o Nono was not the case which a
rationalist would urge against the Church of the time of St. Louis,
but diametrically the opposite case. Against the mediaeval Church it
might be said that she was too fantastic, too visionary, too dogmatic
about the destiny of man, too indifferent to all things but the
devotional side of the soul. Against the Church of Pio Nono the main
thing to be said was that it was simply and supremely cynical; that it
was not founded on the unworldly instinct for distorting life, but on
the worldly counsel to leave life as it is; that it was not the
inspirer of insane hopes, of reward and miracle, but the enemy, the
cool and sceptical enemy, of hope of any kind or description. The same
was true of the monarchical systems of Prussia and Austria and Russia
at this time. Their philosophy was not the philosophy of the cavaliers
who rode after Charles I. or Louis XIII. It was the philosophy of the
typical city uncle, advising every one, and especially the young, to
avoid enthusiasm, to avoid beauty, to regard life as a machine,
dependent only upon the two forces of comfort and fear. That was,
there can be little doubt, the real reason of the fascination of the
Napoleon legend--that while Napoleon was a despot like the rest, he
was a despot who went somewhere and did something, and defied the
pessimism of Europe, and erased the word "impossible." One does not
need to be a Bonapartist to rejoice at the way in which the armies of
the First Empire, shouting their songs and jesting with their
colonels, smote and broke into pieces the armies of Prussia and
Austria driven into battle with a cane.

Browning, as we have said, was in Italy at the time of the break-up of
one part of this frozen continent of the non-possumus, Austria's hold
in the north of Italy was part of that elaborate and comfortable and
wholly cowardly and unmeaning compromise, which the Holy Alliance had
established, and which it believed without doubt in its solid unbelief
would last until the Day of Judgment, though it is difficult to
imagine what the Holy Alliance thought would happen then. But almost
of a sudden affairs had begun to move strangely, and the despotic
princes and their chancellors discovered with a great deal of
astonishment that they were not living in the old age of the world,
but to all appearance in a very unmanageable period of its boyhood. In
an age of ugliness and routine, in a time when diplomatists and
philosophers