminal court of Perugia, on the two counts of parricide, and of having illegal arms in his possession. The Court was composed of the President, Judge, Assistant Judge, and Deputy Judge of the district. These gentlemen (all, I should state, lay officials) were p. 61assisted by the public prosecutor and the Government counsel for the defence. The course of proceedings is stated to have been as follows: prayers were first offered up for the Divine guidance, the prisoner was introduced and identified, the written depositions were read over, a narrative of the facts was given by the president, the prisoner was called upon to reply to the charges alleged against him, the witnesses for the crown and for the prisoner were heard respectively, the counsel for the prosecution called upon the court to condemn the prisoner, and was replied to by the counsel for the defence; the discussion was then declared closed, and after the judges had retired and deliberated, their sentence was given.
All the facts I have been able to put together about the case are gathered from this sentence and from those of the courts of appeal. These sentences, however, are extremely lengthy, very indistinct, and encumbered with a great deal of legal phraseology. As they are all alike I may as well give an abstract of this one as a specimen of all. The sentence begins with the following moral remarks: “Frequent paternal admonitions, alleged scarcity of daily food, and the evil counsels of others, had alienated the heart of the p. 62prisoner to such an extent, that feelings of affection and reverence towards his own father, Venanzio, had given place to contempt, disobedience, ill-will, and even worse.” No one, however, would have supposed that he “was capable of becoming a parricide, as was too clearly proved on the fatal night in question.” After these preliminary reflections comes a narration of the facts much in the words in which I have given them. This is followed by a statement of the arguments for the prosecution and for the defence, consisting of a number of verbose paragraphs, each beginning, “considering that,” &c. The case of the prosecution was clear enough. The medical evidence proved that the father died of the wounds received on the above-named night. The fact that the wounds were inflicted by the prisoner, was established by the evidence of his mother and sister, who overheard the quarrel between him and his father, by the flight after commission of the crime, by the discovery of a blood-stained knife dropped on the threshold, by the deposition of the father before death, and lastly, by the confession of the prisoner himself, who admitted the crime, though under extenuating circumstances. The fact that the sister never heard the knife p. 63open, although it had three clasps, was asserted to be evidence that the prisoner entered the room with his knife open and intending to commit the crime. This charge of malice prepense was supported by the son’s refusal to answer his father, by the insolence of his language, and by the number and vehemence of the stabs he inflicted.
The prisoner’s defence was also very simple. According to his own story, he was half drunk on his return home. His father not only taunted and threatened him, but at last seized the door-bar and began knocking him about the head; and then, at last, maddened with pain and passion, he drew out a knife he had picked up on the road, and stabbed his father, hardly knowing what he did. On the bare statement of facts, I should deem this version of the story the more probable of the two, but as no details whatever are given of the evidence on either side, it is impossible to judge. The court at any rate decided that there was no proof of the prisoner having been drunk, and that the evidence of his father having struck him was of a suspicious character, “while,” they add, “it would be absurd and immoral to maintain, that a father, whose right and duty it is to correct his children (and indeed on this occasion p. 64correction was abundantly deserved by the insolent demeanour of Luigi) could be considered to provoke his son by a slight personal chastisement.” The son, by the way, was over one and twenty, a fact to which no allusion is made. As “a forlorn hope,” in the words of the sentence, the counsel for the defence asserted, that whatever the crime of the prisoner might be, it was not parricide, from the simple fact that Luigi was not Venanzio’s son. The facts of the case appear to have been, that Maria Rosa Battistoni being then unmarried, gave birth in July 1835 to a son, who was the prisoner at the bar; that shortly afterwards the vicar of Cannara gave information to the Episcopal court of Assisi, that Maria Rosa had been seduced by Venanzio Bonci and had had an illegitimate child by him; that, in consequence, a formal requisition was addressed by the above court to Venanzio, and that he thereupon acknowledged the paternity of the child, and expressed his readiness to marry the mother. The marriage was therefore solemnized, and the child entered in the church-books as the legitimized son of Venanzio and Maria Bonci, in June, 1836. Against this strong presumptive evidence of paternity, and the natural inference to be drawn from p. 65the child having been brought up and educated as Venanzio’s son, there were only, we are told, to be set, alleged expressions of doubt on the father’s part, when in a passion, as to his being really the father, and also certain confessions of the mother to different parties, that Luigi was not the child of her husband. All these confessions however, so it is asserted, were proved to be subsequent in date to the son’s arrest, and therefore, probably, made with a view to save his life. The plea is in consequence rejected.
No defence was attempted to the second count. Both charges are therefore declared fully proved; and as the punishment for parricide is public execution, and the penalty for having in one’s possession (a lighter offence by the way, than using) any weapon without special license, consists of imprisonment from two to twelve months, and of a fine from five to sixty scudi, therefore the court “condemns Luigi Bonci for the first count, to be publicly executed in Cannara, and to make compensation to the heirs of the murdered man, according to the valuation of the civil tribunals, and to pay the cost of the trial; and on the second count, the court” (with a pedantic mockery of mercy) “considers the first three months of the p. 66incarceration the prisoner has already undergone to be sufficient punishment, coupled with a fine of five scudi and the loss of the weapon.”
This summary will, I fear, give the reader too favourable an opinion of the original sentence. In order to make the story at all intelligible, I have had to pick out my facts, from a perfect labyrinth of sentences and parentheses. All I, or any one else can state is, that these seem to be the facts, which seem to have been proved by the witnesses. What the character of the evidence was, or what was the relative credibility of the witnesses, whose very names I know not, or how far their assertions were borne out or contradicted by circumstantial proof, are all matters on which (though the whole character of the crime depends on them) I can form no opinion whatever.
The trial occupied but one day, and yet the above sentence, it appears, was not communicated to the prisoner till the 15th of October, 1858, that is, over five months afterwards. When the official announcement of the sentence was made, the prisoner declared his intention of appealing against its justice. By the Papal law, every person condemned for a criminal offence, by the lay tribunals, has the right of appealing to the Supreme Pontifical p. 67Court. It is, therefore, needless to say, that in all cases where sentence of death is passed, an appeal is made on any ground, however trivial, as the condemned culprit cannot lose by this step, and may gain. The practical and obvious objection to this unqualified power of appeal, is that the supreme ecclesiastical court is the real judge, not the nominal lay court, which does little more than register the fact, that the crime is proved prima facie.
On the 15th of February, 1859, after a delay of four months more from the time of appeal, the court of the supreme tribunal of the Consulta Sacra, assembled at the Monte Citorio in Rome, to try the appeal. The court was composed of six “most illustrious and reverend Judges,” all “Monsignori” and all dignitaries of the Church, assisted by a public prosecutor and counsel for the defence, attached to the Papal exchequer. The course of proceedings appears to be much the same as in the inferior courts, except that no witnesses, save the prisoner, were examined orally, and the whole evidence was taken from written depositions. At last, after “invoking the most sacred name of God,” the court pronounce their sentence. This sentence is in a great measure a p. 68recapitulation of the preceding one. Either no new facts were adduced, or none are alluded to. The grounds for the defence are the same as on the previous occasion, namely, the provocation given by the father, and the doubt as to the son’s paternity. There were, in fact, two questions before the court. First, whether the crime committed was murder or manslaughter; and, if it was murder, whether the murderer was or was not the son of the murdered man. Instead, however, of facing either of these questions of fact, the court seems to enter upon abstract considerations, which to our notions are quite irrelevant. The degree to which paternal corrections can be carried without abuse, and the problem whether a man who kills a person, whom he believes and has reason to believe to be his father, but who is not so in fact, is guilty or not of the sin of parricide, seem rather questions for clerical casuistry than considerations which bear upon facts. The final conclusion drawn from these various reflections is, that the court confirms the judgment of the Perugian tribunal, in every respect.
The rejection of the appeal is not communicated for two months more, that is, not till the 22nd of April, to the prisoner, who at once p. 69appeals again against the execution of the verdict to the Upper Court of the Supreme Tribunal. On the 13th of May the case comes on for its third and last trial. The court is again composed of six ecclesiastics of high rank, assisted by the same official counsel as before; the same course of proceeding is adopted, except that the prisoner is not brought into court or examined. Again, after “invoking the most holy name of God,” the tribunal pronounces, not its sentence this time, but its judgment. This judgment alludes only to the two grounds on which the appeal is based. The first is the question of paternity, which is at once dismissed, as being a matter of evidence that has been already decided. The second ground of appeal is a technical and a legal one. The defence appears to have pleaded, that the original arrest was illegal, and that, by this fact, the whole trial was vitiated. On both sides it was admitted that the prisoner was arrested without a warrant, and not in “flagrante delicto,” and that therefore the arrest was, strictly speaking, illegal. The court, however, decides, that though the prisoner was not taken in the act, yet his guilt was so manifest, that the gendarmes were justified in acting as if p. 70they had caught him perpetrating the crime, while in offences of great atrocity the police have also a discretionary power to arrest offenders, even without warrants. Though in this particular instance the result is not much to be regretted, yet it is obvious, that the admission of such a principle, and such an interpretation of the law, gives the police unlimited power of arrest, subject to the approval of their superiors: whether right or wrong, therefore, the appeal is dismissed, and the final sentence of death pronounced.
It seems that this verdict was submitted on the 24th of May by the President of the Supreme Court to the consideration of his Holiness the Pope, who offered no objection to its execution. The prisoner’s last chance was now gone, but, with a cruel mercy, he was left to linger on for eight months more in uncertainty. It was only on the 3rd of January, 1860, that orders were sent from Rome to Perugia, for the execution to take place there instead of at Cannara, on the 13th. On that day the verdict of the court is conveyed to the unhappy wretch. On the 14th, so the last paragraph informs us, “The condemned” Luigi Bonci “was beheaded by the public executioner, in the market-place p. 71of Perugia, and his head was there exposed for an hour to the gaze of the assembled multitude.”
On the 18th the report, from which these facts are taken, was placarded on the walls of Rome. The murder is committed in November, 1856; the murderer is arrested on the night of the crime; for that crime he is not tried at all till May, 1858; his final trial does not come off till May, 1859, and his execution is deferred till January, 1860. For three years and a quarter after the commission of the murder no report is published. These facts need no comment.
Of late years, round and about Viterbo, there was a well-known character, Giovanni Ugolini by name, a sort of itinerant “Jack-of-all-trades,” who wandered about from place to place, picking up any odd job he could find, and begging when he could turn his hand to nothing else. He is described in the legal reports as a Tinker and Umbrella-mender, but his especial line of industry, novel to us at any rate, seems to have been that of a scraper and cleaner of old tombstones. By these various pursuits, he scraped together a good bit of money for a man in his position, and at the end of his winter circuit, in the year 1857, he had saved up by common report as much as 70 scudi, or about £14 odd. On the 4th of May in that year, Ugolini left the little town of Castel Giorgio, with the avowed intention of going to Viterbo, to change his monies into Tuscan coin. Being belated on his road, he resolved to stop over the p. 73night at the house of a certain Andrea Volpi which lay on his road, and where he had often slept before. On the following morning, about eight o’clock, he left Volpi’s house and went on his journey towards Viterbo. Nothing more is positively known about him, except that on the same day his body was found on a bye-path, a little off the direct Viterbo road, covered with wounds. No money was discovered about his person, while there was every indication of his clothes and pack having been rummaged and rifled.
Assuming, as one must, the correctness of these facts, there can be no doubt that a very brutal murder and robbery had been committed. For some reasons, what, we are not told, the suspicions of the police fell at once on one of Volpi’s sons, called Serafino, a lad of about 22, and on a friend of his, Bonaventura Starna, about two years older than himself. Both of these persons, who were common labourers, were, in consequence, arrested on the 7th of May. They were not tried, however, till the 27th of April, in the year following, when they were arraigned for the murder before the lay criminal and civil court of Viterbo.
p. 74The two prisoners, nevertheless, are not tried on the same charge. Volpi is arraigned by the public prosecutor on a charge of wilful murder, accompanied with treachery and robbery, while Starna is only brought to trial as an accomplice to the crime, not as a principal. Before the actual guilt of either prisoner is ascertained, the public prosecutor, that is, the Government, decides the relative degree of their respective hypothetical guilt. The justice of this proceeding may be questioned, but its motive is palpable enough. There was little or no direct evidence against the prisoners, and to convict either of them, it was necessary to rely upon the testimony of the other.
“With both the prisoners,” so runs the sentence of the court, “a criminal motive could be established in the fact of their avowed poverty, as they each clearly admitted, that neither they nor their families possessed anything in the world, and that they derived the means of their miserable sustenance from their daily labour alone.” A very close intimacy was proved to have existed between the prisoners, so much so, indeed, that Starna had frequently been reproved by his parents for his friendship with a p. 75man who stood in such ill repute as Volpi. The fact that the murdered man was, or was believed to be in possession of money, was shown to be well known amongst the Volpi family. Two of Serafino Volpi’s brothers were reported to have spoken to third parties of Ugolini’s savings, and one of them expressed a wish to rob him. Why this brother was neither arrested nor apparently examined, is one of the many mysteries, by the way, you come across in perusing these Papal reports. Serafino too had mentioned himself, to a neighbour, his suspicion of the tinker’s having saved money. On the morning of the murder, Starna was known to have come to the Volpi’s cottage, to have talked with Serafino, and to have left again in his company, shortly after Ugolini’s departure. After about an hour’s absence, Serafino Volpi returned home, and therefore had time enough to commit the murder. He was shown, moreover, to have been in possession of a knife, about which he could give no satisfactory account, and which might have inflicted the wounds found on the corpse.
These appear to have been all the facts which could be established against either Volpi p. 76or Starna by positive evidence, and, at the worst, such facts could only be said to constitute a case for suspicion. Previously, however, to the trial, Starna turned, what we should call, “King’s evidence,” and, in contradiction to his foregoing statements, made a confession, on which the prosecution practically rested the whole of its case. According to this confession of Starna’s, on the morning of the murder he called by accident at the Volpi’s, and stopped there, till after the tinker, who was an entire stranger to him, had left the house. Serafino Volpi then offered to accompany him to his (Starna’s) house, on the pretence of borrowing some tool or other. They walked quickly to avoid the rain, which was falling heavily, and shortly overtook Ugolini, who exchanged a few words with Volpi about the weather, and then turned off along a bye-road. Thereupon Volpi proposed that they should follow the old man and rob him, adding, “he has got a whole lot of coppers.” Starna, according to his own story, refused to have anything to do with the matter; on which Volpi said, in that case he should do it alone, and asked Starna to go and fetch the tool he wanted, and bring it to him where p. 77they were standing. Starna then left Volpi running across the fields to overtake the tinker, and went home to find the tool. In a very short time afterwards, as he was coming back to the appointed meeting-place, he met Volpi in a great state of agitation, who told him that the job was finished, and Ugolini’s throat cut, but that only 20 pauls’ worth of copper money, about eight shillings, were found upon him. Starna admitted that he then took eight pauls as his own share in the booty, and told Volpi to wash off some spots of blood visible on his sleeve. He also added, that later on the same day he met Volpi again, and then expressed his alarm at what had happened; on which he received the answer, “If you had been with me, you would not be alive now.”
One can hardly conceive a more suspicious story, or one more clearly concocted to give the best colour to the witness’s own conduct, at the expense of his fellow-prisoner. No evidence whatever appears to have been brought in support of this confession. The court, notwithstanding, decides that the truth of this statement is fully established by internal and external testimony, and therefore declares that the p. 78alleged crimes are clearly proved against both the prisoners. “Considering,” nevertheless, “that though Starna was an accomplice in the crime, from his having assisted Volpi, and from having, by his own confession, shared in the booty, yet that his guilt was less, both in the conception and in the perpetration of the crime, there being no proof that he had taken any active part in the murder of Ugolini,” therefore, “in the most holy name of God,” the court sentences Volpi to public execution, and Starna to twenty years at the galleys.
Of course, both the prisoners resorted to their invariable right of appeal, but their case did not come on before the lower court of the Supreme Clerical Tribunal at Rome for upwards of a year, namely, on the 17th of May, 1859. At this trial, no new facts whatever appear to have been adduced. I gather indistinctly, that Volpi’s defence was that he had not left his father’s house at all on the morning of the murder, but that his attempt to prove an “alibi” was unsuccessful. The chief object indeed of the very lengthy sentence of the court, recapitulating the evidence already stated, is to establish the comparative innocence of Starna, who, for some cause or other, p. 79seems to have been favourably regarded. We are told, that “the confession of Starna is confirmed by a thousand proofs;” that “it is clearly shown” that Starna “in this confession did not deny his own responsibility; a fact which gives his statement the character of an incriminative and not of an exonerative confession; and that though he might possibly have wished, in his statement of the facts, to modify and extenuate his own share in the crime, yet there was no reason to suspect that he wished gratuitously to aggravate the guilt of his comrade;” and that also taking into consideration the villainous character of Volpi, it cannot be doubted, that he was the principal in the crime. The court at Viterbo had decided that the crime of the prisoners was murder, coupled with robbery and treachery. The Court of Appeal decides, on what seem sufficient grounds, that there is no proof of treachery, and therefore, the crime not being of so heinous a character, reduces the period of Starna’s punishment from twenty to fifteen years, while it simply confirms the sentence of death on Volpi.
Again, as a matter of course, there is an appeal from this sentence to the upper court of the Supreme Tribunal, which appeal comes off p. 80after four months’ delay, on the 9th of September, 1859. The only ground of appeal brought forward is one which, according to our notions of law, should have been brought forward from the first, namely, that the guilt of Volpi is not adequately proved by the unsupported statement of his accomplice Starna, and “that the evidence which corroborates this statement, only constitutes an à priori probability of his guilt.” The court, however, dismisses this plea at once, on the ground that it is not competent to take cognizance of an argument based on the abstract merits of the case, and therefore confirms the verdict.
On the 25th of November the sentence is submitted to, and approved by, the Pope. On the 3rd of January, 1860, orders are issued from Rome for the execution to take place. On the 17th the authorities of Viterbo notify to the prisoner that his last appeal has been dismissed, and “call on the military to lend their support to the execution of the sentence,” and on the following day, two years and eight months after his arrest, Volpi is executed for the murder of Ugolini on the Piazza della Rocca at Viterbo. On that day, too, appears the first report of his crime and trial.
In July, 1859, there were in the Bagnio of Civita Vecchia two galley slaves, Antonio Simonetti and Domenico Avanzi. Simonetti was a man of thirty, whose life, short as it was, seemed to have been one long career of crime. He had enlisted at an early age in the Pontifical dragoons, and served for seven years; on leaving the army, he became a porter, and within a few months was guilty of a highway robbery, and sentenced to the galleys for life, then to five years’ hard labour for theft, and again to seven years at the galleys for an attempt to escape, though how the last punishment could be super-added to the first, is a fact I cannot hope to explain. Of Avanzi nothing is mentioned, except that he was an elderly p. 82man condemned to a lengthened term of imprisonment for heavy crimes. Prisoners, it seems, condemned for long periods, are not sent out of doors to labour at the public works, but are employed within the prison. Both Simonetti and Avanzi were set to work in the canvas factory, and according to a system adopted in many foreign gaols, they received a certain amount of pay for their labour. An agreement had been made between the pair, that one should twist and the other spin the hemp; and the price paid for their joint work was to be divided between them in certain proportions. About a fortnight before the murder this sort of partnership was dissolved at the proposal of Simonetti, and some days after Avanzi made a claim on his late partner for the price of two pounds of hemp not accounted for. There seems to have been no particular dispute about this, but on the morning of the murder, Simonetti was summoned before the overseer of the factory, on the ground of his refusal to pay the sum claimed by Avanzi of fifteen baiocchi, or seven pence halfpenny. Simonetti did not deny that Avanzi had some claim upon him, but disputed the amount. At last, the overseer proposed, as an amicable compromise, p. 83that Simonetti should pay down seven baiocchi as a settlement in full, sooner than have a formal investigation. Both parties adopted the suggestion readily, and returned to their work apparently satisfied. An hour and a half after, while Avanzi was sitting at his frame, with his face to the wall, Simonetti entered the room with an axe he had picked up in the carpenter’s store, and walking deliberately up to Avanzi, struck him with the axe across the neck, as he was stooping down. Almost immediate death ensued, and on the arrival of the guard, Simonetti was arrested at once, and placed in irons. Probably, as a matter of policy, so daring a crime required summary punishment; at any rate, Papal justice seems to have been executed with unexampled promptitude. With what the report justly calls “laudable celerity,” the case was got ready for trial in a week, and on the 30th of July, the civil and criminal court of Civita Vecchia met to try the prisoner. There could be no conceivable question about the case. The murder had been committed during broad daylight, in a crowded room, and indeed, the prisoner confessed his guilt, and only pleaded gross provocation as an excuse. There was no p. 84proof, however, that Avanzi had used irritating language; and even if he had, too long a time had elapsed between the supposed offence and the revenge taken, for the excuse of provocation to hold good. Indeed, as the sentence of the court argues, in somewhat pompous language, “Woe to civil intercourse and human society, if, contrary to every principle of reason and justice, an attempt to enforce one’s just and legal rights by honest means, were once admitted as an extenuating circumstance in the darkest crimes, or as a sufficient cause for exciting pardonable provocation in the hearts of criminals.” The tribunal too considers, that the crime of the prisoner was aggravated by the fact, that his mind remained unimpressed “by the horrors of his residence, or the dreadful aspect and sad fellowship of his thousand unfortunate companions in guilt, or by the flagrant penalties imposed upon him, for so many crimes.” On all these grounds, whether abstract or matter-of-fact, the court declares the prisoner guilty of the wilful murder of Avanzi, and sentences him to death.
On the morrow this sentence is conveyed to Simonetti, who appeals. With considerable expedition the Supreme Tribunal meet to hear p. 85the case on the 23rd of September. The prisoner alleged before this court that his indignation had been excited by improper proposals made to him by the murdered man, and it was on this account their partnership had been dissolved. Besides certain inherent improbabilities in this story, the court decides that it was incredible that, if true, Simonetti should not have made the statement at his previous trial. The appeal was therefore dismissed, and the sentence of death confirmed. This decision was notified to the prisoner on the 18th of November, who again appeals to the higher Court, which meets to try the appeal on the 29th of the same month. This court at once decided that there was no ground for supposing the crime was not committed with “malice prepense,” or for modifying the verdict. It is not stated when the sentence was submitted to the Pope, but on the 20th of January, 1860, the rejection of his final appeal is communicated to the prisoner, and on the 21st the execution takes place, and the report is published.
Now, if I had wished solely to decry the Papal system of justice, I should not have given the report of the last trial, which seems to me far the most favourable specimen of the set I have p. 86come across. I am inclined to believe, from the meagre narratives before me, that all the criminals whose cases I have narrated were guilty of the crimes alleged against them, and fully deserved the fate they met with. My object, however, has been to point out certain features which must, I think, force themselves on any one who has read these cases carefully. The disregard for human life, the abject poverty, the wide-spread demoralization in the rural districts indicated by these stories, are startling facts in a country which has been for centuries ruled by the vicegerents of Christ on earth. At the same time, the great protraction of the trials and the utter uncertainty about the date of their occurrence, the unsatisfactory nature of the evidence, the want of any cross-examination, the manner in which strict law is disregarded from a clerical view of justice, and the identity between the court and the prosecution, the abuse of the unlimited power of appeal, and the extent to which this appeal from a lay to a clerical court places justice virtually in the hands of the priesthood; and finally, the secret and private character of the whole investigation, coupled with the utter absence of any check on injustice through publicity, are all matters patent p. 87even to a casual observer. If such, I ask, is Papal justice, when it has no reason for concealment and has right upon its side, what would it be in a case where injustice was sought to be perpetrated and concealed?
Some months after I had written the question which closes the last chapter, I was fortunate enough to obtain a partial answer to it. During the present year the Cavaliere Gennarelli, a Roman barrister, and a member of the Roman parliament in 1848, has published a series of official documents issued by the Papal authorities during the last ten years; the most damning indictment, by the way, that was ever recorded against a Government. Amongst those documents there appears the official sentence which, as usual, was published after the execution of a certain Romulo Salvatori in 1851. The trial possesses a peculiar momentary interest from the fact that Garibaldi is one of the persons implicated in the charge, and that the gallant general, if captured on Roman territory, would be liable to the judgment passed on him in default. It is, however, p. 89rather with a view to show how the Papal system of justice works, when political bias comes into play, that I propose to narrate this story as a sequel to the others. The words between inverted commas are, as before, verbal translations from the sentence. From that sentence I have endeavoured to extract first the modicum of facts which seem to have been admitted without dispute.
During the death-struggle of the Roman Republic, when the Neapolitan troops had entered the Papal territory on their fruitless crusade, the country round Velletri was occupied by Garibaldi’s soldiery. Near Velletri there is a little town called Giulianello, of which a certain Don Dominico Santurri was the head priest. Justly or unjustly, this priest, and two inhabitants of the town, named De Angelis and Latini, were accused of plotting against the Republic; arrested by order of one of Garibaldi’s officers; imprisoned for a couple of days, and, after a military examination (though of what nature is a matter of dispute) found guilty of treason against the state. The priest was sentenced to death and shot at once; the other two prisoners were dismissed with a reproof. Subsequently p. 90orders were issued for their re-arrest. One of them, Latini, had made his escape meanwhile; the other, De Angelis, being less fortunate, was arrested again and executed.
Now, how far these persons were really guilty or not of the offence for which they suffered, I of course have no means of knowing. Common sense tells one that a nation, fighting for dear life against foes abroad and traitors within, is obliged to deal out very rough and summary justice, and can hardly be expected to waste much time in deliberation. At any rate, when the Papal authority was restored, the Pope, on the demand of the French, declared a general amnesty for all political offences. This promise, however, of an amnesty, like many other promises of Pius the Ninth, was made with a mental reservation. The Pope pardoned all political offenders, but then the Pope alone was the judge of what constituted a political offence.
In accordance with this system the execution of Santurri and De Angelis was decided not to have been a political offence, but a case of private vengeance, and “the indignation of the public was so strong,” that Government could not refuse the imperative call for justice. Within p. 91a few weeks, therefore, of the Papal restoration, seven inhabitants of Giulianello were arrested on the charge of being concerned in the murders of Santurri and De Angelis.
On the 4th of April, 1851, the Supreme Court of the Sacra Consulta met to try the prisoners—nearly two years after the date of their arrest. The court, as usual, was composed of six high dignitaries of the Church, and throughout the mode of procedure differed in nothing that I can learn from what I have described in the former trials, except that there is no allusion to any preliminary trial before the ordinary lay courts. Whether this omission is accidental, or whether, as in other instances during the Papal “Vendetta” after ’49, the ordinary forms of justice were dispensed with, I cannot say. Garibaldi, De Pasqualis, and David, “self-styled” General, Colonel, and auditor respectively of the Roman army, were summoned to appear and answer to the charge against them, or else to allow judgment to go by default. The prisoners actually before the bar were
Romolo Salvatori,
Vincenzo Fenili,
Luigi Grassi,
p. 92Francesco Fanella,
Dominico Federici,
Angelo Gabrielli,
Teresa Fenili.
It is curious, to say the least, that all the prisoners appear to have been leading members of the liberal party at Giulianello. Salvatori was elected Mayor of the town during the Republic, and the next four prisoners held the office there of “Anziani” at the same period, an office which corresponds somewhat to that of Alderman in our old civic days. The chief witnesses for the prosecution were Latini, who so narrowly escaped execution, and the widow of De Angelis, persons not likely to be the most impartial of witnesses.
The whole sentence is in fact one long “ex parte” indictment against Salvatori. The very language of the sentence confesses openly the partizanship of the court. I am told that, in May 1849, “The Republican hordes commanded by the adventurer Garibaldi, after the battle with” (defeat of?) “the Royal Neapolitan troops at Velletri, had occupied a precarious position in the neighbouring towns,” and a good number of p. 93these troops were stationed at Valmontone, under the command of the so-called Colonel De Pasqualis; that at this period, when “an accusation sent to the commanders of these freebooters was sufficient to ruin every honest citizen,” Salvatori, in order to gratify his private animosity against Santurri, De Angelis, and Latini, forwarded to De Pasqualis an unfounded accusation against them of intriguing for the overthrow of the Republic; and in order to give it a “colour of probability,” induced the above-named Anziani to sign it; and that, in order to accomplish his impious design, he wrote a private letter to De Pasqualis, telling him how the arrest of the accused might be effected. Again, I learn that a search, instituted by Salvatori into the priest Santurri’s papers, produced no “evidence favourable to his infamous purpose,” that the accused were never examined, though “a certain David, who pretended to be a military auditor, made a few vague inquiries of Santurri, and noted the answers down on paper with a pencil.” Then we have a queer story how, when Santurri implored for mercy, David replied, “Priests may pardon, but Garibaldi never,” though the very next minute p. 94David is represented as announcing to De Angelis and Latini, that Garibaldi had granted them their pardon. Then I am informed that Salvatori used insulting language to Santurri on his arrest; that it was solely owing to Salvatori’s remonstrances that orders were issued for the re-arrest of Latini and De Angelis; and that though Salvatori ultimately, at the prayer of De Angelis’ wife, gave her a letter to De Pasqualis interceding for her husband, yet he purposely delayed granting it till he knew it would be too late.
Such are the heads of the long string of accusations against Salvatori, of which practically the sentence is composed. The evidence, as far as it is given in the sentence on which the accusations rest, is vague in the extreme. The proof of any personal ill-will against the three victims of the Republic, on the part of any of the prisoners, is most insufficient. Salvatori is said to have had an old grudge against Santurri, about some wood belonging to the Church, to which he had made an unjust claim. De Angelis was stated to have once threatened to shoot Salvatori; but this, even in Ireland, could hardly be construed into evidence that p. 95therefore Salvatori was resolved to murder De Angelis. The only ground of ill-will that can be suggested, as far as Latini is concerned, is that he was a partizan of the priesthood. The act of accusation against Santurri and his fellow-victims, forwarded by the authorities of Giulianello, though essential to the due comprehension of the story, is not forthcoming; and no explanation even is offered of the motives which induced the four “Anziani” to sign a charge which, by the Papal hypothesis, they knew to be utterly unfounded. The bare idea, that Santurri or the others were really guilty of any intrigues against the Republic, is treated as absurd; the fact that any trial or investigation ever took place is slurred over; and yet, with a marvellous inconsistency, Salvatori is accused of being in reality the guilty author of these executions, because some witness—name not given—reports that he heard a report from a servant of Garibaldi, that Santurri was only executed, in opposition to Garibaldi’s own wish, in consequence of Salvatori’s representations.
What was the nature of Salvatori’s defence cannot be gathered from the sentence. From another source, however, I learn that it was p. 96such as one might naturally expect. During 1849, the mayors of the small country towns were entrusted with political authority by the Government. In the exercise of his duty, as mayor, Salvatori discovered that Santurri and the others were in correspondence with the Neapolitans, who were then invading the country, and reported the charge to the officer in command. The result of a military perquisition was to establish convincing proof of the charge of treason. Santurri was tried by a court martial, and sentenced at once to execution; as were also his colleagues, on further evidence of guilt being discovered. Salvatori, therefore, pleaded, that his sole offence, if offence there was, consisted in having discharged his duty as an official of the Republican Government, and that this offence was condoned by the Papal amnesty. This defence, as being somewhat difficult to answer, is purposely ignored; and a printed notice, published on the day of Santurri’s execution, and giving an account of his trial and conviction, is rejected as evidence, because it is not official!
Considering the tone of the sentence it will not be matter of surprise, that the court sums p. 97up with the conclusion, that “Not the slightest doubt can be entertained that the wilful calumnies and solicitations of the prisoner Salvatori were the sole and the too efficacious causes of the result he had deliberately purposed to himself” (namely, the murder of Santurri); and therefore unanimously condemns him to public execution at Anagni. Vincenzo Fenili and Grassi, who had co-operated in the arrest of Santurri, are sentenced to 20 years’ labour on the hulks. There not being sufficient evidence to convict Fanella, Federici, and Teresa Fenili, they are to be—not acquitted, but kept in prison for six months more, while Gabrielli, whose only offence was, that he told Salvatori where the priest Santurri was to be found, though without any evil motive, is to be released provisionally, having been, by the way, imprisoned already for 18 months, while Garibaldi and De Pasqualis are to be proceeded against in default.
Salvatori was executed on the 10th of September, 1851; Fenili and Grassi are probably, being both men in the prime of life, still alive and labouring in the Bagnio of Civita Vecchia, where, at their leisure, they can appreciate the mercies of a Papal amnesty. It seems to me p. 98that I should have called this chapter the Salvatori rather than the Santurri murder, and then the question asked at the end of the last would have required no answer.
At Rome there is no public life. There are no public events to narrate, no party politics to comment on. Events indeed will occur, and politics will exist even in this best regulated of countries; but as all narration of the one, and all manifestation of the other, are equally interdicted for press purposes, neither events nor politics have any existence. To one, who knows the wear and tear of the London press, to whom the very name of a newspaper recalls late hours and interminable reports, despatches and telegrams, proof-sheets, parliamentary debates and police intelligence, leading articles and correspondents’ letters; a very series of Sisyphean labours, without rest or end; to such an one the position of the Roman journalist seems a haven of rest, the most delightful of all sinecures. There are many mysteries indeed about the Papal Press. p. 100Who writes or composes the papers is a mystery; who reads or purchases them is perhaps a greater mystery; but the bare fact of their existence is the greatest mystery of all. Even the genius of Mr Dickens was never able to explain satisfactorily to the readers of Nicholas Nickleby, why Squeers, who never taught anything at Dotheboys Hall, and never intended anything to be taught there, should have thought it necessary to engage an usher to teach nothing; and exactly in the same way, it is an insoluble problem why the Pontifical Government, which never tells anything and never intends anything to be told, should publish papers, in order to tell nothing. The greatest minds, however, are not exempt from error; and it must be to some hidden flaw in the otherwise perfect Papal system, that the existence of newspapers in the sacred city is to be ascribed. The marvel of his own being must be to the Roman journalist a subject of constant contemplation.
The Press of Rome boasts of three papers. There is the Giornale di Roma, the Diario Romano, and, last and least, the Vero Amico del Popolo. The three organs of Papal opinion bear a suspicious resemblance to each other. The Diary is a feeble reproduction of the Journal, p. 101and the Peoples True Friend, which I never met with, save in one obscure café, is a yet feebler compound of the two; in fact, the Giornale di Roma is the only one of the lot that has the least pretence to the name of a newspaper; it is, indeed, the official paper, the London Gazette of Rome. It consists of four pages, a little larger in size than those of the Examiner, and with about as much matter as is contained in two pages of the English journal. The type is delightfully large, and the spaces between the lines are really pleasant to look at; next to a Roman editor, the position of a Roman compositor must be one of the easiest berths in the newspaper-world. Things are taken very easily here, and the Giornale never appears till six o’clock at night, so that writers and printers can take their pleasure and be in bed betimes. There is no issue on Sundays and Feast-days, which occur with delightful frequency. This ideal journal, too, has no fixed price. The case of any one being impatient enough about news to buy a single number seems hardly to be contemplated. The yearly subscription is seven scudi, which comes to between a penny and five farthings a number; but for a single copy you are asked half a paul, or twopence halfpenny. p. 102This however must be regarded as a fancy price, as single copies are not an article on demand; they can only be obtained, by the way, at the office of the Gazette in the Via della Stamperia, and this office is closed from noon, I think, to sunset.
Suppose, for the sake of argument, there was an English newspaper at Rome. Let us consider what would be its summary of contents, this day on which I write. Putting aside foreign topics altogether, what might one naturally suppose would be the Roman news? There is the revolution in the Romagna; if private reports are not altogether false, there have been disturbances in the Marches; there is the question of the Congress, the rumoured departure of the French troops, the state of the adjoining kingdoms, the movements of the Pontifical army, and the promised Papal reforms. Add to all this, there is the recent mysterious attempt at murder in the Minerva hotel, about which all kinds of strange rumours are in circulation. Suppose too, which heaven forbid, that I was a Roman citizen, and had no means of catching sight of foreign newspapers, which is extremely probable, or understood no foreign language, which is more probable still; p. 103what in this case should I learn from my sole source of information, my Giornale di Roma, about my own city and my own country, on this 19th of January, in the year of grace 1860?
The first fact brought before my eager gaze on taking up the paper, would be that yesterday was the feast of St Peter’s chair. Solemn mass was, I learn, performed in the cathedral, in the presence of “our Lord’s Holiness,” and a Latin oration pronounced in honour of the Sacred Chair. After the ceremony was over, it seems that the Senator of Rome, Marquis Mattei, presented an address to the Pope, with a copy of which I am kindly favoured. The Senator, in his own name and in that of his colleagues in the magistracy, declares, that “if at all times devotion to the Pontiff and loyalty to the Sovereign was the intense desire of his heart, it is more ardent to-day than ever, since he only re-echoes the sentiment of the whole Catholic world, which with wonderful unanimity proclaims its veneration for the august Father of the faithful, and offers itself, as a shield, to the Sovereign of Rome.” He adds, that “his mind revolts from those fallacious maxims, which some persons try to insinuate into the feeble minds p. 104of the people, throwing doubts on the incontestable rights of the Church, and that he looks with contempt on such intrigues.” As however both the Senator and his colleagues are nominees of the Pope, and as a brother of the Marquis is a Cardinal, I feel sceptical as to the value of their opinion. The next paragraph tells me, that in order to testify their devotion to the Papacy the inhabitants of Rome illuminated their houses last night in honour of the feast. Unfortunately, I happened to walk out yesterday evening, and observed that the lamps were very few and far between, while in the only illuminated house I entered I found the proprietor grumbling at the expense which the priests had insisted on his incurring. I have then a whole column about the proceedings at the “Propaganda” on the festival of the Epiphany, now some days ago. The Archbishop of Thebes, I rejoice to learn, excited the pupils of the Academy to imitate the virtues manifested in the “Magi,” by an appropriate homily, drawing a striking parallel between the simplicity, the faith and honesty of the three kings, and the disbelief and hypocrisy of the wicked king Herod. I wonder if I have ever heard of Herod under a more modern name, and pass on to a passage, p. 105written in italics, in order to attract my special attention. The “Propaganda” meeting is, I am informed, “a noble spectacle, which Rome alone can offer to the world; that Rome, which God has made the capital of His everlasting kingdom.” This concludes the whole of my domestic intelligence; all that I know, or am to know, about the state of my own country.
Then follows the foreign intelligence, under the heading of “Varieties.” Seventy pro-papal works have, I read, been published in France; indeed, the zeal in behalf of the Pontifical cause gains, day by day, so rapidly in that country, that “every one,” so some provincial paper says, “who can hold a pen in hand uses it in favour of justice and religion, upon the question of the Papacy.” So much for France. All I learn about Italy is that all writings in defence of the Pope are eagerly sought after and perused. Spanish affairs meet with more attention. An English vessel has been captured, it seems, freighted with 14,000 bayonets for Tangiers; and the shipwrecked crew of a French brig were all but massacred by the Moors, or rather, if they were not massacred, it was from no want of malignity on the part of the infidels. I have next an account of the opening p. 106of the Victoria Bridge, Canada, interesting certainly, though I confess that some account, when the sewers in the Piazza di Spagna are likely to be closed, would possess more practical interest for myself. This paragraph is followed by two columns long of the American President’s letter to Congress; a subject on which, as a Roman citizen, I do not feel keenly excited.
The next heading is the “Morning’s News.” This news is made up of small short extracts from, or more correctly speaking, small paragraphs about—extracts from—the foreign newspapers. If I have not heard any rumours at my café, these paragraphs are commonly unintelligible; if I have heard any such reports of agitation or excitement abroad in reference to the Papacy I always find from the paragraphs, that these reports were utterly erroneous. There is a good deal about the new French free-trade tariff, and the pacific intentions of the emperor. There are grave discussions, it appears, in the cabinets of London and Turin; and the return of the conservative Count Walewski to office is confidently expected in Paris. Lord Cowley’s journey to London is now known to have no political signification, and the idea that any accord between p. 107France and England betokened a desertion of the Villa-Franca stipulations, is asserted, on the best authority, to be an entire delusion.
This concludes my budget of news. A whole page is covered with quotations from Villemain’s pamphlet, La France, l’Empire et la Papauté; but as my own personal experience must of course be the best evidence as to the blessings of a Papal government, this seems to me to be carrying coals to Newcastle. I have then a list of the strangers arrived at Rome, one advertisement of some religious work, The Devotions of Saint Alphonso Maria de Liguori, a few meteorological observations from the Pontifical observatory, and half-a-dozen official notices of legal judgments, in cases about which, till now, I have never been allowed to hear a single allusion. I have, however, the final satisfaction of observing that my paper was printed at the office of the Holy Apostolic Chamber.
“Ex uno,” my Roman friend might truly say, “disce omnes.” The number I have taken as a sample is one of more than average interest. I know, indeed, no greater proof of the anxiety and alarm of the Papal government than that so much intelligence should be allowed to ooze out p. 108through the Roman press. I know also of no greater proof of its weakness. A strong despotic government may ignore the press altogether; but a despotism which tries to defend itself by the press, and such a press, must be weak indeed. None but a government of priests, half terrified out of their senses, would dream of feeding strong men with such babes’ meat as this. There are Signs of the Times even in the Giornale di Roma.
If it has ever been the fortune of my readers to mix in tract-distributing circles, they will, doubtless, have become acquainted with a peculiar style of literature which, for lack of a more appropriate appellation, I should call the “candid inquirer” and “intelligent operative” style. The mysteries of religion, the problems of social existence, the intricate casuistries of contending duties, are all explained, in a short and simple dialogue between a maid-servant and her mistress; or a young, a very young man, and his parochial pastor, or a ne’er-do-weel sot and a sober, industrious artisan. The price is only a penny (a reduction made on ordering a quantity), and the logic is worthy of the price.
In its dire distress and need the Papacy has resorted, as a forlorn hope, to the controversial p. 110tract system. As an abstract matter this is only fair play. The Pope has had so many millions of tracts published against him, that it is hard if he may not produce one little one in his own defence. His Holiness may say with truth, in the words of Juvenal,
Semper ego auditor tantum? nunquamne reponam,
Vexatus toties?
But, as a matter of policy, if he has got so very little to say for himself, it would be perhaps wiser if he held his tongue. Be that as it may, the Vatican has thought fit to bring out a small brown paper tract, in answer to the celebrated, too-celebrated, pamphlet, Le Pape et le Congrès. The tract is of the smallest bulk, the clearest type, the best paper, and the cheapest price. Mindful of the Horatian dictum, it plunges at once “in medias res,” and starts, out of breath, with the following interjections: “The end of the world has come. Some want a Pope and not a King; others half a Pope and half a King; and others again, no Pope and no King. And who are these persons—Catholics or Protestants, Jews or Phalansterians, believers or unbelievers? Men who have once believed, p. 111and believe no longer, or men who have never believed at all? Which are the most sincere of these classes? The last, who say, ‘God and the people,’ and who mean to say, ‘No more Popes, and no more Kings.’ Which are the most hypocritical? The second, the men of half measures, who wish for half a Pope and half a King, trusting the while, that either Pope or King may die of inanition, or at any rate that the King will. Which are the greatest dupes? The first, who, Pharisee-like, offering up their prayers, and going to church once a year, deceive themselves with the idea, that the Pope will be more powerful and more free in the vestry of St Peter’s than in the palace of the Vatican.”
The above view of the devotional habits prevalent amongst the Pharisees may appear somewhat novel, but let that pass. Meanwhile, any one experienced in tract lore will feel certain that this outburst will be followed by the appearance of the “candid inquirer,” who comes upon the boards at once, in obedience to the call, and addresses the eloquent controversialist with the stereotyped phrases.
“These three classes of persons, who raise an outcry against the temporal power of the Pope, p. 112are of different stamps; for I understand well whom you allude to; you mean the sincere, the moderate and the devout opponents of the Papacy. I have, however, one or two questions, I should like to ask you; would you be kind enough to answer me?”
X of course replies, that nothing in the world would give him so much pleasure; and during the first dialogue the candid inquirer appears in the character of D, the devout opponent. The pamphlet is much too long and too tedious to give in full. Happily the arguments are few in number; and such as they are, I shall be able to pick them out without much difficulty, quoting the exact words of the dialogue, wherever it rises to peculiar grandeur. X opens the discussion by carrying an assault at once into the enemy’s weak places: “You devout believers say that a Court is not fitting for a priest. Everybody, however, knows that, at the Papal Court, the time and money of the public are not frittered away in parties and fetês and dances. Everybody knows too that women are not admitted to the Vatican, and therefore the habits of the court are not effeminate, while the whole of its time is spent in transacting state affairs; and the due p. 113course of justice is not disturbed by certain feminine passions.” After this statement, startling to any one with a knowledge of the past, and still more to an inhabitant of Rome at the present day, the devout inquirer wisely deserts the domain of stern facts, and betakes himself to abstract considerations. His first position, that the Vicar of Christ ought to follow the example of his master, who had neither court nor kingdom, nor where to lay his head, is upset at once by the argumentum ad hominem, that, according to the same rule, every believer ought to get crucified. No escape from this dilemma presenting itself to our friend D’s devout but feeble mind, X follows up the assault, by asking him, as a deductio ad absurdum, whether he should like to see the Pope in sandals like St Peter. The catechumen falls into the trap at once; flares up at the idea of such degradation being inflicted on the “Master of kings and Father of the faithful;” and asks indignantly if, for a “touch of Italianita,” he is to be suspected of having “washed away his baptism from his brow.” Henceforth great D, after “Charles Reade’s” style, becomes little d. Logically speaking, it is all over with him. If the Pope be the master of p. 114kings, he must by analogy have the rights of a master, liberty to instruct and power to correct. The old parallel of a schoolmaster and his scholars is adduced. D feels he is caught; states, in the stock formula, “that this parallel between the master of kings and the master of scholars puzzles me, because it is unimpeachable; and yet I don’t want to concede everything, and cannot deny everything.” As a last effort, he suggests with hesitation, that “after all, a law which secured the Pope perfect liberty of speech, action and judgment, would fulfil all the necessities of the case; and that in other respects the Pope might be a subject like anybody else.” On this suggestion X tramples brutally. D is asked, how the observance of this law is to be enforced, and can give no answer, on which X bursts into the most virulent abuse of all liberal governments in terms commensurate with the offence. “Praised be God, the days of Henry the VIIIth are passed, and Catholics and Bishops, and all men of great and free intellects need no longer lose their heads beneath the British axe. But are you ignorant that the ‘most catholic France’ has had proclaimed from her tribunes, that the law is of no creed? Are you ignorant of the Josephian laws p. 115of Austria? Glory be now to her young and most devout of catholic sovereigns! but are you not aware, that in the reign of Joseph the bishops in that empire were not allowed to write to, or correspond freely with, the Pope? . . . I suppose, forsooth, you expect observance of the law from those liberal governments of yours, which make the first use of their liberty to destroy liberty itself; who exile bishops, and who, in the face of all the world, break the plighted faith of treaties and concordats—oh yes, those governments, who spy into the most secret recesses of family life, and create the monstrous and tyrannical Loi des suspects, oh yes, they are sure to respect the liberty and the independence of the Bishop of Rome! and are you baby enough to believe or imagine it?” D cowers beneath the moral lash; and hints rather than proposes, that if one country did not respect the Pope’s freedom, he could move into another, though he admits at the same time, he can see grave difficulties in the project. Even this admission is unavailing to protect him from X’s savage onslaught, who winds up another torrent of vituperation with these words: “Yes! This is no question of the Pope and the Pope’s person, but p. 116of the liberty of all the Church, and of all the Episcopate, of your liberty and mine, of the liberty of princes, peoples, and all Christian souls. Miserable man, have you lost all common sense, all catholic sense, even the ordinary sense of language?” In vain D confesses his errors, owns that he is converted, and implores mercy. “No,” X replies in conclusion, “this is not enough; your tongue has spread scandal; and even, if innocent itself, has sown discord. The good seed is obedience and reverence to the Pope our father and the Church our mother. Woe to the tares of the new creed! Woe to the proud and impious men, who under the cloak of piety raise their hands and tongues against their father and mother! The crows and birds of prey shall feed upon their tongues, and the wrath of God shall wither up their hands.”
The demolition of D, the devout, only whets X’s appetite; and heedless of his coming doom, M, the moderate, enters the lists. As a specimen of Papal mild facetiousness, I quote the commencement of the second dialogue.
M. “Great news! a great book!”
X. “Where from?”
M. “From Paris.”
p. 117X. “A dapper-dandy then, I suppose?”
M. “No, a political pamphlet.”
X. “Well, that is the same as a political dandy.”
M. “A pamphlet explaining the policy of the Moderates.”
X. “You mean, of the Moderate intellects?”
M. “No, I mean the policy of the Moderates, a policy of compromise, between the Holy Father and, and—”
X. “Say what you really mean,—between the Holy Father and the Holy Revolution.”
After this test of M’s intellectual calibre, I am not surprised to learn that he is treated throughout with the most contemptuous playfulness. He is horror-struck at learning that, in fact, he is nothing better “than a mediator between Christ and Beelzebub.” He is joked about the fait accompli; and asked whether he would consider a box on his ears was excused and accounted for by a similar denomination of the occurrence; questioned, whether he would like himself to be deprived of all his property; and at last dumbfounded by the inquiry, whether the reasoning of his beloved pamphlet is anything but rank communism. M, in fact, after this tirade ceases p. 118any attempt at argument, and contents himself with feeble suggestions, which afford to X fertile openings for the exercise of his vituperative abilities. For instance, M drops a hint that the Pope might be placed under the guarantee and protection of the Catholic powers; on which X retorts: “The Catholic powers indeed! First of all, you ought to be sure whether the Catholic powers will not co-operate with the Jew, in the disgraceful act of plundering Christ through his Vicar, in order to guarantee him afterwards the last shreds of his garment.” (Another somewhat novel view, by the way, of Gospel history.) “Secondly, you should learn whether any tribunal in the world, in the name of common justice, would place the victim under the protection and guarantee of his spoiler.” When M expresses a doubt whether there is any career for a soldier or statesman under the Papal Government, his doubts are removed by the reflection that the Roman statesmen are no worse off than the French, and that, if Roman soldiers don’t fight, and Roman orators don’t speak, it is because the exertion of their faculties would not prove beneficial to themselves or others. Then follows one of those ejaculatory paragraphs, which p. 119tract-controversialists generally, and X especially, delight in. “You! yes, you! applaud that Parisian insult-monger, who after having robbed Rome of the provinces, that give her power and splendour, and having left her a city maimed of hands and feet, with a frontier two fingers’-length from the Vatican, then speaks of Rome thus degraded; he, I say, this author of yours—this legislator of yours—this Parisian of yours, speaks in the words of Le Pape et le Congrès,”—and so on, through a labyrinth of exclamatory parentheses. “Moderate” is overwhelmed by all this; becomes convinced and converted; and, after the fashion of Papal converts, out-Herods Herod in the ardour of his zeal. He volunteers to X the following original view of French politics: “I can understand the anger of the (French) journals because France has been so unfortunate in her Italian enterprise. She promised, she advised, she threatened; and promises, advice, and threats are alike dispersed in air. She promised and placarded on all the walls the independence of Italy from the Alps to the Adriatic. Where is her promise now? She promised and published through all the Churches the freedom and integrity of the Papal p. 120dominions. Where is her promise now? She advised Piedmont, she advised the Duchies, she advised the Romagna, and her advice was neither received nor accepted. Where is her advice now? Then came the threats of the 31st of December last, and, with profound respect, she threatened the Pope to sacrifice the Romagna; and her prayers or her threats, as you like, where are they now?” Again, of his own accord, M asserts, as a self-evident fact, that “morality and justice have no better sanctuary and no purer inspirations than are to be found in the Court of the Vatican.” What slight difficulties he still entertains are removed at once. He asks X candidly to tell him whether the Papal government is really a bad one or not, and is satisfied with the quotation “Sunt bona mixta malis;” he then inquires, in all simplicity, why there are so many complaints and outbreaks against the Papal rule? and is told, in explanation, that the Pope is persecuted because he is weak. X, emboldened by his easy triumph, ridicules the notion of any reforms being granted by the Papacy, states that what is wanted is a reform in the Papal subjects, not in the Papal rulers, and finally falls foul of poor M, in such language as this:—p. 121“What good can we ever expect from this race of Moderates, who in all revolutions are sent out as pioneers, who have ruined every state in turn by shutting their eyes to every danger, and parleying with every revolution, and who would propose a compromise even with fire or fever, or plague itself.” After this, X repeats the old fable of the horse and the man, and then launches into a tirade against France: “You refused to believe that Italy replaced foreign influence by foreign dominion on the day on which France crossed the Alps. Do you still disbelieve in the treason which is plotting against Italy, by depriving her of her natural bulwarks, Savoy, Nice, and the maritime Alps? Do you not see, that while you are lulled to sleep by the syren song of Italian independence, Italy is weakened, dismembered and enslaved?” A last suggestion of M, that possibly the language of the encyclical letter was a little too strong, brings forth the following retort: “It was strong, and tasted bitter to diseased and vitiated palates, but to the lips of justice the taste was sweet and satisfying. Poor nations! What have politics become? What filth we are obliged to swallow! What scandal to the people; what a lesson of immorality is this fashion p. 122of outraging every principle of right, with sword, tongue and pen! In this chaos, blessed be Providence, there is one free voice left, the voice of St Peter, which is raised in defence of justice, despised and disregarded.” Hereupon M confesses, “on the faith of a Moderate,” that the refusal of the Pope to accept the advice of the Emperor was “an act worthy of him, both as Pope and Italian sovereign,” and then retires in shame and confusion.
S, the sincere opponent, then enters and announces with foolish pride, that “Italy shall be free, and the gates of hell shall prevail.” Pride cometh before a fall, and S is shortly convinced that his remark was profane, and that, by his own shewing, liberty was a gift of hell. S then repeats a number of common-places about the rights of men, the voice of the people, and the will of the majority; and as, in every case, he quotes these common-places incorrectly and inappropriately, X upsets him without effort. As a specimen of the style of logic adopted, I will take one case at hazard. S states that “his reason of all reasons is, that Italy belongs to the Italians, and that the Italians have the right of dividing it, uniting it, and governing it, as seems p. 123good in their own sight.” To this X answers, “I adopt and apply your own principle. Turin, with its houses, belongs to the Turinese; therefore the Turinese have the right to divide or unite the houses of Turin, or drive out their possessors, as seems good in their own sight.” The gross disingenuousness, the palpable quibble in this argument, need no exposure. Logically, however, the argument is rather above the usual range. X then proceeds to frighten S with the old bugbears;—the impossibility of real union between the Italian races; the absorption of the local small capitals in the event of a great kingdom, and the certainty that the European powers will never consent to an Italian monarchy. This conclusion is a short resumé of Papal history, which will somewhat surprise the readers of Ranke and Gibbon.
“After the death of Constantine, the almost regal authority of the Popes in reality commenced. Gregory the Great, created Pope 440 a.d. was compelled for the safety of Italy to exercise this authority against the Lombards on one hand, and the rapacious Exarchs on the other. About 726 a.d. Gregory II. declined the offer of Ravenna, Venice, and the other Italian States, who conferred upon him, in name as well as in fact, p. 124the sovereignty of Italy. At last, in 741 a.d. when Italy was not only deserted in her need, but threatened from Byzantium with desolation and heresy, Gregory III. called in the aid of Charles Martel, that Italy might not perish; and by this law, a law of life and preservation, and through the decree of Providence, the Popes became Italian sovereigns, both in right and fact.” On this very lucid and satisfactory account of the origin of the Papal power, S is convinced at once, and is finally dismissed shamefaced, with the unanswerable interrogation, “whether the real object of the Revolution is not to create new men, new nations, new reason, new humanity, and a new God?”
The three abstractions, S, M, D, then re-assemble to recant their errors. One and all avow themselves confuted, and convicted of folly or worse. X gives them absolution with the qualified approval, that “he rejoices in their moral amendment, and trusts the change may be a permanent one,” and then asks them, as an elementary question in their new creed, “What is the true and traditional liberty of Italy, the only one worthy to be sought and loved by all Italians?” To this question with one voice S and p. 125M and D make answer, “Liberty with law, law with religion, and religion with the Pope.” The course of instruction is completed, and if anybody is still unconvinced by the arguments of the all-wise X, I am afraid that his initial letter must be a Z.
So much for the Independenza e Papa, as the pamphlet is styled. I have given, I fear, a somewhat lengthy account of it; not for its literary merits, which are small, but as being the best native defence of the Papacy I have come across. The dull dead vis inertiæ which formed the real strength of the Papacy has been of late exchanged for a petty useless fussiness. Ever since Guerronière’s pamphlet fell like a bomb upon the Vatican there has been a perfect array of paper-champions, sent forth to do battle for the Papal cause. They are mostly, it is true, of foreign growth. Extracts from Montalembert, De Falloux, and Berryer’s speeches, patched together and re-garnished; reprints of the Episcopal charges in France; editions of Count Sola della Margherita’s much be-praised work; and, I regret to say, translations of Lord Normanby’s speeches in the House of Lords, are advertised daily on the walls of Rome. Of native and original productions there p. 126have been but few. Literary talent does not flourish in Rome, and what little there is, is all retained against the Government. The Eye-glance at the Encyclical, the Widow’s Mite, and the Tears of St Peter, are the titles of some of the anonymous pro-Papal tracts published under Government patronage; of these the Independenza e Papa, which is sold at the printing-office of the Giornale di Roma, is decidedly the ablest and most respectable.
If ever anybody had cause to regret the suppression of lotteries, it is the whole tribe of play-writers and authors. Never will there be found again a “Deus ex Machina,” so serviceable or so unfailing as the lottery. If your plot wanted a solution, or your intrigue a dénoûment, or your novel a termination, you could always cut through all your difficulties by the medium of a lottery-ticket. The virtuous but impoverished hero became at once a very Crœsus, and the worldly-minded parent bestowed his daughter and his blessing on the successful gambler, who, by the way, never purchased his own ticket, but always had it bequeathed to him as a legacy. Alas, lottery-tickets, like wealthy uncles and places under government, have gone out of date. The fond glance of p. 128memory turns in vain towards the good old times, when the lottery was in its glory. It is, however, some comfort to reflect, that if, as devout Catholics assert, the Papacy is eternal, then in Rome, at least, lotteries are eternal also. In truth, the lottery is a great, I might almost say the great Pontifical institution. It is a trade not only sanctioned, but actively supported, by the Government. Partly, therefore, as a matter of literary interest, and partly as a curious feature in the economics of the Papal States, I have made various personal researches into the working of the lottery-system, and shall endeavour to give the theoretical not the practical result of my investigations; the latter result being, I am afraid, of a negative description.
Murray, who knows everything, states that in Rome alone fifty-five millions of lottery-tickets are taken annually. Now though I would much sooner doubt the infallibility of the Pope than that of the author of the most invaluable of hand-books, I cannot help thinking there is some strange error in this calculation. The whole population of Rome is under 180,000, and therefore, according to this statement, every living soul in the city, man, woman, priest and child, p. 129must, on an average, take one ticket a day, to make up the amount stated. If, however, without examining the strict arithmetical correctness of this statement, you take it, just as the old Romans used “sex centi” for an indefinite number, as an expression of the fact, that the number of the lottery-tickets taken annually in Rome is quite incredible, you will not be far wrong. During the year 1858 the receipts of the lottery (by which I suppose are meant the net, not the gross receipts) are officially stated to have been 1,181,000 scudi, or about an eleventh of the whole Pontifical revenue. It is true the expenses of the Lottery are charged amidst the state expenditure for the year at 788,987 scudi, but then a large portion of this expense is directly repaid to the Government, and the remainder is paid to the lottery-holders, who all have to pay heavily for the privilege of keeping a lottery-office, and who form also the most devoted of the Papal adherents, more especially since the liberal party have set their faces against the lottery. Common estimation too assigns a far larger profit to the lotteries than Papal returns give it credit for, and, I own that, from the system on which they are conducted, of which I shall speak presently, p. 130I suspect the profit must be very much beyond the sum mentioned; anyhow, this source of income is a very important one, and is guarded jealously as a Government monopoly. Private gambling tables of any kind are rigidly suppressed. If you want to gamble, you must gamble at the tables and on the terms of the Government. The very sale of foreign lottery-tickets is, I believe, forbidden. To this rule there is one exception, and that is in favour of Tuscany. Between the Grand Ducal and the Papal Governments there long existed an entente cordiale on the subject of lotteries. There is no bond, cynics say, so powerful as that of common interest; and this saying seems to be justified in the present instance. Though the Court of Rome is at variance on every point of politics and faith with the present revolutionary Government of Tuscany, yet in matters of money they are not divided; and so the joint lottery-system flourishes, as of old. The lottery is drawn once a fortnight at Rome, and once every alternate fortnight at Florence or Leghorn; and as far as the speculator is concerned, it makes no difference whether his ticket is drawn for in Rome or in Tuscany, though the gains and losses of each branch are, I understand, p. 131kept separate. These lotteries are not of the plain, good old English stamp, in which there were, say, ten thousand tickets, and ten prizes of different value allotted to the holders of the ten first numbers drawn, while the remaining nine thousand nine hundred and ninety ticket-holders drew blanks. The system of speculation in vogue here is far more hazardous and complicated. To any one acquainted with the German gambling-places it is enough to say, that the Papal lottery-system is exactly like that of a roulette table, with the one important exception, that the chances in the bank’s favour, instead of being about thirty-seven to thirty-six, as they are at Baden or Hamburgh, are in the proportion of three to one. For the benefit of those to whom these words convey no definite meaning, I will endeavour to explain the system as simply as I can.
In a Papal or Tuscan lottery there are ninety numbers, from one up to ninety, and of these numbers, five are drawn at each drawing. You may, therefore, stake your money on any one or two or three or four or five of the ninety numbers being drawn, which is termed playing at the “eletto,” “ambo,” “terno,” “quaterno,” and p. 132“tombola” respectively, or you may finally play “al estratto,” that is, you may not only speculate on the particular numbers drawn, but on the order in which they may happen to be drawn. Practically, people rarely play upon any except the three first-named chances, and they will be sufficient for my explanation. Now a very simple arithmetical calculation will show you, that the chances against your naming one number out of the five drawn is eighteen to one; against your predicting two, four hundred to one; and against your hitting on three, nearly twelve thousand to one. Supposing, therefore, the game was played with ordinary fairness, and even as much as 25 per cent. were deducted for profit and working expenses off the winnings, you ought, if you staked a scudo, for instance, and won an “eletto,” “ambo” or “terno,” to win in round numbers 14, 300, and 9000 scudi respectively. If in reality you did win (a very great “if” indeed), you would not be paid in these instances more than 4, 25 and 3600 scudi. In fact, if ever there was invented in this world a game, of which the old saying, “Heads I win, and tails you lose” held true, it would be of the Papal Lottery. If the numbers you back do not happen to turn p. 133up, you lose the whole of your stake; if they do, you are docked of more than seventy-five per cent. of your winnings. For my part, I would sooner play at thimble-rig on Epsom Downs, or dominoes with Greek merchants, or at “three-cards” with a casual and communicative fellow-passenger of sporting cast: I should infallibly be legged, but I should hardly be plundered so ruthlessly or remorselessly. Still the Vatican, like all gentlemen who play with loaded dice or marked cards, may have a run of luck against it. Spiritual infallibility itself cannot determine whether a halfpenny tossed into the air will come down man or woman, and the law of chances cannot be regulated by a motu proprio. It is possible, though not probable, that on any one occasion the majority of the gamblers might stake their money fortuitously on one series of numbers, and if that series did happen to be drawn, then the loss to the Lottery, even with all deductions, would be a heavy one, and the Roman exchequer is by no means in a position to bear a heavy drain. In consequence, measures are taken to avert this calamity; each office reports daily what sums have been staked on what numbers; and, if any numbers are regarded with undue partiality, orders are issued from the head p. 134department to receive no more money on these numbers or series. I have assumed all along that the numbers are drawn fairly, and, without a very high opinion of the integrity of our Papal rulers, I am disposed to think they are. In the first place, any general impression of unfairness would greatly damage the future profits of the speculation; and, secondly, by the usual rule of averages it will be found that, on the whole, people stake pretty equally on one combination as another, and therefore the question, which particular numbers are drawn, is of less practical importance to the lottery management than might at first be supposed. In spite, however, of these abstract considerations, the virtue of the Papal Lotteries, unlike that of Cæsar’s wife, is not above suspicion; and I have often heard Romans remark, that the only possible explanation of there being one blank day between the closing the lottery-offices and the drawing was the obvious one, that time was required to calculate, from the state of the stakes, what combination of winning numbers will be most beneficial, or least hurtful, to the Papal pockets.
Whatever mathematicians may assert, your regular gamblers always believe in luck, and p. 135therefore it is not surprising that a nation, whose great excitement is the lottery, should be devout worshippers of the blind goddess. It may be that some memories of the Pythagorean doctrines still exist in the land of their birth, but be the cause what it may, it is certain that in the southern Peninsula a belief in the symbolism of numbers is a received article of faith. Every thing, name, or event, has its numerical interpretation. Suppose, for instance, a robbery occurs; forthwith the numbers or sequences of numbers corresponding to the name of the robber or the robbed, the day or hour of the crime, the articles stolen, or a dozen other coincident circumstances, are eagerly sought after and staked upon in the ensuing lottery. Then there are the numeri simpatici, or the numbers in each month or year which are supposed to be fortunate, and lists of which are published in the popular almanacs. The “sympathetic number for instance for the month of March is 88,” why or wherefore I have never been able to discover. Let me assume now, that having dreamt a dream, or heard of a death, or I care not what, you wish to stake your money on the arithmetical signification of the occurrence. You will have no difficulty in discovering a lottery-office; p. 136in well nigh every street there are one or more “Prenditoria di Lotti.” In fact, begging and gambling are the only two trades that thrive in Rome, or are pushed with enterprise or energy. When the drawing takes place in Tuscany, the result is communicated at once by the electric telegraph, a fact unparalleled in any other branch of Roman business. Over each office are placed the Papal arms, the cross keys of St Peter and the tiara. Outside their aspects differ, according to the quarter of the city. In the well-to-do streets, if such an appellation applied to any street here be not an absurdity, the exterior of the lottery-offices are neat but not gaudy. A notice, printed in large black letters on a white placard, that this week the lottery will be drawn for in Rome, or where-ever it may be, and a simple glass frame over the door, in which are slid the winning numbers of last week, form the whole outward adornment. In the poor and populous parts the lotteries flaunt out in all kinds of shabby finery: the walls about the door are pasted over with puffing inscriptions; from stands in front of the shop flutter long stripes of parti-coloured paper, inscribed with all sorts of cabalistic figures. If you like p. 137you may try the “Terno della fortuna,” which is certain, morally, to turn up this week or next. If you are of a philosophical disposition, you may stake your luck on the numbers 19 and 42, which have not been drawn for ever so long a time, and must therefore be drawn sooner—or later; or if you like to cast in your lot with others, you may back that “ambo” which has “sold” marked against it; at any rate, you will not be the only fool who stands to lose or win on that chance, which, after all, is some slight consolation. If none of these inducements are sufficient, you may fix on your choice by spinning round the index on the painted dial-plate, and choosing the numbers opposite to which the spin stops, thus making chance determine chance. Having, at last, selected your combination somehow or other, you enter the office with something of that shamefaced feeling which, I suppose, a man must be conscious of the first time that he ever enters the back-door of a pawnbroker’s establishment.
The interior of these offices is the same throughout. A low, dark room, with a long ink-stained desk at one side, behind which, pen in ear, is seated an official, more grimy even, and more snuffy than the run of his tribe. Opposite p. 138the desk there is sure to be a picture of the Madonna with a small glass lamp before it, wherein a feeble wick floats and flickers in a pool of rancid oil. On the wall you may read a list of the virtuous maidens who are to receive marriage portions of from £5 downwards, on the occasion of the lottery being drawn at some religious festival. Indeed, throughout, the lottery is conducted on a strictly religious footing. The impiegati, or officials who keep them, are all men of sound principles and devotional habits, fervent adherents of the Pope, and habitual communicants. Lotteries too can be defended on abstract religious grounds, as encouraging a simple faith in providence, and dispelling any overwhelming confidence in your own unsanctified exertions. When you have made these reflections, you have only got to tell the clerk what sum of money you want to stake, and on what numbers. The smallest contribution (from eleven baiocchi or about sixpence upwards) will be thankfully received. A long whity-brown slip of paper is given you, with the numbers written on it, and the sum you may win marked opposite. No questions whatever, about name or residence or papers, are asked, as they are whenever p. 139you want to transact any other piece of business in Rome; and all you have to do, is to keep your slip of paper, and come back on the Saturday to learn whether your numbers have been drawn or not.
There is, in truth, a ludicrous side to the Papal Lotteries; but there is also a very sad one. It is sad to see the offices on a Thursday night, when they are kept open till midnight, hours after every other shop is closed, and to watch the crowds of common humble people who hurry in, one after the other; servants and cabmen and clerks and beggars, and, above all, women of the poorer class, to stake their small savings—too often their small pilferings—on the hoped-for numbers. When one speaks of the disgrace and shame that this authorized system of gambling confers on the Papal Government; of the improvidence and dishonesty and misery it creates too certainly among the poor, one is always told, by the advocates of the Papacy, that the people are so passionately attached to the lottery, that no Government could run the risk of abolishing it. If this be true, which I do not believe, I can only say—shame upon the rulers, who have so demoralized their subjects!
There is no University properly speaking in Rome. The constant and minute interference of the priests in the course of study; the rigid censorship extended over all books of learning, and the arbitrary restrictions with which free thought and inquiry are hampered, would of themselves be sufficient to stop the growth of any great school of learning at Rome, even if there existed a demand for such an institution, which there does not. Still in these days, even at Rome, young men must receive some kind of education, and to meet this want the Sapienza College is provided. Both in the age of the scholars and the nature of the studies it bears a much closer resemblance to a Scotch high school than to an University, but still, such as it is, it forms the great lay-place of education in the Papal States. There is a separate theological faculty; p. 141the head of the college is a Cardinal, and the whole course of study is under the control and supervision of the priests. Many, however, of the professors are laymen, the majority of the pupils are educated for secular pursuits, and the families from whom the students come, form as a body the élite in point of education and intelligence amongst the mercantile and professional classes in the Papal States.
At the commencement of the year a great attempt was made by the Government to get up addresses of loyalty and devotion to the Pope. Not even Pius the Ninth himself believed one single word in any of these purchased testimonials. Indeed, on one occasion, when an address was presented by the officers of the army, he informed the deputation with more candour than prudence, that he knew perfectly well not one of them would raise his hand to save the Papacy. But abroad, and more especially in France, it was conceived that such addresses would be accepted as genuine testimonials to the contentment of the Roman people with their rulers. In obedience to these tactics, it was resolved to have an address from the students of the Sapienza. Such an address, containing p. 142the stock terms of fulsome adulation and unreasoning reverence, was drawn up by the authorities. Only a dozen students out of the 400 to 500 of whom the college consists volunteered to sign it. The students were then summoned in a body before the rector, and requested to add their signatures. For this purpose the address was left in their hands, but instead of being signed it was torn to pieces, and the fragments scattered about the lecture-room, amidst a chorus of shouts and groans. With the sort of senile folly which characterized all the proceedings of the Vatican at this period, the affair, instead of being passed unnoticed, was taken up seriously, and assumed in consequence an utterly uncalled-for notoriety. The college was closed for the day, several of the pupils were summoned before the police, an official inquiry was instituted into the demonstration, and the matter became the talk of Rome.
Of course at once a dozen contradictory rumours were in circulation, and it was with considerable difficulty that I obtained the above narrative of the occurrence, which I know to be substantially correct. As a curious instance of how facts are perverted at Rome by theological p. 143bias, I would mention here that when I made some inquiries on the subject from an English gentleman, a recent convert, and I need hardly add a most virulent partizan of the Papal rule, who was in a position to know the truth about the matter, I was told by him, that there had undoubtedly been a demonstration at the Sapienza, but that the truth was, the students were so indignant at the outrages committed against his Holiness, that they drew up an address of their own accord, expressive of their devotion to the Pope, and that upon the rector refusing his consent to the presentation of the address, on the ground that they were too young to take any part in political matters, they vented by tumultuous shouts their dissatisfation at this somewhat ill-timed interference. Now, not only was there such an inherent improbability about this story, to any one at all acquainted with Roman feelings or Papal policy, that it scarcely needed refutation, but subsequent events proved it to be entirely devoid of foundation in fact, and yet it was told me in good faith by a person who had every means of knowing the truth if he had chosen. The anecdote thus forms a curious illustration of the manner in p. 144which stories are got up and circulated in Rome.
The result of the inquiry was that seven or eight of the students, who whether justly or unjustly were regarded as ringleaders in the demonstration, were either expelled or suspended from prosecuting their studies. Amongst the expelled students was the son of the medical Professor, Dr Maturani, who, considering his son unjustly used, resigned, or rather was obliged to resign his post. The Pope then made a state visit to the college, but was very coldly received, and held out no hopes of the offenders being pardoned. The partizans of the Government talked much about the good effect produced by the Papal visit, but within a day or two the students assembled in a body at the Sapienza, and demanded of the rector that the medical professor should be reinstated in his office, and that the sentences of expulsion should be rescinded, as all were equally guilty or equally guiltless. On receiving these demands the rector requested the students, as a personal favour, to make no further demonstration till he had had time to lay their sentiments before Cardinal Roberti, the president of the Congregation of Studies, which he promised to do at p. 145once. The students thereupon retired, but on their return next morning received no reply whatever. The following day was Sunday, when the college is closed, and on Monday the new medical professor was to deliver his inaugural lecture. It was expected that the students would take this opportunity of venting their dissatisfaction, and the government actually resolved to send the Roman gendarmes into the lecture-room in order to suppress any expression of feeling by force. At the time this act was considered only a piece of almost incredible folly, but the events of St Joseph’s day shewed clearly enough that the Vatican was anxious to bring about a collision between the troops and the malcontents. A little blood-letting, after Lord Sidmouth’s dictum, was considered wholesome for the Pope’s subjects. Fortunately the intention came to the knowledge of the French authorities, who interfered at once, and said if troops were required they must be French and not Papal ones, as otherwise it was impossible to answer for the result. On the Monday therefore a detachment of French troops was sent down to the college. The lecture-room was crowded with students, who greeted the new Professor on his entry with a volley of hisses, p. 146and then left the room in a body. The French officer in command was appealed to by the authorities to interfere, but refused doing so, and equally declined receiving an address which the students wished to force upon him. His orders he stated were solely to suppress any actual riot, but nothing further. Some 400 of the students then proceeded to the residences of Cardinal Antonelli, of General Goyon, and the Duc de Gramont, and presented an address, a copy of which they requested might be forwarded to the Emperor. These were the words of the address;
“Your Excellency—Some of our comrades have been removed from us. United to them in our studies, united, too, in our sentiments, we protest against a punishment so unjust and so partial. When adulation and servility suggested to some amongst us the utterance of a falsehood which insulted the Pontiff, while it did no service to the Sovereign, we all rose in union to denounce those who, without our consent, constituted themselves the interpreters of our wishes. This act was not the caprice of a section. It was the vast majority amongst us who thus spoke out the truth. The punishment, if punishment there is to be for speaking the truth, should not fall upon a few alone.
p. 147“We confess it openly, the act was the act of all; the measure of our conduct was the same for all. We therefore demand from your Excellency that the expelled students should be allowed to return, or else that we should all be united with them in one common punishment, as we are proud of being united with them in a common love of truth and of our country.
“The presence of our 400 students supplies the place of signatures.”
The last clause is open to question. The plain fact is, that the students could not get their courage up to signing point. A government of priests never forgives or forgets, and their vengeance though slow is very sure. Any student who had actually affixed his signature to the address would have been a marked man for life; and instead of wondering that the whole body had not sufficient moral resolution to express their sentiments in writing, I am surprised that they had the courage to protest at all, even anonymously. This hesitation, however, afforded the government a loop-hole, which they were wise enough to take advantage of; Cardinal Antonelli declined at once to give any reply to the address, on the ground that he could take no notice of p. 148an unsigned and unauthentic document; so the matter rested. Logically, the Cardinal had the best of the dispute; but, practically, the remonstrants triumphed. The students kept away from the classes, and after a short time the Sapienza college had to be closed, in order, if possible, to weed out the liberal faction amongst the pupils. Numbers of the students were arrested or exiled. As instances of Papal notions of justice and law, I may mention two instances connected with the government inquiry, which came to my knowledge. One student was sent for to the police-office and asked if he was one of those who presented the address; on his replying in the negative, he was asked further, whether, if he had been on the spot, he would have joined in the presentation. To this question, he replied, that the police had no right to question him as to a matter of hypothesis, but only as to facts. The magistrate’s sole answer to this objection consisted in an order to leave Rome within twenty-four hours. Another student was arrested by a gendarme in the street, and brought to the police-office; it was past five o’clock, and the magistrate informed him it was too late to enter on the charge that day, and therefore he must remain in the custody of the p. 149police for the night. In vain the student requested to be informed of the charge against him, and protested against the illegality of detaining a person in custody without there being any charge even alleged; but to all this the magistrate remained obdurate, and the student was sent home under the care of the gendarme. Happily for himself, he managed to give his guardian the slip in the streets, and left the Papal States that night without awaiting the result of an inquiry which had commenced under such auspices.
It is true that the political opinions of a parcel of boys may have very little intrinsic value; but straws shew which way the wind blows, and so this exhibition of the students’ sentiments shews how deep-rooted is the disaffection to the Papacy throughout Roman society, and also how strong the conviction is, that the days of priest-rule are numbered.
The Papacy is too old and too feeble even to die with dignity. Of itself the sight of a falling power, of a dynasy in extremis, commands something of respect if not of regret; but the conduct of the Papacy deprives it of the sympathy that is due to its misfortunes. There is a kind of silliness, I know of no better word to use, about the whole Papal policy at the present day, which is really aggravating. It is silly to rave about the martyr’s crown and the cruel stake, when nobody has the slightest intention of hurting a hair of your head; silly to talk of your paternal love when your provinces are in arms against your “cruel mercies;” silly to boast of your independence when you are guarded in your own capital against your own subjects by foreign troops; silly, in fact, to bark when you cannot bite, to lie when you cannot deceive. No power p. 151on earth could make the position of the Pope a dignified one at this present moment, and if anything could make it less dignified than before, it is the system of pompous pretensions and querulous complaints and fulsome adulation which now prevails at the Vatican. I know not how better to give an idea of the extent to which this system is carried, than by describing a Papal pageant which occurred early in the year.
To enter fully into the painful absurdity of the whole scene, one should bear in mind what were the prospects of Papal politics at the commencement of February. The provinces of the Romagna were about to take the first step towards their final separation, by electing members for the Sardinian Parliament. The question, whether the French troops could remain in Rome, or in other words, whether the Pope must retire from Rome, was still undecided; the streets of the city were thronged with Pontifical Sbirri and French patrols, to suppress the excitement caused by a score of lads, who raised a shout of Viva l’Italia a week before. The misery and discontent of the Roman populace was so great that the coming Carnival time was viewed with the gravest apprehensions, and anxious doubts were p. 152entertained whether it was least dangerous to permit or forbid the celebration of the festival. Bear all this in mind; fancy some Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin, is written on all around, telling of disaffection and despair, and revolt and ruin; and then listen to what was said and done to and by the Pope on that Sunday before Septuagesima.
Some months ago a college was founded at Rome for the education of American youths destined to the priesthood; there were already an English, an Irish, and a Scotch college, not to speak of the Propaganda. However, in addition to all these, a college reserved for the United States, was projected and established by the present Pontiff. Indeed, this American college, the raised Boulevard, which now disfigures the Forum, and the column erected in the Piazza di Spagna to the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, appear to be the only material products of the Pontificate of Pius the Ninth. For some reason or other, which I am not learned enough in theological lore to determine, the feast of St Francis de Sales was celebrated as a sort of inauguration festival by the pupils of the new college. The Pope honoured the ceremony with his presence; p. 153and, for a wonder, a very full account of the proceedings was published in the Giornale di Roma; the quotations I make are literal translations from the official reports.
“The day,” so writes the Giornale, “was in very truth a blessed and a fortunate one, not only for the pupils themselves, who yearned for an opportunity of bearing solemn witness to their gratitude and devotion towards their best and highest father and most munificent benefactor, but also for all those who have it upon their hearts to share in those great works which form the most striking proof of the perpetual growth and spread of our most sacred religion.”
Apparently the number of the latter class is not extensive, as the visit of the Pope attracted but little crowd, and the lines of French soldiers who were drawn up on his way to salute him as he passed, were certainly not collected in the first instance by a spirit of religious zeal. The Giornale, however, views everything with the eyes of faith, not of “pure reason.” Mass was performed at the Holy Church of Humility, and “from early dawn, as soon as the news of the holy father’s visit was circulated, an immense p. 154crowd assembled there which filled not only the church, but the adjoining rooms and corridors. The crowd was composed of the flower of Roman rank and beauty, and the élite of the strangers residing in Rome, both French, English, and American, who desired the blessing of assisting at the bloodless sacrifice celebrated by the Vicar of Christ, and who longed to receive from his hands the angels’ food.” I am sorry truth compels me to state, that the whole of this immense crowd consisted of some two hundred people in all, and that the only illustrious personages of special note amongst the crowd not being priests, were General Goyon, the American Minister and Consul, and the Senator of Rome. The Pope arrived at eight o’clock, and then proceeded to celebrate the communion, assisted by Monsignors Bacon, bishop of Portland, U.S., and Goro, bishop of Liverpool. “The rapt contemplation, the contrition of heart, the spirit of ardent faith which penetrated the whole assembly, more especially while the holy father distributed the sacred bread, were all things so sublime that they are easier to conceive than to describe.”
After mass was over the Pope entered the college. Above the door the following inscription p. 155was written in Latin, composed, I can safely say, by an Hiberno-Yankee pen:
“Approach, O mighty Pius, O thou the parent of the old world and the new, approach these sanctuaries, which thou hast founded for thine American children devoted to the science of the church! To thee, the whole company of pupils; to thee, all America, wild with exultation, offer up praise! For thee, they implore all things peaceful and blessed.”
In the hall prepared for his holiness’ reception there was hung up, “beneath a gorgeous canopy, a marvellous full-length likeness of the august person of the holy Pontiff, destined to recall his revered features. Around the picture a number of appropriate Latin mottos were arranged, of which I give one or two as specimens of the style of adulation adopted:
“Come, O youth, raise up the glad voice, behold, the supreme shepherd is present, blessing his children with the light of his countenance. Hail, O day, shining with a glorious light, on which his glad children receive within their arms the best of parents!
“As the earth beams forth covered with the sparkling sun-light, so the youths rejoice with p. 156gladness, while thou, O father, kindly gladdenest them with thy most pleasant presence!”
Refreshments were then presented to the guests, which I am glad to say were much better than the mottos. The pupils of the Propaganda, who were all present, sang a hymn; addresses were made to the Pope by the pro-rector of the college in the name of the pupils, by Bishop Bacon on behalf of catholic America, and by Cardinal Barnabo, the superior of the Propaganda, all of them in terms of the most fervent adoration. Each of the American pupils then advanced with a short poem which he had composed, or was supposed to have composed, in expression of the emotions of his heart on this joyful occasion, and requested permission to recite it. At such a time the best feature in the Pope’s character, a sort of feeble kindliness of nature, was sure to show itself. I cannot but think indeed that the sight of the young boyish faces, whose words of reverence might possibly be those of truth and honesty, must have given an unwonted pleasure to the worn out, harassed, disappointed old man. “The holy father,” I read, “receiving with agitated feelings so many tokens of homage, was delighted beyond measure.” When the English poems were p. 157recited to him, he called out, “can’t understand a word, but it seems good, very good.” He spoke to each of the lads in turn, and, when he was shown the statue of Washington, told them to give a cheer for their country, to cry Viva la Patria (the very offence, by the way, for which ten days before he had put his own Roman fellow-countrymen into prison), and then when the boys cheered, he raised his hands to his ears, and told them laughingly, they would drive him deaf. Now all this is very pleasant, or in young-lady parlance, very nice, and I wish, truly, I had nothing more to tell. I trust, indeed, that the long abstinence from food (as a priest who is about to celebrate the communion is not allowed to touch food from midnight till the time when Mass is over, and in these matters of observance Pius IX. is reputed to be strictly conscientious) or else the excitement of the scene had been too much for the not very powerful mind of the Pontiff; otherwise I know not how you can excuse an aged man, on the brink of the grave, to say nothing of the Vicegerent of Christ, using such language as he employed.
“After much affectionate demonstration, the Holy Father could no longer restrain his lips p. 158from speaking, and, turning his penetrating glance around, spoke as follows,” in the words of the Giornale:
“One of the chief objects of the most high Pontiffs has ever been, the propagation and maintenance of the faith throughout the world. Their efforts therefore have always been directed towards the establishment of colleges in this sovereign city, in order that the youth of all nations, who would have to preach the faith in the different Catholic countries, might receive their education here. In the foundation then of this new college, he had only followed in the steps of his illustrious predecessors. It thus seemed to him that he had rather performed a simple duty, than an act deserving praise. After his Holiness had pointed out, what a great blessing the faith was, how indeed it was a true gift of Heaven, the sole solace and comfort vouchsafed to us throughout the vicissitudes of fortune, he then expressed his extreme distress, that in these days, this very faith should be made an especial object of attack, and added that this fact alone was the cause of his deep and profound dejection. There is no need, he stated, to refer now, to the prisons and tortures p. 159and persecutions of old, when we are all witnesses to the onslaught which is now being made against the Catholic faith and against whosoever seeks to maintain its purity and integrity. There was no cause however for wonder: such from the cradle had been the heritage of the faith, which was born and bred amidst persecution and adversity, and which under the same lot still continues its glorious progress. The Gospel of the day recalled this truth only too appropriately; although his Holiness continued in the midst of persecution, it was his duty only to arm himself with greater courage, yet the grief of his heart was nevertheless rendered more bitter still, by beholding that in this very peninsula—so highly privileged by God, not only endowed with the faith, and with possessing the most august throne on earth,—that even here, the minds and hearts of men were hopelessly perverted. No, his fears were not caused by the arms or armies, or the forces of any power, be it what it might. No, it was not the loss of temporal dominion, which created in his heart the bitterest of afflictions. Those who have caused this loss must, alas! bear the censure of the Church, and must henceforth be given over to the wrath of God, as long as p. 160they refuse to repent, and cast themselves on His loving mercy. What afflicted and terrified him far more than all this, was the perversion of all ideas, this fearful evil, the corrupting of all notions; vice, in truth, is taken for virtue, virtue counted for vice. At last, in some cities of this unhappy Italy, men have come to make in truth an apotheosis of the cut-throat and the assassin. Praise and honour are lavished on the most villainous of men and actions, while at the same time endurance in the faith and even episcopal resolution in maintaining the holy rights of that faith, and its provident blessings, are stigmatized with a strange audacity, by the names of hypocrisy, fanaticism, and perversion of religion. He then went on to say, that now, more than ever, it was high time to take vengeance in the name of God, and that the vengeance of the priesthood and the Vicariate of Christ Jesus consisted solely in prayer and supplication, that all might be converted and live. That, moreover, the chief of all these evils was only too truly the corruption of the heart and the perversion of the intellect, and that this evil could only be overcome by the greatest of miracles, which must be wrought p. 161by God and interceded from him by prayer. After this, the Holy Father, in language which seemed inspired, as though he were raised out of himself, exhorted all present, and especially the young men destined to carry the faith to their distant countries.”
Even amongst the audience, who all belonged more or less to the Papal faction, the intemperate and injudicious character of this speech, delivered in the presence of the French commander-in-chief, and the allusions which could not but be intended for the Emperor Napoleon, Cavour, and Victor Emmanuel, created great consternation, and was but coldly received. The Giornale however reports, that “where his Holiness, with agitated voice, bestowed his apostolic benediction, awe and admiration could be read on every countenance; all hearts beat aloud; and no eyelid was left dry. The whole assembly pressing forward, bent in turn before the august personage, touching, some his hands and some his dress, while others again cast themselves at his feet, in order to impress thereon a reverent and affectionate kiss.”
After having examined the building, the Pope went on foot to the neighbouring convent of p. 162the Augustine nuns, called “The Convent of the Virgins,” the whole of the religious community were “permitted to kiss the sacred foot,” and then “having comforted the virgins with paternal and loving words,” he returned to the Vatican, past the files of French troops, through the beggar-crowded streets, amidst cold, sullen glances and averted obeisances, back to his dreary palace, there to wait wearily for orders from Paris.
There are things in the world which allow of no description, and of such things a true Roman carnival is one. You might as well seek to analyze champagne, or expound the mystery of melody, or tell why a woman pleases you. The strange web of colour, beauty, mirth, wit, and folly, is tangled so together that common hands cannot unravel it. To paint a carnival without blotching, to touch it without destroying, is an art given unto few, I almost might say to none, save to our own wondrous word-wizard, who dreamt the “dream of Venice,” and told it waking. For my own part, the only branch of art to which, even as a child, I ever took kindly, was the humble one of tracing upon gritting glass, with a grating pencil, hard outlines of coarse sketches squeezed tight against the window-pane. After the manner in which I used to draw, I p. 164have since sought to write; for such a picture-frame then as mine, the airy, baseless fabric of an Italian revel is no fitting subject, and had the Roman Carnival for 1860 been even as other carnivals are, I should have left it unrecorded. It has been my lot, however, to witness such a carnival as has not been seen at Rome before, and is not likely to be seen again. In the decay of creeds and the decline of dynasties there appear from time to time signs which, like the writing on the wall, proclaim the coming change, and amongst these signs our past Carnival is, if I err not, no unimportant one. While then the memory of the scene is fresh upon me, let me seek to tell what I have seen and heard. The question whether we were to have a Carnival at all, remained long doubtful; the usual time for issuing the regulations had long passed, and no edict had appeared; strange reports were spread and odd stories circulated. Our rulers were, it seems, equally afraid of having a carnival and not having it; and with their wonted wisdom decided on the middle course, of having a carnival which was not a carnival at all. One week before the first of the eight fête-days, the long-delayed edict was posted on the walls; the festival p. 165was to be celebrated as usual, except that no masks were to be allowed; false beards and moustaches, or any attempt to disguise the features, were strictly forbidden. Political allusions, or cries of any kind, were placed under the same ban; crowds were to disperse at a moment’s notice, and prompt obedience was to be rendered to any injunction of the police. Subject to these slight restraints, the wild revel and the joyous licence of the Carnival was to rule unbridled. In the words of a Papal writer in the government gazette of Venice: “The festival is to be celebrated in full vigour, except that no masks are allowed, as the fashion for them has lately gone out. There will be, however, disguises and fancy dresses, confetti, bouquets, races, moccoletti, public and private balls, and, in short, every amusement of the Carnival time.” What more could be required by a happy and contented people? Somehow, the news does not seem to be received with any extraordinary rejoicing; a group of idlers gaze at the decree and pass on, shrugging their shoulders listlessly. Along the Corso notice-boards are hung out of balconies to let, but the notices grow mildewed, and the balconies remain untaken. The carriage-drivers p. 166don’t pester you, as in former years, to engage them for the Carnival; and the fancy dresses exposed in the shop-windows are shabby and few in number. There is no appearance of unnecessary excitement; but “still waters run deep;” and in order to restrain any possible exuberance of feeling, on the very night before the Carnival the French general issues a manifesto. “To prevent painful occurrences,” so run General Guyon’s orders, “the officer commanding each detachment of troops which may have to act against a crowd, shall himself, or through a police-officer, make it a summons to disperse. After this warning the crowd must disperse instantly, without noise or cries, if it does not wish to see force employed.” Still no doubts are entertained of the brilliancy of the Carnival; the Romans (so at least their rulers say, and who should know them better?) will enjoy themselves notwithstanding; the Carnival is their great holiday, the one week of pleasure counted on the long, dull year through, and no power on earth, still less no abstract consideration, will keep them from the Corso revels. From old time, all that they have ever cared for are the panem et circenses; and the Carnival gives them both. It is the p. 167Roman harvest-time, when the poor gather in their gleanings. Flower-sellers, vendors of confetti, hawkers of papers, letters-out of chairs and benches, itinerant minstrels, perambulating cigar-merchants, pedlars, beggars, errand-boys, and a hundred other obscure traders, pick up, heaven knows how! enough in Carnival time to tide them over the dead summer-season. So both necessity and pleasure, want and luxury, will combine to swell the crowd; and the pageant will be gay enough for the Vatican to say that its faithful subjects are loyal and satisfied.
The day opens drearily, chilly, and damp and raw, with a feeble sun breaking through the lowering clouds; soon after noon the streets begin to fill with soldiers. Till this year the Corso used to be guarded, and the files of carriages kept in order, by the Italian pontifical dragoons, the most warlike-looking of parade regiments I have ever seen. Last spring, however, when the war broke out, these bold dragoons grew ashamed of their police duties, and began to ride across the frontier without leave or license, to fight in behalf of Italy. The whole regiment, in fact, was found to be so disaffected that it was disbanded without delay, and at present p. 168there are only some score or so left, who ride close behind the Pope when he goes out “unattended,” as his partisans profess. So the dragoons having disappeared, the duty of keeping order is given to the French soldiers. There are soldiers ranged everywhere: along the street pavements there is one long line of blue overcoats and red trousers and oil-skin flowerpot hats covering the short, squat, small-made soldiers of the 40th Foot regiment, whose fixed bayonets gleam brightly in the rare sun-light intervals. At every piazza there are detachments stationed; their muskets are stacked in rows on the ground, and the men stand ready to march at the word of order. In every side-street sentinels are posted. From time to time orderlies gallop past. Ever and anon you hear the rub-a-dub of the drums, as new detachments pass on towards the Corso. The head-quarters at the Piazza Colonna are crowded with officers coming and going, and the whole French troops off duty seem to have received orders to crowd the Corso, where they stroll along in knots of three or four, alone and unnoticed by the crowd around them. The heavy guns boom forth from the Castle of St Angelo, and the Carnival has begun.
p. 169Gradually and slowly the street fills. One day is so like another that to see one is to have seen all. The length of the Corso there saunters listlessly an idle, cloak-wrapt, hands-in-pocket-wearing, cigar-smoking, shivering crowd, composed of French soldiers and the rif-raff of Rome, the proportion being one of the former to every two or three of the latter. The balconies, which grow like mushrooms on the fronts of every house, in all out-of-the-way places and positions, are every now and then adorned with red hangings. These balconies and the windows are scantily filled with shabbily-dressed persons, who look on the scene below as spectators, not as actors. At rare intervals a carriage passes. The chances are that its occupants are English or Americans. On the most crowded day there are, perhaps, at one time, fifty carriages in all, of which more than half belong to the forestieri. Indeed, if it were not for our Anglo-Saxon countrymen, there would be no carnival at all. We don’t contribute much, it is true, to the brilliancy of the coup d’œil. Our gentlemen are in the shabbiest of coats and seediest of hats, while our ladies wear grey cloaks, and round, soup-plate bonnets. However, if we are not ornamental, we are useful. We pelt each other with p. 170a hearty vigour, and discharge volleys of confetti at every window where a fair English face appears. The poor luckless nosegay or sugar-plum boys look upon us as their best friends, and follow our carriages with importunate pertinacity. Fancy dresses of any kind are few. There are one or two very young men—English, I suspect,—dressed as Turks, or Greeks, or pirates, after Highbury Barn traditions, looking cold and uncomfortable. Half a dozen tumble-down carriages represent the Roman element. They are filled with men disguised as peasant-women, and vice versâ; but, whether justly or unjustly, they are supposed to be chartered for the show by the Government, and attract small comment or notice. Amongst the foot-crowd, with the exception of a stray foreigner, there is not a well-dressed person to be seen. The fun is of the most dismal character. Boys with bladders whack each other on the back, and jump upon each other’s shoulders. Harlequins and clowns—shabby, spiritless, and unmasked—grin inanely in your face, and seem to be hunting after a joke they can never find. A quack doctor, or a man in crinoline, followed by a nigger holding an umbrella over his head, or a swell with pasteboard collars, and a chimney-pot on his head, pass p. 171from time to time and shout to the bystanders, but receive no answer. Give them a wide berth, for they are spies, and bad company. The one great amusement is pelting a black hat, the glossier the better. After a short time even this pleasure palls, and, moreover, victims grow scarce, for the crowd, contrary to the run of Italian crowds, is an ill-bred, ill-conditioned one, and take to throw nosegays weighted with stones, which hurt and cut. So the long three hours, from two to five, pass drearily. Up and down the Corso, in a broken, straggling line, amidst feeble showers of chalk (not sugar) plums, and a drizzle of penny posies to the sound of one solitary band, the crowd sways to and fro. At last the guns boom again. Then the score of dragoons—of whom one may truly say, in the words of Tennyson’s “Balaclava Charge,” that they are “all that are left of—not the ‘twelve’ hundred”—come trotting down the Corso from the Piazza del Popolo. With a quick shuffling march the French troops pass along the street, and form in file, pushing back the crowd to the pavements. With drawn swords and at full gallop the dragoons ride back through the double line. Then there is a shout, or rather a long murmur. All faces are turned up the p. 172street, and half a dozen broken-kneed, riderless, terror-struck shaggy ponies with numbers chalked on them, and fluttering trappings of pins and paper stuck into their backs, run past in straggling order. Where they started you see a crowd standing round one of the grooms who held them, and who is lying maimed and stunned upon the ground, and you wonder at the unconcern with which the accident is treated. Another gun sounds. The troops form to clear the street, the crowd disperses, and the Carnival is over for the day. A message is sent to the Vatican, to inform the Pope that the festival has been most brilliant, and along the telegraphic wires the truth is flashed to Paris that the day has passed without an outbreak.
On the last day of the Carnival the Porto Pia road was full as usual, and the Corso filled as usual with soldiers, and spies, and rabble. An order was published, that any person appearing out of the Corso with lighted tapers would be arrested, and therefore the idea of an evening demonstration outside the gates was dropped. Not all the efforts, however, of the police could light the Moccoletti in the Corso. House after house, window after window, were p. 173left unlighted. The crowd in the streets carried no candles, and there were only sixteen carriages or so, all filled with strangers. Of all the dreary sights I have ever witnessed that Moccoletti illumination was the dreariest. At rare intervals, and in English accents, you heard the cry of “Senza Moccolo,” which used to burst from every mouth as the tiny flames flickered, and glared, and fell. Before the sight was half over the spectators began to leave, and while I pushed my way through the dispersing crowds, I could still hear the faint cry of “Senza Moccolo.” As the sound still died away, the cry still haunted me; and in my recollection, the Carnival of 1860 will ever remain as the dullest and dismalest of Carnivals—the Carnival without mirth, or sun, or gaiety—the Carnival Senza Moccolo.
Straws show which way the wind blows, and so, though the straws themselves are valueless, yet as indications of what is coming, their motions are worth noting. It is thus that I judge of the series of demonstrations which marked the spring of this year in Rome, and which ended in the outrage of St Joseph’s day. Of themselves they were less than worthless, but as tokens of the future they possess a value of their own. In recent Papal history they form a strange page. Let me note their features briefly, as I wrote of them at the time.
At last there is a break in the dull uniformity of Roman life.—There is a ripple on the waters, whether the precursor of a tempest, or to be p. 175followed by a dead calm, it is hard to tell. Meanwhile it is some gain at any rate, that the old corpse-like city should show signs of life, however transient. Feeble as those symptoms are, let us make the most of them.
Since the Imperial occupation of Rome, the building in the Piazza Colonna, which old Roman travellers remember as the abode of the Post Office, has been confiscated to the service of the French army. It forms, in fact, a sort of military head-quarter. All the bureaux of the different departments of the service are to be found here. The office of the electric telegraph is contained under the same roof, and the front windows of the town-hall-looking building, lit up so brightly and so late at night, are those of the French military “circle.” The Piazza Colonna, where stands the column of Mark Antony, opens out of the Corso, and is perhaps the most central position in all Rome. At the corner is the café, monopolized by the French non-commissioned officers; and next door is the great French bookseller’s.
Altogether the Piazza and its vicinity is the French quartier of Rome. At seven o’clock every evening, the detachments who are to be p. 176on guard, during the night, at the different military posts, are drawn up in front of the said building, receive the pass-word, and then, headed by the drums and fifes, march off to their respective stations. Every Sunday and Thursday evening too, at this hour, the French band plays for a short time in the Piazza. Generally, this ceremony passes off in perfect quiet, and in truth attracts as little attention from bystanders as our file of guardsmen passing on their daily round from Charing Cross to the Tower. On Sunday evening last, a considerable crowd, numbering, as far as I can learn, some two or three thousand persons, chiefly men and boys, assembled round the band, and as the patrols marched off down the Corso, and towards the Castle of Saint Angelo, followed them with shouts of “Viva l’Italia,” “Viva Napoleone,” and, most ominous of all, “Viva Cavour.” As soon as the patrols had passed the crowd dispersed, and there was, apparently, an end of the matter. The next night poured with rain, with such a rain as only Rome can supply; and yet, in spite of the rain, a good number of people collected to see the guard march off, and again a few seditious or patriotic cries (the two terms are here synonymous) were p. 177heard. Such things in Italy, and in Rome especially, are matters of grave importance, and the Government was evidently alarmed. Contrary to general expectation, and I suspect to the hopes of the clerical party, the French general has issued no notice, as he did last year, forbidding these demonstrations. However, the patrols have been much increased, and great numbers of the Pontifical gendarmes have been brought into the city. On Tuesday night the Papal police made several arrests, and a report was spread by the priests that the French troops had orders to fire at once, if any attempt was made to create disturbance. On the same night, too, there was a demonstration at the Apollo. I have heard, from several quarters, that on some of the Pontifical soldiers entering the house, the whole audience left the theatre, with very few exceptions. However, in this city one gets to have a cordial sympathy with the unbelieving Thomas, and not having been present at the theatre myself, I cannot endorse the story.
Last night I strolled down the Corso to see the guard pass. The street was very full, at least full for Rome, where the streets seem empty at their fullest, and numerous groups of men were p. 178standing on the door-steps and at the shop windows. Mounted patrols passed up and down the street, and wherever there seemed the nucleus of a crowd forming, knots of the Papal sbirri, with their long cloaks and cocked hats pressed over their eyes, and furtive hang-dog looking countenances, elbowed their way unopposed and apparently unnoticed. In the square itself there were a hundred men or so, chiefly, I should judge, strangers or artists, a group of young ragamuffins, who had climbed upon the pedestals of the columns, and seemed actuated only by the curiosity natural to the boy genus, and a very large number of French soldiers, who, at first sight, looked merely loiterers. The patrol, of perhaps four hundred men, stood drawn up under arms, waiting for the word to march. Gradually one perceived that the crowds of soldiers who loitered about without muskets were not mere spectators. Almost imperceptibly they closed round the patrol, pushed back by the bystanders not in uniform, and then retreated, forming a clear ring for the guard to move in. There was no pushing, no hustling, no cries of any kind. After a few minutes the drums and fifes struck up, the drum-major whirled his staff round in the air, the ring of p. 179soldier-spectators parted, driving the crowd back on either side, and through the clear space thus formed the patrol marched up the square, divided into two columns, one going to the right, and the other to the left, and so passed down the length of the Corso. The crowd made no sign, and raised no shout as the troops went by, and only looked on in sullen silence. In fact, the sole opinion I heard uttered was that of a French private, who formed one of the ring, and who remarked to his comrade that this duty of theirs was sacré nom de chien de métier, a remark in which I could not but coincide. As soon as the patrol had passed, the crowd retreated into the cafés or the back-streets, and in half-an-hour the Corso was as empty as usual, and was left to the sbirri, who passed up and down slowly and silently. Even in the small side-streets, which lead from the Corso to the English quarters, I met knots of the Papal police accompanied by French soldiers, and the suspicious scrutinizing glance they cast upon you as you passed showed clearly enough they were out on business.
The present has been a week of demonstrations, both Papal and anti-Papal. Last Thursday p. 180was the Giovedi Grasso, the great people’s day of the carnival. In other years, from an early hour in the afternoon, there is a constant stream of carriages and foot-passengers setting from all parts of Rome towards the Corso. The back-streets and the ordinary promenades are almost deserted. The delight of the Romans in the carnival is so notorious, that persons long resident in Rome possessed the strongest conviction beforehand, that no human power could ever keep the natives from the Corso upon Thursday. The day, unlike its predecessors, was brilliantly bright. The Corso was decked out as gaily as hangings and awnings could make it. The sellers of bouquets and “confetti” were at their posts. A number of carriages were sent down filled with adherents of the Government, dressed in carnival attire, to act as decoy-ducks. All officials were required to take part in the festivities. The influence of the priests was exerted to beat up carnival recruits amongst their flocks, and yet the people obstinately declined coming. The revel was ready, but the revellers were wanting. The stiff-necked Romans were not content with stopping away, but insisted on going elsewhere. By one of those tacit understandings, which are always the characteristic p. 181of a country without public life or liberty, a place of rendezvous was fixed upon. Without notice or proclamation of any kind, everybody knew somehow, though how, nobody could tell, that the road beyond the Porta Pia was the place where people were to meet on the day in question. The spot was appropriate on various grounds. Along the Via Nomentana, which leaves Rome through this gate, lies the Mons Sacer, whither the Plebs of old seceded from the city, to escape from the tyranny of their rulers. The gate too, which was commenced by Michael Angelo, was completed by the present Pontiff, and there is an irony dear to an Italian’s mind in the idea of choosing the Porta Pia for the egress of a demonstration against the Pope Pius. Perhaps, after all, the fact that the road is one of the sunniest and pleasantest near Rome may have had more to do with its selection than any abstract considerations. Be the cause what it may, one fact is certain, that from the time when the Corso ought to have been filling, a multitude of carriages and holiday-dressed people set out towards the Porta Pia. The Giovedi Grasso is a feast-day in Rome, and all the shops are shut, and their owners at liberty. All Rome, in consequence, seemed to be wending p. 182towards the Porta Pia. From the gate to the convent of St Agnese, a distance of about a mile, there was a long string of carriages, chiefly hired vehicles, but filled with well-dressed persons. As far as I could judge, the number of private and aristocratic conveyances was small. The prince of Piombino, who is married to one of the half-English Borghese princesses, was the only Roman nobleman I heard of, as being amongst the crowd. But if the nobility were not present on the Via Nomentana, they were equally absent from the Corso. The footpaths were thronged with a dense file of orderly respectable people. There were, perhaps, half-a-dozen carriages, the owners of which had some sort of carnival-dress on, but that was all. There were no cries, no throwing of confetti, no demonstration of feeling, except in the very fact of the assemblage. As far as I could guess from my own observation, there were about 6000 people present, and from 400 to 500 carriages; though persons who ought to be well informed have told me that there were double these numbers. No attempt at interference was made on the part of the French. There were but few French soldiers about, and what there were, were evidently mere spectators. Pontifical gendarmes p. 183passed along the road at frequent intervals, and, not being able to arrest a multitude, consoled themselves with the small piece of tyranny of closing the osterias, which, both in look and character, bear a strong resemblance to our London tea-gardens, and are a favourite resort of thirsty and dusty pedestrians. The crowd, nevertheless, remained perfectly orderly and peaceful, and as soon as the carnival-time was over, returned quietly to the city. As I came back from the gate I passed through the Corso just before the course was cleared for the races. I have never seen in Italy a rabble like that collected in the street. The crowd was much such a one as you will sometimes meet, and avoid, in the low purlieus of London on Guy Faux day. Carriages there were, some forty in all, chiefly English. One hardly met a single respectable-looking person, except foreigners, in the crowd; and I own I was not sorry when I reached my destination, and got clear of the mob. Yet the report of the police of the Pope was, that the carnival was brilliante, e brilliantissimo.
On the following day (Friday) much the same sort of demonstration took place in the Corso. There being no carnival, the whole street, from p. 184the Piazza del Popolo to the Capitol, was filled with a line of carriages, going and returning at a foot’s pace. The balconies and windows were filled with spectators, and the rabble of the previous day was replaced by the same quiet, decent crowd I had seen at the Porta Pia. The carriages, from some cause or other, were more aristocratic in appearance; while the number of spectators was much smaller—probably because it was a working day, and not a “festa.” By seven o’clock the assemblage dispersed, and the street was empty. Meanwhile, Friday afternoon was chosen for the time of a counter-demonstration at the Vatican. All the English Roman Catholics sojourning in Rome received notice that it was proposed to present an address to the Pope, condoling with him in his afflictions. Cardinal Wiseman was the chief promoter, and framed the address. Many Roman Catholics, I understand, abstained from going, because they were not aware what the terms of the address might be, and how far the sentiments expressed in it might be consistent with their position as English subjects. The demonstration outwardly was not a very imposing one; about fifty cabs and one-horse vehicles drove up at three o’clock to the Vatican, and p. 185altogether some 150 persons, men, women, and children, of English extraction, mustered together as representatives of Catholic England. The address was read by Cardinal Wiseman, expressing in temperate terms enough the sympathy of the meeting for the tribulations which had befallen his Holiness. The bearing of the Pope, so his admirers state, was calm, dignified, and resolute. As however, I have heard this statement made on every occasion of his appearance in public, I am disposed to think it was much what it usually is—the bearing of a good-natured, not over-wise, and somewhat shaky old man. In reply to the address, he stated that “if it was the will of God that chastisement should be inflicted upon his Church, he, as His vicar, however unworthy, must taste of the chalice;” and that, “as becomes all Christians, knowing that though we cannot penetrate the motives of God, yet that He in his wisdom permits nothing without an ulterior object, we may safely trust that this object must be good.” All persons present then advanced and kissed the Pope’s hand, or foot, if the ardour of their devotion was not contented by kissing the hand alone. When this presentation was over, the Pope requested the company to kneel, and then prayed p. 186in Italian for the spiritual welfare of England, calling her the land of the saints, and alluding to the famous Non Angli, sed angeli. He exhorted all present “to look forward to the good time when justice and mercy should meet and embrace each other as brothers;” and finally, with faltering voice, and tears rolling down his cheeks, gave his apostolical benediction. Of course, if you can shut your eyes to facts, all this is very pretty and sentimental. If the Romans could be happy enough to possess the constitution of Thibet, and have a spiritual and a temporal Grand Llama, they could not have fixed on a more efficient candidate for the former post than the present Pope; but the crowds of French soldiers which lined the streets to coerce the chosen people, formed a strange comment on the value of pontifical piety. It is too true that the better the Pope the worse the ruler. Probably the thousands of Romans who thronged the Corso knew more about the blessings of the Papal sway than the few score strangers, who volunteered to pay the homage to the Sovereign of Rome which the Romans refuse to render.
To-day the demonstration was repeated on the Porta Pia; and the Vatican, indignant at its p. 187powerlessness to suppress these symptoms of disaffection, is anxious to stir up the crowd to some overt act of insurrection, which may justify or, at any rate, palliate the employment of violent measures. So in order to incense the crowd, the public executioner was sent out in a cart guarded by gendarmes to excite some active expression of anger on the part of the mob. It is hard for us to understand the feeling with which the Italians, and especially the Romans, regard the carnefice. He is always a condemned murderer, whose life is spared on condition of his assuming the hated office, and, except on duty, he is never allowed to leave the quarter of St Angelo, where he dwells, as otherwise his life would be sacrificed to the indignation of the crowd, who regard his presence as a contamination.
The poor fellow looked sheepish and frightened enough, as he patrolled slowly with his escort up and down the crowded Porta Pia thoroughfare; but even this insult failed to effect its object. The device was too transparent for an Italian crowd not to detect it, and the ill-omened cortége of the “Pope’s representative,” as the Romans styled the executioner, passed by without any comment.
The system of silent legal opposition which was carried on formerly at Milan, and now at Venice, is being organised here against the Papal rule. By one of those mystical compacts to which I have before alluded, it has been resolved to suppress smoking and lottery-gambling. Our anti-tobacconists, or our moral reformers, must not suppose that the Romans have suddenly become alive to the iniquity of either of these pursuits. I wish, indeed, with regard to the latter, I could conscientiously assert that the Liberal faction had decreed its extinction from any conviction of the degradation and corruption inflicted by it upon their country. I fear, however, from the extent to which lotteries are still encouraged by the Tuscan Government, that such is not the case. The reason of the movement is, indeed, a very simple and material one. From the lotteries and the tobacco monopoly the government derives a very large part of its revenues, and a part, too, which does not excite unpopularity in the same way as direct taxation. Any extinction, therefore, or indeed any serious diminution of these sources of revenue, would place the Holy See in great difficulties. The profits on the lottery go directly p. 189into the pockets of the Government, who are also supplied with very extensive and important patronage by the vast number of petty posts which the system employed for collecting tickets places at their disposal. The tobacco monopoly is farmed out to a company, on whom any loss would fall in the first instance; but if the abstention from tobacco were continued long, the Government would soon feel the effects, through the inability of the company to keep up their present rate of payment.
Whether rightly or wrongly, an attempt to cut off the funds of the Papal exchequer in this manner is certainly being made. Strangers, of course, are not interfered with; but Italians are warned at the doors of the cigar-shops and the lottery-offices not to enter and buy. The sudden diminution in the number of people you meet smoking in the streets is quite remarkable, and, I am sure, would strike any observer who had never heard of the movement. There have been already several disturbances between smokers and non-smokers. The story goes, that in a quarrel arising out of this subject, a man was stabbed in the street the night before last; but in Rome it is almost impossible to make out p. 190the truth in a matter of this kind. At several lottery-offices gendarmes have been placed to hinder purchasers of tickets from being molested; and a bitter feeling seems growing up on every side. How long the Romans may have strength of mind enough to abstain from their favourite amusements of smoking and gambling, it is impossible to say; but since I witnessed their resolute abstention from the delights of the Carnival, I think better of their courage than I did before.
On Sunday evening, when the great promenade takes place along the Corso, where, a week ago, there was hardly a male mouth without a cigar or cheroot or cigarette inserted in it, I only noticed four smokers in the Corso crowd, and they were all foreigners. The practice is suppressed not only in the streets but in the cafés. For the benefit of the weaker brethren, who cannot screw up their patriotism to total abstinence, pipes are allowed, as the Government profit on tobacco is very small compared with that on cigars. The Italians, however, are not much of pipe-smokers, and the tobacconists are in despair at the total absence of customers. Of course, the partisans of the Government p. 191prophesy that the movement will end in smoke, but at present the laugh is on the other side.
The Society for the Suppression of Smoking, who by the way send their tracts to the reading-rooms here, of all places in the world, will regret to learn that the Roman Anti-Tobacco Crusade is to expire on and after Sunday next. The leaders of the liberal party have, I think, acted wisely in contenting themselves with an exhibition of their union and power and then withdrawing from the contest. The loss to the Government by the discontinuance of smoking was only an indirect and eventual one; on the other hand, the company, who farm the Tobacco monopoly, would have been ruined by the progress of the movement, and had already been obliged to dismiss a large proportion of their work-people. The tobacconists and street-hawkers of cigars were deprived of their livelihood, and the misery and consequent ill-will created amongst the poor of Rome by keeping up the prohibition would have been serious. Then, too, perhaps it was thought advisable not to impose too heavy a trial on patriotic ardour. Smoke is meat and p. 192drink to a Roman, his first care in the morning, his occupation by day, and his last thought at night. Yet you may truly say, that during the time of its prohibition the whole city willingly gave up smoking. If, in order to testify political dissatisfaction, the whole of London were to leave off beer-drinking by private agreement, the expression of feeling would be hardly a more remarkable one.
The feast of San Giuseppe is the only festa day in Lent, when the Romans eat fried fish in honour of the occasion,—St Joseph alone knows why. Henceforth the day will have other and less pleasing associations. The garland-wreathed stalls, with the open ovens and the frizzling fritters, were reared as usual at every corner; the shops were closed; the osterias were full; the streets were crowded with holiday-people in holiday-attire, and the day was warm and bright like an early summer-day in England, though it was only the 19th of March. The news of the Romagna elections, with their overwhelming majority in favour of annexation to Sardinia, had been just received in Rome with general exultation. No doubt the festive appearance which marked the city throughout the day was not altogether accidental, but was meant for, and p. 194regarded as, an expression of public sympathy with the revolted provinces. St Joseph happens to be the patron saint of the two great Italian popular heroes, Garibaldi and Mazzini, and a demonstration on this day was therefore considered to be in honour of the Three Josephs, the Saint and his two protegés. It was known generally that the adherents of the Liberal party would muster, as usual, on the Porta Pia road, and that the more courageous partizans of the popular cause would be distinguished by wearing a violet in their button-holes.
The Government had, it seems, decided that even these tacit expressions of disaffection must be suppressed at all costs. With a happy irony of cruelty which appears to distinguish a priestly despotism above every other, the holiday of St Joseph was chosen as the opportunity for striking terror into the hearts of the disloyal Romans; and as the policy which sent out the executioner to excite the populace had not been crowned with its coveted success, it was resolved to create a collision between the police and the people. In the morning, five Roman gentlemen of position and fortune, suspected of sympathy with the liberal cause, received notice that they were exiled p. 195from the Papal States, and must leave the city within twenty-four hours. Amongst these gentlemen was St Angeli, who, not long ago, was arrested and imprisoned without charge or trial, and who was but lately released on the remonstrance of the French authorities. There was also Count Silverstrelli, a brother of the gentleman of that name so well known to English sportsmen at Rome. The news of these arrests did not check the proposed demonstration. Towards four o’clock a considerable number of carriages and persons on foot assembled outside the gates on the Via Nomentana; some patrols, however, of French soldiers were found to be stationed along the road; and as it is the great object of the liberal leaders at Rome to avoid any possibility even of collision between the people and the French troops, it was resolved to adjourn the place of assemblage to the Corso. Whether this was a thought suggested on the moment, or whether it was the result of a preconcerted plan, is a mooted question not likely to be decided; the resolution, however come to, was acted on at once. Neither here, nor elsewhere, I may observe, was there anything of a tumultuous crowd, or the slightest apparent approach to agitation p. 196on the part of the multitude. All a spectator could observe was, that the carriages turned homewards somewhat nearer to the gates than usual, and that the stream of people who sauntered idly along the footpath, as on any other festa day, set out earlier than they are wont to do on their return to the city.
About six o’clock the crowd from the Porta Pia had reassembled in the Corso. Six o’clock is always the fullest time in that street; private carriages are coming back from the Pincio promenade, and strangers are driving back to their hotels from the rounds of sight-seeing. The Corso, without doubt, was unusually and densely crowded; the footpaths swarmed with passengers, and, what was peculiarly galling to the Government, after the failure of the Carnival, there was a double line of aristocratic carriages passing up and down; still everything was perfectly peaceable and orderly. At the hour of the Ave Maria the crowd was at its fullest, and this was the time selected for the outrage. In a scene of general terror and confusion it is impossible to ascertain exact details of the order in which events occurred, but I believe the following account is fairly exact.
p. 197There were a great number of the Pontifical police, or sbirri, as the Romans call them, scattered in knots of two or three about the Corso; there were also several mounted patrols of the Papal gendarmes. The police did everything in their power to excite the people, hustled the crowd in every direction, used the most opprobrious epithets, and pushed their way along with insulting gestures. There are various stories afloat as to the immediate cause of the outbreak; one, that as a patrol passed the crowd hissed; another, that a cry was heard of “Viva Vittorio Emmanuele!” and a third, the Papal version, that on a young man of the name of Barberi being asked by a gendarme why he wore a violet flower on his coat, he answered rudely, and, on the officer trying to arrest him, his comrades pulled him away. All stories agree, that the provocation to the police was given in the Piazza Colonna; and the disturbance, if any, was so trivial, that a friend of mine, who was on the spot at the time, perceived nothing of it, and only fancies he heard a murmur as the police rode by. The provocation, whatever it was, was sufficient as a pretext for the premeditated outrage. The sbirri drew their swords, and slashing p. 198right and left, charged the dense crowds of men, women and children. The word was given, and a band of some twenty Papal dragoons, who had been drawn up hard by at the Monte Citorio, waiting under arms for the signal, galloped down the Corso, clearing their way with drawn swords. The sbirri along the street pulled out their cutlass-knives; the dragoons rode on the footway, and struck out at the carriages filled with ladies as they passed by, while the police ran a-muck (I can use no other word) amongst the terror-stricken crowd. The cries of the crushed and wounded, the terror of the women, and the savage, brutal fury of the police, added to the panic and confusion of the scene. Not the slightest attempt at resistance was made by the unarmed crowd; in a few minutes the Corso was cleared as if by magic, and order reigned in Rome.
Short as the time was, the havoc wrought was very considerable. Nearer two than one hundred persons were injured in all. Of course the greater number of these persons were not actually wounded, but crushed, or stunned, or thrown down. There was no respect of persons in the use made of their swords by the police. p. 199Three French officers of the 40th, who were in plain clothes amongst the crowd, were cut down and severely wounded. An Irish gentleman, the brother of the member for Fermanagh, narrowly escaped a sabre-cut by dodging behind a pillar. The son of Prince Piombino was pursued by a gendarme beneath the gateway of his own palace, and only got off with his hat slit right in two. Persons were hunted down by the soldiery even out of the Corso. One gentleman, an Italian, was chased up the Via Condotti by a dragoon with his sword drawn, and saved himself from a sabre-cut by taking refuge in a passage. Some of the dragoons rode down the Via Ripetta, when they had come to the top of the Corso, and cut down a woman who was passing by. As soon as the Corso was cleared, the gendarmes went into the different cafés along the street, and ordered all persons, who were found in them, to go home at once. In one case an infirm old man, who could not make off fast enough, had his face cut open by a sabre-blow; while the backs of the gendarmes’ swords were used plentifully to expedite the departure of the café frequenters. The exact number of wounded it is of course impossible to ascertain. Persons who p. 200received injuries were afraid to show themselves, and still more to call attention to their injuries, for fear of being arrested for disaffection and immured in prison. If I believed the stories I heard on good authority and on most positive assurance, I should put down the number of persons who died from wounds or injuries received during the mêlée at from twelve to fifteen. Still, long experience has led me to place very little reliance on any Roman story I cannot test; and I am bound to say, I could not sift any one of these stories to the bottom. On the other hand, this fact by no means causes me to disbelieve that fatal injuries may have been received. The extreme difficulty, if not impossibility, of obtaining true information on such a point may be realized from the circumstance, that a government official was, within my knowledge, dismissed from his post for merely visiting one of the victims who had been wounded by the police. By all accounts, even by that of the Papal partizans, the number of severe injuries inflicted was very considerable; indeed it is impossible it should have been otherwise, when one considers that along a street so crowded that the carriages could only move at a foot’s p. 201pace, the gendarmes on horse and foot charged recklessly, cutting at every one they could reach. In my statement, however, of the casualties, I have sought to assert, not what I believe, but only what (as far as one can speak with certainty of what one did not actually see) I know to be the truth.
The worst part of the whole story, in my opinion, was the subsequent conduct of the Government. These outrages, which might have been excused as the result of an unforeseen disturbance, obtained in cold blood the deliberate sanction of the Vatican. The Papal gendarmes received the personal acknowledgments of the Pope for their conduct. The six horsemen who distinguished themselves by clearing the Piazza Colonna were promoted for their services, and all the police on duty that day received extra pay. With unusual promptitude, in fact not more than a week after the event, the Giornale di Roma contained an official statement of the occurrence. After alleging that hitherto they had considered the unpleasant event of too small importance to deserve notice, they proceed to give the following narrative.
“On Monday, the 19th instant, in the course p. 202of the afternoon, the revolutionary faction proposed to make a demonstration in the Corso against the Pontifical Government, by an assemblage of persons hired for the express purpose. On the discovery of these designs, fitting arrangements were made in concert with the French police; and the French troops, as well as the Papal gendarmes, were drawn up, so that in case of need they might suppress any disturbance whatever.
“In fact, about five o’clock in the afternoon crowds were formed in the streets, directed by leaders, and amongst these leaders were two hide-tanners, whom the gendarmes arrested with promptitude. The crowd, thus raked together, then began to hoot at and insult the gendarmes, and at last attempted to rescue the prisoners. Not succeeding in this attempt, the rioters, whose numbers had now been swollen by a lot of idle fellows from the vilest rabble, crowded together into the Piazza Colonna, and continued to outrage the officers of public justice with every kind of insult. Thereupon a handful of police advanced courageously against the rioters, and proved quite sufficient to disperse and rout them.
p. 203“The friends of order applauded the gallant gendarmes in the execution of their duty. In less than an hour the most perfect quiet reigned around, and in the affray a very few persons were injured, whose injuries have proved to be of slight consequence.”
Throughout the whole of this document the suppressio veri reigns supreme. It is ludicrous describing the émeute as an event unworthy of special mention, when rewards and praises have been heaped by the Government on the heroes who distinguished themselves in the suppression of this contemptible fracas. In a city like Rome a crowd which filled the whole Corso’s length cannot be described as a faction, while the occupants of the aristocratic carriages which lined both sides of the street are not likely to have had two hide-tanners for their leaders. The size of the crowd disposes at once of the idea that the persons who composed it were bribed to be present; and the attempt to identify the action of the French troops with that of the Papal gendarmes, is upset by the plain and simple fact, that the French patrols were on the Porta Pia road, and not in the Corso at all. Indeed, if the whole matter was not too p. 204serious to laugh at, there would be something actually comical in the notion of the friends of order, or any person in their senses, stopping to applaud the gendarmes as they trampled their way through the helpless, screaming, terror-stricken crowd, striking indiscriminately at friend or foe. The statement has this value, and this value only, that it gives the formal approval of the Government to the brutal outrages of the Papal police.
For a time the Pro-Papal party were in a state of high exultation. A popular demonstration had been suppressed by a score or so of Pontifical troops. The stock stories about the cowardice of the Italians were revived, and the more intemperate partizans of the Government asserted that the support of the French army was no longer needed, and that the Pope would shortly be able to rely for protection on his own troops alone. There was in these exultations a certain sad amount of truth. I am no blind admirer of the Romans, and I freely admit that no high-spirited crowd would have submitted to be cut down by a mere handful of gendarmes. I admit, too, that this blood-letting stopped for the time the fashion of demonstrations. p. 205It is however at best a doubtful compliment to a government that it has succeeded in crushing the spirit and energy of a nation; but to this compliment, I fear, the Papal rule is only too well entitled. “The lesson given on St Joseph’s day,” so wrote the organ of the Papacy in Paris, “has profited;” how, and to whom, time will show. Hardly, I think; at any rate, to the religion of love and mercy, or to those who preach its doctrines, and enforce its teachings by lessons such as this.
Far away among the Sabine hills, right up the valley of the Teverone, as the Romans now-a-days call the stream which once bore the name of Anio, hard by the mountain frontier-land of Naples, lies the little town of Subiaco. I am not aware that of itself this out-of-the-world nook possesses much claim to notice. Antiquarians, indeed, visit it to search after the traces of a palace, where Nero may or may not have dwelt. Students of ecclesiastical lore make pilgrimages thereto, to behold the famous convent of the Santo Speco, the home of the Benedictine order. In summer-time the artists in Rome wander out here to take shelter from the burning heat of the flat Campagna land, and to sketch the wild Salvator Rosa scenery which hems in the town on every side. I cannot say, however, that it was love of antiquities or divinity, p. 207or even scenery, which led my steps Subiaco-wards. The motive of my journey was of a less elevated and more matter-of-fact character. Some few days beforehand a yellow play-bill-looking placard caught my eye as I strolled down the Corso. A perusal of its contents informed me, that on the approaching feast-day of St Benedict there was to be held at Subiaco the great annual Festa e fiera. Many and various were the attractions offered. There was to be a horse-race, a tombola, or open lottery, an illumination, display of fire-works, high mass, and, more than all, a public procession, in which the sacred image of San Benedetto was to be carried from the convent to the town. Such a bill of fare was irresistible, even had there not been added to it the desire to escape from the close muggy climate of Rome into the fresh mountain-air,—a desire whose intensity nothing but a long residence here can enable one to appreciate.
Subiaco is some forty odd miles from Rome, and amongst the petty towns of the Papal States is a place of some small importance. The means, however, of communication with the metropolis are of the scantiest. Two or three times a week a sort of Italian eil-wagen, a funereal and p. 208tumble-down, flea-ridden coach, with windows boarded up so high that, when seated, you cannot see out of them, and closed hermetically, after Italian fashion, shambles along at jog-trot pace between the two towns, and takes a livelong day, from early morning to late at night, to perform the journey. Other public mode of transit there is none; and therefore, not having patience for the diligence, I had to travel in a private conveyance, and if there had been any one else going from the fair to Rome, which there was not, they must perforce have done the same. As to the details of the journey, and the scenery through which you pass, are they not written in the book of Murray, wherein whoso likes may read them? It is enough for me to note one or two facts which tell their own story. Throughout the forty and odd miles of the road I traversed, I never passed through a single village or town, with the exception of Tivoli; and between that town and Rome, a distance of some twenty miles, never even caught sight of one. After Tivoli, when the road enters the mountains, there are a dozen small towns or so, all perched on the summits of high hills, under which the road winds in passing. Detached p. 209houses or cottages there are, as a rule, none—certainly not half a dozen in all—the whole way along. There was little appearance of traffic anywhere. A few rough carts, loaded with charcoal or wood for the Roman markets; strings of mules, almost buried beneath high piles of brushwood, which were swung pannier-wise across their backs; and a score of peasant-farmers mounted on shaggy cart-horses, and jogging towards the fair, constituted the way-bill of the road. The mountain slopes were apparently altogether barren, or at any rate uncultivated. In the plain of the valley, bearing traces of recent inundation from the brook-torrent which ran alongside the road in strange zig-zag windings, were a number of poorly tilled fields, half covered with stones. The season was backward, and I could see no trace of anything but hard, fruitless labour; and the peasants, who were working listlessly, seemed unequal to the labour of cultivating such unprofitable lands. Personally the men were a vigorous race enough, but the traces of the malaria fever, the sunken features and livid complexion, were painfully common; their dress too was worn ragged and meagre, while the boys working in the fields constantly left their work to beg as I p. 210passed by, a fact which, considering how little frequented this district is by travellers, struck me unpleasantly. With my English recollections of what going to the fair used to be, I looked but in vain for farmers’ carts or holiday-dressed foot-folk going towards Subiaco. I did not meet one carriage of any description, except the diligence without a passenger, and could not have guessed, from the few knots of peasants I passed, that there was anything unusual going on in what I suppose I might call the county town of the district.
By the time I reached Subiaco, the first day of the fair was at its height. The topography of the place is of the simplest description,—a narrow street running up a steep hill, with a small market-place; on the summit stands a church; half a dozen cul-de-sac alleys on the right, terminated by the wall that hems in the river at their feet; a long series of broken steps on the left, leading to a dilapidated castle, where the Legate ought to reside, but does not; such are the main features of the town. In fact, if you fancy Snow Hill, Holborn, shrunk to about a quarter of its width, all its houses reduced to much such a condition as that gaunt p. 211corner-building which for years past has excited my ungratified curiosity; Newgate gaol replaced by the façade of a dingy Italian church; the dimensions of the locale considerably diminished; and a small section of the dark alleys between the prison and Farringdon Street, bounded by the Fleet-ditch uncovered; you will have a very fair impression of the town of Subiaco.
The fair, such as it was, was confined to this High Street and to the little square at its head. The street was filled with people, chiefly men, bartering at the doors of the un-windowed shops. A very small crowd would fill so small a place, but I think there could hardly have been less than a thousand persons. Cutlery and hosiery of the rudest kind seemed to be the great articles of commerce. There were, of course, an office of the Pontifical Lottery, which was always crammed, an itinerant vendor of quack medicines and a few scattered stalls (not a single booth by the way), where shoes and caps and pots and pans and the “wonderful adventures of St Balaam” were sold by hucksters of Jewish physiognomy. Lean, black-bristled pigs ran at every step between your legs, and young kids, slung across their owners’ shoulders with their heads downwards, bleated p. 212piteously. The only sights of a private description were a series of deformed beggars, drawn in go-carts, and wriggling with the most hideous contortions; but the fat woman, and the infant with two heads, and the learned dog, whom I had seen in all parts of Europe, were nowhere to be found. There was not even an organ boy or a hurdy-gurdy. Music, alas! like prophecy, has no honour in its own country. The crowd was of a very humble description; the number of bonnets or hats visible might be counted on one’s fingers, and the fancy peasant costumes of which Subiaco is said to be the great rendezvous, were scarcely more in number. There was very little animation apparent of any kind, very little of gesticulation, or still less of shouting; indeed the crowd, to do them justice, were perfectly quiet and orderly, for a holiday crowd almost painfully so. The party to which I belonged, and which consisted of four Englishmen, all more or less attired in those outlandish costumes which none but Englishmen ever wear, and no Englishman ever dreams of wearing in his own country, excited no comment whatever, and scarcely attracted a passing glance. Fancy what the effect would be of four bloused and bearded Frenchmen p. 213strolling arm-in-arm through a village wake in an out-of-the-way English county? By the time I had strolled through the fair, the guns, or rather two most dilapidated old fowling-pieces, were firing as a signal for the race. The horses were the same as those run at the Carnival races in Rome, and as the only difference was, that the course, besides being over hard slippery stones, was also up a steep hill-street, and the race therefore somewhat more cruel, I did not wait to see the end, but wandered up the valley to hear the vespers at the convent of the Santo Speco. I should have been sorry to have missed the service. Through a number of winding passages, up flights of narrow steps, and by terrace-ledges cut from the rock, over which I passed, and overhanging the river-side, I came to a vault-like chapel with low Saracenic arches and quaint old, dark recesses, and a dim shadowy air of mystery. Round the candle-lighted altar, standing out brightly from amidst the darkness, knelt in every posture some seventy monks; and ever and anon the dreary nasal chanting ceased, and a strain of real music burst from out the hidden choir, rising and dying fitfully. The whole scene was beautiful enough; but,—what a pity p. 214there should be a “but” in everything,—when you came to look on the scene in the light of a service, the charm passed away. There were plenty of performers but no audience; the congregation consisted of four peasant-women, two men, and a child in arms. The town below was crowded. The service was one of the chief ones in the year, but somehow or other the people stopped away.
When the music was over, I was shown through the convent. There were, as usual, the stock marvels: a hole through which you looked and beheld a—shall I call it sacred?—picture of Satan with horns and hoof complete; a small plot of ground, where used to grow the thorns on which St Benedict was wont to roll himself in order to quench the desires of manhood, and where now grow the roses into which St Francis transformed the said thorns, in honour of his brother saint. The monk who showed me the building talked much about the misery of the surrounding poor. At the convent’s foot lies a little wood of dark green ilexes, of almost unknown age, valued on account of some tradition about St Benedict, and perhaps still more as forming a kind of oasis on the barren, bare mountain-side. Armed guards have to p. 215be placed at night around this wood, to save it from the depredations of the peasantry; every tree belonging to the convent and not guarded was sure to be cut down. No one, so my informant told me, would believe the sums of money the convent had spent of late on charity, and how for this purpose even their daily supplies of food had been curtailed; but alas! it was only like pouring water into a sieve, for the people were poorer than ever. I own that when the old priest pointed out the number of churches and convents you could see in the valley below, and spoke, with regret, of the time when there were twelve convents round Subiaco alone, I felt that the cause of this hopeless misery was not far to seek, though hard to remedy.
On my way homewards to the town I beheld the half dozen sky-rockets which composed the display of fire-works, and also the two rows of oil-lamps on the cornices over the church-door, which formed the brilliant illuminations. Neither sight seemed to collect much crowd or create much excitement. As the dusk came on the streets emptied fast, and by night-time the town was almost deserted; and, except that the wine-shops were still filled with a few hardened topers, p. 216every sign of the fair had vanished. There was not even a trace of drunkenness apparent. The next morning the same scene was repeated with little difference, save that the crowd was rather greater, and a band of military music played in the market-place. About noon the holy procession was seen coming down the winding road which leads from the convent to the town. I had taken up my position on a roadside bank, and enjoyed a perfect view. There were a number of shabby flags and banners preceded by a hundred able-bodied men dressed in dirty-white surplices, rather dirtier than the colour of their faces. A crowd of ragged choristers followed swinging incense-pots, droning an unintelligible chant, and fighting with each other. Then came a troop of monks and scholars with bare heads and downcast eyes. All these walked in twos and twos, and carried a few crucifixes raised aloft. The monks were succeeded by a pewter-looking bust, which, I suppose, was a likeness of St Benedict, and the bust was followed by a mule, on which, in a snuff-coloured coat, black tights, white neckcloth, and a beef-eater’s hat, the whole sheltered beneath a green carriage umbrella, rode His Excellency the Governor of the p. 217district. Behind him walked his secretary, the Syndic of Subiaco, four gendarmes, and three broken-down, old livery-clad beadles, who carried the umbrellas of these high dignitaries. In truth, had it not been for the unutterable shabbiness of the whole affair, I could have fancied I saw the market scene in “Martha,” and “The Last Rose of Summer” seemed to ring unbidden in my ears. Not a score of un-official spectators accompanied the procession from the convent, and the interest caused by it appeared but small; the devotion absolutely none. The fact which struck me most throughout was the utter apathy of the people. Not a person in the place I spoke to—and I asked several—had any notion who the governor was. The nearest approach that I got to an answer was from one of the old beadles, who replied to my question, “Chi sa?” “É una roba da lontano;” and with this explanation that the governor was “a thing that came from a distance,” I was obliged to rest satisfied. When the procession reached the town the band joined in, the governor got off his mule, room was made for our party in the rank behind him, I suppose, as “distinguished foreigners;” and so with banners flying, crosses nodding, drums p. 218beating, priests and choristers chanting, we marched in a body into the church, where the female portion of the crowd and all the beggars followed us. I had now, however, had enough of the “humours of the fair,” and left the town without waiting to try my luck at the tombola, which was to come off directly High Mass was over.
The nil admirari school are out of favour. In our earnest working age, it is the fashion to treat everything seriously, to find in every thing a deep hidden meaning, in fact, to admire everything. Since the days of Wordsworth and Peter Bell, every petty poet and romantic writer has had his sneer at the shallow sceptic to whom a cowslip was a cowslip only, and who called a spade a spade. I feel, therefore, painfully that I am not of my own day when I express my deliberate conviction, that the ceremonies of Holy Week at Rome are—the word must come out sooner or later—an imposture. This is not the place to enter into the religious aspect of the Catholic question, nor if it were, should I have any wish to enter the lists of controversy as a champion of either side. I can understand that for some minds the ideas of Church unity, p. 220of a mystic communion of the faithful, and of an infallible head of a spiritual body have a strange attraction, nay, even a real existence. I can understand too, that for such persons all the pomps and pageantry of the Papal services present themselves under an aspect to me unintelligible. Whether these ideas be right or wrong, I am not able, nor do I care, to argue. The Pontifical ceremonies, however, have not only a spiritual aspect, but a material and very matter-of-fact one. They are after all great spectacles got up with the aid of music and upholstery and dramatic mechanism. Now, how far in this latter point of view the ceremonies are successful or not, I think from some small experience I am pretty well qualified to judge; and if I am asked whether, as ceremonies, the services of the Church of Rome are imposing and effective, I answer most unhesitatingly, No. I know that this assertion upsets a received article of faith in Protestant England as to the seductive character of the Papal ceremonies. I remember well the time when I too believed that the shrines of the old faith were the haunts of sense-enthralling grandeur, of wild enchantment and bewitching beauty; when I too dreamt how p. 221amidst crowds of rapt worshippers, while unearthly music pealed around you and the fragrant incense floated heavenwards, your soul became lost to everything, save to a feeling of unreasoning ecstasy. In fact, I believed in the enchantments of Papal pageantry, as firmly as I believed that a Lord Mayor’s feast was a repast in which Apicius would have revelled, or that an opera ball was a scene of oriental and voluptuous delight. Alas! I have seen all, and known all, and have found all three to be but vanity.
Now the question as to the real aspect of the Papal pageantry, and the effects produced by it upon the minds, not of controversialists, but of ordinary spectators, is by no means an unimportant one with reference to the future prospects of Italy and the Papacy. Let me try then, not irreverently or depreciatingly, but as speaking of plain matters of fact, to tell you what you really do see and hear at the greatest and grandest of the Roman ceremonies. Of all the Holy Week services none have a more European fame, or have been more written or sung about, than the Misereres in the Sistine Chapel. Now to be present at these services p. 222you have to start at about one o’clock, or midday, in full evening costume, dress-coat and black trowsers. Any man who has ever had to walk out in evening attire in the broad daylight, will agree with me that the sensation of the general shabbiness and duskiness of your whole appearance is so strong as to overcome all other considerations, not to mention your devotional feelings. In this attire you have to stand for a couple of hours amongst a perspiring and ill-tempered crowd, composed of tourists and priests, for the Italians are too wise to trouble themselves for such an object. During these two mortal hours you are pushed forward constantly by energetic ladies bent on being placed, and pushed back by the Swedish guards, who defend the entrance. The conversation you hear around you, and perforce engage in, is equally unedifying, both religiously and intellectually, a sort of réchauffé of Murray’s handbook, flavoured with discussions on last Sunday’s sermon. When you are reduced to such a frame of mind and body as is the natural result of time so employed, the doors of the chapel are opened, and you have literally to fight your way in amidst a crowd of ladies hustling, screaming, and fainting. If you p. 223are lucky, you get standing room in a sort of open pen, whence, if you are tall, you can catch a sight of the Pope’s tiara in the distance; or, if you belong to the softer sex, you get a place behind the screen, where you cannot see, but, what is much better, can sit. The atmosphere of the candle-lighted, crammed chapel is overpowering, and occupation you have none, except trying in the dim light to decipher the frescoes on the roof, with your head turned backwards. For three long hours you have a succession of dreary monotonous strains, forming portions of a chant, to you unintelligible, broken at intervals by a passage of intonation. There is no organ or instrumental music, and the absence of contralto voices is poorly compensated for by the unnatural accents of the Papal substitutes for female vocalists.
The music itself may be very fine,—competent critics declare it is, and I have no doubt they are right; but I say, unhesitatingly, it is not music that addresses itself to popular tastes, or produces any feeling save that of weariness on nine-tenths of its hearers. You can mark clearly the expression of satisfaction which steals over every face as candle after candle of the stack of p. 224wax-lights before the altar is put out successively, at intervals of some twenty minutes. If the ceremony were reduced to one-tenth of its length, it might be impressive, but a dirge which goes on for three hours, and a chandelier which takes the same time to have its lights snuffed out, become an intolerable nuisance. The dying cadence of the Miserere is undoubtedly grand; but, in the first place, it comes when your patience is exhausted; and, in the second, it lasts so long, that you begin to wonder whether it will ever end. The slavery to conventional rules in England, which causes one to shrink from the charge of not caring about music as zealously as one could, and from pleading guilty to personal cowardice, makes Englishmen, and still more Englishwomen, profess to be delighted with the Miserere; but, in their heart of hearts, their feeling is much such as I have given utterance to.
The ceremonies in St Peter’s itself are, as sights, much better; but yet I often think that the very size and grandeur of the giant edifice increases the mesquin-ness (for want of an English word I must manufacture a French one) of the whole ceremony. At the exposition of the relics, for instance, you see in a very lofty gallery p. 225two small figures, holding up something—what, you cannot tell—set up in a rich framework of gold and jewels; it may be a piece of the cross, or a martyr’s finger-bone, or a horse’s tooth—what it is neither you nor any one else can guess at that distance. If the whole congregation knelt down in adoration, the artistic effect would unquestionably be fine, but then not one person in seven does kneel, and therefore the effect is lost. So it is with the washing of the high altar. If one priest alone went up and poured the wine and oil over the sacred stone, and then cleansed the shrine from any spot or stain, the grandeur of the idea would not be marred by the monotony of the performance; but when some four hundred priests and choristers defile past, each armed with a chip besom, like those of the buy-a-broom girls of our childhood, and each gives a dab to the altar as he passes, the whole scene becomes tiresome, if not absurd. The same fatal objection applies to the famous washing of the feet at the Trinita dei Pellegrini. As a mere matter of simple fact, there is nothing very interesting in seeing a number of old women’s feet washed, or in beholding a number of peasants who would be much better if the washing extended p. 226above their feet, engaged in gulping down an unsavoury repast. The whole charm of the thing rests in the idea, and this idea is quite extinguished by the extreme length and tediousness of the whole proceeding. The feet have too evidently been washed before, and the pilgrims are too palpably got up for the occasion.
The finest ceremony I have ever witnessed in Rome is the High Mass at St Peter’s on Easter-day; but as a theatrical spectacle, in which light alone I am now speaking of it, it is marred by many palpable defects. Whenever I have seen the Pope carried in his chair in state, I can never help thinking of the story of the Irishman, who, when the bottom and seat of his sedan-chair fell out, remarked to his bearers, that “he might as well walk, but for the honour of the thing.” One feels so strongly that the Pope might every bit as well walk as ride in that ricketty, top-heavy chair, in which he sits, or rather sways to and fro, with a sea-sick expression. Then the ostrich feathers are so very shabby, and the whole get-up of the procession is so painfully “not” regardless of expense. You see Cardinals with dirty robes, under the most gorgeous stoles, while the surplices are as yellow as the stained gold-worked p. 227bands which hang across them. There is, indeed, no sense of congruity or the inherent fitness of things about the Italian ceremonials. A priest performs mass and elevates the host with muddy boots on, while the Pope himself, in the midst of the grandest service, blows his nose on a common red pocket-handkerchief. The absence of the organ detracts much from the impressiveness of the music in English ears, while the constant bowings and genuflexions, the drawling intonations, and the endless monotonous psalms, all utterly devoid of meaning for a lay-worshipper, added to the utter listlessness of the congregation, and even of the priests engaged in celebration of the service, destroy the impression the gorgeousness of the scene would otherwise produce.
The insuperable objection, however, to the impressiveness of the whole scene is the same as mars all Papal pageants,—I mean the length and monotony of the performance. One chant may be fine, one prostration before the altar may be striking, one burst of the choral litany may act upon your senses; but, when you have chant after chant, prostration after prostration, chorus after chorus, each the twin brother to the other, p. 228and going on for hours, without apparent rhyme or reason, you cease to take thought of anything, in order to speculate idly when, if ever, there is likely to be an end. There is no variety, and little change, too, about the ceremonies. When you have seen one you have seen all; and when you have seen them once, you can understand how to the Romans themselves these sights have become stale and dull, till they look upon them much as I fancy the musician in the orchestra of the old Princess’s must have looked upon one of Kean’s Shaksperian revivals when the season was far spent.
There is, I think, no city in the world where Pilate’s question, “What is truth?” would be so hard to answer as in Rome. In addition to the ordinary difficulties which everywhere beset the path of the foreigner in search of knowledge, there are a number of obstacles peculiar and special to Rome alone.
The whole policy of the government is directed towards maintaining the country in a state of isolation, towards drawing, in fact, a moral cordon sanitaire round the Papal dominions. Indeed, if one lived long in Rome, one would get to doubt the reality of anything. When I last came to Rome straight from Tuscany, seething in the turmoil of its new-bought liberties, I could hardly believe that only six months ago there had been war in Italy within two hundred miles from the Papal city, that the fate of Italy still hung p. 230trembling in the balance, and that the chief province of the country was still in open revolt against its rulers. There was no sign, no trace, scarce a symptom even of what had passed or was passing in the world without. We all seemed spellbound in a dull, dead, dreary circle. There were no advertisements in the streets, except of devotional works for the coming season of Lent; no pamphlets or books placed in the booksellers’ windows, which by their titles even implied the existence of the war and the revolution; no prints for sale of the scenes of the campaign, or the popular heroes of the day. This was the normal state of Rome, such as I had seen it in former years. Later on, indeed, either the force of events, or a change in the counsels of the Vatican, induced the Papacy to drop the defensive passive attitude which constituted its real strength, and to adopt an active offensive policy, which served rather to show the greatness of the dreaded danger than to avert its occurrence. Still the increased animation, though perceptible enough to a Roman, appeared to a stranger but a step above absolute stagnation. I never could get over my astonishment at our utter ignorance of what went on around and amongst us. About p. 231the state of affairs in our two neighbouring countries, whether in free Tuscany or in despotic Naples, we were entirely in the dark. What little news we got was derived from chance reports of stray travellers, or from the French and English newspapers. The Giornale di Roma gave us now and then a damnatory paragraph about the Tuscan Government, from which, out of a mass of vituperation, we could pick up an odd fact or so; but during the first four months of this year, throughout which period I perused the Giornale pretty carefully, I do not remember to have seen a single allusion, good, bad or indifferent, to the kingdom of Naples. The Tuscan papers were naturally enough forbidden, as are almost all the journals of the free Italian states, and could only be obtained by private hands. The Neapolitan Gazette, the Monitore del Regno delle Due Sicilie, was never seen by any chance, though I cannot suppose its circulation was directly interdicted. The communication between Rome and Naples was, and is, scanty in the extreme. During the last ten years, about ten miles of the Pio-Centrale Railroad, the Neapolitan line, have been opened. At present beyond Albano the works are entirely at a stand-still, and there p. 232are still some thirty miles of line, between Rome and the frontier, of which hardly a sod has been turned. The Civita Vecchia line has only been completed in consequence of the pressure of the French authorities, and the Ancona-Florence line is still in statu quo. Three times a week there are diligences between Rome and Naples. The local steam-boats, which used to run along the coast from Porto d’Anzio to the Neapolitan capital have been given up, and in fact there is no ready means of transit, save by the foreign steamers, which touch at Civita Vecchia. Whether purposely or not, everything has been done to check free communication between the Papal and Neapolitan States, and in this respect the Government has been eminently successful. The two countries are totally distinct. A Neapolitan is a forestiere in Rome, and vice versâ. The divide et impera has been the motto of all the petty Italian despots and of the Papacy in particular, and hitherto has proved successful. Even now, as far as I could see and learn, the desire for Italian unity does not penetrate very low down. It is the desire, I freely grant, of all the best and wisest Italians, but scarcely, I suspect, the wish of the Italian people. In truth, Italy at this p. 233moment is very much what Great Britain would be, if Scotland, Ireland, Wales and the States of the Saxon Heptarchy had remained to this day separate petty kingdoms, ruled by governments who fostered and developed every local and sectional jealousy. The broad fact, that for some weeks at Rome we were in utter ignorance whether there had been a revolution or not in the capital of the frontier kingdom, not thirty miles away, and should have been quite surprised if we had learnt anything about the matter, is a sufficient commentary on our state of isolation.
This artificial isolation too is increased by a sort of general apathy and almost universal ignorance, which are characteristic of all classes in Rome. How far this intellectual apathy is caused by, or causes, the material isolation of the city, would be a curious question to determine. The existence, however, of this fact, which none acquainted with Rome will question, constitutes one of the chief difficulties in ascertaining accurate information about facts. The most intelligent and the most liberal amongst the Romans (the two terms are there synonymous) never seem to know the value of positive facts, and even in matters susceptible of proof prefer general statements. p. 234Then, too, the absence of social meetings, or means of intercourse, is one of the most striking features about Roman society. There is no public life, no current literature, little even of free conversation. Of course, among the English and foreign residents there are plenty of parties and gaieties of every kind. At these parties you meet a few Anglicised Italians, who have picked up a little of our English language and a good deal of our English dress. The nobility of Rome who come into contact with the higher class of English travellers give a good number of formal receptions, but amongst the middle and professional classes there is very little society at all. The summer is the season for what society there is, but even then there is but little. There are no saloons in the Roman theatres, and the miserable refreshment-rooms, with their bars even more shabby and worse provided than our English ones, are, as you may suppose, not places of meeting. Even at the Opera there seemed to be little visiting in the boxes. With the exception of the strangers’ rooms, there are no reading-rooms or clubs in Rome, if I may exclude from this category a miserable Gabinetto di Lettura, chiefly frequented by priests, and whose current p. 235lettura consisted of the Tablet, the Univers, the Armonia, and the Courier des Alpes. The only real places of meeting, or focuses of news, are the cafés. At best, however, they are triste, uncomfortable places. There is no café in all Rome equal to a second-rate one in an ordinary French provincial town. There are few newspapers, little domino playing, and not much conversation. The spy system is carried to such an extent here, that even in private circles the speakers are on their guard as to what they say, and still more as to what they repeat. As an instance of this, I may mention a case that happened to me personally. On the morning before the demonstrations at the Porta Pia a Roman gentleman, with whom I was well acquainted, wished to give me information of the proposed meeting, of which, it happened, I was well aware; but though we were alone in a room together, the nearest approach on which my friend ventured to a direct information, which might be considered of a seditious character, was to tell me that I should find the Porta Pia road a pleasant walk on an afternoon.
In fact, paradoxical as the assertion may appear, you learn more about Rome from foreigners p. 236than from natives. Unfortunately, such information as you may acquire in this way is almost always of a suspicious character. Almost every one in Rome judges of what he sees or hears according, in German phrase, to some stand-point of his own, either political or artistic or theological, as the case may be. As to the foreign converts, it is only natural that, as in most cases they have sacrificed everything for the Papal faith, they should therefore look at everything from the Papal point of view. If, however, they abuse and despise the Romans on every occasion, it is some satisfaction to reflect that the Romans lose no opportunity of despising or abusing them in turn. English Liberals who see a good deal of Roman society, see it, I think, under too favourable circumstances, and also attach undue importance to the wonderful habit all Italians have of saying as their own opinion whatever they think will be pleasing to their listener. On the other hand, the persons who are best qualified to judge of Rome, the ordinary residents of long standing, who care little about Italy and less about the Pope, are, I fancy, unduly influenced by the advantages of their exceptional position. There are few places in the world where a stranger, especially p. 237an English stranger, is better off than in Rome. As a rule, he has perfect liberty to do and say and write what he likes, and almost inevitably he gets to think that a government which is so lenient a one for him cannot be a very bad one for its own subjects. The cause, however, of this exceptional lenity is not hard to discover. Much as we laugh at home about the Civis Romanus doctrine, abroad it is a very powerful reality. Whether rightly or wrongly, foreign governments are afraid of meddling with English subjects, and act accordingly. Then, too, Englishmen as a body care very little about foreign politics, and are known to live almost entirely among themselves abroad, and seldom to interfere in the concerns of foreigners; and lastly, I am afraid that the moral influence of England, of which our papers are so fond of boasting, is very small indeed on the continent generally, and especially in Italy. All the articles the Times ever wrote on Italian affairs did not produce half the effect of About’s pamphlet or Cavour’s speeches. I am convinced that the influence of English newspapers in Italy is most limited. The very scanty knowledge of the English language, and the utter want of comprehension of our English modes of thought and p. 238feeling, render an English journal even more uninteresting to the bulk of Italians than an Italian one is to an Englishman; and the Roman rulers are well aware of this important fact. Hard words break no bones, and the Vatican cares little for what English papers say of it, and looks upon the introduction of English Anti-Papal journals as part of the necessary price to be paid for the residence of the wealthy heretics who refuse to stop anywhere where they cannot have clubs and churches and papers of their own. The expulsion of M. Gallenga, the Times correspondent, was in reality no exception to this policy. It was not as the correspondent of an English newspaper, but as an ex-Mazzinian revolutionist and the author of Fra Dolcino, that this gentleman was obnoxious to the Papal authorities. Though a naturalized English subject, he had not ceased to be an Italian, and his personal influence amongst Roman society might have been considerable, though the effect of his English correspondence, however able, would have been next to nothing.
From all these causes it is very hard to learn anything at Rome, and harder yet to learn anything with accuracy. It is only by a process of p. 239elimination you ever arrive at the truth. Out of a dozen stories and reports you have to take one, or rather part of one, and to reject the eleven and odd remaining. It has been my object, therefore, in the following descriptions of the scenes which marked the period of my residence in Rome, to give as much as possible of what I have known and seen myself, and as little of what I heard and learnt from others. What my narrative may lose in vividness, it will, I trust, gain in accuracy.
About half a century ago the Papal question was the order of the day. Another Napoleon was seated on the throne of France, in the full tide of success and triumph of victory; another Pius was Pontiff at the Vatican, under the patronage of French legions, and, strange to say, another Antonelli was the leading adviser of the Pope. The city of Rome, too, and the Papal States were in a condition of general discontent and disaffection; but, unfortunately, this latter circumstance is one of too constant occurrence to afford any clue as to the date of the period in question.
In the year of grace 1806, the enemies of Napoleon were ipso facto our friends; and in consequence the Pope, who was known to be hostile to France, became somewhat of a popular character amongst us. Indeed Pius VII. was p. 241looked on at home rather in the light of a martyr and a hero. It is only of late years that this feeling has worn off, and that we, as a nation, have begun to doubt whether, in his struggle with the Papacy, the Corsican usurper, as it was the fashion then to style him, may not have been in the right after all. Considerable light has been thrown upon this question by the recent publications of certain private State papers, which remained in the possession of Count Aldini, the minister of Italian affairs under the great Emperor.
There had long been subjects of dissension between the Papal and the Imperial Governments. At last, in 1806, these dissensions came to an open rupture. On the 1st of June in that year, Count Aldini wrote a despatch, by order of the Emperor, to complain of the avowed hostility displayed by the Papal Court against the system of legislation introduced into the Kingdom of Italy, and of the private intrigues carried on by Cardinal Antonelli. In this despatch occur these words, which at the present day read strangely appropriate:—
“His Majesty cannot behold without indignation, how that authority, which was appointed by God to maintain order and obedience on earth, p. 242employs the most perilous weapons to spread disorder and discord.”
This appeal to the conscience of the Vatican remained of course without effect, and things only grew worse. At the end of the same year Napoleon published at Berlin his famous decrees for the blockade of England, and the exclusion of all English merchandise. Whether justly or unjustly, the Court of Rome was suspected by Buonaparte of not keeping up the blockade (the most unpardonable of all political offences in his eyes). At last, by a decree of the 2nd of April 1808, he removed the Marches from the Papal Government, and annexed them to the Kingdom of Italy. The legations, by the way, had formed part of that kingdom since the treaty of Tolentino. This experiment proved unsuccessful. Napoleon soon discovered, what his successor is also likely to learn, that the real evil of the Papal Government consisted not in its territorial extent, but in the admixture of temporal and spiritual authority; that, in fact, its power of working mischief was, if anything, in inverse proportion to its size. With that rapidity of resolution which formed half his power, he resolved at once to suppress the temporal power of the Popes, and p. 243gave instructions to Count Aldini to draw up the necessary decrees. The Emperor was then on the eve of departure for the Spanish peninsula; and it was during the harassing reverses of his fortunes in Spain, that the following report of Aldini was perused by him:—
“Sire,—Your Imperial and Royal Majesty has considered that the time is come to fix the destinies of Rome.
“You have directed me to examine which, amidst the diverse governments that Rome has had during modern times, is most adapted for her actual circumstances, while retaining the character of a free government. It appears from history, that Crescenzius governed Rome for many years with the title of Patrician and Consul.
“Pope John XV. having appealed against him to the Emperor Otho, the appeal was dismissed, and Crescenzius was confirmed in his office, and caused to swear allegiance to the Emperor.
“The supreme dominion of the Emperors over Rome was exercised without contradiction throughout all the dynasty of the Othos and Conrads, and only became assailed under Frederick I.
“Afterwards, amidst the multitude of Italian republics, the Roman republic was restored for p. 244a time; and, in the 13th century, had for the head of its government a Matteo of the Orsini family with the title of Senator, in honour of whose memory a medal was struck.
“For a long period the Kings of Naples, of the Anjou race, were Senators of Rome.
“Pope Nicholas III. retained the senatorial dignity for himself; and, by a bull of 1268, forbade the election of any Senator, without the sanction of the Pope.
“From this date all the Senators of Rome have been nominated by the Popes, and were never permitted to be foreigners.
“Besides the Senator, there was a council, called the Conservatori. The members of this council were chosen from amongst the first families of Rome; proposed by the Senator, and approved by the Pope.
“From time to time the Pontiffs have endeavoured to diminish the jurisdiction and the prerogatives of the Senators, so that in latter times their office has been reduced to a mere honorary charge.
“It has appeared to me that the restoration of this form of government, replacing the Senator in his old authority, would be a step at once p. 245adapted to the circumstances of the present day, and acceptable to the Roman people.
“To declare Rome a free Imperial city, and to reserve a palace there for your Majesty and your court, cannot but produce the most favourable effect on the minds of the Romans.
“In the other dispositions of the proposed statute I have confined myself to following the precedents adopted by your Majesty on former occasions, under similar circumstances.”
This report was accompanied by the minutes of three decrees. The first referred to the future government of the Eternal City, and was sketched out in the following articles:—
“Art. 1. Rome is a free Imperial city.
“Art. 2. The Palace of the Quirinal, with its dependencies, is declared to be an Imperial Palace.
“Art. 3. The confines between the territory of Rome and the Kingdom of Italy are to be determined by a line, which, starting from Arteveri, passes through Baccano, Palestrina, Marino, Albano, Monterotondo, Palombara, Tivoli, and thence, keeping always at a distance of two miles inland from the sea, returns to Arteveri.
“Art. 4. The lands of all communes intersected p. 246by the above line form the territory of Rome, excepting all lands that lie between the line and the sea coast.
“Art. 5. A Senator and a Magistracy of forty Conservators are to form the Government of the City and its territory.
“Art. 6. The executive power resides in the Senator; the legislative with the Magistracy of the Conservators. The Senator has the initiative in all projects of law.
“Art. 7. The office of the Senator is for life; that of the Conservators for four years. The Magistracy is to be renewed every year for one-fourth of its members. In the first three years, lot is to decide who go out; afterwards, the members shall retire by rotation.
“Art. 8. Ten Conservators, at least, shall be chosen from the different communes which compose the territory of Rome.
“Art. 9. The Senator is always to be nominated by us and our successors. For the first election alone we reserve to ourselves the right of nominating the Magistracy of the Conservators. Hereafter, as vacancies occur, the Senator shall nominate the Conservators from a double list presented to him by the Magistracy.
p. 247“Art. 10. The judicial functions are to be exercised in the name of the Senator, by judges nominated by him. Their appointment shall be for life. They cannot be removed except for fraud or neglect of duty, recognised as such by the Magistracy, or on being sentenced to any disgraceful or penal punishment.
“Art. 11. Five Ædiles, nominated after the same fashion as the Conservators, shall superintend the preservation of the ancient monuments and the repairs of the public buildings. For this purpose a special fund (the amount to be determined by the Government) shall be placed yearly at their disposal.
“Art. 12. Between the kingdom of Italy and the Roman State, there shall be no intermediate line of customs or duties. The Government of Rome may, however, impose an octroi duty on victuals at the gates of the city.
“Art. 13. For . . . years no ecclesiastic can hold a civil office in Rome or its territory.”
The second decree declares that the Papal States, with the exception of the Roman territories above described, are irrevocably and in perpetuity annexed to the Kingdom of Italy, and that the Code Napoleon is to be the law of the land.
p. 248The third is headed, “Dispositions with regard to his Holiness,” and disposes of the Papal question in this somewhat summary manner.
“We Napoleon, by the grace of God, and by the Constitution, Emperor of the French, King of Italy, Protector of the Rhenish Confederation,
“Having regard to our first decree concerning Rome, have decreed, and decree as follows:—
“Art. 1. The Church and the Piazza of St Peter, the palace of the Vatican and that of the Holy Office, with their dependencies, are a free possession of his Holiness the Pope.
“Art. 2. All the property of the Capitol and the Basilica of St Peter are preserved to those institutions under whatever administration the Pope may please to appoint.
“Art. 3. His Holiness shall receive a yearly income of one million Italian francs, and shall retain all the honorary privileges he has enjoyed in past times.
“Given at our Imperial Palace of St Cloud, this --- day of Sept. 1808.”
In the midst of the Spanish campaigns, these documents were perused and approved by the Emperor, who wrote to Aldini, at that time in p. 249Italy, and told him to make private inquiries as to whether the time was opportune for the promulgation of these decrees, and whether it was expedient to require the clergy to take an oath of allegiance to the new constitution. Aldini’s reply contains the following remarkable passage:—
“The Pope, who has never enjoyed the good opinion of the Roman public, has succeeded in these latter days in winning the sympathy of a few fanatics, who call his obstinacy heroic constancy, and wait every day for a miracle to be worked by God in his defence.
“Except these bigots and a few wealthy persons who dread the possibility, that, under a change of government, their privileges might be destroyed, and the taxes on property increased, all classes are of one mind in desiring a new order of things, and all alike long for its establishment.
“I must not, however, conceal from you that this universal sentiment is chiefly due to two causes:—Firstly, to the idea that the payment of the interest on the public debt will be resumed; as, in truth, a great number of Roman families depend on these payments for their income; and secondly, to the hope that Rome will p. 250become the capital of a great state, a hope which the Romans know not how to renounce.”
Under these circumstances, Count Aldini goes on to recommend that hopes should be held out of an early resumption of payments on the national debt, and that a provisional air should be given to the proposed arrangement, so as to keep alive the prospect of a great kingdom, of which Rome should be the centre. He deprecates enforcing an oath of allegiance on the clergy, on the ground that “all priests will consent to obey the civil government; but all will not consent to swear allegiance to it, because they consider obedience an involuntary act, and an oath a voluntary act which might compromise their conscience.” He finally recommends delay, under present circumstances, till some decisive victory has crushed the hopes of the priest party. This delay was fatal to the scheme. After the battle of Wagram, Napoleon resumed the project, and resolved to encrease the Pope’s income to two millions of francs. Then, however, there came unfortunately the protests of Pius VII. the bull of excommunication hurled against the Emperor, and a whole series of petty insults and annoyances on the part of the Pope; such, for p. 251instance, as walling up the doors of his palace, and declaring, like his successor and namesake, his anxiety to be made a martyr. Passion seems to have prevailed over Napoleon’s cooler and better judgment. The Pope was carried off to Savona, Rome was made part of the French empire, and Aldini’s project slumbered till, in after years, it has been revived, though without acknowledgement, by M. Guerronière, in his pamphlet of Le Pape et le Congrès.
Now this project I have quoted not for its intrinsic value, but because I think it one likely to be realized. Napoleon III. (the fact both for good and bad is worth minding) and not the Italians has to decide on Rome’s future, and any one who has watched the Emperor’s career will be aware how carefully he follows out the cooler and wiser ideas of his great predecessor. The Papal question is not one to be settled by the sword, and I know not whether amongst all the plans that I have seen, the solution of Napoleon I. does not present the fewest difficulties.
Within the space of a few days, some three weeks in all, it was my fortune to be present at two demonstrations forming two pictures of Italian story, or rather two aspects of one picture. In both the subject-matter was the feelings of Italians towards their rulers; in both that feeling was expressed legibly, though in diverse fashions; and from both one and the same lesson—that lesson, which I have sought to express in these loose sketches of mine—may be learned easily. Let me first, then, write of these pictures as I saw them at the time, so that my moral may speak for itself to those who care to learn it.
The 12th of April is the anniversary of Pio Nono’s return to Rome from Gaeta, that refuge of destitute sovereigns. It is also, by a strange coincidence, the anniversary of the day on which p. 253his Holiness and General Goyon narrowly escaped being killed by the falling of a scaffold, from which they were inspecting the repairs at the church of St Agnese. On that day, in honour of the doubly joyful event, the Pope went to celebrate mass at the convent of St Agnese. The time was one when a popular demonstration in favour of the Pope was urgently required. It was in fact the beginning of the end. Victor Emmanuel was about to enter Bologna as king; the news of the Sicilian insurrection had just reached Rome; the Imperial Government had sent one of its periodical intimations, that the French occupation could not be prolonged indefinitely; and General De La Moricière had assumed the command of the Papal army, on his ill-fated and Quixotic crusade. At such a time it was deemed necessary to show Europe, that the Pope still reigned in the hearts of his people, and every effort was made to secure a demonstration. Government clerks and official personages received orders to be present at the ceremony; and all persons, over whom the Priests had influence, were urged to attend and swell the crowd. And yet what came of it all? Along the road between the Convent of Santa Agnese and the Porta p. 254Pia, where the great demonstrations took place some weeks ago, there was little sign of crowd or excitement. The day was chilly and cheerless; but the chilliness of the wind itself precluded the idea of rain, so that it was not the weather which deterred the concourse of the faithful. The Patrizzi Villa, just outside the gate, had a few festoons hung over the garden wall, which fronts the road; but one of the Patrizzi family, I should mention, is a Cardinal. The villas on the road exhibited no decorations or signs of festivity whatever. Indeed, I only observed three houses in all which had placed hangings before their windows, or made any preparations in honour of the event. There were not many persons outside the gates. Every few steps you met patrols of six French soldiers headed by a gendarme. These patrols had been sent by General Goyon to keep the crowd in order; but, unfortunately, there was no crowd to keep in order; so that the soldiers looked and seemed to feel as if they were sent on a fool’s errand. At St Agnese there were some 150 carriages collected, almost all hired ones, of the poorer sort. The private vehicles were very few indeed; not a quarter of the muster at most. p. 255The church itself was gaily filled, but not crowded in any part. Priests, monks, and women formed nine-tenths of the congregation. The sacrament was administered by the Pope himself to a number of communicants, amongst whom the English converts visiting Rome were as usual conspicuous. After mass was over the Pope had breakfast at the Convent, and returned about noon to the city. Meanwhile, something approaching to a crowd, that is about 600 people, half of whom were priests and the rest impiegati, were collected at the gates; and as the Pope passed to his coach and four, each of this crowd, with somewhat suspicious unanimity, drew a handkerchief from his pocket, and raised a feeble cheer. Inside the gates, and along the streets through which the Papal procession passed, there was no appearance of any unusual concourse of people. By the corner of the Gualtro Fontane street, near the new palace of Queen Christina, a large body of nuns and school-children, decked out in white, were drawn up on the pavement, who waved their hats, and threw flowers as the Pope went by; but this was all; and even the Pope himself could hardly have supposed what demonstration there was to be spontaneous. It is true the p. 256Giornale made the most of it. Their narrative ran thus: “About half-past eleven in the morning his Holiness, accompanied by the applause of all who had joined to escort him, entered his carriage, and took the road towards his residence at the Vatican. Words are insufficient to express the enthusiastic affection, the joyous demonstrations, which, for the length of three miles from St Agnese to the Quirinal, were manifested towards him by the good people of this Sovereign City, who had crowded to behold his passage; and who, by any means in their power, expressed the tender affection which they could not but entertain for his sacred person. Infinite, too, was the number of carriages which followed the Royal cortége to the Pontifical palace of St Peter’s.”
To this I can only say, that many things are visible to the eye of faith, and hidden to the common world. To my unenlightened vision, the crowd of three miles in length was composed of a thousand persons in all; and the infinite number of carriages looked uncommonly like sixty.
And now for the converse picture.
Out of chill clouds and dull gloom, I passed into summer sunshine. Across barren moor-land and more barren mountains, by the side of marshy lakes, deserted and malaria-haunted, through squalid villages and decayed cities, my journey brought me into a rich garden-country, studded with thriving towns swarming with life, and watered with endless streams. I came into a land such as children of Israel never looked upon from over Jordan, after their weary wanderings in the wilderness; a land rich in oil and corn, and vineyards and cattle; a very “land of promise.” This, indeed, is the true Italy, the Italy of which all poets of all time have sung; and whose likeness all artists have sought to draw, and sought in vain. The sight, however, of this wondrous beauty was not new to me who write; still less is its record new to you who read. With this much of tribute let it pass unnoticed. Fortunately, it was my lot to see the promised land of Italy as for centuries past she has not been seen. I saw her free, and rejoicing in her freedom. Then let me seek to recall such of the epochs in that right royal progress—when p. 258the chosen King came to take possession of his promised land—as stand most clearly forth.
I remember once seeing a collection of Indian portraits. There were rajahs and dervishes, jugglers and dancing-girls, depicted in every variety of garb and posture. For the whole set, however, there was but one face. Each portrait had a hole where the face should have been, and the picture was completed by placing the one head beneath the blank opening. In fact, you had one face beneath a hundred different draperies. So also, in my wanderings, I saw but one picture in a dozen frames; one sight in many cities. At some, the flags may have waved more gaily; at some again the lamps may have sparkled more brilliantly, and at others the crowd may have cheered more lustily; but the substance of the sight was the same throughout. Everywhere, some half-dozen of dusty open carriages, filled with officers in uniform, passing through crowded streets festooned with flowers, dressed out with banners—everywhere, the one figure of a plain, rough Soldier-king, bowing stiffly and slowly from time to time—everywhere, a surging, heaving, shouting crowd. Such is the one subject of my picture-gallery.
p. 259I am in the Duomo of Florence. Around and about me there is a great crowd. Every niche and cornice where foot can stand is occupied. A deep gloom hangs around the darkened church, and from out the lofty vaulted roof thousands of lamps hang glimmering like stars upon a moonless sky. Ever and anon the organ peals forth triumphantly, and the clouds of incense rise fitfully; and as the bell rings, and the host is raised on high, you see above the bowed heads of the swaying crowd the figure of the excommunicated King, kneeling on the altar-steps. Then, when the service is over, and the royal procession passes down the nave, through the double line of soldiers, who keep the passage clear, I am carried onwards to the front of the grand cathedral, which for centuries has stood bare and unfinished, and which is to date its completion from the time when the city of Dante and Michael Angelo is to date her freedom, too long delayed.
The next scene present to my memory is a dark gloomy night. I am at Pisa, in the city of the Campo Santo, where hang the chains of the ancient port which the Genoese carried off in triumph centuries ago, in the days of the old Republic, and have brought back to day, in p. 260honour of the new brotherhood. The great festival of the Luminara is to be held to-night, in the presence of the King. I have come from Florence through the pleasant Arno valley, shining in the glory of an Italian sunset, and the night has come on, and dark, rain-laden clouds are rolling up from the sea; but neither wind nor rain are heeded now. Through narrow streets, which a year ago were silent and deserted, I follow a great multitude pressing towards the river-side. A sudden turn brings me to the quay, and an illuminated city rises before me across the Arno. The glare is so strong that at first I can scarcely distinguish anything save the one grand blaze of light. Then, by degrees, I see that every house and palace-front along those mile-long quays is lit up by rows on rows of lamps, scattered everywhere. Arches and parapets and bridges are all marked out against the dark back-ground of the sky by the long lines of light, and in the depths of the dull stream that rolls at my feet a second inverted city sparkles brightly. Along either quay a great, countless multitude keeps moving to and fro, casting a dark hem of shadow at the foot of the houses which line the river. Then of a sudden the low, p. 261ceaseless hum of ten thousand voices is exchanged for a loud cheer, and the bands begin to play, and the royal carriages, escorted by a running crowd, pass along the quays; and wherever the throng is thickest, you can tell that Victor Emmanuel is to be found, with Ricasoli by his side. Then, as the King and his party pass out of sight, the storm comes on in its fury, and the gusts of wind blow out the lamps, as if after doing honour to the King their work was ended.
Another scene which I remember well was on a long day’s journey through the Val di Chiana, a day’s journey by fertile fields and smiling villages, and on pleasant country roads. The King was coming in the course of the day along the same route. At every corner, at every bridge and roadside house, there were groups of peasants standing waiting to see Il padrone nuovo, the new sovereign and master. The children had flags in their little hands, and the cottagers had hung out their coloured bed-quilts, and the roadside crosses were decked out with flowers. The church-bells were ringing, country bands were playing lustily, and the national guard of every little town I passed stood under arms, to the admiration of all beholders. It was a holiday p. 262everywhere; the fields were left untilled, the carts were taken up to carry whole peasant families to the market-town of Arezzo, where the King was to spend the night. Man, woman, and child wore the national colours in some part of their Sunday dress; and about everything and everybody there was a look of happiness, hard indeed to describe, but one not often seen nor easily forgotten.
Let us turn northwards. The old streets of Bologna, with their endless rows of colonnades, are filled with people. The dead Papal city is alive again. The priests have disappeared; friars, monks, Jesuits, and nuns have vanished from their old haunts. St Patrick did not clear the land of Erin more thoroughly and more suddenly of the genus reptile than the presence of Victor Emmanuel has cleared Bologna of the genus priest. It is whispered that out of top windows, and from behind blinds and shutters, priests are peeping out at the strange sight of a glad and a free people, with glances the reverse of friendly; but neither the black robe nor the brown serge cowl, nor the three-cornered, low-crowned hat, are to be seen amongst the crowd. Well, perhaps the scene looks none the less gay for their absence. The flags and flowers glitter beneath p. 263the blue, cloudless sky, and the burning sun of a hot summer day gives an unwonted brightness to the grey colours of the grim, gaunt houses. Down the steep, winding road leading from the old monastery of St Michael, where the King is lodged, through the dark, narrow, crowded streets, a brilliant cavalcade comes riding slowly; half a horse’s length in front rides Victor Emmanuel. Amongst the order-covered staff who follow, there is scarcely one of not more royal presence than their leader; there are many whose names may stand before his in the world’s judgment, but the crowd has its eye fixed on the King, and the King alone. For three days this selfsame crowd has followed him, and stared at him, and cheered him, but their ardour remains undiminished. All the school-children of the city, down to little mites of things who can scarcely toddle, have been brought out to see him. Boy-soldiers, with Lilliputian muskets, salute him as he passes. A mob of men, heedless of the gendarmes or of the horses’ hoofs, run before the cavalcade, in the burning heat, and cheer hoarsely. Every window is lined with ladies in the gayest of gay dresses, who cast glances before the King, and try, like true daughters of Eve, to catch a smile from that p. 264plain, good-humoured face. So amidst flowers and smiles and cheers the procession passes on. There is no pause, indeed, in the ceaseless cheering, save where the band of exiles stands with the flags of Rome, and Naples, and Venice, covered with the black veil; or when the regiments defile past with the tattered colours which were rent to shreds at San Martino and at Solferino, and then the cry of “Viva Vittorio Emmanuele” is changed for that of “Viva l’Italia!”
It is a Sunday afternoon, and at three o’clock I have turned out of the broiling streets into the vast, crowded theatre of Reggio. Every place is occupied, every box is crammed; rows of lights sparkle around the darkened house, and the heat is a thing to be remembered afterwards. There is a gorgeous ballet being acted on the stage, and Cæsar is being tempted by every variety of female art and posture, in a way which never happens except to ballet heroes, and to Saint Anthony of Padua. The dancing girls, however, dance in vain, and the orchestra plays to deaf ears, for all voices are raised at once, and all eyes are turned from the stage. The King has entered the royal box, and every lady in the long tiers of boxes unfurls the tricolor-flag she bears in her p. 265hands and waves it bravely. The whole house keeps rising, shouting, cheering. The musicians lay down their instruments, and the ballet-girls drop their postures and Cæsar forgets his dignity, and one and all crowd forward on the stage and join in the general cheering; and when the king leaves, the curtain drops upon the unfinished ballet, and the whole house rush into the piazza to see Victor Emmanuel again as he drives away.
The last time that my path comes across the kingly progress is at a railway station. The long street of Parma, leading to the station, is lined with a dense crowd; and the flowers and flags and triumphal arches are to be seen in greater profusion here than even I have been accustomed to before. The royal carriages have to move at a foot’s pace, on account of the multitude which presses round them. Amidst playing of bands and throwing of flowers, the King, accompanied by his vast escort, has reached the station, and enters it with his suite, but the eager enthusiasm of the multitude is not sated yet. Regardless of all railway rules and penalties, they clamber over palings and run up embankments, and manage to force their way at last to the platform itself, as the royal train is moving on. Even the iron nerve p. 266of Victor Emmanuel seems affected by this last greeting of farewell; and while the train remains in sight I can see the King bowing kindly to the crowd on either side.
Never, I think, in the world’s history was the promised land entered with more of promise.
When, in the old fairy tale, the sleeping princess of the slumber-bound palace awoke to light and life; when of a sudden the horses began to neigh, and the clocks to tick, and the spits to turn, the brightness and suddenness of the change could scarcely have been more complete than that through which I passed. From chill, cheerless, ceaseless rain into bright warm sun-light; from a country fever-haunted, barren, and desolate, into a land swarming with life, rich and fertile as a garden; from a gloomy priest-ridden people, kept down by force of arms, hating their rulers and hated by them, into the presence of a free people rejoicing in their freedom: such has been my change as I passed from the States of the Church into those of Victor Emmanuel.
Surely the moral of these two pictures speaks for itself. Put aside abstract political considerations, put aside, too, theological questions, and look at broad facts patent to all. If anybody can p. 267see Rome and the Papal States, and still believe that the people are happy or prosperous or faring with good prospects either for this world or the next, I can say nothing more. His eyes are not my eyes, nor his judgment mine. For those to whom this ocular testimony is denied, I have written these papers. I have sought to make present to them the utter dreariness, the hopeless discontent, the abject demoralization, which strike a resident in Rome, unless he refuses wilfully to see the truth. In the dead Rome of real life; in the universal spiritless immorality of Roman society; in the decay of what once was the Roman people; in the squalid misery of the country towns, miserable even in their merriment; in the utter isolation of the Papal States, a moral lazaretto amongst European kingdoms, you see only too plainly the permanent condition of the country. As to the present misery, you can read its signs in those pageants which impose on no one; in the Carnivals, where there are no revellers; in the solemn ceremonies, where the worshippers are sought in vain; and in the sad, sullen, hopeless demonstrations, whereby a people protest constantly that they are weary of their fate. If you look for causes, you may find them p. 268perhaps in those trials without law or justice; in that Press without liberty or truth; in those Church-sanctioned lotteries; in the presence of that multitude of priests, and in the policy which dictated the outrage of St Joseph’s day, and the Bull of excommunication. How far these causes are sufficient to explain the fact, is a matter of opinion. I can understand a fervent believer in the Catholic Faith saying, that the people of the Papal States ought to be happy and prosperous under Papal rule. It may be so, but the fact is they are not; and that they are both prosperous and happy under the rule of Victor Emmanuel ever since the great Lombard campaign, when the French armies at Solferino destroyed the Austrian power, the key-stone of the whole priest-despot rule in Italy. I have been living, with but short intervals, in different parts of this Italian land. Wherever the free national government has spread, I can see the growth of prosperity and happiness. There have been, there are, and there will be partial reactions, petty disturbances; but they are but eddies in the great, deep, resistless current. Go to Bologna, or Ferrara, or Ancona, and you will find them, as I have, passed from dead desolation into active life. Commerce is p. 269flourishing, order prevails, and the people are free and full of life. These are facts on which both Protestant and Catholic can judge; and Catholics, as well as Protestants, will tell you the same thing. Then if this be so, and that it is so I assert fearlessly, in what right, human or divine, are a number of God’s creatures to be forced to live out that one short life of ours in dull, abject misery? If you tell me that their misery is necessary to the maintenance of a religious creed, be that creed Protestant or Catholic, I reply that the sooner then that creed disappears, the better for mankind and for faith in God.
And now, a few words in parting about the future. The end I believe is coming on so rapidly, has indeed advanced so far, since first I began to write these letters, little more than a year ago, that I hesitate to make prophecies which to-morrow may render vain. The whole Italian revolution is eminently a political one, not a religious one. It is possible a religious change, whether reformation-like or otherwise, may follow in its steps, but that time is not come. There is no wish in the Italian people, unless I err much, to alter the national faith, or to dispense p. 270with the Pope, as a spiritual potentate. Before long Pius IX., having caused as much misery as one man can well cause in one lifetime, must depart from this world; and then, if not sooner, some arrangement must be come to between the Pope and the Italian people, if the Papacy is to last at all. In some form or other I hold that the compromise will be of the nature of the “Napoleonic Solution,” to which I have therefore given a place amongst these papers. Whether it is possible for a Pope to remain permanently at Rome as a spiritual prince in a free city, time alone can show, but ere long the experiment will be made.
If in these letters I have said aught to wound the faith of either Protestant or Catholic, I have said it unwillingly, and regret that it should be so. This however I believe, and would have others believe it too, that the misery of the Roman people is a real misery, be its cause what it may, and like all real misery in this world, calls to God for justice, and not in vain.
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