The spirit-rapper; an autobiography
predecessors had always been on friendly terms, and whose unexampled
prosperity he saw with pleasure. He could understand our politics, and
respected them, for they were based on a principle—a wrong principle he
believed—nevertheless a principle, consistently carried out. He believed
the Russian system, under which one man governs, is far preferable to
ours, under which all govern. However, we might honestly disagree with
him. Apparently he was the most bitter as well as the most powerful
enemy of our revolutionary plans; but we did not despair of him. He
seemed wedded to the _status quo_; but we felt that when once we had
destroyed that, we could make him and his legions do our work, for we
found him a sort of Pope in his own dominions, and not indisposed to
supplant the Pope of Rome. He was, if a friend to Papacy, the enemy of
the real Pope, and that was enough for us.
The Czar, foreseeing the revolutionary movements which would be
attempted in Western Europe, had for the moment ceased to favor the
Panslavic movement which he previously set on foot; but we saw that the
impulse had been given, and that ultimately he must return to it, go on
with it, or be swept away by it. This Panslavic movement to unite the
whole Slavic race, numbering upwards of seventy millions, and holding a
territory capable of supporting twice, if not three times that number of
inhabitants, under one Slavic government, imperial or republican, would
operate, we thought, altogether in our favor; for it would ruin Austria,
the chief support of the Papacy, and give a decided predominance to the
anti-Catholic powers throughout all Europe. We therefore favored it, and
took care to form various circles in support of it, as we traversed the
Empire from St. Petersburg to Moscow, Ninjï Novogorod, Little Russia, to
the Black Sea; and also, among the Serbs of Bulgaria, Servia, Bosnia, in
European Turkey; Transylvania, the Banat, Croatia, Slavonia, and
Bohemia, in the Austrian Empire.
We visited, on leaving Russia and Slavic Turkey, the kingdom of Hungary.
There we found Kossuth, and he answered our purpose. Priscilla formed a
circle among the Magyar ladies, but it was quite unnecessary. I
initiated Kossuth into my plan, and laid my hand on his head, and
breathed into his mouth, and left him to take care of the Magyar race.
Highly delighted, we passed from Presburg to Vienna, where we stayed
some weeks. The Imperial family and high aristocracy were proof against
our arts, but we found the burghers, the _employés_ of the government,
and especially the students of the University, quite impressible, and we
charged them for a revolution.
From Vienna we passed through Cracow to Warsaw, and from Warsaw we went
to Berlin. In all these places we found every thing favorable. We passed
through the capitals of several of the smaller German States and
principalities, stopped a few days in the Grand Duchy of Baden, and then
hastened to take up our residence at Geneva, in Switzerland. We did not
visit Munich, but sent Lola Montes there, whom Priscilla, at my order,
had prepared. She did very well, but not so well as I expected. She used
her extraordinary powers too much for her own aggrandizement. She should
never have suffered King Louis to have made her a countess. She was too
vain and ostentatious.
We arrived in Geneva, late in the autumn of 1844, and made it our
principal residence till the spring of 1846. We had made no prolonged
stay in Poland, for we found the Poles already mesmerized. Cold and
callous as I had become, I yet had a tear for poor Poland, and, let my
conservative brethren say what they will, I still weep her fate. I am
not affected by the prevailing Russo-phobia, and in the contest now
raging between Russia and the Western powers, I believe that she has the
advantage on the score of justice, though now that they have been mad
and foolish enough to wage war against her, the interests of Europe
perhaps demand their success; for if they fail, she becomes quite too
powerful. There are traits in the Russian character I like, but I can
never forgive the murder of Poland. Catherine, Frederic, and Maria
Theresa, in that crime opened the way to modern revolutions, and
deprived crowned heads, to a powerful extent, of the sympathy of the
friends of justice and order. The Poles had their faults, great and
grievous, but the partition of their kingdom by the three powers of
Russia, Prussia, and Austria, was a crime that no faults could justify,
and, what some would say is worse, a political blunder. Since then, the
Polish nobles have been, and will long continue to be, their evil
genius.
We did not remain long in Germany, for we found most of the German
states already prepared, and already in close communication, after the
German fashion, with the powers of the air. The German genius is mystic,
and plunges either into the profoundest depths of Christian mysticism,
which unites the soul with God, or into the demoniacal mysticism, which
unites it in strictest union with Satan. The German, whatever his
efforts, can never make himself a pure rationalist. He has too much
religiosity for that. He must worship, and when he worships not God, he
worships the devil, and either through the elevating power of the Holy
Ghost rises to heaven, or, through the depressing power of Satan, sinks
to hell. You never find him standing on the simple plane of human
nature, and he is always either superhumanly good or superhumanly
wicked. For an Englishman, an American, an Irishman, there is a medium,
a possibility of compromise, a sort of split-the-difference
character—now saying, good Lord, and now saying, “good devil,”—a _via
media_ genius, which offends both extremes, and satisfies nobody. I like
the German genius better. If the Lord be God, then serve him, if Baal be
God, then in Satan’s name serve Baal. Be either cold or hot, not
lukewarm. _Ernst ist das Leben_ is the German’s motto, and whatever he
proposes to do, whether good or evil, he sets about it in downright
earnest. There is more to hope, and more to fear from the German or
Teutonic race than any other in Europe, for it has very little of the
Italian and French, or the English and American _frivolezza_, that curse
of modern society.
At Geneva we met Mazzini, a remarkable man, in his way, the very genius
of intrigue, and wholly sold to the devil. We also met there the Abbate
Gioberti, a Piedmontese, who had been exiled as a liberal by the
government of Carlo Alberto, the _cidevant_ Carbonaro. He was a Catholic
priest, and though under the censure of the government, and distrusted
by the Jesuits, nay, violently opposed by them, he had not at that time,
so far as I could learn, fallen under the censure of his church. He was
one of the ablest men we met in our European travels, and a fine
specimen of the higher order of Italian genius. Though comparatively
young, not much over forty, he was deeply and solidly learned, and as a
writer on political and philosophical subjects, had, saying nothing of
his peculiar views, no superior, and hardly an equal in all Italy, if
indeed in all Europe.
Gioberti affected to be an Ultramontane, a rigid Catholic, a
thoroughgoing Papist; yet his sympathies were with the liberal or
revolutionary party. He was, first of all, an Italian, and held that the
moral, civil, and political primacy of the world belonged to Italy, and
it was because God had, from remote ages, given to her this primacy,
that the Papal chair was established at Rome. The primacy belonged to
the successors of St. Peter in their quality of _Roman_ pontiffs, who,
as such, were heritors of the Italian _primato_. The Papal authority was
founded in divine right, but mediately through the divine right of the
Italians as heritors of the old Roman sacerdocy, and Italo-Greek
civilization. According to him, the Papacy did not so much continue the
synagogue, as the old Roman priesthood, or rather, the Jewish and Pagan
priesthoods both meet and become one in the Papacy—the summit and
representative of the Christian priesthood.
His plan, therefore, was, first of all, Italian unity, not the
republican or democratic unity of Mazzini and Young Italy, nor yet a
monarchical unity, under a purely secular prince; but a federative union
under the moderatorship of the Pope, made one in the Papacy. The Romans,
he held, at least from the time of Numa, had been an armed priesthood,
and should now resume, under the Pope, their old character and mission.
Italy thus united, thus organized, under the moderatorship of the Pope,
could reassert her primacy, and carry on the work of civilization. With
her twenty-five millions of inhabitants, the natural superiority of her
genius, the moral weight of the Papacy, her peculiar geographical
position, and the productiveness of her soil, she would be impregnable
to attack, and more than able to cope single-handed with any one of the
great European powers. In other words, he sought for the Pope and the
Italians what Nicholas is supposed to seek for the Czar and the
Russians.
The rock on which he split, and I told him so at the time, was in
assuming the intrinsic compatibility of Gentilism and Christianity. He
wished to combine the antique pagan and the modern Christian spirit, and
to train youth to be devout Catholics, and yet, at the same time, proud,
daring, and energetic Gentiles. He did not agree at all with the Abbé
Gaume and the party laboring to exclude the Greek and Roman classics
from our colleges and universities; he had no very high opinion of the
fathers of the Church, with the exception of St. Augustine, and no
patience with the mediæval knights and doctors. He waged unrelenting war
on the philosophy taught by the Jesuits, and, indeed, upon the whole
system of education pursued by those renowned religious religions,
which, he contended, had practically emasculated the European mind,
deprived it of all depth and originality, and of all free and vigorous
activity. Its effect had been to produce, in nearly all Europe, a
universal _frivolezza_, or frivolity of thought and action.
But he forgot to note, that Gentilism and Christianity are directly
opposed one to the other. Christianity educates for heaven, Gentilism
for earth; the former is based on pride, the latter on humility; the one
exalts God, the other exalts man. The Gospel teaches us to despise what
Gentilism honors, and to honor what Gentilism despises, and to possess
the world by rising above it, and trampling it under our feet. A
Christian discipline has for its end, to mortify the flesh, and to make
men live as if dead to the world, and to overcome the world by dying,
not by slaying, by relying on the wisdom and power of God, not on their
own. Gentile discipline trains men primarily for the world, develops the
nobility of pride, not the higher nobility of humility—trains men to
act, by their own wisdom and sagacity, on men, to be artful and
overreaching statesmen, intrepid soldiers, able and invincible
commanders. It is obvious to every one that these two systems can never
be combined, and made to work harmoniously together. Ye cannot serve God
and Mammon.
Taking the Gentile standard, taking a Fabricius, a Scipio, a Cato, a
Cæsar, instead of a St. Bruno or a St. Francis, of Assisium, as a model
man; or a Cornelia instead of Santa Clara or a Santa Theresa, for a
model woman, there can be no doubt of the vast superiority of ancient
Gentilism over modern Catholicity, or even Christianity itself, and, in
this sense, the devout Irishman was right when he said, “Religion has
been the ruin of us,” and more especially as it regards Catholics.
Non-Catholics, as to the empire of this world, display a wisdom, an
energy, and a decision, which you seldom find in strictly Catholic