Part 7

_O Beati Insipientes!_ You know not what safety, what peace, what comfort are gained for you by your mantle of obscurity. You know not, and you would not believe though angels and archangels descended to tell it you, that the splendour of the sunlight of fame is darkened for ever to those whose path lies through it by the shadow which follows, mimicking, prying, listening, grinning, girding, slobbering, eagerly watching for a false step, cruelly counting the thorns trodden amidst the flowers—that shadow which dogs without mercy the whole of a life, and thrusts its prying fingers through the cere-clothes of death, that shadow of merciless and malign curiosity which follows genius as the assassin followed the fair youth Crichton through the streets of Mantua: the crime of Crichton being to excel!

CITIES OF ITALY

Whatever may be the opinion of Europe as to the political advantages accruing to it from the independence of Italy, it must be mournfully confessed that the losses to art and to history through it are greater than any which could have been caused by centuries of neglect or long years of hostile occupation and devastating war. It is scarcely to be measured, indeed, what those losses are; so immense are they in their extent, so incessant in their exercise, so terrible in their irreparable infamy. No doubt it could never be foreseen, never be imagined, by those who brought about and permitted the consolidation of Italy into one kingdom, that the people, nominally free, would become the abject slaves of a municipal despotism and of a barbarous civic greed. None of the enthusiasts for Italian independence possessed that power of foresight which would have told them that its issue would be the daily destruction, by hordes of foreign workmen, of its treasures of art and its landmarks of history. Yet there is no exaggeration in saying that this, and nothing less than this, is its chief issue.

Hermann Grimm published a powerful appeal to the scholars and artists of Europe against the Italian destruction of Rome. Having for thirty years written on Italian cities and their art and history, with scholarship and devotion, he had gained the right to raise his voice in indignant protest and scorn against the mercenary and vulgar shamelessness with which the Roman municipality is so dealing with the splendid heritage which it has received, that soon scarcely one stone will be left upon another of the sacred city. He said, and with truth, that the portion of the Italian nation which has the eyes to perceive and the soul to abhor all that is being done is so small a minority, and one so spiritless, hopeless and discouraged, that it is for all practical purposes non-existent. He appealed to what he termed that larger Rome which exists in the hearts of all who have ever known Rome with a scholar’s knowledge, or an artist’s love. The appeal may be powerless but at least it may be heard; and though it will scarcely be able to pierce through the thick hide of smug vanity and rapacity in which Italian municipalities are enveloped, it will put on record the courage and the scorn of one man for what is the greatest artistic iniquity of our time. It is idle and untrue for Italians to say that the rest of Europe has no right to interfere with what they do with the legacy they enjoy. In the first place, without the aid and acquiescence of Europe, the Italian kingdom as a unity could never have existed at all; without the permission of Europe the entry into Rome could never have been made at all. Europe has the title to observe and to condemn the manner in which the superb gift, which she permitted to be given to those very various peoples who are called Italians, is being squandered away and destroyed. The United Kingdom of Italy may, as a political fact, disappear to-morrow in any European war or any great Socialistic uprising; but historic Italy, classic Italy, artistic Italy, is a treasure which belongs to the whole world of culture, in which, indeed, the foreigner, if he be reverent of her soil, is far more truly her son than those born of her blood who violate her and desecrate her altars. Italy cannot be narrowed to the petty bounds of a kingdom created yesterday; she has been the mistress of all art, the muse and the priestess of all peoples.

What are the Italians doing with her? It is sickening to note and to record. Nothing can ever give back to the world what, day by day, municipal councillors having houses to sell, syndicates and companies merely looking for spoliation and speculation, contractors who seize on the land as a trooper seizes on a girl in a sacked town, are all taking from the fairest and the most ancient cities and towns on earth. The sound of the hatchet in the woods and gardens of Italy is incessantly echoed by the sound of the pickaxe and hammer in the cities and towns. The crash of falling trees is answered by the crash of falling marbles. All over the land, destruction, of the vilest and most vulgar kind, is at work; destruction before which the more excusable and more virile destruction of war looks almost noble. For the present destruction has no other motive, object, or mainspring than the lowest greed. It is absolutely incomprehensible how, after having been the leaders and the light of the far centuries, the Italians have, by common consent and with pitiable self-congratulation, sunk to the position of the most benighted barbarism in art. In everything which is now constructed the worst and most offensive taste is manifest, whilst that which has existed for centuries is attacked and pulled down without remorse. I wholly fail to account, on any philosophic or psychological grounds, for the utter deadness of soul which has come on the Italians as a nation. Born with loveliness of all kinds, natural and architectural, around them, the æsthetic sense should be as instinctive in them as their movements of limbs or lungs. Instead of this, it is entirely gone out of them. They have no feeling for colour, no sense of symmetry, and little or no sense of reverence for the greatness and the gloriousness of the past.

The only people in whom any of the native feeling for natural and artistic beauty still exists are those country people who dwell far removed from the contagion of the towns, and the marine populations of the Veneto. But even in these it is slighter than any student of the past would expect. The sense of colour is _nil_ in most Italians; they might as well be colour-blind for any heed they take of harmony of tones. They delight in _chinoiseries_, in photographs, in crétonnes, in all the rubbish bought in modern Exhibitions. In the superb and immense halls of a palace of the Renaissance one will see priceless tapestries on the walls, antique marbles on the consoles, frescoes of Veronese, of Giulio Romano, or of Sodoma on the ceilings; and at the same time see arm-chairs and couches, some yellow, some blue, some green, some scarlet; a table-cover of crimson; and the mosaic floor covered with a worthless _moquette_ carpet of all hues, and of a set and staring pattern. I call to mind a similar palace on the Tiber, whose very name is as a trumpet-call to all the glories of the past; there the antique statues have been coloured, ‘because white marble is so cold and sad;’ an admirable copy in bronze of the Mercury of Gian’ di Bologna has had his wings, his petasus, and his caduceus gilded; and the marble floors have been taken up to have French parquet flooring laid down in their stead, and varnished so highly that the woods glisten like looking-glasses; yet the owner of and dweller in this place is a great noble, who, after his own fashion, cherishes art. I have seen a Greek Venus, found in the soil at Baiæ, wreathed round with innumerable yards of rose-coloured gauze by its owner, an Italian princess. The excuse given is, ‘_Senza un’po di tinta sta cosi fredda!_’

It is the same feeling which makes the Italian peasant say of the field-flowers which you have arranged in your rooms, ‘How well you have made those vulgar weeds look! Any one would take them now for _fiori secchi_!’ (artificial flowers). Whence comes it, this absolute blindness of the eyes, this deadening absence of all consciousness of beauty? It is the same thing in their villages and their fairs. Go to a fair on a feast-day in any part of France; go to a kermesse in Belgium or Luxembourg; go to a merry-making in Germany or Austria, and you will see a picturesque and graceful sight; you will see a great deal of what the eyes of Teniers, of Ostade, of Callot, of Mieris saw in their day. There will be harmonised colours, unconscious grace of grouping, arrangements of common goods and simple things so made that beauty is got out of them. But in a village festival in Italy there is nothing, except in the water pageants of Venice, which is not ugly; it is all dusty, uninteresting, untempting; what colours there are, are arranged with the same disregard of fitness as is shown in the yellow, red and green arm-chairs of the palace chambers; and the whole effect is one of squalor and of vulgarity. The carnivals, which used to be fine and brilliant spectacles, are now, almost all, save that of Milan, mere tawdry, trivial, unlovely follies. Who can account for this?

Are we to infer that all the transmitted influences of race count for nothing? Would those who, rightly or wrongly, are tempted to explain all the problems of life by the doctrines of heredity tell me why the living representatives of the most artistic races on earth are almost absolutely deprived of all artistic instincts? Some have suggested that it is the outcome of the artificial habits and false taste of the eighteenth century; but this can scarcely be correct, because this artificiality existed all over Europe, not in Italy alone, and besides, never touched the country people in any way or in any of their habits.

The excuse made for the utter disregard and destruction of beauty in Italy is that the utility of all things is now preferred to beauty. But this is no adequate explanation. It may explain why a dirty steamboat is allowed to grind against the water-steps of the Ca’d’Oro, or why the fair shores of Poselippo and the blue bays of Spezzia and Taranto are made hideous by steam and bricks. But it will not explain why the peasant thinks a wax or cambric flower more lovely than a field anemone or daffodil, or why the nobleman paints his Athene and gilds the wings of his Hermes. This can only be traced to the utter decay of all feeling for beauty, natural or artistic, in the Italian mind, and, though we see, we cannot adequately explain, we can only deplore, it. There is no doubt a tendency all the world over to loss of the true sense of beauty; despite the æsthetic pretences of nations, the real feeling for natural and artistic perfection is very weak in most of them. If it were strong and pure, the utilitarian (_i.e._, the money-getting spirit) would not prevail as it does in architecture, and forest solitudes would not be destroyed as they are; and men would see what hypocrites they be who make millions out of some hideous desecration of nature by factories, iron foundries, or petroleum wells, and think they can purchase condonation, and a reputation for fine taste, by buying pictures for their galleries or inlaying their halls with rare woods or stones. The whole world which calls itself civilised is guilty more or less of the most absolute barbarism; but modern Italy is guiltiest of all, even as he who has inherited a fair home and cultured intelligence is guiltier than he who has never known anything but a vitiated atmosphere and a squalid house. It is the immensity of her heritage which makes her abuse of all her opportunities so glaring and so utterly beyond pardon.

Nothing can ever give back to mankind what every day the Italian municipalities and people are destroying, as indifferently as though they were pulling down dead leaves or kicking aside anthills in the sand. There is not even the pretext for these acts that they are done to better the state of the people; to execute them the cheapest foreign labour is called in, ousting the men of the soil off it: house-rent is trebled and quadrupled, house-room narrowed, and in many instances denied, to the native population: and contracts are given away right and left to any foreign companies or syndicates who choose to bid for them. The frightful blocks of new houses, the hideous new streets, the filthy tramways, the naked new squares, are all made by foreign speculators who purchase the right of spoliation from the municipalities as the private owners of the soil. A few men are made temporarily richer: the country is permanently beggared.

‘Rome’ wrote Hermann Grimm, ‘represents for humanity a spiritual value which cannot be easily estimated, but which is none the less precious because ideal.’ Yet the vulgar and petty administration of an ephemeral moment is allowed to treat the capital of the world as though it were some settlement of shanties in the backwoods of America, fit only to disappear beneath the mallet and scaffolding of carpenters and masons. He said with justice that to call it vandalism is an injustice to the Vandals, for they, at least, were too ignorant to know the worth of what they destroyed, and acted in mere fierce instinct of conquest, with no ulterior greed; but they who are now destroying arch on arch, tower on tower, temple and church and palace, piling the sacred stones one on another like rubble, and effacing landmarks which had been respected through a thousand years, have the excuse neither of ignorance nor of war. They know not what to do, and we may add that they care not what they do, so long as their gain is made, their pockets filled.

Of all the grotesque barbarisms committed in Rome, the destruction of the cloister of Ara Cœli and of the tower of San Paolo upon the Capitol, to make room for an equestrian statue of Victor Emmanuel, has been one of the most offensive and ill-judged. All the world knows the beauty of the Capitol, the immemorial memories connected with it, and the great statue which for so many centuries has felt the Roman sunshine strike on its golden bronze. The placing of a modern statue in juxtaposition with the mighty Aurelian is an act so irredeemably vulgar, so pitiably incongruous, that it is a matter of infinite regret, even for the repute of the House of Savoy, that the present king did not peremptorily forbid such use of his father’s manes. In the Superga, or on the mountain-side of the Piedmontese Alps he loved so well, a statue of Victor Emmanuel would be in keeping with his traditions, but it is a cruelty to him to dwarf him by such surroundings and such memories as are there on the Capitol of Rome. His fame is not of the kind which can bear, uninjured, such comparisons; and were it even ten times greater than it is, there could be no excuse for using the Capitol for such a purpose when there is the whole width of the Campagna for it, and when, in perfect accord with the abilities of modern sculptors, there are all the staring and naked modern piazzas waiting for their works. Will it be credited that it was actually proposed to place a statue of him between the columns of St Mark? In these matters the king could and should, with perfect propriety, intervene, and forbid a pretended homage for his father’s memory being made a pretext and cover for the coarse and common vandalism of the epoch. In Florence, the beautiful wooded entrance of the Cascine was destroyed to make the bald, uninteresting square called the Piazza degli Zuavi, and a large, stony, open place, shadeless and unlovely, was reserved for a monument to Victor Emmanuel; for this the oval brick basement of the pedestal was raised many years ago, and there stands, unfinished and hideous, an eyesore to the city, an insult to the royal House.

There is scarcely a little town, there is no provincial capital on the whole peninsula, which has not some new, staring, stucco street named Corso Vittorio Emmanuele, or some historic and ancient square made absurd and pitiable by being re-baptised Piazza dell’ Independenza. The effect is at once ludicrous and deplorable.

If it were necessary thus to deify the events of the last thirty years, and magnify them out of their true proportions, it would have been easy to build some wholly new city in some vacant spot, which might have borne any name or names deemed fitting, and thus have left in peace the great cities of the past, and not have made the present recall the fable of the frog and the bull.

Around Rome, as well as within it, the most luxuriant vegetation, a few years ago, alternated with the most sacred ruins: tombs and temples and triumphal arches were framed in the most abundant foliage; the banksia rose, the orange, the myrtle, the jessamine climbed and blossomed amidst the ruins of the palace of the Cæsars. In all these grand gardens, in these flowering fields, in these grass meadows, stretching between their marble colonnades, there was, as the German scholar says, an infinite calm, a loveliness and stillness in which the poet and the scholar could draw near to the mighty dead who had once been there as living men. There was nothing like it left on earth. Now it is destroyed for ever. Now,—in the stead of that tender silence of the tombs, that exquisite freshness of the spring, awakening in a thousand moss-grown dells and myrtle thickets which had seen Ovid and St Paul, Augustine and Raffael--now, in the stead of this there are the stench of engines, the dust of shattered bricks, the scream of steam whistles, the mounds of rubbish, the poles of scaffolding, long lines of houses raised in frantic haste on malarious soil, enormous barracks, representative of the martial law required to hold in check a liberated people: all is dirt, noise, confusion, hideousness, crowding, clamour, avarice.

The leaders of an invading and victorious army would have been ashamed to cause the havoc and the blasphemy which the Roman municipality have carried out with shameless callousness; the indignant voice of Europe would have bidden a Suwarrow, a Napoleon, a Constable de Bourbon stay his hand, had he dared to level with the dust the august monuments of which neither the majesty nor the memories have power to daunt the impious hand of the nineteenth century Edilizia. Common faith, even, has not been kept with the Roman people in the ruin of their city; the completed plan, put before the public in 1880, of the works which were intended, did not prepare the public for one-tenth of the devastation which has been wrought. In the words of Grimm, those who put forth the plan of ’80 proposed tranquil, moderate and decent measures, and never contemplated the insensate haste, the brutal fury, the unsparing greed shown by those who, professing to accept its propositions, have utterly disregarded and far outstripped them. In the plan of ’80 it was, for instance, expressly stated and provided that certain gardens, amongst them the Ludovisi, should be purchased by the city, but kept intact in their verdure and extent. This promise has been broken.

What traveller has not known the Ludovisi Gardens? What scholar, dreamer, painter, has not found his heaven there? Those immemorial pines, making twilight beneath them in the sunniest noon, those lofty walls of bays and of arbutus, those dim, green, shadowy aisles leading to velvet swards and violet-studded banks, the family of peacocks spreading their purples, their emeralds, their gold, out in the glory of the radiant light, the nightingales singing night and day in the fragrant solitudes, Sappho’s angel in Corrinna’s gardens—who has not known these? who has not loved these? And they are gone, gone forever; gone through the greed of men, and in their stead will stand the vile rows of cheap and staring houses: in their place will reign the devil of centralisation.

Centralisation is the heart-disease of nations. The blood, driven by it from the body and the limbs, becomes turgid and congested, overfills the vessels of the heart, and chokes them up; there is no more health, and later there is death. It has been the curse of France. It will be the curse of Italy. The violated nymphs and the slaughtered nightingales of the ruined gardens will be avenged. But what solace is that to us? We have lost them forever. No power on earth can give them back to us.

There is a violation of that sentiment which the Latins called Piety, so glaring, and so monstrous, in the destruction of Rome by the Italians, that it dwarfs all similar ruin being wrought elsewhere. All over Italy things are daily being done which might wring tears from the statues’ eyes of stone.[A]

Footnote A:

A Zoological Menagérie has been placed in the park of the Villa Borghese!

After the outrage to Rome, the injury done to Venice is the most irreparable, the most inexcusable.

The wanton destruction of the island of Saint Elena is, after the destruction of the Ludovisi and other historic gardens in Rome, the most disgraceful act of the sacrilege of modern Italy. It is barbarism without one shadow of excuse or plea of obligation. This loveliest isle had been spared by all hostile fleets and armies. It lies at the very mouth of the lagoon opening out from the Grand Canal. It arrests the eyes of all who go to and fro the Lido. It was, a little while ago, a little paradise of solitude, fragrance and beauty. Its thickets of wild rose, of jessamine, and of myrtle, were filled with song-birds. Its old church, the oldest in the Veneto, stood, grey and venerable, amidst the shade of green acacias and flowering oleanders. The little world of blossom and of melody, hung between the sea and sky, had a holiness, a pathos, a perfection of woodland loveliness not to be told in words; there no sound was heard except the bells of the matins and vespers, the lapping of the waves, the whir of the white gulls’ wings, and the echo of some gondolier’s boating song. To sit in its quiet cloisters, with the fragrance of its wild gardens all around, and see the sun set beyond Venice, and the deep rose of evening spread over the arch of the skies and the silver plain of the waters, was to live a little while in the same world that Giorgione and Veronese knew. It seems like a vision of a nightmare to find these cloisters levelled and these gardens and trees destroyed; the whole island made a grimy, smoking mound of clay and ruins. Yet thus it is. The government has chosen to make it a site for a factory and foundry; and, not content with this defilement, is throwing up, upon it and beside it, acres of the stinking sand and clay dredged up from the canals, intending in due time to cover this new soil with other factories and foundries, full in the face of the Ducal Palace, a few furlongs from the Piazza of St Mark. Viler devastation was never more iniquitously or more unpardonably wrought.

Meantime the very commonest care is refused to such interesting and priceless houses as the House of the Camel, which is let out to a number of poor and dirty tenants, with its eponymus alto-relievo made the target for the stones of the children; while in the same quarter of the Madonna dell’ Orta, close at hand, a manufacturer is allowed to send the mouths of his steam-tubes hissing through the iron arabesques and between the carved foliage of a most noble Gothic doorway belonging to a deserted church.