VOLPE'S HOME AND THE PRIEST. * SIGNOR GIROLAMO VOLPE could not
have chosen a better season for introducing his book to the public. His story relates to the period which immediately led to the present position in Italy ; its personal interest culminating and mingling in the events of 1848. Its object is to expose the vices and machinations of the priest- hood, and to show how the priest, himself the victim of a false system, becomes an engine of corrupting tyranny in the family and in the State. In the working out of his tale, he presents the English reader with a very truthful representation of the daily life of the tonsured orders, of their ceremonies and slavish obser- vances, of the way in which they dictate the answers of women in the confessional, and of the hold they get over the pockets as well as over the souls of their victims. It is a story of real life con- verted into fiction for the purposes of plain speaking. The scene opens in the province of Lnnaeo, with which the writer is fa- miliar, and it is a very faithful portraiture of actual life in that picturesque part of the country. The narrative for some time is confined to the town of Immix.° and its neighbourhood ; but after- wards we are carried to Venice, where, mixing with the students, the priests, and society in general, we see the way in which the Italian mind has been partly depressed and depraved, and partly kept in a state of constant insurrection and reaction against the vicious despotism of Austria. The Signor has constructed his story so that it shall tell in every way against the Church of Rome, and the wearers of the "abhorred priestly vestment." He writes with a strong animus difficult for the English reader to • The Home and the Priest. By Girolamo Volpe. In three volumes. Published by Newby. appreciate ; his intense sense of what he is aiming at, and the ef- forts he makes to give expression to his powerful feelings, will probably render him liable to the charge of melodramatic exag- geration. The fact is, the natural grace and delicacy of his style are seen as it were through a fog ; for, although the translation u executed with much ability, it has scarcely surmounted the diffi- culty of rendering into English the extreme finish of a cultivated Italian. This is peculiarly observable in some of the most strik- ing and explosive scenes, where.our language appears inadequate to the demands made upon it. Allowing for this disadvantage, the Herne and the Priest has many things to recommend it, and whether the author strays into politics, religious controversy, or the troubled path of love, he keeps steadily to his purpose of showing up the abuses of priestcraft, the profession that depraves its own followers and renders it impossible for the more impulsive or less exalted of them to remain virtuous.
The first volume introduces us to the beautiful heroine, Amelia Fossombroni, who is the orphan granddaughter of a titled lady. The country residence is a perfect portrait of Italian life in villa- giatura, and the girl is a fair type of the most engaging of Italian womanhood. She is gentle, ardent, and impressionable. Early thrown upon the world by the death of her only relation, her very virtues become pitfalls, and she passively allows herself to be domi- nated by the priest. In her youth she forms an attachment for the hero, Francesco Fantoni, who is born of a gentle family, but one inferior to that of the heroine. He is an excellent personifi- cation of the best class of Italian students ; laborious, intelligent, thoroughly versed in the literature and history of his country ; patriotic, and burning with new and liberal ideas ; but rebellious alike against the alien tyrant Austria, and the domestic tyrant, the Papal hierarchy—as it has been managed. The opinions which he cannot conceal attract the notice of the priesthood, even before he is brought into action, and make him first an object of their attempted seductions, and then of their dislike and appre- hension. The sort of ineohate persecution to which he is subjected drives him into stronger convictions, and in the natural progress of the story he becomes a prominent political leader. This is, in the abstract, the history of many an Italian patriot.
But the true and the powerfully-drawn hero in the action of the book is a domestic chaplain in the Fossombroni family, Don Giu- seppe Lanzini, who is confessedly a strongly marked type of the priesthood. Ile is young, handsome, vigorous, endowed with very strong feelings, and an indomitable will. He is the son of a very poor family, and is driven into the church against his in- clination, because there is no other available opening. His mind, which is of no ordinary mould, is thus embittered at the very commencement; and his career in the tale is designed to expose the fatally dangerous and vitiating incongruities to which such a man is liable. Very soon, as might be expected, he falls in love with his spiritual protegee, Amelia ; but his priestly position com- pels him to dissimulate, and-feelings he must not indulge are dis- guised under the cloak of hypocrisy. His naturally good quali- ties are all perverted and depraved by his having to subject them to an unnatural suppression ; and we soon find him using religion as the screen and instrument for his personal machinations. For instance, he follows his victim about, watches her in her walks, pursues her into the midnight chapel, and even into her chamber ; thwarts her happiness, and perverts every action and relation of her life ; and all is done under the veil of sanctity. He is so furiously in love, thit he is always on the point of breaking out, and the ideaof a rival is madness. It needs a tragic pen to paint the conflicts in the heart of a man, bound by vows, whose passions are uncontrollable ; Signor Volpe, however, is quite equal to the work, and there is nothing more terrible about his revolting Priest than the sudden and ghastly physical changes of his countenance. Here is a choice specimen of hypocritical disguise carried to the foot of the very altar itself. Amalie, for once not spied upon, is absent from her seat at the mass, and the jealous chaplain is seized with the delirium of suspicion.
" At the Orate Fratres the priest again turns towards the congregation. He looks again. No one. Who can describe the intense wrath which fills his breast ? Desolating hatred towards all mankind fills his mind. He re- peats the service without knowing what he is saying. He reads the words his missal offers to his eye, but his mind is far away from his missal, far from the spot, far from the mass. " A faintness seizes him, but he determinately resists it, and proceeds with the mass. He comes to the consecration, and pronounces the solemn words. The people believe that the miracle of Transub4antiation has taken place. That man who, according to Romish credence, holds his God in his hand, nourishes in hie heart one single thought, one single passion, one single desire—the thought of vengeance, the passion of jealousy and hate, the desire of blood. The heart of his rival—shall we venture to say it ?— would at that moment have been a most acceptable morsel to his burning throat, could he have pressed it, quivering, warm, and blending, between his teeth. He could no longer doubt. He felt quite convinced that whilst he was engaged in saying mass Francesco and Amalia were together ; and he who would have bounded over a crater, who would have braved death at the mouth of a hundred cannon, who would have trodden over the corpse of his mother in his anxiety to prevent this meeting—he was tied to the altar, before a group of idiots, to play the farce of the Host, whilst they were luxuriating in the pleasure of meeting, of conversing,—perhaps, even, of embracing.
"He continues mass. Everything is perverted to his eye. The altar, the cross, the saints, the candles, all spin round and round, and seem trans- formed into a band of mocking, living beings. But the mass must go on.
He must make superhuman efforts, for he cannot quit the altar. To leave Christ ! abandon Him on the altar and retire!—impossible! The mass goes on, and must go on ; and in the meantime he is enduring anguish the more terrific that he is compelled to conceal it. He pictures the happy lovers among the fields, and flowers, and meadows, blessed in each other's society. ' Oh, Death, where art thou ?—Come to my aid ! An age of felicity could not repay the agony of the present moment : it is more than I can endure.' All this while the mass is proceeding. So great was the torment of his soul that he felt he must die ; but his desire of vengeance made him struggle to support life. He declared he would live to revenge himself. Vengeance,
vengeance, was the cry of his heart, while the mass was still proceeding."
The bad mission of the man only comes out by degrees, arising naturally from the successive development of circumstances. He indulges in evil to such an extent that he becomes hardened to good; he even. falls so low as to become a spy in the service of the Austrians,—the most degrading prostitution to which an Italian can submit. Don Giuseppe is not naturally diabolical, as may be seen by his affection for his mother. He is a hard selfish man ; but his utter depravity is due in a great measure to the force of the circumstances amid which he is placed,—to the dis- appointment of natural affections, and the false position of the priest. He is continually putting restraints upon himself, and the forced disguise makes him a hypocrite. Unable to compass his own happiness, he plots against the woman he loves. He re- presents to her that Francesco is a heretic ; he frightens her into eestacies of terror about her own salvation ; and then he inveigles her into a marriage with an imbecile nobleman. As chaplain in that nobleman's family, he secures a legacy, and a sort of authority over the widow ; and he employs his position to pursue a con- stant course of insinuation, intrigue, and even intimidation. In the end, however, Amalie escapes, her eyes opened to the per- fidy of the wicked priest, and the personal history ends in the explosion of 1848. There are other priestly characters in the book, who have nothing to recommend them but their ugliness, their gormandizing, their treachery, and their general unfitness for the clerical office. Don Domenico is an agreeable exception,— a perfectly sincere Christian, who, from his very simplicity, can- not keep straight with his superiors, and is always in hot water, or is engaged in the doing of active good which is not appreciated by his superiors. Politically the book is of considerable value. Many an essay might be written to explain how the position of the priest in Italy tends to degrade the man, the office, and the nation, but the English reader would scarcely see how it is done. Here the essay is dramatised for him ; the argument is urged with an instance at each step ; and the working of the system is shown as it is seen in life. We do not wonder if the English reader should feel difficulties in reading the book, for it is not a story by an Englishman, the scene laid in Italy, but the world seen by the foreigner, with the foreigner's selection of objects to note, and the implied explanation in the foreign form of narrating : it is a faith- ful portrait by an Italian, from an Italian point of view. Based on the influence of the priest over society in the home, and through the family upon the state, it is a cogent illustration of the very question which now agitates Italy—the temporal au- thority of the Papal priesthood.
Previous page
