Part 14

The authoress tracks the prejudice which explains Oswald's conduct to its source, which she finds to be the English conception of home. Oswald's principal difficulty in coming to a decision about Corinne is expressed in the words: "Of what use would all that be at home?" "And home is everything to us--to the women, at least," remarks an Englishman to Oswald; and the authoress herself remarks elsewhere: "Though it is possible for an Englishman to find pleasure for a time in foreign ways and customs, his heart invariably returns to the impressions of his childhood. If you ask the Englishman you meet on board ship in foreign climes whither he is bound, he answers, if he is upon the return journey: '_Home_.'"[1] It is to this English love of home that she attributes both the superstition that the independent intellectual development of woman is absolutely incompatible with the domestic virtues, and the English idolatry of these virtues. And, strange as it may seem to us to see the Italian woman, nowadays so indifferent to everything intellectual, set up as a model of independence, there is no doubt that Mme. de Staël is right. The ideal of well-being conveyed by the word home, is a genuine Northern, Teutonic conception, originally so foreign to the Latin races that the English word _home_ has passed into the Latin languages, because these possess no equivalent. To this conception of home corresponds the word "cosiness" (untranslatable into any Latin language), which was created to express the pleasure of being able to sit warm and comfortable within four walls. We have not far to seek for the origin of this ideal. The inhabitant of Northern Europe, living in a raw climate, amidst cold, harsh natural surroundings, finds the same pleasure in the thought of sitting by a warm hearth whilst snow and rain beat impotently on the window pane, which a Neapolitan feels in the thought of sleeping under the warm, glorious, starry sky, or passing the cool night in dance, play, and song, in the open air. But to each of these different ideals of well-being and happiness corresponds a different conception of virtues and duties, which the nation that possesses or enforces them regards as the universal conception. It considers itself the first among nations because it exacts the fulfilment of these particular duties and possesses these particular virtues (which is not surprising, seeing that both are naturally entailed by the national character), and it moreover censures all the nations whose conceptions differ from its own.

Speaking of England, Oswald asks Corinne: "How could you leave the home of chastity and morality and make fallen Italy the country of your adoption?" "In this country," Corinne replies, "we are modest; neither proud of ourselves like the English, nor pleased with ourselves like the French." It gratifies her to put both the Puritanic arrogance of the Northerner and the vain Frenchman's fear of ridicule to shame, by comparing them with the frank naturalness which the people of Italy even in their humiliation have preserved. She describes, delicately and truthfully, the touching naïveté with which the latter display their emotions. There is no stiff reserve, as in England, no coquetry, as in France; here the woman simply desires to please the man she loves, and cares not who knows it. One of Corinne's friends, returning to Rome after an absence of some duration, calls upon a distinguished lady. He is informed by the servant that "the Princess does not receive to-day; she is out of spirits, she is _innamorata_." Corinne tells how indulgently a woman is judged in Italy, and how frankly she owns her feelings. A poor girl dictates a love-letter to a writer in the open streets, and the man writes it with the utmost seriousness, never omitting to add all the polite forms which it is his business to know; hence some poor soldier or labourer receives a letter in which many tender assurances occupy the space between "Most honoured contemporary!" and "Yours with reverential respect." _Corinne_ is perfectly correct. I have myself seen such letters. And, on the other hand, it seems as if learning had not been at all unusual among the Italian women of those days. A Frenchman in _Corinne_ who calls a learned woman a pedant, receives the reply: "What harm is there in a woman's knowing Greek?"

Neither does Corinne fail to perceive that the official recognition and support of duty and morality in the North is accompanied by the greatest brutality in all cases in which the laws of society have once been transgressed. She shows how the Englishman respects no promise or relation which has not been legally registered, and how in strict England the sanctity of marriage and an irreproachable home life exist side by side with the most shameless and bestial prostitution, just as the personal devil exists side by side with the personal God. She remarks, with womanly circumspection and modesty, but yet quite plainly: "In England it is the domestic virtues which constitute woman's glory and happiness; but, granted that there are countries in which love is to be met with outside the bonds of holy matrimony, then undoubtedly among all these countries Italy is the one in which most regard is shown to woman's happiness. The men of that country have a code of morality for the regulation of those relations which are without the pale of morality--a tribunal of the heart." It is the same tribunal as that of the mediæval Courts of Love. Byron is greatly impressed when he comes to Italy and finds this complete moral code, exactly the opposite of the English. Mme. de Staël as usual tries to explain the milder morality by the milder climatic conditions; she says: "The aberrations of the heart inspire a more indulgent compassion here than in any other country. Jesus said of the Magdalen: 'Her sins, which are many, are forgiven; for she loved much.' Those words were spoken under a sky as beautiful as ours. The same sky invokes for us the same Divine mercy."

Corinne, who is herself a Catholic, teaches the Scottish Protestant who loves her, to understand Italian Catholicism. "In this country, Catholicism, having had no other religion to combat, has become milder and more indulgent than it is anywhere else; in England, on the other hand, Protestantism, in order to annihilate Catholicism, has been obliged to arm itself with the utmost severity of principle and morality. Our religion, like the religion of the ancients, inspires the artist and the poet; is a part, so to speak, of all the pleasures of our life; while yours, which has had to adapt itself to a country where reason plays a much more important part than imagination, has received an imprint of moral severity which it will always retain. Ours speaks in the name of love, yours in the name of duty. Although our dogmas are absolute, our principles are liberal, and our orthodox despotism adapts itself to the circumstances of life, while your religious heresy insists upon obedience to its laws without making any allowance for exceptional cases."

She shows how, in consequence of this, there is always a certain dread of genius, of intellectual superiority, in Protestant countries. "It is a mistaken fear," she says; "for it is very moral, this superiority of mind and soul. He who understands everything becomes very compassionate, and he who feels deeply becomes good."

"Why are great powers a misfortune? Why have they prevented my being loved? Will he find in another woman more mind, more soul, more tenderness than in me? No, he will find less; but he will be content, because he will feel himself more in harmony with society. What fictitious pleasures, what fictitious sorrows are those we owe to society! Under the sun and the starry heavens all that human beings need is to love and to feel worthy of each other; but society! society! how hard it makes the heart, how frivolous the mind! how it leads us to live only for what others will say of us! If human beings could but meet freed from that influence which all collectively exercise upon each, how pure the air that would penetrate into the soul! how many new ideas, how many genuine emotions would refresh it!"--"Receive my last salutation, O land of my birth!" cries Corinne in her swan song in praise of Rome--and one feels the bitterness of the exile and the thrust at Napoleon in the words that follow: "You have not grudged me fame, O liberal-minded people that do not banish women from your temples, that do not sacrifice immortal talent to passing jealousies! You welcome genius wherever you recognise it; for you know that it is a victor without victims, a conqueror that does not plunder, but takes from eternity wherewith to enrich time."

This sketch of the contrast between the emotional life of Catholicism and that of Protestantism prepares for a digression on the contrast between their respective views of art. On this latter point the book makes a decided attack on Protestant arrogance and want of all understanding of art, as exhibited by Oswald, who represents the narrowest English ideas.

In the midst of this plastic and musical people, who are so good-natured, so childlike, so careless of their dignity, and, according to English ideas, so immoral, Oswald, who is accustomed to regard it as the aim and end of existence to live up to certain insular conceptions of duty and dignity, feels himself very ill at ease. Devoid of all artistic feeling, he judges art now by a literary, now by a moral, now by a religious standard; his prejudices are constantly offended; he understands nothing. He notices some reliefs on the doors of St. Peter's, and great is his amazement to find that they represent scenes from Ovid's Metamorphoses, Leda with the swan, and the like! What is this but pure paganism! Corinne takes him to the Colosseum, and (in this resembling his contemporary Oehlenschläger) his one thought is that he is standing in a gigantic place of execution, his one feeling, moral indignation at the crimes here perpetrated against the early Christians. He enters the Sistine Chapel and, ignorant of the history of art, is greatly outraged that Michael Angelo has ventured to portray God the Father in ordinary human form, as though he were a Jupiter or a Zeus. He is equally scandalised on finding in Michael Angelo's prophets and sibyls none of that humble Christian spirit which he had looked for in a Christian chapel.

All this the authoress has drawn from life. Italy presupposes in her visitors a certain amount of artistic, or æsthetic, taste. There are three ways of looking at everything--the practical, the theoretical, and the æsthetic. The forest is seen from the practical point of view by the man who inquires if it conduces to the healthiness of the district, or the owner who calculates its value as firewood; from the theoretical, by the botanist who makes a scientific study of its plant life; from the æsthetic or artistic, by the man who has no thought but for its appearance, its effect as part of the landscape. It is this last, the artistic, æsthetic view, that Oswald is unable to take. He has no eyes; his reasoning power and his morality have deprived his senses of their freshness. Therefore he cannot lose sight of the substance in the form, therefore the Colosseum awakens in him only the remembrance of all the blood so wickedly spilled there. In Corinne's vindication of the æsthetic view we feel the influence of Germany, more particularly of A. W. Schlegel, the first exponent of the awakening romantic spirit in that country. For, however differently Romanticism may develop in different countries, one thing which it invariably maintains is, that the beautiful is its own aim and end, or Selbstzweck, as it was called in Germany; an idea borrowed from Kant's _Kritik der Urtheilskraft_; the vindication of beauty as the standard and true aim of art. In France this theory was expressed by the formula _l'art pour l'art_, and it makes its appearance for the first time in Denmark in certain of Oehlenschläger's poems.

But it is not only the art, but the people and the life of Italy, that must be seen with the artist's eye to be understood and appreciated. Nothing is more common than to meet in Italy, Englishmen, Germans or Frenchmen, who, seeing everything from their national point of view, have nothing but blame for everything. In the eyes of the Germans the women lack that timid modesty, that maidenliness, which is their ideal; Englishmen are shocked by the want of cleanliness and order; Frenchmen are dissatisfied with the social intercourse, the absence of conversational ability, and express contempt for the Italian prose style.

Corinne points out that the beauty of Italian women is not of a moral, but of a plastic and picturesque kind; that to appreciate it we must have an eye susceptible to colour and form, not dulled by too much poring over printed books. She contrasts Italian improvisation with French conversation, and finds it equally admirable.

A sensible people like the English cultivate and appreciate practical business qualities; an emotional people like the Germans cultivate and love music; a witty people like the French cultivate conversation--that is to say, the best in them is brought out in intercourse, in converse with others; an imaginative people like the Italians improvise--that is to say, rise naturally from their ordinary feelings into poetry. Corinne says: "I feel myself a poet whenever my spirit is exalted; when I am conscious of more than usual scorn for selfishness and meanness, and when I feel that a beautiful action would be easy to me--then it is that my verses are best. I am a poet when I admire, when I scorn, when I hate, not from personal motives, but on behalf of the whole of humanity." And she does not rest content with defending the light nightingale-song which was what the Italians at that time understood by lyrical poetry; she also accounts for the exaggerated importance attached to style and rhetorical pomp in Italian prose. She explains it partly by the love of the South for form, partly by the fact that men lived under an ecclesiastical despotism which forbade the serious treatment of any theme; they knew that it was not possible for them to influence the course of events by their books, and so they wrote to show their skill in writing, to excite admiration by the elegance of their composition--and the means became the end.

Another of the things which had shocked Oswald was Michael Angelo's representation of the Divinity and the prophets in the Sistine Chapel. In the mighty human form of Jehovah he does not recognise that invisible, spiritual divinity into which the passionate national God of the old Hebrews has been transformed by the Protestantism of the North; and where among all these proud forms with which Michael Angelo has covered the ceiling in his Promethean desire to create human beings, where among those defiant, enthusiastic, despairing, struggling figures, is to be found the humility, the meekness he expected to see? Corinne reads her countrymen a lesson, a lesson needed in other countries at this day, and especially in one like ours, where so much unintelligent talk is to be heard on the subject of Christian art and Christian æsthetics.

The passionately violent attack made by Sören Kierkegaard towards the end of his life upon so-called Christian art does not surprise us, coming as it did from a man destitute of all artistic culture. He first invests the painters of the Renaissance with his Protestant, nay, his personal, conception of religion, and is then shocked because, with this conception in the background of their consciousness, they could paint as they did. Oswald behaves in much the same way. He does not realise that the painters of the Renaissance stood in a different relation to their subjects from the painters of our day; that whereas the artists of to-day seek to gain a real understanding of their subject, and study it either from the antiquarian, the ethnological, or the psychological point of view, the artist of the Renaissance took his subject as he found it, and made of it what he fancied--that is to say, what harmonised with his character. Herein is to be found the explanation of what surprises and shocks the North--ener in the old masters. For, just as a small selection of themes taken from the Iliad and the Odyssey provided the whole of Greek art--sculpture, painting, and drama--with its subjects (it is always the same story, of Paris and Helen, of Atreus and Thyestes, or of Iphigenia and Orestes), so a score of themes from the Old and New Testament (the Fall, Lot and his Daughters, the Nativity, the Flight into Egypt, the Passion) keep brush and chisel at work in Italy for three centuries. It is such subjects alone which artists are commissioned to paint, and for long it is only for the purpose of painting such subjects that study from the nude is permitted. Men's minds develop, the subjects remain the same. The pious, naïve faith of old days is superseded by the enthusiastic humanism and reviving paganism of the Renaissance; but it is still Madonnas and Magdalens that are painted, with this difference, that the stiff Queen of Heaven of Byzantine art is transformed into an idealised peasant girl of Albano, and the woefully emaciated and remorseful sinner of Andrea del Verocchio into the voluptuous Magdalen of Correggio; the apostles and martyrs too are still depicted, but the stoned and crucified saints of olden times, painted for the purpose of exciting compassion and devotional feeling, are transformed into the St. Sebastians of Titian and Guido Reni, the beautiful young page glowing with health and beauty, the dazzling white of whose flesh is thrown into relief by one or two drops of blood which drip from an arrow-head inserted becomingly between the ribs.

Oswald is taught by Corinne to admire the liberal spirit of Italian Catholicism, which in the days of the Renaissance permitted each artist to develop his talent or genius with perfect independence, even when he only made his Christian or Jewish subject a pretext for the representation of his own personal ideal of man or woman. This brings us to another of Oswald's stumbling-blocks, namely, that blending of the Christian and the pagan which so offended him in the reliefs by Antonio Filarete on the doors of St. Peter's. The same thing is to be observed everywhere; everywhere the pagan material has been preserved and employed. The old basilicas and churches are built with the pillars of antique temples. A simple cross superficially christianises the obelisks, the Colosseum, and the interior of the Pantheon. The statues of Menander and Posidippos were prayed to as saints all through the Middle Ages.

Corinne shows Oswald that it is to this often childish, but always unprejudiced position towards the pagan and the human, that Catholicism owes the artistic glory with which it will always shine in history, a glory which will never be dimmed by the artistic performances of Protestantism. Protestantism tears down from above its altars the beautiful Albano peasant women with smiling babes at their breasts, tinder the pretext that they are Madonnas, whitewashes all the glowing pictures, and glories in bare walls.

The Italy of the Renaissance divested Christianity of its spirit of self-renunciation, of its Jewish-Asiatic character, and transformed it into a mythology, fragrant of incense, wreathed with flowers. Italian Catholicism allied itself with the civic spirit in the cities, and with all the fine arts when art was born again. Thus its interests were quite as often promoted from patriotic as from religious motives. It was in Tuscany that the Renaissance began. There humanity was born again after its fall, its renegation of Nature. There the first Italian republics were founded. There men once more willed; houses congregated and formed small, proud, indomitably liberal states, each a town with its surrounding district. Towers and spires rose into the air, erect and proud as the bearing of a free man; fortified palaces were begun, churches were completed; but the church was far more a state treasure-house, a witness to wealth, perseverance, and artistic taste, a valuable item in the rivalry between state and state, between Siena and Florence, than a dwelling-place of "Our Most Blessed Lady." Much more was done in honour of Siena than in honour of God. A Tuscan church, such as that of Orvieto, with its mosaics inlaid in gold, or that of Siena, with its façade of sculptured marble resembling the lace robe of some youthful beauty, is to us much more of a jewel-casket than a church.

Or think of the Church of St. Mark in Venice. The first time one sees it, one feels momentarily surprised by its oriental façade, its bright cupolas, its peculiar arches resting on pile upon pile of short, clustered pillars of red and green marble. After casting a glance from the piazza at the mosaics of the outside walls, rich colours on a golden ground, one enters, and one's first thought is: Why, this is all gold, golden vaulting, golden walls! The minute gilt tesseræ composing the mosaic background of all the pictures form one great plane of gold. A sunbeam falling upon it produces sparkling flecks upon the darker ground, and the whole church seems aflame. The floor, undulating with age, is composed of a mosaic of red, green, white, and black marble. The pillars, which are of reddish marble, have capitals of gilded bronze. The small arched windows are of white, not stained glass; coloured windows would be unsuitable with all this magnificence; they are for less gorgeous churches. The pillars are alternated with enormous square columns of greenish marble, at least six yards in diameter, which support gilded half-arches; each cupola rests upon four such half-arches. The smaller pillars which support altars, &c., are, some of green and red speckled marble, some of transparent alabaster. All the lower-lying marble, that, for instance, of the seats and benches running along the sides of the church and surrounding the columns, is of a bright red colour. The whole church, as seems only natural in a town whose school of painting so entirely subordinated form to colour, impresses by its picturesqueness, not by its architectural grandeur. With its gilded ornaments, its inlaid stalls, its lovely bronzes, its golden statues, candelabra, and capitals, San Marco lies there like some luxurious Byzantine beauty, heavily laden with gold and pearls and sparkling diamonds, the richest brocade covering her oriental couch.

Such a church as this was undoubtedly originally an expression of religious enthusiasm, but in the palmy days of the Renaissance, as the building became ever more and more richly ornamented, religious feeling was entirely supplanted by love of art. Very significant of this is the one inscription in the church, which is to be found above the principal entrance: "_Ubi diligenter inspexeris artemque ac laborem Francisci et Valerii Zucati Venetorum fratrum agnoveris tum tandem judicato_." (When you have diligently studied and considered all the art and all the labour which we two Venetian brothers, Francesco and Valerio Zucati, have expended here, then judge us.) A caution by the artists against hasty criticism.

The brothers Zucati were the masters in their art who in the sixteenth century executed most of the mosaics in the church, entirely, or principally, after designs by Titian. Such an inscription, which, instead of being an invitation to worship, a greeting to the faithful, a benediction, or a text of Scripture, is an appeal to the beholder to examine carefully and seriously the artistic work executed in the service of religion, would be an impossibility in or on a Protestant church.