But the popular excitement was not to be satisfied with the trumpetings and parades of the returning exiles—it demanded a new tariff, which was granted, of course. Then followed fêtes and illuminations, until the Pope himself grew tired of being blinded by fireworks and deafened by shouts. A succession of acts of civility passed between his Holiness and his people. He talked of railroads, canals, and commerce. He formed a council, which, so far as any practical effect has been produced by the measure, seems to have died in its birth. He cultivated popularity, walked through the streets, occasionally served the mass for a parish priest, and fully gained his object, of astonishing the populace by the condescension of a pontiff. To all this we make no imaginable objection. Pius IX. did but a duty that seldom enters into the contemplation of the prelacy, and which it would be well for their security, and not unwise in their calling, to practise in every province of Christendom.
But it is to be observed that, in all this pageantry of parliaments, and all those provinces of renovation, nothing has been done—that none of the real machinery of the popedom has been broken up—that the monk is still a living being, and the Jesuit, though a little plundered, is still in the world—that every spiritual law which made Rome a terror to the thinking part of mankind is in full vigour at this moment, and that whatever may be thought of the enlightenment of his Holiness, every weapon of spiritual severity remains still bright and burnished, and hung up in the old armoury of faith, ready for the first hand, and for the first occasion.
Lord Brougham, in his late memorable cosmopolite speech, has charged the popedom with being the origin of the European convulsions. There can be no doubt that the popedom, if it did not give birth to the movement, at least set the example. The first actual struggle with Austria was its quarrel about the possession of Ferrara, which was, after all, but a straw thrown up to show the direction of the wind. The call to the Italian states, though not loud, was deep; and an Italian army, for the purpose of forming an Italian confederation, made a part of every dream between the Alps and the sea.
Then came still more showy scenes of the great drama. France had looked on the Ferrarese struggle with the eager interest which inspires that busy nation on every opportunity of European disturbance. But the Parisian revolution suddenly threw the complimentary warfare of German and Italian heroism into burlesque. The extinction of the throne, the flight of a dynasty, the sovereignty of the mob, and the universal frenzy of a nation, were bold sports, of which Italian souls knew nothing. But their effect was soon perilously felt; the populace of Milan determined to rival the populace of Paris—had an emeute of their own, built barricades, fought the Austrian garrison, and made themselves masters of the capital of Lombardy.
But the Italian is essentially a dramatist without the power of tragedy; he turns by nature to farce, and in his boldest affairs does nothing without burlesque. Could it be conceived that a people, resolving on a revolution, should have begun it by a revolt of cigars! In England "sixty years ago," a noble duke exhibited his hostility to the government of Pitt, by ordering his footman to comb the powder out of his locks—this deficiency in the powder tax being regarded by the noble duke as a decisive instrument in the overthrowing the national policy. It must however be said, for the honour of England and the apology of the duke, that he was a Whig,—which accounts for any imbecility in this world.
The Milanese began by a desperate self-denying ordinance against tobacco. No patriot was thenceforward to smoke! What the Italian did with his hands, mouth, or thoughts, when the cigar no longer employed the whole three, is beyond our imagination. His next act of patriotic sacrifice was the theatre—the Austrian government receiving some rent as tax on the performances. The theatre was deserted, and even Fanny Ellsler's pirouettes could not win the rabble back. Even the public promenade, which happened to have some connexion with Austrian memories, was abandoned, and no Italian, man, woman, or child, would exhibit on the Austrian Corso. To our northern fancies, all this seems intolerably infantine; but it is not the less Italian—and it might have gone on in the style of children raising a nursery rebellion to this hour, but for the intervention of another character.
The history of the Sardinian states is as old as the Punic wars. But the glance which we shall give looks only to the events of the last century—excepting the slight mention, that from the period when Italy was separated from the fallen empire of Charlemagne in the ninth century, the command of the passes of Mont Cenis and Mont Genevre, with the countries at the foot of the Cottian and Graian Alps, was put in charge of some distinguished military noble, as the key of Italy, that noble bearing the title of Marquis or Lord of the Marches.
We come, leaving nine centuries of feud and ferocity behind, to the eighteenth century, when the house of Savoy became allied with the royal succession of England, by the marriage of Victor Amadeus with Anne Marie of Orleans, daughter of Philip, brother of Louis XIV., by Henrietta, daughter of Charles I. of England.
There are few historical facts more striking than the effect of position on the character of the princes of Savoy. The life of the Italian sovereigns has generally been proverbial for the feebleness of their capacities, or the waste of their powers; but Savoy exhibited an almost unbroken line of sovereigns remarkable for political sagacity, and for gallantry in the field. This was the result of their location. They were to Italy what the Lords Wardens of the Border were to England and Scotland; forced to be perpetually in the saddle—constantly preparing to repel invasion—their authority dependent from year to year on an outburst from France, or a grasp from the restless ambition and vast power of the German emperors. It is not less remarkable, that from the middle of the century, when the hazards of Savoy were diminished by the general amelioration of European policy, the vigour of the Savoyard princes decayed; and the court of Turin, instead of being a school of diplomacy and war, sank into the feebleness of Italian thrones, and retained its rivalry only in the opera.
But the French Revolution came, sent to try the infirmities of all thrones. It found Victor Amadeus the Third sitting calmly in the seat of his forefathers, and wholly unsuspicious of the barbarian storm which was to sweep through his valleys. The French burst on Nice in 1792, then on Oniglia, and stripped Savoy of all its outworks to the Alps.