Milan, beneath the Austrian flag, had within its walls a republic of poets and philosophers. Beccaria wrote there more daringly than Montesquieu. His work on "Crimes and Punishments" was a bill of accusation of all the laws of his native country. Parini Monte, Cesarotti, Pindemonte, Ugo Foscolo gay, serious, and heroic poets, then satirised the absurdities of their tyrants, the baseness of their fellow-countrymen, or sang, in patriotic odes, the virtues of their ancestors, and the approaching deliverance of their country.
Turin alone, attached to the house of Saxony, was silent, and proscribed Alfieri.
In England, the mind, a long time free, had produced sound morals. The aristocracy felt itself sufficiently strong never to become persecuting. Worship was there as independent as conscience. The dominant religion was a political institution, which, whilst it bound the citizen, left the believer to his free will. The government itself was popular, only the people consisted of none but its leading citizens. The House of Commons more resembled a senate of nobles than a democratic forum; but this parliament was an open and resounding chamber, where they discussed openly in face of the throne, as in the face of all Europe, the most comprehensive measures of the government. Royalty, honoured in form, whilst in fact it is excluded and powerless, merely presides over these debates, and adds order to victory; it was, in reality, nothing more than a perpetual consulate of this Britannic senate. The voices of the leading orators, who contested the rule of the nation, echoed thence, through and out of Europe. Liberty finds its level in the social world, like the waves in the common bed of the ocean. One nation is not free with impunity—one people is not in bondage with impunity—all finally compares and equalises itself.
X.
England had been intellectually the model of nations, and the envy of the reflecting universe. Nature and its institutions had conferred upon it men worthy of its laws. Lord Chatham, sometimes leading the opposition, sometimes at the head of the government, had expanded the space of parliament to the proportions of his own character and his own language. Never did the manly liberty of a citizen before a throne—never did the legal authority of a prime minister before a people display themselves in such a voice to assembled citizens. He was a public man in all the greatness of the phrase—the soul of a nation personified in an individual—the inspiration of the nation in the heart of a patrician. His oratory had something as grand as action—it was the heroic in language. The echo of Lord Chatham's discourses were heard—felt on the Continent. The stormy scenes of the Westminster elections[7] shook to the very depths the feelings of the people, and that love of turbulence which slumbers in every multitude, and which it so often mistakes for the symptoms of true liberty. These words of counterpoise to royal power, to ministerial responsibility, to laws in operation, to the power of the people, explained at the present by a constitution—explained in the past by the accusation of Strafford, the tomb of Sidney, on the scaffold of a king, had resounded like old recollections and strange novelties.
The English drama had the whole world for audience. The great actors for the moment were Pitt, the controller of these storms, the intrepid organ of the throne, of order, and the laws of his country; Fox, the precursory tribune of the French Revolution, who propagated the doctrines by connecting them with the revolutions of England, in order to sanctify them in the eyes of the English; Burke, the philosophical orator, every one of whose orations was a treatise; then the Cicero of the opposition party, and who was so speedily to turn against the excesses of the French Revolution, and curse the new faith in the first victim immolated by the people; and lastly, Sheridan, an eloquent debauchee, liked by the populace for his levity and his vices, seducing his country, instead of elevating it. The warmth of the debates on the American war, and the Indian war, gave a more powerful interest to the storms of the English parliament.
The independence of America, effected by a newly-born people, the republican maxims on which this new continent founded its government, the reputation attached to the fresh names, which distance increased more than their victories,—Washington, Franklin, La Fayette, the heroes of public imagination; those dreams of ancient simplicity, of primitive manners, of liberty at once heroic and pastoral, which the fashion and illusion of the moment had transported from the other side of the Atlantic,—all contributed to fascinate the spirit of the Continent, and nourish in the mind of the people contempt for their own institutions, and fanaticism for a social renovation.
Holland was the workshop of innovators; it was there that, sheltered by a complete toleration of religious dogmata, by an almost republican liberty, and by an authorised system of contraband, all that could not be uttered in Paris, in Italy, in Spain, in Germany, was printed. Since Descartes, independent philosophy had selected Holland for its asylum: Boyle had there rendered scepticism popular: it was the land sacred to insurrection against all the abuses of power, and had subsequently become the seat of conspiracy against kings. Every one who had a suspicious idea to promulgate, an attack to make, a name to conceal, went to borrow the presses of Holland. Voltaire, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Diderot, Helvetius, Mirabeau himself—had gone there to naturalise their writings in this land of publicity. The mask of concealment which these writers assumed in Amsterdam deceived no one, but it effected their security. All the crimes of thought were there inviolable; it was at the same time the asylum and the arsenal of new ideas. An active and vast trade in books made a speculation of the overthrow of religion and thrones. The prodigious demand for prohibited works which were thus circulated in the world, proved sufficiently the increasing alteration of ancient beliefs in the mind of the people.
XI.
In Germany, the country of phlegm and patience, minds apparently so slow shared with serious and concentrated ardour in the general movement of mind in Europe. Free thought there assumed the form of an universal conspiracy. It was enveloped in mystery. Learned and formal Germany liked to give even to its insurrection the appearances of science and tradition. The Egyptian initiations, mystic ceremonies of the middle age, were imitated by the adepts of new ideas. Men thought as they conspired. Philosophy moved veiled in symbols; and that veil was torn away only in secret societies, from which the profane were excluded. The prestiges of the imagination, so powerful in the ideal and dreamy nature of Germany, served as a bait to the newly arisen truths.