Part 31

And, in addition to all these busts, statues, allegories, tablets, pillars, cairns, lions, bas-reliefs, wreaths, lists of heroes, records of _plébiscites_ anent annexations, _loggias_ whence Garibaldi orated; in addition to all the Piazze Garibaldi and Victor Emmanuel, all the Corsi Cavour and Mazzini, all the streets of the Twentieth of September and other heroic dates, there is the specific Museum of the Risorgimento from which no tiniest town is immune. To see one is practically to see all. With the same piety with which their ancestors collected the relics of the saints, the modern Italians have collected the relics of their heroes and the war—swords, sticks, photographs, crude paintings and engravings, old hats, letters, tricolour scarves, medals, pictures, patriotic money, helmets, epaulettes, broken bombs, cannon-balls, cartoons, caricatures, faded wreaths, autographs, sculptures, crosses, proclamations, prayer-books, pictures of steamers conveying insurgents! And Garibaldi! What town has not some shred of the “Genius of Liberty,” as the tablet in the old castle of Ferrara styles him—his flask, his sword, his shirt, his gun, his letters, his telegrams! Peculiarly sacred is the red shirt which he wore at Aspromonte, though it recalls the ironic fact that when the charmed, invincible hero was at last wounded and captured, it was by soldiers of the king he had created and of the Italy whose triumph he was seeking to consummate. Something Miltonic seems to emanate from that red shirt:

“That flaming shirt which Garibaldi wore At Aspromonte.”

But for the rest, all these relics are as ugly as the relics of the saints. Beautiful and exalting as are the Museums in reality, with their record of sacrifice and patriotism in one of the most wonderful chapters of history, infinitely touching as is every yellow letter or worn glove, when imagination has transfused it, these glass cases are outwardly depressing to the last degree—a warning to the Realist, and a proof that Art in expressing the soul of a phenomenon is infinitely truer in its beauty than Nature unselected and unadorned. The wooden-legged curator of Bologna, who lost his leg at Solferino, is a mere stumping old bore; the little photograph of twenty-four Garibaldians minus arms or with crutches is simply discomforting. Even the story of the modern mother of the Gracchi, Adelaide Cairoli, who gave four sons to her country, exhales but tepidly from the picture at Pavia of a middle-aged lady in a bonnet surrounded by young soldiers in variegated costumes.

“Leonessa d’Italia,” cried Carducci to Brescia, and the one word of the poet wipes out all the crude photographs and grandiose inscriptions by which that seemingly prosaic town asserts its heroism; one ceases even to smile at the tablet at the foot of the castle hill, veiling a defeat in the guise of ferocious Austrian charges, “frequently” repulsed. From a mock passport of Radetsky in the Vicenza Museum I got a more vivid sense of the racial hatred than from all the relics and tablets: “Birth: Bastard of the seven deadly sins. Age: Eighty-two, sixty-five of which have been passed in robbing Austria of the money she stole. Eyes: Of a bird of prey. Nose: Of a Jew. Mouth: Open for the swallowing of divorce! Beard: Nothing. Hair: Enough. Visage: Not human. Occupation: Projector of Conquests. On the field of battle always at the tail; in the destruction of unarmed cities always at the head. Country: No country will own him. Signature: The last five days of his stay in Milan have paralysed him and he cannot sign. _Visé_: Good for nowhere.” And my most lively realisation of the transformation wrought in Europe since 1820 came, not from a Risorgimento museum nor from an official history, but from a black-and-white engraving of Raphael’s _Sposalizio_ “dedicated humbly” by Giuseppe Longhi in 1820 “to the Imperial Royal Apostolical Majesty of Francesco I, Emperor of Austria, King of Jerusalem, Hungary, Bohemia, Lombardy, Venice, Dalmatia, Sclavonia, Galicia, Laodomiria, Illyria, &c. &c.”

IV

Even those streets or buildings that are free from the Risorgimento are pitted with records or statues. Padua records with equal pride how Dante had his exile sweetened by the hospitality of Carrara da Giotto, and how Giovanni Prati, the singer of to-day, lived in the Via del Santo. Verona celebrates impartially Catullus and some minor poet whose name I forget, if I ever knew it, “who by making sweet verses obtained a fame more than Italian.” Ferrara has a positive leprosy of white plaques. Bassano is not a great city, but “there is enough celebrity in Bassano,” writes Mr. Howells, “to supply the whole world.” Things were apparently not always thus; for when Childe Harold went on his pilgrimage he demanded to know where Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio were buried.

“Are they resolved to dust, And have their country’s marbles naught to say? Could not her quarries furnish forth one bust?”

Could her quarries possibly furnish forth one _more_ bust, was the question that came to me on my later pilgrimage. Too much to say have their country’s marbles. No poet could lodge a night at a house but for all time his visit must be graven; every local lawyer or engineer is become a world-wonder; it is recorded where “the inventor of the perpetual electric motor” died; even an assassination must be eternalised in a tablet. As for a room in which conspirators met to smoke and plot, it is for ever glorified and sanctified.

I was relieved, when I did go to Carrara,

“Nei monti di Luni, dove ronca Lo Carrarese,”

to find the supply of marble from its fabular mountains still held out, but the chief occupation of the town seemed to consist in cutting it into slabs with great many-bladed machines. Slowly the grim knives descended, slicing the stone, while a spray moved to and fro to prevent its overheating by friction. And as I watched these plaques gradually grinding into separate existence, I heard them beginning to babble their lapidary language, bursting into eloquent inscriptions to unknown celebrities—chemists, town councillors, hydrographers, economists—nay, commemorating the Risorgimento itself in some village yet ungrown. “Rome or Death,” they cried stonily, and “Italy to her Sons,”and “Ci siamo e ci resteremo.” And the knives sank lower and lower, and the glories rose higher and higher, and the spray, hissing, continued to throw cold water on the enthusiasm, like some cynic observing it was easier to celebrate the old heroism than under its continuous inspiration to create the new. Carrara itself—though one would think it took marbles as a confectioner takes tarts—has its memorials of Garibaldi and Mazzini, besides that more ancient monument to Maria Beatrice overbrooded by the magic mountains.

To what cause shall we ascribe this hypertrophy of self-consciousness since Childe Harold’s day? Is it due to the Risorgimento, or the pleasure-pilgrims, or is some of it inspired by William Walton, canny British Guglielmo, to whom the municipality of Carrara has erected one of his own tablets for his services in stimulating the industry? Is it William Walton who forces all this glory upon Italy? Is it he who creates all this hero-worship? Perugino is no new discovery, yet not till 1865—341 years after his death—did the Commune of Perugia put up a tablet on that steep street which leads to his modest one-storied house, while Carducci, though not even a native, already looks out from the Carducci Gardens towards the rolling snow-mountains on the horizon. To this same 1865 belongs the imposing Dante Monument in the Piazza Santa Croce of Florence. But the six-hundredth anniversary of a poet is a trifle late for his appearance in his native city. True, it had taken him only two hundred years to force his way into Florence Cathedral, but that was merely as a painting on wood. The statue of Correggio in Parma (of course in the Piazza Garibaldi) was not erected till 1870. Tasso has been “the great unhappy poet” for three centuries. Yet not till 1895 did Urbino think it necessary to record his visit to the city as the guest of Federigo Bonaventura. As for Raphael, Urbino’s own wonder-child, that thirty-six foot monument to him dates only from 1897! All these testimonials to Art would be a little more convincing if the straight iron bridges with which Venice and Verona have insulted their fairy waters, did not prove—like the flamboyant technique of the modern Italian painter—that Italy has left her art period irrevocably behind.

And the great knives of Carrara go grinding on, “ohne Hast, ohne Rast,” inexorably supplying celebrity. Like the Greece of the decadence, Italy has reached its stone age, an age which seems the symptom of spent vigour, the petrifaction of what once was vital. Nor is it easy to recognise Mazzini’s soldiers of humanity in a nation whose prophet is d’Annunzio, whose “smart set” repeats the morals of the Renaissance without its genius, whose masses appear to spend their lives in lounging about the streets smoking long black slow-lighting cigars, or patronising the innumerable pastrycooks. It seems a slight return for all the heroic agony of the Risorgimento that Europe should be supplied with an efficient type of restaurant, and a vividly gesturing waiter, who dissects himself in discussing the carving of the joint.

“Scuola di magnanimi Sensi, Auspicata promessa dell’ Avvenire”

cries a memorial tablet at Brescia, but the ennoblement and the promise of the future are less obvious than the orgy of nationalistic sentiment. And when I read how at the recent meeting in North Italy between their King and the Czar, Italian citizens submitted to being treated like Russians during a royal progress; herded outside the town while within it every door was bolted and every blind drawn, as though ’twas indeed the funeral of freedom, I felt how justified was Mazzini’s unwillingness to resurrect under a monarchy. And when I think of the great equestrian monument to Victor Emmanuel II which is to commemorate in 1911 the jubilee of the dynasty’s sovereignty over United Italy—the monument that will cost a hundred million lire, and in the belly of whose horse a _lunch d’onore_ was recently offered by the proprietor of the foundry to the engineers and artisans, “twenty-six persons in all”—I see how wise was Mazzini’s protest against the narrowing down of a great spiritual movement to the acquisition of more territory by a reigning house. It was a commercial traveller who proudly directed my attention to this equine lunch, and this standard of greatness just suits a commercial nation. In this Gargantuan horse the whole millennial dream of Mazzini may end, and those young heroes of freedom, whose deaths lay so heavy on his conscience in his black moments, may have died but to add another to the family party of monarchs who regard the rest of humanity as a subject-race, transferable from one to the other by conquest or treaty.

However valuable a King may be to Italy as a symbol of Unity, Mazzini was historically accurate when he pointed out that the conception of kingship has no roots in Italy, the one epoch of imperial sway being a mere degeneration of the Roman Republic. It was a fine stroke of tactics to celebrate Mazzini’s centenary in 1905 as a national festival, in which the King himself took part. But these centennial tablets and statues were Italy’s way of stoning its prophet; this festival was Mazzini’s real funeral, burying his aspirations out of sight so effectively that the man in the street has forgotten that for Mazzini the goal of Garibaldi and Cavour was only a starting-point; and a popular British Encyclopædia assures us that Mazzini “lived to see all his dreams realised.”

Not that there is a word to be said against the charming and intelligent young man who presides over Italy, and who has signalised himself among his peers by founding an International Agricultural Institute. But what a climax to the long struggle against tyranny, this meeting of King and Czar! To be sure Italy had already made friends with Austria in the very year after Garibaldi’s death—“in the interests of the peace of Europe.”

Poor Europe. They make a spiritual desert and call it peace.

“_Songs before Sunrise_”—yes, but where is the sun?

V

More instinct with vitality than the most eloquent tablets to the Risorgimento are the mural inscriptions of hatred to Austria rudely chalked up by anonymous hands, especially on the Adriatic side. “Down with Austria!” “Death to Austria!” “Death to Trent and Trieste!” is the general tenor, varied by the name of Francis Joseph scrawled between skulls and crossbones. ’Tis a strange comment on the Triple Alliance, and the authorities do not seem hurried to remove this glaring contradiction. Even “Death to the Czar” survives the royal meeting.

But the Irredenta is not to be taken seriously. Not along political lines does the Risorgimento proceed, any more than along the moral lines for which Mazzini worked. The second phase, the second Risorgimento it may indeed be called, is the Industrial Resurrection. Resurrection—because Italy, whose Merchant of Venice reminds us that the Italian nobleman was always a trader, and whose leading Florentines were Magnificent Moneylenders, can hardly be regarded as an Arcadia transformed by the cult of the dollar. Even Mazzini demanded revival of “the old commercial greatness”; perhaps he might have been content to wait patiently through this materialistic epoch, if he were sure it would lead to a third Risorgimento.

Hygiene has yet to penetrate and suffuse the new prosperity. But if even Perugia still stinks in places and Foligno everywhere, the country is getting perceptibly cleaner, and perhaps godliness is next to cleanliness. But the severest moralist cannot grudge Italy her rise in wealth and happiness: the poverty of the peasantry, accentuated by the extravagant ambition of Italy to be a Great Power in the smallest of senses, has been terrible. At what a cost has Italy achieved her first Dreadnought, so perversely christened _Dante Alighieri_!

Beggars abound—blind, crippled, or with hideous growths—especially in the South. Doubtless the influx of the pleasure-pilgrim has increased the deformity of the population, and the Italian beggar pushes forward his monstrosity as though it were for sale, but there is real physical degeneration all the same. The discovery of New York and South America by the Italian has fortunately co-operated with the discovery of Italy by the pleasure-pilgrim and the foreign investor, and some 600,000 Italians in the South of Brazil provide the makings of a Trans-atlantic Italy. Even the semi-savage villages of Sicily are sown with steamer advertisements, and batches going and returning for jobs or harvests make an ever-weaving shuttle across the Atlantic.

And if the monuments of the First Risorgimento clash with the old historic background of Italy, still more is the Second Risorgimento in discord with it. One almost sees a new Italy, infinitely less beautiful but not devoid of backbone, struggling out of the old architectural shell which does not in the least express it. The old ducal and seignorial cities, the old republics, are developing suburbs, sometimes prosperous if prosaic, like the new quarters of Florence and Parma; sometimes grotesque, like Pesaro’s sea-side resort, with its “new” architecture—lobster-red and mustard-green lattices, and sham golden doors, carved with busts; sometimes hideous, like the outskirts of Verona, where under the blue, brooding mountains rises a quarter of electrical workshops and chemical factories. Ancient towered Asti grows sparkling with its new brick Banca d’Italia, and its blued and gilded capitals in the Church of S. Secondo Martire. Look down on Genoa, with its fantasia of spires, campaniles, roof-gardens, green lattices, marble balconies, chimneys decorated with figures of doges and opening out like flowers, and see how the old narrow alleys are almost roofed with telegraph and telephone wires. Go down to the widened harbour and see the warehouses, the American sky-scrapers, the smoking chimneys, the great steamers sailing out for Buenos Ayres and New York, the emigrants with their bundles. The blue bird sings here no more; you hear only the bang of the hammer, which Young Italy declares is the voice of the century.

I look out of my window at Forli (in the Via Garibaldi!) and see a white minaret and a white campanile gleaming fantastically in the moonlight over a panorama of russet roofs. There is a stone floor in my bedroom and no chimney. In the Piazza all is heavy and mediæval: dull stone colonnades and a rough cobbled road. In a church a grotesque griffin ramps over a pavement tomb. Yet through these cumbersome stone forms I feel the new Italy struggling. The Ginnasio Communale of the town shelters with equal pomp and spaciousness the picture-gallery and the chemical laboratory. These colonnades and cobbles have no more congruity with the new spirit than the old seignorial and episcopal Palazzi with the poor “tenement families” whom they house to-day. Presently life will slough off these forms altogether. Where an old castle like that of Ferrara or an old palace like that of Lucca or Pistoja can be tamed to civic uses, it becomes a town-hall; where no old building is available, an adequate modern form is created, as in the handsome post-offices with their almost military sense of the dignity of the common life.

At Pesaro I lodged in a Bishop’s Palace with “steam-heat, telephone, electric light in all the chambers, garage for automobiles, motor omnibus to all the trains!” Palatial was it indeed, so absurdly spacious that the dining-room was only accessible through vast, empty, domed and frescoed halls, and I could have held a political meeting in my bedroom, where I slept with a sense of camping out under the infinities. I had no notion that provincial churchmen were thus magnificent, and I do not wonder that the Lord Cardinal of Ostia, when he saw how the Franciscans of the Portiuncula slept on ragged mattresses and straw, without pillows or bedsteads, burst into tears, exclaiming: “We wretches use so many unnecessary things!” And yet the Cardinal did not use a single thing advertised by the ex-Palace of Pesaro.

Nowhere do new and old clash or combine more disagreeably than in Modena, where crumbling marble-pillared colonnades are painted red, and meet continuations in new brick. The Cathedral, begun in 1099, guarded and flanked by quaint stone lions, bears on its ancient campanile a tablet to Victor Emmanuel. In the great Piazza, church, picture-gallery and war-monument swear at one another. The Ducal Palace is a military school, the moat round the old rampart—where once resounded that archaic song of the war-sentinels—is a public laundry.

And the statues, tablets, monuments, of the Second Risorgimento begin to vie with those of the first. _Pro Nervi_, painted on the benches on that desolate cactus-grown shore, among the Leonardesque sea-sprayed rocks by the old Gropallo tower, attests the activity of a society created to boom the summer resort, while a tablet celebrates the Marchese who, foreseeing the future of Nervi, put up the first hotel and died with the name of the municipality on his lips. I do not think the Marchese himself foresaw how far Nervi would go. I know I walked miles along its tramway amid monotonous streets, with no sign of an end. Indeed the tram-line reaches Genoa.

Nor is the Marchese the only hero of the Second Risorgimento. Trust Carrara for that—Carrara and Guglielmo Walton!

And the creations of this Risorgimento rival those of the Renaissance in costliness. Where in all Europe will you find a street as luxurious as Genoa’s Via XX Settembre—the long colonnade, the granite pillars, the gilded and frescoed roof, the mosaic pavement where the poorest may tread more magnificently than Agamemnon.

And the great Gallery of Victor Emmanuel in Milan, what is it but a secular parody of the Cathedral it faces—nave, transept, dome, complete even to the invisible frescoes, a _Cathédrale de luxe_? Very sad and solemn looked the old Cathedral at night, for all its fairy fretwork, as Life passed it by for its glittering counterpart.

VI

I went to San Marino to get away from Garibaldi. For here—I said to myself—is the one spot in Italy that is _not_ Italy, that has kept its pristine Republicanism. Here on the Titan Mount is the one spot that cannot possibly acclaim the Union. At most I may encounter a memorial to Mazzini.

I left Rimini by the Gate of the Via Garibaldi which leads straight to San Marino, and trudging for the better part of a day I saw it impending horribly some two thousand five hundred feet above me, and after dragging myself through the Borgo or lower suburb, I toiled in the darkness up a narrow, steep, slippery, jagged path, on the brink of a sheer precipice, into—the Via Garibaldi! And in a bedroom looking down on it—for the only hotel is in a Piazzetta abutting on it—I passed the night.

In the morning I found a Garibaldi garden and a Caffè Garibaldi and a Piazza Garibaldi and a Garibaldi bust and a Garibaldi bas-relief and two Garibaldi tablets; item, a tablet to Victor Emmanuel and a centennial tablet and street to Mazzini, even a Via of Giosuè Carducci, the laureate of the Risorgimento.

Part of the explanation is that Garibaldi sought refuge here in 1849, escaping from “the Roman Republic” to the Ravenna pine-wood where poor Anita died, and his order for the day—“Soldiers, we are on a Soil of Refuge,” and his letter of thanks from Caprera—“I go away proud to be a citizen of so virtuous a Republic”—are reproduced on the tablets. But the deeper cause of this sympathy is that San Marino is Italian through and through, and its hoary independence, real enough in the days of the city states, is become a farce solemnly played with separate postage stamps and currency, Regents, Councils, militia, peers, commons, Home and Foreign Secretaries, ribbons, orders, treaties, extradition treaties and a diplomatic corps in England, Austria-Hungary, Spain, France and Italy, all to cover its budget of £11,000 and its population of 10,422 souls, enumerated from week to week in the toy press and decreasing by dozens. ’Tis a game into which all Europe has entered in high good humour, the grand _farçeur_, Napoleon, even proposing to extend the Republic’s boundaries, which comprise only thirty-three square miles. But the Sammarinese had sense enough to see that a greater realm would be treated more seriously. Mount Titan, as the seat not of a toy capital but of something answering less humorously to its name, would cease to be a joke, whereas a State less than one-fourth of the Isle of Wight might remain for Europe a blessed land of diversion from the eternal earnestness of the sword, might even save Europe’s self-respect as a region of civilisation, regardful of treaties and ancient rights. So serious in fact did the Sammarinese consider the danger of being taken seriously, that Antonio Onofri who advised against this Napoleonic inflation stands immortalised as Pater Patriæ.