Critical Studies Part 19

No one of the governing cla.s.ses 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 munic.i.p.al 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.

What else the motive of that wanton disfigurement of Venice which has disgraced the last fifteen years of the munic.i.p.al rule, and is about to continue the work of ruin merely to enrich the men of greed, the English and American tradesmen, the Hebrew speculators, the German hucksters, the cosmopolitan inflators of bubble companies?

The motive of all these destructions is always the same, and always of the lowest kind: gain. Everyone concerned in them gains, or hopes to gain. There is no other instinct or idea than this. It is, like the present diplomacy of Europe, an all-round game of grab; and a large percentage of the gains goes to the doctors who label the gambling 'Hygiene.'

The plea of health is a falsehood usually advanced in excuse of such destructions as those of the Florentine centre and the Venetian Calli and Campielli. Those who allege it know, as well as I do, that the unhealthiness lies not in the habitations but in the habits of the people. Water never touches their bodies; tight-lacing is a female rule in even the peasant cla.s.s; the field-worker is as tightly cased in her leather stays as the d.u.c.h.ess in her satin corset. The favourite foods of the populace are such as give worms, dysentery, and skin diseases; their drinks are adulterated and poisonous;[15] their general habits are unwholesome and injurious beyond all description; they are saved only by the purity of the air which the munic.i.p.alities, who chatter of hygiene, do their best to pollute with acid and chemical fumes, and the stench of noxious trades.

[Footnote 15: Contadini drink the _vinaccia_, or _vinella_, made from the dregs of the wine-vats; but others drink (and often the contadino does so also) the chemical stuffs sold at drinking-houses and taverns with which the streets and roads are studded.]

The men who prate of hygiene know these facts as well as I do; they know, I repeat, that the insalubrity is in the habits, not in the habitations; but the conventional lie pa.s.ses muster and serves its end: it enables landlords to sell, and lawyers to pocket fees, and contractors to make profits, and all the troops of middlemen to fatten on the demolition of n.o.ble and ancient places and the creation of shoddy stucco architecture in their stead.

The sense of beauty has died with the public destruction of beauty: it is dead in the ruling cla.s.ses; and what is far worse, dead in the populace; dead, or nearly so, in the writers, the painters, the sculptors. If in this latter cla.s.s there were any strong, true, and delicate instinct of what is n.o.ble and beautiful, Molmenti would not stand alone in the Council of Venice; Prince Corsini would not alone have resisted the destruction of the Florence of the Renaissance; D'Annunzio would not alone repeat the denunciations of two dead foreigners, Geoffroy and Gregorovius, of the violation of ancient and of mediaeval Rome. The voices of the artists (were they artists in feeling indeed) would be, and would have been, so powerful that no ministry and no munic.i.p.ality would have ventured to ignore them.

But most modern artists are afraid to offend their public, their patrons, the town councils, the mayors, and communes, or the Ministers of Education or of Public Works, to which or to whom they look for employment; they have the decoration-hunger, which is one of the chief curses of Continental Europe, and decorations only come from the powers above; and in these powers above there is not the faintest glimmer of taste or feeling, there is only jealousy of a great and unapproachable Past.

Therefore, the few who do feel indignation do not speak; and the speculator, the jerry builder, the cunning lawyer and conveyancer, the vast body of greedy and gross spoilers, have their way unchecked.

In the case of Rome, of course, that cruellest and ugliest of all pa.s.sions, religious antagonism, has had much to do with the atrocious ruin of the Prati del Castello, of the Trastevere generally, of the pa.s.sage of the four trams in derision in face of St Peter's, of the hideous gimcrack houses built under the walls of the Lateran, of the destruction of street shrines and votive chapels and ancient chapels, of the erection of the entire quarters of what is called New Rome;[16] but religious hatred cannot be the cause of the barbarous sc.r.a.ping and daubing of cla.s.sic buildings, of the degradation of the Via Nomentana, and of Porta Pia, of the ruin of such glory and grace as that of the Ludovisi and the Farnesina villas, of the bedaubing and beplastering, the dwarfing and disfiguring, the vulgarising and disfiguring of everything which is touched by the modern aediles of Rome. No matter what the syndic be called, whether Ruspoli or Guiccioli, or Torlonia, or Colonna, no matter whether the cabinet be headed by Rudini or Giolitti, by Crispi or Pelloux, the pickaxe is never at rest, and the hammer and hatchet sound ceaselessly in street and garden, on desecrated altars, and in devastated groves.

[Footnote 16: It is now almost forgotten that the Ludovisi gardens ever existed as the motley fas.h.i.+on of the new Roman world flocks to the American Legation in the Pal. Piombino!]

To what end have served the fury and haste with which ancient ecclesiastical buildings have been razed to the ground in both the cities and the provinces? To none whatever, so far as any diminution of the funds and the numbers of ecclesiastical foundations can be counted.

The suppression of the monasteries and convents was actuated by love of gain as much as by polemical rancour, by the hunger of the newly-created kingdom, for their treasures and riches, for their rich endowments and saleable possessions. There was no sincerity about it; there could be none in a nation then almost entirely Catholic; and this insincerity is proved by the indifference with which the State allows the re-establishment of these buildings and these orders. At this moment the bare-footed Carmelites, a most bigoted order, have lately opened a new church and convent in Milan, which are endowed with three millions of money, and have been opened with great pomp by the Archbishop. Similar inst.i.tutions are being re-created in all directions, possessing all the evils of those which were suppressed, without their artistic beauty, and largely without their good faith and munificent charity. Rich and lovely maidens continue to take the veil when too young to have any realisation of what they do,[17] and the Church is as enriched as of old by their dowers; whilst the monk is not the less dangerous to intellectual liberty because, when he goes out of the gates for a few hours, he wears a coat and trousers like those of the layman of the adjacent town.

[Footnote 17: A few months ago the Prime Minister, then the Marquis di Rudini, was present at the taking of the veil by a young relative in Naples.]

The ancient monasteries and convents were at least an education to the eye: who could daily see the Certosa of Pavia, or of the Val d'Ema, and not be purified and instructed in visual memory and artistic instinct?

The new revivals of the old orders teach nothing except a base and strictly modern union of superst.i.tion and compromise. Indeed, the State forces the priest to be base; it makes it the condition of allowing his existence. If he do not succ.u.mb to the State in all things (even in those most opposed to his conscience), he is deprived of his _placet_; and Zanardelli has in these last few days desired to deprive him of it without such legal forms as have hitherto been observed. For one of the greatest of the misfortunes of Italy is that, not in the Radicals nor in the Conservatives, nor in any one of the groups into which political life is divided, is there the slightest trace of any respect for individual freedom; liberty of action and of opinion obtain no fair play whatever from any one of the parties of the State.

True, it is not in Italy alone that the sense of symmetry and harmony is leaving the terrestial race; the want of beauty, as the daily bread of life, grows less and less felt every year by the modern mind wherever that mind has been unhinged by the manias of modernity. Beauty, natural and artistic, has become entirely indifferent to the majority of even highly-educated modern men and women. They have no leisure to contemplate it, no temperament capable of feeling it; it is in no sense necessary to them; it makes no impression either on their retina or their memory. Their lives pa.s.s before a revolving panorama, so rapidly dissolving and changing that they have no distinct impression of any of the scenes or subjects. Every year modern habits become more unlovely, and modern sensibilities more blunted. The preservation of what is beautiful, _per se_, at the present time is almost always ridiculed, unless it can be shown to be joined to some profit or utility. The characteristic pa.s.sion of the hour is greed; greed of possession, desire of acquisition, and pa.s.sion for ostentation. Trade has become an octopus embracing the whole world; the thirst for gain engrosses all cla.s.ses; beauty, unless it be a means of gain, is to this temper a useless, or worse than a useless, thing: it is regarded as a stumbling-block and enc.u.mbrance.

It is doubtful if even the power of perceiving what is beautiful has not in a great measure left a large part of the population in all countries.

Modern cities would not be what they are now had not the race to a great extent grown colour-blind, and become without the sense of proportion. Modern builders and modern engineers would remain unoccupied were not the generations, which employ and enrich them, dest.i.tute of all artistic feelings.

Many of the prevailing fas.h.i.+ons would be so intolerable to persons with any delicate or accurate perception, that such fas.h.i.+ons could never have become general had any perception of this kind been general. Even the deformity of their bodies awakens no aversion in the modern public; if it did, the bicycle would never have been in demand.

Such blindness and deadness to the charm of beauty is to be noted in every nation, and is developed even in the extreme East whenever modern European and American usage influences the Oriental.

j.a.pan is rapidly becoming the rival in vulgarity and hideousness of Chicago.

It is no doubt general and inevitable, the low tone of susceptibility, the dense, thick-skinned temper, which accompany what is called Civilisation, which are to be seen everywhere from cold to warm lat.i.tudes, wherever the steam-engine screams and the shoddy suits are worn.

The modern temper is something even worse than inartistic; it is brutally and aggressively hostile to beauty, whether natural or architectural. It will go out of the way to injure, to deface, to uproot, to level with the dust.

To the cold, bald, hard, derisive temper of the modern majority there is something offensive and irritating in beauty, whether it be seen in the stately verdure of a tree in its summer glory, or of an ancient tower,[18] brown and grey in the light of evening. To fell the tree, to pull down the tower, is the first instinct of the modern mind, and it is an instinct clamorous, savage, insatiable, born of incapacity and triviality, of the hunger for destruction, and of a secret and ign.o.ble jealousy.

[Footnote 18: The other day I saw from a railway train a grand old Longobardo tower which had been coloured a bright pink!]

There can, I think, be no doubt that modern education implants and increases this insensibility. If it did not, modern munic.i.p.alities would not be what they are, would not do what they do. The only resistance to this insensibility is found, and this but rarely, at the two extremes of the social scale--the peasant and the n.o.ble, _i.e._, in those who are least subjected to the pressure of general education. In the man, absolutely uneducated, and in the man reared by an individual and highly-cultured education, are alone now to be found any appreciation of beauty, natural or artistic.

A French writer, with no pity for the lovers of teas and porcelains, has said recently that he looks forward with joy to the time when the whole empire of China will be covered with factories and mines as thickly as blades of gra.s.s grow in a meadow. Most modern persons have no higher ideal than his. In similar phrase, Ferrero, whose political writings I have often cited with approval, and whose striking abilities I greatly admire, but with whose narrow socialist temper I have no sympathy, actually states that the plain of Lombardy was created by nature to be studded with factory chimneys!

Even into remote mountain towns, and in small forgotten cities, on the edge of lonely lakes, or deep-sunk in chestnut woods, or ilex-forests, the same desecration creeps, and sullies, and pollutes. Gimcrack, gaudy villas, and pasteboard houses, show their pert and paltry forms amidst n.o.ble palaces, or beside patrician towers. Pistachio green paint makes day hideous everywhere, daubed on deal shutters and blinds, accompanied by the paltry stained doors, and the stucco mouldings, of the epoch. The modern munic.i.p.ality displays its whitewashed and belettered frontage, unashamed, on some grand old piazza, which has seen centuries of strife and splendour. Silent sunlit bays of Tyrrhene or Adriatic, lovely as a poem of Sh.e.l.ley, are made vulgar and ludicrous by lines of habitations such as the jerry-builder of the end of the nineteenth century procreates, wearing an air of smug imbecility which makes one long to slap their stucco faces; of course the drinking-shop, the cycling-casino, and the shooters' club have been run up beside them so that their patrons and frequenters may befoul the roseate evening, and insult the ethereal night.

Moreover, it is strange to note how, with the vulgarisation of the towns and of the landscapes in this cla.s.sic land, the human physiognomy loses its cla.s.sic unity and grace, grows heavier, coa.r.s.er, meaner, commoner, changes indeed entirely its type and colouring; the camus or the snub nose replaces the aquiline, the scrofulous mouth replaces the lips shaped like a Cupid's bow; the eyes diminish in size and grow lack-l.u.s.tre; the beautiful oval outline of cheek and chin alters to the bull-dog jaw and puffy cheeks; the clear and pure skin alters to the sodden, pallid, unwholesome complexion of the new type. This is no exaggerated statement; anyone can see the change for himself who will take the trouble to observe such young Italians as throng the second-rate and the third-rate _cafes_ and dining-saloons of cities, and then go into the more remote country, and see the Italiote race still in its integrity, in old-world hamlets of the Abruzzi or the Apennines, in forest-sheltered nooks of the Sabine or the Carrara mountains, in sea-faring, wind-swept villages of the Veneto, in nomad sheep-folds on the oak-studded gra.s.s plains of the Basilicata, or in old walled towns, calm and venerable, in the lap of the high hills, where the shriek of the engine has not yet been heard; where it is still unknown, that which Loti calls in his latest work, 'cette chose de laid, de noiratre, de tapageur, d'idiotement empressee, qui pa.s.se vite vite, ebranle la terre, trouble ce calme delicieux par des sifflets et des bruits de ferailles, le chemin de fer, le chemin de fer!--plus nivelant que le temps, propageant la ba.s.se camelote de l'industrie, deversant chaque jour de la ba.n.a.lite et des imbeciles.'

In the provinces he will still find, in thousands of living creatures, the youths of Luca Signorelli, the knights of Giorgione and Carpaccio, the young G.o.ds of Paolo Veronese, the n.o.ble grey-beards of Tiziano, the stately women of Michelangiolo, the enchanting children of Raffaelle, and Correggio. But in the towns, and in the country where it receives the moral and physical miasma of the towns, he will find little else but the debased modern type, with its sn.i.g.g.e.r of conceit, its cynical grin, its criminal's jaw, its cutaneous eruptions, its dull and insolent eyes, its stunted growth, and its breath foul with nicotine and chemical drinks, such as the modern schools, and the modern scientists, and the modern dram-shops have made it.

Commerce, from being beneficent, is fast becoming a curse. It usurps and absorbs all place and all energy. Its objects are allowed to push out of existence all higher aims; armies and navies exist only to protect it; and an English Premier was not ashamed at a Lord Mayor's banquet to declare that this was their unique aim: to conquer fresh fields for trading, and protect the trader in his invasion of the rights of others.

His Secretary of State for the Colonies and his Chancellor of the Exchequer have, still more recently, repeated after him this singularly ign.o.ble view of a nation's duty, and of a soldier's and sailor's obligation.

The Secretary of the Colonies, indeed, rising to unwonted enthusiasm, added that all the greatness of Great Britain lies in its commerce. No doubt this may be a fact; but it is not an enn.o.bling fact; and it is one which is the parent of gross sins, and the enemy of high ideals; in the name of commerce, murder, theft, and torture are all legalised, and the most brutal egotism deified; it can be at best only a material greatness which is thus consolidated.

To measure the virtue of a nation by its commerce alone is like measuring the virtue of a man solely by the amount of his income. This manner of estimation is one common in the world, but it can never be considered a high standard. However, this excuse of the prior and dominant claims of commerce which may be put forward in the case of Great Britain for the sacrifice to it of all other interests cannot be alleged by Italy except in some districts of the north. What requires protection in five-sixths of Italy, and only suffers extinction through fiscal pressure, is small commerce: personal arts, crafts, and trades, which flourished so happily in past times, and would still live in fair peace and comfort were they not stoned out of existence by a merciless taxation, direct and indirect. These neither disfigure nor offend the beautiful and venerable little towns in which they dwell; the smith has his anvil under a Lombard arch, the apothecary keeps his ointments and simples in old majolica vases, the barber's pole slants under a shrine of the Renascence, the cloth-seller piles his bales against the sculpture of a Seicento wall, the seedsman's sacks show the s.h.i.+ning berries in their gaping mouths behind the iron scroll-work of mediaeval kneeling-windows. It is not they who have hurt their birthplaces. It is the English syndicate, the Jew syndicate, the German money-changer, the American tram-contractor, the foreign electric company, the foreign co-operative store-keeper, who have no end but their own gain, and who tempt to shameful acts those native to the soil, in whose hands lie the fate of these historic, and late happy, places.

Ferrero has, concerning this, a true and touching pa.s.sage which is much worthier of him than his views regarding Lombardy and the factories. He says, in a recent able article on the 'Miseria e Richezza in Italia':--

'The tendencies of new commercial life, in its immense enterprises, is to send money and movement into a very few amongst the cities of Italy, the others live content with their small traffic and trade; though trembling when the fleet well-springs of their small fortunes are menaced or run dry.

Many of these towns were in other days rich, and still preserve the evidences of their splendid past in sumptuous palaces, s.p.a.cious squares, monumental churches; a sense of venerable years, of profound repose lie on them; yet a sad and cruel tragedy often pa.s.ses between these walls; beneath the magnificent palaces of the Renascence and the beautiful mediaeval Lombard churches, the populace perishes slowly of hunger. The small ancient industries disappear, crushed out by the victorious rivalry of the great tradesmen of the north. The ruin of these small industries and of these individual crafts began some decades ago; but it was much less cruelly felt then than it is now, and the sole recourse or solace now left to it is in revolt. A revolt to which the Government only replies by fixed bayonets, and a duty on corn, which is a crime.'

Ferrero, as a political economist is bound to do, considers that no means should be taken to artificially sustain ancient methods of work and trade, but he says with entire truth that to artificially depress and deplete them is on the part of the State an abominable act. To wear out the temper and patience of the populace with hara.s.sing edicts; to drive to desperation those who are cheerful and contented in an honestly supported poverty; to starve them by artificially raised food-prices, and by gate-taxes, which ruin the small trader, the modest householder, and the rural vendor alike; to render it, by a monstrous taxation, impossible for small industries to exist; to levy income-tax (_focatico_) on the poorest labourer--this is the terrible error, the inexcusable cruelty, of which the actual, and every preceding, Italian Cabinet is, and has been, guilty. If there be revolution in the air, who can wonder? The granaries are guarded by battalions, whilst millions are thrown away on bad statues to Savoy princes. These are facts which it is not necessary for a man to know his A B C to read. But they are the primer which is daily placed before the eyes of the many various peoples of Italy from the Col de Tenda to Cape Sorano; and these peoples are of rare intelligence even where wholly illiterate: often, indeed, most intelligent where most illiterate.

There were, not many years ago, a great measure of mirth and contentment in all the minor cities of Italy, and in the small towns and the big walled villages; much harmless merry-making and pastime, much simple and neighbourly pleasure, much enjoyment of that 'ben' di Dio,' the blessed air and suns.h.i.+ne. Most of it has been killed now; starved out, strangled by regulations and penalties and imposts, and a fiendish fiscal tyranny; dead like the poor slaughtered forgotten conscripts in Africa.

But this opens out a political question, and it is not of politics that these pages treat, but of art and its outrage: above all, of such outrage in Venice; since the President of her Academy did me, of late, the honour to say to me, 'Non pu Lei far nulla per salvare la nostra povera Venezia?' Alas! how powerless are all our forces against the ever-rising tide of modern barbarism!

A precious intaglio of exquisite workmans.h.i.+p is being broken up and pulverised under our eyes; and no one cares.

I know a wide plain, intersected by many streams, and lying full in the light of the west; these streams are filled from August to October with millions of white water-lilies.

Nothing more beautiful can be beheld than these countless water-courses covered with these cups of snow, which share the clear, slowly-rippling streams only with the water-wagtail and the sedge-warbler, the bullrush, and the flag. They resemble exactly the river on which the Virgine delle Rocce drift with their brothers and Claudio. But the peasants push their black, flat-bottomed boats recklessly amongst the silver goblets of the flowers, cras.h.i.+ng into them and breaking them with brutal indifference, and raking them into heaps in their boats, to be cast up on to the oozing banks to rot and serve as land manure; the boorish insensibility of the boatmen is typical of their time; the lilies would serve quite as well for manure were they allowed to live out their lovely life, and were not gathered until they were yellow and faded; but they who rake them in do not wait for their natural season of decay; they smash and break them in full flower as they kill birds on the nest in the fields and hedges.

Their fate is like the fate of that greater lily, rosy-red at sunset, which lies cradled on the waters between Mestre and Murano; and which is roughly and painfully being uprooted and destroyed that a pack of foreign traders and native attorneys may wax fat and lay up gold.

No doubt the fate of Venice is common in these days; no doubt, all over the world, capitalists and socialists join hands across the gulf of their differences to unite in the destruction of all that is beautiful, graceful, harmonious, and venerable.

But in Italy such destruction is more sad and shameful than anywhere else in Europe, by reason of the magnificence and glory of her past, and in view of the pitiful fact that the land, which was a Pharos of light and leading to the earth, is now every year and every day receding farther and farther into darkness: that dreadful darkness of the modern world which comes of polluted waters and polluted air, of the breath of poisoned lungs, and the pressure of starving crowds. The basest form of venality, the lowest form of greed, have fastened on her with the tentacles of the devil-fish; and are every hour devouring her.

_Colston & Coy, Limited, Printers, Edinburgh._