ITALY AND THE ITALIANS BY THE SAME AUTHOR. FREDERIC UVEDALE: A Romance. Crown 8vo, 6s. STUDIES IN THE LIVES OF THE SAINTS. Crown 8vo, 3s. 6d. net. ITALY AND THE ITALIANS BY EDWARD HUTTON THE LIVES OF THE SAINTS WITH ILLUSTRATIONS SECOND EDITION NEW YORK E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 1903 All Rights reseri'ed Printed by William Blackwood & Sons, Edinburgh, Scotland. TO MY FRIEND, D. S. MELD RUM, Esq, i\ m & ^ Preface. To-night, under a nearly full moon, the peasants are practising their dances and songs for to-morrow's feast — the feast of St Sebastian. I am brought from the fireside about ten o'clock out under the stars, to listen to them. The sky is very clear, and the moon rides easily, like a pale lady on horseback, among the stars, that seem incomparably far away. The plaintive, poignant sweetness of the mandolins floating away from me out across the silver levels of water, throbs almost bitterly it seems to me, as I lean over the verandah listening. Just at the bottom of my garden, but on higher ground, — on a kind of a promontory, in fact, that juts out into the sea, — is the cemetery, full of tall calm cypresses that look jet black against the paleness of the sky. Far away, somewhere deep down in the valley, a bugle calls, and as the notes gallop towards me, a curious emotion sweeps through my blood, and I feel the splendours of the pageants and of all the royalty of the emperors and kings that are no more. The bugle ceases, and a quiet wind creeps round viii PREFACE the house through the orange-trees, and once more the throb of the mandolins takes full possession of me, and I wait to hear what the singers will sing. For some time they do nothing but dance. Such funny dances ! Up and down the road they go for fifty yards, the mandolins bitterly upbraiding. And then over all, quite suddenly, the wail of a violin. Unseen by me the musician has joined the group, and now the measure becomes less uncouth, less barbaric, perhaps less modern. As the dancers be- come warmer they throw aside their cloaks and the figures grow more intricate, the throbbing mandolins more insistent, the breathing deeper and less regular ; and at last, when a mandolin breaks as it were from control and shrieks terribly, somewhere high up on the " E " string, the dancers break from one another and throw themselves down on the roadside. Then the singing begins while the dancers rest. Very glad singing it is, with nothing of sadness in it, but of that sweet sentimental kind that is one of the common denominators of all the world. " Santa Lucia " they sing — so old, but one never wearies of it, — " Addio ! Addio ! " and some more songs which delight the visitors at Venice and Naples — songs which we all, once at any rate in our life, believed could never be bettered. The dancing begins again, receding now down the hill slowly, until the night comes up out of the valley and swallows it. I walk up and down the verandah, light a cigarette and determine to enjoy PREFACE ix the beauty of the night for a few minutes. The sky is a deeper blue now, and the stars are not so pale, not so utterly distant. Orion is lying on his side, and Mars — it must be Mars, he looks so red — is stealing up out of the east. The old town lies at my feet, sleeping as it has done these last seven hundred years, between the mountains and the sea. The old towers, their tiles glistening in the moon- light, rise silently towards heaven. A clock strikes suddenly without any preparation, slowly and medi- tatively ; another, more distant, answers it more hurriedly ; in my study my own little carriage-clock pipes too, raising an utterly childish, inadequate voice that cannot possibly reach much farther than the verandah. Still the sky is clear, and the wind from the hills carries the clock notes towards Greece. How far will they go that have just struck midnight here ? I am just thinking of going in — have indeed thrown away my cigarette — when something stops me. It sounds like a very tiny note from high up on the " E " string of a mandolin. But they have all gone home, these singers and dancers, — home to bed to dream of to-morrow and the festa. No ; what was that ? I lean over the verandah and there below me in the road are two tiny figures, a boy and a girl. The boy cannot be more than ten, and the girl, though the taller of the two, is certainly less than twelve years old. A mandolin is slung over the boy's shoulders, and he reaches blunderingly I think for it, till his sister swings it x PREFACE round for him ; and they both, at a whispered word from the girl, drop me curtseys. " Let me sing to you, signore," says the little girl ; " we too love San Sebastiano." The boy tunes his mandolin, and then, with just a simple note or two, startlingly abrupt, they begin. It is a curious song — where have I heard the words before ? — set to a curious music. The notes come as it were in little heaps, with no regular time that I can grasp, but with a kind of spiritual sweetness and clearness, exactly fitting the time and the semi- darkness. Two such curious little figures they look, singing in piping treble there in the road under my window. This is what they sing : — " Fior di mortelle Queste manine tue son tanto belle. Zompa llari-llira. Fior di limone Ti voglio far morire di passione ! Zompa llari-llira. Fiore di nardo Passa Rosina mia : mi da uno sguardo. Zompa llari-llira ! Fiore di Rosa ! Piangi mio ben, perche ? vuoi qualche cosa? Zompa llari-llira. Fiore di spica Collera, o bella, in me non entra mica Zompa llari-llira. Fiore di menta, Questa parola mia ben ti rammenta. Zompa llari-llira." PREFACE xi They sing it right through to the end, and then the boy's fingers wander over the mandolin strings still playing the air. Where can they have learnt that song ? I ask them. "Oh," says the girl, "yes, signore. Giovanni-Battista heard it read out of a paper, and made a tune for it : it is his favourite song." " Sing some more, then, if you would please me," I say, giving them some money. They whisper to- gether for a time ; the mandolin is silent now ; they look just like two little wild-flowers dropped on the road. I can only see their upturned faces. Something is wrong, the girl is down on her hands and knees looking for something. " He has dropped the plettro, signore," she says, " and one cannot play a mandolin with one's fingers." "Wait a moment," I say, "I will bring a light." I go into the house and fetch a big hall lamp, and the girl and I search for the plettro, in vain. " Come and help us, Giovannino," I say. He does not move, but looks on with wide eyes, — eyes that seem to look me through and through, gazing out of a white, spiritual face. " Are you blind, Giovannino ? " I say ; " come and help us look for your plettro." "Yes, signore, he is blind," says the little girl; " but," she adds quickly, putting her arm round her brother — "but he is a great musician, aren't you, Giovanni ? " " Yes," says the boy with a sigh, " I am a great xii PREFACE musician." He says it as though it were not so great a thing after all — as though it certainly were not worth that blindness. The moonbeams play upon his face, he seems not to feel the light at all ; a more spiritual, almost un- canny face, full of a kind of twilight I don't think I have ever seen. He stands quite still, waiting. But it cannot be found, this plettro, that has given us so much trouble. I ask them will they not come into the house and have some supper. " No, thank you, signore," says the girl, " we will go home ; it is late, and San Sebastiano is here." They go off down the road, she leading the boy who is blind and who has lost his plettro, but who is so great a musician ; and I, as I turn and watch them in the moonlight, there where they go down into the valley where all is so quiet and so dark, find my eyes wet with tears. Surely this is Italy that I have seen on the eve of San Sebastiano, Italy who is blind and who has lost her plettro. Contents. IMPRESSIONS OF ITALY OF TO-DAY. PAGE I. ON THE WAY ... 3 II. UNITED ITALY . . . . ,12 III. IL PAPA-RE . • . . .25 IV. THE HOUSE OF SAVOY . . . .41 V. THE SOCIALISTS . . . .54 VI. LITERATURE 1. . , . =65 II. GABR1ELE D'ANNUNZIO . - .78 THE CITIES OF ITALY. I. AT GENOA II. AT PISA III. AT SIENA IV. AT ORVIETO V. ROME . VI. CHRISTMAS EVE IN ROME VII. THE RELIGIOUS ORDERS IN ROME VIII. PLAIN-SONG ON THE AVENTINE HILL IX. AT NAPLES X. AT PERUGIA I03 III 121 131 J 39 145 156 180 189 202 XIV CONTENTS XI. AT ASSISI 210 XII. FLORENCE 1. . 223 XIII. FLORENCE — II. . 235 XIV. LUCA DELLA ROBBIA 243 XV. FRA LIPPO LIPPI 254 XVI. AT BOLOGNA 1 264 XVII. A NOTE ON RAVENNA . 27O XVIII. AT VENICE 274 XIX. AT PADUA . , 290 XX. AT VERONA 300 XXI. AT MANTUA 306 XXII. AT MILAN CONCLUSION APPE NDIX. ' 311 3 2 ° AN ITINERARY . A NOTE ON EDUCATION IN ITALY A NOTE ON THE POLITICAL SYSTEM A NOTE ON THE ARMY AND NAVY 327 33* 334 338 INDEX . 341 Illustrations. IAGE the singing boys ..... Froniispiece By Luca della Robbia. THE CREATION OF MAN .... 8o By Michaelangelo. st peter's, rome . . . . . .138 the forum . . . . . . . 150 the altar of santa maria delle grazie in san lorenzo, perugia . 208 santa maria del fiore and giotto's tower, florence 224 the birth of venus ..... 228 By Sandro Botticelli. SANTA MARIA NOVELLA, FLORENCE . . * 238 VIEW OF VENICE .... . 274 Impressions of Italy of To-Day I. ON THE WAY, " A MONGST those many advantages which conduce to enrich the mind with knowledge, to rectify the judg- ment and improve outward manners, foreign travel is none of the least. But to be a sedentary traveller only, penned up between walls, and to stand poring all day upon a map, upon imaginary circles and scales, is like him who thought to come to be a good fencer by looking on Agrippa's book postures only. But, indeed, this is the prime use of travel, which therefore may be not imperfectly called a moving Academy of the true Peripatetic school. This made Ulysses to be cried up so much amongst the Greeks for their greatest wise man, because he had travelled through many strange countries and observed the manners of divers nations, having seen, as it was said and sung of him, more cities than there were houses in Athens, which was much in that age of the world ; and the greatest of their Emperors did use to glory in nothing so often as that he had surveyed more land with his eye than other kings could comprehend with their thoughts. Amongst other people of the earth, Islanders seem to stand in most need of foreign travel, for they, being cut off as it were from the rest of the citizens of the world, have not those obvious accesses and contiguity 4 ITALY OF TO-DAY of situation and other advantages of society to mingle with those more refined nations whom learning and knowledge did first urbanize and polish." So in the seventeenth century wrote James Howell in the beginning of his ' Instructions for Foreign Travel ' for the use of us Islanders, almost as though he had been retained for a seventeenth -century Mr Cook or Mr Gaze. Yet pardon me, reader, if, with all the will in the world, I fail to maintain so reason- able an attitude. In truth it was in some such mood that I set out one day of spring on foot for Italy ; but I had scarcely gone a score of miles through France before my old world, home-sick from the first, had turned back homewards, and I, not altogether with- out a kind of joy, was talking with some peasants over a bottle of wine in an inn, and found that I, too, was one of the " Peripatetic school " in earnest, and had already begun to whisper to-morrow to myself as a thing of great comfort, and was, indeed, a pilgrim through my world of beckoning roads as I had ever been, though maybe unwillingly, from this world to the next. So I made pilgrimage to the Land of Heart's Desire, and longed with a great longing for the end of the journey, knowing all the time that it was the journey itself that was the end, the great reward. And among innumerable hostelries, inns, taverns, wine shops, monasteries, chapels, and caverns, I discovered almost without knowing it the Island of Once, for which, perhaps, I had set out. Nor, believe me, was I too lonely on the way. I went ON THE WAY 5 by the old highways. The roads down which I travelled were worn white by the feet of saints and sinners, kings and peasants, and the pilgrims to the Eternal City for over a thousand years. Hot and tired, I, too, had climbed that last intolerable hill, and descried, oh, far away ! that faint shimmer to the southward that my heart told me must be the Mediterranean. It was a far journey; shall I ever, in some fortunate year, or in a marvellous sweet dream before I die, see that white road again ? Shall I once more, footsore and almost weeping with the steepness of the way, under an implacable night, see with a passion of joy the friendly lights of the inn by the wayside ? Shall I ever again talk with the dreamers in the fields at evening or pray with the monks in the mountains or listen to the music of the villages ? Oh, has my God so sweet a recom- pense for me in His heart, after all, before I must for ever forget the sun ? I never envied Borrow with his Bible in Spain since I have walked with the saints beside clear rivers, under shivering poplars, and with kings through the plains of France, nor, busied with these, did I forget to love the people by the way. Oh world ! how can a man bear to die ? Have not the children laughed with me be- cause we were alive and because I went down the road, staying nowhere long, having no abiding city? So I met Life, not in the city, where, it may well be, one would not give up all for her as I would 6 ITALY OF TO-DAY do, but in the winds of the great plains of France, that went past me for days like a splendid host, and in the sun of the south and in the shadows of the olive -gardens of Italy. And I have known, at a turn of the road in the silence of the sunshine, or at the sudden noise of waves far below me, or at some gesture of the mountains, or when a child has led me into some immortal city, a passion of sudden glory fill my being, so that for a moment I too have seen, as it were, the gates of Paradise and the angel with the flaming sword. And once, in a lonely and sweet place, I lived for a week with a shepherd whom I had met tending his sheep as in old time. And he told me the history of the world under an almond-tree that had just finished blossoming. He was lonely on the mountains and told the time by the sun ; yet he, too, had dreamed of invincible cities and of the villages among the vines, and of Death that was still unashamed under the stars. " Ah," he said to me on a night of innumerable stars, "all the stars of God's house cannot put out the Night." So I passed ever towards Rome. And at the end of my day's journey I was not so terribly far from the place whence I had set out in the morning, as you will surely be, making pilgrimage, as I foresee you will, by railway. And yet, as God is my judge, reader, what in this earth I love have I in common with you ? God, who is our Father, knows. Even ON THE WAY 7 if you have read so far, my shepherd, who was a thousand times more real than you can ever be, has sent you, it may be, to Baedeker and reality. Reality? Well, I know Italy well, having loved her for a matter of all the long years of youth: drug me in Soho and carry me whither you will, if it be to Italy you have brought me, I would name her; yet if Italy be anywhere in Baedeker, you shall burn me at Amen Corner with the paper and pasteboard of my books. No, no ; for the glory of her name men have been persuaded for more than a thousand years to embrace Death. All the far-fetched greatness, all the elo- quent renown, all the pride and splendour of the hearts of men were her birthright, that even our England had to fetch from her fair, invincible cities. How often on a summer's day, in all the weary delight of her sun and sky, have the tears sprung to my eyes as I looked on the pallid splendour of Genoa from the sea, or gazed with a kind of sacred awe from the tower of Pisa upon the immortal gesture of the mountains ; or, realising quite suddenly some light among the shadows, some aspect of the sky, some glamour of the evening, my heart has leapt up as I wandered through the streets of that brave, sweet city, the mistress of Dante and Michael Angelo and Leonardo da Vinci, on the banks of Arno. For your soul's safety you dare not look for Italy in Baedeker. But on a night that is musical with voices out of the past, when the tireless singing of 8 ITALY OF TO-DAY the mandolines comes to you from across that yellow river, and the stars are beating in heaven with the ecstasy of the night, and the profound sky is as tender as the eyes of Mary Madonna, and because of the wideness of the world and the glory of it you are cleansed from all the stains of life and the blackness of the North and the noise of its trum- pery cities, there in that hour look into your own heart, and it may well be you will find Italy smiling at you from its most sacred depth. Love is not to be hired, nor can you buy knowledge with anything but love. And here is the Land of Heart's Desire, the dear land our fathers sought in youth, so that they might have something lovely stored in their hearts to remember in the quiet and noiseless years of age. You dare not follow in their footsteps with that shouting, scarlet book in your hand, led by the buttonhole by a scientific German. He who would see Rome shall never come in the train of the Goth, unless, as before, he comes and finds it a ruin. And yet, I think, indeed, that is what he has done. That destroying army from Northern Europe, that sacked Rome so many ages ago, only grows more innumerable every year, more contemptible, more disgusting; so that really Rome having been destroyed any time these many cen- turies, it is only the old remorseless ruins that their ancestors have thrown down that the tourist to-dav looks on with a languid curiosity. Rome is only immortal in the hearts of men. To the crowd she ON THE WAY 9 is but a heap of ruins, or a noisy modern capital, or the despised and hated Christian name of the Catholic Church. Ah, you who come to her and are to be seen nowadays, alas ! among her ruins, listening to innumerable lies, or racing through her galleries, or touting for invitations from her new- made nobles and princes, you all seek something immortal, one may suppose, yet how rudely, how noisily you pursue that which is only to be ap- proached after due ceremony, very quietly, through long lanes of the old culture and after long days and nights of enthusiasm and love. That divinity you seek has fled in fear at your approach. You, sir, are clothed, perhaps, for golf, or some form of violent exercise ; are you then in pursuit of that divine being you will never even see ? Would you hunt her, sir ? And you, madam, it is not, I imagine, possible to offend one so indifferent to the feelings of others, therefore I do not scruple to remind you that in Rome one should do as the Romans do, and not seek in vain, in vain I assure you, to advertise the national dress of the sex from the hockey -fields of Yorkshire or the golf-links of far Idaho. So, where Csesar trod, where Caesar sleeps, one can hear to-day the silly shuffle of the flocks of tourists, driven, by the ridiculous barking of the rote-learned sheep-dog guide, from one immortal, desecrated spot to another as emotionless. And now, in the City that flung out the House of Tarquin in order to welcome, more than two io ITALY OF TO-DAY thousand years later, the House of Savoy, associa- tions of hotel -keepers and other bawds have com- bined in order to display more in accordance with the barbarian taste the beautiful body of Italy to the vile and ignorant gaze of the Great Beast from every vandal and successful country in Europe. The Italians may now be said to live on the prostitution of their country to the stranger. Monster hotels are built in the beautiful Piazzas in order that any fool who can pay and gape may be housed, not indeed as befits him but in a manner he can admire. The market - places of the people, hallowed for I know not how many centuries, in the pure and lovely memories of those who are happily dead, are pulled down, and German beer -palaces, and flashy and foreign shops, stocked with heavily taxed bad German goods, are run up with a Carnival King a' horseback in the midst of the square that now bears his name, in order that the foreigners from artistic America, or sensitive England, or austere Germany, may not be offended in Italia la Nuova. This kind of thing is, I think, known as " better- ment " to the halfpenny and more ignorant press of my country. Such a digging up and flinging into the dust -heap of our fathers' bones has their ap- plause, I know. They see, no doubt, in that which displaces the beauty that sometimes seems to me to be fleeing from us for ever, the realisation of their own vile imaginations. It may be there is yet a great while for them to triumph. Yet he, our de- ON THE WAY n liverer, will one day come, with unscabbarded sword and the tramp of soldiers, or it may be silent as time is and sweet as the dawn. The world has not yet said Amen to the work of the Great Beast. So, reader, you see you have, after all, been be- guiled into reading the book of a very fool, an idealist, a valiant silly-pop, and a dreamer. Yet Italy is an unpractical land ; I shall keep you in better humour than your rubicund and portly Ger- man. And I shall tell you of new things, perhaps — but not all by way of information. Will you set out where the road leads ? It is my opinion you will not. Yet you will often be weary at evening, but not of the white roads you will seldom see, that are part of the life of me and call me like a woman. Of all that you know nothing. So be it. Yet it may be that on some fortunate night your angel shall lead you, perhaps, to the long-desired steps of San Pietro in Rome, and you too will remember only old things for a time, where, oh, once upon a time, all the kings in the world were proud to kneel, and there even you too may chance to see the gates of Paradise and the angel with the ilaming sword. I II. UNITED ITALY. T was perhaps but yesterday that Italy ceased to be a vision and became a Kingdom. Yet she has already thrown far from her the high and sweet dreams of youth, and is grown as sceptical as a disillusioned man at the approach of middle age. All the heroic figures of the Homeric years of attack and no less noble defence are gone ; and with them too has fled Faith, into whose eyes Garibaldi had gazed often upon the cliffs of Sicily, whose words Mazzini never ceased to echo, upon whose lips even to-day the eyes of the Church are set, waiting in magnificent patience till they form the image of the word "Amen." It would seem that the mere glance of death is sufficient to make immortal that man upon whom it rests even for a moment. For though Garibaldi had found in the fury and freedom of the sea the secret of his patient desire, it was not till he had been condemned to die for the fierce love he bore UNITED ITALY 13 Genoa la Superba that he was mastered by the glory of his passion against authority. It was then, it would seem, that his dauntless spirit first experienced the joy that he ever received from the nearness of danger. And it is almost as a kind of Lucifer that we see him in the end, in rebellion against all Heaven, setting his proud and superb dream as the end of his desire, following it even to the last, scattering before him, in his chase of it, Popes and Kings, while behind him — but his gaze was ever set forwards — followed all the tragedy of his desires, all the misery of the fulfilment of his dreams, all the loathsome bestiality of the crowd, and the im- mense clamour of implacable greed. So that one realises how even a soul so noble and splendid as his is but the very plaything of its own dreams, the slave of its own ideas for which at the last every- thing must be sacrificed — all the visions it has really seen, the beauty of the only dreams that were al- together lovely, the gentle nobility of those things it really desired. To love one's land too well has ever proved fatal to the lover : Garibaldi, no less than Sir Walter Raleigh or General Gordon, was killed at last by her to whom he had given every- thing. Hopelessly out-generaled, out-numbered, and out-marched, we see him at the last an old and broken man at the age of sixty -three leading some irregular troops in an alien cause in the Vosges Mountains in the war of '70, as a kind of relief from the unbearable weight of the failure of his dreams, 14 ITALY OF TO-DAY and at last, on a tiny island bought for him by the English, in the hands of women, he died, June 2, 1882. One has there something of the marvel of the shooting-star, something too of its swiftness in passing away yet remaining as something beautiful and wonderful in our memories. After all, his red- shirts grappled Italy together into one land ; and though it may be he was scarcely anything more than a great and cunning captain of irregular troops, his dreams have hypnotised not those troops alone, but a whole world, and for this reason his name stands first among those who in making modern Italy have brought not peace but a sword. And we find the natural result of their failure in the pretentious statues that are scattered up and down the beautiful cities : it is not that the men they commemorate were not sometimes great and noble, but that those who have commemorated them have for the most part been full of resentment against their enemies, tasteless and tactless, and without the elementary sense of beauty. The statue of Garibaldi on the Janiculum is perhaps one of the most offensive, in that there the dreamer turns eyes that the crowd has dared to believe were impudent on the Vatican and St Peter's Church. It is so childish a sneer there, in sight of the Alban Hills and the mountains that Horace once looked upon, that have seen Romulus slay his brother and have witnessed the expulsion of the kings and the tears of the mother of the Gracchi, that have gazed into the immortal UNITED ITALY 15 face of Caesar and unmoved have witnessed the gathering and passing of his armies, the triumphs accorded by the Senate, and the Judas face of his murderer. Those hills have watched innumerable emperors pass by, have seen the flames leap up that were the tongues shouting the name of the Son of God to all the world. And it is in their sight one finds a huge figure on horseback sneering at all that ; suggesting every day and every night the glib lie which Italy has believed so easily ; so that she will tell you almost with pride that her history began with the year 1848. It was on a March evening in that volcanic year that an immense crowd, fascinated and exalted by the dreams and visions of Mazzini, waited before the palace of the King of Savoy in Turin till, inspired by the passions of his people, he, " tired of shrinking alternately from the dagger of the Carbonari and the chocolate of the Jesuits," appeared with a tri- colour flag upon the balcony, and was persuaded almost against his own judgment (" il Re Tentenna ") to declare war on Austria, Doubtless that night saw the star of united Italy creep into the farthest sky. Yet are all her unequalled services, all the noble laws of the Republic, all the red years of Empire, all the splendid victories of the Holy Empire and the ecstatic patience of the Papacy to go for nothing ? On that night in 1848 Italy's recorded history spanned more than 2200 years. Looking back over the fifty four years since that luminous night, can we dare to admit 16 ITALY OF TO-DAY that these puny months that number less than the years that went before have outweighed in virtue and splendour and glory the heroic ages in the history of what for most of that time was almost the very world ? There is little to be very ashamed of in that old and princely yet humble past, but in the sordid years since 1848 we find so few great or splendid sins, so few really heroic men, so little honour, so much vulgarity and vainglory and vile meanness and littleness. What has been ill done, and there has been much ill done, has been magnified in vileness and hatefulness by its unutterable mean- ness and sordidness. Has Roman history anything so vile, so brutal, to show as the gambling mania that ruined all those princes who tried to make money out of their own defeat and the successes of their enemies, who pandered to the vilest desires for destruction and brutality on the part of the new- comers — the crowd ? I cannot find it. Yet that frightful patricide, that bloodless crime, is considered almost as a mere misfortune by the whole world that has really lost its sense of proportion in its passion for gold. It is horrible — humanity is concerned to-day less with the character or the nobility or the birth of a man than with the depth of his pockets. The smartest thief is the most lordly hero ; one is confused when the greatest titles are easily acquired by a successful banker or an universal grocer or rhetorical deputy. It is not an aristocracy (Heaven save the word !) of talent one objects to, but an UNITED ITALY 17 aristocracy of knaves and villains. How did these men obtain their titles ? by birth, by theft, by bribery, by auction ? Was Garibaldi a prince or Mazzini a duke in this kingdom "by the grace of God and the will of the people " ? Yet what a fool I am — this is no new thing, say you. 'Tis none the less a damnable thing on that account. Perhaps it is the unconscious fault of the Socialist — give every man an equal chance and it will go hard but the knave will win the prize. It is tiresome to lay every evil at the door of the Socialist ; moreover, it is use- less to do that in Italy. The future is most probably in the hands of the Socialists, and though I am not one of them, I am glad to know for sure that they are not contented with the present state of affairs. But who has the heart now to sing ? — "Fratelli d' Italia L' Italia s' e desta." No, no, Italy has fallen asleep again. The old Faiths are worn out, one no longer believes them ; there have been disappointments ; terrible lies, that have been tended for years with all the care given to a delicate child, have grown up and are devouring the Italians. The Italians — it was easier to find them twenty years ago than it is to-day. To-day there are Romans, Florentines, Neapolitans, Vene- tians, and a few Italians who it may be either have forgotten where they were born or do not care to tell. Yet the old Faiths are not dead. I am sure B 18 ITALY OF TO-DAY they, like Italy, will awake at the voice of the de- liverer. Ah ! never doubt that, believe it, believe it. You, reader, when in England, possibly have often spoken of the "dying Latin peoples," or the "de- cadent Latin nations," or of the " idle Italians," and so forth and so on : but in Italy it is impossible to pish so. The Italians are neither idle nor dying. They have already within living memory produced many very great men : Garibaldi, Mazzini, Cavour, Lombroso, and others whose names perhaps have not reached so far as the suburbs of London. One day they will produce a great leader, which is indeed their chief need, and he will awaken them. Their present condition only shows how utterly illogical the idea of democracy is, how utterly dependent any unfortunate country in the grip of this disease is on her leaders, those whose first duty it is to dominate the crowd, to put Demos in his place, which is always behind, — he is a good follower, as Italian history, no less than English, will easily prove. Even at moments of high passion it is always the idea of one man that drives the crowd to action, as on that March night in 1848. Meantime one sees a strange and sad spectacle. In an old book I have read that a house divided against itself cannot stand — if ever there were a house or nation in that sorry condition, you see it when you look on Italy. And there, I think, I touch the root of all the trouble that has made the past thirty-two years less splendid, less happy, than they UNITED ITALY 19 should have been. If all Italy has lost faith in her destiny and herself — he who sleeps within the Vatican, a prisoner like Peter, has never doubted his vision or his dream for a single moment. In how much worse a plight have been the former vicegerents of the Prince of Life ! The Vatican is not so poor a house for the Church as the Castle of Sant' Angelo with a yelling horde of villains under the Constable de Bourbon (whom Cellini swears he shot) threatening to pull the very world about the ears of Holy Church. And how much better is Rome than Avignon or Gaeta ? Doubtless that prisoner dreams, and nobly too. Yet, consider, is it so impossible for Pope and King, Church and Kingdom, to agree ? Suppose it is. Then must Italy suffer. And one day, say a thousand years from now, either more or less as you will, the king- dom of Italy crumbles, or whatsoever House is on the Italian throne fails to produce an heir, or Italy like Greece is really a thing of the past, still there is that claimant only waiting the will of God. It may be we have among us sequestered him to America, or even, as we did Napoleon, confined his body to a tiny island, yet that marvellous, miraculous, and stupendous idea that he personifies we can never slay, never in all the countless millions of years in which it may be humanity will still laugh into the face of the sun and be sorry to die ; never though all knowledge fail, though the white man has fallen before the Slav and he before the yellow man, and 20 ITALY OF TO-DAY he again in the inscrutable wisdom and justice of time before some other race ; never can we destroy with all our cruelty or our sufferance or our science or our scorn that Church founded upon the Rock, against which our God has promised no gates of hell shall ever prevail, to whom He has said, " Lo, I am with you alway, even to the end of the world." But is it so impossible for Church and Kingdom to agree ? I will never believe it. One day that deliverer will come who will give to his beautiful country the crowning gift of Peace. He will " Cleanse the stuff 'd bosom of that perilous stuff That preys upon the heart," and Italy once more will forget her childish passions and furies and her suicidal purpose of revenge, re- membering her greater past, when the dignity of her Senate struck terror into the heart of the Bar- barian and the most precious altars of God were built in the hearts of her children. Is it not possible that, even as England appears to be willing to sacrifice everything to her principle of Free Trade, so Italy may very easily pay too dearly for her dreams of unity ? It is not that that dream is not great and noble, but that in spite of innumerable sacrifices it remains still a dream. Never in the history of the world has there been unity in that old and dear land, though the idea has lifted a whole people towards heroism, and in- spired the thoughts of many dreamers. Is it not UNITED ITALY 21 possible that, after all, the happiness, the greatness, the character, the history of a people are worth more than a dream which Nature seems to have forbidden reality to claim ? To buy unity at the price of destruction and death seems but a silly bargain. And who, knowing Italy to-day, can say with knowledge and honesty that Florence and Naples, for instance, are sister cities, in the same way that Oxford and Bristol or Manchester and Birmingham are. Just as there are centuries of history behind our England circling her with inde- structible deeds and thoughts and passions and fights, so there is a longer tale of centuries behind the Italian States sundering them with deeds bloodier and more terrible than any that have welded us together ; hatreds that have lived a thousand years, traditions that were born when our Europe was born, distrust that the last fifty years have only served to fan into furious antipathy. Is all this, the unforgetable story of the world, to go for nothing in the hearts of men ? Is it so easy to carve out of their souls the things they have heard with their ears, that their fathers have declared unto them of the old time long ago ? How many years it took to unite England and Scotland ! Yet there are not less but greater reasons for hatred and distrust be- tween North and South in Italy than ever there were between England and Scotland. Yes, and as great a difference in race too, as instinctive a dislike. We are in such a hurry to be rich and great and 22 ITALY OF TO-DAY powerful that we forget it takes more than a hundred years for the smallest wound to heal. We too, like the Americans, are always out of breath — it is a bad habit. But if unity is the true ideal for Italy, then I think there are two things necessary to be won before that dream will become bright reality. The first is good government, and the second follows as the night the day — peace with the Vatican. Let the Government convince, not England or Germany alone, but all Italy too, that its idea of rule is not to spoil the people, not to enrich its wretched deputies, not to make grandiose alliances, not to avenge itself upon the Church, but to make its people happy and prosperous, and to train them to use liberty rightly. For the Italians — as, in spite of themselves, one desires to call them — are capable of great happiness beyond anything dreamed of in England since Cromwell came and, having failed in everything else, succeeded in making us sad. There must be no more adventures in Africa, no more bank scandals, no more despoiling of monas- teries, no more throwing of nuns into the streets, no more robbery, no more bribery, no more wholesale nurder at Ostia and elsewhere, no more cowardice ; but there must be Justice, so that the laws shall not be administered in one way to him who can pay and in quite another to him who cannot. More- over, the Royal House of Savoy must cease to ad- vertise itself by renaming old streets after itself, or UNITED ITALY 23 placing wonderful and ridiculous statues of its mem- bers in all sorts of unexpected and unsuitable places. At the present time the Church does far more for Italy than the Government attempts. For while the Government taxes the people within an inch of their lives the clergy are busied in good works. Meantime the people, of whom no one who knows them dare despair, — nay, rather he who knows them best will believe in them most firmly, — are helping themselves. Everywhere agricultural syndicates and people's banks are appearing, and thus the money- lender Jew, though by no means extirpated, no longer finds an easy prey in the farmer in need of capital. No doubt the State, too, will help more and more, — it is to be believed. Already it is trying with the help of local bodies to prevent malaria, which still claims some 18,000 lives every year. But before all things Peace. Till that is given to Italy by those who govern her, to combat the malaria is but to physic a man for indigestion who is dying of a terrible fever. At present those who are most loving to the Government are least in their allegiance to God. For in Italy, as in Spain, Protestantism is the merest merry-andrew. It has made no impres- sion whatever on the people, nor will it ever do so, save to convince them of the unreasonableness of Religion — a thing patent to every educated man. In Rome, no less than in the other fair cities, to be seen at Mass is as good as to forfeit your position under Government. I do not fear contradiction. 24 ITALY OF TO-DAY The Italian Government is as hostile to religion as the French is at this time, but less openly for fear of the people. For the Italian, taking him in the main, still looks towards heaven with hope and for other reasons than to admire the stars or to point a jest at Joshua. Somewhere behind his ample and profound sky he knows Christ waits with all His saints, nor does he believe for a moment that he is deserted by them. He will desire the priest to give God's blessing on his crops as he sows his seed, and remembers the old stories of the Gospel and the lives of the Saints. To scoff at Christ is still to his mind blasphemy. So in a world that he loves and makes beautiful, he is perhaps a little behind the times; but the blood of Caesar's armies is in his veins, it were well not to torture him beyond endur- ance, nor to anger him more than is necessary. III. IL PAPA-RE. SO soon as we have climbed up to the last Alp, beautiful as though touched with the sword of the archangel, and in some gap among those spectral peaks, moved, perhaps for the first time, to deep emotion, have knelt to gaze down on Italy, we realise that a new land, quite different from any of those we have ever seen before, lies before us. In the mist of early morning, with the sun still low on the horizon, in the devout loneliness of the mountains, as the width of the great plain of Lom- bardy opens before us, with a glimpse of far-away mountains that we can scarcely persuade ourselves to believe to be the Apennines, we almost imagine that we see cupolas, innumerable towns, and the strong and fair walls of cities, and it is not difficult to believe for a moment that in the pure and nimble air we can see even so far as Rome her- self. I think it is some such beautiful and im- mortal city, built of the desire of the world's heart, that we see when we look towards Rome in reality, 26 ITALY OF TO-DAY at least from a great distance, as from Tivoli over the Campagna, when the dome of St Peter's is like a ship for ever a-sail in the distance, beneath which the very precious dreams of an awakened world live ; and where, in spite of unquenchable laughter, innumerable pilgrims still kneel before one who is a king and in prison. And being very young, it was thus I came to Rome. I was a very fool, and, as I have told you before, I came afoot. And when at last, after many adventures, many tarryings by the way, — in Avignon, in Frejus, in the rock villages of the Riviera, in my Genoa of the Proud Heart, in white Pisa and Perugia that frowns over the valley of St Francis, — I came toward Rome on that last day, it was, I dare believe, even in the mood ot the old-fashioned and reverent pilgrim of old time who had followed in the footsteps of an English king. Yes, and I, too, had shouted " Ecco Roma ! " with all my fathers, and crossed the Campagna hurriedly in my eagerness to be in the very city of Rome before another sunset. The first church I saw was St Peter's, and the first house, the prison of the Pope. Yet, at the very moment of my arrival, which should have crowned my journey, a kind of remorse, a horrible regret, came to me for the journey itself now ended. The freedom of the road, the eternal expectation of to - morrow. And, even as I sat resting on the Spanish steps, the bells of the Trinita were ringing the Angelus, and, if you will believe me, there among the tattered IL PAPA-RE 27 " models," almost before the bells had finished ringing, I fell asleep. The prison of the Pope, — well, I thought it finer than the old prison of the first Peter, finer even than Raphael's dream of it, painted in fresco on the wall of the Stanze — and with a view ! But there was no angel of deliverance — yet. Still I will believe, though you will not, the prophecies of St Malachy. A true Irishman was he, with all the gifts of his race and the piety too, Archbishop of Armagh, 1134, m the island of Saints. In these days, when a great Pope cannot be far from death, in Rome as of old the soothsayers have at least a hearing. Traditions, legends, and ap- paritions gather like a crowd of vultures round his last years ; Centro has seen this, or Monsignor has heard that, as they sat with his Holiness and smoothed his forehead when it ached. The Blessed Virgin has deigned to comfort him whose last hours no earthly woman may make easy. And always St Malachy is remembered as having named Leo XIII. " Lumen in ccelo," as he named Pius IX. with equal truth " Crux de Cruce." And, indeed, Leo XIII. has been "Lumen in ccelo" for the Church. When Pius IX. died in 1878 and Cardinal Joachim Pecci was elected as Leo XIII., every Government in Europe almost was hostile to the Papacy. In Italy herself Victor Emmanuel, he who had wrested Rome from the hands of Christ, was just dead, and 28 ITALY OF TO-DAY Humbert by the " grace of God and the will of the people " reigned in his stead. In Germany the con- flict regarding public worship known as the Kultur- Kampf was at its height, and Bismarck was hostile. In England the Government was busy encouraging the Italian monarchy, then eighteen years old, to establish a national Church on the splendid and successful pattern of the Church of England ; in France the anti-clericals, under MM. Dufaure and Waddington, were in power, having caused Marshal MacMahon to resign on the 13th December 1877. It was, too, in 1878 that Gambetta made his speech proposing that theological students should no longer be free from military service. Even Russia had been angered by a protest against her cruel policy in Poland. Indeed the whole world appears to have thought that at length the gates of hell were about to swallow Papacy and Church together. It was of a kingdom seemingly so despised that Leo XIII. was chosen king. Nor has he in his long reign of twenty-four years ever proved himself any- thing but a good, great, and wise ruler. That Pius IX. was a saint is most probable; Leo XIII. has, I imagine, no such claim, but has been content to serve God well and truly with the gifts that were given him. So England is no longer quite so hostile. King Edward VII. is the first king of his House of Hanover to receive a Cardinal Prince in state. He, too, like Queen Victoria before him, has sent a special embassy to Rome to congratulate the Pope IL PAPA-RE 29 in his Jubilee year. But it was in the very year of his election that Pope Leo restored the Hier- archy in Scotland, and soon after composed the difficulty with Bismarck. In 1894 he made his peace with France by recognising the Republic, and although now the French seem bent on sham- ing their country in the eyes of the world by enforcing the Law of Associations, it is, I think, to Leo XIII. we owe the fact that the Religious Orders are almost welcomed in England, where it is well to forget that it is still "against the law" for a Jesuit to land. In fact, the Vatican is now at peace with all Europe, with all the world save Italy only. And there even Leo's wisdom has found no way for peace. There he has not dared to abate one iota of his demands ; there he still regards him- self, nor is he alone in his opinion, as the despoiled King of Rome, the Vicar of Christ, now prisoner in the Vatican. And everywhere, and not least in Italy, there has been a wonderful revival of Catholic energy. Innumerable societies, unions, associations, have been formed, each to express some special side or idea contained in the Catholic Church. So we hear of the "Catholic Socialists" in Italy and France and Germany, of the "Christian Democrats" in Italy, of innumerable congresses and reunions, and in Italy, too, of " Rural Unions," " Catholic Agricultural Unions," and "Village Banks." For Leo, who has been called in England the Working-man's Pope, while resolute against socialism in any other form 30 ITALY OF TO-DAY than that professed by the Catholic Socialists, has really shown a feeling of tenderness even in his policy and in his encyclicals for the poor and the unfortunate. Still, as the Church never for an instant forgets, she is a kingdom, not a democracy. St Malachy prophesied truly when he spoke of Leo XIII. as " Lumen in ccelo," for there is no country in the world that has not seen that bright star on his escutcheon and wondered at the immortality of Christ's Church militant here in earth. But in Rome to-day that light in heaven is setting ; everywhere one may hear whispers of the change that is coming. The Pope is ninety-three and very feeble. Even the cheering of the soldiers and the people is too much for him, the triple crown too heavy, the light of the tapers too dazzling. As he draws near heaven, the world, even that beautiful world seen from the windows of the Vatican which is all that Pope Leo has known for twenty-four years, falls away as a thing not to be endured. Only in some marvellous sweet way the name of Jesus is more precious, the robe of Mary a fold of the soft sky. Meantime, an eager world that is seldom in suffi- cient silence to think of Death other than as an interesting innovator, can hardly contain its im- patience for him who is to come. O cynic Death, who taught us that " a live dog is better than a dead Pope," there are those who call you eloquent in that you have touched the hearts of men, and just because you are indifferent, and mighty because you IL PAPA-RE 31 will not spare even him who natters you. Ah, here over the coffin and the old white body of the mightiest king you will draw together all the far-fetched great- ness, all the greed, pride, and ambition of men, among which will be found no single soul to weep for Joachim Pecci who is dead. But in spite of his great and magnificent titles, in spite of the visible significance of the triple crown, the Pope is no king, but the servant of the servants of God. Though the Vicegerent of Christ is a prisoner as his Master was, it is still Jesus, the Prince of Life, safe in His heaven, who is King. And so one sees the utter uselessness of those lies that are believed so eagerly : that the Pope has nominated his successor in his will, as say the wiseacres Peter did, though, none knows better than the Pope, Peter never did ; or that he is about to surrender the temporal power. Nor are these the only rumours that spread through Europe and the world con- cerning so mysterious a kingdom, for some of the more excitable wiseacres will tell us that Cardinal Rampolla is about to be disgraced on account of the French imbroglio, in spite of the fact that he and he alone has been Leo's Secretary of State since 1878, and that if the present state of religion in France is one of his failures, then the present position of the Papacy in Germany, in Spain, in Austria, in England, is also his success. That he should retire and name Cardinal Ferrata as his successor is, as it were, to suggest that Mr Chamberlain should 32 ITALY OF TO-DAY resign and name Mr Jesse Collings to reign in his stead, so though the voice were that of Jesse, the words would still, as before, be Joseph's. And to those who watch events with some attention and are not at the mercy of the first wind of rumour that blows from the Quirinal or even from less hostile quarters, it appears certain that should the Pope die to-day or very shortly, his successor would be either Cardinal Seranno Vannutelli or Cardinal Prince Rampolla del Tindaro. Yet there is and always must be a great uncertainty as to the result of any election, for the Pope is elected by a majority and not by the unanimous vote of the Conclave. The Cardinal Prince Rampolla del Tindaro was born in Sicily. He is of all men the most tactful, ever ready to annihilate himself if thereby he may gain an advantage. In his manner ordinarily he is quiet, yet he is capable of the most majestical emotions. Thus at Mass he surpasses himself, for he is tactful enough to know that he that humbleth himself shall be exalted. He is said to have the gift of tears, and though he may forget that he is of the South it is impossible for others to do so. His supreme worth, at least one may suppose in the eyes of Leo XIII., is that he is, or seems to be, content to carry out the ideas of the Pope without leavening them in the process. Thus if it is true that it is in France that the chief, it may be the only, failure of the papal policy is seen, it is Leo's policy, not Rampolla's, that has been unfortunate ; IL PAPA-RE 33 yet Rampolla continues to bear the burden not un- willingly, and it may well be that the chief cause of the failure in France is to be found neither in the policy itself nor in the methods by which it was carried out, but in the unfortunate death of Lavi- gerie, who was really a great man and not a mere reactionary like Cardinal Langenieux. There is more beneath the struggle in France than appears at first sight, into which it is impossible to enter here. Yet it is perhaps not altogether unworthy to point out that Cardinal Rampolla has made friends of the cardinal monks, whose votes would be, one may believe, not less than twelve. In spite of all this it is not usual for the Secretary of State to become the new Pope, and so after all it may be that Rampolla desires some new post, and is busy getting himself seemingly disgraced in order to mount in the end to the very chair of St Peter. For if St Malachy is to be trusted, the title of the new Pope is to be " Ignis ardens," which some would tell you will suit Rampolla del Tindaro very well. The prophecies of St Malachy of Armagh, pub- lished for the first time in Venice in 1595, by Arnold Wion, a Flemish Benedictine, in his 'Lignum Vitse,' begin with Celestine II. in 1143, and consist of a roll of one hundred and eleven popes. They have never been looked on seriously by any historian that I know of, yet they are interesting at any rate to the traveller and the passer-by, both because of their extraordinary fulfilment in many instances in o 34 ITALY OF TO-DAY the past, and because they allow of only nine suc- cessors to the present Pope. Leo XIII., " Lumen in ccelo," is the one hundred and second pope in St Malachy's roll ; of these one hundred and two dead popes, St Malachy named Celestine II. (1143-44) "Ex Castro Tiberis " — "From the fortress of the Tiber" — and, as it proved, his name was de Castelli, he had a fortress in his " coat," and he was born in the city of Castello, where the Tiber rises in Umbria. Again, he named Lucius II. (1144-45) " Inimicus expulsus " — " The enemy chased out " — and the Pope's name was Caccianemico, meaning "chase enemy." Again, Eugene III. (1145-53), "Ex magnitudine montis " — "From the greatness of a mountain" — he was born in the castle of Grammonte. Again, Adrian IV., the Englishman (1154-59). " De rure Albo," he called him. Adrian was born at, and was Bishop of, St Alban's. But it will be said, All these popes lived about the time of St Malachy himself (1095-1148) ; what proof is there that these are not prophecies after the event ? Of course there is no proof. But I will give a few instances of St Malachy's prophetic gift in the names of some of the popes who reigned after the date of the publication of the prophecy by Arnold Wion in 1595 ; so that whatever one may think of the inspiration of St Malachy, — and there is no necessity to believe in it that ever I heard of, should one pre- IL PAPA-RE 35 fer to remain incredulous, — it will be seen that it was at any rate manifestly impossible for these prophecies to have been spoken after the event. Of Innocent XII., who reigned (1691-1700) a hundred years after Wion's publication, St Malachy says, " Rastrum in porta" — "The rake at the door." He was of Rastello (the rake) at the very gates of Naples. Pius VI. (1775-1799), " Peregrinus Aposto- licus " — "The apostolic pilgrim" or "wanderer"; he was carried to Siena on his refusal to surrender the temporal power, thence to the Certosa, and thence to Grenoble, and at last to Vallence, where he died. Pius VII. (1800-23), " Aquila rapax " — "The grasp- ing eagle." When it is remembered that Napoleon Buonaparte was then at the height of his power, and that he brought the Pope to Paris, the inter- pretation is easy. So we come down to our own day, to Pius IX., "Crux de Cruce " — "The Cross from a cross" — who reigned through all the troub- lous times of '48, '60, and '70 ; who saw the tem- poral power once more stolen from the Church ; whose cross came truly from the cross of Savoy, whose device, to be found on every match-box or packet of bad cigarettes, is a cross argent. I have already spoken of the title of Leo XIII., but there are still nine popes and no more, according to St Malachy, v\ho are to sit on St Peter's throne. First he comes called "Ignis ardens " — "Burning fire," then " Religio depopolata," then "Fides in- 3 6 ITALY OF TO-DAY trepida," then " Pastor angelicus," then " Pastor et Nauta," which some believing soul has thought points to an American Pope, then "Flos florum," then " De meditate lunae," then " De labore solis," then "Gloria Olivse," — and so St Malachy says during the last tyranny and persecution the Roman Peter shall feed the sheep. " In persecutione ex- trema Sanctse Romanse Ecclesise sedebit Petrus Romanus qui pascet oves in multis tribulationibus quibus transactis, Civitatis Septicollis disuetur, et Judex tremendus judicabit populum." While claiming that there is no little interest in this ancient Irish prophecy, I do not for a moment suggest that there is any real reason to believe it other than that of the pleasure one may find on a holiday or a pilgrimage in so old and precious a land in the idlest words spoken concerning it by one who loved it well. There are very many of the prophecies to which it seems impossible to find any interpretation. Thus Gregory XVI. (1832-46) is named " De Balneis Etruriae," — " From the baths of Tuscany" — but he was a Lombard. Pius VIII. (1829-31) is named " Vir Religiosus " — " A Religious ' : — but he was nothing of the sort. So it will not do for united Italy or any other enemy of the Papacy to depend too much on St Malachy and his "nine more popes," which by the year 2000 would bring the Papacy to an end. Founded as it is on most ancient custom, the papal Conclave has in the course of centuries greatly IL PAPA-RE 37 changed. The election of a Pope was at one time at the hands of the clergy and the people and the soldiers of the city of Rome ; it is now at the hands of the College of Cardinals, a body of seventy men, when complete, which is hardly ever the case. The struggle for the independence of the Papal Court, and of the right of election, from any tyranny of emperor or king in Rome or Germany or Byzantium, is certainly as old as the year 483, when the election was forbidden " without the co - operation of the king's plenipotentiary," a decree annulled by a synod of Pope Symacchus in 502. To-day too, it would seem, we are to witness a like struggle. Certainly in 1878 Crispi managed that the Conclave should be undisturbed, but Italy was not so old then. What guarantee beyond the already broken and evaded " Law of Guarantees " has the Church that in the future she will be per- mitted by an already jealous and frightened Govern- ment to choose her visible Head ? None, I think. For in case of disturbance or riot within the city or the kingdom, the Government would undoubtedly seize the opportunity to remove the cause of it. And if that cause were the length of an election or some other similar reason within the Conclave, Italy might think it a fortunate occasion in which to interfere, and maybe elect an antipope herself almost without outside interference if the Powers were already occupied in China or America or elsewhere. 38 ITALY OF TO-DAY On the death of any Pope all cardinals are sum- moned to a Conclave to elect a successor, ten days being allowed to go by before the Conclave meets. This practically annuls the votes of any American cardinals, who would find it difficult to come to Rome within the time. It is within these ten days that the funeral of the late Pope takes place, and he is buried temporarily in St Peter's amid innumerable ceremonials, pageants, traditions, glories, and pray- ers, under the splendid and tremendous phrases of the Church. Surrounded by the inscrutable mystery and faith of the plain chant the old Pope is carried to his temporary resting-place, while in his funeral train surge the vastest ambitions of the world, the passions that have been blowing in the hearts of men for it may be a generation, the greed and envy and despair of all his ministers, the fears or sorrows of his friends, the curiosity of surprised ambassadors, the weak tears of those who weep because of the beauty of the antique words or the magnificence of the rise and fall of the chant, or the splendour of the tapers. Outside, a world waits chiefly expectant. So few to weep, for he was the Father of us all and therefore had no children ; so many to follow, for that he was a king and has left a great kingdom and no man knows who will wear his crown. The Sacred College rules the Church when the pope dies till his successor is elected, and so the Cardinal Camerlengo is for the time the visible Head of the Church. It is from him that the Swiss Guard IL PAPA-RE 39 will take their orders, and it is for him in case of need they will die. Of the Conclave itself a very excellent account will be found in 'John Inglesant,' by Mr J. H. Short- house, a book that has caught more of the spirit of Italy than any other I know of. It is useless for me to describe again a ceremonial told once for all in so well known a book. As to Pope Leo XIII., he was born at Carpineti, near Segni in the Volscian Hills, in 1810, and christ- ened Joachim Vincent ; he bears the hereditary title of Conte, and comes of a noble family of Siena in Tuscany. Those who have cared to find the old house in the mountains where he was born will re- member the portraits of his father and mother, still hanging on the walls. His likeness to his father is extraordinary. Of his face it is impossible to speak. Only those who have seen him will understand me when I say that, like St Dominic, there is a "certain radiance " about him, so that he seems to have been carved from the whitest and most delicate marble, within which some sun is imprisoned but shining. That it is extremely difficult to decide whether the grievances that he has always stated so openly are really such, or whether a people in its struggle for liberty and unity is justified in robbing both him and the Church, I shall be the first to admit. Nor, I hope, will any one quarrel with me for being of the former opinion. To me it seems clear that the Popes had been practically undisputed masters of Rome for 40 ITALY OF TO-DAY hundreds of years, that Mazzini and Garibaldi desired not a kingdom but a republic, that for ten years Flor- ence was the very excellent and convenient capital of United Italy. To others these things go for nothing. Their devotion to the undeniably noble desires and passions of the Italian people for unity sweep even justice into that sea of things forgot where the tragedy of our own House of Stuart lies. But if it is right for a mass of men, or the majority of individuals of which a nation is made up, or even an entire people, to rob another people, or an institu- tion, or even a single person, though it be for the good of all concerned ; then it is equally right for a tyrant to rob and imprison his people if it be for their ultimate good. To my own countrymen, to whom nothing that is not practical appeals, this argument goes for nothing. To more thoughtful people, such as the Italians, it is an ever-recurring question. And it is not in Italy alone that it is the supreme quarrel of all, but, as is becoming clearer every day, in every country in the civilised world. May a nation do evil, scout justice, rob, murder, and slay in order that the believed happiness of the crowd may by chance be attained ? For myself I have answered this question in the negative — but I shall not quarrel with you for thinking me a fooi. IV. THE HOUSE OF SAVOY. THE murder of King Humbert, a tragedy all the more profound in that he perhaps of all men concerned in the government of his country so little deserved a vengeance so brutal, has perhaps awakened Italy. For his death roused the indignation not of the outer world alone, but of Italy too ; even in England one began to read in the better informed and more intelligent newspapers that the Italian Government was greatly to blame, and at last the truth of twenty years seemed almost to have got itself expressed in our old and dear land — viz., that the Government of Italy was unspeakably corrupt, impotent for good, a great wound from which Italy was bleeding to death. During the last twenty years the Government could not have done worse ; indeed there is not one single thing in which they have done well ; nor can this be gainsaid. I am not concerned to deny that while Italy is anxious to compare herself with the most successful nations, to her own unavoidable discomfort, one should 42 ITALY OF TO-DAY rather compare her present conditions with her past just before that unification — indeed I am anxious to agree in any such contention. It is in such a comparison that one will find a great encourage- ment to believe in her future. For if her present state is not so splendid, nor so successful, as that of her neighbours and allies, she is, I firmly believe, at least on the road to a better world than that she has left ; and although the crowd is not perhaps so happy or so free from taxation in Tuscany or Umbria, for instance, as in the old days a hundred years ago, still a great and bright future is now pos- sible to Italia la Nuova, that was impossible to the geographical expression that travellers and artists and historians called Italy before i860. So though it is into an Eldorado of the spirit at least that you will come over the Alps and along the shores of that old and great sea, it is into a very human land, that democracy has as yet had scarcely time to soil with its desire for uniformity. Theft, adultery, and murder flourish as with us. Nor are the moun- tains as yet scarred with railways, nor quite all of the monasteries turned into barracks. A poor land rich in memories the superficial traveller will remark. It is scarcely the whole truth. There is even a small surplus in the budgets at present ; and there are other things. It is in leaders that Italy is unfor- tunately still so poor. The House of Savoy has not risen to the occasion. Victor Emmanuel, popular though he was, was a soldier, not a statesman. King THE HOUSE OF SAVOY 43 Humbert, lately so foully murdered, had been be- wildered since the day of his proclamation ; he was the last man in the world to hold the reins of the Government that was thrust upon him. A good man, with a kind heart, utterly fearless too, he looked on the Chamber of Deputies as the conjuring-box from which his father had his throne. The ridiculous collection of faddists, anarchists, socialists, irreligious maniacs, and fools that make up that extraordinary camera, he regarded as the nation. Whilst others more bold or credulous than he have believed that God has given them their kingdoms, that they rule by His will, and are to Him accountable, he for his sins, or those of others, knew he ruled "by the will of the people." He showed, full of faith as he was, almost an emotional interest in his Chamber of Deputies : it is difficult to understand, when we remember that shortly be- fore his murder, in the month of April in the year 1900, the obstruction of public business by the mere noise of that gathering was to be ended by the calling in of the carabineers. In May, after the prorogation and the reassembling of the Chamber, at a suggest- ion of the suppression of an obstruction which, as an English paper said at the time, " puts Berlin and Vienna and the simple tactics of Irish members quite in the shade," the Left rose, seventy of them, and began to sing the Marseillaise and Garibaldi's Hymn, using "their desks as drums and their fists as drumsticks." Nor were they content w'th this, 44 ITALY OF TO-DAY but began to sing " The Socialist ' Inno dei Lavor- atori,' a song forbid by law." After these shameful and ridiculous tactics had amused a cynical world for long enough, King Humbert dissolved Parliament, instead of going down to the House with a whip, as Herodotus tells us in the beginning of the book of Melpomene the Scythians did when, on returning to their country after ruling for many years in Upper Asia, they found that their slaves had seized their country and their women. And amid all that vulgar hurly-burly, in all the noise and despair of the place-seeking majority, in all the noise and hatred of the " constitutional Opposition " that under the chivalrous and valiant Signor Giolitti had made common cause with those who shouted treason, there was one man who might have saved the honour and perhaps the soul of his country, but he hesitated — I mean the king. If he was King of Italy — if Italy was his kingdom — why did he not save her from those who were despoiling her ? Why did he not come as Odysseus came, and stretch the mighty bow and slay these suitors, the devourers of man's substance, ere thev could com- pletely slay the beautiful land he loved, and at last even himself also, at Monza in the north ; or if in the multitude of petty vulgarities that surrounded him, amid the hideous obscenity of modern vandalism, he dared not think of great Odysseus, why did he not recall the splendid words of his own father, Victor THE HOUSE OF SAVOY 45 Emmanuel, who in 1849 dissolved his Parliament that had become unruly, and from Moncalieri spoke in words that cut like little whips ? " What fruit," cried he, " have my words obtained ? Acts unfriendly to my crown, the idiotic hostility of the Opposition, and encroachments on my prerogative secured to me by law. I will call the Chamber severely to account for its actions. I have promised to save my nation from the tyranny of parties, what- ever men they be who lead or compose them. I have fulfilled my oath by dissolving a Parliament that had become impossible." Why was it King Humbert never spoke words like these to the vile crew of vampires that were sucking his country dry ? Can it be that he had forgotten them ? or, as he looked from the great windows of the Quirinal down over Rome, and saw far away across the mighty city smouldering in the sunset, the everlasting dome of St Peter's Church, and the mighty angel over the castle of Sant' Angelo, did his heart accuse him of the sins of his ancestors of which he had not yet purged himself, and as he remembered that mighty theft, did he fear that the Romans — nay, the whole world — might remember it too, and so fear also his people, who were his accomplices in that immortal crime ? What thoughts came to him out of that old city as he gazed over her from his palace on the hill we can never know, but be sure they were not always joyful or inspiring. So he never dared to save his country, unless by 46 ITALY OF TO-DAY his terrible death he has shown her the way she is going. He was the first king of his House to fall under the hand of the murderer. And in contem- plating the cowardly deed, one is moved more by its significance, at least at this distance of time, than by its tragedy. He was murdered because he was a king alter the modern pattern, because he reigned but never ruled. It was his own child killed him — one of those who made him and his father what they were, giving them, not without exacting toll as we have seen, stolen goods. His very chivalry, his gallant courage, his fearlessness, his belief in his people, were the things that led him into danger. There is no honour among thieves, nor could he play his part. After all, the temptation was too great ; who could have withstood it, after having listened to the words of Cavour and the marvellous dreams of Mazzini ? He, like his an- cestors, was a dreamer from the mountains ; he should have died with a grey sword in his right hand, not with a trumpery crown in his fingers that he was striving not to break. So with this brittle ring of glass ever in his keeping, he submitted himself, in order to preserve it, to the vile company of atheist Ministers, republican and anarchist depu- ties, who ended by almost persuading him they were " the country," to the contamination of all the sharpers of Sicily and the south, to the vulgar con- versation of the fraudulent grocers and bankers of the north, and to the insolent tactics of the ad- THE HOUSE OF SAVOY 47 venturer. And when he died one was really glad for him. He was a brave man in a terrible situation ; he tried to serve well a herd of swine that he mistook for his subjects. Let us be glad for him, for he is now with his ancestors, and sleeps well. King Humbert's death was received with extraor- dinary quietness by the Italian people. Not even the Socialists dared to say a word. There remains the question of his successor. Where King Humbert, good man though he was, failed, will his son succeed ? That it is impossible to say. Victor Emmanuel III. is really, even now after two years of his reign have passed, an unknown quantity. His first speech from the throne was certainly most splendid. Some of his words seemed to have an echo of his grandfather's speech of 1849 — since then he has been for the most part silent. A writer in the ' Saturday Review ' for August 4, 1900, ventured to say of him : " As Prince of Naples, he has been a complete enigma, and never perhaps did any nation know so little of its sovereign's heir- apparent. He is known to be an efficient soldier with a turn for strategy ; he is a good shot, a fair horseman, a constant yachtsman ; his hobby is numismatics, and he is a good herald and geneal- ogist. In infancy and boyhood his health was weak, hence perhaps the vague general impression that he is also weak in character. There are those who think he will prove even more of a figurehead than his unfortunate father ; and again there are those 48 ITALY OF TO-DAY who think that he is a ' dark horse ' and will do strange and great things and even things autocratic." It may be possible that this enthusiastic athlete and sportsman will prove the deliverer Italy has wished for so long, but I think it were too much to be cer- tain of it as yet. As I have ventured to say in a former chapter, absolutely the first work any really great statesman or king will set himself will be a reconciliation with the Church ; that accomplished, there is no knowing to what splendour Italy might not advance. But wanting that internal peace with- out which no country can for long live, her outlook is dark indeed. It is useless for her to dream of colonial enterprise or of authority and place in the councils of Europe, or even in those of the Triple Alliance, if she is divided in her allegiance within her own borders. It is, then, a man with sufficient imagination, sufficient energy, and sufficient daring Italy needs, and if that man should indeed prove to be her king, then is she twice blest. And this King Victor Emmanuel III. about whom Europe is so curious, should find in the lives and legends of his ancestors an inspiration to control his will and inform his spirit even to compass such great labours as are so plainly set before him. He is the tenth king of his house, which has given more than one pope to Christendom, has produced saints, warriors, statesmen, and cardinals ; and as may also be pointed out, kings too, surnamed the Great, the Peaceful, the Warrior, the Hunter. That he should THE HOUSE OF SAVOY 49 add to these names that of King Victor Emmanuel III., the Saviour of his country, would indeed be to fulfil the tradition of his house. When he spoke those brave and fearless words to his first Parlia- ment : " Unabashed and steadfast I ascend the throne, conscious of my rights and of my duties as king. Let Italy have faith in me as I have faith in her destinies, and no human force shall destroy that which with such self-sacrifice my fathers built," can one dare to believe he really meant what he said ? Let us try to believe it, for some of them who heard him, knowing so well the state of that beloved land, were not ashamed to weep and to cry to their own hearts, It may be, oh that it might be, that the Master has come ! Since then there has been for the most part silence. Yet it may well be that he is but maturing his plans, or waiting the appointed hour or gathering all his strength, so that his mastery may be only more steadfast in the end. Our age was supposed to have no need of kings so short a time ago, yet where were England without her Crown, or Germany without her Emperor, or Austria without her double Crown, or Spain without her beautiful and fearless Regent ? I think, indeed, the age as ever is against sham kings, but against real kings it is not, nor has any age been so since the beginning. Thus Italy, simple of heart, left to the bitter mercies of her professional poli- ticians, is in the position of Andromeda, whom may Perseus her prince rescue with all speed. D 50 ITALY OF TO-DAY Looking on the political life of Italy to-day, one discovers scarcely anything but an almost inextricable confusion. There is no Centre party at Montecitorio, and the Right and the Left have become useless as names for parties so uncertain in their allegiance and in their policy as to be nothing but a mass of inde- pendent and inconsistent votes. Instead of Govern- ment and Opposition, as in a country so indifferent to ideas as England, one finds, for example, that Di Rudini has a small following, Giolitti the shameless another, Sonnino another, and other demagogues other always small followings. Each of these little cliques is really a political party, with a more or less sound or unsound programme by means of which in most cases it hopes to enrich itself. As to a Court party, there is no such phenomenon, happily, and it is there that the King's chief power lies. Neither he nor his father have stooped to trick and plot and bribe, and so happily there is no Royal- ist party. For nowadays in Italy, since the death of that great and profound thinker to whom Italy owes almost all she has of stable government and life, Count Cavour, a politician must satisfy the ridiculous demands of some half-a-dozen parties be- fore he can obtain a majority in this unfortunate Chamber. So that one finds that though one has a majority to-day, to-morrow two or three groups will find themselves offended and will consequently vote against the rest that form with them the Govern- ment. What the ruture has in store it is of course THE HOUSE OF SAVOY 51 impossible to say for certain, but it seems to me (I write in all humility and am willing to take correction from others who are better acquainted with Italy than myself) that all these groups will soon be welded into two great parties, the Conservatives and the Socialists. I speak of the Socialists elsewhere. With all their work and enthusiasm and faith I doubt if they will triumph save for a very short time. It may be they will succeed beyond their expectations and precipitate a revolutionary movement that will border on, if it will not actually achieve, civil war. But from the Conservatives, if they are wise, great things should come. A wise conservatism will be eager to grant real reform where it is needed, and it is needed in many things in Italy ; and if, as I hope, the Conservatives will urge the King to make peace with the Vatican, so that the Pope will no longer refuse to allow good Catholics to vote at the elections, their future is certain. It is impossible that the Clerical party can work for long with the Socialists. The Jesuits, who, one is told, place the recovery of the temporal power for the Church first in their programme, may work — and I for one am inclined to believe that others beside the Jesuits did so work at Milan in 1898 — with the Socialists so far as to disturb and overthrow the present form of govern- ment, for in the end that is the Socialists' aim, but after that they will be compelled to oppose them and fight them for the very mastery of Italy. But 52 ITALY OF TO-DAY in spite of the prejudice felt, for the most part abroad, against the Clericals, they are in touch with the people and they are, if only for their own sakes, eager for reform. A great and splendid party might be formed from the Conservatives and the Clericals, if they could produce a leader. And the King might rind in it the very instrument he needs to begin the work of organisation and reformation that must be done, and done without much more delay. It would be a bright day for Italy should the King be able to say— "The wind that swells my sails Propels ; but I am helmsman." As things are now one sees the shameful spectacle of men sacrificing their country in order to line their own pockets or to realise their own ambitions. Something has been done, not much, but one must make the most of it, and hope it is only a pledge of future good work. An Employers' Liability Act has been given to the people, and what Signor Villari, an excellent judge calis ' 5 an incomplete Old Age Pensions Act,'* But in all this sordid business one figure stands out unsullied by party strife or bank scandal, or misfortune — I mean the King. After all, he is Italy's forlorn hope. In his youth still, with all his energy unimpaired, married to a princess of ancient and strong race, who may well be to him the great encourager, it is to him Italy turns in her need, THE HOUSE OF SAVOY 53 unheeding in her profound expectation the ranting of demagogues and the snarling of fools. Will he rescue her from her danger and set her feet upon the rock, will he dare to venture so far as to make peace with the Pope, and forgetting the late years of passion, remember the deeds of his fathers and do a great deed to save a great people from ruin, and be ashamed to be a figurehead, for that he is indeed a king? V. THE SOCIALISTS. IT is very possible that the immediate future of Italy is in the hands of the Socialists, and, as I believe, it is certain that this is the case unless the King can bring himself to make peace with the Vatican. This, to my mind, is a pity, chiefly because though Socialism may triumph for a time, it will in- evitably fail to satisfy Italian ambition, and because many useful and splendid things must fall to build its very foundations, among which is the new kingdom Italy possessed herself of at such great cost so short a time ago. It is not that one has any ridiculous dislike for Socialism as a theory, but that even as a theory one profoundly distrusts its very postulates and axioms. And coming to close quarters with its special manifestation of itself in Italy, one finds that it proposes to deal with perhaps the most individualist people in Europe as though they were as capable of combined thought and action as are the French or even the Germans. It needs but little reflection to enable one to see how very much easier, had they THE SOCIALISTS 55 been so, the unification of Italy would have been to accomplish, instead of the almost impossible task it has proved. Yet after one has satisfied himself of the inevitable failure of Socialism in the end to bring happiness to this land, he has to acknowledge its gift of faith in itself and in its mission, a gift that every other political party is without ; but lacking it, how can they hope to accomplish anything. It is indeed one of the most valuable emotions that the Clericals would bring to the Conservatives, if ever there might be peace, in which case I think Socialism would be defeated almost before the inevitable battle. But at present Socialism alone seems to have faith in its politics — nor does it hesitate to promise great things, nor is it slow to convince the Italians that it has happiness and prosperity to give. The " minimum programme " of the Socialists is somewhat as follows : First, universal suffrage ; a dangerous gift when one remembers that, so late as 1896, more than thirty-six males even in every hun- dred could not read. But the Socialist idea of uni- versal suffrage is to include both men and women, so that the percentage of illiterates would be much higher. Second, the Socialists place the Referendum, a proposal open to the same objection. Third, the payment of members of Parliament and municipal councillors, a proposal which, considering the already immense number of professional politicians, mounte- banks who earn their living out of politics by all sorts of extraordinary ways and startling contrivance, is, I 56 ITALY OF TO-DAY think, scarcely to be desired, since it would inevitably increase this army of vultures. Fourth, complete liberty of the press, freedom of speech and public meeting — a proposal which probably a wise con- servatism would be anxious to agree to if not to propose, but one that the Socialists have not prac- tised in the past and would possibly be compelled to forget in the future. Fifth, an eight hours' day and minimum wage. Sixth, the abolition of conscription and the substitution of an army on the pattern of the Swiss Militia — a wise proposal, I think. Seventh, a progressive income-tax, also a wise and unobjec- tionable idea. But, as Signor Villari has recently pointed out, this cannot be all. When King Hum- bert passed through Milan on his way to death, the Socialist municipality refused to greet him ; after the murder they refused to take any part whatsoever in the commemoration. " In June 1901," says the same writer, " the Socialist leaders, especially Signor Ferri, made speech after speech in Parliament in which they declared themselves unequivocally hostile to the Monarchy as one of the chief obstacles in the way of the realisation of their objects." Just there, I think, lies the real danger ; for if it is difficult to hold Italy together under a king, it will be impossible to do so under a republic ; especially with the ever- present claim of the Papacy to temporal power, which would be much more hopeful under a republic than under a king, because a republic, as in France has been proved over and over again, is always more THE SOCIALISTS 57 subject to attack, more sensitive of a passing fury or dissatisfaction, than a kingdom. It was the wisdom of Cavour that made the mag- nificent dreams of Mazzini and Garibaldi reality. How would a republic have been able to withstand the defeat at Adowa or the bank scandals ? It was the knowledge that the King, outside and above party government as he is, had no hand in all that villainy, was as innocent of it as the mass of his people, for whom he truly stands, that held Italy back from some frightful revolution. A republic could never have stood so utterly beyond the suspicion of even the most hostile as the King did, for the very men who were most concerned would inevitably have been the very republic herself. But in writing of Socialism in Italy it is in regard to the land that its plans are most far reaching. In Sicily, where I was last winter, I saw the most appal- ling misery that I have ever witnessed in any land. The peasantry were in reality starving, the landlord possibly an absentee in possession of the land that the peasants at least believed was by right their own. It is there that this side of the Socialist programme has most readily found acceptance. For though the Socialist will tell you that he does not aim at a forced division of property, the people believe he does ; and should the Socialist obtain the government, it is what the people believe is his idea, and not what it might once have been, that will of necessity happen. The peasant wants naturally to be a landlord, because 58 ITALY OF TO-DAY he thinks that the landlord is a great man, who can have everything it is possible to wish for, who never felt hungry in his life, and to whom everybody is respectful. So individualist is he that any idea of the nationalisation of land is beyond him. What he chiefly desires is to be a landowner himself, with ten- ants and retainers of his own to whom he can in his turn be a tyrant and indifferent. I firmly believe that were it possible so to nationalise property to- morrow as to give the right to cultivate a certain number of acres to each peasant, he would still feel aggrieved that he had not some one to whom he might appear hateful and to be envied. That desire for glory, for display, is in the very marrow of the bones of the Neapolitans and Sicilians. To be happy is not enough, they must also be envied. It is true that in the north — in Tuscany, for instance, which has had the advantage of fair government for a long time now — there is less discontent and there is less misery. This is not altogether owing to the system of partnership between landlord and peasant that obtains there, but is in part at least due to a real difference in character. Socialism can make but little headway in Tuscany outside the cities. I am not anxious to deny that the Tuscany peasant is far happier and better off than the southerner, — he is, on the contrary, very much better off ; but also he is of a different character, a stronger race, and furnishes, I think, the finest speci- men of an Italian to be found to - day ; indeed THE SOCIALISTS 59 there are few finer races in the world than the Tuscan. But it is in the north that Socialism has been most successful ; in Milan, which sends three Socialists to Montecitorio, thus returning a Socialist for half of her constituencies. This is partly explained by the misery of a large proportion of the artisan class — that is, the peasantry of a large city. The riots of 1898 will prove to any one who cares to examine the matter with fairness the enormous extent of that misery. It is there in Milan that the Christian democrats have a stronghold. It was probably this fact which led to the suspicion of the Church as having helped to cause the riot of 1898. There were undoubtedly hundreds of priests who sympathised with the people. I doubt, however, that they would advise or countenance riot. If they did so, which has never been proven, they did so absolutely with- out authority save that of their own judgment, which in political matters it is difficult to underestimate. But it is on the whole an excellent sign that a party owing supreme allegiance to the Holy See should mix to some extent with the Socialists, for they will help to leaven that very various lump, giving it some- thing of their own high-mindedness and reverence, without which it would be more dangerous than it is. It is curious that wherever Socialism manifests itself — and where does it not? — it is always as champion of the lower class against the upper class, the uneducated against the educated, and never as 6o ITALY OF TO-DAY the champion of humanity as a whole. In this it differs from Anarchism only in its mode of attack, for the latter disease would have humanity commit suicide, while the former philosophy suggests that humanity shall perish utterly in a fight between rich and poor. Their method of propagating an idea in itself noble and Christian may be to blame for my conclusion ; for it is always the rich man who is the enemy, not for any fault of his own, but because he is rich. So to the Italians, who are eager listeners to any sort of philosophy, it appears that he who owns a factory is the natural enemy of him he em- ploys ; he who has a house is the oppressor of him who has none ; he who has food is the murderer of him who has died of starvation. And so the Italian sees the human nature of such an argument, and is not dismayed when he is told in an apologetic way by the householder or the manufacturer that it really is not his fault, but that obviously he would be a fool to give up his factory or his house to the many house- less ones, because then even he himself would be houseless too. But if, on the other hand, the Social- ist desires nothing so much as brotherly love among men, and is not anxious, should he see a chance, to appeal to physical force which might enable him to seize the goods of those he calls bourgeoisie, then how is one to account not only for the bread riots, but also for the many extraordinary speeches and pam- phlets that are written by well-known men up and down Italy ? Thus one finds that in Italy Socialism THE SOCIALISTS 61 is really at the mercy of its ideas, and also at the mercy of the ideas it creates in the mind of the crowd. In a country so phlegmatic, so indifferent, so difficult to rouse as England, Socialism really has a better chance of fulfilling its mission; in Italy it can only exist by stirring up the passions of man, so easily aroused, and in the end being captured by them. I do not for one moment seek to deny that Socialism in Italy was created by the pressing need of reform, but I am inclined to deny that Socialism can ever really do any lasting good to Italy. Already one sees that fatal cancer, Opportunism, eating into the Socialist as into every other political party in Italy, so that one finds it also willing to sacrifice something, some principle, in order to gain an ad- vantage in Parliament or in the country. It is not by pointing out the horrible indifference of the rich to the poor, nor by calling the stupid middle class shopkeeper a murderer, that Italy will be bettered or will find peace, for in the end that idea can only succeed in destroying society utterly ; but in patiently teaching the people how to help themselves, how to better themselves, so that in the end they may be worthy indeed of those things as yet denied them not altogether through the fault of others. It is so easy to preach patience, so difficult to practise it. Yet I believe with all my heart that patience is still the mightiest weapon that those who really desire the good of this country can use. Thirty, 62 ITALY OF TO-DAY forty years are such a long time for a man to wait to see the fulfilment of his dreams, but in the life of a nation they are but a moment. The waiting is long and terrible that is necessary for the realisa- tion of any very precious thing, but the character of a nation is tried and proved by such agony. Let Italy take heart : oh, I speak not as one who is nothing moved by her sorrows and her pain, but as one who would do much to help her, all he could do, and indeed I believe the greatest need at this time is patience and a great faith m herself and in her King. And in these long years of waiting it is the greatest misfortune that the Pope has felt obliged to forbid Catholics to vote at the parliamentary elections. Thus many of the most orderly and sane Italians are compelled to remain out of political life alto- getherc It is to be hoped and believed that before long, perhaps even at the next election, he will be able to repeal this law, that only gives greater power to his bitterest enemies. But it is really not so much in politics of any sort, save those that shall bring peace with the Church, that the salvation of this land, so splendid in every- thing but the fortunes of her people, lies, but in work both industrial and agricultural. Let the Socialists forget their passions and put away all hatred and remember only their love for their country and their fellow-men, and in the greatness of their power let them devote all their energies to the development THE SOCIALISTS 63 of agriculture and the industries of the north. Though Italy is not naturally a very rich country, she is richer than she appears to be to-day. For if the Socialists are honest, as I for one believe them to be, they desire before all things the happiness and welfare of their country, which they will find lies not in hatred but in charity, not in jealousy but in trust, not in selfishness but in self-sacrifice. But I must end as I began, it is to them probably the immediate future is given : we who are but passers-by after all, in spite of all our love, can do little but hope that if they have the power put into their hands they will realise their responsibility and use it well. It is not to be thought of even for a moment that all those great and splendid dreamers dreamed but in vain, that all those heroes who marched under the ragged banners of Garibaldi died in vain ; that vanity should be the end of her of whom all men dream when they are children and hear for the first time the name of Caesar, when they are in the flush of youth and read of love in Horace, when they are men and come to her and find her beautiful and fairer than the fairest, when they are old and stir, by the winter fire in England, or some other land, turn softly the page of Virgil, oh, it is not to be thought of. For her men have yearned in the dark cities for a lifetime> under her sky men have believed in lovely things, on leaving her men have wept as for a dear mistress, to her the world will turn when 64 ITALY OF TO-DAY beauty has fled in terror from elsewhere, at her call ever swords shall flash, at her name eyes blaze with love, for her fame is everlasting and her beauty im- maculate in the hands of the immortal dead to whom she was very precious. VI. LITERATURE, I. ITALIAN literature, that has in the past pro duced so many great and magnificent master- pieces, that numbers among its many glorious names not a few that are immortal, that is the eldest daughter of the Latin tongue, is to-day like one newly risen from the dead. Still pale and but half alive after the long sojourn underground, she prom- ises us at the least, in this her new youth, great things about to be accomplished. And looking back on Italian literature proper of the last thirty years, four names stand out from the innumerable crowd of philosophers, political writers, pamphlet- eers, and revolutionaries — namely, Carducci, Verga, Fogazzaro, and D'Annunzio, and the greatest of these is D'Annunzio. It is only with the present age of letters in Italy that we must concern ourselves, pleasant and prof- itable as it would doubtless be to examine some- E 66 ITALY OF TO-DAY what minutely the more or less distant past. We are but travellers after all ; it is the impression of the living moment that we seek for so labori- ously, betraying it, having snared it carefully, to captivity. And as in all other countries that have subjected themselves to European culture and civilisation, so in Italy we find chaos — Art, Beauty, Letters, fettered and derided by the crowd, that is already licking the plebeian feet of its millionaires. All rules and standards of faith, of morals, and of taste, have been overthrown by the crowd which found them irksome ; no canon of literature or art exists which is acknow- ledged by the anarchists who call themselves a people, or by the particular class of cocks and cockerels who call themselves men of letters. So one finds that not only is the existence of God doubted as of old by fools, but that the merits of the great masters of literature and art are either openly denied or simply disregarded. And even as God is safe in His heaven, nor shall the crowing of ten million cocks distract Him for a moment from His meditation, so in spite of the laughter and ignorance of the crowd the great masters remain immortal and inviolate, guarding the way to Par- nassus. Having decided to forget and forego the Past, it has been found necessary to invent some ideal, some standard of achievement at which this magnificent new democracy may aim in matters of art — so Truth, Reality, was born quietly in a brothel, LITERATURE 67 the ugly daughter of an actor and a harlot, and ever since democracy has been trying to kiss her exaggerated lips and to look into her bloodshot and !y in g e y es - This triumph of democracy over art has not, how- ever, succeeded in effacing individual talent or genius. It is true that no great and classical production seems possible, but the frequently erratic imperfect work of individual writers is met with that merits our atten- tion. Literature in Italy to-day resembles politics in that land, in that it is confused by reason of its own liberty and licence. First in point of time, though it may be not in merit, stands Giosue Carducci, who has contrived to express the romantic desire for liberty and unity that is or was a characteristic of the Italian peoples. The son of a physician, he was born at the village of Valdicastello, between Spezia and Pisa, in July 1836. In 1849 ne with his father went to Florence, where he entered the Scuole Pie, and began his studies that were continued at the University of Pisa. His first volume, ' Rime,' was published in 1857, while he was a private tutor in Florence, where he also wrote for the reviews. There, too, he became part editor of 1 II Poliziano,' a review devoted to the cause of Classicism as opposed to Romanticism. In i860 he appears to have gone to Bologna, where he has lived ever since, being at one time Professor of Literature in the University there. In 1865 appeared his famous " Inno a Satana " — " Hymn to Satan " — in which he 68 ITALY OF TO-DAY appears to look to Satan as a kind of Messiah more genuine than II Gesu Cristo ; as, indeed, the incarnate spirit of Liberty. " Salute O Satana, O Ribellione, O forza vindice, Delia ragione, Sacri a te salgano Gl' incensi e i voti ! Hai vinto il Giova De' sacerdoti," and suchlike youthfulness, very common even in England in the middle of the nineteenth century, that it is scarcely necessary to translate. Mr G. A. Greene, from whose book, ' Italian Lyrists of To-Day,' I have borrowed the graceful translations given in this chapter, says of this poem, " I do not, even for all its brilliancy, consider it truly representative of Carducci's genius, and with re- spect to its form this appears to be the poet's own maturest judgment upon the youthful out- burst which made him famous." He published poems from i860 to 1870, which have been collected in ' Decennalia,' and ' New Poems ' in 1873. In 1877 he published the ' Odi Barbare,' Italian poems in the old classical metres which created much crit- icism on style in modern verse. An example from this volume, translated by Mr G. A. Greene, will not be out of place. LITERATURE 69 In the Square of San Petronio at Bologna on a Winter's Evening. u Rises in frost of winter, gloomy and towered Bologna, While the mountain above smiles in the glimmer of snow. This is the tranquil hour when the sun that is dying saluteth Towers and fane to thee, sainted Petronius, raised. Towers whose summits were touched by wings of the ages that vanished, And of the solemn fane, pinnacles lofty and lone. Cold adamantine, the heavens are agleam with dazzling splen- dour ; All the air like a veil, silver, diaphanous lies Over the forum lightly blending with colour the masses Dark, which the weaponed hand once of our ancestors built. Up on the lofty heights the sun as it sinketh, delaying, Pierces with languid smile violet mists of the night, Which in the old grey stone, in the dusky vermilion brickwork, Seems to waken anew souls of the ages that passed, So that a mournful desire in the frosty air is awakened — Ah ! for the roseate May's, warm in the perfume of eve, When the beautiful maidens danced in the open places, And with the conquered kings triumphing consuls returned. So do the joyful Muses turn to the resonant metre Trembling with vain desire, seeking the beauty antique/' In ' I Critici Italiani e La Metrica delle Odi Bar- bare ' Chiarini defends very ably Carducci's use of the classical metres, yet it may be doubted whether any modern language can support the magnificence and weight of the hexameter, for instance, with dignity. In English, Mr Swinburne and Mr William Watson may be said to have succeeded, perhaps — the latter in one poem "The Hymn to the Sea" — while Clough and a host of others fail. We can 70 ITALY OF TO-DAY never be sufficiently thankful that Spenser decided against this metre for his " Faerie Queene," in spite of the efforts of Abraham Fraunce, whose " Emmanuel " is perhaps the most charming an- tique example of the use of the hexameter in English verse. But it is, as I think, in the Sapphic metre rather than in the Horatian or the hexameter that Carducci has been most successful. The following translation, in Sapphics, may help the reader who knows not Italian to understand something of Carducci's verse : — On Monte Mario. " Cypresses solemn stand on Monte Mario, Luminous, quiet is the air around them, They watch the Tiber through the misty meadows Wandering voiceless. They gaze beneath them where, a silent city, Rome lies extended : like a giant shepherd, O'er flocks unnumbered vigilant and watchful Rises St Peter's. Friends, on the summit of the sunlit mountain Mix we the white wine scintillating brightly In mirrored sunshine ; smile, O lovely maidens ! Death comes to-morrow. Lalage, touch not in the scented copses The boasted laurel that is called eternal, Lest it should lose there in thy chestnut tresses Half of its splendour. LITERATURE 71 Between the verses pensively arising Mine be the laughter of the joyous vintage And mine the rosebuds fugitive, in winter Flowering to perish. We die to-morrow, as the lost and loved ones Yesterday perished ; out of all men's memories And all men's loving, shadow-like and fleeting We too shall vanish. Yes, we must die, friends ; and the earth, unceasing Still in its labour, round the sun revolving Shall every instant send our lives in thousand Sparks evanescent ; Lives which in new loves passionate shall quiver, Lives which in new wars conquering shall triumph, And unto Gods new sing in grander chorus Hymns to the future. Nations unborn yet, in whose hands the beacon Shall blaze resplendent, which from ours has fallen. Ye too shall vanish, luminous battalions Into the endless. Farewell thou mother, Earth, of my brief musings And of my spirit fugitive ! How much thou ^Eons-long whirling round the sun shalt carry Glory and sorrow ! Till the day comes, when, on the chilled equator, Following vainly heat that is expiring Of man's exhausted race survive one only Man and one woman. Who stand forsaken on the ruined mountains Mid the dead forests, pale with glassy eyeballs Watching the sun's orb o'er the fearful ice-fields Sink for the last time." 72 ITALY OF TO-DAY Probably the best example in English of the Sapphic metre so-called — though it is improbable that Sappho invented it — is to be found in Mr Swinburne's poem " Sapphics " : — " All the night sleep came not upon my eyelids, Shed not dew, nor shook nor unclosed a feather, Yet with lips shut close and with eyes of iron Stood and beheld me." But in spite of this desire for manner, for classicism, Carducci is very far from being all form and no sub- ject, if indeed that was ever attained by any writer that ever lived. His " sense " is extremely clear and weighty. In 1896, at the University of Bologna, the jubilee of his professorship was celebrated. In life he has been almost as successful as in art : entering politics as an extreme Radical, he is now a senator, and, we may believe, a loyal subject of King Victor Emmanuel. He is of course an anti-clerical, as his " Hymn to Satan " assures us. He appears but for one exception to dominate modern Italian verse, but the exception, D'Annunzio, beginning as Car- ducci's disciple, has far outsoared his master not only in thought but in the art of poetry. Of him, however, I treat more fully in a separate section, as being of all modern Italian writers the only one who has attained European fame. Carducci's poems have been translated by Mr F. Sewall, and were published in New York in 1891. Mr G. A. Greene, in his 'Italian Lyrists of To -Day' (John Lane, LITERATURE 73 London, 1893), already referred to, has translated a number of his pieces very delightfully. Giovanni Verga, born at Catania in Sicily in 1840, is known all over the world as the author of the libretto of " Cavalleria Rusticana." He is of the same school as Emile Zola, with this difference, that, unlike the Frenchman, he is intensely local — as local, for instance, as Thomas Hardy; and as Hardy seldom or never leaves Wessex, so Verga never leaves Sicily, which he views with that " inward eye " from Milan where he lives. A novelist of the most desperate industry, he is continually producing documents that are, I imagine, in the eyes of the scientist utterly un- trustworthy, but that he vaguely believes may bring him immortality as social history. Perhaps his wish may be fulfilled, in spite of the scientists. The minor poets — some of them true poets though of small volume — at present writing in Italy are in- numerable. Mr G. A. Greene finds thirty-two worthy of translation beside Carducci and D'Annunzio. Of these perhaps the most widely-known writer — though scarcely as a poet — is Antonio Fogazzaro, who in the opinion of many is the greatest novelist at present writing in Italy, for to a host of people D'Annunzio is anathema. Fogazzaro has been called the poet of hope and faith, but it is chiefly as a novelist that he is famous, though to the English public he is access- ible only in his ' Malombra,' translated by Mr F. T. Dickson, published by Fisher Unwin, 1896 ; and ' Daniele Cortis,' translated by Mr S. L. Simeon, 74 ITALY OF TO-DAY and published in 1890. These two books are, how- ever, not the best examples of his work. It is in such books as ' II Piccolo Mondo Antico ' and ' II Piccolo Mondo Moderno ' that he proves himself to be a really fine artist, avoiding what Messrs Bolton King and Okey call his " tendency to preach," though certainly an Englishman would not easily find such a tendency in J Malombra.' He was born at Vicenza in 1842, and published his first work, * Miranda,' a kind of romance in verse, in 1874. His recent work, ' II Piccolo Mondo Moderno,' is, in my opinion, far finer than anything else he has done. f II Piccolo Mondo Antico,' the book that came immediately before it, is almost a masterpiece — the later work is really so. It is concerned with the life and temptations of one Piero Maironi. In the end Maironi enters a monastery, under what Rule we are not told. Fogazzaro will, I feel sure, yet prove himself a greater writer than the world imagines him. He perhaps needs a little reticence — a lack of which in D'Annunzio has almost pre- vented the English from reading him. But he can give us real men and women, who have nothing in common with the creatures of the realists ; his psychology is subtle, but one does not think of his characters from the scientific but rather from the artistic point of view. Guerrini, Ada Negri, Rapisardi, and Ersilio Bicci are four lyrical poets of fine achievement, though not in the first rank. Guerrini began as an erotic poet LITERATURE 75 of the most finished kind, and has developed a love for political verse, which, in its way, is most excellent. Ada Negri, of whom report speaks as one of those utterly natural spirits to be met with perhaps in our day only in Italy, has sung the despair and hopeless- ness of the poor of Lombardy, the poor, who at least in the north are awaking from their lethargy. It is possible she may accomplish much. Rapisardi, the Sicilian, born in 1843 at Catania, as was Giovanni Verga, is the antagonist of Carducci, an anti-Christ- ian and a Socialist : he appears to have been over- come by humanity, and in the struggle his art has suffered, f Giobbe,' one of his most famous works, published in 1884, which was ridiculed especially by Guerrini, is in many respects a fine work spoiled by the poet's enthusiasm for his fellow-men. Ersilio Bicci, born in 1845 in Tuscany, is another of Car- ducci's opponents. A poet of great simplicity, he writes so that he may be understood of the people — a rather hopeless task for a poet, one may believe. A very delightful translation of one of his poems I give below from Mr G. A. Greene's book. Contempt. "When I pass singing, singing on my way, I think not, dream not, of her — not indeed ! Burns she with jealousy? Well, well, she may ; I mind my own affairs, and give no heed. If in my song she fancy that she hears Some note of sadness or some trace of tears, 76 ITALY OF TO-DAY It is my whim — not that my heart is sore ! For as to that I care for her no more. And if they say I drive the cynic's trade, It is Time's fault, not hers who love betrayed ; Or that I call on Death where'er I rove, What matters that to her ? Am I her love ? But if I meet her with Luigi, know She to her grave — I to the gallows go. Edmondo De Amicis, born near Genoa in 1846, was educated for the army. In 1867 he began to write his interesting ' Bozzetti della Vita Militare,' which brought him fame and fortune. He has written many books of travel, on Spain, Constanti- nople, and Holland. His latest book (1902), ' Un Salotto Fiorentino del Secolo Scorso,' is an excep- tion to his work as a rule, in that it is dull and disappointing. He is undoubtedly one of the most popular writers in the peninsula. Of Pasquale Villari, the really fine historian ; of Lanciani and Rossi, the famous archaeologists ; of Lombroso, the criminologist and psychologist, and other specialists as it were in literature and science, it is impossible for me to speak. After all, literature with them is a secondary thing. But Lanciani, at least, is a writer of fine and clear style, whom it is well worth the while of the traveller to read, especially if he be interested in classic Italy. Literature proper is in a condition of drowsiness. It might almost be said that there are but two writers of importance in Italy, Carducci and D'Annunzio, LITERATURE 77 and one of them grows old. Yet with such achieve- ment as theirs before her, Italy can never dare to despair of her future. Matilde Serao, by far the greatest writer of all Italian women, has undoubtedly attained to some- thing of a European fame. Two of her books, 1 Fantasy ' and ' Farewell Love,' were translated into English so long ago as 1891 and 1896, and were published by Mr Heinemann in his " International Library." It is, however, in her later work that Matilde Serao is most fortunate. ' Suor Giovanna della Croce,' perhaps the most pitiful book that modern Italy has produced, is the story of a nun whose convent has been suppressed by the Govern- ment, and who is literally thrown into the streets. It will shortly appear in English, — indeed a uniform edition of Signora Serao's work is in course of publication by Mr Heinemann. In ' The Land of Cockayne ' she treats of the lottery system, that benefits the Government so largely and depraves the people. In ' The Ballet-Dancer ' one finds, as indeed in most of her work, a kind of realism often painful, perhaps seldom really worthy of the name of Art, but very honest and earnest. She is, as I think, not verily of the realist school, for all her work is re- deemed by a kind of poetical emotion that is, how- ever, not strong enough wholly to redeem it, and yet is by no means a mere sentimentality. She thinks too deeply ever to be captured by mere senti- ment. ' II Paese di Gesu ' is, while less exquisite 78 ITALY OF TO-DAY by far than Pierre Loti's ' Palestine,' perhaps more in sympathy with the religion of the Church and of Christ. In ' La Madonna e i Santi,' published in 1902, she is how far ! from the early romances with which she made her success. Something exquisite has come into her life, as it were : often a writer of vision, it is as though she had suddenly for the first time seen the sun, and the whole world had been changed for her. It is certain that the writer of 1 Suor Giovanna ' is capable of much, but the writer of ' La Madonna ' seems to promise us something more and something very different. II. Gabriele D'Annunzio. Born in the year 1863 in the old walled town of Pescara, Gabriele D'Annunzio is at the age of thirty- eight famous throughout Europe, chiefly by means of the influence of the great French critic the Vicomte de Vogue, who, as is well known, welcomed him as the angel of the Latin Renaissance. And perhaps it is by reason of this splendid annunciation, rather than by the power of his own genius, hidden or ob- scured, at least to the majority of mankind, by the general ignorance of so antique a language as Italian, that the world has received him so readily, and set him too among its gods. For though it is in vain that we should deny his genius, for it is incontestable ; it is strange that he is welcomed, everywhere almost, GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 79 more readily than he is in Italy, seeing that it is really only the Italian who reads him in his own words. Profound, in the strict sense of the word, never, as is almost a matter of course in modern English liter- ature, without ideas, he is at one and the same time a Mystic and a Realist. Taking the side neither of the Angels nor of the Devils, he is even scornful of Man, a passion for whom has led to some of the great indiscretions in literature. A Mystic, he is never far from reality ; a Realist, he is almost always a poet, consumed, it would seem, even when in the close embrace of the actual world, with a lust for the beauty of mere words, desiring, almost before any- thing beside, the emotion of their flight and sweep and glory and terror. And in the quest for this beauty he has searched all lands and ransacked the fields of Cadmus and the burial-places of the Atridse. Nor is he without the words and the grave serious accents of the sensualist, possessed by the hallucin- ation of Desire, in which madness he, like all in the grip of that Demon, is minute, dreary, infinitely infinitesimal. His terror he has from the Greeks, and his sensu- ality, obscenity, and passion from his own land ; his realism from France and Russia, and his mysticism from Germany and Belgium and the profound Saints of the Catholic Church. It is only from us he has learnt nothing or next to nothing, at least till lately, finding perhaps in the plays of Shakespeare, or the 80 ITALY OF TO-DAY writings of one or two moderns, something less lengthy, less full of useless words and pages that might have been left out, than in the writings of Zola or the works of Tolstoi or the operas of Richard Wagner, and that may, one is not slow to think, be of use to him at least by way of example. It is well to remember in reading D'Annunzio that he wrote verse before ever he wrote prose, and not verse only but poetry. Chiarini, the critic, welcomed him as early as 1880, when his 'Primo Vere' was pub- lished, seeing in him perhaps another jewel for Italy's new crown, till later he found, as he supposed, noth- ing but "desire"; and as Jowett said of Swinburne, so Chiarini may have said of D'Annunzio, " A brilliant youth ! Too brilliant a youth ! It's all youth ! " For even in those days D'Annunzio was chiefly an artist in himself, exploiting his own soul, and mind, and physical presentment in his work ; so that behind the puppets, be they never so living, happy, or sad, one sees Gabriele D'Annunzio smiling, with not quite truthful or unenigmatic brows. And so among his other delightful, splendid, or shameful poses there is almost before all that famous name — for Gabriel of the Annunciation has not so sweet a Prince's name after all, but is just Signor Rapagnetta in a world that as yet he has taught to smile for no other cause. In his first work in prose, ' Libro delle Virgine,' one finds almost nothing of the Gabriele D'Annunzio of to-day. The strength and beauty of the ' Trionfo ' are not there, and even the very prose itself is almost < •$, « 5: Z o .- ^■^ H o a fc> u - ■v. ~ ai « ~s? — — <,> ( S ■5 5 GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 81 sacrificed to a desire not for reality but for realism ; and it is only when dealing with exterior things that he contrives to make a peace, broken over and over again with a beauty without which, however, he is never quite himself. In considering his Novels first, and his Poetry and Plays afterwards, I deal with him as the world deals, treating him as chiefly a writer of Prose. But in reading his novels it is before all things necessary to remember that the works of D'Annunzio are scarcely novels at all in our sense of the word. It is characteristic of the English novel that, apart from every other form of literature, it alone is indifferent to words, concerning itself chiefly with a tale of love or crime, interesting us not by its Prose but by its inherent Romance or Realism. It is indeed to the rest of literature — to poetry, for example, in its pre- occupation with form — what the photograph is to the work of the painter, appealing to us not by any beauty of its own, but by a kind of familiarity, as who should say, I recognise that person or event, so and not otherwise such or such an occurrence must have happened. In other words, the English novelist is not to-day concerned with art or literature at all, he is merely anxious to interest a certain number of people in the tale he is telling; and be- cause for the majority style or the art of words merely serves to confuse the story, he, wisely no doubt and happily for himself, discards any at- tempt at beauty of sentence or choice of words, F 82 ITALY OF TO-DAY and sets himself to tell a plain tale as lengthily as he can. It is, so D'Annunzio seems to tell us, and not D'Annunzio alone, the interior life unsuspected by the majority breathing there so quietly, that shall quicken imaginative art. The adventures of the soul with itself — it is just there we encounter the eternal in human nature as we never do in the exterior world. Nor, as one can see in D'Annunzio's work, will im- aginative art stop short of Truth itself. For it is not realism, nor even reality, for which we seek, but Beauty. And in this interior castle there can be no lying. In that quiet profound life where one realises perhaps for the first time that mankind was made after one image, it may be indeed as our fathers have told us in the image of God, no noise of argument or contradiction can come ; one finds the assurance of music there, the certainty of life. But there is no country of the spirit that does not include as part of its kingdom a sensuous or even sensual region also. It is not in dreamland, be sure, that the world of D'Annunzio lies, but in a region of sensation, spiritual, sensual, of profound and ridiculous physical passions, and tears as terrible and moving as any looked at from the outside that have, oh, once upon a time, made the world laugh or weep. The phenomena are the same. It is the artist who is different. Con- cerned less with plot than with beauty, he cannot excuse himself if he lies. An enemy really rather contemptuous of story-tellers and realists, he is con- GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 83 cerned with the adventures of the soul of man. Nor will he in his use of words emulate their slovenliness. As his highest aim is beauty, so he finds that at least in his own art it is not to be divorced from words ; that in themselves perhaps words are the most beauti- ful things in the world, to be used carefully and not without a real love. So in comparing D'Annunzio's work with that of the English writers of to-day, it will be found, doubt- less, to be less excited and excitable, but, I think, more enthusiastic. One speaks so many languages, one goes so swiftly by train or electric tram, one lunches so soon after breakfast, that a real sense of humour — that looking on the world as a spectacle of which nothing is strange to us — is among the rarest of habits or gifts. Nor indeed can one say of D'Annunzio that humour is a habit with him. Is there, I wonder, a smile other than that of contempt in all his work ? I doubt it. But there, in the silence and remoteness of ' L'lnno- cente ' or the more profound ' Trionfo,' and even in ' II Piacere ' too, we find time to feel the genius of places, the enchantment of quiet cities, the breadth of the country, the vastness of the sea. In ' II Piacere ' he is perhaps more under the influence of French work than in any other of his longer books. This history of a lust is in some parts almost as ugly as that title ; redeemed indeed by the genius of the author from the more sordid and ex- citing tale of ordinary French fiction, one has glimpses 84 ITALY OF TO-DAY almost from the first of a new manner of handling landscape, nature, music, everything indeed that is outside the miserable soul of the hero. One is not at the trouble (it is never very wise) to look at any man's work from the point of view of the morality of the day, or its fitness for the rather bilious mind of the seventeen-year-old girl or the schoolboy. Yet it appears to me that D'Annunzio is often quite need- lessly obscene, worrying subjects usually dealt with carefully, as a maniac will twist and turn his fingers, never letting them rest for a moment the whole day long. And so, almost in spite of himself as it were, D'Annunzio often attains to a profound morality; for having described with the weary minuteness of the sensualist some scene or passion, one is filled with disgust, one finds the whole thing detestable, where a man of lesser passions and equal genius would have moved us to desire. And here, too, as in all his works, one finds the hero Andrea Sperelli, as at other times one finds Giorgio Aurispa or Tullio Hermil or Cantelmo or the extraordinary being of ' II Fuoco,' isolated, alone, cut off from the world in which he lives by some impass- able barrier of the spirit, so that, as it were, the very atmosphere he breathes would prove too rare for another, who after all, one may believe, is not con- sumed by the same flame as that which is slowly burning the very life out of these sad and passionate people. And so one may say of D'Annunzio, as has been said of Praxiteles, that in spite of his sensuality, GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 85 in spite of his implacable animalism, his aim is ideal. And, curiously enough, it is generally in writing of the sea that one finds that vision, without which one may believe the artist works but in vain. For it is not in the actions of men or women, or in their thoughts about one another, that D'Annunzio is in- terested, but perhaps a little in their loves and in their hates, and chiefly in their thoughts about them- selves. And so when for a moment he forsakes humanity and turns to nature, it is that most human of Nature's elements, the sea, with its absorbing passions and furies, its persistence, its incorrigible ugliness, its majestic beauty, its sadness, its change- fulness, and above all, its isolation, that becomes for him almost a god after the Greek fashion, pos- sessing in its heart even the passions of men, but confined by no law, ruled by no relentless morality, persuaded from an expression of its desire by no equal voice. There are no people in D'Annunzio's novels, just as there are no plots, and scarcely even a story. His men and women, his peasants and young Roman patricians, are only real in so far as they are of little importance, in so far as he has spent but little pains on them. Of his men, Andrea and Giorgio, and Tullio, and Cantelmo — yes, even the hero of ' II Fuoco ' — are but expressions of the same soul, almost of the same body, expressions, if you will, of the author's self, but also of the whole world, as we know it, of the men of our own day, of men as they must have been 86 ITALY OF TO-DAY yesterday, as they will be to-morrow; not in their strength, scarcely ever that, but in their weakness, and in their desires, and in their temptations, to which it is necessary that they should succumb, so that one rinds in them no heroes at all, scarcely even reason- able people, but certain aspects of very life, where people do not usually rise above the implacable cir- cumstances of their lives, and are not too much in love with chastity or asceticism of any sort, and do not concern themselves very often with the necessity of resistance to evil, or desire, which come to them almost always as friends with promises. And as all these things come to man not outwardly at all, there is but little action in this book, and one feels some- thing at the least of that isolation which is to become more pronounced in the ' Innocente,' and complete and never to be broken at all in the 'Trionfo.' And it is in a moment of profound emotion, of dis- gust almost, at the ridiculous figure cut by the pilgrims at the shrine of the Madonna, a scene which perhaps to one less scornful of humanity, less cruel, would not have appeared as ridiculous at all, that D'Annunzio speaks to us really honestly from behind the mask of Giorgio Aurispa in ' The Triumph of Death.' It cannot be [he says] that his being had its roots in that soil ; he could have nothing in common with this multitude, which, like the majority of animal species, had already at- tained to its definite and fixed type. . . . He was as much a stranger to these people as though they were a tribe of South Sea Islanders, as much an alien to his country and his native soil as he was to his family and his childhood's GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 87 home. . . . That dream of asceticism which he had con- structed with so much splendour and adorned with so much elegance, what was it but another expedient for warding off" death ? You must train your mind to avoid Truth and certitude if you would live. Renounce all keen experience, rend no veils, believe all you see, accept all you hear. Look not beyond the world of appearances created by your own vivid imagination. Adore the illusion. It is thus in reality he would counsel us ; so that one comes to see that it is not Truth for which we seek but Beauty, and not Beauty perhaps entirely, but creative power. So in another place he can say :— "You think too much," she cried; "you pick your thoughts to pieces. I daresay you find them more attrac- tive than me, because your thoughts are always new, always changing, whereas I have lost all novelty for you. In the first days of our love you were less introspective, more spontaneous. You had not acquired a taste for bitter things then, because you were more lavish with your kisses than your words. If, as you say, words are such an inadequate form of expression, why make so much use of them — you often use them cruelly." And, indeed, D'Annunzio, like Giorgio Aurispa, is intensely cruel and without pity, utterly scornful, never appeased, keeping his anger for ever against a humanity that has displeased and disgusted him. He describes the plucking of a living dove with an exactness that is wonderful and needless. His de- scription of the pilgrimage in the ' Trionfo ' is one 88 ITALY OF TO-DAY of the most terrible things he has written, yet it is horrible too, for he makes no sign of pity, he sees with the eyes not of a man but of a god or a devil, and is eternally scornful of poor people who were worthy of tears, who must have called forth the tears of a greater man. So he became brutal, and sees a suffering human being only as an object for ridicule, for scorn ; sees the cripple as a barbarian boy might see him, and the unsound of mind as an example of Nature's humour. His manner of describing the aunt of Giorgio in the ' Trionfo ' is an example of what I mean, and not an extreme instance by any means. So one sees the pose of the cynic, perhaps his most natural attitude, becoming the most fre- quent of all his poses, utterly destroying his insight and his creative power, till, as in the ' Fuoco,' he flies over the sky himself, an object for men and angels, having exposed not his own soul alone to the gaze of a world he has hated. So I find him guilty of a deep and ingrained cruelty, that, as I think, he will never quite be able to forget, to unlearn ; for is not cruelty the real malady at the heart of the sen- sualist, and has D'Annunzio not told us, almost with a great boast, that sensuality has claimed him and held him for its own ? It was his aunt Gioconda. . . . She was his father's eldest sister, and about sixty years of age. She was lame from the effects of a fall and somewhat stout, but with an unwholesome stoutness — pale and flaccid. Wholly absorbed in religious exercises, she lived her own life shut away from GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 89 the rest of the family on the upper floor of fhe house, neglected, unloved, regarded as semi-imbecile. Her world was made up of sacred pictures, relics, emblems, symbols ; her sole occupation religious practices, sighing out her life in the monotony of prayer and enduring the cruel tortures imposed on her by her greediness — for she adored sweet things, turning in disgust from any other kind of food, and very often she had to go without. Giorgio therefore was high in favour with her because, whenever he came home he never failed to bring her large quantities of sweetmeats. "Well," she said, "mumbling through her poor old tooth- less jaws — " Well, so you have come back ! Eh ! come back ? " She looked at him half timidly, not knowing what else to say, but there was a gleam of evident expectation in her eyes. Giorgio felt his heart contract with a pang of pity. This poor creature, he thought, who has sunk to the last depths of human degradation — this miserable bigoted old sweet-tooth is connected with me by the insuperable tie of blood. She and I belong to the same race. " Well," she repeated, seized with obvious anxiety, and her expression grew almost impudent. " Oh, Aunt Gioconda, I am so sorry," he answered at last with painful effort, " I quite forgot to get your sweets this time." The old lady's face suddenly changed as if she were going to be ill, the light died out of her eyes. " Never — mind," she said brokenly. " But I will get you some to-morrow," Giorgio hastened to console her ; " I can get some easily — I will write " Aunt Gioconda rallied. " You can get them at the Ursuline convent, you know," she said hurriedly. A pause ensued during which she no doubt enjoyed a foretaste of the delight of the morrow ; for judging by the 90 ITALY OF TO-DAY little gurgling noises in her throat, her toothless mouth was apparently watering at the prospect. Is that true ? If so, it ought never to have been written, at least by a man or woman. In Hell's library, no doubt, such cruel scorn of foolish or bestial men and women is welcomed ; on our earth are we not all too nearly approaching the grave — in which be sure, could we but see ourselves, we should appear ridiculous enough, and desire for our poor bones a little pity from the living — for such betrayal as that, for such scorn as that ? And it is not only in such passages that D'An- nunzio accuses himself of cruelty; for ' II Fuoco,' his last book, is, it appears to me, scarcely anything more than a long torture from beginning to end of a woman whom one is continually on the point of recognising by a man one is never in doubt of for a moment. In this book the Egoist has for once obtained entire command, so that art and workmanship, passion, laughter, tears, are forgotten, are never really thought of at all, so absorbed is the author in expressing himself; in which object, I think, he scarcely succeeds at all, showing us, indeed, instead of a man a human monster, very often ridiculous, whose mad or silly passions or freaks of mind he does not scruple to label genius to an astonished world. Still it is not in such vagaries of a great mind that we must look for the expression of the real GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 91 D'Annunzio, but, I think, in the marvellous and quiet pages of the 'Innocente' and in the ' Trionfo' itself. Of all his women, and they are all adorable, I love best her he has named " Turris Eburnea," the divine Giuliana. But in truth she is no tower of ivory, save in that her body is very white and sweet, for she is full of the sensuous, and almost dreamy desire of life, loving and desirable and tender and in despair and almost reconciled with death. But indeed, like his men, his women are almost always the same woman, with or without that profounder sensuality which crowns Ippolyta above Elena Muti as queen of harlots. And this woman, sweeter than the shoulders of the mountains, desirable and desirous, trips through all his books to the mournful music of the castanets or the melodies of spring or autumn, or the thrumming of the blood in the ears, when she has succeeded in driving us mad for love. She comes to us first as the Duchess Elena, and having given us what we desired, leaves us still unsatisfied as the pale and dear woman of Siena, Donna Maria. And she appears to us again, more desirable than ever, as Giuliana Hermil, Tullio's wife, of the white and flower-like body, whose secrets we learn always with surprise, whose misfor- tunes only make her dearer to us than before. And last of all, stripped naked, her body marked with the bruises of love, in full womanhood, with red and clinging mouth and feet of clay, we see her crashing down to death locked in her lover's arms, keeping 92 ITALY OF TO-DAY always life in her remembrance, whilst he has for- gotten it. There are no women out of Shakespeare so profoundly feminine. George Meredith's girls are girls, and sometimes borrow more than a little from his delightful boys. But place them for a moment beside D'Annunzio's women and they would show their uncouthness, their shyness, their masculine powers of speech or strength or abruptness of manner too well to be untroubled by the beauty of these we have learned to know as a lover knows his mistress. And last of all, in these beautiful and mysterious pages of ' Le Vergini delle Rocce,' we meet those three Princesses, Massimilla, Anatolia, and Violante. Massimilla, who knows that " the shape of her lips forms the living and visible image of the word Amen." Anatolia, who possesses " the two supreme gifts that enrich life and prolong it beyond the mission of death." Violante, whose hair weighs heavier on her brow than a hundred crowns, who has dazed herself with perfumes. In this book of exquisite prose one finds the achievement of the highest poetry. Scarcely to be read without emotion or hurriedly at all, it appeals to us as some majestic and imperial dream. Yet there is nothing but truth in the book, a truth far more profound and necessary than any of the little obvious obscenities or indecencies that have in fiction at any rate almost usurped the very name of Truth herself. These three solitary princesses are no fable, but real beings, born in an old land, in a time that GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 93 is in love with change, that is scornful of old things and its own past, and, like the youngest, looks for glory to the future. After all, we live in a world that shrinks all day long, and maybe in the night too, from death. Let us hug to us, then, Art at least together with the brief charm of the world and the passing glory of the Hills. Content only with perfection ; the proper state of mind after creation being, as one likes to remember, that it was very good. D'Annunzio has written six plays of varying beauty, interest, and power. Two only of these are at all known in England — viz., "The Dead City" and " Gioconda " ; of the "Dream of a Morning of Spring" and the "Dream of an Autumn Sunset' we know nothing, as they have not yet been translated into either French or English. Of his last splendid tragedy, in verse, " Francesca da Rimini," it is almost impossible to speak save in terms of deep admiration. But on a night I shall not forget in the glorious and splendid theatre on the Viminal Hill in Rome, I heard Duse speak the magnificent and sad lines that D'Annunzio has written for her who has made Hell as dear as Heaven. It was not a friendly house. The Roman people, never in history re- markable for perfect taste, satisfied its contempt for the work of a man recognised all over Europe as one of the greatest men of letters of our day, 94 ITALY OF TO-DAY by stamping and shouting continually whenever their slow and vandal minds were puzzled or disgusted by the beauty of the verse. It was scarcely a pleasant impression one had of Beauty in the hands of the crowd. Yet as the first act proceeded, almost in spite of itself the crowd was compelled to be silent, and the glorious verse passed over it and van- quished it and swept it away, till at the close of a long and perfect page shouts of " Bello ! " " Bello ! " rang through the theatre, and the beast with innumerable heads was cowed — nay, even loving for the moment to him who had conquered it with beauty. It is impossible for me to speak of " Fran- cesca da Rimini " as a critic. The night I saw it and heard for the first time D'Annunzio's verse spoken by an artist was one of intense excitement. It was the first representation of the play, which had twice been postponed. All Rome was at the Cos- tanzi to see D'Annunzio's triumph or failure. There were, it was very evident, two parties in the house : those who wished his success and those who above all things desired his failure. These two factions were continually at each others' throats. Even the critics — and they came from Russia and from France, from all Italy, and from Germany and England — were hostile or friendly, it was impossible to be otherwise than excited. Magnificently staged, it was, I think, really owing to the acting that it was not a greater success than it proved to be. La Duse is not what she was even five years ago, and her GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 95 methods are and always were naturalistic, yet in this play she was more stagey than I have ever seen her before. Salvini, who played Paolo, on the other hand was classical in his method, so that really it seemed to me that it was Francesca rather than Paolo who was as it were the guilty one ; that indeed Paolo had very little to do with the matter, he was so little moved, so unconcerned, even when caught in the very arms of Francesca by his brother Malatesta lo Sciancato, Francesca's husband. And D'Annunzio too, in writing this play, has not treated it romantically as one would have ex- pected, but psychologically, so that we find, or seem to find, that he has analysed and laid bare the very soul and inner motives of the characters, and, as indeed in all his plays, one seems rather to be reading a novel than to be watching the action of a play. There seemed to me, too, to be more than a suggestion of " Tristan " — yes, Wagner's " Tristan " — in a play that was fulfilled always with desire and the inevitable mastery of passion. But I will say no more. " Francesca da Rimini " seemed to me to be almost as beautiful as anything he has written. To be, also, something new in his work, written as it is in a classical language, in verse that he has desired " shall not be too unworthy of Dante." " Sogno d'un Mattino di Primavera " — a "Dream of a Morning in Spring " — is a play written probably after a study of Maurice Maeterlinck, and it is to 96 ITALY OF TO-DAY be noticed, not in his plays alone, that D'Annunzio is always strongly influenced by the most unlikely people. Nietsche has influenced him strongly, and the Russians, and even Wagner and Maeterlinck. It is a curious story, as lovely as horrible, that might perhaps have been omitted by Boccaccio from the ' Decameron ' owing to its morbidness, or its horror, told as those stories were, we may remember, not far from the dying and the terror of great misfortune. Isabella, the beautiful wife of the Duca of Poggio- Gherardi, is mad. For her lover, a young lord, was killed as he lay in her arms, on her breast, by the duke her husband, and she, drenched in his blood, still held him close, and at sunrise they found her mad. That is the simple and morbid story of a play that is certainly not the least beauti- ful of all D'Annunzio's work. And one gathers as the play proceeds that Isabella has been sent, together with her sister Beatrice, away into the forest to a villa, there to remain under the care of the doctor, that he may if it be possible cure her. So he banishes from her sight everything that is sad, and the poppies are no longer suffered to grow in the corn-fields, nor are there any red roses to be seen in a world that for Isabella must for the future be green only, with the leaves of the trees and the grass and the whole forest life. And it is really in her becoming one with this green life that the solution of the play seems to lie. And there is in this play, as in " Gioconda," a curious half- GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 97 Shakespearean creature, wholly delightful — Virginio — who, like La Sirinetta in the " Gioconda," stands really outside the action of the play, hears and sees all that is passing so inevitably, but is, as it were, untouched by it, a little lower, a little higher — who knows? — than the human race — than the characters of the play, chiefly concerned with listening to the tragedy of a world by which he is moved so little. Ah, it is impossible within the limits of a single chapter on the works of D'Annunzio generally to do justice to the fantastic beauty of what, after all, is almost as nothing beside the " Trionfo," " La Gloria," or " La Citta Morta." The " Dream of an Autumn Sunset " is really not a play at all but a vision. The terrible and im- possible scenes of lust, and blood, and glory, which can scarcely be realised in the mind, would be ridiculous on the stage, before a public that shrinks from blood as from the very secret of Death. The immense conflagration with which this play closes is certainly a piece of glorious imagination, but the play as a whole is excessive in its very intention, and can scarcely have been written in the saner moments of an author who, after all, is living in a reasonable world. It remains, then, to discuss " La Gloria," and I will say at once that in many respects, and especially because of its magnificent symbolism, this plav seems to me the most remarkable that D'Annunzio has yet written. It is really a picture of Rome — yes, Rome a 98 ITALY OF TO-DAY to-day. For, as I read " La Gloria," Cesare Bronte, who is dying and passing, courageous to the last, impervious to new ideals, fighting to the end those ideas that are destroying him, Cesare Bronte is the Pope — the Papacy; while Ruggero Flamma — the elect one, he who has been chosen by the people and has allied himself with La Gloria, whom in the end La Gloria kills — is the New Rome, the Third Rome, the kingdom that the people chose with so much enthusiasm. I do not think it is possible to give a clear account of this extraordinary play without re- producing it almost word for word. One finds in it a new character — a character entirely new in drama or indeed in Art — " La Folia," the crowd, the multi- tude. The play opens as it closes, with this tremend- ous character governing the issues of the play and of life, till it brings about its own destruction, shouting for the head of Ruggero Flamma, the elect one, its chosen leader, whom La Gloria slays after kissing him upon the forehead and the lips. And can any one who has read this play ever really forget that terrible monster and its awful cry, " La sua testa, la sua testa, gettaci la sua testa " ? La Comnena, or La Gloria, it is the same, is talking with Ruggero Flamma. " You have longed for me, it was for me you waited," she says. " I looked for Fame," he answers. " La Gloria mi somiglia," she says. The Crowd. Death to Flamma ! death to Flamma ! Flamma (to La Comnena). Who are you ? who are you ? GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 99 La Comnena. Listen ! [She goes to the window. The Crowd. The Empress ! the Empress ! Death to Flamma ! death to Flamma ! [She goes to Flamma and kisses hi?n on the eyelids and on the mouth, a?id then drives her dagger through his heart. La Comnena. Listen ! listen ! The Crowd. The Empress ! the Empress ! Kill her ! kill her! La Comnena. Listen ! Ruggero Flamma is dead. [There is a moment of silence, and then a long indis- tinct roar from the multitude. La Comnena. Ruggero Flamma is dead. I have killed him, I, even I myself, have killed him. The Crowd. His head ! his head ! throw us his head ! [The sacred city is in a great shadow, a?id to her, as she turns insolently to withdraw the stiletto, there comes a moa?iing that becomes one vast and terrible cry. His head ! his head ! throw us his head ! So ends a play that is, I say it advisedly, without parallel in our time for significance and terror. For here for the first time an artist has attempted that study not only of his own time but of Demos, that ugly and merciless being which is in our own day really master of the situation, who, even as the other, hails La Gloria as the Empress. In the "Gioconda" and the U CittaL Morta" we have two plays that probably contain the finest dramatic work of D'Annunzio. But he who runs may read, for Mr Arthur Symons' translations are so excellent that they leave nothing to be desired. ioo ITALY OF TO-DAY The English translations of D'Annunzio's work are, as a rule, very bad ; but the two plays, " The Dead City " and " Gioconda," are almost perfect examples of the art of translation, and this is easily tested by the ordinary reader, for in "The Dead City" Mr Symons has translated some passages of Sophocles as they have never before been Englished : I wish he would give us the whole of the ' Antigone,' for we have not even a readable translation of that master- piece, in English. Of the novels, that translated the best is the ' Virgins of the Rocks.' The ' Trionfo ' probably could never have been properly translated owing to the seventeen-year-old English miss and the sixty- year-old Mrs and Mr; and the same unfortunate habit of blushing on the part of the young and old alike of our race would prevent ' II Piacere ' also from being translated fully and honestly. However, all these can be read, not in the entirety, but perhaps as much so as is desirable, in the French. What D'Annunzio's future may be I cannot say. That he will accomplish something, and not a little thing, I believe ; but since he is now thirty-eight years old, it is time that he came down from the clouds and forgot such visions as the " Dream of an Autumn Sunset " or the " Episcopo & Co.," and turned towards a living world, not less wonderful, in which, as he has already shown us, his true inspiration lies. ' The Cities of Italy I. AT GENOA. TO look on Genoa from afar is to see one of the fairest sights of the world. And come to her how you may — by the coast road through Mentone and Ventimiglia, San Remo and Savona, or by sea from Marseilles, or from Turin and Milan over the mountains, down through the olive -gardens by the byways — even from a long way off she appears as the very perfect celestial city. Enthroned in a theatre of mountains with the Mediterranean at her feet, she is like a proud princess, her white brow crowned with the immaculate blue of her sky and the gold that has stained her air and made it precious. "Protinus aerii mellis ccelestia dona Exequar," as Virgil says ; and indeed he is not the only one who has noticed this fragrant and precious quality in the air, so that the meanest material, as stucco or whitewash, or the rose colour of the houses, or the ragged garments of the people, seem to be all 104 GENOA of some precious material — the churches and the Pharos of alabaster perhaps, and the poor cotton of a woman's dress of silk or Venice velvet. Mr Evelyn, in his dedication of the ' Fumifigium ' to King Charles II., notices the peculiar joys of Italy in the perfumes of orange, citron, and jasmine flowers, which may perfectly be smelt for divers leagues seaward. And she is of the true South : the bells of the mules carrying firewood and fuel wake one early on one's first morning ; and ever afterwards one cannot think of her save as a city of the East, with some- thing Biblical about her, something that we have all longed for from our tiniest childhood, — a blaze of white light full of dust, a pleasant wearying heat, a sound of everlasting summer. Ah, over our fields at Easter, in early spring, have there not always come to us, perhaps, in the vulgar noise amid which Christ dies every year in England while the people make holiday, or in the relief and joy of Easter Day, some tameless desire, some unappeasable longing for the light and dust and heat and atmosphere of Palestine or the South, some covetousness just for once of a weariness of the sun ? Well, it was Holy Week when first I came to Genoa. The air was heavy with the scent of orange-blossom, the smell of ships came up from the sea, the oranges among the blossom on the trees against the dark green foliage were like burning lamps in broad sunlight ; in the deep shadow of THE GATE OF ITALY 105 the doorways women sat surrounded by innumer- able flowers, white and gold and red. Amid all the clangour and noise there was a hush and expect- ancy. Quite by chance I passed out of the heat and noise of the crowd in the so narrow streets into a church. It was almost dark, but there were many candles burning. The murmur of the city came in through the heavy curtain, and far off I heard the Latin of prayers. Suddenly a voice louder than the rest chanted the Antiphon — O vos omnes qui transitis per viam, attendite et videte si est dolor sicut dolor meus. Ah ! I knew then that I had found it — the land of heart's desire, the place I had longed for all the days of my life ; and it seemed to me that the very Church herself, distracted and alone on Calvary or by the Tomb in the garden of Joseph, had asked that question, " O all ye who pass by, behold and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow ? " and for the first time I realised how far I was from England, in how different a land, though doubtless I might have heard the words often enough in London, where they would have meant almost nothing at all. And so I too heard the young boy priest pass, singing clear — "Jesus, the son of Mary, has been slain; O come and fill his sepulchre with flowers* Outside was the world at its fairest : the splendour 106 GENOA of that antique sea, the spirituality of the everlast- ing mountains, the calmness, the ineffable comfort of the soft sky. There was a kind of bloom on the city of palaces ; and over towards the lighthouse a great ship put out to sea, perhaps with eyes bent forwards, unconscious of the beautiful city, and I, a sentimental traveller, at least a century behind my time, was captured by the moment, and would have given all the world had it been mine to pro- long that short hour so that I might understand all this fading glory of the world. It is perhaps in some such mood as this that the fortunate traveller may find Genoa the Proud, lying on the bosom of the mountains, whiter than the foam of her waves, a true daughter of the South. To come to her in youth, in the spring, for the first time is, I think, one of the great experiences of life, not to be surpassed by any later passion in Rome or Naples or Florence, that ever after seem but as sisters of the Fairest. Yet I think Genoa gives of her best, at first and from afar. In her narrow and seldom splendid streets one loses the vision, and has to be content with a very inferior picturesque. She was fair, and has had many lovers ; from afar she is still desirable. Yet one remembers sometimes, as one saunters on the ramparts, the story of those vast multitudes that came from all Europe to embark at Genoa for Pales- tine, to rescue the Holy City from the Turk. What vision that they ever after saw, what mirage in the desert, what dream of the armies of the Prince of Life, THE PORT FOR PALESTINE 107 can have compared with their sight of Genoa from the sea, when it was too late to return ? And, indeed, in all history one can find no more pathetic tale than that of those 7000 children who came, under the command of a boy of thirteen years, " clamouring for transports " to take them also to the fight for the sepulchre of Jesus, the son of Mary. What became of them ? In what old age did they forget the vision when they first came in sight of Genoa, still a long way off? Were there not some among that army of babies who believed that indeed it was to Jerusalem they had come ? Were not these marble houses indeed the very palaces of Herod and the High Priest ? Was not the first shining church the very Temple where Christ was found by Madonna sorrowing ? What became of them all ? I have never been able to discover. Yet in that age of iron and of gold, when kings came and sailed away to the sunrise, and countless soldiers, princes, light women, monks and nuns, priests and merchants, loafers and dreamers followed after to die in the desert, there is nothing so magnificent as that boy of thirteen and his army of babies, who, remembering something done for love of them long ago, had come over the mountains only to find the impassable sea. Life unencumbered by rule thrusts itself on one's notice. A street of palaces ends in a brilliant slum, a vista of bedizened squalor leads one's gaze at last to the splendour of the sea. Yet though one could imagine no angel daring to pass through any London io8 GENOA street, here even in the narrowest places one would see him without surprise, so near to life has one come in a city with a blue sky. And in Genoa, wherever one may go, it is the sweetness and nobility of nature rather than of art that haunt one's footsteps, the sky that is as lovely as the stars, the mountains that enfold the beautiful city, the sea that, before all seas, before all other things, is the most precious thing in the world. So often is the traveller, in these days when sunset follows so fast on sunrise, at his work of sight-seeing very early in the morning, as Mr Ruskin among others has directed, that it would appear to be superfluous to say more of the aspect of a place that for me at least is a kind of vision. Yet when one remembers that the sight-seer's day is not as the day of other mortals, that it passes with a tragic swiftness and brings an intoler- able weariness, that it is passed for the most part in churches where he never prays or is even quiet for a little, so that his angel may tell him something perhaps of this very place ; or it is passed in galleries where the innumerable Madonnas, Aphrodites, and long-faced saints irritate him who is too busy listening to the guide or studying his book, to understand or care for their tears or gestures or side-long looks, — one is tempted for a moment to suggest that a day or two spent in lounging on the ramparts or upon the moun- tains, or even a few hours stolen from the sunlight and spent in a meditation in some church, would give the traveller more of the live Genoa, more of the true LEONARDO'S JOHN THE BAPTIST 109 mood of Italy, than any number of days or weeks given up to rushing from one palace to another, from one church to another, or from the arcades — where one is entranced by the sedate and almost sombre appear- ance of the living — to the Campo Santo, where one is disgusted, almost for the first time, by the vulgarity and vanity of the dead. I think, indeed, that the sailors with their bearded lips and the strange life of the port are more valuable to us than even Leonardo's John the Baptist in the Palazzo Rosso. He holds no cross as his prototype does in the Louvre, but is like the Bacchus by the same artist that brought to Gautier's mind Heine's notion of the gods in exile " who to maintain themselves after the fall of paganism took employment in the new religion." " All this joy and gay laughter," says Heine, " have long been silent ; now in the ruins of the ancient temples the old Greek deities still dwell, but they have lost their majesty by the victory of Christ, and now they are sheer devils who hide by day in gloomy wreck and rubbish, but by night rise in charming loveliness to bewilder and allure some heedless wanderer or daring youth." Was it for this the Baptist preferred the desert to a king's house ? Unfortunate gods ! Is it not very possible that Dionysus should have enjoyed one more transformation ? That Christianity, after all, is but an expression of the same worship in a different way, the same gods seen from a different point of view ? Well, it is with some such thought, some such suggestion as this, that one looks on the no GENOA beautiful figure in the Palazzo Rosso that Leonardo seems to have hesitated to name either St John Baptist or Dionysus the Dreamer, the Deliverer. And after one has heard the story of Andrea Doria, and (if one is American) admired the statue of Columbus, and (if one is English) learned how Richard Coeur de Lion on his way to the wars, finding that Genoa had given the "eighty galleys' in which he and the King of Spain with their armies set out for the Holy Land, adopted the battle-cry of the Genoese, v For St George," which we are wont to consider our own special invocation, — after one has wondered at these things, it is, I think, ever as the city of the South, the gate of Italy, that one thinks of Genoa rather than as the supposed birthplace of Columbus, or the home of Admiral Doria, or the port for Palestine. Nowhere in Italy is anticipation doomed to be so entirely unfulfilled. Seen from afar as the city of dreams, she proves on closer acquaint- ance a kind of splendid but unbearable nightmare, more noisy than Rome, as filthy as Naples, less homely than Florence. Yet through life she appears to me, through the mist of morning, whiter than snow, or stained by the sunset and violet crowned, the Proud Princess of the South, the warden of innumer- able dreams. T i. AT PISA. ONE is often tempted at Pisa to think that Italy is as she was long ago, a land of long unhurried days, fulfilled even in their more brilliant moments with a kind of leisure. For the traveller is convinced, after he has seen the little group of buildings on the edge of the city to the north, that Pisa is done with, that she holds nothing else that is precious or worth his time, which, after all, has been snatched so uneasily from business, and in which he is to see not one city or two, but all Italy. But I think, indeed, that to see Pisa truly, is to attain to a kind of culture quite other than is necessary to appreciate Florence or Venice or Rome, or even the works of art that they contain. For there is a silence, and an old world quiet and repose about the place that is only to be found in the smaller cities that the traveller usually passes by without so much as a thought of that old world in which, be sure, they cut a not ignoble figure. Pisa holds only such things as have lasted for a ii2 PISA long time — as quiet, sleep, an antique order, a few churches, a few men, a few women, a few girls and boys, some old priests, and death. Somehow, in spite of the railway, she has been left stranded in her immense plain, within sight of the marble mountains whose daughter she is. And, after all, it is only new and unessential things she lacks ; she has the everlasting necessities of the soul of man, among which her miracle picture is not the least. Walter Pater's picture of her as she was in the days of Marcus Aurelius describes her very beauti- fully as she is to-day. The partly decayed, pensive town [he writes], which still had its commerce by sea and its fashion at the bathing season, had lent, at one time the vivid memory of its fair streets of marble, at another the solemn outline of the dark hills of Luna on its background, at another the living glances of its men and women, to the thickly gathering crowd of impressions out of which his notion of the world was forming. . . . The great temple of the place, as he could remember it, on turning back once for a last look from an angle of his homeward road, . . . the harbour and its lights, . . . the sailors' chapel of Venus, and the gilded image hung with votive gifts, the seamen them- selves, their women and children, who had a whole peculiar colour world of their own ; the boys' superficial delight in the broad light and shadow of all that, was mingled with the sense of power, of unknown distance, of the danger of storm and possible death. Well, one still sees the great temple of the place, and the river and its lights, and the little chapel A QUIET CITY 113 of the sailors, once dedicated to Venus now to Madonna; one still finds a great delight in the women and children, and the broad light and shadow of unknown distance, and the danger of storm and possible death. And, coming from the noise of Genoa, above all one finds peace. Some barrier, miraculous, invisible, guards Pisa from the world, so that one wanders up and down her streets in a kind of ecstatic happiness, with a kind of liberty, since there is no necessity to guard the soul from any roughness or vulgarity, where all is so calm, so beautiful. Yet even in this, perhaps the last of the invincible cities, one finds traces of the handiwork of the enemy ; so that even, as in some aspects Pisa lures one into security within her old walls, or her Cathedral, or her magnificent Campo Santo, so in other moods one sees in her a horrible modernity that despises the old things and is swiftly driving them away. As one looks from the win- dows of the Hotel Victoria along the Lung' Arno, on the wrinkled image of the city in the yellow waters of the river, one sees in that reflection, between the line of houses, a strip of the blue sky full of light, that is still the most beautiful thing to be seen in Pisa* and that has remained unchanged for more than a thousand years. So our good God has placed thus much of immortal beauty beyond the reach of the vandals. It is of course to the wonderful group of buildings to the northward of the city, just within the walls, H ii4 PISA that the curious traveller will first turn his steps. Standing there as though left stranded upon some shore that life has long deserted, they are symbols of all that has had to be given up in order that we may follow her in her modern whims. Coming as one does out from the narrow cloistered streets into the space and breadth of the Piazza del Duomo, one is almost blinded by the sudden light and glory and whiteness of the sunlight on these buildings that seem to be made of moonstone or ivory intricately carved and infinitely noble. And as one stands there, with the tide of life running away from them, though so slowly, through the streets of Pisa and out over the bridges where the trains are marked Milano, Firenze, Roma, Torino, it almost seems as though this Church and Baptistery, the Campo Santo where the cypresses are dying in the earth of Calvary, and the Bell Tower that alone has leaned towards life to follow her, have been really deserted and for- gotten by a world that has taken other gods to its heart. On entering the Campo Santo one is surprised, I think, that it should prove to be so beautiful. Out of the dust and heat of the Piazza one comes into a cool cloister that surrounds a quadrangle open to the sky in which a cypress or two still lives. But it is before the fresco of the Triumph of Death that one stays longest, trying to understand the dainty treatment of so horrible a subject. Those fair ladies riding on horseback with so brave a show of cavaliers, THE CAMPO SANTO 115 even they too must come at last to be just dust, is it ? or like that swelled body that seems to taint even the summer sunshine lying there by the wayside, and come upon so unexpectedly ? What love -song was that troubadour, fluttering with ribbons, singing to that little company under the orange-trees, cava- liers and ladies returned from the chase or whiling away a summer afternoon playing with their falcons and their dogs ? The servants have spread rich carpets for their feet, and into the picture trips a singing-girl, who has surely called the very loves from Paradise or from the apple-trees covered with blossom where they make temporary abode. What love-song were they singing ere the music was frozen on their lips by a falling leaf or chance flutter of bird life calling them to turn and behold Death is here ? It is in such a city as this that meditation upon death loses both its sentimental and its ascetic aspect and becomes almost wholly aesthetic, so that it can never be before this fresco that such contemplations can become as it were "a lifelong following of one's own funeral." For the gentle melancholy and desire for life that one experiences in quiet places are in reality but a process of recreation, a new accumu- lation of emotion and enthusiasm, the coming of reinforcements of one's energy. So in this still and lovely place, as one passes the old fading frescoes and the magnificent sarcophagi or urns or statues, sheltered as they would need to be at home from the sea air, one likes to remember that it was a sight n6 PISA of these ancient and pagan tombs that inspired the great Pisano to produce his most precious works. His son, Giovanni, who built this airy cloister so daintily, found too among the treasures he was enclosing, life to breathe into his own work. The sentimental traveller, now somewhat out- moved, may desire, indeed I confess I did, to see this place by moonlight, nor will he be disappointed by so strange a transformation. Amidst a silence less profound than in the sunlight, by reason of the sibilant rustling of even the loneliest night, it seems as though all the great or splendid people who are buried here, or who have worked here, have assembled for some great office, as Compline or belated Evensong. The keen sea-air penetrates and sends a chill along the blood. The fantastic shadows of the dying cypresses dance on the walls like a very company of spirits, and Orcagna's great fresco seems more dainty than ever, more ravishing a story of the romance of man. But even the sentimental traveller is not quite dead, and, worse still, not quite silent either. I suppose the books that have been written by the wise on the buildings of the Piazza del Duomo would fill a long shelf in my library, and the books written by the foolish all the sides of my room. One might as well try to describe the face of one's angel as these holy places of Pisa, which are catalogued in every guide-book ever written. So I will withhold my hand from desecrating further that which is still so lovely. Only if you would hear the heavenly MADONNA UNDER THE ORGANS 117 choirs before death has his triumph over you, go by night into the baptistry, having bribed some choir- boy with a paper lira to sing for you, and you shall hear from that marvellous roof a thousand angels singing round the blessed feet of San Raniero. Nor shall you omit to hear the huntsman's Mass, Missa dei Cacciatori, at Santa Maria della Spina on the Lung' Arno, where in mediaeval days Mass was said as early as three or four o'clock so that the hunts- men might be off betimes, but armed against all evil chance by Christ himself. If it is chiefly as the city of the Leaning Tower that Pisa is known to the vulgar, and to the learned as the birthplace of Niccolo and Giovanni Pisano; to the Italian peasant and noble (if such remain) within the commune of Pisa it is as the dwelling- place of La Madonna sotto gli Organi, most powerful and celebrated of miracle pictures in Tuscany. There in the Cathedral she dwells, the blessed protectress of Pisa — nay, of all poor banished sons of Eve ; nor till lately, for five hundred years, had any one seen her face. It is true that in 1607 a certain Archbishop, more impudent and proud than is usual even with Archbishops, resolved to remove the seven veils that covered the marvellous picture, and indeed nearly succeeded ; but as he was about to remove the seventh veil (so irreverent and proud was he), death swiftly claimed him, and his accom- plices — certain prebendaries and workmen — became blind. But at last there came others more im- n8 PISA pudent and proud than he ; and in that terrible year when, it is said, the saints shook on their thrones for the safety of the very earth, and all devils danced in their own place, — in 1789, in Dec- ember, on the thirteenth (the one unfortunate day of that blessed month), — Duke Peter Leopold, brother to the Emperor, tore off the seven veils, and for the first time for five hundred years a mortal gazed into the soft eyes of " Madonna under the Organs." Good God ! what could the wretched man expect ? What power in heaven or earth was there to save him from the awful fate that befel the Archbishop and his " lousy prebendary " ? Reader, I know not. For what I know, — such is the beneficence of Heaven, and of her our Blessed Advocate, Virgo Clemens, Mater Amabilis, Janua Cceli (ora pro nobis), — Duke Peter Leopold died in his bed and went no lower than Purgatory, where, I think, all inquisitive travellers should pray for him. But that he had the narrowest escape in the world of utter disaster, I, with my hand on my heart, can assert, since on May 29, 1897, I was in the Cathedral of Pisa when they unveiled Santa Maria sotto gli Organi in honour of her Coronation Jubilee. You, too, oh friend Protestant, were honouring in that same year a lesser Queen than Regina Angelorum, therefore you should not sneer. It was just after the Charity Bazaar fire in Paris, which happened on the fourth of the same month ; doubtless this, as you will see, helped the disaster. There were many thousands MADONNA UNDER THE ORGANS 119 from all Tuscany and the mountains packtd in the Cathedral, myself among them, leaning against a pillar near the great bronze west door. Suddenly some one shouted " Fire ! ' and in a moment that mass of people was struggling madly to get out of the Cathedral. Fortunately (I lay it all at Madonna's feet, I was one of the few who disapproved of this repeated unveiling, though not for orthodox reasons), I reasoned with myself, as : This church is of marble, and therefore a great time must go by before it is consumed ; and, said I, who ever heard of a church being burned down where so miraculous an Image dwells ? (I was wrong in both arguments, but doubt- less She sent them ; they served their purpose.) So I stood quite still behind the pillar, embracing it so that I might not be swept away by the crowd. How strong was that pillar of the church, divid- ing and breaking the crowd like a rock ! Cries and shrieks and agony filled the air, while I said Aves on my fingers against the pillar in fear. Some nine persons were crushed to death and some twenty- one injured. And I think indeed that the little child of two years old that had been knocked out of its mother's arms, whom they found laughing under a bench, and I, were the only persons on that terrible day who were not very much afraid. The child's mother gave its frock, together with a glass case that cost a heap of money, to St Mary under the Organs, for the escape of her little one; and I — well, my gift I keep to myself. To this 120 PISA day when I think of Duke Peter Leopold I shiver. Therefore, all ye who pass by, forget not to pray for a moment at the altar of the Madonna of Pisa, seeing she had mercy on a little child and a poor pilgrim in a time of fear and great danger. Ah, do not be in too great a hurry to leave Pisa for Rome or Florence. They have waited for you now more than a thousand years ; let them wait a day or two longer, while you wander through the King's Park towards the sea, and watch the light on the hills, and dream on the top of the famous tower whence you shall see all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them. It may well be you will never see that line of hills again ; ah, look at them carefully. A little while before to-day the most precious of your dreams was not so lovely as that spur of the Apennines. " lam nox inducere terris Umbras et ccelo diffundere signa parabat. . . . Mali culices ranasque palustres Avertunt somnos, absentem ut cantat amicam Multa prolutus vappa nauta atque viator Certatim. Tandem fessus dormire viator Incipit." . . . So be it, traveller,, Ill, AT SIENA. BEFORE all others Siena is the typical mediaeval city — not without joy. It has been the pro- found mistake of our democratic age to think in its somewhat sentimental fashion of the Middle Age as a period of almost unbroken gloom. But indeed of all ages of the world I ever read of it seems to me to have been fulfilled with the most splendid enthusiasm, profoundly humorous and merry too, in a way the Reformation and Renaissance and the three million and four differences of the three hundred and fifteen religious sects infesting my dear land have, in England at least, made impossible for us. But nowadays one does not come to Siena to be amused — at least I suppose not — but to be instructed. And there, I think, indeed, the traveller makes his greatest mistake. Nothing is so amusing as en- thusiasm, nor is anything I ever saw so enthusiastic as Italian Gothic. And Siena, from the splendour of her gates to the intangible sweetness of her Cathedral, is all glorious, 122 SIENA a very king's daughter, a virgin waiting, not in sad- ness but in ecstasy, for the bridegroom. And her joy has been found in silence, for she has risen up out of the desert, a tower of passionate glory, and her fountains sing her canticle. Fonte Gaia sings of spring, Fonte Branda of the wearying summer, Fonte Nuova of the Resurrection, Fonte Ovile " Gloria in Excelsis." And even as the best and most quiet half of our lives passes away in a dream, "vitam nobiscum dividit somnus," as Seneca says, so it is in such a city as this, fulfilled with a temperate silence, that the most precious hours of an ever anxious life are found at last. For it would be impossible to die without regret while so much beauty lingers in the world, nor, since our angels will at last entice us hence, shall we be surprised at the loveliness of any celestial city. For Siena is the virgin of Italy, Turris Eburnea, and sings Magnificat. All the splendour of Rome is but a bubble while her beautiful white body lies upon the mountains. I am content, having seen her, for ever after to look on nothing but the sky, in the which I may mirror her enfolded in ineffable peace, guarded by innumerable angels invisible, whose swords unscabbarded meet point to point, beneath which dome of flame, in the attitude of prayer, my city stands. It is to the cathedral that the traveller will first turn his steps, and maybe wisely. For there one sees a new creation of the heart of man, all the mystery and passionate groping after God, all the fierce desire of unspoken prayers that in the North have created THE CATHEDRAL 123 Amiens and Chartres and Beauvais, curbed and ful- filled with a kind of magical grace and sanity, so that one remembers rather how God loved the world than His resolve to consume it in a moment, and destroy, who knows, us too with the wicked. Begun in the year 1229 or thereabout, the Cathedral of Siena is, I suppose, the most perfect piece of Italian Gothic anywhere to be found. For a time at least the Italians had forgotten their old gods and remem- bered only Jesus of Nazareth and Madonna Mary. Yet in all that forgetfulness there remains some glimmer, some suggestion, of that older civilisation in a grace and proportion and sanity quite foreign to the Cathedrals of France and Germany and England, where there was neither religion nor civilisation to forget, that lends a new sweetness even to-day to Christianity in Italy. Heaven is not so far off from us in Italy as in England ; one does not grope in any- mysterious gloom after a terrible God, but in a garden of sweetly-coloured marble and level light one as it were walks at least with saints, and is not afraid or mystified at all, but just happy. In the North we are so serious, so gloomy in our faith : here they have, as it were, humanised Christianity. And in spite of the Northerner's inevitable dislike to any sort of familiarity in dealing with the dead, who in his gloomy and smoky cities he has forgotten are not dead but alive for ever, he cannot but be moved by the evidence all about him of the way in which the Italian disdains to be afraid or to forget them. So, remem- 124 SIENA bering they are indeed alive, he asks their prayers and paints their more noble or wonderful deeds upon the walls of God's house, and, not morbidly or with curiosity, but very lovingly, keeps their dust about him. And it is with one of these, long dead and now alive in heaven, that in Siena one is almost compelled to live, seeing that it was her home. Born in Siena in 1347, St Catherine was the daughter of Jacopo and Lapa Benincasa, who had beside twenty -four other children. It was in the Contrada d'Oca, in the valley between the church of San Domenico and the Duomo, that she was born, in a house still standing, over whose door are written the words, " Sponsae Christi Catherinae domus." In 1367 she received the habit of the third order of St Dominic, and from that time earth and this fair city fell away from her, and her little cell became for her heaven and all. It was in silence that she found her great teacher, so that she never at this time spoke to any one save God and her confessor. And that mysticism that afterwards enveloped the souls and bodies of St Teresa and St John of the Cross seems also to have come to her and conquered her. In her contemplation, vile and filthy imaginings, desperate thoughts and despicable passions fought in her soul for mastery, while she, calm and a virgin, told her beads in silence. " At her voice, nay, only looking upon her, hearts were changed," and with a kind of genius men, by the time she was twenty-four, called her SAINT CATHERINE 125 " mother," and her confessors, meeting her majestical eyes under those straight brows, called themselves her sons, as they were indeed already her disciples. So unlearned that she had never been able to read or write, she is taught by a miracle, and becomes, as all the world is a witness, "a writer of singular beauty, force, and distinction." In the short thirty -three years of her life she changed the political aspect of Europe, and her power became greater almost than that of the Papacy itself. For she fulfilled the Dominican ideal of the union of contemplation and labour. In all her century hers is the most splendid figure : Popes and kings shrink into insignificance beside this mystic with a genius for politics, who at any moment of her life, howsoever splendid or successful, would, how gladly, have retired into the silence of a tiny cell. And it was from her unbroken silence in her cell in Siena that she came one day of spring, conquering and to conquer. It was she who was to tame the implacable enemy. The wearying and terrible wars of Guelf and Ghibelline that bolt the Middle Age with the iron of their noise were hushed, and both were united against the Holy See. She, but a girl, a visionary, that in a hundred encounters had possessed herself of the passion of infuriated mobs, the anguish and regret of the dying, the misery of a little world, sick and plague-stricken, saw the banners of the league blazing with the splendid and impossible word, Libertas ; and it may i 2 6 SIENA well have been in pity for mankind, in sympathy with its disappointments and follies and its natural human hopes, its ridiculous and touching faith in itself, that she, never doubting, intervened and pre- vented Siena, Arezzo, Lucca, and other cities from joining a cause so sure of failure. The Pope, Gregory XL, far away in Avignon, a coward and a fool, had at last found a champion before whom the very world was but as a shadow. And at last the Florentines, overcome by her who had so lately left that silence where God dwells, asked her to be their mediator with the Pope. At the gates of Florence she was met by the chief magistrates, who sent her with magnificent honours before them to Avignon. What panoply of war or crusade, what defiance of authority in the name of liberty, what terror of red death, can match in nobility and splendour that scene so long ago ? A girl, scarcely twenty- nine, her white passionate face overruled by silence and contemplation and communion with God, goes forth to compel the Pope to return to Rome, utterly without fear and without doubt. St Catherine came to Avignon on the 18th June 1376 ; she was received by the Pope and Cardinals. To her Gregory XL says, " I put the affair entirely in your hands, only I recommend you the honoui of the Church. I desire nothing but peace." Thus at last she persuaded him to return to Rome, and yet he dared not, unless she held his hand: so that SAINT CATHERINE 127 we find that she met him at Genoa in September of that year and led him into Rome. But in truth the Florentines desired not peace but war, and it was only after a most terrible struggle that she brought peace to him in 1378 ; immediately after she returned to her cell. Yet after all it was not in peace but in grief and tears that she died two years later, the people having chosen another Pope, Urban VI., and knowing this "she would dissolve into floods of tears." Her body is in Rome in the church of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva, a gloomy place enough, while her head is preserved most magically in her own city, in the Duomo. Having so briefly and imperfectly sketched her actions, there remain over thirty - three years of life in which she talked with Jesus and received indeed from His very hands, which the nails had pierced, the Blessed Sacrament. It is told of her how that one Nicola Tuldo of Perugia, being con- demned to death, and he, still in his youth, utterly refusing even for a moment to contemplate so hard a fortune, cursing God therefor, and refusing all consolation, she "came and spoke with him; whence he received such comfort that he confessed and made her promise by the love of God to stand at the block beside him on the day of execution." And yet, even after he had looked into those quiet eyes, he feared the great enemy so that he prayed the Saint to stay with him that he might die content. O wonderful ! And says she, "his head lay on my breast. Then 128 SIENA I felt a great joy within me, and the odour of his blood rose up, and I said, ' Comfort thee, my brother, the block shall soon become thy marriage altar, for sure I will stand beside thee.' " And so she laid her white neck on the block and prayed for his soul and for herself. Then came Tuldo walking "like a gentle lamb," and she preceding him he seemed content, and calling the names of Jesus and of Catherine he died ; while she beheld his soul borne by the angels into God's love. Then she " held his head within her hands, her dress was saturated with his blood, which she could scarcely bear to wash away, so deeply did she triumph in the death of him whom she had saved." That is but one incident in a life almost beyond modern dreams. " Be thou, be thou, that fragrant flower spreading its fragrance abroad in the sweet pres- ence of God," she wrote. Well, is it not with some such refreshment one comes even to-day from her chapel in the Duomo ? But in reading that story of Tuldo, contained in her letter to Brother Raimondo of Capua, it is not only the ecstasy of love we see but the ecstasy of desire. How different perhaps her life might have been had she been less convinced, less captured, in that silence. One hears in her words the ecstatic madness of the profound voluptuary, the sensualist. " The odour of his blood rose up," she says, and in her simple and wise way speaks of her sensuality as of a mighty weapon, "arming oneself with one's sensuality." SAINT CATHERINE 129 Nor is she afraid, for she says to the Pope, " Be a brave man, and not a coward ; " and to the King of France she says, " I will." Ah, all saints beside her are but little children ; was it not she who wrote, seven hundred years ago, "The intelligence feeds the affections — who knows most loves most, and he who loves most enjoys most." One follows her as did those crowds ages ago, even to-day, because one must. Ruled by her will and overcome and utterly defeated, we see " a vast multi- tude clothed in sackcloth and in purple, in iron and in gold," every sort of person comes under her influence and is captured and a slave for ever. It is not only Gregory XL and Queen Joanna of Naples and the King of France that are overcome by her, nor male- factors like Tuldo nor holy men like Stephen, but all sorts and conditions of men and women, nuns and friars, soldiers of fortune, light women, and citizens. And in a vision our Saviour presented her with two crowns, one of gold and the other of thorns, bid- ding her to choose. Says she, " I desire, O Lord, to live here always conformed to thy Passion and to find pain and suffering my delight," and, taking the all -glorious crown of thorns, she pressed it on her brows, loving it better than all else in that she therein wore even what He had worn, for her too among the others. Reader, before so lovely a saint, so glorious a woman, will you too not rest contented for a day or so ? Ah, but I have not told you a hundredth part of I 130 SIENA her history. She is a thousand times more glorious than I have said : read her own words, and you, too, will love her city better than all the more famous places. And it is here in Siena you should think of her, not of our little day. And if your angel should have it in his heart to give you the happiness of remaining in Siena over the sixth day of May, you too, O son or daughter of the North, whence we have frightened all our saints ages ago, may see a tiny remnant of her lovers that still worship at her shrine, friars and nuns, soldiers and light women, and all sorrowful people and oppressed, whose eyes gush out with tears before her who changed the hearts of those who only looked upon her. IV. AT ORVIETO. A CITY of convents and monasteries, exquisite, of the spirit, apart from the world, to be compared only with a vision of the heavenly city ; such is the impression the traveller receives on first catching sight of Orvieto from afar. Too few seek her in her silence and her solitude ; for the many the more re- sounding cities suffice. In a noisy night on the railway, distracted by innumerable and abortive dreams, half-asleep, half-awake, in all the agony of dawn in the train, one rushes past a place that has little to offer but peace. And when one desires the greatest of all, and is so near to her, when almost every moment one expects to see the domes and roofs of Rome herself, it is not Orvieto in her sim- plicity that can turn us from the goal of all our world, even for a moment. Yet somehow more than all the modern magnificence and trumpery splendour of the Eternal City, Orvieto in her antique garments, with her spiritual country face, very like one of Raphael's Madonnas, has for us the gift of Italy. 132 ORVIETO " Imagine," says Gabriele D'Annunzio — " Imagine a rock in the midst of a melancholy valley, and on the top of the rock a city, so deathly silent as to give the impression of being uninhabited — every window closed — grass growing in the dusty grey streets — a Capuchin friar crosses the Piazza — a priest descends from a closed carriage in front of a hospital, all in black and with a decrepit old servant to open the door ; here a tower against the white, rain-sodden clouds — there a clock slowly striking the hour, and suddenly, at the end of a street, a miracle — the Duomo." But it is not to the impatient traveller — he who stays but one night within her walls — that this city set on a hill under the soft sky will reveal her secret ; but to him who, having spent sufficient time in the silence of the Cathedral, has cleansed his heart, so that he may understand her story. You might almost say that within her walls is contained the whole Christian mythos, beginning with Genesis and ending with the Coronation of the Blessed Virgin ; the centre, the climax, the supreme mystery of the whole being the tremendous secret of the Doctrine of the Blessed Sacrament. And it is not in the Cathedral alone that Orvieto declares to us that Christianity has conquered a reluctant world, for in herself she is a monument of that victory. In the Piazza del Duomo there are four buildings beside the Duomo that are inevitably connected with the Church, and so with Christ. The oldest, THE PIAZZA DEL DUOMO 133 the Palace of the Bishop, stands beyond the Cathedral, and though begun in 977 and enlarged by Adrian IV. in 1151, it is now mainly a building of the sixteenth century. We then turn to the Palace of the Popes — Palazzo Soliano, that with the decay of religion has been turned into a museum — built by Boniface VIII. in the end of the thirteenth century. Beside this palace rises the Hospital, built in the end of the twelfth century, and opposite the cathedral itself we find the Opera del Duomo, built in the fourteenth century, a magnificent piece of work. Thus for Orvieto, at the least half her life was laid up in heaven, where also her treasure was. For it was to a miracle that she owed not only her beauty but her true being, there on her great rock above her melan- choly valley, a very miracle herself, famous, and holding gifts. And even as she owed her splen- dour to the blood of Christ, so she seems to have desired the blood of man, staining her streets with that mystical and shameful river of life in the month of August 1312, and at other times when civil war reigned in the streets and many hundreds of citizens perished. And, whether under the Monaldeschi, or the Popes, or the Neapolitan king, always her streets ran with blood — it is as it were the very symbol of herself. But after a week, or even a few days, spent within her walls, it is always to the Cathedral that the traveller will return to be satisfied with its beauty and its dreams. Built in order to commemorate one i 3 4 ORVIETO of the most famous of miracles — that of Bolsena, the story of which Raphael has painted on the walls of the Vatican — the Cathedral is itself perhaps one of the mightiest miracles of the world. And this it may be is scarcely strange, for the miracle the Cathedral commemorates is the divine expression of the truth of the doctrine of transubstantiation — the actual Sacrifice of the Mass. After all, has not this very idea divided Christendom ? It is scarcely strange then that it should have created even the Duomo of Orvieto. It happened in this wise among a faithful, simple, and childlike people, who were in love with the story of Christ and His Mother. A certain German priest — ah, Martin Luther, another of your countrymen — had dared to doubt the doctrine of the Real Presence of Christ in the Blessed Sac- rament. Utterly tired and weary of his doubts, dis- turbed by his uncertainty, he set out for Rome, so that there, in the capital of his religion, he might decide at last or be persuaded. For it began to appear plain to him that if this that he presumed to doubt were indeed untrue other things he had scarcely thought of as yet might be untrue also. It was, therefore, we may well believe, in a certain sadness of heart that he set out for Rome, and, " resting one day on the shores of the beautiful lake of Bolsena," which is but twelve miles from Orvieto, he, at the request of the villagers, celebrated a Mass for them in the Church of Santa Cristina, which is with us even to this day. And though Santa Cristina is THE MIRACLE OF BOLSENA 135 rejected by all authority, she has her lovers in the sweet Umbrian country who will never forget her, and perhaps for their love she brought these things to pass — being in Heaven at the time. For it happened that as our German doubter (Raphael says he was but a lad) elevated the Host, more than ever troubled in his mind concerning the doctrine that none of those simple folk in the church there thought of doubting for a moment, he saw drops of red blood upon the Corporal, " each stain severally assuming the form of a human head, with features like the 'Volto Santo,' or portrait of our Saviour." O wonderful ! What shame in his heart, what anger at his doubts, what love, what certainty, what glad- ness ! Overcome by fear and reverence, he, sinner that he was, dared not consume the Holy Species, but with eagerness and love reserved the Body of our Lord, and travelling in haste to Orvieto, where the Pope then was, he, not without shame, confessed to him not only the miracle that had happened but his doubts also. The Bishop of Orvieto at the command of the Pope hastened to Bolsena, and brought from the altar of Santa Cristina the Sacred Host and the Blessed Corporals. The Pope himself, Urban IV. it was, passed with all the splendid clergy, with joy, with music, in procession to meet him who indeed bore Christ along with him. Thus was instituted the magnificent festival of Corpus Christi, whose office St Thomas Aquinas, the Angelical Doctor, composed. The Sacred Host I3 6 ORVIETO rests to-day in the Capella del Corporale in the Cathedral, surrounded by the magnificent frescoes of Ugolino di Prete d'llario, that tell the story to the world. Thus, in the simple days of old, miracles happened and men believed, and chased the devil down the vistas of his own damnable doubts. To us valiant shopkeepers disputing about the reality of matter it is doubtless nothing but a fairy tale at best; some of us even may be so strict as to call it a lie — yet I can but hope they are few* For we, too, have heard with our ears, and our fathers have declared unto us the noble works done in their day and in the old time before them. After all, I would rather be wrong with St Francis than right with Martin Luther. In order, therefore, to celebrate this miracle, men built the Cathedral of Orvieto — nor is there anything more marvellous extant upon earth. Fra Angelico did not hesitate to spend his genius on her walls. Signorelli, who is so much greater than his fame, in 1499 began to paint the vaulting and the walls. And amid all the magnificence and richness of the work around one, it is again and again to his work that the traveller will return — always with joy. Born at Cortona in 1440, Vasari declares that in his day his works were more esteemed than those of any other master. It is strange that they should have fallen into such neglect in our own. It is the human form that especially delights him, so that in Uffizi we find a picture called The Virgin holding her SIGNORELLI 137 Divine Son in her Lap, in which the shepherds in the background are naked and unashamed, as in an older age. It is, however, in the Cathedral at Orvieto that we find his best work. Says Vasari, " I am not surprised that the works of Luca were always highly extolled by Michaelangelo, or that for his (Michael's) divine work of the Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel he should have courteously availed him- self to a certain extent of the inventions of Signorelli, as, for example, in the angels and demons, in the divisions of the heavens, and some other parts, wherein Michaelangelo imitated the mode of treat- ment adopted by Luca, as may be seen by every one." In looking at his work in the Cathedral, it is perhaps a question whether Michael borrowed to advantage. Nothing more extraordinarily thoughtful and subtle than the Antichrist is to be found in Michael's Last Judgment. So like to Christ as indeed to be always mistaken for him from a distance, Antichrist has all the beauty, all the cynical hatred of mankind, which listens to him in adoration that, after Luca has suggested it to us, we might expect. It is hardly necessary, one might say, for the devil to whisper to him ; in his heart all the cruelty and villany of the universe have been sown and come to flower. Opposite, the fresco of the Resurrection, with its huge naked angels sounding their death-destroying trumpets, decked with a banner of the cross, crushes us beneath its tremendous imaginative power. In 138 ORVIETO his magnificent mind the Resurrection took form, so that he, as it were, was able to comprehend it and its humanity, and show it to us ere it had been re- solved out of the confusion of the trumpets into the order of the syllables of God. Visions as splendid as those of Dante dawn upon him. The Punishment of the Wicked, the Reward of the Blessed, and Paradise. Perhaps Luca Signorelli alone of all great painters, not excepting the author of the Triumph of Death in the Campo Santo at Pisa, has, as it were, com- prehended heaven and hell. With his tremendous thoughts as our companions we walk the streets of Orvieto, ever finding it necessary to return again to the Cappella della Madonna di S. Brizio in the Cathedral. And when at last we leave the beautiful city for Rome, or for Florence, or for the country, it is perhaps with a new vision of life that we set out ; a little tired of less absolute things, till immersed in the history of the Eternal City, or in the thoughts of the Humanists at Florence, we come to see again that man too is, as it were, God in the making, seeing that he was made in the image of God. UJ O / %, <-