Chapter IX: Part 9

That the Italian nation is immovable is not true: for good or evil it moves as its great son Gallileo said of the earth. The fault, the peril, lie the other way. It is to be feared that the Italian people run the risk of losing their finest instincts, and their most gracious characteristics, through the exaggerated and obsequious imitation of foreign peoples, and by a too ready adoration of new things merely because they are new. They are the ideals of many a modern Italian. Guglielmo Ferrero has dedicated many hundreds of pages to the celebration of their perfections. I believe that such worship is chiefly founded on illusion, for it is as easy to cherish illusions about a steam mill as about a mediaeval saint.

Let us look at the actual situation of Great Britain, setting aside her imperialist swagger, and regarding only facts. The English themselves admit that if a European naval coalition succeeded in preventing grain reaching their shores from America and the colonies, the nation in a fortnight would want bread. Is that an ideal or a safe position? If, in a sea-war, the British fleet would be successful is wholly uncertain, since no one can say how the metal battleships would behave in any distress; the manoeuvres have not shed much light upon this question, and many of the marine monsters, as regards their utility in active warfare, are still unknown quantities. Equally uncertain is what would be the conduct of the Indian population were Great Britain vanquished in any great war, for the majority of the peoples of Hindostan most unwillingly endure through coercion the yoke of the British rule.

In Ireland there is a racial hatred which nothing can extinguish, and only demands a favourable occasion to show itself. Canada may any day embroil England with the United States; and so may the West Indies, and the Nebraskan and Nicaraguan questions; and so may Newfoundland with France, and East or West Africa with Germany. In every part of the globe Great Britain has on her hands conquests, colonies, intrigues, enemies, open questions, and concealed questions, of every kind. Her greed is great, and her entanglements are innumerable. There are many weak points in her fortifications. To meet her obligations she is obliged to use legions of Asiatics, or Africans, or employ as mercenaries men from her distant colonies, or send the soldiers of one vanquished nation to help vanquish another. Thus did Imperial Rome, and so went to her undoing. Doubtless Great Britain is rich, powerful, strong, proud, and vain. So was Rome; so was Spain. It is possible, even probable, that at some, perhaps not distant day, Great Britain also will give way under the enormous weight of her self-sought responsibilities, and the still more ponderous weight of her many enemies.

Internally, also, England is not what she used to be. The old nobility is elbowed out of prominent place by a new aristocracy which has been created entirely on a money basis. Every ministry, when going out of office, creates a new batch of titled rich men, lifted into the Lords in return for political or financial service. Wealth is now the dominant factor of English social life; and a commerce, wholly unscrupulous, is the sole scope of the tawdry and noisy empire of which Joseph Chamberlain is the standard-bearer.

What is there in all this to admire or to imitate?

Again we have seen that in the United States, since they abandoned their wise policy of non-intervention in external affairs, the national life resembles the English, is vain, boastful, hypocritical, cruel, and bellicose. The thirst of gain devours the nation. There is no other land in which the contrast between rich and poor is so sharp and terrible; none in which millions are thrown away with more frightful indifference and conceited display. Lynch law in all its horror reigns over many provinces, and unblushing corruption mounts into the highest places and poisons all the sources of national life. Guglielmo Ferrero stands stupefied before their innumerable newspaper offices, which he says use up every day as much paper as would go round the circumference of the earth! But he forgets, or ignores, that the literary quality of those journals is usually of the poorest and vulgarest kind, and that the chief part of their columns is filled by advertisements. He is also transfixed with rapture before the colossal houses which Americans call sky-scrapers, and sees the revelation of a stupendous genius in their passion for what is big, costly, eccentric; nor does he hesitate to compare it with the Florentine and Venetian genius!

Actually there was never on earth two more different kinds of creation than these; never one more absolutely soulless, and one more nobly penetrated by the soul. The genius of the Italian masters was lofty, generous, at once humble and sublime, never interested, always consecrated to Art and Country; the skill of the American constructors has no other scope than that of getting money, of making the world stare, of producing the huge, the gross, the extravagant, the enormous, and labours for only one God, the venal Mercury of the market-place. In these new cities, so vehemently extolled, with their towering constructions which hide the smoke-obscured clouds, and their network of electric wires, of railways in the air, and trams running across each other, there is not the faintest spark of that divine light which is called Liberty. Americans boast of their freedom, but it only exists in words; it has no abiding place outside a boisterous rhetoric. The old Puritanism still exists in religious bigotry and persecution; office is bought and sold; justice is a matter of money; private life suffers from conventionalities and social tyrannies innumerable; political and municipal elections are the work of a Caucus. A man cannot drink, or stir, or do aught without his neighbour knowing and judging what he does; even marriage is to be made a matter for doctors to allow or disallow; the whole press is but a gigantic Paul Pry, a vast Holy Office where the persecution by the pen ends in the execution by the revolver.

Such is American liberty.

What can Italy learn from such a model?

Amongst the maladies of the brain known in this day is one which is called the mania of grandeur. It seems to me that not only individuals, but entire nations, are possessed by it. It is perilous and contagious. Italy has already been inoculated by its virus.

There is also everywhere a fatal tendency to open the door of Italy to every foreign syndicate, and every foreign speculation, which puts forward a prospectus or launches shares on the market. The preponderance of Jews is enormous as owners of ground rents and estates in Italy; the chief part of Italian cities and towns is owned by Jews; and the greater number of the industries of all kinds in the country are in the hands of foreigners, like the newly-projected mining enterprise in Elba. If these mines be worth the working, why does not Italy work them herself, and take all the profits?

These facts are not due to any immovability; but to a dangerously lax tendency to run into foreign roads. The Italian Faust is only too susceptible to the invitations of the foreign Mephistopheles.

On the other hand a very marked inclination in the Italian is towards the modern forms of co-operation and communism. This tendency is not due in any way to the influence of the past, but to that mixture of jealousy and envy, of hatred of the rich, and detestation of labour, and of humble ways and of poor means, which is as general in Italy as it is everywhere else in our time, and which is the modern translation of the old classic clamour for Panem et Circenses. Is it towards this already popular communism that Professor Sergi would direct the Italian nation? The direction is already taken, and does not need his propulsion. If there be one thing more certain than another in the Italy of to-day it is the preference of a large proportion of the people for different forms of socialism and collectivism; and the persecution these doctrines receive lends them a dangerous force. At the same time as it persecutes them, the State, with strange self-stultification, recognises and grants one of the largest and most insolent of socialistic and communistic demands, _i.e._, that for the expropriation of private land in the Agro Romano, and in the various latifundi in Sicily and elsewhere; and thus opens the door either to a most high-handed and unjust spoliation, or to an agrarian civil war in a not distant future.

Again, the most terrible disease of modern society--corruption--is not due to the past in Italy or anywhere else; it exists wherever men exist, and is as general in the republic of France or of the United States as under the autocracy of Russia or of Persia. The Italian disasters of Eritrea were due rather to corruption than to incapacity. When the mules were bought in Naples for 100 lire per head, and sold to the State at 500 lire per head, the battle of Abba-Garima, called by English people the battle of Adowa, was lost before it was fought.

Professor Sergi speaks of the defeat of Abba-Garima as a proof of the decay of the Italian race; but this is a very unfair deduction. As well might the continual defeats of the British in the first months of the present war in South Africa be held as a proof of British poltroonery. Any shortcomings which may have existed in the Italian army in Abyssinia, and exist at home, are, moreover, certainly not to be traced to old-world influences; or to any emasculating tenderness for tradition. There is no reverence for the armies of the past in the actual Italian army, for it is unlike any of them; it does not resemble the armies of the Duchies, or of the Republics, or of the Florentine Carraccio, or of the Lombard trained bands, or of the levies of the Neapolitan Bourbons, or of the legions of Varus. The only model it resembles is that idol of its commanders, the German Army, on which it is shaped and governed, in all the cut-and-dried narrowness and hardness inseparable from the German system. All this may be considered to be inevitable now, but modern militarism is unsuited to the character of Italians, and reacts injuriously on the genius and temper, and physical and mental life, of the people.

Unhappily militarism is the most conspicuous and the most tenacious of all modern influences, and the failure of the Conference of the Hague so immediately followed by the war of aggression in South Africa, is a sad and irrefutable proof that the nations are not in the least likely to free themselves from its yoke.

Taking the modern temper in its civil systems, as in its military, it does not seem to me any better adapted to the Italian idiosyncrasies; and all its worst features already exist in all which is here called government. Italian legislation confounds perpetually regulations with laws; is fidgeting, irritating, inquisitorial, insolent, harassing; its tyranny spoils the lives of the populace; by means of its agents it penetrates into all the privacies of family life; its perpetual interference between father and son, between master and man, between mother and child, between buyer and seller, between youth and free choice, between marriage and celibacy, between the man who takes a walk and the dog who goes with him, constitutes incessant causes of irritation, and is a perpetual menace which lowers over the popular life from sunrise to sunset, and scarcely even leaves in peace the hours of the night.[13]

[Footnote 13: The other evening, in a theatre in Messina, a young gentleman expressed aloud his disapprobation of the performance; a person near bade him hold his tongue; the young man answered the rudeness with a blow; the person immediately produced a pair of handcuffs and clapped them on; he was a detective in plain clothes! The Italian of whatever rank he be can never be sure that he is not shadowed. The apprehension poisons existence to the most innocent.]

More or less there is too much of this in all modern nations, but in Italy it is especially odious, being in such absolute antagonism to the courtesy and gaiety, and warm domestic affections, natural to the Italian public, and a source of continual fret and friction to it both in pleasure and in pain.[14]

[Footnote 14: At Palermo in the April of this year it has been decreed by municipal edict that, as it is contrary to hygiene for the petticoats of women to sweep up the dust of the streets in which the spittal of the sufferers from tuberculosis may have fallen and dried in the sun, all women who walk in Palermo are to shorten their skirts! Health, it is austerely added, is more important than fashion!]

There is certainly no necessity to incite Italians to admiration of foreign products and inventions. Such enthusiasm is only too general, and too blind, at least in that portion of the nation which is under the influence of the schools, the press, and the universities. An electrical machine has many more admirers than the bell-tower of Giotto, and a shop-window of a Bon Marche than the Palace of the Doges. The modern temper, cynical, trivial, avaricious, vulgar, which now discolours human life as the _oidium_ discolours the leaves of the vines, has affected too deeply the Italian mind, and has dried up its natural sense of, and capacity for, beauty. The glorious cities of Italy have been ruined by scandalous disembowelling; its ancient small towns are made ridiculous by electric light and steam tramways; the useful and picturesque dress of its peasantry is abandoned for the ugly and stupid clothes of modern fashion, cut out of the shoddy cloths furnished by English manufacturers; and this want of good sense, of good taste, of all true instincts towards form and colour, is a moral and mental malady due to that contagion of foreign influence which has poisoned Italy as it has poisoned Japan and India, Africa and Asia.

Therefore every counsel to her to follow modern impulses is pernicious. She is but too ready to do so, believing that, by this way, riches lie. Moreover, the advice to the Italians to rise, and change, and follow new paths, seems to me at the present time a cruel derision; because the Italian who gives it must be well aware that the nation is not free to do anything or make any change. It is not even allowed to speak. No public meeting can gather together without intervention of the police. The press cannot publish any opinions which are disapproved of by the Government without incurring sequestration of the journal, perhaps imprisonment of editor, writer, and printer. Where, then, can any fresh field be found in which to plant any flowers of thought with any hope to see them root and blossom in action? The hand of the Public Prosecutor would pluck them up before they could stretch out a single fibre.

Take that question so dear to the country; the question of Italia Irredenta. Where could it be discussed in public without 'authority' intervening and silencing the speakers? Professor Sergi forgets, or avoids, to say that in Italy the first conditions of a 'movement on new lines' are wanting; civil liberty is wanting, and free speech and free acts are forbidden. Who can walk out into the country when barriers block up the end of every street? On the man, as on the dog, under pretence of public safety, the muzzle is fastened, and by its enforced use all health is destroyed.

The Italian of our time is too quickly intimidated, forgets too soon, wears the rosette in his button-hole when he should put crape round his arm, dances with too ready an indifference on the grave of his hopes and of his friends. To form a virile character there is no education so good as the exercise of political and civil liberty; this education is but little given anywhere; it is not given at all between Monte Rosa and Mount Etna. The Italian is by nature too ready to be over-anxious and over-distressed at trifles; he thinks too much of trifling difficulties and the petty troubles of the hour; he is quickly discouraged, he is soon overwhelmed with despair, he has small faith in his own star, and he has not the elasticity and rebound of the Gaulois temper. Nothing therefore can possibly be worse for him than the kind of galling public tutelage and the perpetual molestation in which he is condemned to live; always esteemed guilty, or likely to be guilty, however harmless he may be. It is illogical to condemn a nation for having no virility of character, when the systems under which it is reared, and forced to dwell, destroys its manhood, and forbid all independence of thought, speech, and action.

Let us take for instance that uninteresting person, a small tradesman, native and citizen of any Italian town; in all his smallest actions relative to his little shop, such, for instance, as altering or re-painting his signboard, he must obtain the permission of his Municipality. If he venture to clean or refurbish his board without authorisation, he will receive a summons and be compelled to pay a fine. The same kind of torment occurs in a dozen other daily trifles, magnified into crimes and visited with condign punishment; and, inevitably, the worried citizen becomes timid, nervous, and either afraid or incapable of judging or acting for himself. You cannot keep a man in the swaddling clothes of infancy and expect him to walk erect and well.

A shopkeeper, a tailor in Florence, known to me, cut the cord with which a municipal dog-catcher had throttled his dog; he did no more; he was immediately arrested, dragged off to prison, and kept there for months without trial: when tried he was condemned to four months of prison and a heavy fine.

Herbert Spencer has said, 'Govern me as little as you can'; _i.e._, leave me to regulate my existence as I please, which is clearly the right of every man not a criminal. The Italian is, however, 'governed to death,' and tied up in the stifling network of an infinity of small ordinances and wearisome prohibitions. In the sense, therefore, in which the sufferer from tuberculosis may be said to want health, the Italian may be accused of wanting spirit; but this is not the sense of the reproach of Professor Sergi. Professor Sergi, like so many others of his teachers and masters, desires to propel him along a road which has already cost him dear. How many millions has it not cost in the last score of years, that fatal weakness of Italians for imitating others? The rural communes of the country have more than a milliard of debts, almost all due to the senseless mania for demolition, for novelty, for superfluous alterations and imitations, works worse than useless, commended or proposed by the Government, and eagerly accepted by the communal and provincial councils, since each member of these hoped to rub his share of gilding off the gingerbread as it passed through his hands. All the vast sums thus expended are all taken out of the enormous local and imperial taxation, are divided between contractors, engineers, members of the town and county councils, lawyers, go-betweens, and all the innumerable middlemen who swarm in every community like mites in cheese, at the same time that the poor peasant is taxed at the gates for a half-dozen of eggs, or a bundle of grass, and the poor washerwoman carrying in her linen has her petticoats pulled up over her head by a searcher to ascertain if she have nothing saleable or taxable hidden on her person. These are new ways, no doubt; but they are ways on which walk the ghost of ruin and the skeleton of famine.

If it be true, as Professor Sergi considers, that Italy can never hope to extend her conquests and her commerce as northern and western nations will do, then it is surely all the more needful to hold her own place in the world by the culture and development of her own natural genius. A nation, like a person, should be always natural; to be fashioned on others is to be without any confidence in oneself, and lose one's equilibrium in the stress of every difficulty. The rigid and indigestible character of modern education is not adapted, I repeat, to the Italian temperament, which is _prime-sautier_, subtle but inflammatory, impressionable but unresisting, and loses enormously when it is shut down in the hot stove of the so-called 'highest studies.' Even the national manners, naturally so graceful and charming in all ranks of Italian society, lose their suavity, their ease, their elegance, under the influence of the foreigner and the vulgarity of modern habits. Good taste passes away with good manners; and pigeon-shooting, sleeping-cars, automobiles, bicycles and tramway crowds bring with them the breeding suitable to them; and the modern monuments, the modern squares, the modern houses, the whitewash daubed on old walls, the cast-iron bridges spanning classic waters, the straight, featureless, glaring, dusty streets, the electric trolleys cutting across ancient marbles, all conduce to make ignoble what was noble, and belittle all which was great.

All this is not the fault of a too reverent admiration for an incomparable Art, for a glorious history; it is a much worse thing; it is an oblivion of both history and art, ingrate, unworthy, and ruinous.

Many say that Italians are unfit for freedom; it is certain that they have never been tried by it. Whatever their government is called, freedom is unheard of under its rule. Year after year, century after century, all the Italian provinces, however differently governed, have been held down under an absolutism more or less disguised. The general character, with heroic exceptions, has been inevitably weakened. The man of easy temper and pleasure-loving disposition consoles himself with amusement; the serious man seeks refuge in study or in science; one and all accept inaction as their lot. A political _camorra_ guides the chariot of the State, and the people draw aside, and stand silent, only hoping to escape being crushed under its wheels. Professor Sergi must be well aware of this sad truth; then why speak to Italy as if she were a free country, why speak to her of expansion and vitality when he sees her without power to purge herself of the fiscal and constitutional disease which is in her blood?

With as much reason might he chain up a greyhound, and bid him course the hare; clip the wings of a skylark, and bid it mount to the clouds.

XIII

ALMA VENIESIA

'Our cities are fast losing their best characteristics,' said Pompeo Molmenti at Montecitorio, in one of those eloquent speeches which the Chamber hears often from him, and hears, alas! always in vain. His name is no doubt known to many English readers although his beautiful books are not as widely read outside the peninsula as they merit. His conspicuous position as President of the Venetian Academy has perhaps in a manner obscured, out of Italy, his infinite merits and vast erudition as a writer on history and art, and even Wyzewa reproaches him with making Venice too exclusively his universe. But surely Venice is wide enough, and great enough, to be the world of a man penetrated from his earliest years with her beauty, and with the grandeur of her past, and who, in his childhood, saw, accomplished by his seniors, that union of Venice to northern and central Italy, which raised such high hopes and caused such glorious dreams.

His works are, as I have said, but little known in England, not known at least as the classic scholarship, the historic learning and the artistic erudition of their writer deserve; nor are the debates of the Italian Chamber truthfully enough represented in the English press for the brilliant oratory of the deputy for Salo to have found any echo in English ears. Many-sided as great Italians usually are, politics, literature, and history alike claim his allegiance, and art is his adored mistress. Eloquent, dauntless, and sarcastic, his periods pierce like arrows and lash like scourges, whether he condemns the miserable blasphemies of the modern spirit, or holds up to mockery such individual vanity as that of the Under-Secretary of State, who caused his own name and titles to be cut under a verse of Dante's on one of the stones of the church of S. Francesco at Assisi!

I can imagine nothing more painful than for a man of fine taste and high culture, born and bred in such a city as Venice, venerating every shadow on its waters, the moss upon its walls, to be forced to see, day by day, roll up and break over it the mud-wave of modern barbarism. So may have watched, from the marble atrium of his villa, some Roman patrician of the days of Honorius the approach, upon the golden horizon, of the unlettered tribes drawing nearer and nearer as the sun descended, to burn, to slaughter, to deflour, to desecrate. 'Great and sublime attainment would be his who should save Venice from the dreadful menace now hanging over her!' cries Pompeo Molmenti, with the bitter consciousness that none will succeed in that endeavour, since her lot is now cast in times when her treasures of art are in the hands of tradesmen and speculators, to whom her past glory is naught.

His years have been passed amongst her art and her disciples of art; he has watched the spoilers at their work amongst her treasures, and, with the grief of a son who beholds his mother dishonoured, he has been overwhelmed in these most recent times by the indignity and injustice of her lot.

She shares that lot with her sisters; the burden of her chains lies also on them; every city throughout the peninsula from Monte Rosa to Mount Etna has been insulted, dishonoured, defamed, defiled, even as she herself. But Venice is threatened with something still more than this; she is threatened with absolute extinction. There are schemes now simmering in the brains of speculators by which she will disappear as completely as one of her own fishing-boats, when it is sucked under the sea, canvas, and timbers, and crew, in a night of storm.

A few weeks ago, Molmenti gave the solitary vote against the destruction of more of the Calle, and the establishment of a night service of steamers on the Canalezzo. The record of that single unsupported vote is his own highest honour, and the shame of his contemporaries and co-citizens. But he wrestles in vain with the forces of cupidity and stupidity. Whether in the Council Chamber of Venice, or in the Parliament of Montecitorio, he strives in vain to resist the trampling hoofs of those devastating barbaric hordes which a pseudo civilisation vomits over his country.

What he justly calls the burial of the lagoons goes on every day; loads of clay and sand and stones being poured into that silent water which so lately mirrored walls which were green with the hart's-tongue, penny-wort, and ivy-leaved toad's-flax, and reflected statues white through ages in the dustless air, shining acacia leaves, boughs of fig and laurel, carved niches, illumined shrines; the rubble and the rubbish are shot down into the canals which are chosen for extinction, and the walls are scraped, the acacias, the fig-trees, the laurels are cut down, the fruit-boat, the _sandalo_, the bridal gondola, are pushed out of the way by the brick-laden launches; where marble fretwork crossed the air, there is a cast-iron pontoon, and higher still a telephone wire; under foot there is a paved or macadamised way. Marco Polo could not find his house now; it still exists, but all around it is disfigured, dismantled, defaced.

The Palazzo Narni and the Ponte del Paradiso made, a few years ago, together one of the most beautiful corners in the world; go look at that spot now; it is enough to make the grey-beard of Cadore rise from his grave. There still remains on high, between the two houses, the admirable cuspide of the Trecento, on which there is sculptured the Madonna, who opens wide her mantle and her cloak to receive the kneeling people; but the beautiful bridge has been destroyed, and in its place has been built a frightful structure, with asphalte roadway and painted metal parapet. In similar manner the elegant, yet bold, arches of the three bridges at S. Nicolo di Tolentino exist nowhere, now, except upon the canvases of painters, and the three banks, near the Campo di Marte, which those graceful arches united, are now basely conjoined by three erections of stucco and cast-iron.

'In the _Arzere_ of Santa Marta,' Molmenti writes in his latest
work, 'once so green and gay and sunlit, a poor quarter no
doubt, but one intensely interesting by customs and traditions,
there blocks the way now, in all its stolid vulgarity, a cotton
factory. Between the public gardens and the Lido, instead of
the lovely verdure of the island of Sant' Elena, in its grace
and its green twilight of drooped boughs, is a shapeless
expanse of mud and cinders, which spreads farther every season,
and threatens to invade the water-space which separates it from
the gardens and S. Pietro di Castello. On this desert of coke
and dirt there have been lately erected offices, sheds,
warehouses, chimneys, engines, in the midst of which there
still stands, hiding as though ashamed, the beautiful church of
the Quattro Cento. But the invasion has been useless; the
speculations have failed; and art and history mourn
unavailingly the senseless and profitless destruction of this
fairest gem of the lagoons: _insularum ocellus_. The ruin of
Sant' Elena, of the view of San Giorgio, of the bridge of San
Lio, the hideous new wing added to the noble brown marbles of
the Pal Tiepolo, the hideous iron warehouse fronting and
affronting the Ca d'Oro, the whitewash daubed on the Pal
Sagredo, the indecent alterations and additions to that jewel
of Pietro Lombardo the Pal Corner-Spinelli, the new red (like
ruddle or red ochre) with which the Pal Foscari has been
insulted, these are all offences which every traveller of
taste, every artist of culture, can see, and number, and
denounce. But countless, and unknown to the world in general,
and undreamed of by those who knew not Venice fifteen years
ago, is the enormous loss to the city by the destruction at the
hands of the Muncipal Councillors of the _Calli_, of the
_Arzere_, of the mediaeval bridges, as of those of which I have
spoken above, of innumerable nooks and corners, historical and
beautiful; old wells, old fountains, old shrines, beautiful
fragments of sculpture and fresco, solemn convent walls,
graceful church spires and monastic belfries, parapets, arches,
doorways, spiral staircases winding up to hand-forged iron
balconies, lamps of metal-work fine as lace-work, all these in
innumerable numbers have been effaced, pulled down, built over,
or sold; and, above all, there have been destroyed those lovely
quiet green places, called each _il Campo_ or _il Campiello_
(the field or the little field), where, of old, the Venetians
fed their sheep, stretches of grass enclosed by old houses, old
convents, old towers, old quays, old bridges, with always a
sculptured well in the centre of each, and the splash of oars
near at hand.'

These have nearly all had a similar fate to that of the beautiful house in the Campo di S. Margherita, which Molmenti especially laments, of which the Venetian colouring, the carven galleries, the climbing vines, the bronze railing, the falling water with its spouting jets, have all disappeared, to give place to a yellow, plastered modern building, while its basso-relievo of the Virgin, so long dear to all artists, has been sold to a picture dealer.

'One must be blind indeed,' writes Molmenti, 'not to see the
horrible misgovernment of Venice in this latter half of the
century, and persons still young can remember a Venice poetic,
picturesque, filled with fascination and mysterious charm, now
destroyed for no other reason than a senseless and brutal craze
for novelty.'

What language can strongly enough denounce such wicked and insensate acts?

He quotes the well-known lines of Philippe de Commines as to the 'most triumphant city' that he had ever seen, 'the most beautiful street' (the Canal Grande) 'that there could be found in all the world'; and he adds, 'the stranger who comes now into this street only finds himself in a vast alley of shopkeepers.'

The Canalezzo is now, indeed, as he says, little more than a huge bazaar of tradesmen and dealers in curios, in which hundreds of advertisements, in many-coloured posters, announce the wares which are now for sale within the ancient palaces. The syndicate of foreign traders, now being established in Venice, will achieve its degradation.

Italian ministers and Italian municipalities are often accused of not encouraging warmly enough English, German, and American tradesmen and manufacturers to establish themselves in Italy, and of putting upon foreign commercial establishments in Italy a prohibitive taxation; the truth is that it would be much better were such foreign firms discouraged more effectively. It is urged on their behalf that they bring capital into the country; they may do so, but only to take it out again for their own profit, and Italian labour sweats and groans only that some millionaire of Eaton Square or Fifth Avenue may increase his wealth, whilst at the same time Italian tradespeople, trading in their own right, on their own soil, are undersold by the shop-keeping and store-keeping Briton and Yankee.

I am far from entire agreement with Molmenti in many of his views (as for instance his admiration of English pre-Raphaelism), but I am wholly with him in his views of the claims of Venice, and of the sacrilege which is destroying her; wholly with him in his severe and scornful denunciation of what he rightly calls the _gretta e meschina arte dei nostre tempi_ (the mean and trivial art of modern times), and of the modern density of perception and invulnerable self-conceit which render it impossible for the modern mind to appreciate harmony of hues and of proportions, and impossible for the modern architect to place a new building beside an ancient one without injury or vulgarity. Giotto could place his church at Padua on the remains of the Roman amphitheatre, with perfect unity, although in absolute contrast. When a modern mind has sufficient intuition to enable it to admire a work of other times, it can think of no better way of showing its admiration than to desire to pull down all the houses in its vicinity to lay it bare.

Molmenti says, with entire truth, 'It is a supreme duty for the few, who are capable of feeling them, to assert the sentiment of, and respect for, Art against the destructive and impious tendencies of the time.'

But, alas! it is labour of Sisyphus.

There is now under consideration a scheme to make a tramway-road raised on piles from Mestre to Venice parallel with the line now followed across the lagoon by the railway. It is difficult to comprehend the motives and views of persons who desire to turn a beautiful water-city into a commonplace land one, or rather it is easy to perceive that the motive inspires the views, since nothing but the greed of concessionaires and of contractors could ever have evolved such a plan out of any human mind.

The concessionaire and the contractor are the modern representatives of ghouls and vampires of old-world romance. Truly, to them, as to the Sabreur of Offenbach, nothing is sacred. They are guided entirely by their lust of percentage, and to this they are ready to sacrifice every other consideration; indeed, no other consideration exists for them. They have settled on Italy for many years past as they are now settling on Abyssinia. Venice is essentially a water-city; dealt with as land cities are, under the present system, it will not only be disfigured and mutilated like them, but it will be swept away; it will cease to be. The world will have in its stead a dreary, dingy, trading port, with warehouses, factories, docks, grain elevators, electric works, all the polluted, crowded, discoloured, monotonous frightfulness which you can have now at any moment on any coastline of the United States of America. The Venice of Giambellini and the Veronese will be no more; you will have in its stead a petty maritime Pittsburg.

At the present moment Molmenti has successfully combated this Mestre project, but as the abominable scheme of the night steamers on the Canalezzo, and the pontoon under S. Zeno, was almost unanimously _rejected_ four times by the Venetian Council, yet, on its presentation a fifth time, was _accepted_ (unacknowledged influences having been at work), it is impossible to all those who love Venice as she merits not to feel the greatest anxiety. For these speculators resemble the Roentgen rays, and find means to penetrate through closed doors and all other barriers. Iron still resists the Roentgen rays, and such iron the speculators find now and then opposed to them in the scorn of such men as the Count Antonio Dona della Rosa, who dismissed with offence and disdain the offer of two millions in gold for the purchase of the historic tapestries of his palace in Venice.

Were there only fifty such men as Count Dona in every Italian province they would be able to hold in check the rage of destruction. But the character of Count Dona is very rare in these days anywhere, and grows rarer with every decade. The sordid Mephistopheles of a buyer usually finds as sordid a temper in the Faust of a seller whom he tempts. This may be a temper which enriches individuals; it is not one which ennobles or elevates a nation: and frequently not even individual wealth is realised for any length of time by the base barter, for the gambling on the Bourse, or at the club-house, often makes the ill-got gains vanish almost as soon as they are obtained. Such persons as find no attraction in either form of gambling, unhappily for the most part, shrink from action and from public life. Few have the courage of Molmenti, who throws himself into the strife careless of what enmity he incurs, and rarely even buoyed up by any hope of success in his efforts, since to weave ropes of sand were scarcely more hopeless labour: it is impossible to succeed in any public work where there is no response to your appeal from the multitudes. And the voices of those who do secretly respond in feeling are dumb in Italy; people are afraid to speak; they are intimidated by the cry cast against them of want of energy, and of enmity to progress (progress, good heavens! a gin-shop instead of a temple!); they are afraid to be called reactionary, romantic, unpatriotic; and in municipal government, as in other government, everything is done by the wire-pullers, the money-grubbers, the speculators.

The timid public huddles together, mute, submissive, and afraid, shorn of its fleeces like a flock of sheep, but not daring to complain.

Those who do so dare are either ignored, or, if they give trouble, are repressed. The gondoliers of Venice have again and again risen against the ruin of their livelihood by the 'black devils' of the _vaporetti_, but force is at once called in and they are brutally silenced, flung into prison, and deprived of their licence, _i.e._, of their daily bread. Because it is so picturesque a calling, and the balancing of the oar looks so easy a work, those who are outside it do not realise the hardships of a gondolier. In summer, if Venice be full, it is well enough, and brings a fair, though never a high, wage; but in the other seasons it is a life of great and continual exposure and fatigue. In cold weather, and Venice is intensely cold in the winter solstice, the long vigils on the _traghetto_ are most tedious and trying, especially through the long chill nights. When the icy winds blow in from the Alps or the Adriatic, the gondolier stands exposed to all their fury, whilst the passenger he carries sits warm and sheltered under the felze.

Strong and lithe in form, often handsome in feature, almost invariably intelligent and acquainted with legend and verse, invariably courteous and well-bred, the gondolier should have received the utmost attention from his rulers. It is painful to know that no body of men has ever been so slighted, so injured, and so wantonly outraged.

There is nowhere any more interesting and deserving community than the Venetian gondoliers, and few more worthy of regard; yet they have been dealt with as though they were no more than so much scum of the sea. Their long-established rights receive no consideration, and their injuries no compensation.

If the vote of Venice could have been honestly polled, no steam-boat would ever have been allowed on the Grand Canal, as, if the vote of Florence could have been honestly polled, the centre of Florence would be now standing untouched, and would have remained untouched for many a generation.

Meanwhile, it is said, by those competent to judge, that the great Murazzi, which protect Venice from the onslaught of the sea in winter storm, and which we all know so well as we pass out from the Lido by the Bar of Malamocco to Chioggia, are being dangerously undermined by the attacks of the high tides in rude weather, and require costly and immediate repair. It is in vain that this most necessary work is urged upon the Government in Rome. The Government neither undertakes it itself, nor allows Venetians to undertake it. For any foolish, needless disfiguring work, such as the installation of the electric light in the ducal palace, against which Venetians in vain protested, the Government is always ready to waste millions. But for a work of obvious and vital necessity, such as that of the strengthening of the Murazzi, it has not a soldo to spare.

The architecture of Venice has the fragility as it has the fairness of the dianthus or the gemmia of the sea; its walls and buttresses and foundations are plunged into salted, sanded mud; its piles grow green and brown and purple with weed; its snowy marbles and its ruddy stones are mirrored in rippling or in stagnant water; they tremble under the vibrations caused by the accursed paddle-boats; they quiver, like living things, under the knife, as the engines roar and the cog-wheels turn. Assailed as the city is within by the invasion of steam and barbarism, it is entirely certain that she could not resist the force of the inrushing waters if the Murazzi were ever to yield to the pressure of a winter sea; and it is unhappily quite possible that the gigantic barrier of the sea-walls may give way on some day of unusually high tides and violent tempest, and the city herself will then be overwhelmed beneath the Adriatic waters.

Who would care if this were her fate?

The contractors, and concessionaires, and jerry-builders, and bureaucratic thieves, and foreign speculators would have the pleasure and profit of building a spick and span new town, north-east of Mestre: all tiresome reminiscences of the Lion of St Mark would have sunk with the bronze horses underneath the waves.

Many public men would breathe more freely were Venice but a memory of the past entombed in seaweed and in sand. For there is nothing so curiously malignant or so restlessly jealous as the enmity of a feeble Present of a great Past. It is such malignity, it is such jealousy, which, even more than greed of gain, and vitiated taste, caused, and causes, and will cause, the destruction of the great cities of Italy by Italian deputies, syndics, and municipalities, and by those foreign companies and alien speculations to which they unhappily open their gates.

If the fact did not face us at every step, it would seem incredible that, even in this age, such cities as Venice and Florence and Rome could have been sacrificed to the ignominious interests of wire-pullers. Each possessed, to protect it, unique beauty, splendour of association and tradition, an heroic past: and for each had the greatest of men laboured, in each had the charm of atmosphere and horizon lent a more than mortal loveliness to the architecture of man. And each is now wrecked, and ransacked, and despoiled, and obliterated, and destroyed as though a horde of savages had been let loose in their precincts.

There is no language strong enough to condemn the injuries from which they suffer.

On the walls of the Flavian Amphitheatre there grew in marvellous fertility countless plants unknown elsewhere; survivors of sylvan worlds destroyed, of botanical kingdoms for ever perished, the seeds of which perchance had lodged in the sandals of the legions as they came from Palmyra or Babylon; this most precious legacy of nature was, as everyone knows, mercilessily destroyed in the first years of the Italian occupation of Rome.

The uprooting with knives and acids of the unique flora of the Colosseum was a type of the acts which, for the last fifteen years, have hacked away and corroded and destroyed off the face of the earth the supreme flowers of human genius.

In the present debasement and desecration of Italian cities there is not even such motive and excuse as that which was urged by archaeologists for the ruin of these plants. There is everything lost, nothing whatever gained, in the debasement of classic and artistic cities to the level of Buluwayo or Klondyke.

To pull down the Palazzo Venezia and the Palazzo Torlonia, which it is decided to do in Rome, in order that the statue of Victor Emmanuel, for which the funds have not even yet been raised, may be visible from the Corso, is as contemptible as it is childish. The beauty of the Campidoglio is already ruined in order to place that statue there: might not that suffice? To throw down the Tower of the Amadei to put in its place a restaurant, or a drinking-shop, is so stupid an act that the enormity of the offence to history and art is almost forgotten in its imbecility. To cut off a portion of the Archbishop's Palace to widen a road, and destroy half the gardens of the Orti Oricellari to make a mean street, and to place the stations and rails of tramway companies on the macigno pavement under the Campanile, the Battistero, and the Duomo of Florence, are outrages to the whole educated world and the history of five centuries. To destroy the Ponte del Paradiso in order to put a cast-iron pontoon in its place, is an abomination which should only seem possible to a company of clowns crazy with drink; whilst to turn the lovely isle of Sant' Elena into a heap of cinders for the pleasure of a carriage-building company, which company was not even guaranteed from bankruptcy, was unquestionably as unbusinesslike and as unprofitable as it was impious.

There is neither common sense, nor common decency, in the chief part of the measures taken within the last decade to humiliate and imbastardise the cities and towns of Italy. The process of destruction began indeed much earlier; but within the last ten years the pace has been increased from a leisurely walk to a furious gallop. The scramble to be first to outrage, to deface, to despoil, has become a St Vitus's dance amongst the syndics, assessors, and councilmen; each deliriously eager for the approving smile of the various ministers in whose hands the destinies of these great and unrivalled Urbes unfortunately are placed.

It must be remembered by the foreign reader that there is no Minister of Fine Arts in Italy. There is a Minister of Education, another of Public Works, and another of Agriculture, and between these three all questions of art and architecture are divided, and are decided in agreement with the various municipalities. The mischief the trio does is incalculable, for they are seldom selected with any regard to their aesthetic qualifications. Indeed, if ever anyone of them show any scholarly capacity and aptitude for his office, like that which was shown by Villari, his possession of power is very short. Of a recent minister of agriculture it is related that, as he looked over a valley planted with magnificent olives near Brescia, he exclaimed, 'What fine willows!'

A similar ignorance in matters belonging to their respective departments is expected of the Ministers of Education and Public Works. Were there a Minister of Fine Arts, he would undoubtedly be chosen from the attorneys, the manufacturers, the scientists, or the rural Boeotians.

Another minister of agriculture, Count Francesco Guicciardini, had an admirable and thorough command of the objects of his Dicastero; skilled in agriculture himself, and the owner of large estates, he knew what to do and how to do it; and by his energy an outbreak of phylloxera was arrested before any great losses had ensued. But outside agriculture, his influence was less excellent, because he was unfortunately enabled to meddle with matters not agricultural and beyond his knowledge; as when he ordered the destruction of a whole quarter of the martial and ancient city of Pistoia, and the waste of the town funds in the erection of a new savings bank. Over the choice of a design for this building, the townspeople of Pistoia are now violently quarrelling, whilst many of their finest and noblest palaces are left to go empty to decay!

A minister of the strictest probity, of the strongest desire to do what is just and wise, is never long able to resist the pressure of those around him, the force of example, the persuasions of local magnates, and the insistence of the crowd of hungry perquisite-hunters. It is such shocking and wicked waste of money as was this in Pistoia which impoverishes every town, and disfigures each with vulgar piles of brick and iron, and grotesque monuments of black metal, whilst a miserable woman at their gates pays four centimes duty on a pint of milk before she can take it past the guards to sell, and a wretched man, who owns a little road-fed flock of goats, is taxed two hundred francs a year before he may drive them into the streets to yield the little nourishment which they can afford to invalids and children. Should the law now under consideration pass, and the debts of the Communes be paid by the State, and monies be henceforth lent lavishly by the State to the Communes, this expenditure will increase tenfold, and the jobbery accompanying it will be multiplied in similar measure.

No one of the governing classes is guiltless in the matter; cabinets, senators, deputies, prefects, mayors, town councils, provincial councils, each and all, sin alike in this matricide, and seem to vie with each other in suggesting and executing the abominable projects which disgrace the close of the century.

In this day, in everything appertaining to municipal government, the greater is sacrificed to the lesser; the smug, the ordinary, the expedient, the venal are first of all considered; the kind of man who pushes to the front in affairs is bustling, sharp, keen, insensible, in whose own existence no necessity for anything except vulgar prosperity, as ugly as you will, is felt for an hour. To speak to such men of such impersonal desires as moved the makers of the great cities of old, is to speak in an unknown tongue, which they appraise as gibberish. They are, for the present time, the rulers of the world, and the material they are made of is the same clay, whether its shape take that of an emperor or a contractor, of a king or a beadle, of a minister or a vestryman. At the present hour the earth is given over to them.

Wyzewa accepts this insatiable mania for destruction as a characteristic, which of course it undoubtedly is, of the general disease of modernity; but he does not seem to trace it to what is surely its source, the greed of gain. All these engineers, builders, contractors, town councillors, bankers, usurers, speculators, chairmen, shareholders, and directors of companies, can make nothing out of the ancient glory and grace of beautiful cities; the mayors can get no savoury morsel to compensate them for all their servility and time-serving; the deputies can find no useful plunder to enrich the crew who have voted for them; in respecting the beauty of the past, syndicates and tradesmen and gamblers on 'Change would reap no harvest of gold whatever.

What else but greed has been the motive of that shameless desecration of Rome against which Geoffroy has raised his voice from the tomb to protest?

What else but greed the motive of that infamous destruction of the entire centre of Florence, its historic towers and churches and palaces, torn down with blind rage to be replaced by hideous hotels, and monster shops, and grotesque monuments? the most piteous, and the most inexcusable, injury ever done to the rights of history and of art.