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ITALIAN FANTASIES
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO
ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO
MACMILLAN & CO., Limited
LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA
MELBOURNE
THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd.
TORONTO
AN ITALIAN FANTASY
By Stefano de Zevio (Vercna)
ITALIAN FANTASIES
BY
ISRAEL ZANGWILL
AUTHOR OF "CHILDREN OF THE GHETTO,'
" THE GREY WIG," ETC., ETC.
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1910
All rights reserved
Copyright, 1910,
By the MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up and electrotyped. Published November, 1910.
NortoooH IPtfBB
J. 8. Gushing Co. — Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
AUTHOR'S NOTE
The germ of this book may be found in three essays
under the same title published in " Harper's Magazine "
in 1903 and 1904, which had the inestimable advantage
of being illustrated by the late Louis Loeb, " the joyous
comrade " to whose dear memory this imperfect half of
what was planned as a joint labour of love must now be
dedicated.
I. Z.
All roads lead from Rome
vi
CONTENTS
PAGE
Of Beauty, Faith, and Death : a Rhapsody by Way of
Prelude 1
Fantasia Napolitana : being a Reverie of Aquariums,
Museums, and Dead Christs 18
The Carpenter's Wife : a Capriccio 47
The Earth the Centre of the Universe : or the Ab-
surdity OF Astronomy 85
Of Autocosms without Facts: or the Emptiness of Re-
ligions 93
Of Facts without Autocosms : or the Irrelevancy of
Science 115
Of Facts with Alien Autocosms : or the Futility of
Culture 133
St. Francis : or the Irony of Institutions . . . 162
The Gay Doges : or the Failure of Society and the
Impossibility of Socialism 176
The Superman of Letters : or the Hypocrisy of Politics 191
Lucrezia Borgia : or the Myth of History . . . 206
Sicily and the Albergo Samuele Butler : or the Fiction
of Chronology 216
Intermezzo 227
Lachrym^ Rerum at Mantua : with a Denunciation of
d'Annunzio 238
vii
viii CONTENTS
PAOB
Of Dead Sublimities, Serene Magxificences, and Gagged
Poets 253
Variations on a Theme 268
High Art and Low 276
An Excursion into the Grotesque : with a Glance at
Old Maps and Modern Fallacies 287
An Excursion into Heaven and Hell : with a Deprecia-
tion of Dante 310
St, Giulia and Female Suffrage 330
Icy Italy : with Venice Rising from the Sea . . . 340
The Dying Carnival 349
Napoleon and Byron in Italy: or Letters and Action 354
The Consolations of Phlebotomy : a Paradox at Pa via 366
Risorgimento : with Some Remarks on San Marino and
THE Millennium 372
ITALIAN FANTASIES
ITALIAN FANTASIES
OF BEAUTY, FAITH, AND DEATH : A RHAP-
SODY BY WAY OF PRELUDE
I TOO have crossed the Alps, and Hannibal himself had no
such baggage of dreams and memories, such fife-and-drum
of lyrics, such horns of ivory, such emblazoned standards
and streamered gonfalons, flying and fluttering, such
phalanxes of heroes, such visions of cities to spoil and
riches to rifle — palace and temple, bust and picture,
tapestry and mosaic. My elephants too matched his ; my
herds of mediaeval histories, grotesque as his gargoyled
beasts. Nor without fire and vinegar have I pierced my
passage to these green pastures. " Ave Italia, regina terra-
rum T^ I cried, as I kissed the hem of thy blue robe,
starred with white cities.
There are who approach Italy by other portals, but
these be the true gates of heaven, these purple peaks
snow-flashing as they touch the stainless sky ; scarred and
riven with ancient fires, and young with jets of living
water. Nature's greatness prepares the heart for man's
glory.
I too have crossed the Rubicon, and Csesar gathered no
such booty. Gold and marble and sardonyx, lapis-lazuli,
agate and alabaster, porphyry, jasper and bronze, these
were the least of my spoils. I plucked at the mystery of
the storied land and fulfilled my eyes of its loveliness and
colour. I have seen the radiant raggedness of Naples as I
squeezed in the squirming, wriggling ant-heap ; at Paestum
I have companied the lizard in the forsaken Temple of
B 1
2 ITALIAN FANTASIES
Poseidon. (O the soaring Pagan pillars, divinely Doric !)
I have stood by the Leaning Tower in Bologna that gave
a simile to Dante, and by the long low wall of Padua's
university, whence Portia borrowed her learned plumes ; I
have stayed to scan a placarded sonnet to a Doctor of
Philology ; I have walked along that delectable Riviera di
Levante and left a footprint on those wind-swept sands
where Shelley's mortal elements found their fit resolution
in flame. I have lain under Boccaccio's olives, and caressed
with my eye the curve of the distant Duomo and the wind-
ing silver of the Arno. Florence has shown me supreme
earth-beauty, Venice supreme water-beauty, and I have
worshipped Capri and Amalfi, offspring of the love-
marriage of earth and water.
O sacredness of sky and sun ! Receive me, ye priests
of Apollo. I am for lustrations and white robes, that I
may kneel in the dawn to the Sun-God. Let me wind in
the procession through the olive groves. For what choking
Christian cities have we exchanged the lucid Pagan hill-
towns ? Behold the idolatrous smoke rising to Mammon
from the factory altars of Christendom. We have sacri-
ficed our glad sense of the world-miracle to worldly
miracles of loaves and fishes. Grasping after the unseen,
we have lost the divinity of the seen. Ah me ! shall we
ever recapture that first lyric rapture ?
O consecration of the purifying dawn, O flame on the
eastern altar, what cathedral rose-window can replace thee?
O trill of the lark, soaring sunward, O swaying of May
boughs and opening of flower chalices, what tinkling of
bells and swinging of censers can bring us nearer the
divine mystery ? What are our liturgies but borrowed
emotions, grown cold in the passing and staled by use —
an anthology for apes !
But I wrong the ape. Did not an Afric explorer — with
more insight than most, albeit a woman — tell me how even
an ape in the great virgin forests will express by solemn
OF BEAUTY, FAITH, AND DEATH 3
capers some sense of the glory and freshness of the morn-
ing, his glimmering reason struggling towards spiritual
consciousness, and moving him to dance his wonder and
adoration ? Even so the Greek danced his way to religion
and the drama. Alas for the ape's degenerate cousin, the
townsman shot to business through a tube !
I grant him that the shortest distance between two
points is a straight line, yet 'tis with the curve that beauty
commences. Your crow is the scientific flier, and a dis-
mal bird it is. Who would demand an austere, unbend-
ing route 'twixt Sorrento and Amalfi instead of the white
road that winds and winds round that great amphitheatre
of hills, doubling on itself as in a mountain duet, and cir-
cumvoluting again and yet again, till the intertangled
melody of peaks becomes a great choral burst, and all the
hills sing as in the Psalmist, crag answering crag I Do
you grow impatient when chines yawn at your feet and
to skirt them the road turns inland half a mile, bringing
you back on the other side of the chasm, as to your mere
starting-point ? Do you crave for an iron-trestled Ameri-
can bridge to span the gap ? Nay; science is the shortest
distance between two points, but beauty, like art, is long.
What is this haste to arrive? Give me to walk and
walk those high paths hung 'twixt mountain and sea : the
green wild grass, with its dots of daisy and dandelion ;
cactus and asphodel overhanging from the mountain-side,
figs, olives, vines sloping in terraced patches to the sea,
which through bronze leafy tunnels shows blue and spar-
kling at the base of contorted cliflPs. A woman's singing
comes up from the green and grey tangle of gnarled
trunks, and mingles with the sweet piping of the birds.
A brown man moves amid the furrows. A sybil issues
from a pass, leaning on her staff, driving a pair of goats,
her head swathed in a great white handkerchief. I see
that the Italian painters have copied their native land-
scape as well as their fellow men and women, though they
4 ITALIAN FANTASIES
pictured Palestine or Hellas or the land of faery. Not
from inner fancy did Dosso Dossi create that glamorous
background for his Circe. That sunny enchantment, that
redolence of mediaeval romaunt, exhales from many a
haunting spot in these castled crags. Not from mere
technical ingenuity did the artists of the Annunciation
and other sacred indoor subjects introduce in their com-
position the spaces of the outc world shining through
doors or windows or marble porticoes, vistas of earthly
loveliness fusing with the holy beauty. Geology is here
the handmaiden of Art and Theology. The painters
found these effects to hand, springing from the structure
of cities set upon ridges, as in a humble smithy of Siena
whose entrance is in a street, but whose back, giving upon
a sheer precipice, admits the wide purpureal landscape ;
or in that church in Perugia, dominating the Umbrian
valley, where the gloom of the Old Masters in the dim
chapel is suddenly broken by the sunlit spaciousness of an
older Master, framed in a little window. Do you wonder
that the Perugian Pintoricchio would not let his St. Jerome
preach to a mere crowded interior, or that the Umbrian
school is from the first alive to the spirit of space? Such
pictures Italy makes for us not only from interiors, but
from wayside peep-holes, from clefts in the rock or gaps
in the greenery. The country, dark with cypresses or
gleaming with domes and campaniles, everywhere com-
poses itself into a beautiful harmony ; one needs not eye-
points of vantage. The peep-hole simply fixes one's point
of view, frames the scene in one's horizon of vision, and
suggests by its enhancement of Nature the true task of
Art in unifying a sprawling chaos of phenomena. And
if to disengage the charm of space, Raphael and Perugino
and Francia and even Mariotto Albertinelli make such
noble use of the arch, was it not that its lovely limitation
and definition of the landscape had from early Roman
antiquity been revealed by Architecture? Arches and
OF BEAUTY, FAITH, AND DEATH 5
perspectives of arches, cloisters, and colonnades, were
weaving a rhythm of space round the artists in their daily-
walks. Where Nature was beautiful and Art was second
Nature, the poets in paint were made as well as born.
Paradox-mongers have exalted Art above Nature, yet
what pen or brush could reproduce Amalfi — that vibrant
atmosphere, that shimmer and jBicker of clouds, sunshine,
and water ; the ruined tower on the spit, the low white
town, the crescent hills beyond, the blue sky bending over
all as over a great glimmering cup? Beethoven, who
wrote always with visual images in his mind, might have
rendered it in another art, transposing it into the key of
music ; for is not beauty as mutable as energy, and what
were the music of the spheres but the translation of their
shining infinitude ?
Truer indeed such translation into singing sound than
into the cacophonies of speech, particularly of scientific
speech.
I saw a great angel's wing floating over Rimini, its
swan-like feathers spread with airy grace across the blue
— but I must call it cirrus clouds, forsooth, ruffling
themselves on a firmament of illusion. We name a thing
and lo I its wonder flies, as in those profound myths
where all goes well till scientific curiosity comes to mar
happiness. Psyche turns the light on Cupid, Elsa must
know Lohengrin's name. With what subtle instinct the
Hebrew refused to pronounce the name of his deity I A
name persuades that the unseizable is seized, that levia-
than is drawn out with a hook. " Who is this that
darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge ? " Primi-
tive man projected his soul into trees and stones — animism
the wise it call — but we would project into man the
soullessness of stones and trees. Finding no soul in
Nature, we would rob even man of his, desperately dis-
integrating it back to mechanic atoms. The savage lifted
Nature up to himself ; we would degrade ourselves to
6 ITALIAN FANTASIES
Nature. For scientific examination read unscientific ex-
animation. And now 'tis the rare poet and artist for
whom river and tree incarnate themselves in nymphs and
dryads. Your Bocklin painfully designs the figures once
created by the painless mythopoiesis of the race ; your
Kipling strives to breathe back life into ships and engines.
As philosophy is but common sense by a more circuitous
route, so may Art be self-conscious savagery. And herein
lies perhaps the true inwardness of the Psyche legend.
The soul exchanges the joys of naivete for the travails of
self-consciousness, but in the end wins back its simple
happiness, more stably founded. Yet, so read, the myth
needs the supplement of an even earlier phase — it might
well have occupied a spandrel at least in those delicious
decorations for the ceiling of the Villa Farnesina that
Raphael drew from the fable of Apuleius — in which
Psyche, innocent of the corporeal Cupid, should dream of
Amor. For me at least the ecstasy of vision has never
equalled the enchantment of the visionary. O palm and
citron, piously waved and rustled by my father at the
Feast of Tabernacles, you brought to my grey garret the
whisper and aroma of the sun-land. (Prate not of your
Europes and Asias ; these be no true geographic cuts ;
there is but a sun-life and an ice-life, and the grey life of
the neutral zones.) But the solidities cannot vie with the
airy fantasies. Where is the magic morning-freshness
that lay upon the dream-city ? Dawn cannot bring it,
though it lay its consecrating gold upon the still lagoons
of a sea-city, or upon the flower-stones of a Doge's palace.
Poets who have sung best of soils and women have not
always known them : the pine has dreamed of the palm,
and the palm of the pine.
"Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard . . ."
Ah, those unheard ! Were it not better done — as poets
use — never to sport with Beatrice in the shade, nor with
the tangles of loved Laura's hair ? Shall Don Quixote
OF BEAUTY, FAITH, AND DEATH 7
learn that Dulcinea del Toboso is but a good, likely country
lass ? I would not marry the sea with a ring, no, not for
all the gold and purple of the Bucentaur. What should
a Doge of dreams be doing in that galley ? To wed the
sea — and know its mystery but petulance, its unfathomed
caves only the haunt of crude polypi ; no mermaids, no
wild witchery, and pearls but a disease of the oyster!
Maj^hap I had been wiser to keep my Italian castles in
Spain than to render myself obnoxious to the penalties of
the actual. Rapacity, beggary, superstition, hover over
the loveliness of the land like the harpies and evil embodi-
ments in Ambrogio Lorenzetti's homely Allegory of Bad
Government in the Sala della Pace of Siena. To-day that
fourteenth-century cartoonist would have found many a
new episode for his frescoed morality-play, whereof the
ground-plot would run : how, to be a Great Power with
martial pride of place, Italy sacrifices the substance. In-
calculably rich in art, her every village church bursting
with masterpieces beyond the means of millionaires, she
hugs her treasures to her ragged bosom with one skinny
hand, the other extended for alms. Adorable Brother
Francis of Assisi, with thy preachment of " holy poverty,"
didst thou never suspect there could be an unholy poverty ?
'Tis parlous, this beatitude of beggary. More bandits
bask at thy shrine than at almost any other spot in Chris-
tendom. Where the pilgrims are, there the paupers are
gathered together ; there must be rich prey in those
frenzied devotees who crawl up thy chapel, licking its
rough stones smooth. Thou hadst no need of food : if
two small loaves were provided for thy forty days' Lent
in that island in the Lake of Perugia, one and a half re-
mained uneaten ; and even if half a loaf seemed better to
thee than no bread, 'twas merely because the few mouth-
fuls chased far from thee the venom of a vainglorious copy
of thy Master. Perchance 'tis from some such humility
the beggars of Assisi abstain from a too emulous copy of
8 ITALIAN FANTASIES
thee. Thou didst convert thy brother, the fierce wolf of
Agobio, and give the countryside peace, but what of this
pack of wolves thou hast loosed — in sheep's clothing!
With wliat joy did I see in a church at Verona an old
barefoot, naked-kneed beggar, who v/as crouching against
a pillar, turn into marble !
Or shall we figure Italia's beggars as her mosquitoes, in-
evitable accompaniment of her beauties ? The mosquito-
mendicant, come he as cripple or cicerone, buzzes ever in
one's ears, foe to meditation and enkindlement. Figure
me seeking refuge in a Palazzo of once imperial Genoa ;
treading pensively the chambers of Youth and Life, the
Arts, and the Four Seasons, through which duchesses and
marchese had trailed silken skirts. With gaze uplifted at
the painted ceilings, I ponder on that magnificence of the
world and the flesh which the Church could not wither —
nay, which found consummate expression in the Pope's
own church in St. Peter's, where the baldachino of twin-
kling lights supplies the one touch of religious poetry. I
pass into the quiet library and am received by the vener-
able custodian, a Dr. Faustus in black skull-cap and white
beard. He does the honours of his learned office, brings
me precious Aldines. Behold this tome of antique poetry,
silver-typed — a "limited edition," twenty -four copies
made for the great families. He gloats with me over
Ovid's " Metamorphoses " ; over the fantasy of the title-
page, the vignettes of nymphs and flowers, the spacious
folio pages. Here is Homer in eight languages. My
heart goes out to the scholarly figure as w^e bend over the
parallel columns, bookworms both. I envy the gentle
Friar of Letters his seclusion and his treasures. He lugs
out a mediaeval French manuscript, a poem on summer —
Saison aussi utile que belle, he adds unexpectedly. We
discourse on manuscripts: of tlie third-century Virgil
at Florence and its one missing leaf in the Vatican ; how
French manuscripts may be found as early as the tenth
OF BEAUTY, FAITH, AND, DEATH 9
century, while the Italian scarcely precede Dante, and
demonstrate his creation of the language. We laud the
Benedictines for their loving labour in multiplying texts —
he is wrought up to produce the apple of his eye, an illu-
minated manuscript that had belonged to a princess. It
is bound in parchment, with golden clasps. Figures de
la Bible I seem to remember on its ornate title-page. I
bend lovingly over the quaint letters, I see the princess's
wliite hand turning the polychrome pages, her lace sleeve
ruffled exquisitely as in a Bronzino portrait. Suddenly
Dr. Faustus ejaculates in English : " Give me a drink ! "
My princess fled almost with a shriek, and I came back
to the sordid Italy of to-day. Of to-day? Is not yester-
day's glamour equally illusionary? But perhaps Genoa
with her commercial genius is no typical daughter of
Italia. Did not Dante and the Tuscan proverb alike de-
nounce her ? Does not to-day's proverb say that it takes
ten Jews to make one Genoese ? And yet it was Genoa
that produced Mazzini and sped Garibaldi.
Would you wipe out this bookish memory by a better ?
Then picture the library of a monastery, that looks out on
the cypressed hills, whose cloisters Sodoma and Signorelli
frescoed with naive legends of St. Benedict and Satan.
See under the long low ceiling, propped on the cool white
pillars, those niched rows of vellum bindings guarding the
leisurely Latin lore of the Fathers. Behold me meditating
the missals and pontificals, pageants in manuscript, broid-
ered and illuminated, all glorious with gold initials and
ultramarine and vermilion miniatures, or those folio pro-
cessions of sacred music, each note pranked in its bravery
and stepping statelily amid garlands of blue and gold and
the hovering faces of angels ; dreaming myself into that
mystic peace of the Church, till the vesper bell calls to
paternosters and genuflexions and the great organ rolls
out to drown this restless, anchorless century. Now am
I for nones and primes, for vigils and sackcloth, for
10 ITALIAN FANTASIES
breviaries and holy obedience. In shady cloisters, 'mid
faded frescoes, round sleepy rose-gardens, I will pace to
papal measures, while the serene sun-dial registers the
movement of the sun round the earth. Who speaks of a
religion as though it were dependent upon its theology ?
Dogmas are but its outward show ; inwardly and subtly it
lives by its beauty, its atmosphere, its inracination in life,
and its creed is but a poor attempt to put into words a
thought too large for syllables, too illusive for phrases.
Language is a net that catches the fish and lets the ocean
stream through. Again that fallacy of the Name.
Beautiful I will call that service I saw at Bologna on
Whitsun Sunday, though you must dive deep to find the
beauty. Not in S. Petronio itself will you find it, in those
bulbous pillars swathed in crimson damask, though there
is a touch of it in the vastness, the far altar, the remote
choir and surpliced priests on high, the great wax candle
under the big baldachino, the congregation lost in space.
Nor will you easily recognise it in the universal disorder,
in that sense of a church parade ivithin the church, in the
brouhaha that drowns the precentor's voice, in the penny
chairs planted or stacked as the worshippers ebb or flow,
in the working men and their families sprawling over the
altar-steps, in the old women coifed in coloured handker-
chiefs, with baskets that hold bottles as well as prayer-
books ; not even in the pretty women in Parisian hats, or
the olive-skinned girls in snoods, least of all in the child's
red balloon, soaring to the roof at the very moment of the
elevation of the Host, and followed with heavenward eyes
by half the congregation. And yet there is no blasphemy
even in the balloon ; the child's innocent pleasure in its
toy is mixed with its sense of holy festivity. There is no
sharp contrast of sacred and secular. The church does
not end with its portals ; it extends into the great piazza.
Nor do the crowds squatting on its steps in the sun, and
seething in the square it dominates, feel themselves out'
OF BEAUTY, FAITH, AND DEATH 11
side the service. The very pigeons seem to flutter with
a sense of sacred holiday, as though they had just listened
to the sermon of their big brother, St. Francis. The
Church, like the radiant blue sky, is over all. And this
is the genius of Catholicism.
Not without significance are those thirteenth-century
legends in which even the birds and the fishes were brought
into the fold universal, as into a spiritual Noah's Ark, all
equally in need of salvation. Some of the Apostles them-
selves were mere fishers, spreading no metaphoric net.
What an evolution to St. Antony, who wins the finny
tribes to reverence and dismisses them with the divine
blessing ! Even the horses are blessed in Rome on St.
Antony's Day, or in his name at Siena before the great
race for the Palio, each runner sprinkled in the church of
its ward.
To think that missionaries go forth to preach verbal
propositions violently torn from the life and the historic
enchainment and the art and the atmosphere ! If they
would but stay at home and reform the words, which
must ever change, so as to preserve the beauty, which must
never die ! For words must change, if only to counter-
balance their own mutations and colourings, their declines
and falls. They are no secure envelope for immortal
truths: I would as lief embody my fortunes in a paper
currency. Let the religion of the future be writ only in
music — Palestrina's or Allegri's, Bach's or Wagner's, as
you will — so that no heresies can spring from verbal
juggles, distorted texts, or legal quibbles. And yet —
would the harmony be unbroken ? What quarrels over
misprinted sharps and naturals ! How the doctors of
music would disagree on the tempo and the phrasing and
burn and excommunicate for a dotted semibreve ! What
Church Councils — the pianissimo party versus the fortis-
simo, legato legions and staccato squadrons, the Holy
Wars of Harmony — all Christian history da capo !
12 ITALIAN FANTASIES
I like that gracious tolerance of buiiiauisiii you find in
some Renaissance pictures, those composite portraits of
ideas, in wliich Pagan and Christian types and periods
mingle in the higher syntliesis of conception — or perhaps
even in a happy inconsistence of dual belief. Rapliael
could not represent the conflagration in the Borgo that
was extinguished by papal miracle without consecrating a
corner of his work to the piety of J:Cneas, carrying Anchises
on his back in a parallel moment of peril. Raphael's
work is, in fact, almost a series of illustrations of the
Sposalizio of Hebraism and Hellenism. That librarj^ of
Julius 11. in the Vatican may stand as the scene of their
union. Beyond the true Catholicism of its immortal fres-
coes humanism cannot go. If the Theology is mainly con-
fined to Biblical concepts and figures, it is supplemented
by Perino del Vaga's picture of the Cumsean Sybil showing
the Madonna to Augustus, which is at least a dovetailing of
the divided worlds and eras. And if to explain the parity
of Sybils with prophets in the designs of Michelangelo you
call in those Fathers of the Church who found Christology
in the old Sybilline leaves and have coupled David and
the Sybil in the Catholic funeral service, you must admit
a less dubious largeness in Raphael's cartoons for the
dome mosaics in the Cappella Chigi of Santa Maria del
Popolo; for to group tlie gods of Hellas round the Creator
and His angels, even by an astronomic device involving their
names for the planets, shows a mood very far removed
from that of the Christians who went to the lions in this
very Rome. (The consistent Christian mood is seen in
the (Quaker's avoidance of the heathen names of our days
and months, mere bald numeration replacing the Norse
and Roman divinities.) Moreover, Raphael's Parnassus
is almost wholly to the glorj^ of ancient Greece and Rome.
It is Dante and Petrarch who are honoured by neighbour-
ing Homer and Virgil. It is the violin that is glorified
by Apollo's playing upon it. Anaclironism if you will.
OF BEAUTY, FAITH, AND DEATH 13
But Art may choose to see history sub specie ceternitatis,
and surely in Plato's heaven rests the archetypal violin, to
which your Stradivarius or Guarnerius is a banjo.
Nor has antiquity ever received a nobler tribute than in
TJie School of Athens, that congregation of Pagan philo-
sophers to which the Dukes of Urbino and Mantua repair,
to which Raphael himself brings his teacher, while Bra-
mante, builder of St. Peter's, is proud to adorn the train of
Aristotle. See, too, under the ceiling-painting of Justice,
how Moses bringing the tables of the Law to the Israelites
is supplemented by Justinian giving the Pandects to
Tritonian. Thus is Justice more subtly illustrated than
perhaps the painter consciously designed. How finely —
if even more paradoxically — this temper repeats itself
later in the English Puritan and Italian sonneteer, Milton,
whose " Lycidas " vibrates 'twixt the Classic and the
Christian, and whose very epic of Plebraism is saturated
with catholic allusiveness, and embraces that stately pane-
gyric of
Athens, the eye of Greece, mother of arts
And eloquence.
Why, indeed, quarrel over religions when all men agree ;
all men, that is, at the same grade of intellect ! The
learned busy themselves classifying religions — there are
reviews at Paris and Tubingen — but in the crude work-
ing world religion depends less on the belief than on the
believer. All the simplest minds believe alike, be they
Confucians or Christians, Jews or Fantees. The elemental
human heart will have its thaumaturgic saints, its mapped
hells, its processional priests, its prompt answers to prayer,
and if deprived of them will be found subtly to reintro-
duce them. Mohammed and the Koran forbade the wor-
ship of saints, yet the miracles and mediations of the waits
and the pilgrimages to their tombs — with Mohammed
himself as arch-wali — are inseparable from Islam. The
Buddha who came to teach a holy atheism was made a
14 ITALIAN FANTASIES
god, the proclaiiner of natural law a miracle-monger, his
revolution turned into a revolution of prayer-Avheels and
his religion into the High Church Romanism of Lamaism.
Tlie Hebrew Torah which cried anathema on idols be-
came itself an idol, swathed in purple, adorned with
golden bells, and borne round like a Madonna for reverent
kisses. The Madonna herself, overgrown with the roses
of a wayside shrine, perpetuates the worship of Flora.
On the very gates of St. Peter's, Europa, Ganymede, and
Leda show their brazen faces. Not Confucius nor Christ
can really expel devils. What grosser idolatry than the
worship of those dressed wax dolls which make many an
Italian church like a theological Madame Tussaud's I
The Church has its Chamber of Horrors too, its blood and
nails and saintly skulls ; the worship of Moloch was not
more essentially morbid. At tlie base of the intellectual
mountain flourishes rank and gorgeous vegetation, a
tropic luxuriance ; higher up, in the zone of mediocrity,
there are cultivated temperate slopes and pruned gardens,
pleasant pastures and ordered bowers ; at the snowy sum-
mits, in the rarefied jcther, flash white the glacial imper-
sonal truths, barely a tuft of moss or lichen. H.ark ! peak
is crying unto peak : " Thy will be done."
But what is this new voice — comes it from the mole-
hills? — " Our will be done." See — in tlie mask of the
highest Christianity and science — the old thaumaturgy
creeping in, though now every man is his own saint, heal-
ing his own diseases, denying death with a Podsnappian
wave o' the hand. O my friends, get ye to the Eternal
City — that canvas for the flying panorama of races and
creeds — and peep into a cofiin in the Capitoline Museum,
and see the skeleton of the Etruscan girl, with rings glit-
tering on her l)ony hngers, and bracelets on her fleshless
wrists, and her doll at her side, in ironic preservation, its
blooming cheeks and sparkling eyes mocking the eyeless
occiput of its mistress. Even so shall your hugged
OF BEAUTY, FAITH, AND DEATH 15
treatises and your glittering gospels show among your
bones. Do you not know that death is the very condition
of life — bound up with it as darkness with light ? How
trivial the thought that sees death but in the cemetery !
'Tis not only the grave that parts us from our comrades
and lovers ; we lose them on the way. Lose them not
only by quarrel and estrangement, bat by evolution and
retrogression. They broaden or narrow away from us,
and we from them ; they are changed, other, transformed,
dead and risen again. Woe for the orphans of living
parents, the widowers of undeceased wives ! Our early
Ego dies by inches, till, like the perpetually darned sock,
it retains nothing but the original mould and shaping.
Let us read the verse more profoundly : " In the midst of
life we are in death." Whoever dies in the full tilt of
his ambitions is buried alive, and whoever survives his
hopes and fears is dead, unburied. Death for us is all we
have missed, all the periods and planets we have not lived
in, all the countries we have not visited, all the books we
have not read, all the emotions and experiences we have
not had, all the prayers we have not prayed, all the battles
we have not fought. Every restriction, every negation,
is a piece of death. Not wholly has jjopular idiom
ignored this truth. " Dead to higher things," it says ;
but we may be dead too to the higher mathematics.
Death for the individual is the whole universe outside
his consciousness, and life but the tiny blinking light of
consciousness. But between the light and the dark is
perpetual interplay, and Ave turn dark to light and let
light subside to dark as our thoughts and feelings veer
this way or that.
And since 'tis complexity of consciousness that counts,
and the death of the amoeba or the unborn babe is less a
decomposition than the death of a man, so is the death of
a philosopher vaster than the death of a peasant. We
have but one word for the drying up of an ocean and the
16 ITALIAN FANTASIES
drying up of a pool. And the sediment, the day that we
bury, wherefore do we still label it with the living name?
As if Ceesar might truly stop a bung -hole ! Mark Antony
might come to praise Ciesar ; he could not bury him.
Here lies .Alazzini forsooth ! As if that spirit of white
fire could rest even on the farthest verge of thee, O abom-
inable Campo Santo of Genoa, with thy central rotunda
pillared with black marble, thy spires and Grecian build-
ings, thy Oriental magnificence, redeemed only by the
natural hills in which thou nestlest. Are our ashes in-
deed so grandiose and spectacular a thing ? Or art thou
a new terror added to death ? From thy haughty terrace
— whereon Death himself in black marble fights with a
desperate woman — I have gazed down upon thy four par-
allelograms, bounded by cypresses and starred with great
daisies, that seen nearer are white crosses, and a .simple
contadina lighting the lamp for her beloved dead alone
softens the scene. O the endless statuary of the gallery,
the arcades of slabs and reliefs, the faded wreaths, or those
drearier beads that never fade ! — I could pray to the
Madonna whose blue and gold halo shines over thy dead
to send a baby earthquake to swallow thee up.
Away with these cemeteries of stone, this frigid pomp of
death, that clings on to life even while spouting texts of
resignation! Who cares for these parish chronicles, these
parallelograms of good people that lived and fell on sleep,
these worthy citizens and fond spouses. Horrid is that
clasp of intertwined hands. I could chop at those fingers
with an axe. 'Tis indecent, tliis graveyard flirtation.
Respect your privacy, good skeletons! Ye too, couples
of the Etruscan catacombs, who dash our spirits from your
urns, to wliut end your graven images outside your in-
cinerated relics ? Not in marmoreal mausolea, nor in
railed-off tombs, with knights and dames couchant, not in
Medici chapels nor in the florid monuments of Venetian
Doges, not in the columbaria of the Via Appia nor in the
OF BEAUTY, FAITH, AND DEATH 17
Gothic street-tombs of the Scaliger princes, resides death's
true dignit}'^ — they are the vain apery of life — but in
some stoneless, flowerless grave where only the humped
earth tells that here lies the husk of one gathered into
the vastness of oblivion.
There are times when one grows impatient for death.
There is a sweetness in being gathered to one's fathers.
The very phrase is restful. Dying sounds more active ;
it recalls doing, and one is so tired of doing. But to be
culled softly, to be sucked up — the very vapour of the
Apostle — how balmily passive : to be wafted into the
quiet Past, which robs even fame of its sting, and wherein
lie marshalled and sorted and ticketed and dated, in stately
dictionaries and monumental encyclopaedias, all those
noisy poets, painters, -warriors, all neatly classified and
silent. And the sweet silence of the grave allures even
after the bitter silence of life ; after the silent endurance
that is our one reply to the insolence of facts. And in
these delicate, seductive moments, half longing, half ac-
quiescence, the air is tremulous with tender, crooning
phrases, with gentle, wistful melodies, the hush-a-bye of
the earth-mother drawing us softly to her breast.
But an you will not acquiesce in simple earth-to-earth, I
commend you to the Greek sarcophagi you may see in the
Naples Museum. There you will find no smirking senti-
ment, no skull and cross-bones — ensign of Pirate Death
— but the very joy of life, ay, even a Bacchanalian glad-
ness. I recall a radiant procession, Cupids riding centaurs
and lions and j^laying On lyres, mortals driving chariots
and blowing trumpets, or dancing along, arms round one
another's necks.
" What pipes and timbrels, what wild ecstasy I "
Bury me in an old Greek sarcophagus, or let me fade into
the anonymous grass.
FANTASIA NAPOLITANA : BEING A REVERIE
OF AQUARIUMS, MUSEUMS, AND DEAD
CHRISTS
I
Of all the excursions I made from Naples — renowned
headquarters for excursions — none led me through more
elemental highways than that which started from the
Aquarium, at a fee of two lire. Doubtless the Aquarium
of Naples exists for men of science, but men of art may-
well imagine it has been designed as a noble poem in
colour. Such chromatic splendours, such wondrous
greens and browns and reds, subtly not the colour scale
of earth, for over all a mystic translucence, a cool suffu-
sion, every hue suffering " a sea change into something
rich and strange " ! And the form of all these sea-
creatures and sea-flowers so graceful, so grotesque, so
manifold ! " Nature's plastic hand," as Dante hath it,
works deftly in water. It leaps to the eye tliat Art
has invented scarcely anything, that the art of design in
particular is a vast plagiarism. Here be your carpets
and your wall-patterns, your frosted glass and your
pottery. What Persian rug excels yon lamprey's skin?
]My mind goes back to a great craftsman's studio, stacked
with brilliant beetles and dragon-flies — Nature's feats of
bravura — to eke out his inventions. Even the dress-
maker, I remember, is the greatest client of the butterfly-
net in her quest for delicious colour-blendings. Yet
with how few root-ideas Nature has worked ; the infini-
tude of her combinations is purely an affair of arrange-
ment, complicated with secondary qualities of size and
18
FANTASIA NAPOLITANA 19
colour. Conscious life even at its most complex is a
function of four variables : a food apparatus, a breathing
apparatus, a circulating apparatus, and a nerve apparatus.
With what inimitable ingenuity Nature has rung the
changes on these four factors ! Her problem has affinities
with the task of the inventors of typewriters, who, having
to produce the same collision of inked type with blank
paper, have found so many ways of achieving it that their
machines resemble highly organised creatures of curious
conformation, one having no resemblance to another.
Some are annular and some are cubical, some have wheels
of letters, some have letters that fly singly. 'Tis scarcely
credible that they all do the same work. Are not animals
machines ? said Descartes. But I ask, Are not machines
animals ? A vision surges up of Venice at night — out
of the darkness of the Grand Canal comes throbbing a
creature of the Naples Aquarium — all scattered blobs of
flame, cohering through a spidery framework. Through
the still, dark water it glides, under the still, starry sky,
with San Giorgio for solemn background, and only from
the voices of Venetians singing as they float past — an
impassioned, sad memory, a trilled and fluted song —
could one divine behind the fiery sea-dragon the mere
steam-launch. Between the laws that fashioned steam-
boats and those that fashioned the animate world there
is no essential difference. The steamboat is not even
inanimate, for at the back of it burrows man like a
nautilus in its shell, and his living will has had to fight
with the same shaping forces as those which mould the
entities of the water. The saurian age of the steamboat
was the uncouth hollowed trunk, and by slow, patient
evolutions and infinite tackings to meet winds and tides,
it has come to this graceful, gliding creature that skims
in the teeth of the tempest. Denied the mastery of
water, man adds a floating form to his own ; forbidden
the sky, he projects from himself a monstrous aery sac
20 ITALIAN FANTASIES
or winged engine; condemned to crawl the earth, he
supplements liis nerves with an electric motor apparatus.
Thus endlessly transformed, Man the Prometheus is also
i\Iaii the Proteus. Dante praised Nature for having
ceased to frame monsters, save the whale and the ele-
phant ; he did not remark that Man had continued her
work on a substratum of himself.
The forms of the typewriters are even more clearly
conditioned by the struggle for life. The early patents
are the creatures in j)ossession, and to develop a new
type without infringing on their pastures, and risking
their claws, a machine is driven into ever-odder contri-
vances, like creatures that can only exist in an over-
crowded milieu by wriggling into some curious shape and
filling some forgotten niche. The lust of life that runs
through Nature transforms the very dust to a creeping
palpitation, fills every leaf and drop of water with pullu-
lating populations. 'Tis an eternal exuberance, a riotous
extravagance, an ecstasy of creation. Great is Diana
of the Ephesians, for this Diana, as you may see her
figured in the Naples Museum, black but comely, is a
goddess of many breasts, a teeming mother of genera-
tions, the swart, sun-kissed Natura Nutrix, who ranges
recklessly from man to the guinea-pig, from the earwig
to the giraffe, from the ostrich to the tortoise, from the
butterfly to the lizard, from the glued barnacle timidly
extending its tentacles when the tide washes food towards
its rock, to the ravenous shark darting fiercely through
the waters and seizing even man in its iron jaws. Yet
they are at best mere variations on the primal theme of
heart, brain, lungs, and stomach, now with enchanting-
grace as in the gazelle, now with barbaric splendour as
in the peacock, now with a touch of grotesque genius
as in the porcupine. And directly or indirectly all of
them pass into one another — in the most literal of senses
— as they range the mutual larder of the globe.
FANTASIA NAPOLITANA 21
'Tis well to remember sometimes that this globe is not
obviously coDstvucted for man, since only one-fourth of it
is even land, and that in a census of the planet, which no-
body has ever thought of taking, man's poor thousand
millions would be outnumbered by the mere ant-hills.
And since the preponderating interests numerically of this
sphere of ours are piscine, and in a truly democratic world
a Fish President Avould reign, elected by the vast majority
of voters, and we should all be bowing down to Dagon,
the Aquarium acquires an added dignity, and I gaze with
fresh eyes at the lustrous emerald tanks.
Ah, here is indeed a Fish President, the shell-fish that
presided over the world's destinies ; the little murex that
was the source of the greatness of Tyre, and the weaver
of its purpureal robes of empire. Hence the Phoenician
commerce, Carthage, the Punic Wars, and the alphabet in
which I write.
Not only is colour softened by a sea change, but in this
cool, glooming, and glittering world the earth-creatures
seem to have been sucked down and transformed into
water-creatures. There are flowers and twigs and green
waving grass that seem earth-flowers and twigs and grass
transposed into the key of water.
Only, these flowers and grasses are animal, these coralline
twigs are conscious ; as if water, emulous of the creations
of earth and air, strove after their loveliness of curve and
line, or as if the mermaidens covered them for their
gardens. And there are gemmed fishes, as though the
mines of Ind had their counterpart in the forces producing
these living jewels. And there are birdlike fishes with
feathery forms, that one might expect to sing as they
cleave the firmament of water : some song less troubling
than the Lorelei's, with liquid gurgles and notes of bub-
bling joy. And the sea, not content to be imitative, has
added — over and above its invention of the fish — to the
great palpitation of life ; priestly forms, robed and cowled,
22 ITALIAN FANTASIES
silver-dusty pillars, half-shut parasols. Even the common
crab is an original ; a homely grotesque with no terraceous
or aerial analogue, particularly as it floats in a happy
colour-harmony with a brown or red sponge on its back, a
parasite literally sponging upon it. But though you may
look in vain for mermaid or Lorelei, naiad or nymph, there
is no reason in Nature why all that poets feigned should
not come into being. The water-babe might have been as
easily evolved as the earth-man, the hegemony of creation
might have been won by an aquatic creature with an
accidental spurt of grey matter, and the history of civilisa-
tion misrht have been writ in water. The merman is a
mere amphibian, not arrived. The grj^phon and the
centaur are hybrids unborn. 'Tis just a fluke that these
particular patterns of the kaleidoscope have not been
thrown. We may safely await evolutions. The winged
genius of the Romans, frequent enough on Pompeian
frescoes, may even be developed on this side of the skies,
and we may fly with sprouted wings and not merely with
detachable. Puck and Ariel perchance already frisk in
some Patagonian forest, Caliban may be basking in forgotten
mud. Therefore, poets, trust yourself to life and the ful-
ness thereof. Whether you follow Nature's combinations
or precede them, you may create fearlessly. From the
imitatio Naturoe you cannot escape, whether you steal her
combinations or her elements.
Shelley sings of " Death and his brother Sleep," but
gazing at this mystic marine underworld of the Naples
Aquarium, I would sing of Life and his brother Sleep.
For here are shown the strange beginnings of things, half
sleep, half waking : organisms rooted at one point like
flowers, yet groping out with tendrils towards life and
consciousness — the not missing link between animal and
vegetable life. What feeling comes to trouble this mys-
tic doze, stir this comatose consciousness ? The jelly-fish
that seems a mere embodied pulse — a single note replacing
FANTASIA NAPOLITANA 23
the quadruple chord of life — is yet a complex organism
compared with some that flit and flitter half invisibly in
this green univei'se of theirs : threads, insubstantialities,
smoke spirals, shadowy filaments on the threshold of ex-
istence, ghostly fibres, flashing films, visible only by the
beating of their white corpuscles. 'Tis reading the
Book of Genesis, verse by verse. And then suddenly a
hitherto unseen entity, the octopus, looses its sinuous
suckers from the rock to which its hue protectively assim-
ilates — a Darwinian observation Lucian anticipated in
his " Dialogue of Proteus " — and unfolding itself in all
its manifold horror, steals upon its prey with swift, melo-
dramatic strides.
From the phantasmal polyzoa to these creatures of
violent volition how great the jump ! Natura 7ion facit
saltum, forsooth ! She is a veritable kangaroo. From
the unconscious to the conscious, from the conscious to the
self-conscious, from the self-conscious to the overcon-
scious, there's a jump at every stage, as between ice
and water, water and steam. Continuous as are her
phases, a mysteriously new set of conditions emerges with
every crossed Rubicon. Dante, in making the human
embryo pass through the earlier genetic stages (" Purga-
tory," Canto XXV.), seems curiously in harmony with
modern thought, though he was but reproducing Averroes.
But mankind has never forgotten its long siesta as a
vegetable. Still linked with the world of sleep through
the mechanic processes of nutrition, respiration, circulation,
consciously alive only in his higher centres, man tends
ever to drowse back to the primal somnolence. Moving
along the lines of least resistance and largest comfort, he
steeps himself in the poppies of custom, drinks the man-
dragora of ready-made morals, and sips the drowsy syrups
of domesticity, till he has nigh lapsed back to- the autom-
aton. But ever and anon through the sluggish doze
stirs the elemental dream, leaps the primeval fire, and man
24 ITALIAN FANTASIES
is awake and astir and atlirill for crusades, wars, martyr-
doms, revolutions, reformations, and back in his true bio-
logical genus.
Not only in man appears this contest of life and sleep :
it runs through the cosmos. There is a drag-back : the
ebb of the flowing tide. How soon the forsaken town re-
turns to forest ! Near the Roman Ghetto you may note
how the brickwork of the wall of the ancient Tlieatre of
Marcellus has relapsed to rock ; man's touch swallowed
up in the mouldering ruggedness, the houses at the base
merely burrowed, the abodes of cave-dwellers.
II
I saw the sea-serpent at Naples, though not in the
Aquarium. Its colossal bulk was humped sinuously along
the bay. 'Twas the Vesuvius range, stretching mistily.
Mariners have perchance constructed the monster from
such hazy glimpses of distant reefs. Still, no dragon has
wrought more havoc than this mountain, which smokes
imperturbably while the generations rise and fall. Beauti-
ful the smoke, too, when it grows golden in the setting
sun, and the monstrous mass turns a marvellous purple.
We wonder men should still build on Vesuvius — betwixt
the devil and the deep sea — yet the chances of eruption
are no greater than the chances of epidemic in less salu-
brious places, as the plague-churches of Italy testify.
But should a new eruption overwhelm Pompeii, and its
first record be lost, there were a strange puzzle for the
antiquarians of the fiftieth century exhuming its cosmo-
politan population ; blonde German savages in white pot-
hats, ancient Britons in tweeds, extinct American cycle-
centaurs ; incongruously resident amid the narrow streets
and wide public buildings of a prehistoric Roman civilisa-
tion.
Pompeii is buried some twenty feet deep. The Middle
Ages walked over these entombed streets and temples and
FANTASIA NAPOLITANA 25
suspected nothing. But all towns are built on their dead
past, for earth's crust renews itself as incessantly as our
own skin. We walk over our ancestors. There are
twenty-seven layers of human life at Rome.
It needs no earth-convulsions, no miracles of lava.
One generation of cities succeeds another. Nature, a
pious Andromache, covers up their remains as softly as
the snow falls or the grass grows. When man uncovers
them again, he finds stratum below stratum, city below
city, as though the whole were some quaint American
structure of many storeys which the earth had swallowed
at a single gulp, and not with her stately deglutition.
At Gezer in Palestine Macalister has been dissecting a
tumulus which holds layers of human history as the rocks
hold layers of earth-history. Scratch the mound and you
find the traces of an Arab city, slice deeper and 'tis a
Crusaders' city ; an undercut brings you to the Roman
city whence — by another short cut — 3"0U descend to the
Old Testament ; to the city that was dowered to Solomon's
Egyptian Queen, to the Philistine city, and so to the
Canaanite city. But even here Gezer is but at its prime.
You have sunk through all the Christian era, through all
the Jewish era, but fifteen centuries still await your de-
scent. Down you delve — through the city captured by
Thotmes III., through the city of the early Semites, till
at last your pick strikes the Hivites and the Amorites,
the cave-men of the primitive Gezer. Infinitely solemn
such a tumulus in its imperturbable chronicling, with its
scarabs and altars, its spear-heads and its gods, the bones
of its foundation-sacrifices yet undecayed. The Judgment
Books need no celestial clerks, no recording angels ; earth
keeps them as she rolls. In our eyes, too, as we gaze upon
this ant-heap of our breed, a thousand years are but as a
day — nay, as a dream that passeth in the night. We are
such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is
rounded with a mound. Beside Gezer, Pompeii and Her-
26 ITALIAN FANTASIES
culaneiim are theatrical, flamboyant, the creatures of a
day, the parvenus of the underworld.
Mentally, too, strange ancestral strata lie in our deeps,
even as the remains of an alimentary canal run through
our spine and a primitive eye lies in the middle of our
brain — that pineal gland in which Descartes located the
soul. Sometimes we stumble over an old prejudice or a
primitive emotion, prick ourselves with an arrow of an-
cestral conscience, and tremble with an ancient fear.
Mayhap in slumber we descend to these regions, explor-
ing below our consciousness and delving in the catacombs
of antiquity.
The destruction of Pompeii was effected, however, not
by Vesuvius, but by the antiquarian. He it was to whom
Pompeii fell as a spoil, he who turned Pompeii from a
piece of life to a piece of learning, by transporting most of
its treasures to a museum. The word is surely short for
mausoleum. For objects in a museum are dead, their
relations with life ended. Objects partake of the lives of
their possessors, and when cut off are as dead as finger-
nails. A vase dominating the court of a Pompeian house
and a vase in the Naples Museum are as a creature to its
skeleton. What a stimulation in the one or two houses
left with their living reality — their frescoes and their
furniture, their kitchens and middens ! 'Tis statues that
suffer most from their arrangement in ghostly rows. A
statue is an aesthetic climax, the crown of a summit, the
close of a vista. See that sunlit statue of Meleager in the
grounds of the Villa Medici, at the end of a green avenue,
with pillar and architrave for background, and red and
white roses climbing around it, and imagine how its glory
would be shorn in a gallery. The French have remem-
bered to put the Venus of Milo at the end of a long Louvre
corridor, which she fills with her far-seen radiance. These
collections of Capolavori — these Apollos and Jupiters,
and Venuses and Muses, dumped as close as cemetery
FANTASIA NAPOLITANA 27
monuments — are indeed petrified. The fancy must resur-
rect them into their living relations with halls and court-
yards, temples and piazzas, shrines and loggias. The
learned begin to suspect that the polytheism of Greece
and Rome is due to the analogous aggregation of local
gods, each a self-sufficing and all-powerful divinity in its
own district. When there were so many deities, their
functions had to be differentiated, as we give a different
shade of meaning to two words for the same thing. Were
one to collect the many Madonnas in Italy, one might
imagine Christianity as polytheistic as Paganism.
But the most perfect visualising of a god's statue in its
local setting will not annul that half -death which sets in
with the statue's loss of worship. These fair visions of
Pallas and Juno, shall they ever touch us as they touched
the pious Pagan ? Nay, not all our sense of lovely line
and spiritual grace can replace that departed touch of
divinity.
The past has indeed its glamour for us, which serves
perhaps as compensation for what we lose of the hot
reality, but an inevitable impiety clings to our inquisitive
regard, to our anxious exhumation of its secrets. Unless
we go to it with our emotions as well as our intellect,
prepared to extract its spiritual significance and to warm
ourselves at the fire of its life and pour a libation to the
gods of its hearth, a wilderness of archseological lore will
profit us little. A man is other than his garments and a
people than its outworn shell.
There is perhaps more method than appears at first
sight in the madness of the Turk, who reluctantly permits
the scientific explorer to dig up the past but insists that
once he has unearthed his historic treasure, his buried
streets and temples, ay, of old Jerusalem itself, he shall
cover them up again. The dead past is to bury its dead.
Death, whether in citizens or their cities, is sacred. Cursed
be he who turns up their bones to the sun. And who will
28 ITALIAN FANTASIES
not sigh over the mummies, doomed to be served up in
museums after five thousand years of dignified death?
Princesses and potentates were they in their lives ; how
coukl they dream, as they were borne in their purpureal
litters through the streets of the Pharaohs, that they
would make a spectacle for barbarians on wet half-holi-
days ? And thou, Timhotpu, prefect of the very Necro-
polis of Thebes in the eighteenth dynasty, how couldst
thou suspect that even thy gilded sarcophagus would be
violated, thy golden earrings wrenched off, thy mortuary
furniture stolen, and thy fine figure exhibited to me in the
Turin Museum, turned into a grey char under thy winding-
sheet ! The very eggs placed in the tombs of thy ceme-
tery have kept their colour better : one feels that under
heat they might still hatch a hieroglyphic chicken. But
thou art for evermore desiccated and done with.
Saddest of all is the fate of the immortals : goddesses
of the hearth and gods of the heaven are alike swept into
the museum-limbo. They are shrunk to mythology, they
who once charioted the constellations. For mythology
dogs all theologies, and one god after another is put on
the bookshelf.
All roads lead to the museum. Thither go our old
clothes, our old coins, our old creeds, and we wonder
that men should ever have worn steel armour or cast-iron
dogmas. Gazing at the Pompeian man, that " cunning
cast in clay," whose clutch at his money-bags survives his
bodily investiture, who does not feel as one from another
planet surveying an earth pygmy ? What strange limited
thoughts were thine, O Pompeian of the first century !
I warrant thou hadst not even heard of the Man of
Nazareth : how small thine atlas of the world, not to say
thy chart of the heavens ! Poor ignoramus — so unac-
quainted with all that hath happened since thy death!
How wise and weighty thou wast at thy table, recumbent
amidst thy roses, surrounded by those gay frescoes of
FANTASIA NAPOLITANA 29
Cupids and Venuses ; with what self-satisfaction thou
didst lay down the Roman law, garlanded as to thy nar-
row forehead !
But if 'tis easy to play the Superman with this fusty
provincial, 'tis not hard to smell the museum must in our
own living world. Too many people and things do not
know they are essentially of the museum : have the arro-
gance to imagine they are contemporary. How full of life
seems the cannon as it belches death ! Yet 'tis but an un-
couth, noisy creature, long since outgrown and outmoded
among the humanised citizens of the planet ; some day it
will be hunted out like the wolf and the boar, with a price
upon its mouth.
'Tis to the stage that extinct human types betake them-
selves by way of after-life — the theatre serving as the
anthropological museum — but there are some that linger
unconscionably on this side of the footlights. Bigots, for
example, have an air of antediluvian bipeds, monstrous
wildfowl that flap and shriek. I even gaze curiously
at Gold Sticks and pages of the Presence. They are be-
come spectacular, and to be spectacular is to be well on
the way to the museum. Mistrust the spasmodic splen-
dour — leap of the dying flame. Where traditions must
be pored over, and performers rehearsed, it has become a
play; is propped on precedent instead of uplifted by sap.
The passion for ritual is one of the master-passions of hu-
manity. Yet stage properties can never return to the
world of reality. The profession will tell you that they
are sold off to inferior theatres, never to the real world
outside. What passes into the museum can never repass
the janitor.
On the leaders of life lies in each generation the duty
of establishing the museum-point. The museum-point in
thought, art, morals. No matter that obsolete modes pre-
vail in the vulgar world : do the ladies allow the mob to
dictate their fashions ? Hath a bonnet existence because
30 ITALIAN FANTASIES
it survives in Seven Dials or the Bowery ? Is a creed alive
because it flourishes in Little Bethel ? Man is one vast
being, and the thought of his higher nerve-centres alone
counts : generation hands the torch to generation.
Doubtless the lower ganglia are not always ready for the
new conception. But such considerations belong to
Politics, not to Truth. At the worst the map must be
made while the march is preparing.
Ill
No object in the Naples Museum fascinates the philo-
sophic mind more than Salpion's vase. Who was Salpion ?
I know not, though his once living hand signed his work,
in bold sprawling letters,
SAAniQN A0HNAIO2 EHOIHSE
An Athenian made you, then, I muse, gazing upon its
beautiful marble impassivity, and studying the alto-relievo
of Mercury with his dancing train giving over the infant
Bacchus to a seated nymph of Nysa. He who conceived
you made you for sacrifices to Bacchus, lived among
those white temples which the Greeks built for the adora-
tion of their gods, but which remain for our adoration.
He mounted that hill agleam with the marble pillars of
immortal shrines, he passed the Areopagus, and the altar
" to the unknown God " ; he entered the Propylsea and
gazed through the columns of the Acropolis upon the blue
^gean. He sat in that marmoreal amphitheatre and saw
the mimes in sock and buskin take the proscenium to the
sound of lyres and flutes. Perchance 'twas while seeing
the Mercury fable treated in a choric dance in the sanded
orchestra that he composed this grouping. Perhaps he
but copied it from some play lost to us, for the Greek
theatre, with its long declamations, had more analogy
with sculpture than with our agitated drama of to-day.
FANTASIA NAPOLITANA 31
The legend itself is in Lucian and Apollonius. But
Salpion is not the beginning of this vase's story. For
the artist himself belonged to the Renaissance, the scholars
say ; not our Renaissance, but a neo-Attic. Salpion did
but deftly reproduce the archaic traditions of the first
great period of Greek sculpture. Even in those days
men's thoughts turned yearningly to a nobler past, and
the young prix de Rome who should find inspiration in
Salpion would be but imitating an imitation. Nor is
Athenian all the history this fair Attic shape has held.
Much more we know, yet much is dim. In what palace
or private atrium did it pass its first years ? How did it
travel to Italy ? Was it exported thither by a Greek
merchant to adorn the house of some rich provincial, or
— more probably — the country seat of a noble Roman ?
For the ruins of Formise were the place of its discovery,
and mayhap Cicero himself — the baths of whose villa
some think to trace in the grounds of the Villa Caposele
— was its whilom proprietor.
But, once recovered from the wrack of the antique
world, it falls into indignity, more grievous than its long
inhumation through the rise and fall of the mediseval world.
It drifts, across fields of asphodel, to the neighbouring
Gaeta — the Gibraltar of Italy, the ancient Portus Gaeta^
itself a town-republic of as many mutations and glories —
and there, stuck in the harbour mud, performs the function
of a post to which boats are fastened. Stalwart fishermen,
wearing gold earrings, push off from it with swarthy
hands ; bronzed women, with silver bodkins pinning in
their back hair with long coils of many-coloured linen,
throw their ropes over its pedestal. Year after year it
lies in its ooze while the sun rises and sets in glory on the
promontory of Gaeta: it reeks of tar and the smell of fish-
ing-nets ; brine encrusts its high-reliefs. The clatter of
the port drowns the hollow cry of memory that comes
when it is struck by an oar : there is the noise of shipping
32 ITALIAN FANTASIES
bales ; the crews of forth-faring argosies heave anchor
with their ancient chant; the sails of the galleons flap ;
the windlasses creak. Perchance a galley-slave, flayed
and fretted by chain and lash, draws up with grappled
boat-hook, and his blood flows over into Salpion's vase.
And then a tide of happier fortune — perhaps the same
that bore the Sardinians to the conquest of Gaeta and the
end of the war for Italian independence — washes the vase
from its harbour mud and deposits it in the cathedral of
Gaeta. Tlie altar of Bacchus returns to sacerdotal uses :
only now it is a font, and brown Italian babies are soused
in it, while nurses in gilt coronets with trailing orange
ribbons stand by, radiant. Doubtless the priests and the
simple alike read an angel into Mercury, the infant Jesus
into the child of Jupiter and Semele, and into the nymph
of Nysa the Madonna whose Immaculate Conception Pio
Nono proclaimed from this very Gaeta.
Its Bacchantes are now joyous saints, divinely uplifted.
And why not ? Is not the Church of Santa Costanza at
Rome the very temple of Bacchus its Bacchic processions
in mosaic and fresco unchanged ? Did not the early
Church make the Bacchic rites symbolic of the vineyard of
the faith, and turn to angels the sportive genii ? Assuredly
Salpion's vase is as Christian as the toe of Jupiter in St.
Peter's, as the Roman basilica3 where altars have usurped
the ancient judgment-seat, as the Pantheon wrested from
the gods by the saints. Nay, its Bacchic relief might have
been the very design of a Cinquecento artist for a papal
patron, the figures serving for saints, even as the Venetian
ladies in all their debonair beauty supplied Tintoretto and
Titian with martyrs and holy virgins, or as the beautiful,
solemn-robed, venerable-bearded Bacchus on another
ancient vase, which stands in the Campo Santo of Pisa,
served Niccolo Pisano for the High Priest of his pulpit
reliefs.
Outside Or San Michele in Florence you may admire
FANTASIA NAPOLITANA 33
the Four Holy Craftsmen, early Roman Christians
martyred for refusing to make Pagan deities. They had
not yet learned to baptize them by other names.
And now Salpion's vase has reached the Museum, that
cynosure of wandering tourists. But it belongs not truly
to the world of glass cases : it has not yet reached museum-
point. It is of the Exhibition : not of the Museum
proper, which should be a collection of antiquities. Other
adventures await it, dignified or sordid. For museums
themselves die and are broken up. Proteus had to change
his shape ; Salpion's vase has no need of external trans-
formations. Will it fume with incense to some yet un-
known divinity in the United States of Africa, or serve as
a spittoon for the Fifth President of the Third World-
Republic ?
O the passing, the mutations, the lapse, the decay and
fall, and the tears of things ! Yet Salpion's vase remains
as beautiful for baptism as for Pagan ritual ; symbol of
art which persists, stable and sure as the sky, while
thoughts and faiths pass and re-form, like clouds on the
blue.
And out of this flux man has dared to make a legend of
changelessness, when at most he may one day determine
the law of the flux.
Everything changes but change. Yet man's heart de-
mands perfections — I had almost said petrifications —
perfect laws, perfect truths, dogmas beyond obsolescence,
flawless leaders, unsullied saints, knights without fear
or reproach ; throws over its idols for the least speck of
clay, and loses all sense of sanctity in a truth whose
absoluteness for all time and place is surrendered.
Yet is there something touching and significant in this
clinging of man to Platonic ideals : the ruder and simpler
he, the more indefectible his blessed vision, the more
shining his imaged grail. And so in this shifting world
of eternal flux his greatest emotions and cravings have
34 ITALIAN FANTASIES
gathered round that ideal of eternal persistence that is
named God.
IV
There are two torrents that amaze me to consider — the
one is Niagara, and the other the stream of prayer falling
perpetually in the Roman Catholic Church. What with
masses and the circulating exposition of the Host, there is
no day nor moment of the day in which the praises of God
are not being sung somewhere : in noble churches, in dim
crypts and underground chapels, in cells and oratories.
I have been in a great cathedral, sole congregant, and, lo !
the tall wax candles were lit, the carven stalls were full of
robed choristers, the organ rolled out its sonorous phrases,
the priests chanted, marching and bowing, the censer
swung its incense, the bell tinkled. Niagara is indifferent
to spectators, and so the ever-falling stream of prayer.
As steadfastly and unremittingly as God sustains the
universe, so steadfastly and unremittingly is He acknow-
ledged, the human antiphony answering the divine strophe.
There be those who cannot bear that Niagara should
fall and thunder in mere sublimity, but only to such will
this falling thunder of prayer seem waste.
Yet as I go through these innumerable dark cliurches
of Italy, these heavy, airless glooms, heavier with the
sense of faded frescoes and worm-eaten pictures, and vaults
and crypts, and mouldering frippery and mildewed relics,
and saintly bones mocked by jewelled shroudings, and
dim-burning oil-lamps — the blue sky of Italy shut out as
in a pious perversity — and more, when I see the sub-
jects of the paintings and gravings, these Crucifixions and
Entombments and Descents from the Cross, varied by the
mimetic martyrdoms of the lirst believers, it is borne in on
me depressingly how the secret of Jesus has been darkened,
and a doctrine of life — " Walk while ye have the light
. . . that ye may be the children of light " — has been
FANTASIA NAPOLITANA 35
turned to a doctrine of death. St. Sebastian with his
arrows, St. Lawrence with his gridiron, are, no doubt, sub-
lime spectacles, but had not the martyr's life been noble,
and had lie not died for the right to live it, his death
would have been merely ignominious. The death of
Socrates owes its value to the life of Socrates. Many a
murderer dies as staunchly, not to speak of the noble ex-
perimenters with Rontgen rays, or the explorers who perish
in polar wastes, recording with freezing fingers the latitude
of their death.
Painting half obeyed, half fostered this concentration
on the Passion, with its strong lights and shadows. In-
deed, the artistic strength of the mere story is so tremen-
dous that it has wiped out the message of the Master and
thrown Christianity quite out of perspective. Tintoretto's
frescoes in San Rocco — -indeed, most sacred pictures —
are like a picture-book for the primitive. Q'-Picturce sunt
idiotarum lihri.''''') The anecdotal Christ alone survives.
And the painters were the journalists, the diffusers and
interpreters of ideas.
The true Christ was crucified afresh in the interests of
romance and the pictorial nude. Crivelli painted with
unction the fine wood and the decorative nails of the
Cross ; even the winding-sheet is treated by Giulio Clovio
for its decorative value. Where in all these galleries and
legends shall we find the living Christ, the Christ of the
parables and the paradoxes, the caustic satirist, the prophet
of righteousness, the lover of little children ? The living
Christ was overcast by the livid light of the tomb. He
was buried in the Latin of the Church, while every chapel
and cloister taught in glaring colour the superficial
dramatic elements, and Calvaries were built to accentuate
it, and men fought for the Cross and swore by the Holy
Rood, and collected the sacred nails and fragments of the
wood and thorns of the crown.
The Sacro Catino of Genoa Cathedral once held drops of
36 ITALIAN FANTASIES
the blood ; a chapel of marble and gold at Turin still pre-
serves in the glow of ever-burning lamps the Santo Sudario,
or Holy Winding-sheet. Strange mementoes of the plein
air Prophet who drew his parables and metaphors from the
vineyard and the sheepfold ! The Santo Vol to for which
pilgrims stream to Lucca is not the holy face of loving
righteousness, but a crucifix miraculously migrated from
the Holy Land and preserved in a toy tempietto. Of the
fifteen mysteries of the Roman Catholic Rosary, five are
of Birth, five of Death, five of Glory. But none are of
Life. There are also the rosaries of the Five Wounds
and the Seven Dolors.
No doubt the majestic and sombre symbolism of the
Cross owed its power over gross minds to its very repudi-
ation of the joy of life, but the soul cannot healthily con-
centrate on death, nor can " Holy Dying " replace " Holy
Living." Those early purple and gold mosaics of the
Master with His hand on the Book of Life, placed over
altars, — as in the cathedral of Pisa, — taught, for all their
naivete, the deeper lesson: "jE'</o sum lux mundi.''' The
rude stone sculptures on the portals of Parma Baptistery
depict a Christ grotesque in a skull-cap, yet active in works
and words of love, and Duccio's panels on that reredos in
Siena in the dawn of Italian art equally emphasise the
life of Christ, and not its mere ending. In fact, the earlier
the art the less the insistence on darkness and death. The
Christians of the Catacombs, for whom death and darkness
were daily realities, turned all their thoughts to light and
life. They enjoyed their crypts more than the Christians of
to-day enjoy their cathedrals. " ' The Acts of the Apostles,' "
says Renan in his " St. Paul," " are a book of joy." It was
the later ages, which found the battle won, that took an
artistic and morbid pleasure in depicting martyrdoms and
created those pictorial concepts that tend to caricature
Christianity. It is worth remarking that Tempesta, who
brought pictorial martyrology to its disgusting climax in
FANTASIA NAPOLITANA 37
S. Stefano Rotondo at Rome, came so late that he lived to see
the eighteenth century in. A pity that temporary neces-
sities of martyrdom among the early Christians lent colour
to the misconception of Christianity as a religion of death.
Toleration or triumph robbed the saint of his stake, and
left to him a subtler and severer imitatio CJiristi. Buried
so long beneath his own Cross, tlie true Christ will rise
again — to the cry of '•'-Ecce Homo ! "
On that day the teaching of Arius as to the originate
nature of Christ, or the model trinitarianism of Sabellius
by which the same God manifested Himself as Father, Son,
and Holy Ghost, may cease to be a heresy, or Joachim of
Flora's expectation of a Super-Gospel of the Spirit may
find transformed fulfilment. For if Christianity has a
future, that future belongs, not to its dogmas, but to its
heresies, the thought of the great souls who, instead of re-
ceiving it passively, wrestled for themselves with its meta-
physical and spiritual problems, and passed through the
white fires and deep waters of the cosmic mystery. There
is scarcely a heresy but will better repay study than the
acrid certainties of St. Bernard or the word-spinnings of
Athanasius triumphant contra mundum.
Art is, indeed, not sparing of the resurrected Christ who
rules in glory, such as He whose majestic figure dominates
and pervades St. Mark's; but this Christ who presides
in so many pictures at the Last Judgment, His foot on the
earth-ball. His angel-legions round Him, and who, indeed,
in some is actually represented as creating Adam or giving
Moses the Law ; this Christ v\\o — by a paradoxical re-
version to the Pagan need for a human God — has super-
seded His Father with even retrospective rights, is still
further removed than the crucified Christ from the Christ
of life.
This apotheosis, how inferior in grandeur to His true pre-
sidence over the centuries that followed His death ! And
this death, how infinitely more tragic than the conven-
38 ITALIAN FANTASIES
tional theory of it ! Naught that man has suffered or man
imagined, no Dantesque torture or Promethean agony, can
equal the bhickness of that ninth hour when " Jesus cried
with a loud voice, saying, Eli^ Eli, lama sabachthanif^
Where be the twelve legions of angels, where the seat for
the Son of Man at the right hand of power ? Why this
mockery, this excruciation ?
Purblind must be the dryasdust who can 'read this pas-
sage and doubt that Jesus was an historical person. As if
the writers of Matthew and Mark could have invented so
wonderful a touch, or would, had they understood its full
import, have inserted so flagrant a contradiction of the
Christian concept — a contradiction that can only be coun-
teracted by an elaborate theory of kenosis. The dying
cry of Jesus stamps him with authenticity, as the complaints
of the Israelites against their leader guarantee Moses and
the Exodus.
What a colossal theme — Ormuzd broken by Ahriman,
the incarnation of light and love agonising beneath the
heel of the powers of darkness and goaded into the supreme
cry : " My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me ? "
I have seen only one Crucifixion that adequately renders
this dreadful moment — the supreme loneliness, the un-
rayed blackness — for most Crucifixions are populated and
bustling, like Tintoretto's or Altichieri's or P'oppa's or
Spinello Aretino's, or that congested canvas of the brothers
San Severino, when they are not also like Michele da
Verona's, a translation of the tragedy into a Carpaccio
romance of trumpeters and horsemen and dogs and lovely
towered cities and mountain bridges, not to mention the
arms of the magnificent Conte di Pitigliano. But what
painter it is who has caught the true essence and quiddity
of the Crucifixion I cannot remember, nor haply if I saw his
picture in Spain and not in Italy, nor even if I dreamed it.
Lucas Van der Leyden and Van Dyck give us the lonely
figure, but in Italian art before our own day I can only
FANTASIA NAPOLITANA 39
recall it in an obscure picture of the Parmese school, and
in a small painting of the eighteenth-century Venetian,
Piazzetta. Tura's impressive, sombre study is only a
fragment of a stigmata picture. Guido Reni suggests the
loneliness, but he leaves the head haloed and melodramatic,
besides sketching in shadowy accessories. A nineteenth-
century Italian, Giocondo Viglioli, places the lonely
Christ against the shadowy background of the roofs and
towers of Jerusalem. But the picture I have in my mind
is Rembrandtesque, the blacks heaviest at the figure in
the centre, who, unillumined even by a halo, uncom-
panioned even of thieves, hangs nailed upon a lonely cross
in a vast deserted landscape. For Jesus at this tremen-
dous moment is alone — however vast the crowd — alone
against the universe, and this universe has turned into
a darkness that can be felt ; felt as a torment of body as
well as a shattering of the spirit.
When I looked upon the myth of Psyche in the Villa Far-
nesina at Rome as designed by Raphael, it was borne in on
me how the primitive Greek, penetrated by the certainty
and beauty of his body, had made the world and the gods
in its image. But the race of Jesus, evolved to a higher
thought, had demanded that the universe should answer to
its soul. " Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right ? "
asks Abraham severely of God in another epochal passage
of the Bible. And now here is a scion of Abraham who
has staked his all upon the innermost nature of things
being one with his own, upon a universe aflame with love
and righteousness and pity, and lo ! in this awful hour it
seems to reveal itself as a universe full of mocking forces,
grim, imperturbable, alien. It is an epic moment — the
tragedy not only of Jesus, but of man soaring upwards
from the slime —
" Such splendid purpose in his eyes "
— and finding in the cosmos no correspondence with his
40 ITALIAN FANTASIES
vision. Nor could Jesus, who had outgrown the notion
of a heavenly despot, even find the satisfaction of the
Prometheus of J^schylus :
" You see me fettered here, a god ill-starred,
The enemy of Zeus, abhorred of all
That tread the courts of his omnipotence,
Because of mine exceeding love for men."
Yet in a sense the despair of Jesus was unwarranted.
The universe had not forsaken him ; ic contained, on the
contrary, the media for his eternal influence. On the
physical plane, indeed, it could do nothing for him ;
crucifixion must kill or the cosmos must change to chaos.
But on the spiritual plane he could neither be killed nor
forsaken. Infinitely less tragic his death than that of
Napoleon, of whom we might say, in the words of Sanna-
zaro,
"Omnia vincebas, superabas omnia Caesar,
Omnia deficiunt, incipis esse nihil."
It was Moses who more voluntarily than Jesus offered
his life that the equilibrium of this righteous universe
should not be shaken. " Ye have sinned a great sin ; and
now I will go up unto the Lord ; peradventure I shall
make an atonement for your sin." And the atonement
offered ran : " Blot me, I pray Thee, out of Thy book
which Thou hast written." Here, then, in the Old Tes-
tament, and not in the New, first appears the notion of
vicarious atonement. But the Old Testament sternly
rejects it ; " Whoever hath sinned against Me, him will I
blot out of My book." Beside which trenchant repudia-
tion the Christian reading of the Old Testament as a mere
prolegomenon to the Crucifixion, an avenue to Calvary
strewn with textual finger-posts, appears a more than usu-
ally futile word-play of the theological mind. One might,
indeed, more easily discover the germ of the atonement
idea in Iphigenia. And that the Greek mind had spirit-
FANTASIA NAPOLITANA 41
ualised itself — even before it contributed the logos to
Christianity — is obvious not only from its literature and
its Orphic and Eleusinian mysteries, but from its art.
For the Hellenic art of Raphael v^^as, after all, only the
Renaissance view of Hellas, and the Greek myths in his
hands were merely a charming Pagan poetry, no truer to
the Hellenism of the great period than was the " Endy-
mion" or " Hyperion " of Keats. How can I look at the
statue of Apollo in this same Museum of Naples and not
see that the very type of Christ had been prefigured ? I
mean the Christ with the haunting eyes and the long
ringlets, for this Apollo is a nobler figure by far than
the Christ of the Byzantine mosaics. And I am not
the first to remember that Apollo is the Son of Zeus
the Father.
It is very strange. The Greeks, beginning with a Na-
ture-religion, come in the course of the centuries to find it
inadequate and to yearn for something beyond —
" Tendebantque manus ulterioris ripse amore."
The Nature-religion, therefore, gradually replaces itself
by a Jewish heresy, expounded in Greek, largely influenced
by Greek Alexandrian philosophy, and organised by a
Greek-speaking tent-maker of Jerusalem named Saul or
Paul, who, shutting out infinity with a tent, after the
fashion of his craft, left a Church where he had found a
Christ. Some fourteen centuries later old Greek thought
is rediscovered, and operates as the great liberator of the
mind from the constriction of this Church which has ob-
scured and overgloomed Nature. But only subconscious
of itself, this movement back to Nature, this renewed
joie de vivre, finds its expression in the adornment of altars
for the worship of sorrow, and under the ribs of death a
new soul of loveliness is created that can vie with the art
of the Greeks. And finally this new Nature-worship
grows conscious again of its inadequacy to the soul of
42 ITALIAN FANTASIES
man, there is a Reformation and a Counter-Reformation,
and then both are outgrown and humanity stands to-day
where the old Greeks stood at the dawn of Christianity.
The wheel has come full circle. And meantime the
original Mosaic cult stands unmoved by these two millen-
niums of heresy, unbroken by the persecution, still pa-
tiently awaiting the day when " God shall be One and His
Name One." What are the fantasies of literature to the
freaks and paradoxes of the World-Spirit ?
V
It is as the Bambino that Christ chiefly lives in Art,
and at this extreme, too, we miss his true inwardness.
Yet the tenderness of the conception of the Christ-babe
makes atonement. What can be more touching than
Gentile da Fabriano's enchanting altar-piece of the
Adoration of the 3Iag% in which — even as the glamorous
procession of the Three Kings resteeps the earth in the
freshness and dew of the morning — the dominance of
holy innocence seems to bathe the tired world in a wistful
tenderness that links the naive ox and ass with the human
soul and all the great chain of divine life.
The Christ-child, held in his mother's arms, lays his
hand upon the kneeling Magi's head, yet not as with
conscious divinity : 'tis merely the errant touch of baby
fingers groping out towards the feel of things. No lesson
could be more emollient to rude ages, none could better
serve to break the pride and harshness of the lords of the
earth. "A slave might be elder, priest, or bishop while
his master was catechumen," says Hausrath of the early
days of Christianity. Yet this delicious and 3^earning
vision of a sanctified and unified cosmos remains a dream ;
futile as a Christmas carol that breaks sweetly on the ear
and dies away, leaving the cry of the world's pain undis-
possessed. It was precisely in Christian Rome that sla-
FANTASIA NAPOLITANA 43
very endured after all the other Great Powers of Europe
had abolished it.
Nay, were the dream fulfilled it could not undo the
centuries of harsh reality. Here in Naples, under the
providence of a kindly English society, the wretched breed
of horses, whose backs were full of sores, whose ribs were
numerable, have been replaced by a sleek stock, themselves
perhaps soon to be replaced by the unsentient motor. But
what Motor Millennium can wipe out the ages of equine
agony ?
And despite the Christ-child and the Christ crucified,
nowhere does the triumph of life run higher than in this
sunny land of religious gloom, Mantegna's conversion of
the babe into a young Csesar being a true if unconscious
symbol of what happened to the infant. Flourishing the
forged Donation of Constantine to prove its claim to the
things that were Caesar's, it grew up into that " Terrible
Pontiff " whose bronze effigy by Michelangelo was so aptly
cast into a cannon, and whose Christian countenance you
may see in the Doria Gallery at Rome ; or into that
Borgian monster who was to bombard a fortress on Christ-
mas Day, and who, crying joyfully, " We are Pope and
Vicar of Christ," hastened to don the habit of white
taffeta, the embroidered crimson stola, the shoes of ermine
and crimson velvet. God might choose to be born in the
poorest and worst dressed circles of the most unpopular
People, but the lesson was lost. His worshippers insisted
on thrusting Magnificence back upon Him. Or perhaps
it was their own Magnificence that they were protecting
against His insidious teaching. Consider their cathe-
drals, built less in humility than in urban emulation —
the Duomo of Florence to be worthy of the greatness, not
of God, but of the Florentines ; S. Petronio to eclipse it
to the greater glory of Bologna ; Milan Cathedral to sur-
pass all the churches in Christendom, as Giangaleazzo's
palace surpassed all its princely dwellings. In whose
44 ITALIAN FANTASIES
honour did the Pisans encircle their cathedral with a silver
girdle, or the Venetians offer ten thousand ducats for the
seamless coat ? Poor Babe, vainly didst thou preach to
Italy's great families, when in humble adoration of thee
they had themselves painted in thy blessed society, the
Medici even posing to Botticelli as the three Magi, and
thrusting their Magnificence into thy very manger.
And in our own northern land the ox, companion of the
manger, for whose fattening at Christmastide St. Francis
said he would beg for an imperial edict, is fattened indeed,
but merely for the Christmas market, stands with the
same pathetic eye outside the butcher's shop, labelled
" Choose 3^our Christmas joint," and the clown and panta-
loon come tumbling on to crown the sacred birthday.
Alas ! history knows no miracles of transformation.
Evolution, not revolution, is the law of human life. In
Santa Claus's stocking what you shall truly find is traces
of earlier feasts. The Christian festival took over, if it
transformed ,to higher import, the Saturnalia of earlier
religions and natural celebrations of the winter solstice.
Holly does not grow in Palestine ; the snowy landscapes
of our Christmas cards are scarcely known of Nazareth or
Bethlehem ; mince-pie was not on the menu of the Magian
kings ; and the Christmas tree has its roots in Teutonic
soil. But even as the painters of each race conceived
Christ in their own image, so does each nation unthink-
ingly figure his activities in its own climatic setting. And
perhaps in thus universalising the IMaster the peoples
obeyed a true instinct, for no race is able to receive lessons
from "foreigners." The message, as well as the man,
must be translated into native terms — a psychological
fact which missionaries should understand.
Nor is it in the Palestine of to-day that the true
environment of the Gospels can best be recovered, for,
though one may still meet the shepherd leading his flock,
the merchant dangling sideways from his ass, or Rebeccah
FANTASIA NAPOLITANA 45
carrying her pitcher on her shoulder, that is not the
Palestine of the Apostolic period, but the Palestine of
the patriarchs, reproduced by decay and desolation. The
Palestine through which the Galilaean peasant wandered
was a developed kingdom of thriving cities and opulent
citizens, of Roman roads and Roman pomp. Upon those
bleak hill-sides, where to-day only the terraces survive
— the funereal monuments of fertility — the tangled
branchery of olive groves lent magic to the air. That
sea of Galilee, down which I have sailed in one of the
only two smacks, was alive with a fleet of fishing vessels.
Yes, in the palimpsest of Palestine 'tis an earlier writing
than the Christian that has been revealed by the fading
of the later inscriptions of her civilisation. And even
where, in some mountain village, the rainbow-hued crowd
may still preserve for us the chronology of Christ, a
bazaar of mother-o'-pearl mementoes will jerk us rudely
back into our own era. But — saddest of all ! — the hands
of Philistine piety have raised churches over all the
spots of sacred story. Even Jacob's well is roofed over
with ecclesiastic plaster ; incongruous images of camels
getting through church porches to drink confuse the
historic imagination. Churches are after all a way of
shutting out the heavens, and the great open-air story of
the Gospels seems rather to suffer asphyxiation, overlaid
by these countless chapels and convents. Is it, perhaps,
allegorical of the perversion of the Christ-teaching ?
The humanitarian turn given to Yuletide by the genius
of Dickens was at bottom a return from the caricature
to the true concept. Dickens converted Christmas to
Christianity. But over large stretches of the planet and
of history it is Christianity that has been converted to
Paganism, as the condition of its existence. Russia
was baptized a thousand years ago, but she seems to
have a duck's back for holy water. And even in the
rest of Europe upon what parlous terms the Church still
46 ITALIAN FANTASIES
holds its tenure of nominal power ! What parson dares
speak out in a crisis, what bishop dares flourish the logia
of Christ in the face of a heathen world? The old gods
still govern — if they do not rule. Thor and Odin, Mars
and Venus — who knows that they do not dream of a
return to their ancient thrones, if, indeed, they are aware
of their exile. Their shrines still await them in the
forests and glades ; every rock still holds an altar. And
do they demand their human temjiles, lo ! the Pantheon
stands stable in Rome, the Temple of Minerva in Assisi,
Paestum holds the Temples of Ceres and Minerva, and
on the hill of Athens the Parthenon shines in immortal
marble. Their statues are still in adoration, and how
should a poor outmoded deity understand that we
worship him as art, not as divinity ? It does but add
to his confusion that now and anon prayers ascend to
him as of yore, for can a poor Olympian, whose toe has
been faith-bitten, comprehend that he has been catalogued
as pope or saint ? Perchance some drowsy Druid god,
as he perceives our scrupulous ritual of holly and fir-
branch, imagines his worship unchanged, and glads to
see the vestal led under tlie mistletoe by his officiating
priest. Perchance in the blaze of snapdragon some pur-
blind deity beholds his old fire-offerings, and the savour
of turkey mounts as incense to his Norse nostrils. Shall
we rudely arouse him from his dream of dominion, shall
we tell him that he and his gross ideas were banished
two millenniums ago, and that the world is now under
the sway of gentleness and love ? Nay, let him dream
his happy dream ; let sleeping gods lie. For Avho knows
how vigorously his old lustfulness and blood-thirst might
revive ; who knows what new victims he might claim
at his pyres, were he clearly to behold his power still
unusurped, his empire still the kingdom of the world ?
THE CARPENTER'S WIFE: A CAPRICCIO
"Habent sua fata — feminse."
Although the Pilgrims' Way is a sliady arcade, yet the
ascent from Vicenza was steep enough to be something of
a penance that sultry spring evening, and I was weary
of the unending pillars and the modern yet already fading
New Testament frescoes between them. But I was in-
terested to see which parish or family had paid for each
successive section, and what new name for the Madonna
would be left to inscribe upon it. For even the Litany of
Loreto seemed exhausted, and still the epithets poured
out — '•'■Lumen Confessorum^'''' '■'' Consolatrix Viduarum,^''
'■^ Radix Jesse.,'''' '''■ Stella Matutina.,'''' '•'• Fons Ladirymarum^''
" ChjiJeus Oppressorum " — a very torrent of love and
longing.
At last as I neared the summit of the Way, a fresco
flashed upon me the meaning of it all — an " Apparitio
B.M.V. in Monte Berico, 1428," representing the Virgin
in all her radiant beauty appearing to an old peasant-
woman. So this it was that had raised this long religious
road to the Church of Our Lady of the Mountain ! I re-
membered the inscription in S. Rocco, telling how 30,000
men had pilgrimed here in 1875 — spectaculum mirum
visu.
But where was the church that had been built over the
spot of the Madonna's appearance? I looked up and
sighed wearily. I was only half-way up, I saw, for the
road turned sharply to tlie right, and a new set of names
began, and a new set of frescoes — still cruder, for I caught
sight of nails driven into the Cross through the writhing
47
48 ITALIAN FANTASIES
frame of the Christ. But even my curiosity in the
cornucopia of epithets was worn out. The corner had a
picturesque outlook, and on the hill-side a bench stood
waiting. Vicenza stretched below me, I could see the
Palladian palaces admired of Goethe, the Greek theatre,
the Colonnades, the Palace of Reason with its long turtle-
back roof ; and, beyond the spires and campaniles, the
gleam of the Venetian Alps. A church-bell from below
sounded for "Ave Maria." I sat down upon the bench
and abandoned myself to reverie. Why should not the
i\Ia(U)nna appear to me P I thought. Why this preference
for the illiterate ? And then I remembered that this very
Pilgrims' Way had served as a battle-ground for the
Austrians and the poor Italians of '48. How these Chris-
tians love one another ! I mused. And so my mind's eye
flitted from point to point, seeing again things seen or
read — in that inconsequent phantasmagoria of reverie —
to the pleasant droning of the vesper bell. Presently,
telling myself it was getting late, I arose and continued
my ascent to the Church of Our Lady of the Mountain.
*****
But I looked in vain, as I came up the hill, for the in-
scriptions and the frescoes. The sun was lower in the
west, but the sunshine had grown even sultrier, the sky
even bluer, the road even steej^er and rougher, and it was
leading me on to a gay-flowering plain lying in a ring of
green hills amid the singing of larks and the cooing of
turtle-doves. And on this plain I saw arising, not the
church of my quest, but a far-scattered village, whose small
square, primitive houses would have seemed ugly had their
roofs not been picturesque with storks and pigeons and
their walls embowered in their own vines and fig-trees and
absorbed into the pervasive suggestion of threshing-floors
and wine-presses and rural felicity. By a central fountain
I could perceive a group of barefoot maidens, each waiting
her turn with her water-jar. They seemed gaily but
THE CARPENTER'S WIFE . 49
lightly clad, in blue and red robes, with bracelets gleaming
at their wrists and strings of coins shining from their
faces.
Anxious to learn my whereabouts, yet shy of intruding
upon this girlish group, I steered my footsteps towards
one who, her urn on her shoulder, seemed making her way
by a side-track towards a somewhat lonely house on the
outskirts, overbrooded by the brow of a hill. She was
brown-skinned, I saw as I came near, very young, but
of no great beauty save for her girlish grace and the
large lambent eyes under the arched black eyebrows.
"Di grazia?" I began inquiringly.
"Aleikhem shalom," tripped off her tongue in heedless
answer. Then, as if grown conscious I had said some-
thing strange, she paused and looked at me, and I instinc-
tively became aware she was a Hebrew maiden. Yet T
had still the feeling that I must get back to Vicenza.
"How far is thy servant from the city?" I asked in my
best Hebrew.
"From Yerushalaim?" she asked in surprise. "But it
is many parasangs. Impossible that thou shouldst arrive
at Yerushalaim before the Passover, even borne upon
eagles' wings. Behold the sun — the Sabbath-Passover
is nigh upon us."
Ere she ended I had divined by her mispronunciation
of the gutturals and by the Aramaic flavour of her phrases
that she was a provincial and that I was come into the
land of Canaan.
"What is this place?" I inquired, no less astonished
than she.
"This is Nazara."
"Nazara? Then am I in Galila?"
"Assuredly. Doubtless thou comest from the great
wedding at Cana. But thou shouldst have returned by
way of Mount Tabor and the town of Endor. Didst thou
perchance see my mother at Cana?"
50 ITALIAN FANTASIES
''Nay; how should I know thy mother?" I replied
evasively.
She smiled. "Am I not made in her image? But
overlong, meseems, have ye all feasted, for it is two days
since we expect ray mother and brothers."
"Shall thy servant not carry thine urn?" I answered
uneasily.
"Nay, I thank thee. It is not a bowshot to my door.
And," she added with a gentle smile, "my brothers do
not carry my burdens; why should a stranger?"
"And how many brothers hast thou?" I asked.
" Some are dead — peace be upon them. But there are
four yet left alive — nay," she hesitated, "five. But our
eldest hath left us."
"Ah, he hath married a wife."
She flushed. "Nay, but we speak not of him."
"There must ever be one black sheep in a flock," I
murmured consolingly.
She brightened up. 'So my brother Yakob always
says."
"And Yakob should speak with authority on the colour
of sheep, and not as the scribes." I laughed with forced
levity.
Her brow wrinkled thoughtfull3\ "Doubtless Yeshua
is possessed of a demon," she said. "One of our sisters,
Deborah, was likewise a Sabbath-breaker, but now that
she is old, having nineteen years and three strong sons,
she is grown more pious than even our uncle Yehoshuah
the Pharisee."
"Lives she here?"
"Ay, yonder, near my mother's sister, the wife of
Halphai."
She pointed towards a battlemented roof, but my eyes
were more concerned with her own house, at which we
were just arriving. It was a one-storey house, square
and ugly like the others, redeemed by its little garden
THE CARPENTER'S WIFE 51
with its hedge of prickly pear, though even this garden
was littered with new-made wheels and stools and an
olive-wood table.
"Halphai is gone up for the Passover," she added.
She stopped abruptly. The tinkle of mule-bells was
borne to us from a steep track that came to join our
slower pathway.
"Lo, my mother ! " she cried joyfully ; and placing her
urn upon the ground, she hastened down the narrow
track. I moved delicately, yet not without curiosity, to
the flank of the hedge, and presently a little caravan
appeared, ambling gently, with the girl walking and
chattering happily by the side of her mother, who rode
upon an ass. I noticed that the woman, who was small
and spare, listened but little to her daughter's eager talk,
and seemed deaf to the home-coming laughter of her four
curly-headed sons, who rode their mules sideways, with
their legs dangling down like the fringes of their gar-
ments. Her shoulders were sunk in bitter brooding, and
when a sudden stumbling of her ass made her raise her
head mechanically to pull him up, I saw the shimmer of
tears in her large olive-tinted eyes. Certainly I should
not have called her made in the image of her daughter, I
thought at that moment, for the face was sorely lined,
and under the cheap black head-shawl I saw the greying
hair that was still raven on her arched eyebrows. But
doubtless the burden of much child-bearing had worn her
out, after the sad fashion of Eastern women.
These reflections were, however, dissipated as soon as
born, for a little cry of dismay from the girl brought to
my perception that it was the forgotten water-jar that had
caused the ass's stumble, and that the urn now lay over-
turned, if not shattered, amid a fast- vanishing pool.
The little mishap made her brothers smile. " Cour-
age ! " cried the eldest. " Yeshua will fill it with wine
instead." At this all the four rustics broke into a roar of
52 ITALIAN FANTASIES
merriment. The youngest, a mere beardless youth, added
in his vulgar Aramaic, " What one ass hath destroyed
another ^vill make good."
The little woman turned on him passionately. "Hold
thy peace, Yehudah. Who knows but that he did change
the water into wine ? "
"Let him come and do it here," retorted the eldest.
"Thou hast not forgotten what befell when he essayed
his marvels in Nazara. No mighty works could he do
here, albeit Shimeon and Yose, inclining their ears to
Zebedee's foolish wife, were ready to sit on his right and
left hand in the Kingdom."
The two young men who had not yet spoken looked
somewhat foolish.
" He laid his hand upon sick folk and healed them,"
one said in apology.
" How many ? " queried young Yehudah scornfully.
" And how many are alive to-day ? Nay, Shimeon, if he
be Messhiach let him heal us of these Roman tyrants —
not go about with their tax-farmers ! "
" Peace, Yehudah ! " The little mother looked round
nervously, and a fresh terror came into those tragic eyes.
There was something to me deeply moving in the sight of
that shrinking little peasant-woman surrounded by these
strong, tall rustics whom she had borne and suckled.
" Let Yeshua hold his peace ! " answered the lad angrily,
"and not prate about rendering unto Csesar the things
that are Cresar's. But, God be thanked, a greater
Yeshua hath arisen — Ben Abbas — a true patriot, who
one day "
" Aha ! Behold my flock at last ! " Startled by this
sudden new angry voice, I glanced over the hedge, and
saw standing on the doorstep cut in the rock, with a ham-
mer in his horny hand, a big red-bearded peasant with
bushy eyebrows. " These two days, Miriam, have I
awaited thee."
THE CARPENTER'S WIFE 63
The little woman slid meekly off her ass. " But, Yus-
sef," she said mildly, " thou saidst thou wouldst go up for
the Paschal sacrifice ! "
" And how could I go up to the Holy City with all this
work to finish, and not one of my four sons to carry my
work to Sepphoris before the Sabbath ! " He glared at
them as they began to lead their beasts behind the garden.
" Halphai was sorely vexed that I did not company him
and join in his lamb-group. And the house is not even
ready for Passover at home ; I shall be liable to the pen-
alty of stripes."
" I baked the mazzoth ere I departed," his wife pro-
tested, "and Sarah hath purged the house of leaven."
She patted her daughter's head.
" Sarah ? " he growled, reminded of a fresh grievance.
" Sarah should have had a husband of her own. But with
these idle sons of mine, feasting and merrymaking while I
saw and plane, I cannot even save fifty zuzim for her
dowry."
Sarah blushed and hastened to pick up her urn and
carry it back to the fountain.
"Nay, but we have tarried at Kephar Nahum," said
Yakob defensively, as he disappeared.
The carpenter turned on his wife, his eyes blazing
almost like his beard. His hammer struck the table in
the garden, denting it. "'Twas to see thy loveling thou
leftest home ! "
The little mother went red and white by turns. " As
my soul liveth, Yussef, I knew not he would be at the
wedding."
" He was at the wedding ? " he asked, softened by his
surprise.
" Ay, he and his disciples."
" Disciples ! " The carpenter sniffed wrathfully. " A
pack of fishers and women, and that yellow-veiled Miriam
from Maerdala."
54 ITALIAN FANTASIES
" The Magdala woman was not there ! " she murmured,
with lowered eyes.
"She knew thy kinsman would not suffer her pollution.
Ah, Miriam, what a son thou hast brought into the
world ! "
Her eyes filled with tears. " Thou must not pay such
heed to the Sanhedrim messengers. In their circuit to
announce the time of the New Moon they gather up all
the evil rumours of Galila. This Magdala woman is re-
pentant ; her seven devils are cast out."
" Miriam defends Miriam," he said sarcastically. " But
thou canst not say I trained him not up in the way he
should go. Learning could we not afford to give him, but
did not thine own brotlier, Jehoshuah ben Perachyah,
teach him Torali, and did I not teach him his trade?
His ploughs and yokes were the best in all Galila."
" And now his followers say his homilies are the best,"
urged the poor mother.
" Homilies ? " he roared. " Blasphemies ! But were
his Midraschim Holy Writ itself, I agree with Ben Sameos
(his memory for a blessing !) greater is the merit of
industry than of idle piety."
" But why should he work ? " cried Yakob, who with
Yehudah now reappeared from the stable. " Would that
the wife of Herod's steward followed me!""
"Or even that Susannah ministered to us with her sub-
stance ! " added Yehudah. " Then I too would teach,
take no thought for the morrow ! " And he laughed
derisively.
" He never took thought for anything save himself,"
said Yussef, shaking his head. " Dost thou not remember,
Miriam, those three dreadful days when he was lost, as
we were returning from his Bar-Mitzvah in Yerushalaim !
God of Abraham, shall I ever forget thy heart-sickness !
And what was it he answered when we at length found
him in the Temple with the doctors ? He was about his
THE CARPENTER'S WIFE 55
father's business ! He was assuredly not about my busi-
ness."
" The Sabbath and Passover are drawing nigh," she
murmured, and slipped past her sons into the house.
" And what did he answer thee at Kephar Nahum ? "
her husband called after her. " ' Who is my mother ? '
The godless scoffer ! The Jeroboam ben Nebat ! I thank
the Lord / did not try to bring him back home. He
might have asked, ' Who is my father ? ' "
There was no reply, but I heard the nervous bustling of
a broom. The carpenter turned to Yakob.
" And what said he at Cana ? "
" He demanded wine, he and his disciples ! "
"Methought he was an Ebionite or an Essene ! "
" Nay, as thou saidst, Yeshua was ever a law unto him-
self. But there was no wine."
" No wine ? " cried Yussef . " So great a wedding com-
pany and no wine ? Methought the Chosan was rich
enough to plant wine-booths all the way from Cana to
Nazara, like the Parnass of Sepphoris, and had as many
gold and silver vessels as the priests in the Temple."
" True, my father, but Yeshua had brought with him
that vile tax-farmer Levi, who grinds the faces both of
rich and poor, and, seeing the spying publican, the bride-
groom straightway bade the servants hide the precious
flagons and goblets, lest more taxes be squeezed out for
the Romans."
Yussef grinned knowingly. " And so poor Yeshua
must go athirst."
"Nay, but hear. When he clamoured for wine the
servants wist not what to do, and my mother said gently
to him, 'They have no wine.' But Yeshua turned upon
her like a lion of Mount Yehudah upon a lamb, and he
roared, ' Woman, what have I to do with thee ? My hour
is not yet come to be a Nazarite.' "
The carpenter chuckled. " Now she will know to stay
66 ITALIAN FANTASIES
at home. ' Woman, what have I to do with thee ? ' " he
repeated with unction.
" Howbeit, my mother feared that liis demon again pos-
sessed liim, and she besought the servants to do whatso-
ever he said unto them. But they still held back. Then
Yesliua, understanding what it was they feared, said,
'Bring the water-pots.' So they went out and brought
the earthen pots wherewith we had washed our hands for
the meal — albeit Yeshua would not wash his — and lo !
they were full of wine."
The carpenter repeated his knowing grin. " And Levi
the publican — what said he ? "
" He was the first to cry ' A miracle ! ' " laughed Yakob,
"and Shimeon-bar-Yonah held up his hands and cried,
' Master of the Universe ! Now is Thy glory manifest ! ' "
Yussef joined in his son's laugh. "Is not Shimeon the
lake fisherman ? "
"Yea, my father; him whom Yeshua calls the Rock."
" The Rock, in sooth ! " broke in fiery young Yehudah.
"Say rather, the Shifting Sand. It was from Shimeon I
learned to be a Zealot, and now this recreant Maccabtean
is bosom friend of Roman tax-gatherers and babbles of the
keys of Heaven."
" Babble not thyself, little one," the father rebuked him.
He turned to Yakob. " And what said Yeshua after the
wine ? "
" When he belield his disciples had drunk new faith in
him, he too was flown, and prophesied darkly that he would
appear on the right hand of power, with clouds of glory
and twelve legions of angels, whereat my mother feared
that his madness was come upon him as of yore, and she
made us follow in his train as far as his lodging in Kephar
Nahum. And we spake privily to Yudas that he should
watch over him till his unclean spirit was exorcised."
" Yudas ! " cried Yussef. " What doth an honest Is-
raelite like Yudas in such company ? But did I not fore-
THE CARPENTER'S WIFE 57
tell what would come of all these baptizings of Rabbi
Jochanan, all these new foolish sects with their white
garments and paddles and ablutions ? Canaan is full of
wandering madmen. The Torah I had from my father,
Eli — peace be upon him ! — is holy enough for me, and
may God forgive me that I have not gone up to kill the
Paschal lamb."
Yakob lowered his voice. " Thou wouldst have met the
madman."
" What ! Yeshua is gone to Yerushalaim ? "
" Sh ! My mother knoweth naught. We spake him
secretly as though converted, saying, ' Lo ! we have seen
this day how thou workest miracles. But if thou do these
things, show thyself to the world. Depart hence and go
into Yudsea, that men may see the works that thou doest.
For there is no man that doeth anything in secret, and he
himself seeketh to be known openly.' So he is gone up to
Yerushalaim ! "
The malicious glee on Yakob's face was reflected in his
father's. " Now shall the mocker be mocked ! Even thy
learned uncle, Ben Perachyah, they scoff at for his accent,
nor will they let him read the prayers. How much less,
then, will they listen to Yeshua ! "
"And the Pharisees hate him," said Yakob, "because he
hath called them vipers, and the Shammaites for profaning
the Sabbath ; even the Essenes for not washing his hands
before meals."
" And all the Zealots hold him a traitor ! " cried Ye-
hudah with flashing eyes.
" Nor will the Sadducees or the Bcethusians listen to a
carpenter's son," added Yakob, laughingly.
" Shame on thee, Yakob, for fouling thine own well ! "
And Sarah, returning with her pitcher on her shoulder,
went angrily within.
Yakob grew red. " And dost thou think the nobles of
Yerushalaim who eat off gold and silver will follow him
58 ITALIAN FANTASIES
like fishers ? " he called after her. " Say they not already,
' Can anything good come out of Nazara ? ' "
'' Yeshua is gone to Yerushalaira ? " The little mother
had dashed to the door, her eyes wide with terror. The
urn she had just taken from her daughter fell from her
trembling hand and shattered itself on the rocky doorstep,
splashing husband and son.
"Woman!" cried the caipenter angrily, "have more
care of my substance ! "
" Yeshua is gone to YerushalaimI " she repeated fren-
ziedly.
" Ay, like a good son of Israel. He hath gone up for
the Paschal sacrifice. Mayhap," he added with his
chuckle, " he will do wonders with the blood of the lamb.
Come, Miriam, let us change our garments and anoint
ourselves for the festival."
He pushed the woman gently within the room, but she
stood there as one turned into a pillar of salt, and with
an Eastern shrug he went in.
Presently Sarah came and wiped the steps with a clout
and gathered up the shards, and then, with a new pitcher
on her shoulder, she bent her steps towards the fountain.
I skirted round to meet her on her return, not a little
to her amazement; but this time she surrendered her
burden to my entreaty, though the ungainly manner in
which I poised the pitcher lightened her clouded brow
with inner laughter.
" This wandering brother of thine," I ventured to ask
at length, " dost thou think harm will befall him in Yeru-
shalaim? "
Her brow puckered thoughtfully. " Perchance these
strangers will believe on him, not knowing as we do that
he hath a demon. Yeshua was wroth with us when he
came, crying out that a man's foes are those of his own
household, and a prophet is nowhere without honour save
in his own country. But how should Yeshua be able to
THE CARPENTER'S WIFE 59
work miracles more than Yakob or Yehudah ? When he
stood up in our synagogue on the Shabbos to read and
expound the prophet Yeshaiah, his lips were touched with
the same burning coal — almost he persuaded me to be a
heretic — but inasmuch as he could do no miracles, all they
in the synagogue were filled with wrath, and rose up and
thrust him out of the city." She pointed to the brow of the
hill hanging over us. " Up there they led him, that they
might cast him down headlong. But out of compassion
for my mother, who had followed with the crowd, they
let him go, and he returned to Kephar Nahum and con-
tinued to make yokes and wheels for his livelihood."
" And he still works there? "
"Nay, he neglected his craft to preach in the great
synagogue built by the centurion — indeed, it is a hot place
for work down there by the lake, neither is it so healthy
as here in Nazara. Also he had free lodging with the
family of Shimeon-bar-Yonah whom they call Petros, while
Shalome, the wife of Zebedee, and other women tended
him and mended his garments. But his fever took him
and he began to wander about all Galila, teaching in the
synagogues and preaching his strange gospel."
" What gospel ? "
" How should a girl know ? Some heresy anent the
Kingdom. And there went out a fame of him through
all the region round about, and some said he healed all
manner of sickness, so that there followed him great mul-
titudes of people. But many came to us and said, 'Alas!
he is beside himself.' And the Messengers of the New
Moon told us many strange tales, so that my mother was
nigh distraught, and when it was bruited that he had said
Kephar Nahum shall be thrust down to hell, she journeyed
thither, she and my brothers, to bring him home and watch
over his affliction. But lo! they could not lay hold of
him, for he was surrounded by such a press of people that
they could not even come nigh unto him. So she sent a
60 ITALIAN FANTASIES
message that his mother and brothers desired to have
speecli of him. And he answered, 'Who is my mother?
Who are my brothers ? ' and he stretched forth his hand
towards his disciples and said, ' Beliold my mother and my
brothers.' So she returned home sorely stricken, and put
on mourning garments, and even the birth of her grand-
children gave her no joy. But when came the marriage
of her rich kinsman in Cana my father would have her go,
being weary of her weeping and thinking to cheer her
heart; but lo! her last state is worse than her first, inas-
much as " She broke off abruptly as we reached the
hedge of prickly pear. " But why have I told all this to
a stranger ? "
" Because I have none else with whom to eat the Pass-
over," I answered boldly.
She turned and looked at me. Then, taking her pitcher
from rae with a word of thanks, " I will tell my father,"
she answered gravely.
I waited in the little garden, watching a patriarchal tor-
toise. Presently the carpenter reappeared on the doorstep,
a new man in festal garment and mien, his head anointed
with oil.
" Baruch Habaa !" he cried cordially. "Since I cannot
go up to Yerushalaim, Yerushalaim comes up to me."
I followed him into the house, duly kissing the mezuzah
as I went through the door. The room was small and
dark, with bare walls built of little liver-coloured blocks
of cemented stone, and the matted floor seemed to hold less
furniture than that which littered the garden. The car-
penter's bench had been covered with cushions, and I
could see that the divan was used for a bed. Very humble
was the house-gear, these earthenware dishes and metal
drinking-cups and brass candlesticks on the Passover
table, and I saw no ornaments save a few terra-cotta vases,
a Hebrew scroll or two, and a rudely painted coffer. The
housewife, busy at the hearth with the roasted egg and
THE CARPENTER'S WIFE 61
bone of the ritual, greeted me with wistful eyes and lips
that vainly tried to murmur or smile a welcome, and I
watched her deft mechanic movements as I sat lightly
gossiping with the males over the exegesis of the seventh
chapter of Yeshaiah. I told them that the Septuagint
translator had darkened the fourteenth verse by loosely
rendering nX2 7!? as irap6evo<i^ or " virgin," instead of
" maiden," but this did not interest them, as they knew
no Greek. The room took a more cheerful air when the
mother lit the Sabbath candles with a blessing almost as
inaudible as her welcome to me, and soon my host began
the Haggadah service by holding his hands over the wine-
goblet. But Yehudah asked the ritual question, " Why
does this night differ from all other nights ? " with a touch
of sarcasm, and interrupted himself to cry passionately :
" How can we celebrate our deliverance from Egypt when
the Roman Eagle hangs at the very door of our Temple?"
At this the little mother turned yet paler, and every eye
glanced uneasily towards the stranger.
" Nay, I am no friend of the Romans," I said reassuringly.
Yehudah continued the formula sullenly. It was as I
had always heard it, save for the question, " Why is the
meat all roasted and none sodden or boiled ? " But the
father had scarcely begun his ritual reply when we heard
a loud knocking on the door, the latch was lifted, and in
another instant we saw a burly man panting on the thresh-
old, and behind him, more vaguely in the dusk, an agi-
tated woman under a head-shawl.
" O Reb Yussef ! " breathed the newcomer.
" Halphai ! " cried the carpenter in amaze. " Art not in
Yerushalaim ? "
The little mother had sprung to her feet.
" They have killed my Yeshua ! " she shrieked.
" Sit down, woman ! " said the carpenter sternly.
But she gestured to the figure in the rear : " Speak, my
sister, speak."
62 ITALIAN FANTASIES
" Nay, I will speak," grumbled her sister's husband.
" Why else did I take horse from the Holy City without
hearing the Levites sing or the trumpets blow for the
blood-sprinkling? Thy Yeshua came up through the
Fountain Gate riding on an ass, and as one flown with
new wine."
" Yea, the wine of the water-pots ! " laughed Yakob.
" And a very great multitude spread their garments in the
way ; others cut down branches from the trees and strewed
them in the way. And the multitudes that went before
and that followed cried, ' Hosanna to the son of David ! ' "
He paused for breath, leaving this picture suspended, and
I saw a new light leap into the mother's tragic eyes, a
strange exaltation as of a secret hope incredulously con-
firmed.
" In Yerushalaim ? " she breathed. " They cry Hosanna
in Yerushalaim ? "
" Yea," said her sister. " And Halphai told me, even
the little children cried, ' Hosanna to the son of David ! ' "
The carpenter was crumbling a mazzo with nervous
fingers ; an angry vein swelled on his forehead. " And
Pilatus permitted this ? " he cried.
" Patience, Reb Yussef ! " said Halphai. " There is
more to come. For, growing yet more swollen in his pre-
sumption, Yeshua went to the Holy Temple, and, enter-
ing the Court of the Gentiles, where sit those who sell the
sheep and the oxen and doves, instead of purchasing a
sacrifice for his sins, he drove them all out with a scourge
of small cords and poured out the changers' money ! "
Horror held the household dumb. I saw Halphai look
round complacently, as though compensated for his hot
ride to Nazara. " And ye know what profit Hanan makes
out of his bazaars," he added significantl3\
The mother was wringing her hands. " Hanan will
never forgive him," she cried. " They will kill him as
they killed Jochanan the Baptizer."
THE CARPENTER'S WIFE 63
" Peace, woman," said Yussef impatiently. " The
High Priest and the Eklers will but drive him from
the city."
" Nay, nay," said Halphai. " They hold him captive.
And his disciples are fled. All save Yudas, who led a
multitude with swords and staves to find him. And
Shimeon-bar-Yonah too is taken, merely because his speech
bewrayeth him as a Galilsean. How then should I dare
stay, who have the ill-hap to be married to his mother's
sister ! "
The little mother was moving towards the door. Her
husband stopped her. " Whither goest thou ? "
" To saddle the ass. I must to Yerushalaim ! "
« Thou ! "
"Who else! Shall that yellow-veiled woman of Mag-
dala give him comfort ? "
" And will he take comfort from thee ? Doth he not
teach his followers to hate their father and their mother ?
And doth he not scoff at the womb that bare him ? "
" Not he, but his demon," she answered obstinately, and
pressed forward again.
His brow grew black. " But it is the Sabbath ! "
" It is my first-born."
" Thou speakest more foolishly than Job's wife. Now
we see whence Yeshua sucked his blasphemies."
" It is my first-born ! " she repeated more frenziedly.
" Thy first-born ! But did he keep to-day the Fast of
the First-born ? "
" Let her go, Yussef," pleaded Halphai. " As Rabbi
Hillel taught (his memory for a blessing), the Sabbath
was handed to man, not man to the Sabbath ! "
" And the wife to the husband," retorted Yussef, " not
the husband to the wife. I forbid thee, Miriam, to disturb
the Passover peace. Go — and I put thee away publicly! "
She blenched and sank back on the divan. " Peace ? "
she moaned. " Thou callest this peace ! "
64 ITALIAN FANTASIES
" Obey thy lord, Miriam ! /will go." And Halphai's
wife stooped and kissed her.
Miriam burst into loud sobs. She caught her sister to
her breast, and the two women mingled their tears.
The carpenter shrugged his shoulders. " Blessed art
Thou, O Lord, who hast not made me a woman," he said
drily.
* * ^ * in
The walls of the little room seemed higher, the light
stronger, the prayer devouter, the company more numerous.
Instead of the two little Sabbath candles and the earthen-
ware dishes, I saw a barbaric blaze of gold and rich stuffs
and jewels, and my eyes blinked before the flames of tall
candles shining in gold candlesticks on a magnificent altar,
in the niche of which stood a black cedar-wood, idol,
crowned and holding a crowned doll, and wrapped in a
marvellous ornate vestment widening out like a bell.
Over my head around the rough, liver-coloured stone
walls hung lamps and bronzes and candles held by Cupids,
and gilded busts, and medallions and hearts and bronze
reliefs and pictures, and even a cannon-ball, and at my
feet surged the white head-shawls of prostrate worshippers,
like a great wave breaking on the crimson steps of the
altar.
And gradually I became aware that the room had now
doors on the right and the left, and these of bronze and
wondrously wrought after the fashion of the Renaissance,
through which a stream of worshippers poured, kissing the
bronze as they passed in and out. And following one
stream and vaguely looking for Miriam and her husband
and the Passover table, I was borne back into the room,
through another door, and now found myself in a narrow
and still more crowded space at the back of the altar, where
the gorgeous jewelled black idol with her doll stood in
her niche in the gleam of ever-burning silver lamps, and
I saw a golden eagle in a yellow sun flying over her head.
THE CARPENTER'S WIFE 65
and over the eagle two gilded angels holding a glittering
wreath, and still higher, through a hole in the roof, as
riding on clouds, a blue-mantled Mother and Child among
a soaring escort of angels, while near the floor I beheld a
large metal box with a yawning slit, into which a kneel-
ing, weeping press of people rained money.
" II Santo Camino, signore ! " said an ingratiating voice,
and looking up I perceived at my side a beadle with a
wand.
" The holy kitchen ? " I repeated in amaze.
" Si^ signore. Here is the hearth at which the Ma-
donna cooked for the Holy Family."
He pointed to the money-box, and I now indeed recog-
nised the fireplace whence Miriam had taken the roasted
bone and egg. But it had moved to another side of the
living-room, unless I was confused by the altar planted in
the place of the Passover table.
" Then this is the house of Nazara ? " I said in a whis-
per, for, dazed as I was, I feared to disturb the worship-
pers.
" Sicuro ! " He smiled reassuringly. " La Santa Casa !
Here the Holy Family abode in the peace and love of the
Holy Ghost. And here there is Plenary Indulgence every
day in the year. Eceo! One of their pots ! " And he
produced a terra-cotta vessel, not unlike one I had seen
the little olive-eyed woman wiping, save that it was lined
with gold and adorned with bas-reliefs of the Manger and
the Annunciation.
" That must have cost money," I murmured feebly.
" (rm," he assented complacently. " And behold the
Madonna Neva., carved by St. Luke. Her attire is worth
1,800,000 lire."
" Come ? " I gasped.
He spurned a sobbing peasant-woman with his foot and
cleared a space with his staff that he might plant me at
the centre of the money-box.
66 ITALIAN FANTASIES
" Fassi,'' he said pleasantly, seeing I hesitated to dis-
place these passionate souls. " Regard the jewels and
precious stones of her robe, the diamonds, emeralds, and
pearls in her crown, the collars of Oriental pearl, the rings,
the crosses of topaz and diamonds, the Bambino's diamond
necklace, the ring on his finger, the medallion with the
great diamonds given by the King of Saxony " He
trolled off the glittering catalogue, on and on, in a joyous,
dominant voice, to which the sighs and groans of the wor-
shippers made an undertone. Countesses and Cardinals,
Popes and jNIarchese had vied in dressing the idol, and
decorating the kitchen. " And you must see the Treas-
ury," he wound up. " Gifts from all the royal houses
of Europe to Our Lady of Loreto ! "
" Loreto ? " I repeated dully.
He looked at me sharply, as at a scoffer.
" But how did the Holy House get to Loreto ? " I added
hastily.
"It was carried by angels," he answered simply.
" But when ? "
" On the night of the tenth of December in tlie year
1294 from tlie bearing of the Virgin."
" Who saw it carried ? "
" You are an Englishman," he answered briefly. " You
shall see it in English."
He made a i)ath through the praying crowd, and I fol-
lowed him without, and ray breath failed me as I became
aware that the Holy House was inclosed in a precious
outer casing of marble, carved with beautiful reliefs of
the life and death of the Virgin, holding all round its
four lofty walls niches with statues of prophets and sybils
and other gleaming altars, each with its surf of worship-
pers, and tliat this marvellous screen, so rich in the work
of the Masters, was itself engirdled by a vast high-domed
church with rich-dyed windows, gilded like a Venetian
palace and full of arches and pillars and altars and chap-
THE CARPENTER'S WIFE 67
els and mosaics and statues and busts and thick-populated
frescoes, while from the centre of the choir windows a
haloed Lady in a blue mantle gazed down upon her
white-hooded ghostly worshippers filling the nave. And
all around her from the interlacing of the arches and from
the painted walls haloes gleamed like a firmament of cres-
cent moons.
" Behold there ! " said the beadle, pointing with his
staff, and I saw that round the projecting base of the
marble walls ran two deep parallel furrows. " Worn in
the stone by the knees of six centuries of pilgrims," he
said pleasantly. " Of course there are not many to-day,
being an ordinary Sunday, but in the year there are a
hundred thousand, and in the season of the pilgrimages,
or on the Feast of the Assumption " An expressive
gesture wound up the sentence.
We passed along the aisles, just peeping into the
copious chapels, all pervaded by the ubiquitous Maria in
picture or mosaic, in statue or bas-relief — Maria Immac-
ulate, Maria the Virgin, Maria the Mother of God, Maria
the Compassionate, Maria the Mediatress, Maria Crowned ;
and the marriage of Maria, and her death, and the visit to
Elizabeth, and the Annunciation, and her family tree, and
the disputes of the Sorbonne over the dogmas concerning
her. And as we walked the organ began pealing, and
priests and choristers chanted.
" Uceo ! " cried the beadle, as he stopped in the left aisle
and pointed to a great black-framed slate between two
altars. " In your own English ! "
I looked and read the headline of white letters :
" The Wondrous Flitting of the Kirk of our Blest Ledy
of Lavreto."
Underneath ran in parallel columns these two sentences :
" By decree of the Meikle Werthy Monsignor Vincent
Casal of Bolonia Ruler of This Helly Place Vnder the
protection of the Mest Werthy Cardinal Moroni."
68 ITALIAN FANTASIES
" I Robert Corbington Priest of the Companie of Jesvs
in the Zeir MDCXXXV Heve Trvlie translated the prem-
isses of the Latin Storie Hangged vp in the seyd Kirk."
And underneath these parallel statements were the
words, "To the Praise and (llorie of the Mest Pvre and
Immaculate Virgin."
Then began the story proper :
" The Kirk of Lavreto was a caumber of the hovse of
the blest Virgin near Jerusalem in the to wne of Nazaret in
which she was borne and treined vp and greeted of the
angel and hairin also Conceaved and norislit har sonne
Jesvs."
My eye ran impatiently over these known details and
lighted at a lower point of the great dimly-lit slate.
" Pavl de Sylva an eremyt of micle godliness, wha
woned in a cell near by this Kirk whair dail}^ he went to
mattins, seyd that for ten zcirs, one the eight of Septem-
ber, twelve hovrs before day, he saw a light descend frera
heaven vpon it, whilk he said was by the bu weathair
shawed har selfe [si'e] one the feest of har birth. In proof
of all whilk twa verteous men of the seyd towne of Re-
canah many times avowed to me Rvler of Terreman and
Govenor of the forseyd Kirk as foUoweth. Ane of them,
nemmed Pavle Renallvci, affirmed that his grandsyres
grandsyre sawe when the angels broght it over sea setting
it in the forseyd wood and hed oft frequented it thair, the
other nemmed Francis Prior sicklik seyd that his Grand-
syre, being a hunder and twaintie zeirs awd hed also
meikle havnted it in the same place and for a mere svr
testimony that it had beine thair he reported that his
grandsyres grandsyre hed a hovse beside it wharin he
dwelled and that in his dayes it was beared by the angels
frae thence to the hill of they tweye brothers whar they
set it as seyd. ..."
" The angels seem to have carried it about more than
once," I interrupted.
THE CARPENTER'S WIFE 69
" (rta," said the beadle. " At first they placed it on the
hill of Picino, in a grove of laurels which bowed before it
and remained in adoration. But so many thieves and
assassins took cover under them to plunder the pious
pilgrims of their offerings that the laurels raised their
heads again, and after a stay of only eight months the
Holy House moved."
" And came here ? "
" Not yet. It moved first to a pleasant hill belonging
to the brothers Artici, ancestors of Leopardi."
" Ah, the hill of they tweye brothers," I murmured.
" But the treasure heaped upon it dazzled them. They
might have fought over it like Cain and Abel. So the
house moved on."
"And yet even Leopardi chanted the Madonna," I
said.
" Lo credo,'''' said the beadle, unastonished. " And there
is still an inscription on the hill, but it does not console
the neighbourhood any more than the chapel at Ravinizza."
" The chapel at Ravinizza ? "
" Did I not say ? That Avas where it stopped first —
near Dalmatia."
" Quite a wandering Jew-house," I murmured.
" That was in 1291, when the Holy Land fell into the
power of the Infidel."
" Ah, that was why it left Palestine ! "
" Naturally. And you may imagine the agony of the
Dalmatians when they returned from the Crusades to find
the Holy House no longer in Ravinizza, Even to-day the
pilgrims sail out in little boats singing, ' Return to us,
Maria, with thy house ! ' But how could it return to
Dalmatia, seeing that seventy-five years before it left
Palestine the blessed St. Francis had fore-told its coming
here by his word Picenvm, which is a region on our side
of the Adriatic, and being, moreover, interpreted by Latin
scholars is a prophetic acrostic ? "
70 ITALIAN FANTASIES
" It seems a pity the house did not come straight to
Loreto," I ventured.
" We are fortunate it did not go straight back to Naza-
reth after the battle of Lepanto," he said simply. "It
was after Our Lady's victory over the Turks that this
marble screen was placed around it. Here is the Treasury."
And thrusting roughly through the press of congregants,
he opened a door and ushered me into a palatial room
where under the ceiling-frescoes of Pomerancio of Pesaro
I saw what seemed a vast bazaar of every precious article
known to humanity.
"The New Treasury," he said apologetically. "The
old treasure was seized by Napoleon. It was worth
96,000,000 lire." He looked sad.
" And how much is this worth ? "
"Only 4,000,000." And the unctuous catalogue re-
commenced. A Genoese family had given this case of
jewellery ; it was worth 100,000 lire. These were the
copes and vestments of Pio Nono (150,000 lire). This
was the diadem of ]\Iaria, Queen of Spain, wife of Carlo
IV. — behold the amethysts, the brilliants, the rubies.
These Oriental pearls were from the Princess of Wiirtem-
berg. Each pearl cost 150,000 lire and there were forty-
three pearls — the signore could calculate for himself.
This diamond tiara with an Oriental pearl in the centre
was given by ]\Iaria Louisa, Duchessa di Parma. It was
worth 420,000 lire.
" ]{estoring some of her first husband's plunder," I inter-
rupted.
'■'■Gid. And the Madonna Neva was given back too.
And this pearl and gold covering for her is from Maria
Theresa, Archduchess of Austria. It is worth 12,000
lire. And Giuseppe Napoleon's wife gave us this mon-
strance. And this cup is from Prince Maximilian of
Austria, and these regalia "
The list went on, and I studied a coral model of the
THE CARPENTER'S WIFE 71
Santa Casa with the mother and son riding on the roof,
while from the church came a boy's voice soaring heaven-
ward.
" And do you refuse offerings from those who are not
royal ? " I broke in at last.
" Ah, no," he said seriously. " See ! In that glass case
are a thousand rings from a thousand pilgrims, and this
standard is from a pilgrim of Budapest, and this little
wooden ship — the Maria — was given by a sailor, and this
pearl showing the Madonna and her Son was found inside
a fish by a fisherman, and these ornaments painted with the
juice of grass are the work of priests, and this beautiful
bronze candelabrum was given by the Guild of Blacksmiths
of Bologna. A Capuchin father from South America
brought us these great bouquets of flowers made of the
wings of Brazilian birds, and a Roumanian noble this
little Byzantine brass Madonna, and Prince Carraciolo of
Naples "
'■'' Basta ! ^'' I cried hurriedly, for he was back in the
" Almanach de Gotha," and, slipping a large piece of silver
with a royal portrait on it into his hand, I moved towards
the door.
His face shone. " But you have not seen the cups in the
Santa Casa from which the Holy Family drank. And
their little bells, and "
"I have seen enough," I said.
" And the cannon-ball," he went on in undiminished
gratitude. " The cannon-ball which shattered the pavil-
ion of Pope Julius II. when he was besieging a city,
but which by the grace of the Blessed Virgin left him
un "
I escaped into the crowd of snooded peasant women
and worked my way along the aisle till I stood outside
the portal under a gigantic Madonna and Child.
But the beadle was beside me.
" Go and look at the Fontana deUa Santa Casa." And
72 ITALIAN FANTASIES
he pointed in parting gratitude to the centre of the
piazza. ^'Bellismna ! "
I did not go, but I looked at the great marble fountain
with its grotesque beasts and Cupids and basins, and
remembering the humble village fountain at which the
carpenter's daughter had filled her urn, I turned sharply
to the right and found myself descending a long sordid
street of sliops and stalls, all doing a busy trade — despite
the Sunday — in crosses, rosaries, crucifixes, chaplets,
picture-postcards, medals, and all the knick-knacks of
holiness. Sometimes through open windows of the ugly
one-storey houses I caught sight of the landscape below
— the path descending to the sea, bordered with butter-
cups and a-flutter with birds, the rolling olive-plains,
the strip of blue sea, the wonderful headland. Never had
I seen a lovelier view shut out by meaner buildings. With
its patches of refuse and its dreary shops and booths it seems
the ugliest street in all Italy, bearing on its face the mark
of its bastard origin — a city grown up not from natural
healthy human life, but for the exploitation of a miracle.
And this it was that drew gold like water from the
crowned heads of Europe. And this it was that had
drawn hither even Descartes, the first Apostle of Philo-
sophic Doubt. Surely " Non cogito, ergo sum," is the
motto of Faith, I thought.
*****
I stood in a vast ancient market-place among canvas-
covered stalls, by a lovely fountain with a smiling little
Bacchus that faced an old cathedral, and I gazed like ten
thousand others at a lovely open-air pulpit tliat rose in
the shadow of a tall campanile. From a bronze capital
it rose, girdled with beautiful marble reliefs of dancing
children by Donatello and protected from the sun by a
charming circular roof, and in this delectable coign of
vantage stood a priest holding something that fevered
the perspiring mob.
THE CARPENTER'S WIFE 73
" La sacra cintola ! La sacra cintola ! "
I knew what the Virgin's girdle would be like, for had
I not seen her handing it to St. Thomas in Lippo Lippi's
picture in this same town of Prato, as she flew up to
heaven in the radiance of her youth and beauty, standing
on cherubs' heads and escorted by angels ? But now so
far as I could see this tasselled belt, it seemed to corre-
spond ill with the waist measurement of the little mother
of Nazara.
Some white pigeons fluttered round the priest's head
and settled on the pulpit, and a great sigh of ecstasy
went up from the people.
I looked round at the little Bacchus. But he was still
smiling.
I stood before an altar in a little church, but this time
a sweet-faced woman in a wimple stood beside me.
" The wall is behind the altar," she said. " And once
a year the miraculous image of the Madonna of the Bed
is shown to the people of Pistoja and the pilgrims,
exactly as Our Lady of the Graces impressed it on this
piece of wall here when she appeared to the sick girl.
Very beautiful is she in her crown and mantle, clasping
to her arms the crowned Bambino as she flies upwards."
" And where is the bed ? "
" The bed was removed from this sanctuary, which it
blocked up disproportionately. A separate little chapel
was built for it."
We passed to the bed-chapel by way of the old cloisters
of the Ospedale, and saw in a small room a heavy brown-
ish wooden bed with a red quilt, made as for an occupant.
A Madonna and Child was painted on the headpiece,
and a Madonna and Child at the foot, and a Madonna and
Child hung on the wall.
" And when was the miracle wrought ? " I asked.
"In 1336."
74 ITALIAN FANTASIES
The very year of the death of Cino, the poet of Pistoja
and the friend of Dante, I remembered. And Dante and
Cino had receded into the dim centuries while this bed with
its prosaic quilt and pillows stood stolid, inscribed at head and
foot with inscriptions dated 1336 and 1334, begging me to
pray for the souls of Condoso Giovanni and Fra Ducchio.
" Here," explained the sweet faced sister, "the poor girl
had lain many long years, incurable, when one day the Virgin
appeared in dazzling beauty, holding the Child, and told
two little boys who happened to be in the hospital to fetch
brother Jacopo della Cappa. The venerable brother, be-
ing busy confessing, refused to be disturbed, whereupon
the Virgin sent a second message bidding him come at
once, for she desired him to predict a pestilence in Pistoja,
of which he would die in a month. So he came forthwith,
but he had scarcely entered the room when the dazzling
apparition disappeared. But she left the invalid girl in
perfect health, and her holy image on the wall."
" And did Fra Jacopo duly die ? "
" To the day. And so great was the plague that there
was scarcely any one left to administer the last office."
" As disproportionate as the bed to the church," I
thought, " to kill off all Pistoja and save one bedridden
girl." But how utter such a thought to this sweet-faced
sister ?
" Since then the bed and the image on the wall have
wrought many miracles," she said. " The blind have had
their siglit, the deaf their hearing, the paralysed their limbs.
That was why the name was changed from Our Lady of the
Bed to Our Lady of the Graces. And countless were the pil-
grims that came. But in 1780 the wicked Scipione Ricci,
who was a secret Jansenist, was made our bishop, and he
tried to destroy the faith in our sanctuary and in the Girdle
of Prato. But our neighbours of Prato rose against him,
rushed into the cathedral, smashed his episcopal chair, and
sacked his palace. He liad to resign his bishopric, and
THE CARPENTER'S WIFE 75
so our faith was purged of the heretic, and Maria was
avenged. Ah, that jubilee of her Immaculate Conception
in 190-1 ! It was a day of Paradise."
*****
Again a haze disturbs my vision. For a moment I see
the little olive-eyed Jewess of Nazara, racked between
husband and son, wringing her impotent hands ; then my
vision clears, and I am reading a printed Italian prayer
before a chapel of the Madonna in a mighty fane.
"To THE Holy Immaculate Virgin of Hope Vene-
rated IN the Basilica op S. Frediano
" Kneeling before you, Immaculate Virgin, Mother of
God, consoler of the afflicted, refuge of sinners, we pray
you to turn upon us your looks full of goodness, com-
passion, and love. Yon see all our spiritual and temporal
needs. Obtain from your divine Son sincere contrition
for sin, light to know the truth, force to conquer temp-
tations, help to believe and act as true Christians, patience
in tribulations, peace of heart, holy perseverance to the
end. Obtain for us that there may remain far from us
disease, pestilence, hunger, war, earthquakes, fires, drought,
flood, sudden death. Take this City under your particular
protection, preserve it, defend it, cause ever to reign therein
the spirit of religion and of concord, and in private
families mutual charity, domestic content, and good
morals. . . . Whoever will devoutly recite this will
acquire forty days' Indulgence already conceded by His
most Reverend Excellence Monsignore the Archbishop
Filippo Santi.
''Lucca, 1818."
*****
I seemed to be back in Asia on a burning June day
fifteen hundred years before this prayer was written,
much pushed about by the crowd that surged round a
church.
76 ITALIAN FANTASIES
"Is it the Whitsuntide service?" I asked a priest at
last in the Greek I heard on all sides.
" Nay ; art a barbarian or a worshipper of the Temple
of Diana that thou knowest not the Church of the Theo-
tokos, and the great Imperial Council of Bishops that is
sitting there to avenge the insults of Nestorius to the
Virgin ? "
" What insults ? " I murmured.
" Surely thou hast snored in the cave in the Pion Hill
with our Seven Sleepers ! This blasphemous Patriarch
of Constantinople denies Our Lady the title Theotokos,
would argue that she is not Mother of God, but that the
Christ born through her was only the human part of Him,
not the Eternal Logos." His voice trembled, his beady
eyes flamed with passion. " And he dares come defend
his thesis here — in Ephesus, where the Holy Virgin lies
buried ! But our saintly Cyril of Alexandria hath drawn
up twelve anathemas and will stamp him out as he
stamped out that minx Hypatia."
" Is Cyril here too, then ? "
" Ay, and what an ambrosial homily he preached ! ' Hail,
Mary, Mother of God, spotless dove ! Hail, Mary, per-
petual lamp at which was kindled the Sun of Justice !
Hail, Mary ! Thanks to Thee, the archangels rejoice and
sing ; thanks to Thee, the Magi followed the star ; thanks
to Thee the college of Apostles was established. . . .'"
His voice died away in reminiscent ecstasy.
" Then Cyril and Nestorius are now in debate ? "
"Nay, the heretic shrinks from appearing — he pretexts
that all the bishops are not arrived, and he induced the
Emperor's commissioner to protest against the sitting.
But as thou seest, the Council is going on — hath been
going on from early morn — there are two hundred
bishops."
" There are only a hundred and fifty," put in a voice.
" It is scandalous."
THE CARPENTER'S WIFE 77
" Ay," assented another voice. " Where is the Patri-
arch of Antioch ? "
The priest turned on the Nestorians. " It is beasts like
you with whom Paul fought here," he said.
" Beast thyself," retorted a physician in a long robe,
"to suggest that God could be contained in the womb."
It was the beginning of a scuffle that grew to a bloody
battle between the Nestorian minority and the orthodox.
Daggers and scimitars gleamed in the air. I saw a group
of Nestorians take refuge in a church, but fly from it
again, leaving a trail of bleeding corpses along the aisle.
The survivors made for the harbour, hoping doubtless for
safety in the multitude of boats and ships.
And ever thicker grew the crowd surging round the
Council-chamber, till at last as the long summer day
closed, a rumbling as of distant thunder was heard from
within — " Anathema ! Anathema ! " And the cry passed
to the crowd — " Anathema I Anathema ! " — till the
whole firmament seemed to crash and rock with it and
men cheered and danced and tossed their weapons in air.
And as the venerable figures began to troop out and the
word came that Nestorius was deposed, a thousand torches
leapt as by magic into flame, and men escorted the
Bishops to their lodgings, leaping and singing, and lo !
round the whole city blazed illuminations and bonfires.
And my eyes, piercing through the future, beheld Italian
hottegas with immortal Masters and Pupils, turning out
through the centuries portraits of the Madonna and Child,
to be blazoned henceforward inseparable, a symbol of the
true faith : delectable, innumerable, filling the whole earth
with their glory.
^ ^ ^ ^ ife
The close smell of the studios gave way again to the
odour of crowded humanity and I was in the arena of
Seville. But never, not even at Easter, had I seen the
populace so joyous, the ladies shrouded in such rich
78 ITALIAN FANTASIES
mantillas or flirting such precious fans, the picadors so
gaily caparisoned, the toreadors so daring, the bulls mad-
dened with so many banderillas or disembowelling so
many horses. It was the mutual ecstasy of slaughter.
And from all parts of the city penetrated the chiming of
bells, while the thunder of festive cannon sometimes
drowned even the roar of the ring. And at every thrill-
ing stroke or perilous charge there came irom parted lips,
'■'■Ave Maria piirissima,^^ or " Viva nuestra Senora,^^ and
from all around rose the instinctive reply : " Sin peccado
coneebida."
Gradually, as I listened to the conversation in the in-
tervals of the bull fights, I became aware of the sense of
the Fiesta. All this overflow of religious rapture sprang
not from the bulls but the Bull — Regis Pacifici — which
after centuries of passionate controversy had at last been
launched by Paul V. in this sixteen hundred and seven-
teenth year from the bearing of the Virgin, forbidding the
opponents of Immaculate Conception to sustain their
doctrine in public. Maria had been conceived without
sin. The last flaw had been removed from her perfec-
tion.
" Heaven rewards us for expelling the last of the Moors,"
cried a lovely Seiiora with a dazzling flash of eyes and
teeth. " And now that we have purged Spain and placed
her and her mighty possessions under the protection of the
Immaculate Conception, her future shall be even more
glorious than her past."
But my reply was drowned by the roar of the ring as
the dead bull was trailed off at a gallop.
" Ave Maria purissima ! "
" Sin peccado coneebida ! "
* » * * »
I am still in Spain, watching Senor Bartholome Est6ban
Murillo polish off his Madonnas for country fairs or South
American convents. Presently under the guidance of
THE CARPENTER'S WIFE 79
Senor Pacheco, Holy Inquisitor of pictures, he paints the
popular dogma of the day, in the shape of little angels
floating below a lovely lady in a blue mantle standing
with clasped hands on the earth-ball, and the scene shifts
to France where two centuries later the picture is pur-
chased at a fabulous price by the Louvre just before Pio
Nono from his refuge at Gaeta publishes the Bull Ineffabilis,
definitely declaring that the freedom of the Virgin from
original sin is a divine revelation. Cheap coloured pictures
of the "Immaculate Conception" multiply, and Bernadette,
a pious young shepherdess in the French Pyrenees, beholds
in a grotto by a spring a White Lady, veiled from head
to foot, with a cerulean floating scarf, a chaplet with
golden links, and two golden roses on her naked feet, who
announces herself as " The Immaculate Conception " and
demands a Procession to her shrine.
And before my eyes unrolls the long panorama, painted
in immortal colours by the epical brush of Zola : the
mushroom Lourdes of hotels and holy shops replacing
the rude village, the Hospital of Our Lady of Sorrows,
the crowned statue of Our Lady of Salvation, the Fathers
of the Grotto, the Blue Sisters, the Church of the Rosary,
the Basilica swathed in splendid banners, glittering with
golden hearts innumerable, and jewels and marbles and
marvellous lamps ; the unending masses and litanies, the
three hundred thousand pilgrims a year, the thaumaturgic
bathing pools, unclean, abominable, the White Train roll-
ing through the night with its hideous agglomeration of
human agonies, amid ecstatic canticles to the Madonna,
the thirty thousand tapers winding round in leagues of
flame to the rhythm of interminable invocations, the per-
petual thunder of supplication breaking frenziedly on the
figure of the Madonna framed in the ever-blazing Grotto.
*****
The thunder continued, but it was again the roar of an
arena, though by the towered old palaces round the great
80 ITALIAN FANTASIES
semi-circle of cobbled piazza and by the fountain with the
bas-relieifs of Christian virtues I knew I was back in Italy, in
my beloved Siena. But what was this smoky flame that
shot skyward, and what was this tree near the Christian
fountain that they were breaking up to throw on the bon.
lire ? What was this dreadful sport that had replaced the
Palio?
In a vast pyre burnt a great huddle of writhing figures,
whose shrieks were drowned by the fiendish roar of the
drunken mob.
" llva Maria ! Viva Maria ! "
And I remembered that Siena had peculiarly dedicated
itself to the Holy jNIother was the scivitas Virginis^ and
that the Madonna was its feudal suzerain, formally pre-
sented with the keys of its gates. Visions from the old
chronicles floated before me — the dedication of 1260, the
weeping Syndic in his shirt, a rope round his neck, pros-
trate with the Bishop before the altar of the Virgin, or
walking behind her as she was carried in the great bare-
foot procession to the chanting of Ave Marias ; and the
victory over Florence that duly followed, when, throwing
her white mantle of mist over her city, she enabled her
faithful feudatories to slay ten thousand Florentines " as
a butcher slays animals in a slaughter house," so that
the Malena ran bank-high with blood, and the region,
polluted by the carcases of eighteen thousand horses, was
abandoned to the wild beasts, and coins were struck i^i
her honour ; and the renewed dedications whenever the
Commune was in peril, the gorgeous processions and "Te
Deums," the great silk standard showing the Madonna
rising into heaven over the city, the Cardinal, the Prior,
the Captain of the People, the Signoria in violet and
cloaked as on Good Friday, the trumpeters trumpeting in
the striped Duomo, the feudal keys in a silver basin, the
fifty poor damsels in white, dowered annually so long as
the Virgin did her duty as suzerain
THE CARPENTER'S WIFE 81
But the shrieks from the bonfire brought me back to the
moment.
" Whom are they burning ? " I cried in horror.
" Only Jews," replied my neighbour reassuringly, and
indeed, I could now distinguish the Hebrew death-cries
of the victims.
"Hear, O Israel, the Lord Our God, the Lord is One."
" We burn them and the Tree of Liberty together ! "
my neighbour chuckled. " No godless French Republic
for us ! " A fierce yell from the crowd underlined his
remark. He craned forward, beaming, exalted.
" They have found another ! O Blessed Virgin of
Comfort, they have found another ! "
And I perceived, dragged along towards the pyre by her
greying hair, a little olive-eyed Jewish mother, whose worn
face I seemed to recognise under her dishevelled head-shawl.
" Viva Maria ! Viva Maria ! Viva la Madre di Dio ! "
* If: ^ * ¥/:
The spectacle was too horrible. With a convulsive
shudder I shook off these visions and rose, cramped, to my
feet. The sun was dipping beyond the mountains of
Vicenza, the peaceful bell from below was still tolling, the
air was cool and delicious. Now I could continue my
climb to the church of Our Lady of the Mountain. And
the loving epithets recommenced — " Debellatrix Incre-
dulorum^^ '■'•Janua Goeli^'' " Turris Davidica,^^ without
pause, without end. And as I walked, other of her count-
less names began crowding upon me, from " Our Lady of
Snows," to " Our Lady of Sorrows," from " Our Lady of
the Porringer " to " The Queen of the Angels," and all the
symbols of her, from the Pomegranate to the Sealed Book,
from the Dove to the Porta Clausa ; and all the myriads
of churches and altars that had been dedicated to her from
Rome to Ecuador — from Milan Cathedral with its hun-
dred spires to the humblest wayside shrine of Sicily or
Mexico — and all the feasts, all the " Months of Maria,"
82 ITALIAN FANTASIES
all the Pilgrimages, with all the medals and missals, all
the elligies in wood or wax or bronze, all the marbles and
mosaics, from the crude little black sacrosanct Byzantine
figures to the exquisitely tender marble Pieta of Michel-
angelo, and all the convents and orders she had created,
all the Enfants de Marie, and Serviti di Maria, and Sisters
of the Immaculate Conception, and all the hymns, anti-
phons, litanies, lections, carols, canticles. The air was full
of organ sounds and the melody of soaring voices. " Ave
Maris Stella " they sang, and " Salve Regina," and " Stabat
Mater," and then in an infinite incantation, sounding and
resounding from all the spaces of the world : " Sa7icta
Maria^ ora pro nobis ! Sancta Maria^ ora pro nobis ! "
And her figure floated before me, pure, radiant, loving, as
it has floated before millions of households for hundreds of
years, consoling, blessing, vitalising.
And I thought of her long adventure to reach this
marvellous apotheosis : in what a strange little source this
mighty river had begun ; how that looseness of the
Septuagint translator in rendering the Hebrew for
" maiden " by " virgin " in an utterly irrelevant passage of
Isaiah had led to i\Iar3''s virginity ; how she had remained
a virgin through all the vicissitudes of her married life,
Joseph turning into a man of eighty with children by his
former wife, or even remaining virgin himself, the brothers
of Jesus changing into his cousins ; how her son had been
born as a ray of light or even as an illusive appearance ;
how, with the growth of theology and Mariolatry and
nunneries and monasteries, she had grown holier and
holier, immaculate, impeccable, a model to men and
maidens, the Queen of Heaven, mighty beyond all the
saints, giving four feast-days to the Church, entering into
the liturgy, redeeming souls from purgatory on Assump-
tion Day, and even sustaining the saintly with her milk ;
how her final ])urification from the taint of original sin had
been a stumbling block for the more rigid theologians, St.
THE CARPENTER'S WIFE 83
Bernard opposing the festival, Aquinas and the Dominicans
denying the dogma against Duns Scotus and the Francis-
cans ; but how the " intellectuals " — so serviceable to
the mob when their logic found contorted reasons for the
popular faith — were sooner or later swept aside, the harsh
definers of heresy themselves left heretics, when they ran
counter to the popular emotion, the popular festivals, the
popular instinct for an ideal of purity and perfection.
What a curious play and interplay of schoolman-logic and
living emotion, working ceaselessly through the centuries,
combining or competing to re-shape and sublimate the
carpenter's wife till she was wrought to the mould of the
popular need, her very parents, unknown to the Gospels,
becoming, as Joachim and Anna, the centre of a fresh
cycle of legends, pictures, Church festivals. And what
uncountable volumes of monumental learning and jejune
controversy, from Augustus and Anselm and the venerable
Bede to the two thousand and twelve pages of Carlo
Passaglia of Lucca, the respondent to Renan!
And my thoughts turned from the theologians to the
poets and painters, to the Vergine Bella e di sol vestita —
the beautiful Apocalyptic Virgin, clothed with the sun —
of Petrarch, and the weeping Virgin of Tasso, and the
Vergine Madre Figlia del tuo Figlio of Dante, and the
images in all these forms created by the artists, for whom
the Madonna sufficed to open all the mansions of art ;
who could cluster all the poetry of the world round her
glory or her grief, were it rural loveliness or the beauty of
lilies, or lofty architecture, or space-rhythm, or begemmed
and brocaded attire, or the sculptural nude ; who set her
rich-carved throne, adorned with arabesques or hued in
strange green and gold, amid palatial pillars under diapered
ceilings or within glamorous landscapes, or in the bowers
of roses or under the shadow of lemon-trees ; who even
crowned her with the Papal tiara.
But none of these images would stay with me : for not
84 ITALIAN FANTASIES
even the triple crown, surmounted by the golden globe
and cross, not even this symbol of temporal, spiritual, and
purgatorial authority, could banish the worn face of the
carpenter's wife under the cheap head-shawl, the little
olive-eyed mother in Israel, in whose ears sounded and
resounded the terrible words : " Woman, what have I to
do with thee ? "
THE EARTH THE CENTRE OF THE UNIVERSE :
OR THE ABSURDITY OF ASTRONOMY
From the swinging of the bronze lamp in the nave of
Pisa Cathedral Galileo caught the idea of measuring Time
by the pendulum ; by the telescope he made at Padua
he mapped Space. Within a decade of the burning of
Giordano Bruno the heavens were opened up to show
the infinity of worlds, and the heliocentric teaching of
Copernicus was confirmed by the revelation of Jupiter's
satellites. What the " Sidereus Nuncius " of Galileo an-
nounced was the end of an era. By this terrible book and
his terrible telescope the poor little earth was pushed out
of the centre of the stage. The moon — no longer teres
atque rotuyida — lost her beautiful spheric smoothness, her
very light was a loan — unrepaid. Great Sol, himself,
the old lord of creation, gradually sank to the obscure
coryphaeus of some choric dance veering towards and
around some ineffable pivot in a measureless choragium.
The ninefold vault engirdling Dante's universe was
shrivelled up. The cosy cosmos was replaced by a maze
of solar systems, glory beyond glory, of milky ways that
were but clouds of worlds, thick as a haze of summer
insects or a whirl of sand in the Sahara. The poor human
brain reeled in this simoom of stars, and to complete its
confusion, the philosophers hastened to assure it that with
the universe no longer geocentric, man could no longer
flatter himself to be its central interest.
" So many nobler bodies to create,
Greater, so manifold, to this one use,"
85
86 ITALIAN FANTASIES
appeared disproportionate to Milton's Adam. Homo
could not be the Master-Builder's main concern — the
great human tragedy was a by-product. A sad con-
clusion, and possibly a true — but a conclusion utterly
unwarranted by these premises. More sanely did the
beneficent and facile Raphael remind the doubting Adam,
" Whether heaven moves or earth
Imports not."
The noble astronomic questionings in the eighth book of
"Paradise Lost" testify to the ferment among the first
inhabitants of the new cosmos — Milton was born in the
same year as the telescope and met Galileo at Florence —
but despite the poet's half-hearted protests, man has
swallowed too humbly the doctrine that our earth is not
the centre of the universe. Pray do not confound me with
those pious pundits whose proofs of the flatness of the
earth are still the hope of a lingering sect, and a witness
to the immortality of human stupidity. I am no Muggle-
tonian whose sun is four miles from the earth. I have no
lance to tilt against the mathematicians and their tubes.
But I fail to see how the mere broadening out of our uni-
verse can displace Terra from the centre. Till we have
the final and all-inclusive chart of the heavens — and
worlds immeasurable are still beyond our ken, worlds
whose light speeding to us at eleven million miles or
so a minute is still on its waj"" — how can any one assert
conclusively that our earth is not in the exact centre of
all the systems ? That it goes round the sun — instead of
being the centre of the sun's revolution — is nothing
against its supremacy or central status. The fire exists
for the meat, though the spit revolves and not the fire.
And if the earth be not in the centre of the systems, it
assuredly remains at the centre of Space. For by that
old definition of Hermes Trismegistus to which Pascal
gave currency, every point of an infinite area is really its
THE EARTH THE CENTRE 87
centre, even as no point is its circumference. And in a
psychological sense too, wherever a spectator stands is the
centre of the universe.
But grant the earth be not the centre of Space or the
systems ! What then ? How does it lose its lofty estate?
Is London at the globe's kernel ? Did the axis pass
through Rome ? Kepler wasted much precious time under
the current philosophic obsession that the orbits of the
planets must be circular — since any figure less perfect
than a circle were incompatible with their dignity.
Hence the cumbrous hypotheses to explain their apparent
deviation from perfection, hence was the sphere girt
" With centric and eccentric scribbled o'er,
Cycle and epicycle, orb in orb."
The same fallacy of symmetry surely underlies the
notion that the earth is dethroned from its hegemony of
the stellar system merely because the lines drawn to it from
every ultima Thule of the universe are unequal. 'Tis a
confusion of geometric centre with centre of forces. It
may be that just this asymmetric station was necessary for
the evolution of the universe's crowning race.
For if the Universe has not its aim and centre in man,
pray to what other end all this planetary pother? If man
is but a by-product of the cosmic laboratory, what is the
staple ? Till this question is answered, we may safely
continue anthropocentric.
Man abased forsooth by this whirl of mammoth worlds!
Nay, 'tis our grandeur that stands exalted, our modesty
that stands corrected. We did not dream that our facture
required such colossal machinery, that to engender us a
billion billion planets must be in experimental effervescence.
A fig upon their size ! Do we rank Milton inferior to the
megatherium ? Can a man take thought by adding a
cubit to his stature ? The ant is wiser than the alligator,
and the sprawling saurians of the primal slime may have
88 ITALIAN FANTASIES
their analogue in the huge weltering worlds that have
never evolved a human brain. And had the earth swollen
herself to the gross amplitude of the sun, her case were
no better : she would still be — in the infinite wash of
Space — a pebble, even as a pebble is a stellar system in
miniature. There lies the paradox of infinity. Nothing
in it is large enough to be important — if quantity is the
criterion of importance. To be in one spot of Space is as
dignified or undignified as to be in another. Why, I
wonder, has position in Time escaped tliis invidious criti-
cism. As well assert that nothing important can happen
or nothing that happens can be important, because every-
thing must happen at a mere point of Time, which is not
even Time's central point. It was a truer sense of values
that made Christendom and Islam boldly place their
foundation at Time's central point, up to which or back
to which all the ages lead. The year One begins with
Christ's birth, with Mohammed's Hegira. In the same
spirit, though with a more literal belief, did the old car-
tographers draw their world round Jerusalem as a centre.
Position in Time or Space is not the measure of impor-
tance, but importance is the measure of position in Time
or Space. Where the highest life is being lived, there is
the centre of the world, and unless a higher life is lived
elsewhere, the centre of the universe. Not, where are we
in Space, but are we on tlie central lines of cosmic evolu-
tion ? That is the question.
Theology, then, stands where it did, wherever Terra
stands. Not the mythical theology of sacred books, but
the scientific theology of sacred facts. The expansion of
the universe from a mapped parish to a half-uncharted
wilderness of worlds cannot shake religion — a Deity is
more suitably lodged in infinity than on a roof-garden —
but it did shake the Church, so recklessly committed to a
disprovable cosmogony. And the Church burnt books
and men with its habitual consuming zeal, denying the
THE EARTH THE CENTRE 89
motion of the earth as it had denied the Antipodes, cling-
ing to an earth surrounded by menial planets, as it had
clung to the flat plane of " Christian Topography."
But is there nothing to be said for the Churchmen ?
Were they mere venomous obscurantists ? Nay, they
were patriots fighting for their father-world, for the cos-
mos of their ancestors, jpro aris et focis. They saw their
little universe threatened by the rise of a great stellar
empire. They saw themselves about to be swallowed up
and lost in its measureless magnificence. And so in a
frenzy of chauvinism they gagged Galileo and burned
Giordano Bruno, those traitors in the camp, in league
with Reason, emperor of the stars.
But despite the Church's defeat, our little globe still
maintains a sturdy independence. And until you bring
me evidence of a superior genus I shall continue to regard
our good red earth as the centre of creation, and man as
the focus of intercelestial planetary forces.
Millions of spiritual creatures may walk the earth un-
seen, as Milton asserts, and millions more may be invisible
in Mars and the remoter seats of the merry-go-round, but
de non apparentibus et de non existentihus eadem est ratio.
It is William James who of all philosophers in the world
would argue our fates regulated by superior beings with
whom we co-exist as with us our cats and dogs. The anal-
ogy has not even one leg to stand on. The cat and the
dog have solid proof of our existence, they see and hear
us, and we share with them a large segment of existence.
Our anatomy and theirs are much of a muchness. They
divide with us our food and our drink and bask at the
same fire, nay, it requires a vast conceit to look them in
the face and deny our kinship. But who save Gulliver
hath beheld a bodily Superman or partaken of his meals?
Even with our spiritual superiors, with our Shakespeares
and Beethovens, we have a substantial basis of identity.
The range of thought which circumscribes ours must at
90 ITALIAN FANTASIES
the same time partially coincide with it, and though our
thoughts be not wholly their thoughts, their thoughts must
needs be partially ours.
God may be infinitely more than man, but He is not
finitely less. Even a God without humour would be — to
that extent — man's inferior. Matthew Arnold's gibe of
the " magnified non-natural man " is groundless. I do
not become a magnified non-natural dog because I have
attributes in common with my terrier. The God of the-
ology is already divested of man's matter ; deflate Him
likewise of man's spirit, and what remains ? In robbing
their Deity of all human traits the de-anthropomorphic
philosophers have overshot the mark and reduced Him to a
transcendental nullity who can neither be comprehended
by His creatures nor comprehend them.
Or if they allow Him ideas and passions, they neutralise
and sterilise them in a frenzy of scholastic paradox.
" Amas, nee cestuas^"" cries St. Augustine, " zelas et securus
es ; pcenitet te et non doles; irasceris et tranquiUus e«."
God repents, but without regret ; He is angr}^ but perfectly
tranquil. To evade the limitations of any attribute we
endow Him at the same time with its opposite, as who
should say a white negro. But such violent assaults upon
the unthinkable yield no prize either of understanding or
of satisfaction.
If "the love that moves the sun and the other stars"
be not that same love which a noble man may feel for his
fellow-creatures of every order of being, if it be a love
that is at the same time indifference, or even hate, then it
may equally be expressed as " the hate which moves the
sun and the other stars " (and which is at the same time
love). Or it may find far honester expression as the
agnostic's unknowable — the X that moves the sun and
the other stars. If God's justice be not man's justice,
then it is no justice. It must be our justice — if it is
justice at all — our justice, only occupied and obscured by
THE EARTH THE CENTRE 91
innumerable pros and cons to us unknown, and extending
over times and spaces beyond our ken, so that were we
placed in possession of all the evidence we should applaud
the verdict. The philosophers do but narrow their God
under illusion of broadening Him — or rather they broaden
Him so tenuously that He becomes an infinite impalpa-
bility whose accidental evaporation would scarcely be
noted. It was a more consistent mystic who said : " God
may not improperly be styled nothing."
So that our circumnavigation of the infinite brings us
back to our noble selves and our own door-step. The
sun is still there to give us light by day, and the moon
and stars still shine to give us light by night. Nor is it
less their function to nourish us with beauty and with
mystery.
" When Science from Creation's face
Enchantment's veil withdraws,
What lovely visions yield their place
To cold material laws ! "
Campbell, who thus complained, was no profound poet.
The laws are neither cold nor material, nor do the lovely
visions yield their place. Their loveliness is as abiding
as the laws which produce them. 'Tis true that at first
Galileo seemed to have profaned Cynthia, the " goddess
excellently bright." The moon, the beautiful moon of
poets and lovers, lay betrayed — a dead planet, a scarred
desolation, seamed with arid ravines and pitted with a pox
of craters. Is then the moon of the poets a delusion
which science bids us put away like a childish toy? No,
by her own heavens, no. A more scientific science restores
the glamour. The moon has all the beauty she appears
to have. The loveliest woman's face, viewed through a
magnifying glass, appears equally scarred and seamed and
pitted. But here 'tis the lens that is accused of falsifica-
tion, 'tis the ugliness that is pronounced the delusion —
a face was meant to be seen at a certain distance and with
92 ITALIAN FANTASIES
the natural eye. Even so — and the moon chose her dis-
tance with admirable discretion.
The synthesis of everyday reality is always man's cen-
tral verity. The peering unnatural scientific vision of the
moon has the lesser truth, is but a spectral rim of the
whole-orbed reality. 'Tis the poet's moon tliat is the full
moon. But the poet were as foolish as the astronomer if
he in his turn imagined himself dealing with absolutes, if
he forgot that in logic as in landscape all views depend on
the point at which 3'ou place yourself. It is only from the
true point of view that the earth remains the centre of the
universe.
OF AUTOCOSMS WITHOUT FACTS : OR THE
EMPTINESS OF RELIGIONS
And what is the invasion of our consciousness by the
extended stellar system to its invasion by the intensive
infinities of our own globular parish ? The endless galaxy
of the centuries and the civilisations has opened out before
our telescopic thought. We are no longer at the centre
of our cosmos — we can no longer snuggle in a cosy con-
ceptual world, Classical or Christian, nor can we make the
best of both these worlds, like Raphael or Milton. The
dim populations have become lurid. Japan pours her art
upon us, and her equal claim to hold a chosen people —
" pursuing," as its Emperor's oath declares, " a policy co-
extensive with the heavens and the earth." Egypt unrolls
the teeming scroll of her immemorial dynasties. The
four hundred millions of China lie on our imaginations
like a nightmare in yellow, and we perceive that the maker
of man hath a predilection for pig-tails. India opens out
her duskily magnificent infinities and we are grown famil-
iar with Brahma and Vishnu, with Vedas and Buddha-
Jatakas. Persia reveals to us in the Zend Avesta of Zoro-
aster a strangely modern gospel, glimmering through
grotesque images of space and time. Mohammed is no
longer an Infidel, and we recognise the subtlety alike of
the Motekallamin and the Arabic Aristotelians. We re-
spect the Norse Gods and the great Tree Yggdrasill. The
Teutonic divinities have reappeared in every part of the
civilised earth and their operatic voice is heard with more
reverence than any other god's. Even the old Peruvian
civilisation solicits us, that successful social order of the
Incas. The stellar swirl of worlds is a crude puzzle in
93
94 ITALIAN FANTASIES
quantity beside these mental worlds which the peoples
have spun for themselves like cocoons.
But not only the peoples. Each creature that has ever
lived, from the spider to Shakespeare, has spun for itself
its own cosmos. Microcosm we cannot call this cosmos,
since that implies the macrocosm drawn to a smaller
scale, and this — like all creations — is a mere selection
from the universe, excluding and including after its own
idiosyncrasy. Autocosm is the word we need for it — a
new word, but a phenomenon as old as the first created
consciousness, and a phenomenon that has never perfectly
repeated itself since that day. For no two autocosms have
ever been precisely alike. In the lower orders of being
the autocosm may be substantially identical throughout
all the individuals of the species, but as we mount in the
grade of organisation, the autocosm becomes more and
more individual. And even the large generic autocosms,
how variously compounded — the scent- world of dogs, the
eye-world of birds, the uncanny touch-world of bats, the
earth-world of worms, the water-world of fishes, the gyro-
scopic world of dancing-mice, the flesh-world of parasites,
the microscoi^ic world of microbes. These worlds do not
need untrammelled orbits, they intersect one another in-
extricably in an infinite interlacing. Yet each is a sym-
metric sphere of being, a rounded whole, and to its denizens
the sole and self-sufficient cosmos. One creature's poison
is another creature's meat, one creature's offal is another
creature's paradise, and our cemetery is a nursery aswarm
with creeping mites. If on the one hand Nature seems a
wasteful housekeeper, scattering a thousand seeds that one
may bear, on the other hand she appears ineffably ingen-
ious in economising every ort and oddment, every cheese-
paring and scum-drop as the seed-plot of new and joyous
existence. Life, like an infinite nebulous spirit, bursts in
through every nook and cranny of matter, squeezing it-
self into every possible and improbable mould, and even
OF AUTOCOSMS WITHOUT FACTS 95
filling a chink in an existing creature rather than remain
outside organisation. And each atom of spirit that achieves
material existence takes its cramped horizons for the bound-
aries of the universe and itself as the centre of creation. Woe
indeed to the creature that has seen beyond its own bound-
aries, that can weave no cosy autocosm to nestle in. This
is what happens to your Shakespeares and your Schopen-
hauers; this is the "Everlasting Nay" of "Sartor Re-
sartus." Life is become
" A tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing."
Such an autocosm is the shirt of Nessus. Hercules
must tear it off or perish. And we are all the time chang-
ing our autocosms. That is the meaning of experience.
Only the fool dies in the same cosmos in which he was
born, and a great teacher or a great statesman changes the
autocosm of his generation.
Here be the true weaving with which Time's Shuttle is
busy, these endless patternings and re-patternings of men-
tal worlds, adjusted to ever-changing creatures, and ever-
shifting circumstances. The birth and death of planets
is stability compared with this mercurial flux, which in
the human world is known as movements of thought and
religion, growths and decays of language, periods of art
and politics. History is the clash of autocosms, and every
war is a war of the worlds.
As I walk into Milan Cathedral, the modern autocosm
fades out with the buzz and tingle of the electric cars that
engirdle the great old building, and the massive walls of
the mediaeval autocosm shut me into a glowing gloom of
unearthly radiance, whose religious hush is accentuated by
the sound of soft bells. Only the dominating figure on
the cross seems out of tone ; this blood is too violent for
peace. What a paradox that the Christians are such dom-
inant races — perhaps they needed this brake. But even
96 ITALIAN FANTASIES
without the blood, the cruciform dusk of the interior is in
discord with the lace-work of the exterior, recalls the som-
breness below the glittering Renaissance. All this multi-
tudinous microscopic w^ork is waste, all this wealth of
fretwork and finial, for it is only at a distance, when the
details have faded into the mass, that this mass appears
noble. And this, too, is like th«. Catholic autocosm, with
its rococo detail and its massive magnificence.
And round the Cathedral, as I said, rages the modern
order — is not Milan the metropolis of Italian science and
do not all tram-roads lead to the Piazza del Duomo ? —
and a ballet I saw in La Scala danced the carmagnole of
the new world. " Excelsior " was its jubilant motto, the
ascent being from Cathedrals to Railway Bridges and
Balloons. A Shining Spirit of Light (^Luce) inspired
Civilta and baffled the priestly powers of darkness
{Tenehre'), while ineffably glittering coryphees proclaimed
with their toes "Eureka ! "
But ah ! my dear Corybants of Reason, an autocosm
may be habitable and even comfortable in despite of
Science. Its working value is independent of its contain-
ing false materials, or true materials in false proportions.
And yet, my dear devotees of Pragmatism — that parvenu
among Philosophies — its utility does not establish its
truth. A false coin wdll do all the work of a true coin so
long as it is not found out. Nevertheless there exists a
test of coins independent of their power of gulling the
public. And there exists a name for those who continue
to circulate a coin after they know it to be false. The
Pragmatist may apply his philosophy to justify past forms
of belief and action, now outmoded, but he will do infinite
mischief if he tries to juggle himself or the world into
such forms of belief or action because they lead to spirit-
ual and practical satisfactions.
Oh, what a tangled web we weave
When first we practise to believe !
OF AUTOCOSMS WITHOUT FACTS 97
Nay, it is doubtful whether satisfaction can come as the
sequel of any but a genuine and involuntary belief. There
is much significance in the story of tlie old Welsh lady
who desired the removal of the mountain in front of her
window and complained to her pastor that all her prayers
had been unable to move it a single inch. "Because you
have not real faith," was the glib clerical reply. Where-
upon, resolved to have '•'•real faith," the old lady spent a
night of prayer on her knees opposite the mountain.
When morning came, and she rolled up the blind, lo ! the
mountain stood as before. " There ! " she exclaimed.
" Just as I expected ! "
This pseudo-faith is, I fear, all that the Pragmatist can
beguile or batter himself into, for if he has real faith he
needs no Pragmatism to justify it by.
I grant you — indeed I have always pointed out — that
there is a large area of the autocosm given over to artistic,
moral and spiritual truths which are their own justifica-
tion. But it is only where there is no objective test of
truth that Pontius Pilate's question may be answered with
the test of success and stimulation. Wherever it is pos-
sible to compare the autocosm with the macrocosm, con-
tradiction must be taken as the mark of falsity, and either
our notion of the macrocosm must be amended, or our
autocosm. Of course in the last analysis the macrocosm
is only the autocosm of its age, but it is the common
segment of all the individual autocosms. And while they
are liable to shrivel up like pricked bladders, the objective
universe can only expand and expand.
Despite La Scala and its daedal Modernism it was, I fear,
the Catholic autocosm which fascinated me most in Italy,
with its naive poetry, its grossness, its sublimity, and its
daring distortions of the macrocosm. The very clock-
wheels in their courses fight against reality. Read in the
great church of S. Petronio the directions on the two
clocks of Fornasini, one giving the solar time in the an-
H
98 ITALIAN FANTASIES
tique Italian style — when the hour varied with the day-
light — and the other the mean time of the meridian of
Bologna. " Subtract the time on the Italian clock from
2-4 o'clock, add the remainder to the time indicated on the
other clock, but counted from 1 to 2-4 o'clock. TJie time
thus obtained will he the hour of Ave Maria ! " The hour
of Ave Maria ! Not some crude arithmetical hour. Not
the hour of repose from work, not the hour of impending
sunset, but the hour of the vesper bell, the hour of Ave
Maria ! How it circumlaps, this atmosphere, how it
weaves a veil of pity and love between man and the
macrocosm.
It is nearly three and a half centuries since Italy helped
to break the power of the Paynim at Lepanto, yet the be-
lief that the Madonna (who could not free her own land
from the Turk) was the auxilium Christianorum, is as lively
as on the day w'hen the bigoted Gregory XIII. instituted
the Feast of the Rosary to commemorate her victory. At
Verona I read in a church a vast inscription set up at the
tercentenary of the battle, still ascribing the victory not
only to the " supreme valour of our arms steeled by the
word of Pius V.," but also to " the great armipotent Vir-
gin." Saints that I had in my ignorance imagined remote
from to-day, shelved in legend and picture, retired from
practical life, are, I found, still in the full exercise of their
professional activities as thaumaturgists, and scholastic
philosophers whose systems I had skimmed in my youth
as archaic lore, whom I had conceived as buried in en-
cycloptcdias and monastic libraries, blossom annually in
new editions. There is the Angelic Doctor — Preceptor
as he was styled on the title-pages — whom I had thought
safely tucked away in the tenth canto of the "Paradiso."
In the Seminario Vescovile of Ferrara I beheld the bulky
volumes of his " Summa Theologize " in the pious hands of
the fledgeling priests, in a class-room whose ceiling bears
the sombre frescoes with which Garofalo had enriched the
OF AUTOCOSMS WITHOUT FACTS 99
building in its palmy days as a Palazzo. And the theology
has decayed far less than the frescoes. Still, that which
we look upon as the faded thought of the Middle Ages
serves as the fresh bread of life to these youthful souls.
Little did I dream when I first saw Benozzo Gozzoli's
picture of The Triumph of St. Thomas, or Taddeo Gaddi's
portrayal of his celestial exaltation over the discomfited
Arius, Sabellius and Averroes, that I should see with my
own eyes scholars still at the feet of the 3Iagister studen-
tium of the thirteenth century. Well may the Pope un-
daunted launch his Encyclicals, and the Osservatore Romano
remark that " the evolution of dogma is a logical nonsense
for philosophers and a heresy for theologians."
Pascal summed it up long ago : " Truth on this side of
the Pyrenees, Falsehood beyond." What is true in the
Piazza of St. Peter grows false as you pass the Swiss
Guards. Catholic truth, like the Vatican, is extra-
territorial. Why should it concern itself with what is
believed outside ? Even the Averroist philosophers taught
that their results were true only in philosophy, and that '
in the realm of Catholicism what the Church taught was
true. And though " impugning the known truth " be one
of the sins against the Holy Ghost, the known truth and
the Church truth show scant promise of coinciding. And
the triumph of St. Thomas continues, as saint no less than
as teacher. " Divus Thomas Aquinas " I found him styled
in Perugia. His Festo is on March 7, as I read in a pla-
card in the Church of S. Domenico in Ferrara.
" Festa deir Angelico Dottore
S. T. d'Aquinas
San Patrono delle Scuole Cattoliche."
On the day of the Festa there is plenary indulgence for
all the faithful. There was another indulgence " per gli
ascritti alia Milizia Angelica." But whether the Angelic
Militia are the pupils of the Angelic Doctor I am not
learned enough to say.
100 ITALIAN FANTASIES
His even earlier saintship, St. Antony, not only con-
tinues to dominate Padua from his vast monumental
Church, and enjoy his three June days of Festa in his
nominal city, but his tutelary grace extends far beyond.
In the Church of San Spirito in the Via Ariosto of Ferrara,
the famous preacher to the fishes was — after the earth-
quake of 1908 — the target of three days of prayer. The
house Ariosto built himself in the fifteenth century stands
in the same street, but Ariosto's world of medieval chivalry
is shattered into atoms while St. Antony still saves
Ferrara from earthquake.
Yes — allowing Messina and Reggio to be annihilated
— the Saint in 1908 said to the seismic forces, " So far
and no farther," and 'tis not for me, whose umbrella he
recovered on the very day I mocked at his pretensions, to
resent his preferences. Three days of thanksgiving (mass
in the morning at his altar and prayers and Benediction in
the afternoon), " per lo scampato flagello del Terremoto "
rewarded his partiality for P'errara. The town keeps doubt-
less a morbid memory of earthquakes, for from an old Ger-
man book printed at Augsburg by Michael Manger, I learn
that the terrible Terremoto of 1570, " in Welschland am
Po," started in Ferrara on a 16th in the night and lasted
till the 21st, during which time two hundred people
perished, and many houses with a dozen churches, monas-
teries and nunneries were destroyed in Ferrara alone.
Why St. Antony nodded on that occasion is not explained.
Nor why he should have limited his protection to the Jews,
not a man of whom was injured. Perhaps he had not yet
recognised the claim of Ferrarese Christianity upon him.
There is a wistful note in the prayer placarded in the
Ferrarese church of San Francesco. " O great saint, com-
monly called the saint of Padua, but worthy to be called
the saint of the world. . . . You who so often pressed
in your arms the celestial Bambino ! "
Happy Paduans, to whom this chronological prodigy is
OF AUTOCOSMS WITHOUT FACTS 101
securely attached, who indeed hastened to build a Cathedral
round him in the very year of his canonisation (1232).
Here amid crudely worked flowers, crutches, photographs
and other mementoes of his prowess the faithful may find
remission of their sins or expiation of the faults of their
dead. For what limit is there to his intercessory power ?
Let me English the prayer hung up in his chapel. Every
religion has its higher and more sophistic presentation, but
it is well to turn from the pundits to the people.
" Orazione a S. Antonio di Padova.
" Great St. Antony, the Church glories in all the prerogatives that
God has favoui-ed you with among all the saints. Death is disarmed
by your power ; error is dissipated by your light. They whom the
malice of man tries to wound receive from you the desired relief.
The leprous, the sick, the crippled, by your virtue obtain cure, and
the hurricanes and the tempests of the sea calm themselves at your
command; the chains of slaves fall in pieces by your authority, and
the lost things are found again by your care and return to their legi-
timate possessors. All those who invoke you with faith are freed from
the evils and perils that menace them. In fine, there is no want to
which your power and goodness do not extend."
Here the intermediary has practically superseded the
Creator, even if dulia be still distinguished from latria.
Rimini was likewise safeguarded from the earthquake
of 1908, but not by St. Antony. A saint of its own, the
glorious Bishop and Martyr, St. Emidio, " compatrone
della citta, protettore potentissimo contro il flagello del
Terremoto," received the Three Days' Solemn Supplica-
tion, and the Riminese were adjured in many a placard to
repeat their fathers' glorious outburst of faith before the
thaumaturgic images when the city was delivered from the
frightful earthquake of 1786. But on the whole the saints
can scarcely have done their duty by the old towered cities,
for all Italy is full of the legend of toppled towers.
In war-perils it is the Archangel Michael who is the
power to approach. A prayer, ordered by Pope Leo XIII.
102 ITALIAN FANTASIES
to be said in all the churches of the world on bended knees
after private mass, pleads to that Holy Prince of the
celestial legions to defend us in battle and to thrust Satan
and other roving spirits of evil back to Hell. " Tuque,
Princeps Militise Coelestis, Satanam aliosque spiritus
malignos, qui ad perditionem animarum pervagantur in
mundo, divina virtute in inferLum detrude. Amen."
That Satan still has the entry of the Catholic autocosm,
I was indeed not unav/are. But I was certainly taken
aback to find the Plague still curable by Paternosters.
Yet this is what I was told in a little church in Brescia
devoted to Moretto's works and monument, and summing
up in letters of gold the whole duty of man.
" Christians !
Bless the most holy name of God and of Jesus,
Respect the Festas,
Keep the Fasts and the Abstinences !
In short, only by Prayer
And Penitence will cease
Great Mortality, Famine
And every Epidemic."
I had regarded the Salute and the other Plague-Churches
of Venice as mere historic curiosities, and written it down
as an asset of human thought that the Plague of 1630 was
duo to the filthiness and congesti'on of the Levantine
cities. That when 60,000 Venetians died — " uno ster-
minato numero" as the tablet in the Salute says — the
Venetian Republic should with vermicular humility erect
a gorgeous church in gratitude for the Death-Angel's
moderation — this might pass in 1630, like St. Rocco's
neglect in performing only the few desultory miracles
recorded in the wooden bas-reliefs of his choir. In the
seventeenth century one might even adore the angel of
Piero Negri's staircase-fresco of Venice Relieved of the
Pest, tardily as he came to relieve those ghastly visions of
the plague-pit which Zanchi has painted, facing him.
OF AUTOCOSMS WITHOUT FACTS 103
But that in 1836 Venice should have decreed a Three
Days' Thanksgiving to the " Deiparse Virgini salutari "
for salvation from " the cholera fiercely raging through
Europe " shows that two centuries had made no change in
the Catholic autocosm, nor in the caprice of its Olympians.
Venice had already passed under the Napoleonic reign of
pure reason, and in an old poster of the Teatro Civico I
read an invitation to the citizens to " democratise " the
soil of the theatre by planting here the Tree of Liberty
and dancing the graziosissima Carmagnola. But revolu-
tions, French or other, leave undisturbed the deep instinct
of humanity which demands that things spiritual shall
produce equipollent effects in the physical sphere.
"E pur si muove," as Galileo said a hundred and thirty
years after his death. The Catholic autocosm and the
objective macrocosm begin to rub against each other even
in the churches. Quaintly enougli, 'tis over the popular
practice of spitting that science and religion come into
friction. The priest who convoyed me through the
Certosa of Pavia seemed to regard his wonderful church
as a glorified spittoon, and notices in every church in Italy
make clear the universality of the offence. But whereas
at Pavia you are asked " For the decorum of the house of
God do not spit on the pavement," in Brescia the depreca-
tion is headed : " Lotta Contro la Tuberculosi," as though
the most penitent and pious might be rewarded for
church-going by consumption. The Cremona and Lucca
churches compromise : "Out of respect for the house of
God and for h3^giene please do not spit on the pavement."
In Verona the formula is practically the same : "Decency
and hygiene forbid to spit on the pavement." In Bologna
the modern autocosm was, I gather, even more victorious,
for in time of plague, some frescoes in S. Petronio were
whitewashed over. I trust for the sake of symbolic
completeness these were frescoes of St. Sebastian and St.
Rocco, the protective plague-saints.
101 ITALIAN FANTASIES
A false cosmos, I said, like a false coin, may be as use-
ful as a true one, so long as it is believed in. As long as
the attrition of the macrocosm outside does not wear a hole
in the Catholic autocosm, it will keep its spheric inflation.
For there is nothing to wear a hole from inside, nothing
contrary to pure reason, nothing inconsistent with some-
thing else. There is no a priori reason why saints should
not control the chain of causation by spiritual forces as
engineers and doctors control it by physical forces at the
bidding of intelligence. There is no formal ground for
denying that penitence puts cholera to flight. It is merely
a matter of experience — and even Popes and Cardinals re-
move to cooler places when the pest breaks out at Rome.
There is no conceptual reason why there should not be a
Purgatory, nor why masses and alms for the dead (or still
more the emotions of love and remorse which these repre-
sent) should not enable us to assist the posthumous des-
tinies of those we have lost, nor why our sainted dead
should be cut off from all fresh influence upon our lives.
It seems indeed monstrous that they should pass beyond
our yearning affection. In these and other things the
Catholic autocosm gives hints to the Creator and shows
how the "sorry scheme of things" may be moulded "nearer
to the heart's desire." Nor is there any reason why
there should not be a Trinity or a vicarious Atonement.
These concepts, indeed, explain obscurum per obscurius —
" No light but rather darkness visible — "
and seem less natural and more complicated than the
Jewish theory of a divine unity and a personal human
responsibility. But complexity and incomprehensibility
are not proofs of falsity. Tertullian, indeed, in his great
lyric cry of faith, would make them proofs of truth.
'■'Certum est quia imposslbile est.'' And it may be conceded
to Tertullian that in a universe of mystery all compact,
the word of the enigma can scarcely be a platitude.
OF AUTOCOSMS WITHOUT FACTS 105
But there is a limit to this comfortable canon. Im-
possibility can only continue a source of certitude
so long as transcendental theological conceptions are
concerned. But when, leaving the tenuous empyrean
of metaphysics, the Impossible incarnates itself upon
earth, it must stand or fall by our terrestrial tests of
historic happening, and the canon should rather run :
Providing it has really happened, its mere impossibility
does not diminish its certitude. So that, per contra, if
it never happened at all, its mere impossibility cannot
guarantee it. Impossibility is a quality it shares with
an infinite number of propositions, and if it wishes to
single itself out from the crowd, it must seek extraneous
witnesses to character. And if it fails in this quest, its
impossibility will not save it. We may believe the
w?iproved, but not the c?isproved. The true interpreta-
tion of the universe must be incomprehensible, my inter-
pretation is incomprehensible, therefore my interpretation
is true — what tyro in the logics will not at a leap re-
cognise the fallacy of the undistributed middle? Yet on
this basis rest innumerable volumes of apologetics.
Nay, Sir Thomas Browne himself fell into this " Vulgar
Error." " Methiuks," he cries, basing himself upon
Tertullian, " there be not impossibilities enough in Reli-
gion for an active faith ... I love to lose myself
in a mystery, to pursue my Reason to an altitudo ! "
As if " altitudo " is not persuable b}^ the simplest Pagan,
following the maze of Space and Time. The author of
" Religio Medici " confesses that certain things in Genesis
contradict Experience and History, but he adds : " Yet I
do believe all this is true, which, indeed, my Reason would
persuade me to be false ; and this I think is no vulgar
part of Faith, to believe a thing not only above, but con-
trary to Reason and against the Arguments of our proper
Senses." Pardon me, esteemed Sir Thomas. It is pre-
cisely the vulgar part of Faith — Religio Populi! It is
106 ITALIAN FANTASIES
putting the disproved and disprovable on the same plane
as the unproved and the unprovable, where alone the ec-
stasy of the altitudo may be legitimately pursued.
The friction between the Bible and Science has grown
raspier since Sir Thomas's day, and by a new turn in
human folly we are told that Science is bankrupt — with
the implication that therefore the Bible is solvent. Poor
old autocosms ! They are both bankrupt, alas ! Neither
the ancient Bible nor the twentieth century Science can
pay twenty shillings in the pound. Not that the Bible
cannot meet its creditors honourably, nor that Science
will not be permitted to go on dealing. The salvage from
both is considerable. But neither can afford an autocosm
in which the modern intellect can breathe and the modern
soul aspire.
Nor was such work ever within the capacity of Science.
She, the handmaid of religion, forgot her place when she
aspired to the pulpit. And religion, with Time and
Space and Love and Death for texts around her, stepped
down from hers when slie persisted in preaching from
witliered parchments of ambiguous tenor and uncertain
authorship. What can be more pathetic than the joy of
orthodoxy when the pick strikes some Old Testament
tablet and it is discovered that there really was an Abra-
ham or a Lot. As well might a neo-Pagan exult because
the excavations in Crete prove that the Minotaur really
existed — but as a fighting bull to which toreadors imported
from conquered Athens sometimes fell victims. Not even
Lot's wife supplies sufficient salt to swallow Genesis with.
The Old Testament autocosm is dead and buried — it can-
not be dug up again by the Palestine Exploration Fund.
It is no longer literally true, even in the Vatican, where,
if I understand aright, only the miracles of the New
Testament still preserve their authenticity.
" Things are what they are, and the consequences will
be what they will be," as the much-deluded Butler remarked.
OF AUTOCOSMS WITHOUT FACTS 107
Wherefore, though you imagine yourself living in your
autocosm, you are in truth inhabiting the macrocosm all
the time and obnoxious to all its curious laws and inflexible
realities. It is as if, playing cards in the smoking-room
of a ship and fancying yourself at the club, you should be
suddenly drowned. Only by living in the macrocosm
itself can you avoid the stern surprises which await those
who snuggle into autocosms. Hence the perils of the
Catholic autocosm for its inhabitants. For in the real
universe pestilences and earthquakes are not due to the
wrath of God. The physical universe proceeds on its own
lines, and the religious motives of the Crusaders did not
prevent a Christian host from dying of the putrefying in-
fidel corpses which it had manufactured so abundantly.
Nor did heaven endorse the theory of the Children's
Crusade — that innocence could accomplish what was im-
possible for flawed manhood. The poor innocents perished
like flies, or were sold into slavery. These things take
their course as imperturbably as Halley's comet, which
refused to budge an inch even before the fulminations of
Pope Callixtus III. Nor is the intermission of earthquakes
or pestilence to be procured by the intercession of the
saints or by the efficacy of their relics. A phial of the
blood of Christ was carried about in Mantua during the
plague of 1630, but there were not enough boats to carry
away the corpses to the lakes. It was those marshes round
Mantua that should have been drained. But it is in vain
God thunders, " Thus and thus are My Laws. I am
that I am." Impious Faith answers, "Not so. Thou art
that Thou art not."
Pestilence — we know to-day — can be averted by
closing the open cesspools and opening the sunless alleys
of media3valism ; malaria can be minimised by minimising
mosquitos, and earthquakes can be baffled by careful
building after the fashion of Japan, which, being an
earthquake country, behaves as such. After the Messina
108 ITALIAN FANTASIES
earthquake the Japanese Government sent two professors
— one of seismology and the other of architecture — to
study it and to compare it with the great Japanese earth-
quake of 1891, and they reported that although the
Japanese shock was greater and the population affected
more numerous, the number of Italian victims was four
hundred and thirty times as great as the number of Jap-
anese, and that " about 998 out of 1000 of the number
killed in Messina must be regarded as having fallen
victims to the seismologically bad construction of the
houses." But where reliance is placed on paternosters
and penitence, how shall there be equal zeal for antiseptics
or structural precautions ? The censer tends to oust the
fumigator, and the priest the man of action. " Too easily
resigned and too blindly hopeful," says the Messagero of
Rome, commenting on the chaos that still reigns among
the population of Messina.
" Trust in God and keep your powder dry " was the
maxim of a Protestant. Cromwell but echoed the Psalm-
ist, " Blessed be the Lord my strength, which teacheth
my hands to war and my fingers to fight." This is the
spirit that makes the best of both cosms. The too trust-
ful denizen of the Catholic autocosm with his damp
powder and his flaccid fingers risks falling a prey to the
first foe.
But the balance-sheet is not yet complete. For it may
be better to live without sanitation or structural pre-
caution and to die at forty of the plague or the earth-
quake, after years of belief in your saint or your star, than
to live a century without God in a bleak universe of
mechanical law. True the believer has the fear of hell,
but by a happy insanity it does not interfere with his
joie de vivre. He has had, indeed, to pay dearly for the
consolation and courage the Church has sold him — since
we are at the balance-sheet let this be said too — and
seeing how in the last analysis all this overwhelming
OF AUTOCOSMS WITHOUT FACTS 109
ecclesiastic splendour has come out of the toil of the
masses, I cannot help wondering whether the Church
could not have done the thing cheaper. Were these
glittering vestments and soaring columns so absolutely
essential to the cult of the manger-born God ?
But perhaps it was the People's only chance of Mag-
nificence. And after all the mediaeval cathedrals were
as much public assembly rooms as churches.
Dear wrinkled contadine whom I see prostrated in
chapels before your therapeutic saints ; dear gnarled
facchiiii whose shoulders bow beneath the gentler burden
of adoration ; poor world-worn beings whom I watch
genuflecting and sprinkling yourselves with the water
of life as the spacious hush and the roseate dimness of
the great cathedral fall round you ; and you, proud
young Venetian housewife, whose baby was carried to
baptism in a sort of cage, and who turned to me with
that heavenly smile after the dipping and that rapturous
cry, " Ora ella e una piccola Cristiana ! " and most of all
you, heart-stricken mothers whose little ones have gone
up to play with the Madonna's bambino, think ye I would
prick your autocosm with my quill or withdraw one
single ray from the haloes of your guardian genii ? Nay,
I pray that in that foreign land of death to which we
must all emigrate ye may find more Christian considera-
tion than meets the emigrants to England or America.
May your Christ be waiting at the haven ready to
protect you against the exactions of Charon, to rescue
you from the crimps, and initiate you into the alien life.
Only one thing I ask of you — do not, I pray you in
return, burn up m^ autocosm — and me with it. And
ye, gentlemen of the cassock and the tonsure, continue,
unmolested by me, your processions and your pageants and
your mystic operas and ballets, your drinking ceremonials
and serviette-wipings, for, bland and fatherly as you
seem, you are the fiercest incendiaries the world has ever
110 ITALIAN FANTASIES
l^nown — the arson of rival autocosms your favourite
virtue. And I am not of those who hold your power
or passion extinct. Even in your ashes live your wonted
fires, and I may yet see the pyres of Smithfield blaze as
in the days of Mary. For to hold the keys of Heaven
and Hell is as unsettling as any other form of monopoly.
Human nature cannot stand it. And by every channel,
apert or subterranean, you are creeping back to power,
carrying through all your labyrinths that terrible touch
of faith. Already relics have been borne in procession
at Westminster. But perhaps I wrong you. Perhaps
your very Inquisition will make some concession to
science and the age, and electrocute instead of burning.
But though ye burn me or electrocute, yet must I praise
your Church for its three great principles of Democracy,
Cosmopolitanism, and Female Equality. At the apogee
of its splendour, in the days before its autocosm contra-
dicted the known macrocosm, it made a brotherhood of
Man and a United States of Europe, and St. Catherine
and St. Clara ranked with St. F'rancis and St. Dominic.
What can be more wonderful than that an English menial,
phiin Nicholas Breakspeare, should rise into Pope Adrian
IV. and should crown Barbarossa at Rome as Emperor of
the Holy Roman Empire, or that when this Empire's
fourth Henry must fain go to Canossa it was the reputed
son of a carpenter that kept liim waiting barefooted in
tlie snow ? Contrast all this with the commercial chau-
vinism, the snobbery, and the Mussulman disdain of woman
into which Europe has fallen since tlie "Dark Ages."
I grant that the Papacy was as far from ensuring a
liuman brotherhood as the Holy Roman Empire was from
tlie ideal of Petrarch, yet both institutions kept the ideal
of a unity of civilisation alive, and if they did not realise
it better, was it not because two institutions aiming at the
same unification are already a disturbing duality ? The
situation under which the Emperor elected the Pope who
OF AUTOCOSMS WITHOUT FACTS 111
consecrated the Emperor, or the Pope excommunicated
the Emperor who deposed the Pope and elected an anti-
Pope, was positively Gilbertian, and the grim comedy
reached its climax when Pope and anti-Pope used their
respective churches as fortresses. The old duel persists
to-day in the tug-of-war between Court and Vatican, and
the Pope is so little a force for unification that he still
refuses to recognise the unity of Italy. Yet no ironies of
history can destroy the beauty of the Catholic concept.
" I lift mine eyes and all the windows blaze
With forms of Saints and holy men who died,
Here martyred and hereafter glorified ;
And the great Rose upon its leaves displays
Christ's Triumph, and the angelic roundelays,
With splendour upon splendour nmltiplied;
And Beatrice again at Dante's side
No more rebukes, but smiles her words of praise.
And then the organ sounds, and unseen choirs
Sing the old Latin hymns of peace and love
And benedictions of the Holy Ghost;
And the melodious bells among the spires
O'er all the house-tops and through heaven above
Proclaim the elevation of the Host."
That is the Catholic autocosm at its loveliest, as seen
by the poet of the Pilgrim Fathers when under the spell
of translating Dante. And 'tis, indeed, no untrue vision
of its ideal.
I saw an old statue of St. Zeno in his church at Verona,
and the saint who began life as a fisherman appeared as
proud of his fish pendent as of his crozier. Can one
imagine a British bishop in a fishmonger's apron ? Even
the Apostles are doubtless conceived at the Athenaium
Club as a sort of Fishmongers' Company, with an old hall
and a 'scutcheon. For England combines with her dis-
trust of High Church a ritual of High Life, which is the
most meticulous and sacrosanct in the world.
112 ITALIAN FANTASIES
Nor is there any record of a British bishop behaving
like St. Zeno when the Emperor Gallienus gave him the
crown from off his own head, and the saint requested per-
mission to sell it for the benefit of the poor. True, British
bishops are not in the habit of exorcising demons from the
daughters of emperors, but neither are they in the habit of
dividing their stipends among curates with large families.
St. Zeno, by the way, came from Mauretania, and St.
Antony was not really of Padua, but of Portugal. 'Twas
a free trade in saints. There was no protection against
protectors. Virgil and Boethius themselves enjoyed a
Christian reputation. One does not wonder that even
Buddha crept into the calendar by an inspired error. It
is heartening to come on an altar in Verona to St. Remigio,
" apostle of tlie generous nation of the French," to find
Lucca Cathedral given over to an Irish saint and honouring
a Scotch king (" San Riccardo, Re di Scozia "), and to read
of King Canute treating with Pope John and Emperor
Conrad for free Alpine passes to Rome for English pilgrims.
Universities too were really universal. The Angelic
Doctor was equally at home in Naples, Paris, and Co-
logne.
What can be more nobly catholic than the prayer I
found pasted outside Italian churches : " My God, I offer
Thee all the masses which are being celebrated to-day in
all the world for the sinners who are in agony and who
must die to-day. May the most precious Blood of Jesus
the Redeemer obtain for them mercy ! " True, the poetry
of this prayer is rather marred by the precise information
that " every day in the universe about 140,000 persons
die: 97 every minute, 51 millions every year," but not so
grossly as by the indulgences accorded to the utterers.
Why must this fine altruism be thus tainted ? But, alas !
Catholicism perpetually appears the caricature of a great
concept. Take for another example the methods of
canonisation, by which he or she who dies " in the odour
OF AUTOCOSMS WITHOUT FACTS 113
of piety " may pass, in the course of centuries, from the
degree of venerable servant of God to the apogee of
blessed saintship. What can be grander than this notion
of taking all time as all earth for the Church's province ?
Yet consider the final test. The great souls she has
produced must work two posthumous miracles, forsooth,
before they can be esteemed saints. By what a perver-
sion of the spiritual is it that holiness has come to be on a
par with pills ! Surely a true Church Universal should
canonise for goodness of life, not for mortuary miracles.
Joan of Arc, who must wait nigh five hundred years for
saintship — did not the miracle of her life outweigh any
possible prowess of her relics ?
But despite, or rather because of, this grossness, the
walls of the Catholic autocosm are still stout : centuries
of friction with the macrocosm will be needed to wear
them away. The love of noble ritual and noble buildings,
of ordered fasts and feasts, of authority absolute ; the
comfortable concreteness of Orthodoxy beside the nebulous-
ness of Modernism ; the sinfulness of humanity, its help-
lessness before the tragic mysteries of life and death ; the
peace of confession, the therapeia of chance and hypnotism,
the magnetism of a secular tradition, the vis inertice — all
these are pillars of the mighty fabric of St. Peter. But
even these would be as reeds but for the massive prop of
endowments. 'Tis Mortmain — the dead hand — that
keeps back Modernism. So long as any institution pos-
sesses funds, there will never be any lack of persons to
administer them. This is the secret of all succcesful
foundations. The rock on which the Church is founded
is a gold-reef. And it is actively defended by Persecution
and the Index, by which all thought is equally excluded,
be it a Darwin's or a Gioberti's, a Zola's or a Tyrrell's.
Who then shall set a term to its stability ?
With such a marvellous machinery at hand for the
Church Universal of the future — so democratic, so cosmo-
114 ITALIAN FANTASIES
politan, so free from sex injustice — it seems a thousand
pities tliat there is nothing to be done with it but to scrap
it. Surely it should be adapted to the macrocosm, brouglit
into harmony with the modern mind, so that, becoming
again the mistress of our distracted and divided world,
moderating the frenzy of nationalisms by a European
cult and a European culture, keeping in their place the
mediocrities who are seated on our thrones, and the
democracies when they stray from wisdom, it could send
out a true blessing urbi et orhi. But this, I remember, is
an Italian fantasy.
OF FACTS WITHOUT AUTOCOSMS : OR THE
IRRELEVANCY OF SCIENCE
I DID not need the lesson of the Scala ballet — Civilta
inspired by Luce and chasing Tenebre. I know that that
light is electric. Have I not found it in the deepest crj^pt
of the underground cathedral of Brescia, illuminating the
two Corinthian pillars from the Temple of Vespasius ?
Have I not seen in the quaint sleepy alleys of rock-set
Orvieto the wayside shrine of the Madonna utilised to hold
an electric lamp ? And have I not seen that ancient mar-
ble shrine between Carrara and Avenza supporting the
telegraph wires, or the crumbling tower of Lucca the tele-
phones ? And did I not watch the thousand-year-old
cathedral of Genoa — with St. Lorenzo's martyrdom on
its f agade — preparing to celebrate the fourth centenary
of St. Caterina — " whose mortal remains in their urn have
not felt the injury of time " — by a thorough cleansing
with a vacuum cleaner ? Ceaselessly throbbed the engine,
like the purr of a pious congregation, and the hose ex-
tended to the uttermost ledges of the roof, sucking in dust
immemorially undisturbed. And the cathedral clock of
Verona that looks down on Charlemagne's paladins, Ro-
land and Oliver, in rude stone — did it not tell me the
correct time ? Yes, 'tis the hour of Science.
And the contribution of Italy to Science is almost as
great as her contribution to Art or Religion. A country
that can produce St. Francis, Michelangelo, and Galileo,
that founded at Verona the first geological museum and
at Pisa the first botanical garden, has indeed all winds of
the spirit blowing through her. But except in Da Vinci,
116
116 ITALIAN FANTASIES
Alt and Science have not been able to lodge together.
Ilini the sketches for his flying-machines in the Ambrosian
library make a boon-fellow of Wright, Voisin, and Santos,
as Luca Beltrami enthusiastically proclaims. Galileo had
some pretensions to letters, writing essays and verses, and
is even suspected of a comedy. But the life of Galileo
practically divides Italy's art period from her scientific, so
far at least as the material arts are concerned. His aman-
uensis, Torricelli, preluded the barometer, and the crea-
tion of electrical science by Galvani and Volta was a
main factor in the evolution of our modern world of
machinery. Venice and Florence founded statistical
science, and if Sicily and South Italy have relapsed from
the Arabic-Aristotelian stimulus administered by Freder-
ick II. — perhaps for fear of sharing the imperial Epicu-
rean's furnace in the Sixth Circle of the Inferno — North
Italy has remained a pioneer of the modern. It is not by
accident that Marconi was born in Bologna, or Lombroso
in Verona — which is to hold his statue — or that the
most learned exponent of the dismal science of our day
has been Luigi Cossa, Professor of Political Economy in
the Universities of Pavia and j\Iilan. But even Naples
and Palermo have remained faithful to astronomy and
the mathematics.
F'ar be it from me to say a word against Science as a
magnified magical maid-of-all-work ! But in so far as she
pretends to set up in the parlour, ousting her old mis-
tresses. Theology and Poetry, let me point out to her swains,
the electro-plated youth of Lombardy, that the facts of
Science, existing as they do outside autocosms, are as sub-
stantial to lean upon as the shadows of reeds. Of the
need of a Seientia Scientiarum to put all these facts in
their place the average scientific specialist is as uncon-
scious as a ploughboy of the calculus.
For it follows from the doctrine of autocosms that a
fact cannot exist as such till it has settled to which
OF FACTS WITHOUT AUTOCOSMS 117
autocosm it belongs. It must be born into the world of
meaning. The same raw material may go to form part of
autocosms innumerable, as the same man may be the but-
ler at a duke's, the guest of honour at a grocer's, and the
chief dish at a cannibal banquet. The same fire that
beacons a ship from destruction sucks a moth to its doom,
and the same election figures scatter at once delight and
despair. The " fact," outside an autocosm, can only be
regarded as a potentiality of entering into ratios ; in
other words, it is a " rational " possibility. But since
there is a definite limit to its possibilities, and an election
result cannot glut the cannibal appetite, nor a butler
operate as a beacon-fire — except in the way of Ridley
and Latimer — we are compelled to recognise an obstinate
objective element fatal to the Pragmatic Philosophy.
Potential facts are stubborn things. Pragmatism was a
healthy reaction against the obsession of a world wholly
gaugeable by Reason, like the reaction of Duns Scotus
against Aquinas, but when it replaced Reason by Will it
fell into the other extreme of error. Both Reason and
Will must enter into the Science of Sciences, and they
must even be supplemented by Emotion.
For the human consciousness, our sole instrument for
apprehending the world, is trinitarian. I should say we
have three antennse — Reason, Will, Emotion — where-
with to grope out into our environment, were it not that
those antennee are triune, and no knowledge of the outer
world ever comes to us save with all the three factors
intertwined in varying proportions. Why then should
we throw away all that Will and Emotion tell us, putting
asunder what God has put together ? To represent the
Report of the bare intellectual faculty as the Report of
the whole Commission is fraudulence. Will and Emotion
have too meekly contented themselves with a Minority
Report. It is time they insisted on their views colouring
and fusing into the Report Proper. Even Kant, having
118 ITALIAN FANTASIES
reached spiritual bankrui)tcy by his "Critique of Pure
Reason," apologetically called in the Practical Reason to
save the situation, thereby importing into his system an
absurd dualism. Kant's Practical Reason is simply Will
and Emotion restored to their proper rank as conjoint
antennaB of apprehension. The effort to probe the
universe with an isolated antenna was foredoomed to
failure. The Practical Reason should have been called in,
not after the bankruptcy as a sort of receiver to make the
best of a bad estate, but before starting operations, as a
partner with additional capital.
A fact, then, to be a fact, must be born into an autocosm,
must be caught up not only into intellectual perception,
but into emotional and volitional relations. The so-called
scientific fact is thus two-thirds unborn. It is not a fact,
but a facet of a fact. 'Tis only by a shorthand conven-
tion, indeed, that anything can be treated as purely an
object of intellectual discrimination. Every substantive
in the dictionary is a shrivelled leaf which requires the
sap and greenness of a living sentence to restore it to life.
This is best seen in words with more than one meaning,
like "bark," which needs to be in a sentence to show
whether it is canine or marine. But every word is in the
same ambiguous case, and acquires its nuance from its
relations with life. The molecule or structural unit of
reality being thus triune, it is obvious that the isolated
presentation of the material aspect of things in the shape
of words under the name of Science can never be a presen-
tation of Truth. It is a mere abstraction from the trini-
tarian wholeness of experience. Full life exists in three
dimensions. Art in two, and Science in one, like a solid, a
superficies, and a line, and the line as little reproduces the
plenitude of being as the coast-line of a map the beetling
cliffs and thundering seas.
But the subject-matter of the sciences is not even the
universe treated as a material whole, but the universe cut
OF FACTS WITHOUT AUTOCOSMS 119
up into abstract 'ologies and 'onomies, each of which in-
sidiously tends to swell into a full-seeming sphere of
Truth, as when Political Economy, having proved that
Free Trade produces the cheapest article, tends to assume
that humanity is therefore hou7id to buy in the cheapest
market ; so that even the Tariff Reformer, under the same
hypnosis, seeks to deny this economic law, instead of ad-
mitting and overriding it by considerations from supple-
mentary spheres of Truth. Similar fallacies spring from
pathology, psychology, physiology, criminology, and other
methods of vivisecting our noble selves. We are parcelled
out among the professors, each of them magnifying his
office.
"Hark, hark, the lark at Heaven's gate sings 1"
says the beautiful song in "Cymbeline." The sciences
pounce upon that lark like hawks, and tear it to pieces be-
tween them. But the truth about the lark — is it in the
unreal abstractions of the sciences, or is it in the poet's per-
ception of the lark in all the fulness, colour, and richness of
actual existence ?
The little Gradgrinds, says Dickens, had cabinets in va-
rious departments of science. " They had a little chrono-
logical cabinet, and a little metallurgical cabinet, and a
little mineralogical cabinet, and the specimens were all
arranged and labelled, and the bits of stones and ore looked
as though they might have been broken off from the parent
substances by those tremendously hard instruments, their
own names."
But it is only in the falsificatory museums of science
that things exist in little cabinets, or that the butterfly is
impaled on a pin and ranged in a glass case with other
Lepidoptera. In the real universe it flutters alone amid
the flowers. It is full of its own vivid life ; it does not
know it has been classified. This classification exists only
in some student's mind ; the truth is in the fluttering
120 ITALIAN FANTASIES
butterfly. And Truth really flutters like a butterfly,
free aud joyous, winged with iridescent splendours and
subtle shades. Truth is not a dead formula, but an
airy aliveness.
When I was a youth studying mathematics and the
'ologies I became infected with the sense of superiority to
the crowd which these pursuits bring : such cold, logical
reasoning, such rare reaches of thought ! To think that
men eminent in these branches should remain unrewarded
by popular fame, while every petty scribbler with a gift
of invention commanded the applause of the mob ! To be
a novelist seemed a paltry affair ; yet later on I came to
recognise that the crowd is right, and that those who
decry the predominance of the novel are wrong. All these
sciences and speculations deal with human life, not in its
living fulness, but with an abstractness which makes it
dead, unreal, false. The world's instinctive distrust of
pedants and students and mathematicians is justified.
They isolate one aspect of life, one thread of the tangled
skein, one motif in the eternal symphony, and sometimes
drawing from reality the merest shred of tune, execute
upon it an enormous fantasia — as in the higher mathe-
matics — which plays itself out inaudibly in vacuo. The
cold perfection of mathematics is due to our having elimi-
nated in advance all the accidents of reality, and even the
supposed infallibility of the proposition that two and two
are four shatters itself upon the futility of adding two
elephants to two speeches on the Irish question. And
yet in those callow days it was to Number that I, like
Pythagoras, was fain to look for the key of the riddle.
But that was under the glittering spell of the late Mon-
sieur Taine, who well-nigh persuaded me that a Science
was only truly Scientific when it passed from the qualita-
tive to the quantitative stage. If you could only express
everything by mathematical formuUe, then at last you
would catch that shy bird. Truth, by the tail. Strip away
OF FACTS WITHOUT AUTOCOSMS 121
Truth's feathers, then the flesh, then even the bones, till
you get a meaningless world of imaginary atoms, and that,
forsooth, is the ultimate Truth. " The universe," said
Taine triumphantly, " will one day be expressed in math-
ematical formuhe." In other words, strip away all there
is to know, get rid of all that interests you, the colour and
the form and the glow of life, and then jou. will really
know the thing. The only way to know a thing is elabo-
rately to prevent yourself from knowing it.
That invaluable institution the Post Office annually
provides us with statistics. So many billion letters are
sent a year, so many postcards, so many packages, and of
these so many are left open, and so many unaddressed or
unstamped, and so many go astray. These figures have
as much to do with the realities implied in this corre-
spondence as the figures of the quantitative sciences with
the realities they are drawn from. Even could it be
proved that the ratio of unaddressed letters to addressed
is constant over a given area, or that the percentage of
postcards varies inversely with the status of the senders,
how much nearer are we to the hot passions and wild
despairs, the commercial greeds and the loving humours
which are the actuality of the phenomena under calcula-
tion ?
Even the lines and angles of geometry, which have
more body than statistics, are a poor substitute for the
full, rich world, with its forests and skies. Mathematics
may be indispensable to navigation, but on the sea of life
we sail very well without it. Some of the most charming
women I know count on their fingers. When
" A Rosalind face at the lattice shows . . .
And Sir Romeo sticks in his ear a rose,"
it is indifferent to the situation that the rose is compact
of chemical atoms dancing in complex figures, setting to
partners, visiting and retreating.
122 ITALIAN FANTASIES
Biroii in " Love's Labour Lost," professing to derive
his learning from women's eyes, which are
" the ground, the books, the academes.
From whence doth spring the true Promethean fire,"
was, though the sentiment may be unpopuhir in this edu-
cational age, wiser than Faust in his study soliloquising
on the curse of useless learning. Many of the statements
of science are true for the abstract logical f acult}^ ; they
are not actually conceivable. We laugh at the mediaeval
controversies as to how many angels could dance on the
point of a needle, but surely our modern theory of the
atomic constitution of the needle-point justifies the ques-
tion. One angel per atom would exhaust the angelic
hosts. Perhaps the sparks emitted for years by one drop
of bromide of radium on the point of a needle are really a
dance of demons. Or take the undulatory theory of light
— that to produce the varying colours of the spectrum the
luminiferous ether must vibrate from 458 to 727 million
of million times per second. It might as well have been
a thousand billions or ten trillions for all the difference to
our understanding. To give us such figures is like offer-
ing a million-pound note to an omnibus conductor and
expecting change. The best scientists admit these concep-
tions are but working hypotheses. Nay, I find a worthy
German actually calling them " useful fictions." Indeed,
they cannot endure cross-examination, and if you want
to see a scientific man as angry as a theologian of the
Inquisition era, you will treat his mystic conceptions as
Tom Paine treated the mysteries of religion. The world
went very well ere we knew the fairy-tales of science and
learned to dread death in every breath we took, every
crumb we ate, every drop of non-alcoholic drink we drank.
As if it were not tragic enough to read the newspapers,
we are harassed with the life-histories of insects invisible
to the naked eye, thirty generations or so of which live
OF FACTS WITHOUT AUTOCOSMS 123
and die every day in a drop of ditch-water. At the same
time such surface questions as why a man lives six times
as long as a dog and a tortoise six times as long as a man
are left in absolute darkness.
Men of science are to be admired for their patient and
fearless groping after knowledge, the only reward of which
is the applause of that splendid international brotherhood
of learning. But this knowledge of theirs is never more
than raw material for the philosopher at the centre to
weave into his synopsis. No doubt there are men of
science who preserve their perspective, who do not view
the universe as heaven-sent material for a series of text-
books, but this part of their thinking is done, not as scien-
tists, but as poets or philosophers. Classification is all that
Science Proper can do, and when the pigeon-holing is com-
plete to the last Z, the universe will remain as mysterious
as before. When the astronomers have determined the
size, weight, orbit, speed, and spectrum lines of all the four
hundred millions of visible stars, we shall still look up
and say,
" Twinkle, twinkle, little star,
How I wonder what you are ! "
But this pigeon-holing of the universe by Science is con-
spicuously zwcomplete. For by a paradoxical modesty the
man of science too often forgets to include himself in the
inventory.
In this way Herbert Spencer explained everything —
except Herbert Spencer. Possibly the forgetfulness is
wilful, because the existence of the man of science upsets
so many of his explanations. " I find in the Universe no
trace of Will or Reason," protested one of them to me.
" I see only the blind movement of forces, mechanical as
billiard-balls." "Naturally," I retorted, "if you omit to
look in the one direction where Reason and Will assuredly
exist — in your own self."
On the physical plane we get movement without will,
124 ITALIAN FANTASIES
on the animal plane the will to live, on the human plane
the will to live divinely. These three strata cannot be
reduced, to a lowest common denominator of blind force.
And if they could, the miracle of their differentiation would
still remain. That blind forces should rise to conscious-
ness and write books about themselves is even more
wonderful than an eternity of spirit. Reduce all the
seventy odd elements to one, as Chemistry hopes, and in-
stead of an explanation you will only get the new puzzle
of how the one could contain the seeds of the many.
Even the popular Evolution theory is but a juggling with
time. You do not get rid of Creation by shifting the
beginning back to a billion years last Tuesday.
And with all my admiration for the fine qualities of the
man of science I cannot away with his cocksureness, so
curiously proof against the fact that scientific conceptions
are always changing — witness the revolution wrought
b}'^ radium. Even such a simple analysis as the composi-
tion of air has taken in many new and important constitu-
ents — argon, xenon, helium, krypton, neon, &c. — since
the days when as a schoolboy I got full marks for stating
them inaccurately. And yet to this day the scientist re-
counting the constituents of air forgets to wind up, " With
power to add to their number."
As for those sciences which do not depend on intellectual
conceptions and practical experiments, but on antiquarian
research, those learned and dry-as-dust studies which
academies delight to honour, they owe all their importance
simply to antiquity's lack of self-consciousness and its
failure to provide for the curiosity of posterity. Had the
first man who evolved from the ape drawn up a note upon
his ancestor, or, better still, made a picture of his ancestral
tree, what controversies we should have been spared ! Had
the builders of the Pyramids or the delvers of the Roman
catacombs put up little tablets to explain their ideas, what
scholarship would have been nipped in the bud ! The
OF FACTS WITHOUT AUTOCOSMS 125
reputation of the Egyptologists depends on the fact that
the writers of hieroglyphics apparently left no dictionary.
If one were to turn up, the reputation of these savants
would be gone. At present they are able to translate the
same text by " The King went a-hunting " or " My grand-
mother is dead " without ceasing to be taken seriously.
But it is in the realm of Italian art-connoisseurship that
the greatest havoc would be wrought did an official cata-
logue come to light, say in one of the recesses of the Vati-
can or in that wilderness of the Venetian archives. For
the lordly neglect of the Old Masters to put their names
to their pictures has flooded us with a tedious pedantry of
rival attributions, and the thing of beauty, instead of be-
ing a joy for ever, is an eternal source of dulness.
" Ass who attributes it to Mantegna," I saw scribbled
on a fresco, at Padua, of St. Antony admonishing Ezze-
lino, and connoisseurship is merely politer. As long ago
as 1527 a quiz or a braggart of an artist, Zacchia da Vezzano,
painted underneath a sacred picture of his, now in Lucca :
" His operis visis hujus cognoscere quis sit
Auctorem dempto nomine quisque potest."
As who should say, " Take away the name and anybody can
tell the artist." But experience proves the contrary.
I do not say that the virtuosi would all be exposed, as
by the pedigree of a Da Vinci bust, could we light on a
source of certainty like the contemporary slatings in the
Renaissance Review. Some of these sleuth-hounds might
even be vindicated ; and I opine that to you, aynico mio,
who of thirty-three Titians in a London exhibition pro-
nounced no less than thirty-two to be hung on false evi-
dence, the discovery of a set of Accademia catalogues would
not be unwelcome. But your career as a connoisseur would
close. Dead too would be the school of Morelli, collapsed
the draper}' students and ear-measurers, whose mathemat-
ics had, indeed, as little relation to Art as it has to life.
126 ITALIAN FANTASIES
The Sherlock Ilolmeses of Science and Art dig up old
cities, reconstruct forgotten civilisations, redistribute fa-
mous pictures, and amend corrupt texts or corrupt them
more hopelessly. It is but rarely that they have imagina-
tive and historic insight. " Learning is but an adjunct to
ourselves," says Biron. Scholars are too often but an
adjunct to learning. For men with real insight there are
enough dead civilisations and forgotten customs still flour-
ishing all about us. The taboo, the fetish, the totem, the
oracle and the myth are the very atmosphere of our being.
Our generation will leave newspapers and museums —
nay, gramophone records and the films of bioscopes ; the
ghosts of our shapes and voices will haunt our posterity,
and the only chance for scholars will be to condense the
too, too ample materials — there are four miles of novels
already in the British Museum — or perhaps a few benefi-
cent fires will give scholarship a new lease of life. At
their best and richest antiquarian studies only help to make
the past present again, but how does that help us in essen-
tial insight ? The past of to-morrow is here to-day and
we are no wiser. In the hundredth century the excavator
may exhume London, but we see London even more clearly
to-day, and how does that help us in the real problems ?
No ; the only help for us lies in those elements of Truth
which we draw from ourselves, not receive from without
— in those emotional and volitional contacts with the es-
sence of things which accompany all intellectual percep-
tion ; in these motor aspects of reality which drive us
along, these flashes of faith and spiritual intuition which,
although they may vary from age to age under the spell
of individual poets and prophets, and under the evolution
of knowledge and civilisation,
" Are yet a master-light of all our seeing."
They may have been intertwined with incorrect intellec-
tual elements, but because one antenna of the apparatus of
OF FACTS WITHOUT AUTOCOSMS 127
consciousness functions falsely we are not therefore justified
in wholly rejecting the joint report. When we think of
the vast number of contradictory truths by which men in
all ages and countries have lived and died, we shall find
consolation in the thought that the emotional and voli-
tional elements of Truth are more important than its in-
tellectual skeleton.
But what a curious confusion that these emotional and
volitional elements should themselves come to be treated
as intellectual, and desiccated into dogmas ! This is the
result of their seeking expression in words, that unsuit-
able, impossible and fading medium. It is through their
felicitous escape from words that verbally inarticulate
artists and musicians paint and compose truer things than
philosophers say, things that survive vicissitudes of
thought and are as true to-morrow as yesterday. With
the music of the Roman Catholic Church we all agree, and
who shall contradict the Venus of Milo ?
Yes, a statue or a symphony is safe from syllogisms, at
least until it gets into the hands of the art critic and the
programme-concoctor. But the truth airily embodied in
words is at the mercy of system-builders and deduction-
squeezers. Taken with the hard definiteness of coins —
as if, indeed, even coins did not vary from day to day in
purchasing power and according to the country of circula-
tion, — the words are added together to yield a specific
sum of truth. Flying prophetic phrases and winged
mystical raptures are shot down and stuffed for Church
Catechisms and Athanasian Creeds. As if the emotional
and volitional fringe of living words permitted them to be
thus sterilised into scientific propositions ! For just as
facts are the skeletons of truths, so words are single bones,
and the dictionary is a vast ossuary. Talk of the dead
languages — all languages are dead unless spoken, and
spoken with real feeling. A parrot always speaks a dead
language. It is the folly of a universal language that it as-
128 ITALIAN FANTASIES
sumes the same vocabulaiy could be used over a vast area of
varying conditions, its words never expanding nor contract-
ing in meaning, nor ever changing in pronunciation or col-
our. As if Latin was not once universal in those countries
which have gradually transformed it into French, Spanish,
Portuguese, Italian, Provencal, Roumanian, and Rumonsch I
Idiomatic expressions cannot be torn from the soil they
grow in. Maiiana has not the same meaning outside Spain
nor Kismet outside Islam. Language lays such traps for
fools ; the fools have always spoiled and fossilised what
the men of genius have felt and thought. They have
made logic out of poetry and have deadened worship and
wonder into theology. " What do you read ? " says
Hamlet. "Words, words, words."
A truth, then, may be formulated, but it is not true till
it is felt and acted on, and ceases to be true when it ceases
to be felt and acted on. Nor does this canon apply only
to inner truths. Without an element of feeling and voli-
tion, however shadowy, even the simple realities of the
outer world have never been perceived, and the omission
of these elements invalidates the total reality. If
so many readers skip scenery in novels, 'tis because the
scene is described as though it existed in itself. The
dead chunk of landscape bores and depresses. The
reader subconsciously feels that so impersonal a vision is
untrue to the actualities of perception. Nobody has ever
seen a landscape without some emotion, if only the travel-
ler's desire to be at the other end of it. A dozen persons
— even omitting the colour-blind — would see it in as
many different ways, each with different accompaniments
of feeling, thought, and volition, potential or actual, just as
every person in " The Ring and the Book " sees Pompilia
differently. Let the novelist describe the scene, not for
itself, but for its relation to the emotions and purposes of
his personages, and it leaps into life. Similar is the case
of Science, whose facts in divesting themselves of all
OF FACTS WITHOUT AUTOCOSMS 129
emotion and individual error divest themselves likewise
of reality. The dry scientific coldness with which the
universe must be envisaged is an artificial method of
vision. True, the scientist himself may be impelled by
the most tingling curiosity. But the passion and thrill of
his chase for truth does not appear in the quarry : that is
a mere carcase. His report on his specialty is always
carefully divested of emotion. But our emotional and
volitional relations to the spectacle of existence are as
much a part of the total truth of things as colour is of the
visible world. The world is not complete without
" The light that never was on sea or land,
The consecration and the poet's dream."
When Lear cries to the heavens that they too are old, or
Lamartine calls on the lake to remember his happiness,
Ruskin would tell us that this suffusion of Nature with
our own emotions is the pathetic fallacy. On the con-
trary, its absence is the scientific fallacy. Science registers
the world as the phonograph registers sound or the camera
space — without any emotion of its own. As the former
with equal phlegm records a song or a curse, or the latter
a wedding or a funeral, so does Science register its impas-
sive observations. For once admit such a shifting subjec-
tive factor as emotion, and what becomes of the glorious
objectivity of Science ? Away, therefore, with all but the
frigid intellectual view of things ! Since the otlier ele-
ments of Truth elude our grasp, let us boldly declare them
irrelevant. The bankruptcy of Science, you see, comes
not at the end of its operations. Science starts bankrupt.
It has not sufficient capital to begin trading. Its methods
and apparatus are entirely inadequate for the attainment
of truth. A cat may look at a king — but its observation
will not be very profound. And Science is as little
equipped for observing the universe as the cat for observ-
ing the king. All it can perceive or establish is chains of
130 ITALIAN FANTASIES
causation, or rather recurring sequences of phenomena, in
an unconscious continuian. It is a post-mortem investiga-
tion to ascertain, not the cause of death, but the cause of
life.
But the universe is not a quaint collection of dead things
in a vacuum, not a museum of stuffed birds or transfixed
butterflies, but a breathing, flying, singing, striving and
suffering process — an unfinished infinitude. This kinetic
process cannot be expressed in terms of statics. " What
is Truth ? " says the jesting cosmos, and does not stay for
an answer. But by an artificial abstraction parts of it can
be expressed for the intellect in static 'ologies and 'onomies,
on the understanding that the intellect never forgets to
put back its results into the palpitating flux to which
they belong and in which alone they have true significance.
This understanding the intellect too frequently violates
or forgets, and therefore for Truth we must go, not to the
man of science, but to the poet, who registers his universe
synthetically with soul as well as with brain. Tragedy,
comedy, heroic drama, sombre suffering, majestic mystery
— ■ all these are in the flux — more surely than ether waves
and dancing atoms — and the poet in painting the fulness
of life with the fulness of his own emotion is giving us a
fuller truth than any that Science can attain to. " We
cannot really know the truth unless we love the truth,"
said Fenelon. "They who love well will know well."
This is not mysticism but common sense, and Goethe re-
peated it when he said that " No one can write about any-
thing unless he writes about it with love." " To see things
in their beauty," said Matthew Arnold, " is to see them in
their truth." It may be that the knowledge of things
through pure intellect is pure delusion, that to pigeon-hole
the universe is to make it into a cemetery. Instead of
that " love is blind," the truth may be that only love sees.
There is a sense in which every mother's babe is the most
beautiful in the world.
OF FACTS WITHOUT AUTOCOSMS 131
Knowledge, then, as a mere function of the intellect, is
only the dead knowledge that appears in school-books.
But who shall say that knowledge was meant to be only a
function of the intellect, that we do not know with our
heart and soul as well as with our brains ? Nay, as if to
mock at mere intellect, the universe absolutely refuses to
yield up its secret to the intellect. Hence the antinomies
of Kant or Mansel or Plato's " Parmenides." Follow up
mere thought, however apparently clear, and it lands us
in nonsense. Perhaps wisdom does not lie that way at
all. Perhaps the fear of the Lord is really the beginning
of wisdom.
For if Science is Truth in one dimension and Art Truth
in two dimensions, it is only when we complete emotional
vision by volition that we arrive at Truth's full-orbed
reality. Even love cannot bring wisdom unless the love
translates itself into action. In short, the meaning of
Truth must be changed from a dead fact of the intellect
into a live fact of the whole being. The Truth is also the
Way and the Life.
Aristotle in his " Metaphysics " tells us that Cratylus
carried the scepticism of Heraclitus to such a degree that
he at last was of opinion one ought to speak of nothing, but
merely moved his finger. Aristotle does not see that in
this moving of his finger Cratylus was asserting at least
the volitional element of Truth and perhaps its most im-
portant. For the universe is not a museum, placarded
"Look, but please do not touch." It says, "Touch, and
then you will really see. Live, work, love, fight, and
then you will really know what the nature of your universe
is."
The world of the physical sciences is only the stage-set-
ting for the spiritual drama. Though there is a truth of
dead things called Science, the real truth is of live things
— a triple truth in which intellect, will, and emotion are
one. Our sense of this truth — obtained as it is during
132 ITALIAN FANTASIES
emotional volition — is individual, irreducible to the
simpler planes of Science and Art, and thus incommuni-
cable. And the measure of our attainment of it will be
the measure of our sympathetic insight and of the depth
to which we have penetrated by action into the heart of
the phenomena. Then what seemed a mass of dull facts
may break into music like a Beethoven score under the
baton of a master.
The scientist who should say that a Beethoven symphony
consisted of the atoms of the paper and ink which con-
stitute the score, or even who expressed it mathematically
as a sequence of complex air-vibrations made by strings
and holes, would be talking truth; but as incomplete and
irrelevant truth as the ignoramus who should say it was
curious black strokes and dots on ruled paper, or the
statistician who should count the semi-breves or fortissimo
passages. The true truth of the symphony comes into
being only when it is interpreted by the finest performers
to souls whose life it enlarges.
And so with the universe, which is not a dead, complete
thing outside of us, but a palpitating spiritual potentiality,
for the fullest truth about which the co-operation of our own
souls is needed, our souls that create a part of the truth
they perceive or aspire to. The universe, in short, is a
magic storehouse from which we may draw — or into
which put — what we will to the extent of our faith, our
emotion, our sense of beauty, our righteousness. " Ask,
and it shall be given you ; seek, and ye shall find ; knock,
and it shall be opened unto you."
OF FACTS WITH ALIEN AUTOCOSMS: OR
THE FUTILITY OF CULTURE
When I betake me to a zoological garden, equipped
with a pennyworth of popcorn, a food strangely popular
even among the carnivora, I am touched by a prescience
of all the pleasure and dumb gratitude to be evoked by
those humble grains. And in truth how many eager caged
creatures are destined to have a joyous thrill of sniffing
suspense, followed by the due titillation of the palate!
My proffering fingers shall meet the gentle nose of the
deer, the sensitive arching trunk of the elephant, the kindly
peck of parrots, the mischievous hands of monkeys, the
soft snouts of strange beasts. Not otherwise is it when,
faring forth to Italy, I provision myself with a bag of coin.
Into what innumerable itching tentacles these gilded or
cuprous grains are to drop : white-cuffed hands of waiters,
horny digits of vetturini and facchini, gnarled fins of gondo-
liers and hookers, grimy paws of beggars, shrivelled stumps
of cripples, dexterous toes of armless ancients, spluttering
mouths of divers, rosy fingers of flower-throwing chil-
dren, persuasive plates of serenading musicians, deceptive
ticket-holes of dishonest railway clerks, plethoric pockets
of hotel-keepers, greedy tills of bargaining shopkeepers,
pious palms of monks and sacristans, charity-boxes of
cathedrals, long-handled fishing-nets of little churches,
musty laps of squatting, mumbling crones, greasy caps of
guides, official pyxes of curators and janitors, clutching
claws of unbidden cicerones. All these — and how many
more! — photographers and painters and copyists and
133
134 ITALIAN FANTASIES
forg^ers, modellers and restorers and lecturers on ruins,
landlords and cooks and critics — live by Italy's ancient
art. Great Caesar dead — and turned to Show.
The beauty of Italy is elemental fodder for the autoch-
thones ; yet how strange the existence of the Neapolitan
swimmer whose metier is to dive for coppers when the
steamer sails for the witching cliffs of Sorrento, and to
cry in enticing gurgles, " Money in the water ! " the
spluttering syllables flowing into one another as in the
soft patois of Venice ! Precisely when the Bay of Naples
is a violet dancing flame and Vesuvius, majestically
couchant, sends her white incense to the blue, and you
are tranced with beauty and sunshine, comes this monetary
merman to drag you down to the depths.
"Nutritive chains" the biologists name the inter-related
organisms whose existence depends on one another, and
another link of this chain you shall count the boatmen
waiting to show you the blue grotto of Capri. Their skiffs
dart upon you like creatures whose prey comes only at
a fixed hour; like creatures, moreover, shaped in the
struggle for existence to the only function by which
they can survive, for they are fittest to pass under the
low arch of the cerulean grotto (the occupant consenting
to crouch like an antenna drawn in). That ardent
water in the Capri cave — that lovely flame of light blue
in a bluer burning spirit — sustains likewise the naked
diver who stands poised on a rock, ready to show its
chromatic effects upon flesh ; the culminating moment
of whose day — the feeding- time, as it were — comes
when the tourists glide in.
Apt symbol indeed of the tourist, that shallow skiff
skinnning over beauty with which the native is in deep
elemental contact, from which, indeed, he wrests his
living.
Since Goethe with his gospel of culture spent those
famous Wanderjahre in Italy, a swollen stream of pious
OF FACTS WITH ALIEN AUTOCOSMS 135
art-pilgrims has been pouring over the land. And
coming into Florence from Lucca and a sheaf of quiet
cities on an afternoon of this spring, I had a horrid im-
pression of modern bustling streets and motors and trams
and a great press of people, and ten thousand parasites
battening on the art and beauty of the city, and it was
not till I had won my way to my beloved Ponte Vecchio,
with its mediaeval stalls, tliat the city of the lily seemed
to possess her soul again. Then as I saw her compose
herself under her deep blue sky into a noble harmony,
with her heights and her palaces and her river and her
arches and arcades, and group herself round a tower, and
brood in Venetian glamour over her water with her
ancient rusty houses, and rise behind into a fantasy of
quaint roofs and brick domes and steeples and belfries,
all floating in a golden glory ; and as I reflected on all
she was and held within her narrow compass, how the
names of great men and great days were written on every
stone, and how every sort of art had been poured over her
as prodigally as every sort of earth-beauty ; and as I
thought of the enchanting villages around and above her,
where the cypress and the olive, the ilex and the pine
slumbered in the sunshine, amid great rocks that shadowed
cool gloomy pools, and white roads went winding odorous
with may and sweet with the song of thrush and black-
bird, framing and arabesquing the faery city below in
magic tangles of leafy boughs ; and as I remembered that
here to-da^^ in this same city was not only spring, but Bot-
ticelli's Spring — then it seemed to me that her flowers
and her palaces, her frescoes and the curves of her hills
were pushed up from the same deep elemental core of
beauty, and that she lay like some great princess of
Brobdingnag on whose body a colony of all the culture-
snobs of the world had dumped its masses of raw build-
ing, run up its hundreds of hotels and pensions, piled its
pyramids of handbooks, biographies, Dantes, histories,
136 ITALIAN FANTASIES
essays, landed its hordes of guides and interpreters,
encamped its army of lecturers and art critics, installed
its cohort of copyists, dragged up its heavy battery of
professional photographers, supplemented by an amateur
corps of Kodak snapshooters ; but that, breathing lightly
beneath all this mountainous cumber, unasphyxiated even
by the works on the Renaissance, she could still rise
radiant in her immortal strength and beauty, shaking
off the Lilliputian creatures and their spawn of print,
ungalled by that ceaseless fire of snapshots, imperturbable
amid the lecturing, unimpaired even by all that immemo-
rial admiration.
The pioneers of this culture-colony blundered some-
times, as pioneers will, and even Goethe, one notes with
malicious glee, spent himself upon the wrong pictures,
gloating over Guercino, wrestling with Carracci, Guido
and Domenichino, and passing Botticelli by, nay taking
all Florence as an afternoon excursion. And Pater him-
self, the pontifical Pater, though he has the merit of a Bot-
ticelli pioneer, yet thought it necessary to apologise for
criticising " a second-rate painter " : which is as though
one should apologise for discussing Keats.
Nor were Byron and Shelley more felicitous in their
admirations. The Kunstforscher^ that Being usually made
in Germany, has been busy since their day. Amid the
great movement of life, while men have been sowing and
reaping, writing and painting, voyaging and making love,
this spectacled creature has been peering at pictures and
statues, scientifically analysing away their authenticity and
often their charm. There is the Venus de' Medici, which
generations have raved over, which innumerable proces-
sions of tourists have journeyed to admire and found ad-
mirable. The connoisseurs have now pronounced her
" spurious and meretricious," and to-day nobody who re-
spects himself would allow himself a thrill at the sight of
her. Yet Childe Harold cried ;
OF FACTS WITH ALIEN AUTOCOSMS 137
" We gaze and turn away, and know not where,
Dazzled and drunk with beauty, till the heart
Reels with its fulness."
I must admit that after the Venus of Milo the beauty
of the Medici Venus does appear a trivial prettiness. But
even the Venus of Milo — though we are still permitted
to admire her — is "late and eclectic."
The unhappy Byron also wrote to somebody : " The
Venus is more for admiration than for love. What
struck me most was the mistress of the Raphael por-
trait." Alas ! nobody believes now that the picture has
anything to do with La Fornarina.
As for Shelley, when in 1819 he saw at Florence the
Medusa attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, he broke into
lyric raptures,
" Its horror and its beauty are divine,
Upon its lips and eyelids seems to lie
Loveliness like a shadow, &c. &c.
^ * ^ * *
'Tis the tempestuous loveliness of terror ;
For from the serpents gleams a brazen glare,
Kindled by that inextricable eri'or ! . . ."
Kindled indeed by that inextricable error ! For the Me-
dusa is now given up by every connoisseur. It is a mere
inartistic futility, and to-day every lover of the arts must
grow stony at the sight of it. That immortal line "the
tempestuous loveliness of terror " is the only thing to its
credit, though some might count, too, the passage in which
Pater gloats over its beauty of conception.
Then there is that little matter of Leonardo's St. John
in the Louvre. Michelet saw the whole Renaissance in it,
and Pater alludes to it as " one of the few naked figures
Leonardo painted," and builds upon it a complex theory
of Leonardo's symbolic suggestive method, and is not sur-
prised at the saint's "strange likeness to the Bacchus
which hangs near it, which set Theophile Gautier think-
138 ITALIAN FANTASIES
ing of Heine's notion of decayed gods, who, to maintain
themselves after the fall of Paganism, took employment
in the new religion." And now the St. John turns out to
liave been a pupil's or an imitator's, and probably not even
a St. John.
The culture-pilgrims of to-day, armed with sacred text-
books, verbally infallible, and canonical lists of authentic
attributions, enjoy a suspicious superiority in aesthetic
judgment over the greatest creative artists. For Goethe
and Byron and Shelley did at least create, and Pater's
interpretation of Mona Lisa is finer than the picture itself ;
whereas the pursuit of culture in the average pilgrim is a
confession of sterility either in himself or in his own na-
tion, which is not sufficiently vitalised to absorb his inter-
ests. " If the Romans had had to learn Latin," said Heine,
" they would never have conquered the world." And were
England free in thought and nobly artistic, there would
be no need of this fervour for the preservation of Greek.
Even Goethe, it is amazing to discover from his " Italian-
ische Reise," never saw the sea till he went to Italy. And
his first glimpse of it was, of all places in the world, at
the Lido in Venice ! He with the German Ocean to draw
from him, as it drew from Heine, the cry of " Thalassa ! ";
he who might have seen how
" Die weissen Meerkindei-
Hoch aufspringen und jauchzen
Uebermut-ber ausch t, "
must fare forth to another land and behold a lazy, almost
tideless lagoon lapping in shallow muddiness on the tamest
and dullest shore in the world. Surely we have here an
ironic image of the culture-pilgrim who sets out to see
Art abroad before he has seen Nature at home.
When the Goths besieged Rome, Belisarius hurled down
upon them the statues of the Mausoleum of St. Angelo,
and the tomb was turned to a citadel. But against the
OF FACTS WITH ALIEN AUTOCOSMS 139
siege of Rome by the Goethes there is no known defence.
A rain of statues would merely aggravate their zeal, and
the more hopelessly the statues smashed, the more would
their admiration solidify. So to-day the Goethes and the
Huns alike are invited up to see the statues — for a fee —
and every citadel of reality is turned to a mausoleum-
museum. St. Angelo, that has stood the storms of eigh-
teen centuries, is the perquisite of a facetious warder who
gabbles automatically of Beatrice Cenci, "?a piil hella
ragazza c?' Italia^'''' as he points out her pitiful, if dubious,
dungeon. In the stone cell of the Florentine monastery,
on whose cold flags Savonarola wore his knees in fasting
and prayer, a guide holds up a reflector to concentrate
the light on the frescoes with which Fra Angelico glorified
the rude walls. Where St. Catherine walked — in the
footsteps of the Bridegroom— leaving the marks of her
miraculous feet, a buxom native of Siena expects her
obolus. Outside the pyramid-shadowed cemetery where
Keats lies under his heart-broken epitaph, a Roman urchin
turns supplicatory somersaults. Italia Bella, a paper pub-
lished at Milan, adjured Arona to wake up and celebrate
the tercentenary of the canonisation of its Saint Carlo,
"if only because it pays." History, with its blood and
tears, becomes sesthetics for the tourist and economics for
the native. Of a truth quaint links concatenate Csesar
and the showman, the saint with the apple-woman who
finds a profitable pitch for her stall at his church-corner.
While we are fuming and strutting we are but providing
popcorn for posterity. Buskined heroes of history, who
walk the earth in tragic splendour, perchance your truest
service to humanity has been done in affording occupation
for the poor devil who expatiates upon the traces of your
passing. This, at least, ye may be sure is good service ;
the rest of your work, who shall sever the good and evil
strands of it? So much pother of prophets and politicians
— and, lo ! how poor a planet we still wander in.
140 ITALIAN FANTASIES
The culture-pilgrim, too, apart from this scattering of
popcorn, is a futile being. Culture as a mere excursion
from a solid home-reality may be vitalising, but whoso
thinks to batten on alien arts and letters is filling his belly
with the sirocco. There is no reality in the travel-world,
be it the world of Art or the world of Nature, for we have
no true volitional relations with it. 'Twas Schopenhauer
who discovered this for Art — though his World has only
the two dimensions of Will and Idea. But he did not, if
I remember, point out that everything seen with aloofness
from action partakes of this art-quality. The landscape
from the observation-car is a mere picture to us, however
real to the peasants working in the fields.
The only "real" traveller is the commercial. We
others, wandering through streets that our ancestors did
not build, or sitting in alien apartments and gazing upon
unhomely hills, are still spectators, not actors. We are
not rooted in this soil, nor feel the deep intimacies that
are the truest truth about it. I may partake in the
annual /esto of an Italian mountain village, hear the Mass,
bear banner and taper in the procession, salute the saintly
image, dance upon the plateau-piazza with a snooded
peasant-girl, but how shall I feel the holiness and joy of this
day of days ? — I whose infant breath was not drawn amid
these precipitous fastnesses, who have not lived in these
human caves cut in the rock, who have not played in these
steep stone streets, who know nothing of the dear narrow-
ness, the vivid intensity that is born of cramped conscious-
ness I There is in the very attitude of spectator something
that stands between one and the object in its truth. This it
is that makes the appreciations of cities by the school of
Pater such hollow fantasy, such bastards of an accident
by a temperament. This it was that begot Pierre Loti's
monumental misreading of Japan as a Lilliput of the
pretty-pretty. To lose the artistic Ego in the inner life
of the phenomenon — how rare the critic who is capable of
OF FACTS WITH ALIEN AUTOCOSMS 141
that ! Listening to these parasites upon alien autocosms,
"Moving about in worlds not realised,"
one would imagine that a civilisation or a city existed,
that its remote founders had fevered, and its burghers
toiled, and its architects built, to the mere end that cen-
turies after they were dust some exquisite vibrations
should be registered on a sensitive soul.
Only less arrogant is it to place one's soul in patronising
" appreciation " before some great historic structure — a
cathedral, a mosque, a palace, a library. These works of
man so immensely transcend any man's works that he fits
into them almost as ludicrously as a mouse. A cathedral
that represents the genius and labours and sacrifices of
generations towers so immensely out of proportion to any
individual that he can only recover a reasonable relation
to it by fusing himself into the life and stature of the race.
To be solely concerned with its impingement upon his
own soul is an impertinence, to pass his life in contriving
such impingements is to live by robbery, and to enjoy
these secular products of human solidarity on the Paterian
pretext that the only reality is the fleeting and isolated
Ego, is peculiarly paradoxical.
Pater himself would even go so far as to study men, e.g.^
Pico di Mirandola, for their aesthetic flavours. This is,
indeed, to live resolutely Im Schonen if not Im Ganzen,
and it is, therefore, the more curious, that in citing
Goethe's maxim in his " Winckelmann " Pater should, like
Carlyle, have unconsciously substituted Im Wahren for Im
Schonen. The gesthetic appreciation of Pico — as of most
things — is a mere by-product. I do not deny that by-
products are sometimes delightful. But let us not mis-
take them for central verities. And these churches, these
pictures, these statues, these palaces, these monasteries
which we see to-day in two dimensions, had once their
third dimension of reality, nay,' often have it still to those
142 ITALIAN FANTASIES
who know them in their truth. How quaint that juxta-
position of Bibles and Baedekers in Italian churches I
The image which, seen through tears, is soothing a wor-
shipper's pain, is at the same moment finding exact
appreciation at the eyes of a connoisseur. Who can read
without emotion of how in thirteenth-century Florence
Cimabue's Madonna, " the first Madonna the people could
love," was borne in triumph from the painter's studio to its
church by the whole population of the quarter, which
henceforwards took the name of the Allegro Borgo! To-
day the art-critic analyses its types and its composition,
and it takes its place coldly in the history of painting as
the link between the Byzantine and the Tuscan. But the
citizens of the Joyous Quarter had the true flavour of the
thing.
Despite the doctrine of Art for Art's sake it remains
questionable if any maker of Art has ever escaped a desire
to act — massively or diffusively — upon the life of his
age. In vain he hides himself in the past, or flies to No-
man's-land, he vibrates throughout to the present, touches
living interests with their myriad indirect relations to
action, to the third dimension. Every art-product holds,
however subtly, something of that topical quality which
makes the portrait of a contemporary celebrity, wet from
the painter's brush, very different from the peaceful re-
moteness of an old master.
No half-deciphered face of dim sweetness, charming us
from the magic casement of some fading fresco by some
forgotten artist, as with the very image of Art aloof and ab-
solute, but was once wrought for a specific market and born
into a specific atmosphere. The forlorn stumps and
torsoes that litter the moss-grown courts of museums were
hailed, as they fell from the craftsman's hand, by a definite
clientele, rejoicing in their beauty, stimulated by their
freshness. Nothing, alas ! is so old, so corroded with
time, but it was once brand new, the pleasant novelty of
OF FACTS. WITH ALIEN AUTOCOSMS 143
the day to beings looking back upon an immemorial anti-
quity, and now long since mouldered to dust. Every
blurred inscription, every crumbling pillar and shattered
fragment had once its life, its meaning, its public.
The hand of time in eliminating the topical element and
reducing a picture to pure Art — the inactive beauty that
is its own end — removes from our perception the full
reality of the art phenomenon as it fell from the artist's
hand into time and space.
Some parts of this original plenitude were indeed better
forgotten, for the Old Masters who were young once,
young and impecunious, turned Renaissance art into a
fancy dress ball of their patrons, the Magnificent Ones
figuring as saints and patriarchs, Bethlehem shepherds and
Magian kings, whom oblivious time has done well to mel-
low into a quasi-anonymity. But if the loss of such in-
tellectual elements is a gain, I am less certain as to the
evaporation of the emotional auras of works of art.
Andrea Orcagna worked ten years at the marble Gothic
Tabernacle that stands in the fuscous Or San Michele of
Florence, and men of other races and faiths gaze perfunc-
torily upon its decorative jewelled marvels, its pictorial
reliefs, wrought after the plague of 13i8 from the pious
legacies of the dead or the thank-offerings of the survivors.
The marble gleams in the immortal inactive beauty that
is its own end — but where are the hope and the faith, the
mourning and the anguish that made the atmosphere in
which its beauty had birth ? Ebbed to the eternal silence
like that great wave of popular rejoicing on which
Cimabue's 3fadonna was carried to S. Maria Novella, or a
picture of Duccio's to its due church in Siena. Can it be
that Art, launched thus upon a sea of emotion, is only its
true self when stranded high and dry upon the beach ?
Is perhaps its most precious aspect precisely that by
which it is related to life ? And its least precious part
that which remains over for the connoisseur of beauty ?
1-14 ITALIAN FANTASIES
Oh, but this is heresy, almost the philistinism of a Tolstoy
or a Savonarola.
But believe me, my dear Virtuosi, that flavour which
the citizens of the Joyous Quarter tasted, that wild-straw-
berry flavour of living, that dog-rose aroma of reality
which you miss by your wilful avoidance of volitional re-
lations, by your gospel of Art for Art's sake, is as ex-
quisite as any of your hot-house flowers and fruitage.
Are you rushing in pursuit of the new pleasure ? Nay, it
can only be captured by those who do not pursue it, who
are even unaware that it exists. Mill's eudseraonistic
paradox again, you see.
Has any professional hunter of the aesthetic ever, I wonder,
had so exquisite a sense of the starry heaven as Garibaldi
when lie embarked from Quarto to redeem his country ?
" O night of the fifth of May, lit up with the fire of a
thousand lamps with which the Omnipotent has adorned
the Infinite ! Beautiful, tranquil, solemn with that so-
lemnity which swells the hearts of generous men when
they go forth to free the slave I "
" He never tampered with his sense of reality." These
words came to me as the epitaph of an old Jewish pedlar
when I heard of his passing away in far-off Jerusalem.
He too knew this joy of the Allegro Borgo (though in his
autocosm the Madonna was an idol) and gleams of it sus-
tained him through long years of poverty and pain, and
through the shadows of his closing hour. Pictures, songs,
histories — all had no existence for him outside his re-
ligion. All were but ministers of faith, to feed its sacred
flame. There was not in his whole life a moment of di-
vorce between reality and consciousness. In such sim-
plicity, what a unity, what a giant strength ! Pitiful ye
seem in comparison, ye unshelled aesthetes, wandering in
search of an autocosm or yearning to inhabit every one in
turn. Imagine it, to live the years of the Patriarch in our
complex tortured era, and never to have had an art-
OF FACTS WITH ALIEN AUTOCOSMS 145
emotion, never — save perhaps in childhood — to have
known make-believe, never to have sundered vision and
idea from actuality ! Think of it, ye who have played
such tricks with your souls as would make the angels
weep, whose pious emotion has as much relation to religion
as the enjoyment of a painted ocean to a struggle in the
blind waters. You, Monsieur Loti of the Academie
Frangaise, with your vain literary vigil at the Holy
Sepulchre, will you not envy this high seriousness which
found an exaltation in forty fasts a year, without bite or
sup, and drew a salty vitalisation from the tear of peni-
tence ? And you, sophisters of religion, who cling to your
creed because it is good for the poor, or a beautiful tradi-
tion, or a branch of respectability ; and above all, you,
amateurs of ' la volupte dans la devotion,'''' after the recipe of
Barres ; you, neo-Catholics who mistake masturbation for
adoration, bow your heads before one who worshipped
God as naively as a dog adores his master, who did not
even know that he believed, who ivas belief ; who went to
Jerusalem not because he was a Zionist but because it was
Zion, whose tears at the Wailing Wall were tinctured
with never a thought of the wonder and picturesqueness
of weeping over a Zion lost eighteen hundred years before
he was born ! Poor Parsifal ! Poor pure fool ! Gone is
thy restful simplicity. Persiflage is now our wisdom.
But because I have been privileged to see this sancta
simplicitas of the old Jewish pedlar, I feel I know my
Middle Ages better than the Protestant connoisseur whose
learning flattens me out, or the pseudo-Catholic in search
of sensations. I understand the Allegro Borgo, I say,
and I am not appalled by the terrible list of Christian for-
geries and legends, the apocryphal Gospels, the pseudo-
Epistles, the hagiologies, for I know that 'tis the dry light
of literary history that is false — like every other science
— and that in life all these figments may have been the
harmless nutriment of saintly souls. In this old Jew's
U6 ITALIAN FANTASIES
autocosm, too, there were no physical impossibilities, no
incredible miracles, no monsters or leviathans so strange
but their names in Hebrew letters were a certificate of
pedigree ; the centuries were fused for him as by a cosmic
cinematograph, the patriarchs and saints hovering over
him in immortal synchrony. So am I not taken aback to
see the Bambino still in his mother's lap by the time the
Visconti present the Certosa to the Madonna, nor does it
disconcert me to behold all the abbots and bishops of
Christendom in attendance at the Crucifixion with consol-
ing models of their churches. And as for the Madonna
being an Italian grande dame dressed in Venetian silks or
Florentine brocades, how else, pray, are we to preserve
religion ? True local colour and true Jerusalem costum-
ing would have brought relativity into the absoluteness of
belief, would have been a reminder that the Madonna was
a foreigner. The truer truth is that she is Our Lady.
Art, you see, had in its palmy days to be a full-orbed
reality, carrying conviction as well as beauty to the guile-
less beholder. To us too 'tis only the masterpiece attuned
to our own macrocosm that can give us this plenary satis-
faction. Even " Paradise Lost " is for us merely a magnifi-
cent banquet of words, the virgin bloom of Paradise truly
lost with our faith in the groundwork of the epic. Tol-
stoy's attack on Art fails to differentiate between the Art
of alien autocosms, the Culture Art which divides our soul
against itself, and the real vitalising Art of our own epoch.
For though we say, " Blessed are the simple, who live in
the Absolute," 'tis no necessary converse to cry damna-
tion on the complex. Art, we know, is in a sense a play-
ing with life, an outcome, as Schiller said, of the play-
impulse, the exuberance of energies not exhausted in the
struggle for existence. This is what Carlyle felt when he
denounced mere rhymesters and canvas-colourers ; it was
the secret of his " imperfect sympathies " (in Elia's phrase)
with Shakespeare himself. 'Tis Hebraism versus Helen-
OF FACTS WITH ALIEN AUTOCOSMS 147
ism — the earnestness of the writers of the Bible, whose
Art is an unconscious enhancement, a by-product struck
off at white heat, versus the self-conscious manipulation of
themes by -3^schylus or Sophocles. A sense of futility
and superfluity, if not of positive pravity, lies behind the
eternal distrust of the Puritan for the make-believe of Art,
his suspicion of the theatre and the nudities of Pagan
sculpture. A prick of atavistic Calvinism caused the
writer with the profoundest instinct for make-believe our
generation has seen — Robert Louis Stevenson — suddenly
to declare that the artist was no better than a fiUe de joie.
But this was because the bulk of Stevenson's fiction —
unlike his essays and his poetry — is Art in its anecdo-
tage, without serious relation to the spirit. And there
are moods in which a jejune elegance or an empty exhilara-
tion is as unsatisfying as a lady's boudoir ; and the artist,
as a maker of beautiful toys, must sink into the same
place as the contriver of perfumes and cushions. In
Japan, where every workman is an artist. Art is in its
proper place, and there is neither cant nor confusion.
But besides the little Art of decorative line and melodious
tinkle and romantic falsification of life there is the greater
Art which has in it the unrest of the ocean and the silence
of the starry night. Art, if in some instances it has
sprung direct from the play-impulse, has largely come to
us by way of religion, and where it is merely play for
play's sake — as in rococo Art — it is doomed to sterility.
Although Art represents, yet, as photography came to
prove, representation is not the aim of Art. The aim of
Art is creation — creation that stimulates the soul. The
artist has not to reproduce his model, but to create some-
thing new, living, and stimulating by help of it. He adds
new creations to Nature. He marries her facts to his
passion and pain, and the offspring is Art — Nature crossed
by Man. The great odes of Keats and Wordsworth, the
symphonies of Beethoven, the pictures of Bellini, the
148 ITALIAN FANTASIES
statues of Michelangelo, transmit to us the artists' spirit-
ual exaltations, their ideals of beauty and energy. It
boots not to point out that the artist is often selfish and
licentious, irritable and vain. It is the greatness of his
soul, not its pettinesses, which he puts into his art ; his
emotions and ideals into its content, his sincerity into its
craftsmanship. And by greatnesses I do not mean only
moral greatnesses, for life is larger than morality. It is his
own temperament with which the artist crosses Nature.
And that is why schools of Art can never yield more
than craft : new creations can only be got by new
crossings.
I would grant the Puritan, to whom all Art is of Satan,
as I would grant his strange ally, Plato, that eesthetics
may be abused, especially when divorced from life.
There are young ladies who consume a novel a day, Sun-
days not omitted, by which process half their waking
life is passed in a species of opium-eating. There are
amateurs of music whose life is a surfeit of sweet sounds,
and picture-lovers whose day is an orgy of line and colour.
But when Tolstoy, perceiving what a sensual sty of Fine
Art we may wallow in, ranged himself with the old Puri-
tan iconoclasts, and launched his famous Platonic encyclical
against music divorced from public psalmody, song sun-
dered from harvest-festivity, or poetry that was not a
marching song to the Millennium, he overlooked that even
a healthy soul may have a surplusage of play-energy —
nay, that this is the very child-soul — and that even from
a Puritan point of view Fine Art may purify for fine
Action, though it lack the direct nexus with Action.
Tolstoy's tracts on religion may even be less vitalising for
our age than " Anna Karenina " operating by way of the
Aristotelian katharsis.
And the relation of so-called fiction to truth may be
even closer than its nexus with Action. For it follows
from our analysis of Science that novels and plays have
OF FACTS WITH ALIEN AUTOCOSMS 149
the great initial veracity of reproducing the fulness of
life as compared with the segregative sciences with their
one-sided abstractions, which are to actuality as the con-
jugations in a Greek grammar are to a conversation with
Helen of Troy. While the artificial selection of Science
breaks a whole into parts, the artificial selection of Art can
make a part truly represent the whole. And the greater
the artist-soul the less will it play with its moods by the
artificial and conscious refraction of Art for Art's sake.
None should know better than Tolstoy that the highest Art is
only Truth seen as Beauty. The great artist's registration
and reflection of the universe in tone or colour, line or
word, is, indeed, the highest form of Science at our com-
mand, fact and flower in one. " Beauty is Truth, Truth
Beauty." Sophocles, Shakespeare, Dante, Michelangelo,
Beethoven, Milton, Browning, were not playing with life.
The world of Art may not be the world of Science, but
it is the world we live in, the human world furnished
with faith and emotion, no less " real " than the naked
universe of physical law.
To accept Art for Art's sake, to divorce it from life,
would be to pigeon-hole our souls, as most people put
their religion into Sundays. The deepest analysis seems
to conduct us back to a recognition that Art and Reality,
though they have no necessary relation, do actually tend
to approach each other in the greatest Art. The greatest
writers — a Shakespeare or a Tourgenieff — in that selection
from life which constitutes Art, select so as to give a sense
of the whole, avoiding the one-sided selection which gives
us on the one hand the disproportionate sexualities of the
Palais-Royal farce or of the elegant bawdy-book, on the other
the disproportionate sentimentalisms of goody-goody fiction.
In painting, too, the Art which seizes the essence of places
and people is the greatest, and I believe the greatest music
seizes the essence of moods. Moreover, it is only by their
relations to human realities that imagfinative creations like
150 ITALIAN FANTASIES
Goethe's Mepliistopheles or Swift's Lilliputians, the
Prometheus of iEschylus, the Caliban of Shakespeare, or
the Jungle-Beasts of Kipling, have power to hold us. It
may give us a useful distinction between Imagination and
Fancy to connect the one with invention along the lines of
life and born of insight into its essence — as in the creation
of Hamlet ; the other with artificial invention — as in the
creation of Alice's Wonderland. Whether Hamlet existed
or not, or that Prince Hal did exist, is irrelevant to Art.
The transient reality has been replaced by the permanent
creation. Per contra, what was meant as Truth may
survive only as Art, like the mythological parts of the
"Iliad," "Macbeth," "Paradise Lost," or the "Divina
Commedia." Yet, as I have just pointed out, even these
great artistic creations lose their hold in proportion as
they cease to seem in correspondence with external realities.
And if the supreme test of plastic and literary Art is its
communication of a sense of life, is it not Truth we are
really worshipping. Truth under another name ? For
lifelikeness, if it does not necessarily mean likeness to
particular individuals, does necessarily mean likeness to
universals. And Selection, though it omits portions of
the truth, does not omit the whole truth — nay, sometimes
reveals the whole truth by cutting away the obscuring de-
tails. Reality is the inexhaustible/ows et origo of all great
Art ; apart from which there is no life in Art, but a rootless,
sapless, soulless simulacrum. So that with the supreme
artist, the Puritan antithesis of Truth and Art, Reality and
Make-believe, Hebraism and Hellenism, disappears. A
Sophocles is as earnest as a Socrates, a Michelanglo as a
Savoutcrola, a Shakespeare as a Luther, a Beethoven as a
Darwin.
As earnest, but not as limited. The biggest souls have
never been able to express tlieir sense of the multiform
flowingness of things in neat packets of propositions;
they have expressed it through the infinitude of Art.
OF FACTS WITH ALIEN AUTOCOSMS 151
And Art, having once in human history been the medium
of the spirit, must never sink back into a soulless toy.
The Art of the future must vivify Science and take it up
into Life ; it must touch Truth with emotion and exalt it
into Religion.
ST. FRANCIS: OR THE IRONY OF
INSTITUTIONS
Ludibria rerum humanarum cuuctis in negotiis.
Tacitus.
I
So eccomi back in Assisi, after heaven knows how many-
years, and here is the same bland Franciscan — or his
brother — to show me the same tiny monastery garden
with the same rusty rose-bushes and tell me the same
story of how its native thorns and briars turned into
thornless roses with blood-specked leaves after St, Francis
had rolled in them to subdue the flesh, and the same anec-
dote of the neophyte who refused to plant cabbages with
their roots upward and was rejected by the saint as in-
sufficiently simple and obedient, and I ask the same ques-
tion as to the botanic results of planting cabbages topsy-
turvy and receive the same beaming reassurance that they
waxed to prize dimensions, while a blight fell on those
whose roots had, with worldly-wise presumption, been
planted in earth. And I am shown the same little hut
which the saint occupied, with the same unnatural eccle-
siastic vaulting and the same unnatural oratory above it,
and I go again into the same Lilliputian church (twenty-
two feet by thirteen) beloved of St. Francis, with its rude
plaster and its wooden benches and its plain brass lamps,
and receive the same shock at the thought of its asphyxia-
tion beneath the giant grandeur of S. Maria of the Angels,
that spreads over it like a golden eagle brooding a street
sparrow. And from the door of this dear little Portiuncula
I glean the same glad tidings that Pope Gregory XIII. at
162
ST. FRANCIS 153
the instance of the most illustrious Cardinal Sforza has
conceded to every faithful Christian who will say (or pay
for) a mass at its altar the grace of liberating a soul from
Purgatory. And I am given the same illuminated leaflet
about St. Francis, with the same specimen of ensanguined
rose-leaf — precisely like that which grows in my own gar-
den — and I pay the same lira on the same spot where St.
Francis, who called coins " flies," had some of these pests,
innocently offered by a worshipper, thrown out upon asses'
dung. The only change since my last visit is that a fig-
tree has been planted " by request " in remembrance of
the old tree in which Sister Grasshopper sang with the
saint for eighty days.
And this " by request " is a vivid reminder that the
Franciscan legend is flourishing more and more, like the
topsy-turvy cabbage, and that shoals of pleasure-pilgrims,
richly clad, come by carriage or motor to maunder over
" the little poor man of Assisi," to gloat upon the cord of
his tunic, stored up in a cupboard, and to gain an appetite
for lunch by rhapsodising over the cell in which he fasted.
Yes, the lover of poverty and of the brute creation has
brought a good deal of money to the little hill-town, and
no small sum of labour and lashings to its horses, and it is
not surprising that the region round the poor little aban-
doned church of S. Maria in Portiuncula has grown up in
the last quarter of a century into a big suburb, with eat-
ing- and lodging-houses, or that the successors of the saint
who in his horror of property tried to tear down the
chapter-house built for him, and who left even his cell
because somebody referred to it as St. Francis's, have
within the last ten years been able to enrich their vast
basilica with three elaborate carven doors and an iron
railing, not to mention the horrible modern fresco with
six angels like ballet-girls hovering without the chapel
where St. Francis died.
As I leave this musty S. Maria of the Angels and mount
154 ITALIAN FANTASIES
on this divine spring day towards the sunny hill-top where
Assisi proper sits rock-hewn, with its towers, domes, and
castles, and see beneath me the wonderful rolling Apen-
nines, and the windings of white roads and silver streams,
and around me the grey-green of olives and the bridal
white of cherry-trees, and above me the cloud-galleons
sailing in the great spaces of sky, a remark of the bland
brother comes back to me with added significance. " We
do not know where St. Francis's heart is," he said, grudg-
ingly conceding that the rival church on high possessed
his body. The fancy takes me, as I toil up to this tomb,
that St. Francis's heart refused to be buried in a church,
is here out of doors, at one with the spring and the sun-
shine.
And even more symbolic sounds to me the bland
brother's boast that the colossal church built over the
poor little Portiuncula is on the model of St. Peter's.
Canonisation is a process that normally lasts centuries ;
our King Alfred's is not yet complete. But twenty
months after his death Francesco Bernardone was hustled
into formal saintship. The Pope crushed him by a loving
embrace, and over his beloved doll's house of a church was
erected a copy of St. Peter's ! And far above, on the rival
ridge of Assisi, as if to give a culminating irony to the
symbolism, and as if one great church built over his body
did not suffice to keep him down, a second church of S.
Francesco has been built on the top of the first, and be-
neath these two churches, each supplied with its frescoed
falsifications by the school of Giotto, the little brother of
the poor who demanded only to lie among the criminals
on the " Infernal Hill " was safely buried.
And yet not so safely but that his spirit has begun to
penetrate through all the layers of stone and legend.
Perhaps it has escaped through that portal of the upper
church which, incautiously thrown open to illumine the
painted miracles, tempers the austere gloom and the drone
ST. FRANCIS 155
of ceaseless psalm- saying from below with a revealed
greensward and a piping of birds. But one cannot
imagine that his spirit has gone to occupy that large red
throne between two yellow armchairs which the fresco
depicts as the vision of his appointed seat in heaven, or
that fiery chariot with which to bedazzle the brethren left
behind. These twenty-eight wall frescoes, like the four
triangular allegories on the ceiling below, hold little of
the true St. Francis (notwithstanding that they are all
drawn from Franciscan literature), and the least spiritual
and the most mythical portions of the legend, the demons
flying over Arezzo, or St. Francis hovering in the air while
praying, figure on equal terms with his real activities,
while the picture of his offering the Soldan the ordeal of
fire is an imaginative amplification even of the literature.
Setting aside all the fatuous monastic miracles, and the
more tedious anecdotes of the Franciscan legend — and it
must be remembered that the earliest dated manuscript of
the " Fioretti " comes a hundred and sixty-four years after
the death of St. Francis — we are yet able to extricate
from it a kernel of personality sufficient to account for its
genesis and growth, and it is this St. Francis who has at
length burst through the three churches devoted to
keeping him down and made his appeal to the modern
mind. Yet the modern mind might easily misread itself
into the medieeval mystic.
Despite his marriage to Lady Poverty, St. Francis was
far from a conscious rebel against the glories of the
Vatican. He was too humble-minded to be anything but
a meek acceptant of the established Church and the ruling
ritual. But there was in his literal translation into life
of the Sermon on the Mount, the germ of a dangerous
schism — a germ which duly developed into a sect of
" Spirituals " for whom the Gospel of Assisi was the
Eternal Evangel destined to supersede the Christianity
of the Vatican — and it is not an accident that his
156 ITALIAN FANTASIES
followers, despite their popularisation of the idea of Papal
infallibility, gravitated more to the Ghibelline cause than
to the Guelph, and were, later on, formally condemned as
heretics by John XXII. This unstatesmanlike Pope was
not only ignorant that persecution is the seed of the sect,
but he undermined the doctrine of his own Papal infallibil-
ity by thus reversing the bull of Nicholas III. confirming
their order. He alleged that Nicholas had framed it
without his Cardinals, but the more logical Minorite
Brothers contended that the contradiction of his predeces-
sors proved him no true Pope, but a usurper. John and
his successors retorted with the Holy Inquisition, and the
Franciscans were burnt in stacks or tortured to death in
dungeons ; " martyrs," says Dollinger, " to the doctrine
of Papal infallibility and the rule of poverty." And such
is the comedy of Catholicism.
One wonders sometimes what St. Francis would have
made of himself, had Christianity never come his way.
His own genius would never have created the melancholy
dogmas of the mediaeval Church. There is neither Christ
nor Atonement in his Canticle to the Sun — his most
characteristic utterance. The Christianity he absorbed
from his environment makes but a hybrid composite with
his essential personality. There is thus no real unity in
his spiritual being, no real reconciliation between his
theory of utter abnegation and unworthiness, and his
cheerful mystic oneness with the material universe and all
its creatures. That everything God has created is laud-
able except one's self, and that all matter is sacramental
except one's own body, is scarcely a congruous creed.
And he followed his Christianity for the most part with a
prosaic literality that showed that here he was but a pas-
sive receiver, as in his pharisaic prohibition against the
brethren's practice of soaking pulse the evening before it
was eaten, on the ground that this meant taking thought
for the morrow. Not to soak it, is precisely taking
ST. FRANCIS 157
thought, since it is concentrating attention on a triviality.
But in liis tender mystic universalism on the other hand
he was a master, a creator. " Our Brother tlie Sun,"
" Our Sister the Moon," "Our Sister, Water," "Our little
Brothers and Sisters the Birds," " Our Sister the Death
of the Body " — these are the mintings of an original
genius, not that tame subservience to texts which limited
his wardrobe because of certain words in St. Matthew.
And the originality of this genius consists, curiously
enough, in the spontaneous reproduction of Hindu op-
timism and universality in a Western. How Hindu this
thought is appears vividly from the story in the " Speculum
Perfectionis " that when St. Francis's drawers caught fire
about the knee, he would not put it out nor harm his
Brother Fire. From this point of view Hell would only
be Brother Fire enjoying himself. Yet we find St. Francis
engaged all his life in thwarting the fraternal appetite.
St. Francis would have been a greater man, had he been
less of a Christian.
His distinctively Christian sayings are indeed compara-
tively poor. One scans the record almost in vain for any
flash of the irony or sublimity of Jesus. The profoundest
remark of the " Fioretti " — " everything, good or bad, that a
man does, he does to himself " — belongs to Brother Giles
who, one is not surprised to find, left a book of " Verba
Aurea." Occasionally a superb transcendence of ritual as
in St. Francis's remark that so far from not eating meat
when Christ's nativity fell on a Friday, " the very walls
should eat flesh on such a day, or if they cannot should at
any rate be greased outside," recalls the flouter of Pharisaism,
and we catch the voice of an authentic master in his exposition
of a passage of Ezekiel to a peace-loving doctor of divinity
perturbed about the text: "If thou proclaim not to the
wicked man his wickedness, I will require his soul at thy
hand." It was by the brightness of his own life and the per-
fume of his fame, said St. Francis, that the servant of God
158 ITALIAN FANTASIES
proclaimed their wickedness to the wicked. That was not
precisely the method of Jesus, and herein St. Francis is
more Christian than Christ. Nevertheless, if one had not
his Hindu utterances to supplement his Christian, there
would be little to distinguish the skinny black-eyed little
strolling preacher from the numberless narrow-browed
ascetics of the Church except his childishly dramatic
delivery, his success in founding an Order and his redeem-
ing weakness for talking bad French. It is that strange
animism of his which gives him his hold upon us, which,
not content with reading a soul into the bird, the fish, the
grasshopper and the wolf, extends with half-savage, half-
childish personalisation to fire and water, and even to
wood and stone, nay to the very letters of the alphabet, so
that he will not erase a letter even when he has set it down
in error. Behind this divination of life in all things must
have lain an ex(;[uisite sensibility, and it was thus his un-
fortunate fate to be supremely alive to beauty — even in
woman — yet to be driven by his creed to the worship of
sorrow, abnegation and self-inflicted pain, though even
from these his subtle nervous system could snatch a rare
moment of ecstasy, for so delicately was he strung that the
mere words " the love of God " set up a sweet vibration
like a plectrum striking a lute. How indeed should the
gay knight, whom his comrades elected " King of the
fools," change his sensitive skin, merely because he turned
to be " God's fool " ? If he now found his joy in the
ecstasy of mystic communion and absolute abnegation, the
joy was still at his core, and however he might afflict his
body, with a subconscious sense of setting a model to his
weaker brethren, it was impossible for him to subdue
his sun-worship, or not to delight in the ripple of water,
and the grace of birds and flowers and women. And
herein he differs from the Buddha with whose life-story
and tenderness for all creation he has so much in common,
but to whom this world is merely a mistake to be endured
ST. FRANCIS 159
till the nullity of Nirvana is attained. Even the pseudo-
Christian theory of this vale of tears is not so pessimistic
as Buddhism, for the lachrymose vale is merely the prelude
to a mountain of bliss, and Schopenhauer's attempt to pair
Christianity with Buddhism overlooked that the Buddhist
saint lives to die and the Christian dies to live. Kuenen
showed much deeper insight when he pointed out that
Buddha does not value purity and renunciation as virtue
— he is " beyond good and evil " — but as the best means
of escape from life. But for St. Francis the world is not
a vale of tears. Indeed the conception of a world of
sorrow is contradicted by the sorrowful lives of the saints.
For abnegation is pointless if there is no happiness to be
surrendered. The pathos of the life of St. Francis lies
precisely in his exquisite capacity for terrestrial happiness,
and in his daily crucifixion of every natural desire at the
bidding of a vicious theory of virtue, to which a natural
want means something created by God in order to be
thwarted, and which makes a vice of every necessity.
Fortunately he had from his Hindu side the saving grace
of joyousness, and could rebuke the saturnine visage of
professional sanctity and even — towards the end — his
own barbarity to that brotherly ass, his body.
His disciples, whose affinities with him were so imper-
fect that his most devoted biographer is the author of the
" Dies Irse," attempt indeed to harmonise the two halves
of his personality by the mediation of texts. If he loves
even the humble worm, it is because "he had read that
word concerning the Saviour : ' I am a worm and no man,' "
and if he treads reverently on the stone, it is not from some
mystic sense of a stone-life or some sacramental sense of a
divine immanence, but " for love of Him who is called the
Rock." That his delight in water should be traced to its
baptismal uses, and his prohibition against cutting down
the whole of a tree to a reverence for the material of the
cross, was, of course, inevitable. Nor is it impossible that
160 ITALIAN FANTASIES
St. Francis occasionally glossed himself over to himself,
and it is quite probable that his special tenderness for the
hooded lark was due to its quasi-monkish cowl, and that
his comparative coldness to the ant reposed upon its pro-
viding for the morrow. For it was his tragedy to be torn
between a blithe personal revelation of the divine and a
stereotyped tradition of sorrow, to constrict his spiritual
genius to a cut-and-dried scheme of salvation, and to be
crucified on a second-hand cross. The stigmata which are
the best proof of his hypersesthesia are likewise the best
evidence of his spiritual plagiarism and his comparative
failure. For to be crucified is not to be Christ. Jesus
did not set out to be crucified, but to do his and his
Father's work. Crucifixion came in the day's work, but
was its interruption, not its fulfilment. The true imita-
tion of Christ is to do one's work though men crucify one.
But deliberately to seek crucifixion — even crucifixion of
one's natural desires — is to imitate the accident, not the
essence. A still greater perversion is it to brood upon the
crude insignia of the Passion till auto-hypnotism works
miracles in the flesh.
The followers of St. Francis pushed the plagiarism so
far as to adumbrate a parallel legend, with a descent into
Purgatory and a John of the Chapel who fell away and
hanged himself, and by the latter end of the fourteenth
century the parallel was made precise and perfect in the
"Liber Conformitatum" of Bartolommeo of Pisa. But the
copy is only superficially true to the original. There is
nothing in the story of the great Galilsean to justify the
perpetual self-torture of St. Francis in his morbid quest
of perfect humility and sinlessness. On the contrary,
Jesus speaks with so god-like an assurance of righteous-
ness that it has become one of the chief arguments for his
divinity, as it is the chief stumbling-block to the efficacy
of his example. For if God was made not man but super-
man, we can no more emulate this superman's goodness
ST. FRANCIS 161
than his power of creating loaves and fishes in a crisis.
Only if Jesus were not God is his example valuable. But
man or superman, he did not sap his energies by brooding
on his own vileness. Buddhism, with all the apathy that
its pessimism engenders, is healthier here, since (accord-
ing to the Mahaviyuhassutta) the Muni, the Master of
renunciation, never blames himself.
I sympathise cordially with the perplexities of Brother
Masseo, who, according to the "Analecta Franciscana,"
lost his naturally cheerful countenance under the difficulty
of believing himself viler than the vicious loafer; and who,
when this peak of humility was by grace attained, found
himself in fresh despondency before the new Alp that rose
on the horizon. " I am sad because I cannot get to the
point of feeling that if any one cut off my hands or feet or
plucked my eyes out, though I had served him to the best
of my power, still I could love him as much as I did be-
fore, and be equally pleased to hear him well spoken of."
Poor Masseo ! Why should this worthy brother, a man,
according to the " Fioretti," of great eloquence and belong-
ing to the inner circle of St. Francis, waste his time and
spoil his valuable cheerfulness over such hypothetic absurd-
ities? The humour of the last clause is worthy of Gilbert.
It is in face of such a heautontimorumenos as poor Brother
Masseo that I revolt against all his strained ethics, this
gymnast virtue demanding years of training to force the
soul into some unnatural posture which it can only sustain
at best for a few seconds. I could weep over all this
wasted goodness v/hen I think of the wrongs crying out
for justice, the voice of lamentation that rises daily from
the wan places of the world. How much there is for
Hercules to labour at without standing on his head and
balancing the seven deadly virtues on his toes ! The
beauty of holiness is often put on the same level as the
holiness of beauty, as a self-sufficient ideal. But even as
false ideals of beauty may impose themselves, so may false
162 ITALIAN FANTASIES
ideals of holiness. The static sanctity of a Stylites has
loner been relegated to those false ideals, and even a St.
Francis cannot be accepted as a model for to-day, though
a few satiated souls may yearn after abnegation as the last
luxury of the spirit. There is much barren ifisthetic admira-
tion wasted upon religious maxims which it is admitted
would overturn society if acted upon; and it is question-
able, therefore, whether there is any real beauty in these,
any more than in jewelled watches that will not go. Even
when a rare saint acts upon them, they seem to produce
spiritual sickliness rather than spiritual health. There
is, perhaps, a finer beauty of holiness in the life of a wise
and good man of the world with a sense of humour, than
in the life of an ecstatic and underfed saint, whose very
notion of the Fatherhood of God lacks the reality and ful-
ness that comes from paternity.
There are few things in literature more touchingly
simple than those adventures in search of holiness, that
picaresque novel of the spirit, known as " The Little
Flowers of St. Francis." These gentle souls, who wander
without food or knapsack, under the tutelage of the ser-
aphic saint, through the enchanting valleys and hills of un-
spoiled thirteenth-century Italy, and adventuring in even
more glamorous regions, hold strange parleyings with the
Soldan of Babylon, have upon them a morning light of
innocence and that perfume of holiness which can never
fail to justify the Master's exposition of Ezekiel. If any-
thing could add to the sweetness of the idyll, it is the
spiritual loves of St. Francis and St. Clara. And yet our
adoration of St. Francis must not blind us to the ques-
tionable aspects of the chronicle. " I may yet have sons
and daughters," he replied deprecatingly to one who
proclaimed him blessed and holy. What a caricature of
true ethics ! Even the poverty for which he was " so
greedy" is impossible if everybody is greedy for.it, and
the abnegation he practised he could not have preached.
ST. FRANCIS 163
Otherwise when he tossed his own tunic to a shivering
beggar, he should have inspired the beggar to toss it back
to his now shivering self, and so ad infinitum. That
game of tunic-tennis with nothing ever scored but "love"
would have been true Franciscanism, but also its reductio
ad absurdum. I do not wonder that Goethe smiled at the
" Heiliger " of Assisi, for neglecting to visit whose shrine
he was nearly arrested as a smuggler.
Yes, the bland brother does well to babble of the cabbage
planted with its leaves in the ground. For he has
blundered into the very essence of the Master's teaching :
this topsyturvydom, these roots in the air, are the secret of
St. Francis's success. There is a tendency to blame our
paradoxists, to deride their inversions as mechanical. But
St. Francis is an inversion incarnate, a paradox in flesh
and blood. While with other men Property is a sacred
concept, a fetish guarded by a mesh of laws, he refuses to
own anything and even disposes with blasphemous levity
of other people's property. Theft he daringly defines as
not to give something to anybody who has greater need of
it than oneself. He hated Property, not as the Socialist
hates it who covets its communalisation, but as something
in itself evil. These practical inversions of his have the
same excuse as those of the literary paradoxist. Nothing
less than this violent antithesis will suffice to shake men's
notions from the rigor mortis that overtakes even true
ideas, or to offset the exaggeration which gradually falsifies
them. One false extreme must be met by another, if the
happy mean is to be struck.
Pray do not imagine I would endorse Aristotle's doctrine
of the mean, or the popular platitude that truth always
lies midway between two extreme views. On the contrary,
truth is often the most violent and extreme of all possible
propositions and right action the most violent and extreme
of all possible forms of conduct. But the system of St.
Francis needed as much contradiction from the world of
164 ITALIAN FANTASIES
common sense as the world of common sense needed from it.
In so far as it was Cliristian, i-t was an imitation of early
Christianity, minus the time-limit which justified its model.
But the right course of action when the world is about to
come to an end will not necessarily be the right course if the
world is indefinitely to be continued in our next. In such a
world the system of St. Francis is an impossibility, if only
because it would bring the world to an end by lack of
population. And if it really succeeded, it would bring
itself to an end even before the world, for in the absence
of owners there would be none to receive alms from, none
to bake that bread which St. Francis naively regarded as
coming by grace as simply as water. This absolute avoid-
ance of money resembles, indeed, nothing so much as
banking, which is possible only if the bulk of the investors
do not ask for their money at the same time. It is on the
certainty of his failure that the success of a saint reposes.
His disciples will never be more than a miserable minority,
and so he will seem recuperative and not destructive to
society. The exaggeration of his holiness will mitigate
the materialism of the average man. Dives will not give
up his dinner, but he will drop a crumb for Lazarus and
another for the saint, and perhaps eat only salmon and
trout on Fridays. It is this reflection that he incarnates
for the race an ideal of perfection, imperfect though it be
in its impossibility, that reconciles me to the saint, as the
reflection that the Church Fathers were engaged in fashion-
ing that ideal reconciles me to their meticulous morality,
in a world so given over to slaughter, sensuality and every
abomination of injustice that their fine shades and their no-
tion of an impassable infinity between right and the smallest
wrong appear ludicrously disproportionate and academic.
The saint on this theory is a scapegoat, a victim on the
altar of human selfishness ; he does, suffers, or gives up,
too much because most other persons do, suffer, or give
up, too little. He is sacrificed to the balance of things,
ST. FRANCIS 165
or, as St. Paul put it, he is the leaven to the lump. Yet
things would overbalance were he too successful, and too
much leaven would spoil the lump.
If there is within St. Francis an unresolved discord be-
tween Hinduism and Christianity, still more jarring is the
outerdiscordbetweenNatureandChristianity which he tried
so heroically to harmonise. Don Quixote tilting at wind-
mills is a practical figure beside St. Francis trying to Chris-
tianise bird and beast. The consciously grotesque pathos
of Cervantes is surpassed by the unconsciously grotesque
pathos of the chronicles of St. Francis. The struggle for
'existence in Nature — the angler's hook and the bird-
catcher's snare — can hardly be glossed over by sermons
to the birds and the fishes. Doubtless St. Francis had —
as some sinners have to-day — a strange power of fascina-
tion over the lower creatures, but the butcher was not
eliminated because St. Francis occasionally bought off a
lamb or a turtle-dove. We know too little of the psy-
chology of wild beasts to deny that he tamed the Wolf of
Agobio — though it is permissible to doubt the civil con-
tract with Brother Wolf which in Sassetta's fanciful pic-
ture is even drawn up by a notary ; nor is the stone record
of the miracle you may read to-day on the fagade of that
little church in Gubbio which was set up three centuries
later, nor even the skull of Brother Wolf himself, found
— according to a lady writer on Gubbio — "precisely on
the spot pointed out by tradition as the burial-place of the
beast," and " now in the possession of a gentleman at
Scheggia," as convincing a testimony as she imagines " to
the indubitable truth of the tradition, and to the super-
human power of love towards every living creature."
Love has no such power to turn lions and wolves into civil
contractors or vegetarians. There is a battle of beneficent
and sinister forces in the universe which Persian specula-
tion has always recognised frankly, but which Hebraic
and Hindu systems, by their higher synthesis of Love or
166 ITALIAN FANTASIES
Good, unconsciously whittle away into a sham fight, or at
best a tournament ; a play of God with His own forces.
'Tis Docetism writ larger. But whether the fight be sham
or real, the universe is not run on a Franciscan system,
and it is this which makes the pathos and the grotesquerie
of the saint's attempts to equate the macrocosm with his
autocosm. Yes, St. Francis is as nobly mad as Don
Quixote. Nay, towards the end, where the cavalier of
Christ, broken by disease in the prime of his years — ■
disease of the spleen, disease of the liver, disease of the
stomach, disease of the eyes — macerated by senseless
privations, a mere substratum for poultices and fomenta-
tions and cauterisations, scarcely even washing himself for
fear of ostentating the stigmata, still sings songs of praise
so blithely as to scandalise his companions' sense of death-
bed decency, we touch a more Quixotic pathos than any-
thing in Cervantes.
And these legends of his pious influence over the cicala
and the swallow and the wolf, this tench that plays around
his boat, this pheasant that haunts his cell, this falcon that
wakes him for matins during his fast in the mountain,
these birds that fly off in four companies like a cross after
devoutly digesting his sermon, all make for the comity of
creation, especially in Italy, where animals have no souls,
only bodies that may be ill-used : indeed, St. Francis —
with his disciple St. Antony of Padua — contributes to
Christianity that missing note of respect for the animal
creation which Hinduism expresses " in the great word
Tat-twam-asi (This is thyself !)." And here at least mod-
ern thought is with St. Francis and his Hindu universal-
ism. The evolution theory is usually considered a
depressing doctrine, yet it has its stimulating aspects.
For though we may doubt if St. Francis converted the
wolf, we cannot doubt that Nature Christianised it, or at
least some creature as low and savage. For from some
gibbering ferocious brute there did, in the process of the
ST. FRANCIS 167
suns, emerge a seraphic, selfless being witli love for all
creation. The wolf, in fact, became St. Francis ; a more
notable conversion than any in the missionary books.
But what did St. Francis become ? Here the record is
not so stimulating ; here begins degeneration, devolution.
Before he died he was an idol and the nominal centre of
vast organisations, lay as well as monastic, female as well
as male, and in this success lay his defeat. Lachrymce.
rerum inhere even more in success than in failure. The
portrait of St. Francis by Ribera which may be seen at
Florence — a melancholy monk with his eyes turned up,
holding a skull — was no sadder caricature of the blithe
little man who swept out dirty churches with a broom than
these gigantic and infinitely quarrelsome organisations
were of his teaching.
A great man may either influence humanity by his soli-
tary work or he may found an institution. The institu-
tion (if adequately financed) will live, but with himself
squeezed out of it — for worship at a safe height. The
squeezing out of St. Francis from Franciscanism began
even before his death — the Papacy pressing from without
and his own vicars from within. That very sensible fear
of Brother William of Nottingham — evidently a practical
Briton — that superfluities would grow up in the Order as
insensibly as hairs in the beard, was more than verified.
The dangerous rule of Absolute Poverty was relaxed,
scholastic learning was reinstalled in its armchair, a net-
work of rules replaced the rule of the spirit, and the little
brotherhood that had lain on straw and tattered mattresses
in the Portiuncula swelled and split into Conventualists
and Observants, the majority established in magnificent
monasteries. St. Francis lamented the degeneration of the
brethren, though he characteristically refused to punish it.
And when he was quite squeezed to death there began a
fight for his body — holy body-snatching was a feature of
the Middle Ages — and that vile enemy of the soul which
168 ITALIAN FANTASIES
he had battled against all his life took his place as the
centre of the cult. Perugia, holding by force the body of
St. Giles, removed from Assisi the only possible rival of
his relics. His very poultice is still preserved as an object
of edification.
II
Erasmus dreamed once — so he writes to Charles Uten-
hove — that St. Francis came to thank him for chastising
the Franciscans. The Founder had not the scrupulous
stage-costume of his degenerate followers : his brown frock
was of undyed wool ; the hood was not peaked, but
merely hung behind to cover the head in bad weather;
the cord was a piece of rope from a farmyard ; the feet
were bare. Of the five wounds of the stigmata there was
as little trace in St. Francis as of the six virtues in the
F'ranciscans. Obedience, poverty, chastity, humility, sim-
plicity, charity — where had flown these "six wings of the
seraph " ?
Eheu fugaces ! 'Tis the story of all founders, of all
orders. St. Francis at his supreme moment of renuncia-
tion had not even the brown frock of Erasmus's dream.
In the market-place of Assisi he stood in his shirt. And
he desired to die even more naked, as Thomas of Celano
and the "Legenda Trium Sociorura" testify. The first
Franciscans were simple souls kindled by his love and
ecstasy, "the minstrels of the dear Lord." They bore
revilement and scourging ; dragged along by their hoods,
they never ceased to proclaim Peace. They lay a-cold in
caves, with hearts careless of the morrow ; they served in
lepers' houses. And above all they worked ; begging was
only to be a last resort, and never was money to be asked
for. "Beware of money," says the " Regula."
Brother Elias of Cortona, the immediate successor of
St. Francis, is said to have lived like a prince, with valets
and horses, and he readily got the Pope to sanction a de-
ST. FRANCIS 169
vice by which he obtained all the money he wanted per
interpositas personas. Nor did the Master's teaching fare
better at the hands of the more faithful faction — the
Observants whom the Conventualists persecuted — for the
rule of Absolute Poverty was applied without the genial
concessions and exceptions he knew how to make ; and
under the guidance of the caustic and canonical Antony
of Padua the ancient gaudentes in Domino hardened into
slaves of the letter, while the more mystic degenerated
into anchorites who retired to the mountains to save their
own souls.
Nothing can point the tragedy of St. Francis's success
more vividly than his own homely words in his "Testa-
mentum." " And they who came to take up this life gave
up whatever they might have to the poor and were content
with a single tunic, patched inside and out (if they wished),
together with a girdle and drawers : and we would have
no more. We clerks said the office like other clerks ;
the lay-brothers said the Lord's Prayer. We gladly
abode in poor and forsaken churches, and were simple
folk and subject to all. And I used to work with my
hands, and I desire to work, and my earnest wish
is that all the brethren should work at some decent
employment."
Only a century later Dante's eulogy of the Founder
("Paradiso," Canto XI.) is qualified by the remark that
so few of his followers cleave to his teachings that " a
little stuff may furnish out their cloaks." And three
centuries later the spectacle which these Fratri Minori rep-
resented to Erasmus was that of arrogant mendicants,
often of loose morals, begging with forged testimonials,
haunting the palaces of the rich, forcing themselves into
families, selling the Franciscan habit to wealthy dying
sinners as a funeral cloak to cover many sins. His little
sisters, the swallows and the doves, fluttered over St.
Francis's tomb, but from it issued the hawks and the vul-
170 ■ ITALIAN FANTASIES
tures. An old, old moral, though humanity will never
learn it.
Saint Francis was Francis Saint. The Lady Poverty
" who for eleven hundred years had remained without a
single suitor " found in him a spouse faithful unto death.
His soul went out in fraternity to all tlie wonderful crea-
tion, in joyous surrender to pain and tribulation : even
Death was his sister. To found an Order of St. Francis
is to count upon a succession of St. Francises. As well
found an Order of Shakespeare, a phalanstery of Da Vincis.
In religion no less than in literature or art the Master
is ever a new individual — " Natura lo fece e rtqjpe il
tipo'''' — but followers ever think to fix the free-blowing
spirit. Alas ! saints may be summarised in a system,
but the system will not produce saints. Academies,
churches, orders, can never replace men ; they too often
serve to asphyxiate or assassinate such as appear. St.
Dominic, the sterner founder of the other mendicant order,
was not more fortunate in creating an apostolic succession
of Poverty than his friend and contemporary ; and as for
his precursor, St. Bruno, contrast his marble image in the
Certosa, gazing agonisedly at a crucifix, with the mosaics
of agate, lapislazuli, amethyst, and cornelian worked over
the altars by eight generations of the Sacchi family, or
with the Lucullian feasts which the Carthusians could fur-
nish forth at the biddingf of the Magnificent Lodovico.
St. Bruno retreated to the desert to fast and pray, and the
result was Chartreuse. If he now follows the copious liti-
gation he may well apprehend that his order has modified
its motto and that for " Stat crux dum volvitur orbis " you
should read " Stat spiritus.'"
Benedictine, too, is a curious by-product of the first of
all the Western orders, and the one by which England
was converted to Christianity. How pleased the founder
of Monte Cassino must be to see a British bishop sipping
Benedictine !
ST. FRANCIS 171
Religion has not, indeed, lacked saints aware of the ten-
dency of followers to substitute the forms for the realities
and the leader for the spirit. There was Antoinette Bou-
rignon, with her love for the free flowing of the Holy
Ghost and her hatred of the Atonement theory, but in the
absence of forms her sect had not sufficient material frame-
work to maintain itself by. If the Quakers still survive,
it is because they have erected something into a system, if
only colour-blindness. But the twaddle which is talked
at Quaker meetings when an old bore is played upon by
the spirit, turns one's thoughts longingly to a stately lit-
urgy, independent on the passing generation. Humanity
is indeed between the devil and the deep sea. Institutions
strangle the spirit, and their absence dissipates it.
"Nee tecum possum vivere, nee sine te."
Even if by miracle a Church remains true to the spirit of
its founder, this is a fresh source of unspirituality, for his
spirit may be outgrown. An excellent definition of what
a Church should be was given some years ago by a writer
in the Church Quarterly : " A National Church, elastic
enough to provide channels for fresh manifestations of
spiritual life, yet anchored to the past." But where is
such a Church to be found ? " Anchored to the past " —
yes, that condition is more than fulfilled. But spiritual
elasticity ? The Church Quarterly reviewer has the face
to pass oif his definition as that of the Church of England,
and to say that such a National Church " might have saved
the United States from many of those grotesque, and worse
than grotesque, features which have at various times dis-
figured their spiritual life," But the Church of England
has notoriously failed in elasticity — even the Archbishop
of Canterbury is unable to make it express his view of the
Athanasian Creed. And, far from its anchoring the spir-
itual life of the English people, they have violently torn
themselves away from it in secessions of Baptists, Metho-
172 ITALIAN FANTASIES
dists, Quakers, &c. &c. As to its preserving them from
grotesque religious features, the aberrations of English
sectarianism fully equal those of America, when the differ-
ence of geographic area is considered and the absence of
supervision over great spaces. Sandemanians, Walworth
Jumpers, Joanna Southcottians, Seventh Day Baptists,
Plymouth Brethren, Christadelphians, Peculiar People —
such are a few of the British aberrations, some of which
have counted distinguished followers. The bequests to
foster even the Southcott mania were treated as sacred by
the Court of Chancery. Jump-to-Glory-Jane is an Eng-
lish type put into poetry by an English poet. The sect
to which Silas Marner belonged, with its na'ive belief in
drawing lots — the practical equivalent of the sortilege of
the Pagan soothsayer — was not made in America. It
was England which Voltaire ridiculed for its one sauce and
its endless sects. The great scale of America magnifies
the aberrations. But even Mormonism, Dowieism, and
Christian Science have solid achievements to their credit.
Salt Lake City is a paradise built over a desert reclaimed
by Mormon labourers, Zion City is a handsome town with-
out drinking-palaces, and Christian Science has made more
advances in the last generation than Christianity made in
its first two centuries, numbering as it does its temples and
its teachers by the thousand. There is at least life behind
these grotesqueries, while in the Established Churches
there is asphyxiation by endowments.
Endowments — there is the secret of stagnation. It is
an unhappy truth that man tends to become a parasite on
his own institutions. Humanity is a Frankenstein that is
ridden by its own creations. Its Churches, with their
cast-iron creeds and their golden treasure-heaps, are the
prisons of tlie soul of the future. The legal decision in
the great Free Church fight serves as what Bacon calls an
" ostensive instance " of this elemental truth, bringing out
as it does that the legal interpretation of a Church involves,
ST. FRANCIS 173
not the elasticity so glibly vaunted by the Church Quarterly
reviewer, but absolute inelasticity. A tiny minority of
ministers is able, for a time at least, to hold millions of
money and hundreds of buildings, because the vast majority
has elected, in a spirit of brotherly love, to join another
body from which it is separated by a microscopic point.
There can, at this rate, never be development in a Church.
The faintest divergence from old tradition may justify the
hard-shell orthodox in claiming all the funds and regard-
ing the innovators as deserters of their posts and proper-
ties. All Church funds are indissolubly connected with
the doctrines to which they were first tacked on, and
changes in doctrine involve forfeiture of the belongings in
favour of those who have had the fidelity or the shrewd-
ness to cling to the original dogma. How much change is
necessary to alter a creed is a delicate problem, known in
logic as of the Soros order. For every day brings its subtle
increments or decrements, and a dogma of imperishable
adamant has not yet appeared in human history. Every
dogma has its day. The life of a normally-constituted truth
is, according to Ibsen, twenty years at the outside, and aged
truths are apt to be shockingly thin. Thus the danger
which threatens all Churches — the danger of having to
buy their ministers — is raised to infinity if the money is
thus to be tied up by the dead hand of the past. A pre-
mium is placed upon infidelity and mustiness. There is
no Church or religious body in the world which is not
weighted with pecuniar}'- substance, from Rome to the
Order we have been considering, founded for the preach-
ment of Absolute Poverty. The continuity of policy
which the Church Quarterly applauds becomes a mere con-
tinuity of property, if progress is to be thus penalised.
Nor are the Dissenting bodies immune from this pecuniary
peril. A Calvinist chapel in Doncaster that was gravitat-
ing to the New Theology has found itself closed pro tern.
under its trust deed of 1802.
174 ITALIAN FANTASIES
The remedy for this clogging of spiritual life is clear.
It was always obvious, but when Property is in danger one
begins to consider things seriously.
Every Church and sect must be wound up after three
generations. The time-limit needs elucidation.
The first generation of a Church or a heresy — the
terms are synonymous, for every Church starts as a heresy
— is full to the brim of vitality, fire, revolt, sincerity,
spirituality, self-sacrifice. It is a generation in love, a
generation exalted and enkindled by the new truth, a gen-
eration that will count life and lucre equally base beside
the spreading of the new fire. The second generation has
witnessed this fervour of its fathers, it has been nourished
in the warmth of the doctrine, its education is imprinted
with the true fiery stamp. It is still near the Holy Ghost.
In tlie third generation the waves radiated from the
primal fire have cooled in their passage through time ; the
original momentum tends to be exhausted. Now is the
period of the smug Pharisees profiting by the martyrdoms
of their ancestors, babbling rhetorically — between two
pleasures — of their fidelity to the faith of their fathers.
If the third generation of a Church can get through with
fair spiritual success, it is often only because of a revival
of persecution. But the third generation is absolutely the
limit of the spiritual stirring. In the fourth generation
you shall ever find the young people sly sceptics or sullen
rebels, and the Vicar of Bray coming in for high prefer-
ment. Here, then, is the limitation dictated by human
nature. The life of a Church should be wound up by the
State. The birth of a heresy must be free to all, and
should be registered like the birth of a child. It would
expose its adherents to no disadvantages, either religious
or political. But after three generations it must be
wound up.
Of course, it should be perfectly open for the Church
to reconstitute itself immediately, but it should do this
ST. FRANCIS 175
under a new name. If it started again afresh, the com-
pulsory winding-up would have acted as a species of
persecution and thoroughly revitalised the content of the
particular credo. The third generation would have
strained every sinew to realise their faith and bring it
home to the young and fourth generation. The latter,
ere re-establishing the Church, would have rediscovered
its truth, and thereby given it fresh momentum to carry
it through another three generations. This simple system
would allow children to continue the faith of their fathers
from conviction instead of compulsion, and, by terminating
the right to property, would save posterity from the
asphyxiation of benefactions.
The life of a generation is computed by biological
statisticians at thirty-three years. Three generations
would thus make ninety-nine years. A century brings
such changes in thought and things that the excerpts
from the Times of a hundred years ago read like the
journalism of another planet.
The bequests by which eleven old gentlewomen of a
certain parish, that has been swept away, receive groats
of an abolished currency, on a day that has disappeared
from the calendar, to perpetuate the memor}^ of a benevo-
lent megalomaniac, would, on a similar principle, be
limited to the natural run of a century. It is enough
to be allowed a dead finger in the pie of proximate
posterity, " a century not out " must never be written over
any human will or institution.
If this time-limit seems a trifle harsh, apply it, dear
reader, not to your own creed, but to something esoteric,
like the doctrine of the Dalai Lamas of Tibet, which has
for so many centuries paralysed a priest-ridden Asiatic
population. Do you think this theory of reincarnation
deserved a longer run than three generations ?
THE GAY DOGES: OR THE FAILURE OF
SOCIETY AND THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF
SOCIALISM
" Dieses Prunkscliiff ist ein rechtes Inventarienstuck, woran man
sehen kann, "was die Venetianer waren, und sich zu sein diinkten."
Goethe : " Italianische Reise."
But if Absolute Poverty is less worshipful than St.
Francis imagined, Magnificence as an ideal will, I fear,
always be found to connote defective moral sympathies,
as of the Pharaohs building their treasure-cities on the
labour of lashed slaves. For how in our world of sorrow
and mystery can magnanimity and magnificence meet ?
What great soul could find expression in gilt, or even in
gold ? 'Tis a reflection on the character of the Doges of
Venice that everywhere in their palace is a sense of over-
gilded ceilings. Even when the Masters have made a
firmament of frescoes, the massive flamboyant framing
weighs like a torrid haze on a weary land. Art is over-
laid and obliterated by gold. What wonder Religion too
is soon asphyxiated in these flaming halls of Council —
the Doge ceases to kneel to the Madonna, he stands before
Venice Unthroned between Mars and Neptune. It is Juno
who from a ceiling-fresco pours gold on Venice, and in
the heavy gilded picture of Zelotti, the Magnificent Ten
could behold Venice Seated on the World. What sly
satirist was it who — over the choir of St. Mark's —
crucified Christ on a cross of gold ?
In " The Merchant of Venice," 'tis the Duke of Morocco
176
THE GAY DOGES 177
who chooses the golden casket ; I feel sure 'twas Bassanio,
the Venetian. Not that I do not hate the leaden casket
more. Portia should have gone with a field of buttercups
in June.
Of all expressions of human greatness, metallic sheen
is the most banal. I have never recovered from the
shock of learning that the Greeks gilded their temples,
and though I can now with even a spice of zest imagine
them shining afar from their headlands in a golden glory,
I would have preferred to keep my vision of austere
columns and noble pediments ; and I am grateful to
Time, that truer artist, for having refined away that
assertive aureola.
On the water, indeed — which is beneath one's feet, and
not sagging on one's head — metallic sheen may exhilarate,
subtilising and softening itself, as it does, in its own wa-
vering reflections, and I find the Doge's gilded galley
more endurable than his lacunar aureum. It may be
because Shakespeare (or rather Plutarch) has reconciled
me to Cleopatra's barge by those magnificent burnished
lines. The Lord Mayor of London, too, had anciently
his gilded barge, and if you will look at an eighteenth-
century picture in the Guildhall by a pair of forgotten
painters, representing the Lord of Cockaigne sailing in
state on the Thames on the ninth of November, on the
way to be sworn at Westminster, you will see how easily
London, with her old boatmen and barges, and water-
gates and water-parties, singing as in Pepys, might have
paralleled the water-pomp of Venice, and how completely
we have now thrown away the gorgeous possibilities of
our proud water-way, lining it with warehouses in lieu of
stately mansions, and cutting out of our lives all that
shimmering vitality of ever-moving water. Man does
not live by bread alone, and " Give us this day our daily
water " were no unfitting prayer in our arid city. The
Henley Week is our one approach to the colour of a
178 ITALIAN FANTASIES
Venetian festa. Yet what a Grand Canal the Thames
niisrht have been ! I vow that at a distance I should take
that old Guildhall picture, with its gay old costumes, its
pageant of gilded galleys, each flying a brave array of
rich-dyed flags, and manned with rowers in white ; its
spires and turrets, and the noble dome of St. Paul's swell-
ing into sunny spaces of air and cloud, all suffused in a
golden mellowness, to represent the Doge of Venice going
to a " solemn rite " at the Salute. Alas ! the Lord Mayor
has now only a gilded coach, and the Doge of Venice
has vanished away, and only fragments of galleys in the
Arsenal and a model of the last of the Bucentaurs remain
to tell the tale of his marine glories, and his marriage to
the Adriatic on Ascension Day.
One mast of the Bucentoro — the very mast that upbore
the flag of the winged lion and the proud inscription. In
hoc signo vinces — survives in tragic recumbency, while a
morsel of frieze shows in gold, on a basis of dark wood,
delicious angels playing trumpet and harp at the prow.
The relics of other galleys, pranked with figures about
half life-size, enable us to gather what exuberance of
fancy and grotesquerie went to grace the Bucentoro which
Napoleon burnt, while the fact that he extracted the gold
of 80,000 Napoleons from its aslies shows with what pro-
digality the Republic blazoned its sense of itself.
But the marvellous model reconstructed by Ferdinand
of Austria in 1837 at a cost of 152,000 francs, reveals, if
it be exact, that seamy side which is always the obverse
of Magnificence. At first the eye is taken up with its
opulence of decoration, as it seems to take the water with
its proud keel, and its great all-topping flag of the lion
and the cross. For its upper deck is of mosaic, over-
hinged by a huge lid, red velvet without and gold relief
within, and from the water-line rise winged figures, and
over tlie arch through which pass the many-flashing oars of
red and gold is a frieze of flying horses, the rape of Eu-
THE GAY DOGES 179
ropa, Centaurs, and what not ; and above this are winged
figures flying towards a gold sky, and gold figures on
a balcony, which is supported at the prow by winged
lions and a pair of mermen, and at the bowsprit couches
the winged lion with two little angels playing behind him ;
and on the hull is a naiad pouring out her urn, and a mer-
man blowing his trumpet, and the protrusive heads of alli-
gators ; and lest you should think Venice meant nothing
but gold and fantasy and the pride of life, behold domi-
nant over these Justice with her sword and her scales,
and Peace with her dove and her olive-branch.
But below, hidden away behind and beneath the gild-
ing, at the unseen end of the red and gold oars
" Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke,"
sat one hundred and seventy -eight galley-slaves, chained
four to an oar ; and here in this fuscous interior the
benches are no longer of plush, but of rough deal ; here
is no play of Fancy — here in the hard seats we touch
Reality. But not herein lies the supreme sordidness of
the Bucentoro — the crowning touch is given by the oars,
which, at the very point where they disappear over the
rowlocks under the gay arches, turn from their red and
gold into a plain dirty white, like shirt-cuffs that give on
soiled sleeves. 'Tis the very magnificence of meanness !
The horny-handed wretches, to the rhythm of whose tired
muscles this golden vessel moved along in its music and
sunshine, to whose caged gloom no glimpse came of the
flags and the purple, the angels and the naiads, could not
even be conceded the coloured end of an oar. But could
there be an apter symbol of civilisation, ancient, mediaeval
or modern, than this gilded oar, whose gaudiness fades as
it passes from the bravery of the outer spectacle to the
grimnessof the inner labour? Upon such sweating slaves
rested all the glitter and pageantry of the ancient world
— not only Babylon and Carthage, but even the spiritual
180 ITALIAN FANTASIES
and artistic greatness of Greece. In hoc signo vinces — in
the sign of slavery ; in the sign of the lion and the cross
— the lion for yourself and the cross for the people. And
in every land of to-day the same State-Galley glides along
in bannered pomp, parading its decorative images of Peace
and Justice, and the radiant creations of its Art, while be-
low are the hard bare benches and the labouring, groan-
ing serfs. The serfs are below, even in another sense, for
it is their unsightly hands that have built up every square
inch of this splendour. Beatrice d'Este went to see a
galley a-building, her velvet cap and her embroidered
vest stuck full of jewels ; complacently recording the
ejaculations of admiration for her diamonds and rubies,
while the Venetian women, and even children, were toil-
ing at making the sails and the ropes. Yes, the social
order too must be gazetted bankrupt. It has, indeed,
never been solvent. It has never paid its real cred-
itors, the slaves of the uncoloured oar.
Nor does our civilization hold much hope of a change
for the fairer. Despite prophets and poets, despite Social-
ists, dryasdust or dithyrambic, despite philanthropists
and preachers, the revel on the top-deck amid the velvet
and the mosaics grows ever wilder, the flutes ever more
Dionysiac, the fantasies on prow and poop ever more gro-
tesquely golden. America, shorn of monarchy and feudal-
ism and rank, and all that the friends of man screamed
against, divides with Russia the hegemony of hotels and
outdoes the worst extravagances and debaucheries of the
Renaissance. Where in the Cinquecento a few despots
and " humanists " wallowed in lust and luxury, we have
now ten thousand private tyrants and loose-livers, re-
strained hardly by the penal law. The deeds of the
Cenci or the Baglioni must be done in a glass-house in
the fierce light that beats upon local greatness. The
ruffians of the Renaissance had no such free field for
vagaries and vices as the vagrom son of a millionaire en-
THE GAY DOGES 181
joys in this modern world, where property in growing
fluid has become dissolved from duty; where in every
pleasure-city palaces invite and women allure and slaves
grovel; where every port swarms with white-winged yachts
to bear his indolent irresponsibility to glamorous shores ;
where in a million halls of light his world-strewn flunkeys
proffer unseasonable food cooked by unsurpassable artists,
and rare champagnes, oscillated for months in a strange
daily ritual by troops of underground elves.
They tell us that this New Year's Eve in New York
alone some three million pounds were spent in suppers in
the flaring restaurants, where between eleven and twelve
o'clock only champagne could be served. Such is the
New Era ushered in by the New World — the Era of-
Champagne. For this the Red Indian was uprooted and
the wilderness tamed. For this Washington lived and
Lincoln died. By the flood of champagne all standards of
life and letters are swept away, save the one standard of
financial success, save the ability to dine in that wonderful
culinary cathedral where in a dim irreligious light as of a
submarine world of faery, to a melting liturgical music, a
fashionable congregation follows with absorbing zeal the
lengthy order of service. What an Agapemone!
And this epidemic of vulgarity, spreading to our own
country, has made the England of 1802, which Words-
worth denounced for " glittering like a brook," the
England where " plain living and high thinking " were
no more, appear like an island of pristine simplicity.
Even the old families surrender to the new standard and
— in the plaint of Dante — " wori heroico more^ sed plebeo
sequuntur superhiam.^^
What is to be done ? What is to be done about it all ?
We writing men, to whom the highest British manhood is
still Wordsworth in that country cottage where visitors
must pay for anything beyond bread and cheese, we to
whom the greatest American personality is still Walt
182 ITALIAN FANTASIES
"Whitman in his Camden shanty, must at least preserve our
divine gift of laughter, our one poor power of laughing at
these vulgarians, whom even the occasional smuggling of
an Old Master out of Italy cannot redeem from barbarism.
The purple pomp of kings, blatant though it be in
comparison with true grandeur, is at least the expression
of a public dignity : it is an official costume like the
judge's wig and gown. But because greatness must accept
office at the hands of its otherwise helpless inferiors, and
office must be suitably apparelled, a certain confusion has
been established between splendour and greatness, as
though because greatness means splendour, splendour
must mean greatness. Of this confusion those are prompt-
est to take advantage to whom the high road to considera-
tion is closed. Private pomp is a confession of personal
pettiness. The little soul must needs inflate itself by a
great house-shell, and protract itself by a long retinue of
servants. 'Tis almost too pathetic a meekness, this humil-
ity of the Magnificent Ones.
Cannot I breathe into you — O Magnificent Ones — a
little proper pride ? Ye buy the Past, watching one
another in jealous competition ; will no one buy the
Future ? Why not buy with your millions an earth
renewed and regenerated, a solvent social order ? Why
not build a true civilisation on this malarious marsh, that
shall rise like the spires and domes of Venice from her
swamps ? Surely that were a dream worthy of Magnifi-
cence I Come, let us build together a State-Galley where
the oars shall be red and gold from blade to handle, and
every man shall take his turn at them, and the fantasies of
Art shall adorn the hull of Righteousness, and Justice and
Peace shall no longer be ironic images carved for the
complacency of the top-deck. So shall there dawn an
Ascension Day on which the Doge shall go out with
banners and music, not to marry the sea with a ring, but
to celebrate the nuptials of Earth with Heaven.
THE GAY DOGES 183
Private pomp is surely a questionable thing. Mediaeval
life centred round the Cathedral, the Castle, the Palace.
And the masses touched the life at each and all. The
Cathedral gave them their religion, their laws came from
the Palace, their protection from the Castle. Dominating
a feudal population, the towers of law and war uplifted
and unified the people. The lowliest were of this greatness.
To-day palaces flaunt themselves, divorced from moral
meaning, magnificence without significance. The world,
as I said, is full of private autocrats, without duties or
dangers : an unhappy consequence of the fall of feudalism,
ere a system as human was ready to replace it. And to-
day the Cathedral is our one feudal relic, reconciling
magnificence with morality : the light streaming through
the rose-window haloes the grey head of the market-woman,
and her prayer equals that of the Magnificent One himself.
It is significant that no villa — whoever the architect — ■
can attain the poetic quality of the simplest village church.
The palace of Moses is nowhere mentioned, but we read
many minute instructions concerning the Tabernacle and
the Temple. In truth, art treasures are essentially public:
the furniture of cathedrals, libraries, law-courts, market-
places, and parks. The owners of collections do indeed
often allow the public to visit them at inconvenient times,
but that anybody should have exclusive rights is an ab-
surdity. If Art were a form of property like any other,
the owner could destroy it, and the righteous indignation
of the world at the destruction of a Botticelli or a Velasquez
would mark the boundaries of private property. Land
comes under the same canon. Nothing, perhaps, should
be owned which might not be destroyed at will.
In literature and music — which are more spirits than
bodies, and which can be multiplied without loss — monop-
olies are unnecessary. If I write a book against Social-
ism, the world will applaud, and communistically possess
itself thereof after a brief term. And this legal limitation
184 ITALIAN FANTASIES
of copyright which forcibly wrests epics, operas, and
novels from the heirs might be extended to pictures and
statues.
II
But if the galley of old Venice stimulates my Social-
ism, the cinematograph of modern Venice torpifies it
again. For be it known that in Venice there are scores
of halls and theatres devoted to delectable visions at prices
to suit the poorest, and open to ragazzi for a couple of
soldi. And in every city of Italy the fever rages ; one
performance follows on the heels of another, and the
wretched manipulator of the magic lantern must subsist
on sandwiches while the theatre is clearing and re-filling.
Every unlet dancing-hall or decayed rink or bankrupt
building has blossomed out into a hall of enchantment
where even the words of the play are sometimes given by
the cunning juxtaposition of gramophones. In this way I
heard "Amletto, or the Prince of Denmark," its too, too solid
flesh melted into a meat extract. But the most wonderful
spectacle of all was soundless, save for the flowing music.
For twenty centesimi the Teatro S. Marco passed before
my eyes an exquisite vision of JLe Ore — the hours in ten
" Quadri animati" from the shiver of light that precedes
tlie dawn to the last falling of night. In the Sala d'Aurora
of the Castle of Ferrara, Dosso Dossi has depicted Tramonto,
Notte, L' Aurora^ and Mezzogiorno^ but not more poetically
than the modern stage-manager who arranged these living
pictures. As I watched these allegorical groupings of
nymphs and fauns by their stream in the glade, I felt that
the old Pagan religion still lingered in the souls that could
conceive and enjoy this nature-poetry.
And as I sat here, amid Venetian washerwomen and
street boys, it was further borne in upon me that no State
Bureau would ever have begotten this marvel for the joy
and uplifting of the people, and that in the present imper-
THE GAY DOGES 185
fection of human nature, individual initiative under the
spur of gold or hunger could alone work these miracles of
Socialism. " La propriete c'est la vol,'" said Proudhon, but
" vol " in his sense implies a bullish acceptance of the
very conception he is combating. Let us translate it by
"flight." Property is the impulse of the aeroplane.
Therefore pray do not count my aspiration for a solvent
social order as an adhesion to an}^ cut and dried theory of
the State owning and administering all social resources.
For that sort of Socialism is — like science — bankrupt,
even before it begins. It fails, not merely because it
would substitute an external arrangement for a change of
heart — and Socialism will either be a religion or will not be
— but because no external arrangement is possible. The
collective ownership of land and capital is feasible in Juan
Fernandez so long as Robinson Crusoe and Friday con-
tinue exiled from civilisation, but impossible in our world
of international finance, where private ownership extends
to countries which the property holder will never even
visit. Unless, therefore, every country in the world sim-
ultaneously adopted Socialism, there would be an inex-
tricable tangle of Socialism and Individualism. Not to
mention that capital — as every shareholder knows —
means men as much as money. But even in Juan Fer-
nandez, as soon as it became thickly populated. Socialism
would be unmanageable, because the stock of concentrable
human consciousness is insufficient to arrange a social
order from a central bureau. Omniscience alone would
be equal to the task, not to mention All Goodness and
All Wisdom. Despite the vast loss by friction and ab-
sence of organisation, despite the vast suffering, the strug-
gle for existence is the only agency capable of fitting
the pegs into the holes. Shall the State, for example,
select which man shall write poetry ? And still more
vital, which poetry the State Press shall print? We
have already had experience of the State as a selector of
186 ITALIAN FANTASIES
Laureates and a censor of drama, and ]\Iilton knew it as a
censor of literature. Our most brilliant Socialists, an
they had their way, would be reduced to pasting pas-
quinades on the pedestals of our street statues.
But in a looser connotation, " we are all Socialists now,"
if indeed we ever were anything else. From the day of
the first human grouping for co-operation and common
defence, Socialism has been the rule of life, and the ques-
tion of how the common work and the common products
are to be apportioned is a mere question of organised dis-
tribution. That we have hitherto left this cumbrous and
infinitely complex problem of distribution to solve itself
by natural selection does not make society less socialistic.
Nor would the discovery of a more excellent way of divid-
ing up the labour and its results make society more social-
istic. For compared with the assets of civilisation in
which we share equally — the museums, picture galleries,
libraries, parks, roads, schools, life- boat and fire-engine
services, armies, navies, light-houses, weather-bureaus, asy-
lums, hospitals, observatories — the assets in which we
share unequally are relatively unimportant, and without
sacrificing to a machine the zest and stimulus of liberty, and
the fine flavour of individuality, it is a comparatively simple
matter to minimise the waste and suffering produced by
the struggle for existence, and to arrange that talent
shall rise to the top, not for its sake but our own. It is
no evil that one man should live in a palace and another
in a cottage ; these differences even add to the colour and
joy of life. The evil is solely that any man willing to
work should lack a cottage, or that the cottage should be
a malarious hovel. Levelling up is the only reform nec-
essary, as it is the only reform possible. For if tlie grad-
ual consolidation of railways, land, mines, and a few
leading industries in the hands of the State is not beyond
practical politics, this would still be very far from " So-
cialism," and it is vastly amusing to witness the agony of
THE GAY DOGES 187
apprehension with which respectable society looks forward
to the advent of a social order which cannot possibly ma-
terialise, and which menaces us less than the flaming tail
of a comet. Only less amusing is the awe with which so-
ciety regards Property as something sacrosanct in quality
and immutable in quantity. Why, even the King's shil-
ling is as nimble and elusive as mercury, will buy you
mutton to-day and only tripe to-morrow, and scarcely run
to dog-sausage in a siege. Property is a Proteus, a shadow,
a transient and generally embarrassed phantom. Prop-
erty merely means a potential call upon human service —
past or future — and if human service is unwilling or absent,
Property shrinks or collapses, like the bag of pearls found
by the thirsting Arab in the desert. Finance — like all
other branches of science — has been treated as though its
subject-matter had absolute existence. But the assets of
the world's bankers incalculably outrun the world's power
of service, and Property is merely a promissory note wliich
can only be redeemed if there is not too great a run upon
the labour bank at which it is presented. Still more elas-
tic is the service that produces this right to call upon the
service of others. A hundred thousand readers buy this
book — instead of borrowing it — and I am a Croesus ; a
hundred, and I am free of income tax. Motor cars are
invented, and my house in Ascot falls to half its former
value because the smart set need no longer stay overnight
during the Ascot week. My unknown aunt remembers
me in her will and I am a thousand pounds the richer.
The Seine rises and my Paris flat is a ruin. I die and my
land dwindles to six feet. Where in this foolish flux is
room for holiness? And why may not society — the only
source of values — mould Property as it will for society's
ends? Why — among the many vicissitudes with which
Property must reckon — should not social reform count
equally with bad harvests, wars of conquest, and Stock
Exchange manoeuvres ?
188 ITALIAN FANTASIES
To say that Property is sacred is to confuse the means
with the end, like the miser who hoards his gold and for-
gets its uses. Society is sacred, not Property, and what-
ever sanctitude or stability has been attached to Property
has been attached entirely for socialistic purposes; not
that the individual may be enriched, but that he may
not lose the spur that drives him to enrich society.
Individual property is merely a by-product of labour for
society. He who demands overmuch for his labour is
under-moralised. The true citizen is anxious to be taxed
for the general good, provided his taxes are used for
social service. He is anxious that some form of distribu-
tion of the common products shall be organised to sup-
plement natural selection and correct its over-harshness.
Experience might prove that interference with natural
selection saps the stamina and initiative of society more
than it benefits the "submerged tenth," in which case we
should reluctantly return to the present form of Socialism.
As for land, it is the one thing that I can conceive
nationalised even under our present form of Socialism,
nay, which is already nationalised to the extent that the
private owners of British land may not sell it to Germany
or Japan, as they may sell anything else of theirs. Every
new State should doubtless begin by trying to nationalise
its land. I say " trying," because it is by no means cer-
tain that it would succeed, since so far from the increment
in land values being unearned, it is the very possibility of
earning it that induces the pioneer to suffer peril, privation,
and isolation. Were Canada, for example, not to give
away its land, the many adventurers who have flowed in
from the United States would probably have remained at
home, and all this Canadian territory have been still
empty. And once you have made land quasi-private
property, it cannot justly be subjected to any peculiar
tax, since colossal as is the rise of land values in growing
towns, the value of land is controlled by the same factors
THE GAY DOGES 189
of luck and judgment as rule all other property values,
and may be depreciated as well as enhanced by the opera-
tion of social forces beyond the owner's control or provi-
sion. Wherefore all increments in value — in stocks and
shares, copyrights, patents, &c., &c. — should be treated
as potential matter for taxation equally with the so-called
"unearned increment" on land.
One would imagine from the war cries in our latest
political campaign that Socialism was already upon us,
and that the only refuge from it lay in Tariff Reform.
But it is precisely Tariff Reform which is Socialism ; a
taxation of the entire community in the interests of this
or that industry. Nor should the entire community be
averse from taxation for any provably good object ; a
moralised community would even be always looking round
for fresh methods of self-taxation. Budget Day would
be a national festival, a day of solemn joy, tense with the
hope that new ways would be found of making England
the Kingdom of God. Alas I it is a day of sick anxiety,
with a sequel of farcical unfailingness, in which every
section taxed sends a deputation to show that it is the one
section that should have been left unburdened, while from
the bloated gluttons and swillers at the great hotels arises
the cry of " Red ruin and the breaking-up of laws." And
the poor philanthropist we have always with us — he who
threatens to stop his charity contributions. As if the
abolition of charity was not the very object of social re-
form ! Every benevolent activity means a sore in the
social system, and charity covers indeed a multitude of
our sins.
Strange that these sordid questions of money should so
fever this mighty England of Shakespeare and Milton.
Ship-money cost Charles the First his head, and a petty
land tax changes the House of Peers. Poor humanity,
so deluded as to the essential values of life, so peculiarly
demented in all that concerns Property ! But I bid you cast
190 ITALIAN FANTASIES
away your fears. I repeat to you my good tidings of great
joy. Socialism is impossible. A perfect and just distri-
bution of the goods and labours of life — " to each accord-
ing to his needs, from each according to his powers " — is
Utopian. Moreover envy, luitred, and all uncharitableness
prevent it : stupidity, sloth, selfishness, treachery, and
tyranny preclude it. Rejoice, therefore, and let us cry
Hosannal
Nor are these evil qualities confined to the capitalist,
they are found in even uglier forms in the working man,
who is merel}^ a capitalist without means, and through his
Trade Unions talks equally of rights and even less of
duties and ideals.
But if Socialism is impossible, and Socialist parties con-
sequently deficient in constructive potency, they yet per-
form in every country a critical and regulative function of
the first importance. Our own Labour members are the
only gentlemen in British politics. To all questions,
national or international, they bring a broad spirit and a
Quixotic ideal, and while our Howards and our Percys
cower in craven terror of Germany, or make prudent al-
liance with Holy Russia, or handle with correlative des-
potism India, Ireland or the woman question, our men
from the pits and the factories sit free and fearless, the
sole guardians of England's ancient glory.
THE SUPERMAN OF LETTERS: OR THE
HYPOCRISY OF POLITICS
AuRESTiVE was it in an aisle of Santa Croce — the Floren-
tine Church of the Holy Cross — to come upon a monu-
ment toNiccolo Machiavelli, anathema alike for Catholicism
and Protestantism, the "Old Nick" of the Hudibras
rhyme. 'Tvvas as if Mephisto had managed not only to
slip into the Cathedral, but to achieve canonisation. But
even a devil is not given his due at the hands of his own
countrymen : it was reserved for an English earl, more
than two and a half centuries after Mephisto's passing, to
provide his works with a splendid setting and his remains
with a massive monument. And so, in the dim religious
light, I pondered over the stately inscription :
" Tanto Nomini nullum par Elogium."
How, indeed, equate eulogy to so great a name ? Ma-
chiavelli was our first modern — the first to exhibit the
reign of law in human affairs, to read history as the play
of human forces and not as the caprice of a cloudy Provi-
dence, modified by the stars. What an epic sweep in the
opening sentences of his " History of Florence" — Gibbon
in a nut-shell, the whole " Decline and Fall," summarised
as the economic emigration southward of the surplus popu-
lation of the Goths into an Italy weakened by the removal
of the seat of Empire to Constantinople. Vagarious
chance, indeed, he admits, as a complication (to be mini-
mised by prudence) but Providence is mentioned in " The
Prince," only to be dropped, and astrology is not even
mentioned. Machiavelli would have agreed that " the
fault's in ourselves, not in our stars, that we are under-
191
192 ITALIAN FANTASIES
lings," and for those who wished to prince it, he was pre-
pared to point the conditions of success. And this
indifference to the stars — to quadrangles and hexagons,
sigils, conjunctions, and configurations — is not his least
amazing merit.
Pico della Mirandola had, indeed, refuted astrology
before him, but it was in the interests of that conventional
theory of Providence and free-will which leaves the chaos
of history irreducible to order. Machiavelli not only
ignores astrology, but substitutes causation for the chaos.
'Tis true Corate suggested that astrology was, likewise,
an attempt to reduce to law the chaos of human phe-
nomena, but the remark is over-ingenious. Where there is
no rational connection between causes and effects there is
no science. The planetary conjuncture one was born
under might, indeed, not impossibly affect temperament
or internal destiny, just as the climate one was born under,
but the notion that it could shape external destiny belongs
to the medioeval megalomania. Galileo's discovery of
new stars must have shaken it, falsifying as it did all
previous horoscopes — indeed. Sir Henry Wotton, our
ambassador to Venice, was more impressed by Galileo's in-
juriousness to astrology than to theology. " For the
virtue of these new planets must needs vary the judicial
part, and why may there not yet be more ? " But
Machiavelli belongs to the pre-telescope period ; he wrote
a whole century before Galileo, and thirty years ere
Copernicus unsettled the ancient heavens by his Nurem-
berg treatise. True, even in the twelfth century, Mai-
raonides had denounced astrology as " a disease, not a
science," and the great Jew's letter " to the Men of Mar-
seilles " had evoked Papal applause. But not even Popes
could arrest the disease. A century before Machiavelli
was born Petrarch poured scorn on the astrologers. But
the mockeries of this pioneer of humanism did not save
a prince of the Renaissance like Lodovico from employing
THE SUPERMAN OF LETTERS 193
an astrologer advisory, under whose calculations he went
from disaster to disaster. There were even Professors of
Astrology at the Universities. Bodin, the next great
political philosopher after Machiavelli, though half a
century later, still dallies with astrology, still coquets with
the theory of a connection between the planetary motions
and the world's history, while Copernicus he regards as a
fantast unworthy of serious refutation.
Earlier in the sixteenth century Luther had denounced
astrology as " framed by the devil," and in his Table Talk
had challenged the astrologers to answer him why Esau
and Jacob, who were " born together of one father and one
mother, at one time and under equal planets " were yet
" wholly of contrary natures, kinds and morals." Neverthe-
less in the next century, Milton in " Paradise Regained "
makes Satan predict truly to Jesus on the strength of
*' what the stars,
Voluminous or single characters,
In their conjunction met,"
give him to spell, and throughout the whole seventeenth
century, as " Guy Mannering " reminds us, nativities con-
tinued to be cast. The child's horoscope in some parts of
Europe hung side by side with his baptismal certificate.
Even to-day such phrases as " Thank your lucky stars,"
conserve a shadow of the ancient belief, and the sidereal
influence survives even more subtly in the word "consider."
Through such banks of fog pierces the searchlight of the
great Florentine, it turns its powerful beam even upon
Church history. The Princes of ecclesiastical principalities,
he remarks drily, are the only ones who can possess States
and subjects without governing and defending them, but
it would be presumptuous in him to discuss these matters,
as they are under the superintendence and direction of an
Almighty Being, whose dispensations are beyond our
weak understandings. But the Church has likewise
194 ITALIAN FANTASIES
attained temporal power, and here Mephisto may intrude
without blasphemy. Secular triumphs demand secular
explanations. One is reminded of the dialogue on Julius
II. attributed to Erasmus. Our Mephisto notes grimly
that no prophet has ever succeeded unless backed by an
armed force. Hence the collapse of " brother Jerome
Savonarola when the multitude ceased to have faith in
him." In short, in the making of history Might and Right
are partners.
Not in the exposition of this commonplace lay Machia-
velli's offensiveness for his contemporaries. Had he
remained the passionless observer of the pitiful human
breed, the explicator of the tangled threads of history, he
would have been acclaimed as a moralist, unveiling with
ruthless hand the hypocrisies of princes. What changed
angel to devil was that instead of fulminating against the
partnership of Might and Right, he found that only by
this firm could history be made. He wrote not science
but art — the ars usurpandi. Not only had the Princes of
the past combined Might with Right, guile with goodness,
but whoso wished now to be a Prince must needs go and
do likewise. The ethics springing from the social relations
of citizen to citizen no longer holds in the relation of
ruler to subjects.
It is true " The Prince " might also be regarded as an
elaborate Swiftian irony — a negative Pulcinellian advice
to those about to usurp — an exposition of Princedom as
the service of the devil. " A New Prince cannot with im-
punity exercise all the virtues, because his own self-preser-
vation will often compel him to violate the laws of charity,
religion and humanity." But this Swiftian supposition
does not tally with the dedication to Lorenzo de' Medici
and his overt encouragement to the Most Magnificent to
seize the reins. Machiavelli plainly believes in the sense
he alleges hidden by the ancients in the myth of Chiron
the Centaur, who was the educator of rulers because he
THE SUPERMAN OF LETTERS 195
had the double qualification of the brute and the man. In
high politics crimes are only crimes when they are blunders.
Unsuccessful cruelty is unpardonable. Wickedness should
be pursued with an economy of means to end : like the
causes in Occam's canon, crimes should not be multiplied
prcBter necessitatem. Politics is a sort of bee-keeping, and
the master of the hive will use the instincts and ethics of
the little creatures for his own purposes, his kindness will
be as cold-blooded as his cruelty. Thus, some three and
a half centuries before Nietzsche, was expounded the
doctrine of the Superman, the splendid blonde beast who
had passed Jenseits von Gut und Bose. " The despised
virtues of patience and humility have abased the spirits
of men, which Pagan principles exalted." It is in such
precisely Nietzschean terms that Sir Thomas Browne
sums up, albeit unapplausively, " the judgment of Machia-
vel." But as a treatise on apiculture, "The Prince" is
not rigidly scientific. The Superman, alone upon his
dizzy height, Diabolists and neo-Dionysians as yet unborn
to cheer him, has his moments of human weakness.
Before the crimes of Agathocles he falters, and remarks
with delicious gravity, " Still it must not be called virtue
to murder one's fellow-citizens or to sacrifice one's friends,
or be insensible to the voice of faith, pity or religion.
These qualities may lead to sovereignty but not to glory."
And there is a more general apologia in the concession
that the times are out of joint — in the grim Tacitean
explanation that " he who deviates from the common
course of practice, and endeavours to act as duty dictates,
necessarily ensures his own destruction." Super-morality
lapses here into morality.
Moreover, Machiavelli did not himself play the Super-
man. He wrote the part — or founded it on Csesar
Borgia — but he did not act it. The Rubicon 'twixt
thought and action he never crossed. His own morals
appear to have been conventionally excellent. Like
196 ITALIAN FANTASIES
Helvetius, who traced virtue to the lowest roots of self-
interest, he was of a rare magnanimity. As a scientific
observer he advises the Tyrant, if he cannot live in the
Republic he has conquered, to destroy it root and branch,
but as a man he bore torture and imprisonment for the
cause of liberty. Indeed, in his later years something of
the S(xva indignatio of Swift seems to have possessed his
breast. It was Napoleon who was destined to incarnate
the maxims of Machiavelli, though on a far grander stage
than even Casar Borgia ever dreamed of : it was Napoleon
who gave the greatest performance of "The Prince."
And by a hitherto unnoted coincidence Napoleon was
born exactly three centuries after Machiavelli. Exactly
three hundred years (1469-1769) divided the nativities
of the Superman of Letters and the Superman of Action
— 'tis almost enough to revive faith in the potency of
planetary conjunctures. True, Nietzsche regards Napo-
leon as but " half-Superman," the other half being beast,
but we have seen that the bestial portion is a necessary
factor of the Machiavellian Superman, who is nothing if
not super-dominant. What Nietzsche's Superman was to
be, Nietzsche did not precisely know, though we may well
suspect that the direction in which he strained his vision
for him was not the horizon but the looking glass. Nietzsche
has not even the credit of inventing the Superman, for
when Nietzsche was six years old, Tennyson published "In
Memoriam," with its prophetic peroration :
"A closer link
Between us and the crowning race. . . .
"No longer half akin to brute,
For all we thought and loved and did,
And hoped, and suffered, is but seed
Of what in them is flower and fruit."
Tennyson pressed home this idea of the further evolution
of our race in his very last volume, in a poem called "The
Making of Man."
THE SUPERMAN OF LETTERS 197
"Man as yet is being made and ere the crowning Age of ages
Shall not aeon after aeon pass and touch him into shape?"
And again in " The Dawn."
"Ah, what will our children be,
The men of a hundred thousand, a million summers away ? "
More self-conscious a disciple of Machiavelli than Na-
poleon was our own Thomas Cromwell, who carried "The
Prince " as his political enchiridion, and who within three
years of its publication chopped off Sir Thomas More's
head as coolly as a knight captures a bishop on a chess-
board. If you have to choose between love and fear, said
the Master, then fear is the stronger weapon. With fear,
Thomas the pupil hewed his way to the great ends he had
set himself. Thomas Cromwell's application of the sys-
tem was, however, vitiated by one radical mistake. By a
paradox, worthy of Machiavelli himself — and repeated in
our own day by Bismarck — " thePrince " he worked for was
not himself but his sovereign. Howsoever Thomas Crom-
well may have appeared the true gerent, the final profit
was to the suzerain, and the axe of despotism which he
had forged for Henry VIII. was turned against his own
neck. Of his canon that traitors should be condemned
unheard, he was the sole victim. Possibly he might have
triumphed even over the flaw in his pi'actice, had Ann of
Cleves been more personable. It was essential to his
game to queen this pawn, and queen her he did. But at
what a cost I It has been said that if Cleopatra's nose
had been longer, the world's history would have been other.
Of the German princess's nose it may be said that had it
been prettier — or perchance had Holbein flattered it less
before it was seen by the matrimonial agent — Thomas
Cromwell would have continued to rule England, and
Europe might have been spared the Thirty Years' War.
But even Supermen cannot change the shape of ladies'
noses, and in this surd of a world, where the best laid
198 ITALIAN FANTASIES
plans may "gang agley" over the tilt of a nostril, what
avail your Supermen more than Supermice ? The toasted
cheese is but temporary, the end of Napoleon is the
mouse-trap.
The phenomena of history are indeed too multifarious
for consciousness, and the Machiavellian method of treat-
ing persons as things — in defiance of the moral maxim —
shatters itself upon the impossibility of foreseeing all the
permutations of the things. A bad prince is no more
secure against assassination than a good prince. A religious
reformer may arise and upset the snuggest peace. A
failure of crops may precipitate rebellion. A child's arm
may plug up a dam. In brief, lacking the necessary
omniscience, the shrewdest of Supermen is driving in the
dark. The upshot of Napoleon's career was to make Ger-
many and mutilate France.
It is through lack of omniscience, too, that we cannot
obey the frequent modern suggestion to breed the Super-
man — the Superman, that is, not as the cold-blooded
manipulator of man, but as his moral superior and suc-
cessor, Tennyson's Superman, not Nietzsche's. We are
too abysmally ignorant for evolutionary eugenics. We
breed horses and roses for higher types, but then we
immeasurably transcend horses and roses. Who tran-
scends us so immeasurably that he should breed us ? In
breeding we have a clear vision of our aim — to produce a
thornless rose or a Derby winner. What clear vision has
any one of the Superman ? It is impossible to read even
Nietzsche without seeing a spectral swarm of shifting
types. Moreover we breed only for physical qualities.
What experience have we of breeding for moral qualities?
And what were all our breedings compared with Nature's
inexhaustible experimentation, her thousand million men
and women of all shades and psychoses, her endless blend-
ings and crossings that yield now Nietzsches, now Isaiahs ;
yesterday Platos, to-day Darwins and Wagners.
THE SUPERMAN OF LETTERS 199
The Superman will come of himself : already man rises
as imperceptibly into him as he fades into the orang-out-
ang. " This was no man," said Napoleon, reading the
Sermon on the Mount — an involuntary admission by the
Machiavellian of a finer species of Superman than his own.
And this brings us to the paradox that the defect in
Machiavelli's system was not in his morals but in his in-
tellect. In the hive he examined were creatures greater
than he, obeying motives beyond his ken. To him Princes
ruled primarily for their own glory, for the pomp and
pride of power. Of the small but infinitely important
class of rulers who assume mastership only because they
have the greatest power to serve, he has no adequate con-
ception. That there has sometimes been a Pope who felt
himself literally servus servorum .Dei passed his comprehen-
sion. This falsifies his treatment of history, this makes
his vision imperfect, this throws his conclusions out of gear.
The verse in St. Matthew, " he that is greatest among you
shall be servant of all the rest " represents a more scien-
tific generalisation. As Chapman's Don Byron (Act 3,
Scene 1) reminds us, in his denunciation of " the schools
first founded in ingenious Italy," the true
" Kings are not made by art
But right of nature, nor by treachery propt
But simple virtue."
But Machiavelli, that crude biologist, treats Moses and
Cyrus as creatures of the same species, would run together
the Attilas and the Buddhas. Hence the hard metallic
sheen of his style as of an old Latin prose-writer ; of spir-
itual iridescence, of Jewish tenderness, of Christian yearn-
ing, of even the Nietzschean ecstasy there is no trace. It
is not astonishing that he should have turned a scornful
ear to Savonarola's message, dismissed him as a compound
of fraud and cunning. How dramatic is the picture of
Mephisto listening to the preacher of San Marco that week
of the Carnival of 1497 ! (What a pity " Romola " does
200 ITALIAN FANTASIES
not exploit that episode instead of using Machiavelli as a
mere caustic conversationalist.) But though Machiavelli's
flair for crouching Caesars was not utterly at fault, though
the Dominican did indeed aspire to be "The Prince" of
the Church, and even the power behind the thrones of the
Princes of Christendom, yet 'twas all ad majorem Dei
gloriam and for the greater confusion of the infidel, and
George Eliot has understood this impersonal egotist infi-
nitely better than his cynical contemporary understood him.
And this intellectual limitation — this absence of the highest
notes from his psychological gamut — must always keep
Machiavelli out of the first rank of writers. He cannot
rise above the notion that power is an end in itself and
that those who can satisfy it "deserve praise rather than
censure." If the King of France — he tells us — was
powerful enough to invade the kingdom of Naples, then
he ought to have done it. Though Machiavelli could see
that the individual's crimes "may lead to sovereignty but
not to glory," yet he did not question the right of a State
to absorb or shatter another. He saw that the world went
on
*' The simple plan
That they should take who have the power,
And they should keep who can,"
and he admitted that the rule was indispensable — if you
went into politics. This was his crime — High Treason
against Idealism. Humanity- prefers to be guided by rules
which it disavows. The splendid blonde beasts who prac-
tised the maxims of Machiavelli shuddered at the scribe
who merely stated them. Nowhere probably was disgust
with the Florentine writer more vehement than in Venice,
which employed assassins as a principle of polity. Could
that Turkish " Prince " who decreed that each new monarch
of his house must safeguard the dynasty by massacring his
swarm of brothers, or that Persian "Prince" who invented
the principle of blinding them, have seen the printed
THE SUPERMAN OF LETTERS 201
" Prince " of Machiavelli, they with their correct Islamic
or Zoroastrian principles would have shared in the uni-
versal opprobrium.
That the world shudders still is shown by the apologetic
attitude of his commentators and even of his panegyrists.
Not one but repudiates his system, charitably traces it to
the unhappy circumstances of his day, to the welter of
force and fraud amid which his lot was cast. Yet are
these circumstances essentially changed ? The small urban
republics have vanished, but in their stead are the Great
Powers. Caesar Borgia and Ezzelino are gone, but we
have the Congo Ruler and the Trust Magnate. " Every
country hath its Machiavel," says Sir Thomas Browne,
and there is no spot on earth where the maxims of " The
Prince " are not in daily operation. The voice may be
the voice of Savonarola, but the hands are the hands of
Machiavelli.
Nay, it is often the voice of Machiavelli even when it
sounds like the voice of Savonarola. For, as Lord Acton
subtly pointed out, Machiavellism lurks in many a seem-
ingly innocent and even pious proposition. It is perhaps
straining his point to find it in Jeremy Bentham's " greatest
happiness principle," but who shall doubt but that it is in-
volved in the popular idea that " Time tries all, "and that
everything happens for the best in the long run, and that
history is, after all, the Will of God ? What are all these
nebulous notions but the acceptance of success — of the
brute fact — as the moral standard ? Less obvious than
the proposition that " God is on the side of the biggest
battalions " they are substantially identical with it. They
simply mean that God was on the side of the biggest
battalions. They imply that whichever party triumphed,
God was with that party. So that many even of those who
reject Machiavelli with loathing are found to be uncon-
sciously Machiavellian.
Hallam in his " Introduction to the Literature of
202 ITALIAN FANTASIES
Europe " palliates the darker features of the Machiavellian
teaching by the nature of the times, yet in his own " Eu-
rope during the Middle Ages," writing of the rapid decay
of Charlemagne's Empire under his son Louis, " called by
the Italians the Pious, and by the French the Debonair or
Good-natured," he says " the fault lay entirely in his heart;
and this fault was nothing but a temper too soft and a
conscience too strict. It is not wonderful that the Empire
should have been speedily dissolved." And Charlemagne,
its peerless founder, is described as having divorced nine
wives, beheaded four thousand Saxons in a single day, and
executed all who ate flesh during Lent !
It is when I hear the words of Church or Press, Parlia-
ments or Royal Proclamations, that I fall into a rage
against language, and even as Sancho Panza blessed the
man who invented sleep, I curse the man who invented
speech. In the beautiful dumb days the strong rent the
weak in sacred simplicity. Now the strong make pious
speeches to show that the eupepsia of the universe is their
appetite's aim, and the weak must listen to proofs that
they are being eaten for their own good. Happily the
serpent no longer talks, else were his slow slimy degluti-
tion of the living rabbit accompanied by a sermon. The
State has not only killed Christ but stolen his words. At
the Hague the lion and the lamb lie down together, and
the concordial words flow on like music, till the lamb sug-
gests that the lion should pare his claws. And the lamb
himself — is he anything but a wolf in sheep's clothing?
Is he not at heart envious of claws, always feeling his
paws for talons of his own ?
" And when the Lord thy God shall deliver them be-
fore thee, thou shalt smite them and utterly destroy them :
thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor show mercy
unto them." Where outside Machiavelli shall you find a
clean strong sentence like this of Moses ? The Destroying
Angel's sword shall be sharp and antiseptic as a surgeon's
THE SUPERMAN OF LETTERS 203
knife ; he shall leave no writhing torsoes, no half -sawn
limbs and festering wounds littering the purlieus of life.
But this utterance is too strong for Christian stomachs, it
belongs to the feefofum eye-for-eye period of the Old
Testament : with the New entered the reign of ethereal
mildness, lilies showering from full hands, festal fountains
spouting the milk of human kindness. Well might
Wordsworth cry out:
" Earth is sick,
And Heaven is weary, of the hollow words
Which States and Kingdoms utter when they talk
Of truth and justice."
But even the Old Testament is comparatively sophisti-
cated. This extinction of the native tribes of Palestine
is enjoined, not on political grounds but on religious. It
is not that Palestine, which offers the most convenient
territory for the refugees from Egypt, happens unfortu-
nately to be densely populated. No, virtue must be vin-
dicated, not brute force. But one cannot too much admire
that the Biblical historian chose the less nauseous of the
two morals open to him. " Not for thy righteousness, or
for the uprightness of thine heart, dost thou go to possess
their land ; but for the wickedness of these nations the
Lord thy God doth drive them out from before thee."
By a remarkable exception in epics, Israel is the villain,
not the hero, of his own story. But all the same, the
story has to be coloured in the interests of righteousness.
His successors in invasion have not been content to blacken
the autochthones, they have brightened themselves. It
is for their own uprightness that the Lord casts out the
tribes before them or sets them to rule over the heathen.
The Lord calls them to spread His word in countries closed
to their commerce. He ordains they should bear the
White Man's burden — the Black Man's ivory and gold
are indeed no liglit weight. Pah! let us talk of politics
like Machiavelli or for ever hold our pejice.
204 ITALIAN FANTASIES
And yet something can be said for the world's hypocrisy.
It is tlie homage which the Relative pays to the Absolute,
part of that yearning of mankind for indefectible ideals,
for Luther's "pearl of certainty." Its Kight must be
Right in all circumstances under the stars, nay, before
the stars were born. Etliics shall not be a child of con-
ditions ; what holds between man and man, must obtain
equally between ruler and ruled, even between State and
State. But what is to be done when ethics demands one
thing and necessity the opposite? Necessity wins of
course, but on condition of not blazoning its victory.
The Church, forbidden to shed blood, exacts an expiation
from its indispensable warriors, or gravely invents the
bloodless stake for its heretics, or with an even inore
Immorous preference of the letter to the spirit forbids its
priests to practise surgery. The negro, enfranchised by
the Quixotic theory of the American constitution, is dis-
established by the Sancho Panzas who miscount his votes.
The Jew, commanded to rid himself of leaven during
Passover, sells his stock of groceries to an accommodating
Christian till the Festival be over. The Christian, to
whom money-lending is a sin against nature, hands over
the necessary function to the accursed Jew with the
sanction of St. Thomas Aquinas, or founds the Monte di
Pieta which Leo X. permits to exact a fee on its loans to
cover the cost of its officials. Ethics, like the old astron-
omy, complicates itself with the cycles and epicycles of
practice, but the theory of the perfect circle of planetary
motion remains immutable. In Lombardy, in Florence,
under the very eye of the Pope, the industrial system of
modern Europe founds itself on money-lending, but no
Encyclical removes the prohibition or condones the sacri-
lege, or grants Christian burial to the impenitent financier.
The irresistil)le force of facts comes into collision with
the immovable body of principles, but the crash is sound-
less, and by a delicate instinct Society looks the other
THE SUPERMAN OF LETTERS 205
way. The immortal principle is buried silently — not a
drum is heard, not a funeral note. For later generations
its deadness is a matter of course.
Even so mankind founds its social systems upon beauti-
ful ideals and averts its eyes from the rotten places of the
fabric. It will concede almost anything to practice, if
practice will only remain under the rose. This Social
Conspiracy is sub-conscious. In war or in religion, in sex
or even the smaller animal functions, it works towards a
harmony of seeming, an artistic selection of the beautiful
or the perfect with rejection of the ugly or the jarring.
Is not this indeed our highest art, this art of civilisation,
which, out of the raw stuff we are, fashions us into the
figures of an heroic and poetic masque ? Costumed in the
skins of our fellow beasts or in the spoils of our vegetable
contemporaries, our dames pranked in the web of a worm,
we ruffle it in drawing-rooms as gods and spirits, no ter-
restrial weakness bewrayed. Our true superiority to the
brutes is that we are artists, and they are naturals. Man
will not be a creature of Nature, as Coleridge noted. All
the world's a stage and all the men and women players,
or — to say it in Greek — hypocrites. It is for bad man-
ners that Machiavelli has been boycotted.
LUCREZIA BORGIA: OR THE MYTH OF
HISTORY
It was with a thrill that I came upon a holograph of
Lucrezia Borgia in the library of the University of Ferrara.
I had already seen in a little glass case at Milan, in the
Ambrosian library, a lock of her notorious yellow hair,
and this wishy-washy tress, so below the flamboyance of
its fame, should have prepared me for the Ferrara relic.
For the document was — of all things in the world — a
washing list ! The lurid lady — the heroine of Donizetti's
opera, the Medea of Victor Hugo's drama — checked, per-
haps mended, her household linen ! It has been sufficiently
washed in public since her day. But this list alone should
serve to cleanse her character. Indeed Pope Alexander's
daughter does not lack modern whitewashers — what
ancient disrepute is safe from them ? Roscoe, Gilbert and
Gregorovius defend her, and even in her lifetime she had
her circle of court laureates that included Ariosto himself.
Her platonic friendship with Cardinal Bembo is rather in
her favour. The copiously grey-bearded ecclesiast in cap
and robe, whose portrait may be seen at Florence in the
corridor between the Pitti and the Uffizi, does not look
like a man who would consort with the legendary Lucrezia.
Yet even a man of letters of Bembo's status is liable to
colour-blindness when the Scarlet Woman is a reigning
duchess. Bembo, we know, was afraid to read the Epistles
of St. Paul, for fear of contaminating his Latin, but we
are less certain that any fear of contaminating his char-
acter would keep him from reading the epistles of Lucrezia.
206
LUCREZIA BORGIA 207
But it seems fairest to accept the view that once freed bj'
her third marriage from the vicious influences of the Vati-
can and the company of the Pope's concubines, she became
rangee^ steadying herself into an admirable if pleasure-
loving consort of the ruler of Ferrara ! Nevertheless even
in Ferrara rumour connected her with the murder of the
poet Ercole Strozzi, and the guides used to count among
their perquisites the blood-flecked wall of the Palace in
which, by way of revenge for her extrusion from a respect-
able Venetian ball-room, she poisoned off at a supper-party
eighteen noble Venetian youths, including a natural son of
her own whom she poignarded in the frenzy of the dis-
covery.
And Addington Symonds, even after the huge mono-
graph of Gregorovius in her favour, can only exchange the
idea of " a potent and malignant witch " for " a feeble
woman soiled with sensual foulness from the cradle," a
woman who could look on complaisantly at orgies devised
for her amusement, applauding even when Cesare chivied
prisoners to death with arrows.
But it was reserved for the latest biographer of the
Borgias (Frederick Baron Corvo) to write of her : " She
was now the wife of royalty, with a near prospect of a
throne, worshipped by the poor for her boundless and
sympathetic charity, by the learned for her intelligence, by
her kin for her loving loyalty, by her husband for her per-
fect wifehood and motherhood, by all for her transcendent
beauty and her spotless name. Why it has pleased modern
writers and painters to depict this pearl among women as
a ' poison-bearing maenad,' a ' veneficous Bacchante ' stained
with revolting and unnatural turpitude, is one of those
riddles to which there is no key." As for there being no
key to it, that is nonsense, for naturally Lucrezia Borgia
would share in the opprobrium due to the pravity of
Cesare Borgia and Pope Alexander VI., and Corvo him-
self claims that Gregorovius proves that these calumnious
208 ITALIAN FANTASIES
inventions came from the poisoned pens of her father's
enemies. Tlils judgment of a reckless writer may how-
ever be discounted, for Corvo throughout defends that
Papal Antichrist, Lucrezia's father, in a spirit which
Machiavelli, to whom " virtu " and " magnanimita " meant
efficiency whether for good or evil, could not possibly
better. And he gaily announces in his preface that he
does not write to whitewash the House of Borgia, "his
present opinion being that all men are too vile for words
to tell." In such a darkness, in which all cats are grey,
Lucrezia Borgia might well seem as white as a blue-eyed
Persian. But the paradox remains that Corvo may not
impossibly be right. As, but for superhuman strainings,
Dreyfus might have gone down to history as a traitor to
France, so may the Borgian Lucrezia have been as blameless
as the Tarquinian to whom indeed Ariosto boldly compares
her. The woman who protected the Jews during a famine,
provided poor girls with dowries, passed evenings over her
embroidery frame and held the esteem of the greatest poet
and the greatest stylist of her day, may really have lived
up to that washing list. Chose jugee is never absolutely
true in history, and there is no trial but is liable to revision.
Even the saints are not safe ; the devil's advocate may
always appeal. Sir Philip Sidney himself has been sadly
toned down in his latest biography and per contra it may
well be that Lucrezia Borgia has innocently shared in the
blackness of the Borgias. But how shall we ever know ?
How is it possible — especially considering the public and
private conspiracy of falsification and suppression — to un-
cover the truth even about our contemporaries ? Our very
housemates elude us. The simplest village happening is
recounted by the onlookers in a dozen different ways ; an
historic episode varies according to the politics of the
recording newspaper. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John
recount their great story, each after his own fashion, so
that even "gospel truth" is no synonym for objective ve-
LUCREZIA BORGIA 209
racity. Letters are taken as invaluable evidence in past
history, yet every letter involves a personal relation between
the writer and the receiver, is written in what the logicians
in a narrower sense call " the universe of discourse," so
that words written to one man differ from the same words
written to another man, and still more from the same words
written to a woman. Facetiousness, exaggeration, under-
statement, pet-words, words in special meanings, are the
note of intimate intercourse. 'Tis a cipher to which no-
body else has the key, and which can never be read by the
chronicler. " Our virtuous and popular Gloster " might
mean " our vicious and universally odious Gloster." How
shall the peering student of musty records behold the
wink in the long-vanished eye of the writer, the smile on
the skull of the reader ? A frigid note may veil a burning
love ; a tropic outburst disguise a dying passion. Who
has the clue to these things ? And in the literature of an
age the things that are understood are exactly the things
that are not written down, and thus the things that are
written down are the things that are not understood.
What would we not give for a little realistic description
of houses, clothes and furniture in the Bible ! But such
information only drifts into the text indirectly and by
accident. Official documents are the bed-rock of history,
yet even such formal things as birth-certificates are unre-
liable, for did not the wife of my dearest friend momen-
tarily forget where her own baby was born ? Suppose
Peggy grows up a celebrity, an Academician or even a
Prime Minister, what is to prevent her birth-plaque being
affixed to the wrong house ?
Once, and once only, did I strive to penetrate to the
sources of history — it was the life of Spinoza — and I
found to my amaze that the traditional detail of his doings
and habits rested on little more solid than the mistranslated
scribblings of a Lutheran pastor who had occupied his
lodging a generation after his death. And once in my
210 ITALIAN FANTASIES
life did I examine State papers. It was in the Archives
of Venice ; and as I wandered through the two hundred
and ninety-eight rooms of the Recording Angel — though
I did not verify the statement that there are fourteen
million documents — I saw enough chronicles and certifi-
cates, enough Orators' letters in cypher from every court
in Europe (with inter-bound Italian translations) to keep
in life-long occupation a staff of Methuselahs. And this
for only one town, or, if you will, for one empire ! Who
is it that has the patience to sift this mammoth dust-heap,
or who, having the patience, is likely to have the insight
to interpret, or the genius to embody its essence ? How
shall we know which ambassador lied abroad for his coun-
try's good, and which for his own? How shall we abstract
the personal equation from their reports? How allow for
their individual prejudices, jealousies, stupidities, rancours,
mal-observations and dishonesties ?
As the wise Faust pointed out. History is a subjective
illusion.
"Mein Freund, die Zeiten der Vergangenheit
Sind uns ein Buch mit sieben Siegeln.
Was ihr den Geist der Zeiten heisst,
Das ist im Grund der Herren eigner Geist
In dem die Zeiten sich bespiegeln."
Or as honest Burckhardt puts it more prosaically in his
preface to his " Renaissance in Italy " : " In the wide
ocean upon which we venture, the possible ways and
directions are many ; and the same studies which have
served for this work might easily, in other hands, not only
receive a wholly different treatment and application, but
lead also to essentially different conclusions."
This would be the case even were our information on
the past complete. The reduction of this wilderness of
material to ordered statement and judgment would permit
innumerable ways of seeing and summarising. But con-
sisting as our knowledge does for the most part of mere
LUCREZIA BORGIA 211
ruins and shadows, or worse, of substantial falsities, such
infinite perspectives of misreading are opened up that the
bulk of written history can be only an artistic manipula-
tion of hypotheses. What wonder if the original research
and original insight of successive historians is constantly
changing the colours and perspectives ? Read Pope
Gregory's letter to the German princes describing the
humiliation of Henry IV. and judge for yourself whether
the famous story of the three days' penance can really be
built up out of " utpote discaleiatus et laneis indutus,^'' &c.
or whether it should be blotted out from the history-books
as some modern writers demand. Is there, indeed, any
episode to which we can pin a final faith ? Has history
bequeathed us anything on which the duty to truth is not
so large as almost to swallow up the legacy ? Popular
wisdom in insisting that " Queen Anne is dead " selects
the only sort of historic affirmation which can be made
with certainty. As for any real picture of a period, how
can the manifold currents of the ocean of life be represented
in a single stream of words ?
No ; the truth about Lucrezia Borgia will never be known.
But what imports ? Our librettists and dramatists need
themes, our novelists cannot do without " veneficous
Bacchantes." If Lucrezia Borgia was not a "poison-bear-
ing Msenad," somebody else was. Perhaps that other has
even annexed the reputation for virtue that should have
been Lucrezia's ! What matters who is which ? Let them
sort themselves out. If the Meenad or the Bella Donna is
indispensable to the novelist or the dramatist, so is the
Vestal Virgin and the Saint, and though his models may
have exchanged names, he keeps his canvas true to reality.
Cleopatra, to judge by her coins, had a face of power, not
beauty, but shall the artist therefore surrender the con-
ceptual Cleopatra ? Assuredly there has been no lack of
beautiful women to sterilise statesmen ! Great figures are
even more necessary in life than in art. Life would
212 ITALIAN FANTASIES
indeed be a " Vanity Fair " if it were " a novel without
a hero." We need monuments, memorials, masses, days
of commemoration — for ourselves, not for the heroic
dead. Dead men hear no tales. Posthumous fame is
an Irish bull. We cannot atone to the dead for our
neglect of them in their lives, but we need the mem-
ory of their lives to uplift ourselves by, we need the out-
pour of reverence for nobility of soul, we need to lose
ourselves in the thought of greatness. But whether we
are worshipping the right heroes is comparatively im-
material. Let us not be depressed, then, at the dubiety
of history or at that labyrinth of Venetian archives. We
can do without the belief that history is a just tribunal,
so long as we preserve the belief in justice, and keep a
sufficient store of heroes to applaud and villains to hiss.
" La vie des heros a enrichi V histoire,''^ said La Bruyere, " et
Vhistoire a embelli les actions des heros.'''' It is a fair give
and take.
Peculiarly immaterial, so long as we preserve an enno-
bling conception of majesty, is the real character of that
most embellished class of heroes — the Kings. Were we
pinned down to drab reality, popular loyalty would not
infrequently be paralysed. For that on the hereditary
principle a constant and unfailing succession of genius and
virtue should be supplied to a nation, contradicts all
biological experience, yet nothing less than this is de-
manded by the necessities of State and the yearning of
every people for wise and righteous leadership. In truth
heredity is ruled out of court. Kings are not born but
made. By a marvellous process of mythopoiesis the
monarch is manufactured to suit the national need, and
from the most unpromising materials prodigies of goodness
and genius are created, or, in the case of female sovereigns,
paragons of beauty. It is wonderful how far a single
feature will go with a princess, and what crumbs of sense
and courage will suffice for the valour and wit of a prince.
LUCREZIA BORGIA 213
Bricks can be made — and of the liighest glaze — without
a single wisp of straw. Of course a neutral character
supplies the best basis for apotheosis : traits too positive
for evil or for ugliness would render the material intract-
able. But there are few things too tough for the national
imagination to transform. Perhaps the manufacture of
monarchs is thus facile because the article is not required
to last. The duration of the myth need not exceed a
couple of reigns, nor need it be robust enough for expor-
tation. Humanity, while insisting on the perfection of its
own monarchs, is prepared to admit that prior generations
and foreign peoples have not been so fortunate : indeed
my school history of England made out that the country
had been governed up till the Victorian era by a succes-
sion of monsters or weaklings. 'Tis distance lends disen-
chantment to the view. Even, however, when the hero is
real, he never bulks as large as the fantasy of his
idolaters. Napoleon himself was a pigmy, compared with
the image in the heart of Heine's " Zwei Grenadiere.^^
II
Parasina, the Marchioness d'Este, that other heroine
whom Ferrara has contributed to romance, or — if you
will — to history, for she makes her first English appear-
ance in Gibbon's "Antiquities of the House of Bruns-
wick," has been less fortunate in finding defenders ; perhaps
because her guilt was less. Very shadowy appears that
ill-starred Malatesta bride, of whom nothing seems re-
corded save that she and her paramour, Hugo, her hus-
band's natural son, were beheaded by her righteously
indignant spouse. Yet she grew suddenly solid when I
found a scribble of hers, neighbouring Lucrezia Borgia's
washing-list. " Mandate per lo portafore del presente died
ducati d'oro per una certa spesa la quale hahiamo fatto." It
sounds suspiciously vague, I fear. " For a certain ex-
214 ITALIAN FANTASIES
pense." What could Parisina have bought with those
ten ducats ?
But for aught we know they may have been dispensed
in charity. And for aught history can tell us, she may have
been as spotless as Desdemona. Gibbon, mark you, is by
no means convinced of her guilt. If the couple were in-
nocent, he observes oracularly, the husband was unfortu-
nate ; if they were guilty, he was still more unfortunate.
" Unfortunate " is a mild word for the Margrave, as if his
begetting of Hugo were a mere casualty. It is true that
at this period in Italy there was little discrimination
against bastards, especially those of Popes and Princes.
Still Nicholas had only himself to blame for thrusting his
Hugo into the contiguity of his wife. Byron, indeed, in
his mediocre poem of " Parisina," makes Hugo offer vivid
reproaches to his father (mellifluously transformed to Azo,
which the poet omits to say was really the name of the
first Margrave of the line). But though these reproaches
are comprehensive enough :
" Nor are my mother's wrongs forgot,
Her slighted love and ruined name,
Her offspring's heritage of shame,"
and embrace even the charge that Parisina was originally
destined for Hugo himself, but refused to him by the
father on the brazen ground that his birth was unworthy
of her, nevertheless Byron, like most vicious men, preserves
the conventional view of the husband's rights.
In his poem Parisina's fate is left artistically uncertain.
" No more in palace, hall, or bower
Was Parisina heard or seen."
But the guides know better. She was beheaded in her
dungeon, and the original door leading to that dungeon is
still standing in the mighty old castle, and I passed through
it. The cell is two storeys below this grim portal, and is
LUCREZIA BORGIA 215
reached through a trap-door and passages, and then a
second trap-door and more passages, and then a door
of iron on wood, and then a door wholly iron, with
an iron flap through which her food was pushed. Poor
Parisina, poor fluttering bird, caught in that cage of iron!
The very light filters into this cell only through a series of
six cobwebbed gratings, tapering narrower and narrower,
as though some elf of a prisoner might squeeze his way out
into the moat. Through such peep-holes, and asfuscously,
filters the light of history to us adown the cobwebbed
centuries.
SICILY AND THE ALBERGO SAMUELE BUT-
LER : OR THE FICTION OF CHRONOLOGY
To cycle in Sicily is to experience the joys or the
sorrows of the pioneer, to pedal backward on the road of
Time, and revisit the pre-bicycle period ere man had
evolved into a rotiferous animal. Palermo has witnessed
the landing of many tribes and races : Phoenician and
Greek, Roman and Goth, Saracen and Norman, Spaniard
and Savoyard. But not till my comrade and I disem-
barked with our wheels had any cyclist troubled the
Custom House. Others, indeed, had preceded us by land,
but we hold the record by sea — the first marine invaders.
And our arrival, by way of Tunis, fitly fluttered and
puddered the guardians of the port. Three or four
officials and a chaos of bystanders, quidnuncs, and porters,
entered into excited discussion. The recording angel —
a mild and muddled clerk, whose palsied pen shook in his
fingers — turned over not only a new leaf, but a new book,
and made us sign in three wrong places in the immaculate
tome ; we had to answer a world of questions, and await
innumerable calculations and consultations. Meantime,
without, the rich, romantic harbour fretted our curiosity,
and the painted Sicilian carts gave an air of fairyland.
The very dust-carts were perambulating art-galleries,
pompous with grave historic themes, or pious with carven
angels or figures of the Virgin ; the horn of the horses
was exalted, springing in scarlet from the middle of their
216
THE FICTION OF CHRONOLOGY 217
backs, their blinkers and headpieces were broidered in red.
The workaday world was transfigured to poetry, and the
old Church-poet's maxim:
" Who sweeps a room as by God's laws
Makes that aud the action fine "
seemed translated into visual glorification of the dignity
of labour and the joy of common life.
Everything combined to make us kick our heels with
unusual viciousness. Finally we were condemned to pay
about fourpence each, and, mounting our ransomed
machines, we rode forth into the strange new world.
Palermo itself proved a disappointment ; a monstrous,
straggling, stony, modern city, wedged between mountain
and harbour, as difficult to escape from as a circle of the
Inferno. Miles on miles of hard riding still leave you
liemraed in by unlovely houses, harried by electric trams.
But at last, by muddy byways, you come upon fluting
shepherds, grey olive-trees, flowering almonds, orange-
groves, gleaming like fairy gold through bowers of green,
and beyond and consecrating all, the blue-spreading, sun-
dimpled sea. You have reached the land of Theocritus
— though Theocritus himself, by the way, is quite
unknown to the Palermese booksellers. And if Palermo
is prosaic, Monreale, not five miles off, is one of the remot-
est towns in Europe. Perched eleven hundred and fifty
feet above the sea, over which it looks superbly across a
pastoral landscape, it is a dirty network of steep and
ancient alleys, with shrines at street-corners, and running
fountains down steps, and large yellowish jars on the
house-ledges by way of cisterns. The roadway swarms
with morose, shawled, swarthy men, lounging and gossip-
ing, while the busy women stride along, bearing brimming
vase-pitchers on their gracefully poised, kerchiefed heads ;
goats, greedy of garbage, feed ubiquitously, some rampant
on tubs of squeezed lemons ; poultry peck and scurry
218 ITALIAN FANTASIES
through the slime ; the milkman passes with his mobile
milkcan, the she-goat, to be tapped at every door ; on the
mouldering fagades stream flaring insignia of orange-peel,
strung together for sale to confectioners, or macaroni
hangs a-drying in the sun. And, for crowning assurance
of medisevalism, the magnificent Roman-Saracen cathedral,
surely one of the seven wonders of Christendom, offers its
bronze portals and its Byzantine blaze of mosaics, Bible
illustrations naive as a Noah's ark. Monreale is already
the true Sicily, with its aloofness from the modern age,
and with its architecture carrying like geological strata
the record of all the influences to which it has been
exposed. Presently the cyclist or the motorist will leave
a new imprint upon the historic soil, saturated with the
blood of rival races, and with the finest poetry of Pagan
mythology. At present there are few roads for him to
follow, and fewer inns to lodge him, and the rumour of
brigands dogs his footsteps, though we ourselves never
encountered even an exorbitant landlord. Like Blondins
of the bicycle, we pursued our unmolested way over ten-
uous ridges, 'twixt ditch and rut, daring to swerve no
hair's-breadth, and the only terror of the countryside was
that which we ourselves produced. Wherever we passed,
pigs scuttered and poultry fluttered, and goats bleated
and kids scampered ; horses reared and broke from their
traces, mules stampeded in craven terror, dogs fled howling
or dumbstruck, whole populations crowded to the doors
and balconies, children escorted us literally by hundreds,
racing by short cuts across the mountain-paths to get
additional glimpses of us from parallel parapets. Like
ominous comets we flared through the old Sicilian villages,
scattering awe and wonder. The only sensible creatures
were the donkeys ; they regarded us stolidly, or turned a
head of mere intelligent curiosity upon our receding
mechanisms. Our wheels had become Time-machines,
tests of the difference from standard central-European
THE FICTION OF CHRONOLOGY 219
time, and they showed Sicily half a century — nay, a
whole cycle — slow.
Chronology is indeed a metaphysical figment, and even
this little globe still offers all the centuries simultaneously
to the traveller.
Fantastic is the common reckoning of time by which our
globe revolves in a temporal continuum, so that it is the
same date — within twelve hours — all over its surface. The
Irishman who spoke of the so-called nineteenth century
was severely logical. The nineteenth century has not
even yet dawned for the bulk of our planet, which presents
in fact a bewildering diversity of dates. The Pyrenees
divide not merely right from wrong, as Pascal was puzzled
to find, but even century from century.
Meals in the byways of Sicily were rather haphazard.
The hotels had often nothing in the house, and even when
one advanced the money to get something, there might be
a dearth in the neighbourhood. Macaroni is, however, a
standby. But a single bed-sitting-dining-and-coffee-room
spells adventure rather than accommodation. The posses-
sion of one spare room sets up the hardy Sicilian peasant-
woman as a hotel-keeper. Ceres wandering through Sicily
in search of Proserpina must have had a poorish time,
unless she fell back upon her own horn of plenty. It was
a voluptuous emotion to glide one evening into the broad
white streets of Castelvetrano under a crescent moon and
into the haven of a real hotel.
Castelvetrano was the nearest town to one of the great
goals of our pilgrimage — the ruins of Selinunte. The Nor-
mans did not conquer Sicily as permanently as those old
Greeks, and even in their decay the Greek temples of
Sicily rank with the most precious vestiges of ancient art.
Some hours of cycling brought us to the magnificent chaos
of graven stone that fronts eternity on a barren field by a
lonely shore. There they lie, seven temples, sublime in
their very huddle and pell-mell, a wilderness of snapt and
220 ITALIAN FANTASIES
tumbled columns, Ossa piled on Pelion. Only one of
Vulcan's freaks — and the fire god had a workshop under
Etna — could have wrought this mighty upheaval. In
' utter abandonment the land stretches towards the empty
sea, and where priests sacrificed and worshippers trod,
spring the wild parsley, the purple anemone, the marigold
and the daisy. From clefts of the great broken bases or
in hollows of the fallen capitals push dwarf palms and
myrtles, like the lower world of the vegetable reasserting
itself over the stone that had mounted to beauty by alliance
with man's soul. An odd monolith left towering here or
there but accentuates the desolation.
The temples of Concord and of Juno Lacinia still stand
four-square to the winds at Girgenti. But of all the
temples that preserve for us " the glory that was Greece,"
that of Segesta stands predominant, if only by reason of
its situation. From afar it draws the eye upwards,
gleaming almost white on its hilltop. But, standing amid
the wild fennel in its grassy court, you see that the noble
Doric pillars, though marvellously preserved through
three-and-twenty centuries, are corroded in great holes
and bear the rusty livery of Time. Behind the temple
the earth sinks into a gigantic cup, forming a natural
theatre, and in front stretches a vast spread of rolling
hills, with beautiful cloud-shadows of purple and brown
and silver, and a little glimmer of the Gulf of Castella-
mare. The few cultivated patches, the faint trees and
solitary farms in the dim background, scarcely modify the
impression of Nature unadorned. Nothing is given you
but the largest elemental things — the sun, the sea, the
barren mountains, and the sternest, sublimest form of
human architecture. Nothing is known even as to the
god to whom the temple was dedicated.
One could wish that mighty Syracuse, with its memo-
k ries of ^Eschylus and Pindar, had lapsed to such a wilder-
ness instead of survivino: as a small modern town for
THE FICTION OF CHRONOLOGY 221
tourists. A Babylon with restaurants and cab-fares is
bathos. But Taormina — the first Greek settlement —
still remains, despite its pleasure-pilgrims, the culminating
point of a visit to Sicily. Culminating, too, in a sense
that will not recommend it to C3'clists. Ours are perhaps
the only machines that have laboured steadily and daily
up this forbidding steep, some four hundred feet above
the sea and the railway station. The road mounts even
higher — past walled gardens of roses and lemons and
almonds, till from the ruined castle at JNIola you command
a marvellous scape of land and sea. But the mere every-
day view from Taormina itself is one of the greatest pic-
tures of the Cosmic Master, for out beyond the sunlit
straits shows the Calabrian foot of Ital}^ generally muffled
in a fairy mist, while the Sicilian shore is washed by a
pale rainbowed streak of sea. And for eternal background
Etna towers, infinitely various, now in snow-white majesty,
now cloud-veiled and sombre, now ablaze with an apoca-
lyptic splendour of sunset. But it is in the wooded gorges
around Taormina, with their tumbling rock-broken streams,
that the climax of Sicilian picturesqueness is reached : here
is all the wild witchery of romantic landscape, set to music,
as it were, by the piping and trilling of some solitary, far-
off shepherd, whose every note travels clear-cut in the
lucid air. In the grove below you passes a procession of
young women, their right hands supporting lemon-baskets
on their shawled heads. Their feet are bare, and they
sing a wistful Eastern melody as they move slowly on.
A boy leads a black cow by a string round its horns. All
is antique and pastoral. Or rather, the Eclogues of Virgil
and the Idylls of Theocritus seem contemporay.
At the Greek Theatre, too, that naked majestic amphi-
theatre, how tinkling and trivial would have sounded the
dialogue of modern drama. Sophocles and ^schylus alone
could fill the spaces with due thunder. Or was not the
large drama of the Greeks positively forced upon them by
222 ITALIAN FANTASIES
this great natural theatre, o'er-towered by mountains,
roofed by the sky, and giving on the sapphire sea? The
infinities and the eternities conspired with the dramatist
in a religious uplifting, and his utterance must needs be
spacious and noble.
II
I was not aware that any English writer had achieved
the distinction of stamping his name upon a Sicilian street,
or even — quainter, if lesser glory — upon a Sicilian inn.
Yet at Calatafimi, a little town so obscure (despite its
heroic Garibaldi memories) that it had not yet reached
the picture-postcard stage, a town five miles from a rail-
way station, up one of the steepest and stoniest roads of
the island, I lodged at the Albergo Samuele Butler, and
walked through the Via Samuele Butler. Yes, this pe-
culiar immortality was reserved in a Catholic land for our
British iconoclast. It was the Communal Council that
resolved that the street leading from the Nuovo Mercato
towards Segesta should " honour a great man's memory,
handing down his name to posterity, and doing homage to
the friendly English nation." But the change in the name
of the inn, which is in another street, must have been due
to the personal initiative of the proprietors, in commemo-
ration of their distinguished client. Meantime " the
friendly English nation " cares even less about Samuel
Butler of " Erewhon " than about Samuel Butler of " Hu-
dibras," if indeed it distinguishes one from the other.
Thus the super-subtle satirist, understanded not of the
British people, paradoxical in death as in life, has left his
highest reputation in the hearts of Sicilian peasants. The
recluse of Clifford 's Inn, the stoic and cynic of civilisation,
was hail fellow well met with the cottagers of Calatafimi.
It was only natural that the pundits of Trapani should
welcome with complacent acquiescence the theory of " The
Authoress of the Odyssey," which was received in England
THE FICTION OF CHRONOLOGY 223
with such raised eyebrows ; for did not Butler locate the
adventures of Ulysses as a voyage round Sicily, and iden-
tify Trapani as the place where the lady writer composed
the Odyssey ? Butler won equal gratitude in Italy by his
exhumation and glorification of the sculptor Tabachetti,
whom he identified with the Flemish Jean de Wespin.
But these learned lucubrations of his would not have suf-
ficed to enthrone Butler in the hearts of the simple. That
was the reward of his Bohemian bonhomie. " He always
remembered all about everybody," says his friend, Mr.
Festing Jones, "and asked how the potatoes were doing
this year, and whether the grandchildren were growing up
into fine boys and girls, and never forgot to inquire after
the son who had gone to be a waiter in New York."
" He called me la hella Maria,''^ the septuagenarian
landlady of the Albergo Samuele Butler told me, as she
showed me the photograph he had given her — the portrait
of the melancholy tired thinker, whom she survives with
undiminished vitality and fire. He was done in a group,
too, with her and her husband, and altogether appeared to
have found a rest from the torture of thought and the bitter-
ness of " The Way of All Flesh " in these primitive per-
sonalities.
And here again I had occasion to note the absurdity of
chronology, the first century and the fortieth lodging under
the same roof — for Butler was at least as far ahead of the
twentieth century as his hostess was behind it. Pleasant
it is to think that there is a possible human community be-
tween epochs so sundered.
Spring after spring came Butler to the inn that now
bears his name, and having followed unconsciously in his
footsteps, and slept in his very bed, I wonder how he could
have found life tolerable there. The Admirable Crichton of
his day, novelist and poet, musician and painter, scientist
and theologian, art critic and sheep farmer, and perhaps
the subtlest wit since Swift, Samuel Butler seems to have
224 ITALIAN FANTASIES
reduced his personal demands upon the universe to a smaller
minimum than Stevenson in his most admired moments.
And that not from poverty, for his resources in later life
were adequate, but from sheer love of " plain living
and high thinking." The walls of his bedroom in the
formerly yclept Albergo Centrale are whitewashed, the
ceiling is of logs, the washstand of iron, and even if the
water-jug is a lovely Greek vase with two handles, and
the pail a beautiful green basin, this is only because Sicily
supplies no poorer form of these articles. The bed is of
planks on iron trestles. The Albergo itself, with its prim-
itive sanitation, is in keeping with its best room. For
Sicily it is, perhaps, a Grand Hotel, embracing as it does
an entire flat of three bedrooms on the second floor (a cob-
bler occupies the ground floor, and the m3^stery of the first
floor I never penetrated). This three-roomed hotel is shut
off from the rest of the house by a massive portal. On
the first night there appeared to be even a dining-room,
but morning revealed this as a mere ante-chamber,
windowless, and depending for its liglit upon the bedroom
doors being open. On the second night even this substi-
tute for a dining-room vanished, owing to the advent of an-
other traveller, and the ante-room became a bedroom so
that I had to make my entrances and exits through the
new lodger's pseudo-chamber. The landlady also passed
through it on her morning visit to me, which was made
without any regard for my morning tub. '■'- E permessof''
she asked gaily, as she sailed in. This was her ordinary
formula — first to come in, and then to ask if she might.
When I opened my door I had a curious double picture
impressed upon my memory : the shirted backs of two young
men dressing, each in his room ; the one in the bedroom
proper was seen in a pale morning light, the occupant of
the windowless ante-room was vividly Rembrandtesque
under his necessary lamp. Each was singing cheerily to
himself as he made his toilette.
THE FICTION OF CHRONOLOGY 225
Nor was the food superior to the accommodation. But-
ter was unobtainable during my stay, and breakfast con-
sisted of dry bread, washed down by great bowls of coffee.
Fish was not, and the meat had better not have been. I
must admit that the dry bread was served with an air that
made it seem wedding cake. " Pane ! " la Bella Maria
would exclaim ecstatically, dumping the coarse, scarce edi-
ble loaf on the table with a suggestion of Diana triumphant
in the chase. "Co^e.-'" was another hallelujah, as of a
Swiss Family Robinson, discovering delectable potions.
And '■'■Latte ! " bore all the jubilation of a cow specially
captured and despoiled for the first time in human history
of the treasure of its dugs. Maria's manner of waiting
revitalised the common objects of the breakfast table,
made them a fairy-tale again ; under her magic gestures
every piece of sugar grew enchanted and every spoon an
adventure. And Butler's tastes were of the simplest, even
in Clifford's Inn, where, out of consideration for his old
laundress, he made his own breakfast before she turned up.
All the same, the attraction of Calatafimi for Butler is
difficult to explain. It is one of the dingiest Sicilian
towns, littered with poultry, goats, children, and refuse,
though, of course, you are soon out of it and amid the
scenery of Theocritus. But the view from Butler's own
balcony — often a paramount consideration for a writer —
was not remarkably stimulating ; hemmed in by the oppo-
site houses, though rising into hills and a ruined castle.
Nor was he a student of the campaign of the Thousand,
Homeric as was the battle of Calatafimi. It may be that
he found the spot more secluded than a seaport like Tra-
pani for pursuing his topographical investigations into the
wanderings of the woman-made Ulysses ; or it may be that
he found unceasing rapture in the contemplation of the
aforesaid temple of Segesta that dominates the landscape
from its headland, albeit a closer contemplation of its noble
columns costs a five-mile walk and climb. Here Goethe
226 ITALIAN FANTASIES
came and philosophised on the passing show of human
glory, and here, too, Butler may have loved to muse.
In a fine sonnet on Immortality, published in the Athe-
nceum a few months before mortality claimed him, Butler
expressed his belief that the only after-life for the dead
lay in the hearts of the living, and only upon their lips
could those meet whom the centuries had parted.
" We shall not even know that we have met,
Yet meet we shall, and part, and meet again
Where dead men meet, on lips of living men."
It is strange to me, who lived — as chronology would
say — in the same age as Butler, and in the same London,
and only a minute's walk from him, to think that I should
yet never have met him save on the lips of the peasants of
Calatafimi, lips that spoke only Sicilian.
INTERMEZZO
Here have I been in Italy half a book, and scarcely a
page about the Pictures or the "National Monuments."
"CV vuol pazienza.'"' I fear you will soon cry "hold, enough,"
as I have cried many a time in these endless galleries
congested with bad pictures, yet apparently never to be
weeded. For the bad Masters were just as prolific as the
good, besides having the advantage of numbers. Civer-
chio, Crespi, Garofalo, the Caracci, Penni, Guercino,
Domenichino — the very names recall acres of vast glar-
ing canvases, and the memory of Pistoja with only one
picture to see — and that a Lorenzo di Credi — is as the
shadow of a great rock in a weary land. Berenson, that
prince of connoisseurs and creative critics, has done brave
service both in dethroning and uplifting. Yet am I con-
vinced there is still a wilderness of invaluable pictures by
unvalued artists, who, to-day obscure, shall to-morrow be
exalted in glory. Mutations of taste are not yet fore-
closed : Michelangelo himself with his Super-statues, may
recede and rejoin the mellifluous Raphael, while Siena
replaces Florence. The art of Japan may win further
victories, or we may follow the great expounder of
Renaissance painting to his Chinese Canossa. Or the
revolt against anecdote may spread to sacred anecdote,
and disestablish the bulk of Christian art. I can imagine
a newer Pre-Raphaelitism ruling the vogue, and Stefano da
Zevio's St. Catherine in the Hose- Garden becoming the
centre of the world's desire. I have a weakness myself
for this Veronese picture, just because it is so frankly free
227
228 ITALIAN FANTASIES
from so many artistic virtues, so unpretentious of reality,
so candidly a pattern, a reverie in roses and birds and
angels and gold, a poem, a melting music. I like this
new chord of roses and haloes, it is a rare harmony, a
lovely marriage of heaven and earth. I can well imagine
a visual art arising which will repudiate realities alto-
gether. The cinematograph has come to complete the
lesson of the camera, and to throw back the artist on his
own soul.
But whatever revolutions in taste await us, my peregri-
nations have convinced me that there is no single con-
sciousness in the world that holds a knowledge of the
treasure of art, even though we limited the art to Italian,
nay though we omitted sculpture and architecture and
tapestries, and the delicious terra-cottas of Luca della
Robbia, and ivories and bronzes and goldsmiths' work,
and the majolicas of Urbino and Pesaro, and cameos and
medallions and glass-work, and book-binding and furni-
ture, and the intarsiatura of cassoni and pulpits and choir-
stalls and lecterns, and the pavement art of the graffiti, and
everything save drawing and painting. For when every
church, house, and gallery in the world had been ransacked
for every trace of Italian brush or pencil on plaster, can-
vas or paper, and all this registered in the one poor human
brain, there would still remain the unexplored ocean of
illumination — the manuscript books and missals, and de-
crees and charters of guilds and confraternities and Monti
di Pieta, and lists of monks and rules of monasteries, and
matricular books of Drapers and Mercers, and even deco-
rative wills and deeds of gift — all that realm of beauty so
largely extinguished by printing.
Upon which fathomless ocean embarking, we may well
behold without too much of awe or envy the sails of the
master-mariners. Sufficient to drift and anchor at the
first enchanted isle.
Less enchanted, however, are even the galleries of
INTERMEZZO 229
masterpieces than the quiet bowers one finds for oneself
— like that chapel in Arona where, unveiling an altar-
picture in despite of a tall candlestick, I caught my
breath at the sudden serene beauty of Gaudenzio Ferrari's
Holy Family; or like that reclusive Venetian church,
where the luminous unity of Bellini's Madonna and Saints
pierces the religious gloom. Pictures in collections are as
unreal as objects in museums, less so perhaps to-day than
when each was painted for a definite altar, refectory, wall
or ceiling, yet none the less destroying one another's beau-
ties. 'Tis only in the visual arts that we surrender our-
selves to a chaos of impressions ; imagine Beethoven,
Wagner, Verdi, Rossini, Gounod, sounding simultane-
ously. I could have wept to see how Simone Martini's
Annuyiciation in the Ufiizi had suffered by being trans-
planted to more gilded society. Gone was that golden
and lilied purity which used to illumine the corridor.
And yet to see a picture in its own place is often
equally heartbreaking. Some of the greatest pictures
have carefully selected the most sombre and inaccessible
situations.
Europe has perhaps no more melancholy chamber than
that art-shrine in Rome in which the pleasure-pilgrims
of the world crick their necks or catch bits of frescoed
ceiling in hand-mirrors. 'Tis not merely the bad light —
for even in the best morning light the Sixtine Chapel
is fuscous — nor the sombre effect of the discoloured and
chaotic Last Judgment^ with its bluish streakiness and
dark background — nor the dull painted hangings, nor
the overcrowding of the ceiling with its Titanic episodes
and figures, nor even tlie Signorellis and Botticellis round
the walls, thougli all contribute to the stuffy sublimity.
The oppressiveness is partially due to the fact that the
architectural ceiling that Michelangelo painted — as arti-
ficial as the. hangings — has faded rather more than the
frescoes themselves, so that the figures seem to droop
230 ITALIAN FANTASIES
higgledy-piggledy upon the spectator's head instead of
standing out statuesque in their panels and spandrils.
I dismiss the specious theory of a painting friend that
they thus only hover the better, as prophets and patri-
archs should. I refuse to be crushed even by Michel-
angelo. I know that a ceiling can soar, not menace, for
have I not expanded under the gay lightness of the
Pintoricchio ceiling in the Borgia apartments ! Even the
heavy and gilded ceiling of the Scuola di San Rocco at
Venice, sombre enough in all conscience, by preserving
architectural plausibility, and resting on painted pillars,
escapes seeming to fall upon one's head. Yet at best
a ceiling is a poor place for any save the most simple
design. Michelangelo, or rather his papal employer, went
against the principle of decoration. A room with such
massive masterpieces on its ceiling could not but be
top-heavy. Moreover the art feeling can only be re-
ceived in comfort. If we are to be transported outside
our bodies, we must not be distressfully reminded of
them by the straining of neck muscles. How foolish
and provoking of Correggio to put his finest soaring
figures not only into a cathedral cupola, but into a cupola
lit only by a few round windows. And his frescoes in
the other dome at Parma are equally invisible. One is
reduced to enjoying them in the copies. Michelangelo
himself undertook the dizzying task of vault-painting with
vast reluctance, and complained in a sonnet that he had
grown a goitre, and that his belly had been driven close
beneath his chin. He achieved a miracle of art — in the
wrong place. Perhaps Julius II. was not so Philistine
in thinking more ultramarine and gold-leaf would have
brightened it up.
II
A prophet is never without honour in his own country
after his fame has been recognised by the world, indeed,
INTERMEZZO 231
his own country will cling piously to him after the
tide of his larger reputation has receded, being as slow
to unlearn as to learn. Particularly is this true of
painters. And when the artist has achieved the feat
of substituting himself for a town in the popular imagina-
tion, like Bassano, Garofalo, Luini, Sassoferrato, Cor-
reggio, the town thus snubbed is usually prudent enough
to identify itself with his glory. But it must be humili-
ating for a town like Correggio, once the capital of
a principality, to owe its only hold upon the present
to a painter who did not live there, and of whom it
does not possess a single picture. Let arrogant cities
take warning : the time may come when their only niche
in history will be provided by some obscure citizen now
neglected, if not ill-treated or repudiated.
Once arrived, then, the Old Masters are not to be
shaken off, even after they have departed again. Their
birthplace or their working centre makes a cult of them,
and it is touching to see them at home each presiding
over a sola at least of his works, and though depreciated
abroad, yet still at an exorbitant premium in his local
shrine, like some obscure paterfamilias basking and
burgeoning at the family hearth. Guercino is still a
god at Cento, his statue in the piazza, his pictures in the
gallery. Possagno has a shrine with casts of all Canova.
With what a gusto did the cicerones of Mantua talk of
Giulio Romano ! How the name rolled from the tongue,
how it brightened a dingy fresco and glorified a dubious
canvas. Si! Si! Tutto di Criulio Romano ! Poor Giulio
Romano ! Not that those giants of yours tumbling on their
heads in the Palazzo Te are as detestable as Dickens said.
Those of David and Goliath in the great courtyard are
even charming. And more fortunate than poor Guido, who
must share his Bologna with Francia, you have a town to
yourself. Even in his own sola poor Guido is put in the
shade by the poetry of Niccolo da Foligno.
232 ITALIAN FANTASIES
Moretto is properly the hero of Brescia, though not
born there, and he dominates the Pahizzo Alartinengo
with his charming St. Nicholas presenting the School Chil-
dren to the Virgin, and a dozen other pictures, as he domi-
nates the bishop's palace and the churches. It is rare
that so large a proportion of a painter's work should re-
main at home, even when the painter himself is as home-
keeping as was Moretto.
Very proud are they in Forli of Melozzo, exhibiting
engravings of all his works, and even a rescued shop sign
of his representing a pepper-brayer banging with his
pestle. Marco Palmezzani, too, is high in honour in Forli.
Correggio, who made his home in Parma, has been adopted
by that city, and it is one of the few things to the credit
of Marie Louise that she inspired this sacrosanct treat-
ment of his work, in rich pilastered frames, under sculp-
tured and vaulted ceilings, with two pictures to a room, or
in the case of the Madonna della Scodella a room to itself.
Poor Parmigiano, the real native of Parma, is thrown into
the shade, though there is a Parmigiano room in the
Pinacoteca and a Parmigiano statue in the Piazza della
Steccata.
Urbino, a city as dead as Correggio, except for the
fame of its ancient majolica, resembles it further in not
possessing a single example of the work of its greatest son,
so that Raphael's father, who had the talent which so often
sires a genius, pathetically holds the place of honour with
his Santa Chiara and other more or less mediocre pictures.
And yet there were five years at least in which Guido-
baldo Montefeltro might have summoned Raphael to that
famous Court which Castiglione depicted as a model.
To-day, of course, the steep cobbled old city is all Raphael,
with the exception of Polidoro Virgili, " the most learned
man of letters of the fifteenth century," and Gianleone
Semproni "Epic Poet" (!) ^ Contrada Raffaello, and a
bronze bust, and a monument 36 ft. high, all attest his
INTERMEZZO 233
glory. But it would have been far wiser to have perpetu-
ated his exclusion from the Montefeltro Palace than to
represent him by a hideous complete set of cheap tiny
photographs of his works, all set side by side in a large
frame which stands in the chapel, together with his skull
in a glass case ! At least, it is not really his skull — it
has not even that excuse — it is merely a cast in clay,
though the clay was taken from his skeleton, from the
cavity where once the heart that loved all beauty had
pulsed. And here, looking upon the scenes his youthful
eye had dwelt on; here, where one would wish to sur-
render oneself to memories of his magical creations, this
skull with its perfect teeth is set to grin its mockery of
art and life.
An anthropologist, we are told by an eminent historian
of art, supposed this cast to be that of a woman, and we
are invited to see in it the explanation of Raphael's
suavity. But I had been satisfactorily explaining this
suavity myself by the amenities of the tame landscape
— olives, poplars, hawthorn, a half-dried river, pairs of
white oxen — as I trudged the forty kilometres from
Pesaro to Urbino, till to my chagrin the character of the
country changed and grew wilder and wilder as I ap-
proached his birthplace.
At dusk I was climbing up to an Urbino towering
romantically above me with its few twinkling lights and
wafting down the music of its vesper bells. My persua-
sion that I had explained Raphael dwindled with every
painful step up the " Contrada Raffaello," probably the
steepest and worst-paved street in the world, and vanished
altogether by the time I had climbed one of the gigantic
stone staircases of the rock-hewn fortress city. And next
morning I looked from the loggia of the great hook-nosed
Duke upon wonderful rolling mountains, range upon
range, snow-capped at the last, and winding paths twisting
among them in a great poetry of space. Ha ! Poetry of
234 ITALIAN FANTASIES
space! Was that not now set down as Raphael's one real
claim to greatness? And it was here no doubt he had
found it, just as Piero dei Franceschi had found it, when
here at the Duke's invitation. But a hundred thousand
other people — I suddenly remembered — have been born
or have lived at Urbino, and why — I asked myself —
were they not inspired to paint like Raphael? And a
hundred thousand other men have had feminine skulls
(not to mention women), and why have they not produced
Transfigurations and Schools of Athens? Alas! I fear
the Taine method has its limitations. Rousselot in his
" Histoire de I'Evangile Eternel " talks as if Calabria with
its solitary mountains and valleys could not help produc-
ing Joachim of Flora, nor Assisi St. Francis. But why
do these places not go on producing saints and mystics ?
Ill
If a painter's skull is so offensive artistically and so
futile scientifically, what shall we say of a poet's heart ?
" Look into thy heart and write " may be a sound maxim,
but to look into somebody else's heart, is another matter.
Separate sepulture for the poet's heart is not unknown.
But the exhibition of a poet's heart as a literal literary asset,
or library decoration, is, I imagine, only to be seen in the
University of Ferrara. 'Tis the heart of the poet Monti
who died in 1828, after having frequently resided in Ferrara,
as a local tablet to "the sovereign poet of his age" testifies.
Be it known that to Ferrara's University turn the hearts
of all poets, inasmuch as hither were transported the bones
of Ariosto — and here a beautifully bound Ariosto album
by all the poets of the day still awaits Napoleon's promised
attendance at the osseous installation, side by side with a
lonely phalange of Ariosto that was equally belated for
the ceremony. Monti could not resist the desire to be-
queath his heart to this shrine of the Muses, and lo 1 there
INTERMEZZO 235
I beheld it, in a sort of air-tight hour-glass, a little brown
heart, preserved in alcohol like a physiological specimen.
Could anything be more prosaic of a poet, nay, more
heartless? Fie upon you, Vincenzo ! Was it not enough
that your side-whiskers are perpetuated in the bust in the
Ambrosian library ? Are you an Arab that you should
hold the heart the centre of the soul ? Would you per-
suade us that this quaint ounce of flesh was the heart
that contracted and dilated with tragic passion as you
wrote your " Aristodemo," the heart that beat out the
music of '-''Bella Italia, amate sponde,'^ the heart that swelled
with the tropes of the Professor of Eloquence at Pavia ?
Was it with these auricles and ventricles that you pumped
up j'our poetry, was it these cardiac muscles that wrested
the laureateship from Foscolo and Pindemonte ? Was this
" the official organ " of Napoleon ?
Go to ! Wear your heart on your sleeve, if you will,
so long as it throbs with your life, but foist not upon us
this butcher's oddment as the essential you. Is it that
you would abase us like Hamlet's gravedigger with abject
reminders of our mortality ? Pooh ! a lock of your hair
during your lifetime were no more distressing. Not with
this key did Shakespeare unlock his heart. And if we
wish to behold your heart, we shall turn to your poems,
and see it divided among many loves, equally susceptible
to Dante and Homer. But this offal — let it be buried
with Ariosto's phalange !
Indeed, in justice to Italian taste, it should be stated
that this heart has already been buried once. The cour-
teous librarian of the University informed rae that at
Monti's death in 1828, it was sent to the library by a
beloved friend who had placed it in a pot of alcohol. But
Cardinal Delia Genga vetoed its exhibition and it was
interred in the Certosa, under the poet's monument.
There it remained till 1884, when it was decided to carry
the lead case in which the heart was buried to the library.
236 ITALIAN FANTASIES
In 1900 the case was opened in the presence of the author-
ities and the heart found splendidly preserved. It was
therefore placed on view in a chest belonging to the poet,
and containing papers of his. But the sooner it is re-
moved again the better. That sort of "literary remains"
scarce goes with the atmosphere of libraries.
IV
But from the heart in a more romantic sense the most
learned atmosphere is not safe, and I am reminded of
another University affair of the heart which I stumbled
upon in Bologna.
As we know from old coins, '''- Bononia doeet.'" But some-
where about 1320 Bologna ceased to teach. For there
was a strike of students. An old stone relief in the
Museo Civico, representing a crowned figure holding a
little scholar in his lap and stretching his hands to a
kneeling group, celebrates the reconciliation of the Rector
with his scholars and sets down in Latin a record of the
episode. " The Scholars of our University being recon-
ciled with the city, from which they had departed in
resentment at the capital punishment inflicted upon their
colleague Giacomo da Valenza, for the ravishing of Con-
stanzia Zagnoni, by him beloved, the Church of Peace
was erected in the year 1322, in the Via S. Mamolo and
this memorial was placed there."
What a tragic romance ! What a story for a novelist,
the Church, the World and the University all inter-
mingled, what a riot of young blood all stilled six hundred
years ago !
The Doctors of that day still sit in carven state beside
this memorial ; learned petrifactions, holding their stone
chairs for a term of centuries, Bartoluzzo de' Preti,
Reader of Civil Law, who died in 1318, and Bonandrea
de' Bonandrei, Reader of Decretals, who died in 1333.
INTERMEZZO 237
The " pleasant " Doctor tins Bonandrea is styled ; season-
ing, no doubt, his erudition with graces of style. I figure
him deeply versed in the decisions published by Gregory
IX. in 1234, and a profound expounder of the Isidorian
Decretals.
LACHRYMiE RERUM AT MANTUA: WITFI A
DENUNCIATION OF D'ANNUNZIO
Befitting was it at Mantua to feel so poignantly the
lachrymce rerum. I should perhaps have felt it at Virgil's
own tomb at Naples, had that not been so vague and
rambling a site that no moment of concentration or
even of conviction was possible. But the ancient Ducal
Palace of the Gonzagas in the Piazza Sordello had the
pathos of the unexpected. Nothing in its exterior sug-
gested ruin and desolation, nay the scaffolding across the
fagade spoke rather of restoration and repair. The tall
red brick arches of the portico beneath, the double row
of plain straight windows in the middle, and the top tier
of ornamental arched windows, surmounted by the battle-
ments, conveyed an impression of Gothic solidity and
moderate spaciousness. It was not till I had walked for
many minutes through an endless series of dilapidated
chambers and mutilated magnificences — propped-up ceil-
ings and walled-up windows and rotting floors, and
marble and gold and rich-dyed woods and gorgeous
ceilings, and mouldering tapestries and paintings, and
musty grandeurs multiplied in specked mirrors, and
faded hangings and forlorn frescoes, and chandeliers
without candles, and fly-blown gilding and broken furni-
ture and beautiful furniture and whitewash and blackened
plaster and bare brick and a vast unpeopled void — that
there began to grow upon my soul the sense of a colossal
tragedy of ruin, a monstrous and melancholy desolation,
an heroic grandeur of disarray, a veritable poem of decay
238
LACHRYMiE RERUM AT MANTUA 239
and destruction. Not the Alhambra itself is so dumbly
eloquent of the passing of the Magnificent Ones.
" Babylon is fallen, is fallen."
For the interior answers not to the exterior, whether in
preservation or in character. It is renaissance and ruin,
with a minor note of the Empire ; all the splendours of
the world fallen upon evil days. Only by remembering
the mutations of Mantua can one account for this hybrid
Cortile Reale of dishevelled grandeurs, whose face so be-
lies its character and its fortunes.
The Palace was begun under the dynasty which pre-
ceded the Gonzagas, it saw all the glories of the Renais-
sance, saw Mantua sacked by the Germans, and the Gon-
zaga dynasty extinguished by the Austrians, and the city
fallen to the French, and refallen to Austria, and caught
up into the Cisalpine Republic, and then into the Napo-
leonic Kingdom of Italy, and then Austrian again till the
yoke was broken by Victor Emmanuel and the stable dul-
ness of to-day established. It is in fact a microcosm of
Mantuan history from the day Guido Bonacolsi laid the
first stone somewhere near the year 1300. The building
had not proceeded very far before the Gonzagas came into
power in 1328, in time to stamp the apartments with their
character, and it is with Isabella d'Este that its most in-
ventive features are associated.
A hundred and eighty rooms, said the janitor, and
when one remembers the crowd of resident courtiers
and the great trains with which the Magnificent Ones
travelled, one should not be astonished at the resem-
blance of an ancient Palace to a modern Grand Hotel.
Isabella d'Este's brother-in-law, Lodovico the Moro, once
visited her here with a suite of a thousand persons and
that was only half the number with which Lodovico's
brother, Galeazzo, Duke of Milan, descended upon Flor-
ence in 1471. But no modern hotel could keep open a
240 ITALIAN FANTASIES
week with such apartments. I do not refer merely to
their dearth of conveniences, but to their mutual accessi-
bility, their comparative scarcity of corridors. I do not
see how a man could go to bed without passing through
another man's bedroom. Grandeur without comfort, art
without privacy, such was the Palace in its peopled prime.
Think of it to-day — grandeur in rags, art torn from its
sockets and a lonely scribe trailing through vaulted and
frescoed emptiness.
The portraits of the Gonzagas are still in the Hall of
the Dukes, but when I ascended the beautiful staircase to
the vast armoury, I found an aching void. The weapons
had been carried off in the sack of Mantua — a sack so
complete that Duke Carlo on his return had to accept a
few sticks of furniture from the Grand Duke of Tuscany.
The Hall of the Caryatides preserves its paintings, but the
Apartment of the Tapestry is a chandeliered vacancy.
The Apartment of the Empress (for Maria Theresa crossed
Mantua's line of life) is in yellow silk upholstery with
gilded ceilings and an antique chandelier from Murano,
but one wall is relapsed to rough brick, in sharp contrast
with the white medallioned ceiling. The Refectory or
Hall of the Rivers survives, a curious symphony in brown,
a lonjr vaulted room with frescoes of Father Po and his
brother-rivers and lakes, with grottoes, and caryatides,
and marmoreal mosaics, its windows looking on a hang-
ing garden — yea, Babylon has fallen ! — with a piazza of
Tuscan columns and a central temple.
A sense of passing through a fantastic dream-world be-
gan to steal upon me as I wandered through the Hall of
the Zodiac with its great blue roof of stars and celestial
signs and ships drawn by dogs, and its walls gay with
figures in green and gold, and came to a bed with tall
green curtains, in which the inevitable Napoleon had once
slept. He was not, I mused, of those who could not sleep
in a new bed. Followed a suite of three rooms of the
LACHRYM^ RERUM AT MANTUA 241
Emperor, decorated with painted tapestry, the real re-
moved to Vienna.
And the nightmare continued — one long succession of
cold stone floors below and crystal chandeliers on high,
bleakly glittering. There was a Hall of the Popes, bare
as a barrack. There was a long shiny gallery of bad pic-
tures, which was once a shrine of the Masters. There
was a Ducal Aj^artment modernised, but with the old gilded
and bossed ceiling, and dark cobwebbed canvases of the
Flemish school. There was the Hall of the Archers,
picturesque with the great wooden rafters of its ruined
roof and still painted with illusive white pillars, statues
and scenes. Most monstrous of all was the many-mirrored,
many-chandeliered Ball-room — its rows of mirrors reflect-
ing what dead faces, its gold frieze of putti still echoing
what madrigals and toccatas, the gods of Olympus look-
ing down from its frescoed ceiling, Apollo driving his
chariot and four, and the Arts, the Sciences, Parnassus,
Virgil, Sordello, peeping from every arch and lunette.
And from the Hall of the Archers my nightmare led me
through Ducal Halls and still other Ducal Halls, till I
had passed through seven — vasty Halls of Death, with
marvellous gilded ceilings and unplastered walls, or with
plaster or whitewash over frescoes, or with a sixteenth-
century ceiling swearing at an elegant Austrian bath-
room (hot and cold). Vivid, even in this strange dream,
stood out a ceiling intaglioed with a labyrinth of gilded
wood recording the victory of Vincenzo over the Turks :
" Contra Turcos pugnavifc
Vincenzo Gonzaga"
— and intertangled repeatedly with the labyrinth the de-
vice which d'Annunzio has borrowed for his latest novel
— '•'•Forae che siforse che no'' — and reproduced upon the
cover. An old mirror with the glass half-sooted over re-
242 ITALIAN FANTASIES
fleeted these glories drearily and showed me the only living
face in this labyrinthine tomb.
And so at last by many rooms and ways and up a little
staircase of eleven steps under a painted ceiling, I came,
like a soul that has travailed, to the Apartment of Paradise,
the bower of the beautiful sweet-voiced Isabella d'Este,
where, under her ceiling-device " nee spe nee metu " she
lived her married life and her long years of widowhood,
with her books and her pictures and her antiquities, play-
ing on her silver lyre and her lute and her clavichord, and
corresponding with her scholars and poets, " the first lady
of the Renaissance." Piety for this legendary dame du
temps jadis seems to have preserved her six-roomed
apartment much as it was, with her wonderful polychrome
wooden ceilings and her wonderful doors fretted with por-
phyry and marbles and her bird's-eye views of great cities
she had not seen — Algiers, Jerusalem, Lisbon, Madrid —
and her real view of the panorama sloping towards the
Po ; this combination of a river, a garden and a lake being
so stupendo to the inhabitants of that melancholy region
of Italy that Isabella's apartment took thence its name of
Paradise, much as that dull Damascus is " the pearl of the
East." Her music-room, too, is intact, save for the rifling
of its pictures. Its intarsia depicting dulcimer, virginal,
harp, and viol, and musical notation, its heavy-gilded
vaulted ceiling with its musical staves and other decora-
tions, and the little bas-relief showing herself with her
beloved instruments, remain as in the days when Gian
Trissino wrote a canzone " To Madonna Isabella playing
on her lute." But the Mantegnas she commanded, the
Lottos and the Perugino, are at the Louvre, doubtless at
the behest of Napoleon, that despot of a greater Renais-
sance to whom even Isabella's formidable brother-in-law,
the Moro, was a pygmy, though both of them died in
prison and exile, as is the habit of the Magnificent
Ones.
LACHRYM^ RERUM AT MANTUA 243
Did my nightmare end in this Paradise, softening in this
quiet bower into a sleep
"Full of sweet dreams and health and quiet breathing"?
Nay, it grew only more incoherent — vast Halls ruined
by being turned into barracks, the statues smashed by a
rude soldiery, the pictures slashed, and only the inacces-
sible splendours of the ceiling safe — though not from the
damp; in the Hall of the Triumphs no Triumph remaining
save the Triumph of Time and of Fate, Mantegna's pictures
of the Triumphs of Caesar haled to Hampton Court, only
their empty oaken frames here gaping; corridors, empty
and long, corridors echoing under the footstep, corridors
adorned with stuccos and rafaellesques ; the Hall of the
Moors with a splendid old ceiling and figures of Moors
on a frieze of gilded wood ; the Corte Vecchia ; the Apart-
ment of Troy, with crowded wall-frescoes by Giulio
Romano, Mantegna, Primaticcio ; the lovely salon of Troy,
dismantled, discoloured, its frescoed legend of Troy unde-
cipherable, its ceiling of intaglioed wood delapidated ; the
Hall of the Oath of the Primo Capitano, the Hall of the
Virtues, Halls anonymously mouldering ; the Saletta of
the Eleven Emperors denuded of Titian's portraits to the
profit of the British Museum ; the Hall of the Capitani
with a Jove of Giulio Romano thundering from the ceiling
but ironically damaged by real rainstorms ; the Saletta of
Troy, with more Homer and Virgil — do you begin to have
a sense of the monumental desolation ? But you have yet
to figure me drifting in my dream through the Court of
the Marbles and the empty Sculpture Gallery with its
great ruined ceiling and the Cavallerizza or Hippodrome,
the largest of its time, now stilled of the clangour of tour-
nament and the plaudits of ladies, and the Apartment of
the Boots and the Gallery over the lake, and another gar-
den hanging dead, with a Triton for a tombstone and owls
for mourners, the Apartment of the Four Rooms, blackened
244 ITALIAN FANTASIES
by the smoke of days when they were let as lodgings, and
Halls and more Halls, and still more Halls and Cabinets,
and the Hall of the Shells, with its tasty pictures of fish
and venison, and the Hall of the Garlands, and the Apart-
ment of the Dwarfs, with their miniature chambers and
their staircases with small squat steps — a quarter in itself !
Basta! The nightmare grows too oppressive. Why
wake the buffoons from their pygmy coffins of dwarf
oak ?
Poor little jesters ! Are their souls, too, I wonder,
stunted, and is there for them in heaven some Lilliputian
quarter, where the Magnificent Ones must make sport for
them ?
" Isabella Estensis, niece of the Kings of Aragon,
daughter and sister of the Dukes of Ferrara, wife and
mother of the Marquises of Gonzaga, erected this in the
year 1522 from the Virgin's bearing."
So runs — O rare Renaissance lady — the Italian vaunt
in the frieze round thy Grotto, and I, reading it from thy
little courtyard, sit and chew the cud of bitter fancy.
Poor Madonna Isabella, whose inwoven name still clings
so passionately to thy boudoir walls, in Avhat camera of
Paradise dost thou hold thy court ? Methinks thy talent
for viol and harp, and that lovely singing voice of thine,
should find fit service in that orchestral heaven, where
thou — always desiderosa di cosa nuova — enjoyest per-
chance an ampler pasture for thy sensibilities. ^'■Forse che
si,forse che no.'''' But from earth thou art vanished utterly,
and Renaissance for thee is none. Where be thy pages
and poets and buffoons, thy singing seraphs, thy painters
and broiderers, thy goldsmiths and gravers, thy cunning
artificers in ivory and marble and precious woods?
Where is Niccolo da Correggio, thy perfect courtier ?
Where be Beatrice and Violante, who combed thy hair,
and Lorenzo da Pavia who built thy organ, and Cristoforo
Romano who carved thy doorway and designed thy medal,
LACHRYMJE RERUM AT MANTUA 245
and Galeotto del Carretto who sent thee roundelays to carol
to thy lute ? Have all these less substance than the very
brocades in which thy soul was wont to bask ? Can these
chalcedony jars of thy Grotto outlive them, these shells
mock their flippant fleeting ? And thy rhyming and thy
reasoning, and thy gay laughter and that zest to ride all
day and dance all night — could all this effervescence of
life settle into mere slime? And this hideous doubt —
this fluctuant forse — can we really face it "wee spe nee
metu " ?
A horn sounds and steeds clatter up and down thy
graded staircase. The hounds give tongue, the hawk
flutters on thy wrist. The great spaces of the Cavallerizza
fill with jousting paladins ; dames in cloth of gold and
silver look down from the balconies, princes and ambassa-
dors dispute their smiles. Where has it vanished, all that
allegro life — for I must speak to thee by the stave — that
gay gavotte that went tripping its merry rhythm through
the vasty vaulted halls ? Whither has it ebbed ? On
what shore breaks that music ?
And that Mantuan populace that poured in like a stage-
crowd to hear its Dukes take the oath of fidelity — are
the supers, too, dismissed for ever with the run of the
dynasty? And the Dukes themselves, the haughty Gon-
zagas, is it possible that they are crumbled even more ir-
redeemably than those plasterless walls of their palace ?
Can it be that Mantegna's portraits are less phantasmal
than the originals ?
"For the honour of the illustrious Lodovico the Mag-
nificent and Excellent Prince, and unconquered in Faith,
and his illustrious Consort Barbara, the incomparable
glory of women, his Andrea Mantegna, the Paduan,
executed this work in 1473."
At last, at last something lives and breathes in this
vast wilderness of shadows. Bless you, Barbara, incom-
parable glory of women, with your strong masculine face ;
246 ITALIAN FANTASIES
and you, too. Magnificent long-nosed Lodovico. Far have
I been driven in my dream — I am wandered even to the
adjoining ruin of tlie Ducal Castle — but now I am with
the quick, witli pigments whose life, though it has its fad-
ing, is a quasi-imraortality compared with our transience.
Go, get you to my lady's chamber, and tell her to be
painted, for this canvas complexion is the sole that will
last.
Isabella d'Este lives at Vienna, recreated by Titian, and
at Paris Vittore Fisano shows us what a princess of her
house was like, painting beauty of face and brocade against
a Japanese background of flowers and butterflies. A more
shadowy life she lives in this legend of the princess of the
Renaissance, which the prince of Italian writers has revived
in his novel, " Forse che si, forse clie no," a book in which
my Italian friends tell me d'Annunzio has won yet another
triumph of language, old words being so cunningly min
gled with new that the}" do not jar, but chime. D'Annunzio
is a demi-incarnation of the Renaissance spirit, exanimate of
the Christian half, and it is characteristic that the qualities
round which his adoration of Isabella plays are the qualities
not of a great lady, but of a great courtesan ; a leader of
the demi-monde. But as d'Annunzio lives in a half-world,
what can his heroines do but lead it ? His Isabella d'Este
— as re-created through the worshipful eyes of Aldo — is
the rival in dress of Beatrice Sforza, Renata d'Este, and
Lucrezia Borgia ; marchionesses borrow her old clothes as
models, Ippolita Sforza, Bianca Maria Sforza and Leonora
of Aragon are hopelessly out-dressed. Her sister Beatrice
alone sticks like a thorn in her side — Beatrice whose
wardrobe had eighty-four accessions in two years ! But
Isabella squeezed ninety-three into one year ! ! Lucrezia
Borgia, when she went to marry Alfonso d'Este, had two
hundred marvellous chemises ; Isabella outdid her, and
even Lucrezia must have recourse to her for a fan of gold
sticks with black ostrich feathers. Isabella invented new
LACHRYM^ RERUM AT MANTUA 247
styles and new modes, and the fashion of the carriage at
Rome. Isabella loved gems, particularly emeralds, and
succeeded in obtaining the most beautiful in existence.
She had her goldsmiths at Venice, at Milan, at Ferrara.
She possessed not only the finest jewels, but the finest
settings, rings, collars, chains, bracelets, seals, and so
through the list of gewgaws and baubles. She was the
admiration of France. She adored perfumes and com-
pounded them, and masks, and sent Csesar Borgia a hundred,
and had the most exquisite nail-files for manicuring, and
was head over ears in debt — per sopra ai capelli — for she
had a mad desire to buy everything that took her whimsy.
Has any one ever better summarised the eternal courtesan ?
Not a word about the nobler Isabella, the kind-hearted
lady who was always interceding for criminals or unfortu-
nates ; not a word of the Isabella of unspotted reputation
in an age of demireps (naturally d'Annunzio would hush
this up) ; not a whisper of the Isabella who felt the defence
of Faenza against Ceesar Borgia " as a vindication of the
honour of Italy." Scarce a hint of the inspirer of human-
ism, the patroness of some of the finest artists of all time;
still less any suggestion of the other Isabella, the house-
wife who sent salmon -trout to her friends, the philosopher
who, when the King of France had entered Naples, pointed
out to her lord that the discontent of the people is more
dangerous to a monarch than all the might of his enemies
on the battlefield, and the worldly wise woman who, when
he was hesitating over an inglorious military appointment,
bade him take the cash and let the credit go.
So complex an Isabella is beyond the scope of d'Annun-
zio, whose Isabella Inghirami is an elemental creature of
passion and tragedy.
'■'■ Forse che si, forse che no." An inhabitant of the full
world, beholding this motto written and rewritten in the
ceiling-labyrinth of the Gonzaga Palace, might fall into
contemplation of the labyrinth of human life, and see this
248 ITALIAN FANTASIES
device scribbled all over it ; he might hail it as the phi-
losophy of Montaigne in a nutshell, and jump, if he were a
novelist, at this magnificent setting for some tale of high
speculative fantasy. But for d'Annunzio there can be
only one problem lying between these mighty opposites.
Will a woman yield to lier lover, or will virtue resist him?
To this petty issue must these measureless words be
narrowed, 'Tis not even a forse. With d'Annunzio
there can be no negative in such an alternative. And so
the mighty Mantuan ruin which has known so many deso-
lations receives its last humiliation, and passes into litera-
ture as a background for lust. '■'■Sunt lachrymce rerum.''''
The true Isabella d'Este has been as much rarefied by
the Renaissance legend as she has been materialised by
d'Annunzio. For she cannot be wholly exonerated from
d'Annunzio's panegyric. " Would to God," she cried at
sight of her brother-in-law's treasure, " that we who are
so fond of money possessed as much." It was this treasure
of the Duke of IMilan's that did, indeed, make her sister
Beatrice a thorn in her side, if also a rose in her breast,
since darling Duchess Beatrice set the pace at a rate
ruinous to the Marchioness of Mantua. Isabella could
not even go to Venice at the same time as Beatrice, lest
all that magnificence (whose very leavings overwhelmed
me in her Palace) should appear shabbiness. And when
she lost her mother, she appeared more anxious about the
proper shade of mourning tlian the proper sentiment of
grief. (How came d'Annunzio to have missed this trait ?
What a chance for analysis of the eesthetic temperament !)
More pardonable was her anxiety as to the colour of the
hangings in the Moro's rooms, her hurried borrowing of
plate and tapestries, when he impended with that suite of
a thousand. But even for Beatrice's death she seemed to
find some satisfaction in the ultimate reversion of her
much-coveted clavichord, and she found it possible to
borrow a Da Vinci portrait from the Duke's former mis-
LACHRYM^ RERUM AT MANTUA 249
tress — her sister's cross. Nor — after the Duke was in
exile — does it seem very loyal to that fallen idol and
faithful admirer, to have ingratiated herself with the
French conqueror. That she should rejoice in the election
to the papacy of her profligate kinsman, Cardinal Rodrigo
Borgia, was perhaps not unnatural, but when every allow-
ance is made for her virtues, it must be admitted that she
was not utterly unworthy of d'Annunzio's admiration.
She was, in brief, a Magnificent One, and if the Magnifi-
cent Ones are, as a rule, less monstrous when they are
women, at the best they are a seamy shady lot, grinding
the faces of the poor, that their babes may lie in foolish
cradles of gold, and building themselves lordly pleasure-
houses designed by hirelings of genius. Even Da Vinci
prostituted his genius to plan a bath-room for that minx
of a Beatrice, and a pavilion with a round cupola for the
castle-labyrinth of his Most Illustrious Prince, Signor
Lodovico. Yet Lodovico must be commended for his
taste, which is more than can be said for the Magnificent
Ones of to-day, who are apt to combine the libertine with
the Philistine. Save for the mad King of Bavaria, I can
recall no modern monarch who has had a man of genius at his
Court. The late King Leopold exacted gold and executed
evil on a scale beyond the dreams of the Moro, but where
were his Leonardos and Bramantes ? Burckhardt tells us
that the Renaissance Despot, whose sway was nearly
always illegitimate, gathered a Court of genius and learn-
ing to give himself a standing ; the pompous dulness of
our modern Courts shows that Gibbon's plea for stability
of succession failed to reckon with the stagnation of
security.
Prosaic compared with the fate of the Palace at Mantua
is the fate of the Castle of Ferrara, the cradle of Isabella
d'Este. 'Tis one of those gloomy massive four-towered
structures that recall the fables of the giants, with its
moat still two yards deep and its drawbridge intact — a
250 ITALIAN FANTASIES
barbarous mediaeval pile, forbidding by daylight and sin-
ister in the moon, with a great clock that has so much
leisure that it strikes the hour before every quarter.
Yet this grim fortress, originally built by a despot as a
refuge from his subjects, is merely the seat of telegraph
and other civic offices ; like some antediluvian dragon
tamed and harnessed, instead of wastefully slain, by the
St. George who gleams above the portcullis.
In the piazza before the castle, where I saw only a cab-
rank of broken-down horses, the festa of this patron-saint
of Ferrara was wont to set Barbary horses racing for the
pallium, and splendid battle-chargers ramped in that great
tournament which was held by Duke Ercole, Isabella's
father, in honour of his son-in-law, the Moro, and which
was won by Galeazzo di Sanseverino, the model of the
Cortigiano. Isabella d'Este in her glad virginal youth
walked her palfrey up and down the great equine stair-
case, now given over to messenger boys and clerks.
Under the sportive ceilings and adipose angels of Dosso
Dossi, or within that girdling frieze of putti driving their
teams of birds, beasts, snakes or fishes, pragmatic council-
lors hold debate. In the castle ball-room are held —
charity dances !
But infinitely the saddest relic of the Magnificent More
is his former palace in Ferrara. Why he needed a palace
in Ferrara I do not know, unless to accommodate the over-
flowings of his suite when he visited his ducal father-in-
law. Of this palace the excellent Baedeker discourses
thus : " To the S. of S. Maria in Vado, in the Corso Porta
Romana, is the former Palazzo Costabili or Palazzo Scrofa,
now known as the Palazzo Beltrami- Calcagnini. It was
erected for Lodovico II Moro, but is uncompleted. Hand-
some court. On the ground-floor to the left are two rooms
with excellent ceiling-frescoes, by Ercole Grandi ; in the
first, Prophets and Sybils ; in the second, scenes from the
Old Testament in grisaille."
LACHRYMiE RERUM AT MANTUA 251
It could not have been done better by an auctioneer.
Here is the reality. A courtyard with arches, dirty,
refuse-littered, surrounded by a barrack of slum-dwellings.
Tlie first room I penetrated into was palatial in size but
occupied by three beds, and a stove replaced the old hearth.
The floor was of bare brick. Sole touch of colour, a canary
sang in a cage, as cheerfully as to a Magnificent One. The
crone whose family inhabited this room conducted me at
my request to the chamber with the ceilings by Ercole
Grandi. She opened the door, and — like Maria of Sicily
— entered crying, '■'• E permesso ? '''' with retrospective cere-
moniousness, and I followed her into a vast lofty room,
dingy below, but glorious above, though more to faith than
to sight, for the firmament of fresco was difficult to see
clearly in the gloom. The floor was of stone, and held two
beds, a chair or two, a cradle, a stout dwarfish old woman,
and a sprawl of children with unkempt heads. In the
adjoining room sat a sickly and silent woman working a
sewing machine under the hovering Sybils and Prophets,
dim and faded as herself.
For those who covet a Renaissance chamber, even after
this exposure of the auctioneer, let me say that the rent of
this last room was thirty-two scudi a year, Sybils and
Prophets thrown in.
The entire Palace Beltrarai-Calcagnini is, I imagine,
to be acquired for a song. When I first read in Ruskin's
" A Joy For Ever," his exhortation to Manchester manu-
facturers to purchase palaces in Verona so as to safeguard
stray Titians and Veroneses, I felt that the Anglo-Saxon
aspiration to play Atlas had reached its culminating gro-
tesquerie. But now that I have seen the state of the
Ercole Grandi frescoes, I feel that the Anglo-Saxon might
do worse than step in, and I cannot understand why Italy,
so rigid against the exportation of her treasures, is so
callous to their extinction.
And this is the Palace built by the great Moro, who
252 ITALIAN FANTASIES
" boasted that the Pope Alexander was his chaplain, the
Emperor Maximilian his condottiere, Venice his chamber-
lain, and the King of France his courier " ; for whose
wedding procession, which was preceded by a hundred
trumpeters, Milan draped itself in satins and brocades;
who patronised the immortals of Art ; and who wore to
death in an underground dungeon in France.
An older than Virgil hath spoken the final word : Vanitas
vanitatum, omnia vanitas.
OF DEAD SUBLIMITIES, SERENE MAGNIFI-
CENCES, AND GAGGED POETS
There are few livelier expressions of vitality than
tombs, especially tombs designed or commissioned by their
occupants. These be projections of personality beyond
the grave, extensions of egotism beyond the body. The
Magnificent Ones have invariably the mausolean habit.
It is another of their humilities. The majesty of death,
they know, is not enough to cover their nakedness. Moses,
the true Superman, had his sepulchre hidden that none
might worship at it. The false Superman ostentates his
sepulchre in the hope that some one may worship at it.
His Magnificence is only Serene in his tomb : his life passes
in uneasy tiptoeings after greatness. Sometimes his mor-
tuary tumefactions are softened by his spouse being made
co-tenant of his tomb, as in the Taj Mahal of Agra, or in
that beautiful monument ordered by Lodovico of Milan
for himself and Beatrice d'Este. And sometimes when
" the Bishop orders his tomb " it may be with an extenuat-
ing design to beautify his church — " ad ornatum ecclesise " —
as " Leo Episcopus " says of the monument he designed
for himself in Pistoja Cathedral. Unfortunately Bishop
Leo's worthy object is scarcely attained by the two fat
angels leaning sleepily against his sarcophagus, or by the
skull and the shell-work over it, though in comparison
with Verrocchio's adjacent monument of Cardinal Forte-
guerra — or rather the bust and the black sarcophagus
superimposed upon the original marble — the Bishop's
tomb is a thing of beauty.
253
254 ITALIAN FANTASIES
But it is only when the corpse has not commanded his
monument that I am able to endure its magnificence. The
Cardinal of Portugal in San Miniato, the poisoned Pope
Benedict in Perugia, St. Dominic in Bologna, St. Agatha
in Venice, and even the mysterious Lazaro Papi, " Colonel
for the English in Brazil," the " esteemed writer of verses
and history," whose friends raised him so elaborate a
memorial in the cathedral of Lucca in 1835, all lie as guilt-
less of their monumental follies as Mausolus himself, who,
it will be remembered, was the victim of his designing
widow. Nor could the Ossa Dantis well escape that domed
mausoleum at Ravenna, though they lay low for a century
and a half.
Still further removed from responsibility for his own
posthumous pomp is St. Augustine, who with all his in-
spiration could not foresee the adventures of his corpse ;
how from Hippo it should come to rest at Pavia, by way
of Sardinia, and there, a thousand years after his death, have
that marvellous Area erected over it by the Eremitani.
Nor could St. Donato, when he slew the water-dragon of
Arezzo by spitting into its mouth, foresee the great shrine
embodying this and other miracles of his which the mil-
lennial piety of the town would rear over his desiccated
dust.
But the Medici, the magnificent Medici ! Not their
chapel in Santa Croce, full though it be of the pomp of marble
and majolica ; not their San Marco monastery with their
doctor-saints — St. Cosmo and St. Damian — not their
Medici Palace, despite that joyous Benozzo fresco with its
gay glamour of landscape and processions ; not the Pitti
with its incalculable treasures ; not the Villa Medici, nor
even the Venus herself, so reeks with the pride of life as
all that appertains to their tombs. When I gaze upon the
monuments of these serene Magnificences in the Old Sacristy
of Florence, with the multiple allusions to the family and
its saints — in marble and terra-cotta, in stucco and bronze,
OF DEAD SUBLIMITIES 255
in fresco and frieze, in high-relief and low-relief — I feel a
mere grave-worm. And when I crawl into the Capella
dei Principi where stand the granite sarcophagi of the
Grand Dukes, there glances at me from every square inch
of the polished walls and the pompous crests and rich mosa-
ics a glacial radiation of the pride of life — nay, the hubris
of life. That hushed spaciousness is yet like an elaborate
funeral mass perpetually performed by an orchestra opu-
lently over-paid.
I wonder how in their life-time men dared to apply to
these Magnificent Ones the common Italian words for the
body and its operations and why there was not evolved for
them — as for the bonzes of the Cambodgians — a specific
vocabulary to differentiate their eating and drinking
from the munching and lapping of such as I. And yet
in the New Sacristy I find consolation. For, inasmuch as
the genius of Michelangelo was harnessed to the funeral car
of his patrons, I perceive that here at last they are truly
buried. They are buried beneath the majestic sculptures
of Day and Night, Evening and Dawn, and 'tis Michel-
angelo that lives here, not they. Peace to their gilded dust.
Far more reposeful, at least for the spectator, is Michel-
angelo's own burial place in Santa Croce, which is the
most satisfactory church the Franciscans have produced,
and in its empty spaciousness an uplifting change from
the stuffy, muggy atmosphere, the tawdry profusion of
overladen chapels, which make up one's general sense of an
Italian church. It is not free from poor pictures and
monuments, and only some of the coloured glass is good,
but the defects are lost in the noble simplicity of the
whole under its high wooden roof. Michelangelo's monu-
ment is unfortunately impaired by one of the few errors
of overcrowding, for the frescoes above it make it look
inferior to the Dante cenotaph, though it is really rather
superior. Curiously enough the line anent the " great poet"
" Ingenio cujus non satis orbis erat,"
256 ITALIAN FANTASIES
does not come from Dante's monument, but from that of
a certain Karolus, presumably Carlo Marsuppini !
I have spoken of the museum as the mausoleum of
reality. But mausolea, too, turn into museums ; in losing
their dead they, too, die and become a mere spectacle.
Such is the melancholy fate of the Mausoleum of The-
odoric the Great outside Ravenna, robbed of its imperial
heretical bones by avenging Christian orthodoxy. Infi-
nitely dreary this dead tomb when I saw it in the centre
of its desolate plain, to which I had trudged through
sodden marshland that would have been malarious in
summer ; snowbound it lay, its arched substructure
flooded, its upper chamber only just accessible by a
snow-crusted marble staircase : a bare rotundity, a bleak
emptiness, robbed even of its coffin, uncheered even by
its corpse. O magnificent Ostrogoth, conqueror of Italy,
O most Christian Emperor, when you turned from the
splendour of your court at Ravenna to build your last
home, you with your imperial tolerance could hardly fore-
see that because you held Christ an originated being, as
Arius had gone about singing, a Christian posterity would
scatter you to the four winds. And that rival gigantic
tomb in the Appian Way at Rome, does Csecilia Metella
still inhabit it, I wonder ? I mourn to see such spacious
tombs stand empty when there are so many living Mag-
nificences whom they would fit to a span. Very proper
was it to bury Beatrice, the mother of Matilda, in the
sarcophagus of a Pagan hero. Mausolea no more than
palaces should remain untenanted. Let them be turned
into forts and castles, an you will, like Hadrian's Tomb
into Sant' Angelo, or into circuses, like the Mausoleum
of Augustus — sweet are the uses of Magnificence — but
to keep them standing idle when there must be so many
Magnificences in quest of a family sepulchre is a crime
against America. The tomb of Theodoric is, I fear, too
secluded for American taste, but the Exarch Isaac's in
OF DEAD SUBLIMITIES 257
such cheerful contiguity with town and church may arride
the millionaire more. For a consideration the Exarch's
own sarcophagus miglit be had from the Museum, and the
Exarch scrapped. Or there is Galla Placidia's Mausoleum,
with its Byzantine mosaics thrown in. Come ! Who
bids for these rare curios, one of the few links between
Antiquity and the Renaissance, with their grotesque me-
dieval sincerity. Remark, Signori, that prefiguration
of the Index Expurgatorius, that bearded Christ or S.
Lorenzo (you pay your money and you take the choice)
who is casting into a crate of serpentine flames one of
those Pagan volumes for which the Cinquecento will go
hunting madly. No, that cabinet does not contain cigar-
boxes — what did the saints know of cigars ? — nor are
Marcus, Lucas, Matteus, Joannes, the names of brands.
Those apparent cigar-boxes, as you might have seen from
the strings, are holy manuscripts triumphant over the
Pagan volume. This naive draughtsmanship, Signora, is
just what makes them so precious and your petty bids so
amazing. What is that you say, Signorina? Galla
Placidia is still in possession ? And two Roman Em-
perors with her ? Nay, nay, a nine hundred and ninety-
nine years' lease is all that a reasonable ghost may desire ;
after that, every tomb must be esteemed a cenotaph;
unless indeed the heirs will pay the unearned increment.
Choose your sarcophagus, Signori, an Emperor's sarcoph-
agus is not in the market every day.
But I do not think that even the vulgarest millionaire
would desire his ashes to dispossess the Doges of Venice,
or at least not Giovanni Pesaro. The most romantic
auctioneer might despair of disposing of that portal wall
of the Frari which is sacred to the Gargantuan grotesquerie
of his colossal memorial. Does the whole world hold a
more baroque monument ? Going, going — and how I wish
I could say gone ! — that portal upheld by bowed negro
giants on gargoyled pedestals, with patches of black flesh
258 ITALIAN FANTASIES
gleaming through holes in their trousers. Item, one black
skeleton surmounted by other unique curios, including
two giraffes. Item, His Sublimity, the Doge himself, sit-
ting up on his sarcophagus, holding up his hands as if in
expostulation, gentlemen, against your inadequate bids.
Item, a wealth of heroic figures, and an array of virtues
and vices, all life-size. (Could be sold separately as ab-
solutely incongruous with the negro portions of the mon-
ument.) Also, in the same lot if desired, two hovering
angelets, holding a wreath, suitable for any Christian
celebrity.
Alas, Barnum is no more and bidding languishes. And
yet I do not see why the lot should not be knocked down.
Who was this Pesaro that he should have the right to im-
pose this horror on posterity ? Why should generations
of worshippers at the Frari be obsessed by this nightmare ?
There can be no sacredness in such demented mural tes-
taments. And Time, wlio preserved this, while he has de-
stroyed so many precious things, who shattered Leonardo's
horse and melted Michelangelo's bronze Pope, is hereby
shown of taste most abominable. History must get a
better curator.
The black skeleton — I had not thought before that
skeletons could be negro — flourishes a scroll which
ascribes to the Doge the wisdom of Solomon and an im-
placable hostility against the foes of Christ, while a tablet
held by one of the giant negroes announces
"Aureum inter optiiiios principes vides."
Aureum indeed ! Doubtless only some faint sense that
sheen and death are discrepant held back the Doges from
being buried in golden caskets. The Doge lives again in
this monument, boasts the Latin, and one can only reflect
that if the dogal taste reached this depravity by the mid-
dle of the seventeenth century, '''•actum est de republicd^'
might have been written long before Napoleon. Fortu-
OF DEAD SUBLIMITIES 259
nately for the memory of the Pesaro family it finds a
nobler, if no less bombastic expression, in the great Titian
altar-piece, the Madonna di Casa Pesaro, in which the
Queen of Heaven bends from her throne to beam at its
episcopal representative, and St. Francis and St. Anthony
grace by their presence the symbols of its victory over the
Turk, while St. Peter pauses in his pious lection.
But the dead Doges lie mostly in SS. Giovanni e Paolo,
where their funeral service was performed. It is the very
church for Their Sublimities — floods of light, pillared
splendour, imposing proportions. Their tombs protrude
from the walls, and their sculptured forms lie on their
backs, their heads on pillows, their feet comfortably on
cushions. Even when we are reminded of the finer things
for which the Republic stood, there is an echo of material
opulence.
" Steno, olini Dux Venetiorum, amator
Justitise, Pacis, et Ubertatis anima."
Uhertatis anima ! The soul of prodigal splendour ! Even
spiritual metaphor must harp on images of Magnificence.
But not every dead Doge consents to be couchant.
Horatio Baleono, who died in 1617, " hostes post innumeros
stratos," has for monument a cavalier (of course, gilded)
riding roughshod over writhing forms and a broken-down
cannon, and Pietro Mocenigo, whose mausoleum vaunts
itself " ex hostium manubiis," stands defiant on the sum-
mit of his sarcophagus, which is upborne by a trinity of
figures.
What a family this Casa Mocenigo, with its record of
Doges ! Remove their memorials and mausolea from this
church and you would half empty it of monuments. Tin-
toretto, no less than Titian, was dragged at their triumphal
car. There is an Adoration of the Saviour at Vicenza, which
might just as well be the adoration of the Doge, Alvise
Mocenigo, who is in the centre of the picture. For though
he is kneeling, he has all the air of sitting, and all the other
260 ITALIAN FANTASIES
figures — the worshippers, the angel flying towards him, and
the Christ flying down to him — converge towards him like
a stage-group towards the limelit hero. Compare all this
posthumous self-assertion with the oblivion fallen on Ma-
rino Faliero, the decapitated Doge of Byron's drama, whose
dubious sarcophagus was shown to the poet in the outside
wall of this church.
Nor could Padua, Venice's neighbour, fall behind her in
mortuary magnificence.
"Nequidque patavino splendore deesset"
says a monument to Alessandro Contarini in the nave of
the cathedral, a monument supported by six slaves and
embracing a bas-relief of the fleet. Another in the worst
dogal style exhibits Caterino Cornaro, a hero of the Cretan
War (who died in 1674) in a full-bottomed wig and baggy
knee-breeches, holding a scroll as if about to smack the
universe with it. Sad is it to see so many " eternal monu-
ments " of faded fames.
The Scaliger street-tombs in Verona are at least artis-
tically laudable, however ironically their Christian osten-
siveness compares with the record of the Family of the
Ladder, whose rungs were murdered relatives. But even
had Can Signorio lived the life of a saint, it would have
needed a considerable conquest of his Christian humility
before he could have commissioned that portentous tomb
of his from Bonino da Campiglione. Knowing the Mag-
nificent One, Bonino gave him solidity and superfluity, a
plethora of niched and statued minarets of saints and
virtues, armed warriors, and bewildering pinnacles clothed
with figures, all resting on six red marble columns spring-
ing from a base which supports the tomb, and is itself up-
borne by angels at each corner and adorned with pious
bas-reliefs. And while the dead man lies in stone above
his tomb, guarded by angels at head and foot, he also
bestrides his horse and sports his spear on the uttermost
OF DEAD SUBLIMITIES 261
pinnacle of his ladder-crested memorial, as though making
the best of both worlds ; which was indeed the general
habit of the Magnificent, who desired likewise the beati-
tudes of the Meek, and often shed tears of sincere repent-
ance when they could sin no more. Mastino della Scala's
tomb is more gilded and elegant than Can Signorio's,
though not less assertive and bi-worldly. And as for
the tomb of Can Grande — " Dog the Great," as Byron
translated him in "The Age of Bronze," — which is perched
over the church door and soars up into a turret, it was —
on the day I first saw it — provided with a long and dirty
Ladder for repairing purposes. So that I say Father Time
— if he be a poor curator — is at least a fellow of infinite
jest. One of his jests is to hound the Magnificent dead
from pillar to post, from church to monastery, from crypt
to chapel. In the grave there is rest ? Fiddle-faddle !
No body is safe from these chances of mortality. Stone
walls do not a coffin make, nor iron bars a tomb. Call no
body happy until it is burnt. After five centuries of rest
Matilda of Tuscany was carried off from Mantua in a sort
of mortuary elopement by her great admirer, Pope Urban
VIII., and hidden away in the castle of S. Angelo, till she
could be inhumed in St. Peter's, and it was only the pride
of Spoleto that saved Lippo Lippi from being sold to Flor-
ence. Napoleon, in suppressing churches, disestablished
many an ancient corpse, and the pious families of Verona
hastened to transport their sarcophagi to the Church of
S. Zeno on the outskirts. Hither must ride the dead
Cavalli with their equine scutcheons, flying before the
World Conqueror on his white horse.
Dismemberment, too, befalls tombs at the hands of the
merry jester. The friars of S. Maria delle Grazie who
owed so much to the great Sforza Duke, broke up his
monument and offered his effigy and his wife's for sale.
The more loyal Carthusians snapped up Cristoforo Solari's
beautiful sculptures for the beggarly price of thirty-eight
262 ITALIAN FANTASIES
ducats, and Lodovico and Beatrice in marble must leave
their dust and make a last journey to Pa via. A last jour-
ney ? "C/a'sa.^"
" Iterum et iterum translatis," sighs the monument over
the bones of Cino in Pistoja Cathedral, and who knows
that the " pax tandem ossibus " is more than a sanguine
aspiration ? Cino was not the only Italian poet to be
thus " translated," though neither Petrarch nor Ariosto
was " translated " so often. Petrarch indeed was rather
pirated than "translated," for his right arm was stolen
from his sepulchre at Arqua for the Florentines, and the
rest of him is now supposed to be in Madrid — a town
which also holds that monarch of sanctity Francesco di
Borja, likewise minus an arm, for the Gesu of Rome kept
back that precious morsel of the Duke who had entered
the kingdom of heaven by the rare gate of abdication.
But stranger than these mutations of mortality is the
fact that Italy holds the ashes of our Shelley and Keats,
as it held so much of the life of Byron and Browning.
As if Home had not riches and memories to super-satiety !
A Protestant cemetery seems indeed out of key as much
with these poets as with Rome, but that overshadowing
Pyramid of Cestius restores the exotic touch, and violets
and daisies blot out all but the religion of beauty, so that
Shelley could write : " It might make me in love with
death to think that one should be buried in so sweet a
place." It is pleasant to think that only a year later
Shelley, however exiguous his ashes, found in that sweet
place the rest and re-union for which his cor eordium
yearned.
" 'Tis Adonais calls ! oh hasten thither,
No more let life divide what Death can join together."
With what a wonderful coast Shelley has mingled his
memory — fig-trees, olives, palms, cactus, hawthorn, pines
bent seaward, all running down the steep cliff. What
OF DEAD SUBLIMITIES 263
enchanting harmonies they make with the glimpses of
sea deep below, the white villages and campaniles, seen
through their magic tangle. As you pass through the
sunny, dusty village roads, the girls seem to ripen out of
the earth like grapes, both white and black, for there are
golden-haired blondes as well as sun-kissed brunettes.
They walk bare-footed, with water-jars poised on their
heads, sometimes balancing great russet bundles of hay.
And the old peasant women with Dantesque features sit
spinning or lace-making at the doors of their cottages, as
they have sat these three thousand years, without growing
a wrinkle the more, if indeed there was ever room for
another wrinkle on their dear corrugated faces. What
earth lore as of aged oaks they must have sucked in dur-
ing all these centuries !
It is here that one understands the Paganism of
d'Annunzio whose soul lies suffused in these sparkling in-
finities of sun and sea and sky, whose marmoreal language
is woven from the rhythmic movement and balance of
these sculptural bodies.
Viareggio, which holds Shelley's monument, is a place
of strange, twisted plane-trees. The Piazza Shelley is a
simple quiet square of low houses fronting a leafy garden
and the sea. It leads out, curiously enough, from the
Via Machiavelli. There is a bronze bust, which admirers
cover with laurel, and an inscription which represents
him as meditating here a final page to " Prometheus
Unbound." (Baedeker, comically mistranslating "una
pagina postrema," represents him as meditating " a post-
humous page" !)
Not here, however, but in La Pineta is the place to
muse upon Shelley. It is a thick, sandy pinewood with
an avenue of planes. The pines are staggering about in
all directions, drunk with wind and sun. Very silent was
it as I sat here on a spring evening watching the rosy
clouds over the low hills and the mottled sunset over the
264 ITALIAN FANTASIES
sea. The birds ventured scarcely a twitter ; they knew
they could not vie with Shelley's skylark.
Shelley's epitaph in the Roman cemetery is like a soft
music at the end of a Shakespeare tragedy.
" Nothing of me that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange."
What a curious and pacifying fusion of poetry and wit !
It reconciles us to the passing back of this cosmic spirit
into the elements by way of water. But what a jarring
perpetuation of the world's noises on the tombstone of
Keats !
" This grave contains all that was mortal of a young
English poet, who on his death-bed, in the bitterness of
his heart at the malicious powers of his enemies, desired
these words to be engraven on his tombstone : ' Here lies
one whose name was written in water.' "
Water again ! But water as chaos and devourer.
How ill all this turbulence accords with the marble
serenity of his fame, a fame that so far as pure poetry is
concerned stands side by side with Shakespeare's ! We
are a good way now from the twenty-fourth of February,
eighteen hundred and twenty-one. A few years more
and Keats will have been silent a hundred years, and we
know that his nightingale will sing for ever. AVhat
profits it, then, to prolong this mortuary bitterness, to
hang this dirty British linen on the Roman grave ? The
museum is the place for this tombstone — I could whisk
it thither like the Doge Pesaro's wall. Will it save the
next great poet from the malice of his enemies ? Will
they speak a dagger less? Not a bodkin ! The next
great poet, being great and a poet, will appeal in novel
and unforeseeable ways and be as little read and as harshly
reviewed as the marvellous boy of Hampstead whose
death at twenty-five is the greatest loss English literature
OF DEAD SUBLIMITIES 265
has ever sustained. Were it not fittest, therefore, to
celebrate the centenary of this death by changing his
epitaph for a line of " Adonais " ? —
" He lives, he wakes ; 'tis Death is dead, not he."
The tragedy of Keats is sufficiently commemorated in
Shelley's preface and in the pages of literary history and
in the doggerel of Byron.
" ' Who killed John Keats ? '
'I,' says the Quarterly,
So savage and Tartarly,
' 'Twas one of my feats.' "
And Byron lamented and marvelled
" That the soul, that very fiery particle.
Should let itself be snuffed out by an article."
I do not share this discontent. To be snuffed out by
an article is precisely the only dignified ending for a
soul. This dualism of body and spirit which has been
foisted upon us has degradations enough even in health.
No union was ever worse assorted than this marriage of
inconvenience by which a body with boorish tastes and
disgusting habits is chained to an intelligent and fastidi-
ous soul. No wonder their relations are strained. Such
cohabitation is scarcely legitimate. Were they only to
keep their places, a reasonable modus vivendi might be
patched up. The things of the spirit could exercise
causation in the sphere of the spirit, and the things of the
body would be restricted to their corporeal circle. But
alas ! the partners, like most married couples, interfere
with each other and intrude on each other's domain.
Body and soul transfuse and percolate each other. Too
much philosophising makes the liver sluggish and a tooth-
ache tampers with philosophy. Despair slackens the
blood and wine runs to eloquence. Body or soul cannot
266 ITALIAN FANTASIES
even die of its own infirmity ; the twain must arrange a
modus moriendi, each consenting to collapse of the other's
disease. Thus a body in going order may be stilled by a
stroke of bad news, and a spiritual essence may pass away
through a pox.
Think of the most powerful of the Popes, the head of
Christendom, the excommunicator of the Kings of France
and Spain, having to succumb to a fever ; think of the
great French writer, in whose brain the whole modern
world mirrored itself, having to die of a gas from which
even his dog recovered ; think of the giant German phi-
losopher, who had announced the starry infinitude of the
moral law, degenerating into the imbecile who must tie
and untie his necktie many times a minute. Surely it
were worthier of man's estate had Innocent III. perished
of an argument in favour of lay investiture, had Zola been
snuffed out by an anti-Dreyfusard pamphlet or a romantic
poem, had Kant succumbed to the scornful epigram of
Herder, or even to the barkings of the priests' dogs who
had been given his name. And far worthier were it of a
poet to die of a review than of a jaundice, of a criticism
than a consumption. Infinitely more dignified was the
death of Keats under the Quarterly/ than the death of
Byron himself under a fever, which some trace to a
microbe, itself possibly injected by a mosquito. That
were an unpardonable oversight of Dame Nature, who in
her democratic enthusiasm forgets that mosquitoes are not
men's equals, and that these admirable insects should be
blooded more economically. Assuredly the author of
" The Vision of Judgment " would have preferred to die
of a stanza or a sting-tailed epigram.
Dame Nature had the last word ; but was Byron, fore-
seeing her crushing repartee, so absolutely unjustified in
his criticisms and questionings of a Power that held liim
as lightly as the parasite on the hind leg of any of the
fifty thousand species of beetles ? For if Fate treads
OF DEAD SUBLIMITIES 267
with equal foot on a Byron and a beetle, the bard may be
forgiven if he takes it less christianly than the coleopteron.
Byron is " cheap " to-day in England, and while Greece
celebrates the centenary of his arrival and Crete calls on
his name, while Italy is full of his glory, his hotels and his
piazzas, while Genoa is proud that he lived in II Paradiso
and the Armenian Monastery at Venice still cherishes the
memory of his sojourn there to learn Armenian, and every
spot he trod is similarly sacred, the Puritan critic reminds
us that
" The gods approve
The depth and not the tumult of the soul."
Yes, we know, but when a poet is disapproving of the
gods their standards matter less. And we are men, not
gods, that their standards should be ours. Humani sumuSy
and nothing of Byron's passion and pain can be alien from
us. This tumult of the soul, who has escaped it ? Not
Wordsworth, assuredly, who wrote those lines. Only the
fool hath not said in his heart, " There is no God." Even
Cardinal Manning said it on his death-bed. Not that
death-bed conversions are worth anything. Matthew
Arnold was apt to give us Wordsworth as the reposeful
contrast to the bold, bad Byron. But the calmness of
Wordsworth is only in his style, and if his questionings
are cast in bronze they were often forged in the same
furnace as Byron's, and fused through and through with
the pain
" Of all this unintelligible world."
Poets, even the austere, have to learn in suffering what
they teach in song. Only the suffering is always so much
clearer than what it teaches them. And then, as Heine
says, comes Death, and with a clod of earth gags the
mouth that sings and cries and questions.
" Aber ist Das eine Antwort ? "
VARIATIONS ON A THEME
Among these multitudinous Madonnas^ and countless
Crucifixions, and Entombments innumerable, who shall dare
award the palm for nobility of conception ? But there is
a minor theme of Renaissance Art as to which I do not
hesitate. It is the Pietd theme, but with angels replacing
or supplementing the Madonna who cherishes the dead
Christ, and it is significant that the finest treatment of it I
have seen comes from tlie greatest craftsman who treated it
— to wit, Giovanni Bellini. His Cristo Sorretto da Angioli
you will find painted on wood — a tavola — in the Palazzo
Communale of Rimini. The Christ lies limp but tranquil,
in the peace, not the rigidity, of death, and four little an-
gels stand by, one of them half hidden by the dead figure.
The exquisite appeal of this picture, the uniqueness of
the conception, lies in the sweet sorrow of the little angels
— a sorrow as of a dog or a child that cannot fathom
the greatness of the tragedy, only knows dumbly that here
is matter for sadness. The little angels regard the wounds
with grave infantile concern. Sacred tragedy is here fused
with idyllic poetry in a manner to which I know no
parallel in any other painter. The sweet perfection of
Giovanni Bellini, too suave for the grim central theme of
Christianity, here finds triumphant and enchanting justi-
fication.
It is perhaps worth while tracing how every other
painter's handling of the theme that I have chanced on
fails to reach this lyric pathos.
Bellini himself did not perhaps quite reach it again,
though he reaches very noble heights in two pictures (one
268
VARIATIONS ON A THEME 269
now in London and the other in Berlin), in which the re-
duction in the number of angels to two makes even for
enhancement of the restful simplicity, while in the Berlin
picture there is a touching intimacy of uncomprehending
consolation in the pressing of the little angelic cheeks
against the dead face. But the fact that in both pictures
one angel seems to understand more or to be more exer-
cised than the other contributes a disturbing complicacy.
The serene unity is, indeed, preserved by Bellini in his
Pietd in the Museo Correr of Venice. But here the three
young angels supporting the body are merely at peace —
there is nothing of that sweet wistfulness.
For a contrary reason the woodland flavour is equally
absent from its neighbour, a picture by an unknown
painter of the Paduan school. Here the peace is exchanged,
not for poetry but tragedy. * The Christ is erect in his
tomb, and the two haloed baby angels who uphold his
arms are the one weeping, the other horror-struck. The
horror is accentuated and the poetry still further lessened
in an anonymous painting in a chapel of S. Anastasia in
Verona, where boy angels are positively roaring with
grief. Nor is the poetry augmented in that other anony-
mous painting in the Palazzo Ducale of Venice, where one
angel kisses the dead hand and the other the blood-stained
linen at the foot. In Girolamo da Treviso's picture in
the Brera one child angel examines the bloody palm and
the other lifts up the drooping left arm with its little
frock. Great round tears run down their faces, which are
swollen and ugly with grief. Still more tragic, even to
grotesquerie, is an old fresco fragment in an underground
church in Brescia, where the little angels are catching the
sacred blood in cups — those cups invented by Perugino
and borrowed even by Raphael. Francesco Bissolo, in
the Academy of Venice, preserves the tranquillity of
Bellini, but by making the angels older loses not only the
seductive naivete but the whole naturalness, for these
270 ITALIAN FANTASIES
angels are old enough to know better, one feels. They
have no right to such callousness. Raphael's father in
his picture in the cathedral of Urbino escapes this pitfall,
for his adult angels bend solicitously over the Christ and
support his arms from above. But Lorenzo Lotto, though
he gives us innocent child-angels, tumbles into an analogous
trap, for he forgets that by adding a Madonna and a
]Masrdalen in bitter tears he transforms tliese untroubled
little angels into little devils, who have not even the curi-
osity to wonder what in heaven's name their mortal elders
are weeping over. In Cariani's so-called Deposizione at
Ravenna one little angel does weep in imitation of the
mortals, leaning his wet cheek on the Christ's dead hand
— " tears such as angels weep " — but he only repeats the
human tragedy, and might as well be a little boy. Two
older angels howl and grimace in Marco Zoppo's picture
in the Palazzo Almerici of Pesaro, while the haloed, long-
ringleted head of the Christ droops with slightly open
mouth and a strange smile as provoking as Mona Lisa's.
Francia in the National Gallery gives us a red-eyed Ma-
donna with one calm and one compassionate angel, and
Zaganelli in the Brera vies with Bellini in the vague,
tender wonderment of the child angels who lift up the
arms, but the picture is second-rate and the angels are
little girls with bare arms and puffed sleeves. Nor is it a
happy innovation to show us the legs of the Christ sprawl-
ing across the tomb.
Marco Palmezzano, with inferior beauty, also trenches
on Bellini's ground ; but not only is the Christ sitting up,
not quite dead, but one of the two child angels is calling
out as for aid, so that the restful finality of Bellini is van-
ished. Still nearer to the Bellini idea approaches a
picture in the Academy of Venice attributed to Marco
Basaiti and an unknown Lombardian. But if this avoids
tragedy, the turn is too much in the direction of comedy.
The child angels are made still more infantine, so that
VARIATIONS ON A THEME 271
there is neither horror nor even perturbation, merely a
shade of surprise at so passive a figure. One plays with
the Christ's hair, the other with his feet — the Blake-like
tenderness is not absent, but the poetry of this utter un-
consciousness is not so penetrating as the wistful yearning
of the Bellini angels before some dim, unsounded ocean of
tragedy. This precise note I did, indeed, once catch in
a corner of Domenichino's Madonna del Mosario, where a
baby surveys the crown of thorns ; but this is just a side-
show in a joyous, thickly populated picture, and the
Christ is not dead, but a live bambino, who showers down
roses on the lower world of martyrdom and sorrow.
He is almost too dead in the fading fresco of the little
low-vaulted, whitewashed, ancient church of S. ISIaria
Infra Portas in Foligno. A great gash mutilates his side,
his head, horribly fallen back, lies on the Madonna's lap,
his legs and arms droop. The mother's long hair hangs
down from her halo, she clasps her hands in agony, and
a child angel on either side looks on commiseratingly.
Strange to say, this conserves the poetry, despite the
horror, though the horror removes it out of comparison
with Bellini's handling.
In Genoa I found three more variations on the theme,
two in the cathedral, the first with four angels, all gravely
concerned, and the second with quite a crowd of little
boys and angels, nearly all weeping. One of the little
angels has taken off the crown of thorns — a good touch
in a bad picture. The third variant is by Luca Cambiaso,
and in the Palazzo Rosso, with a single agitated boy angel.
A Pietd in Pistoja takes its main pathos from its lonely
position on the staircase of the fusty town hall : a last
rose of summer, all its companions are faded and gone,
all save one pretty lady saint blooming in a vast ocean of
plaster. Even its own Madonna and Apostles are half
obliterated ; but the boy angel remains in a curious pos-
ture : he has got his head betwixt the legs of the Christ,
272 ITALIAN FANTASIES
and with his arms helps to sustain the drooping figure.
Still more original touches appear in Andrea Utili's picture
in Faenza. Here the Christ has his arms crossed, and his
halo, tilted back over his crown of thorns, gleams weirdly
in red and gold, and on his tomb rest pincers and a ham-
mer. The two youthful angels are deeply moved ; one
holds a cross and the other three nails.
If any painter could vie in enchantment with Giovanni
Bellini it is Crivelli, and, indeed, there are fascinating
things in his Pietd in the Brera, idyllic sweetness in the
angels, original decorative touches in the book and burn-
ing taper, and masterly imagination in the ghastly lack
of vitality with which each dead hand of the Christ droops
on the tender living hand of an angel. Had only the
angels been a little younger, this would have been as
sweetly lyrical as Bellini. From Michelangelo we have
only a sketch of the subject, with his wingless child
angels, over whom stands the jNIater Dolorosa with useless
outspread arms, that should have been helping the poor
little things to support their burden. In Guido Reni's
Pietd at Bologna her hands droop in folded resignation,
while one angel weeps and one adores and pities. I fear
the presence of the Madonna and other mortals destroys
the peculiar celestial poetry, though of course the con-
junction of mortals and angels brings a poetry of its own.
Tura's treatment of the theme in Vienna I have not seen.
But Vivarini breaks out in a new direction. His two
angels fly from right and left towards the tomb, under full
canvas, so to speak. But it is a pattern et proeterea nihil.
More poetic in its originality is a picture of the Veronese
school in the Brera, showing us two baby angels, half curi-
ous, half apprehensive, unfolding the Christ's winding-
sheet. But it is a dark, poorly painted picture. Another
new invention is Garofalo's in the same gallery. He gives
us a crowd of commonplace weeping figures in a pictur-
esque landscape, and his angel is a sweet little cherub
VARIATIONS ON A THEME 273
aloft on a pillar over the heads of the mourning mob.
But the angel might be a mere architectural decoration,
for all his effect upon the picture.
Thus have we seen almost every possible variation tried
— adult angels and young angels and baby angels, calm
angels and callous angels, lachrymose angels and vociferous
angels, helpless angels and hospital angels, boy angels and
girl angels, and only one artist has seen the sole permuta-
tion which extracts the quintessential poetry of the theme
— the high celestial tragedy unadulterated by human
grief, and sweetened yet deepened by angels too young to
understand and too old to be unperturbed, too troubled
for play and too tranquil for tears.
And it is to that incarnation of evil, Sigismondo Mala-
testa, that we owe this masterpiece of lyric simplicity, for
'twas the Magnificent Monster himself that commissioned
it — His rolling and reverberating Magnificence, Sigis-
mondo Pandolfo Malatesta di Pandolfo — whose polypho-
nous, orotund name and the black and white elephants of
whose crest pervade the splendid temple which he remod-
elled at Rimini for the glory of God. And lest the
world should forget 'twas he to whom heaven owed the
delicious Pagan reliefs by the pillars, or the now-faded
ultramarine and starry gold of the chapels, each first pilas-
ter bears in Greek the due inscription :
TO THE IMMORTAL GOD
SIGISMONDO PANDOLFO MALATESTA DI PANDOLFO
(Pray do not pause here — epigraphs, like telegrams, are
not punctuated.)
PRESERVED FROM MANY OF THE GREATEST PERILS OP THE ITALIAN WAR
ERECTED AND BEQCEATHED MAGNIFICENTLY LAVISH
AS HE HAD VOWED IN THE VERY MIDST OF THE STRUGGLE
AN ILLUSTRIOUS AND HOLY MEMORIAL
T
274 ITALIAN FANTASIES
No less reflexive was his apotheosis of the frail Isotta, of
whom he first made an honest woman and then a goddess.
What wonder if his critics carped at the " Disottte," the
" divine Isotta," he wrote over her tomb, in lieu of the
conventional " Dominse Isottae Bonse Memorise " I But
one must do the bold, bad eondottiere the justice to say that
wliile two angels bear this inscription over her in gold,
his own tomb is comparatively modest. It is Isotta
whose tomb is supported by shield-bearing elephants and
culminates in flourishes as of elephants' trunks, Isotta who
stands over her altar in the guise of a gold-winged angel.
Malatesta's patronage of Giovanni Bellini was not his
only contribution to the arts, for a cluster of poets found
hospitality at his court and burial at his temple — with a
careful inscription that it was Sigismondo Pandolfo Mala-
testa di Pandolfo who buried them — though these seem
to have plied the trade of Laureate, if I may judge from
the volume published at Paris, " LTsotteo." I cannot
pretend to be read in Porcellio de' Pandone or Tommaso
Seneca or Basinio of Parma. But Bellini's tavola suffices
to make me say with riddling Samson, " Out of the strong
Cometh forth sweetness."
For this is perhaps the teleological purpose of the Magni-
ficent Ones, to play the Maecenas to some starveling artist
or penurious poet. There is in the santuario of the Mala-
testa temple a fresco of this Sigismondo. He is seen in
the flush of youth, gay in a brocaded mantle and red hose,
but somewhat disconcertingly on his knees before a crowned
figure — his patron saint according to some, the Emperor
Sigismondo more probably. Let us call it that sovereign
fate to which even megaphonious Magnificence must bow.
Almost divine in his lifetime, within a few years the Mag-
nificent One's character commences to decay, as if that
too could not resist the corruption of death. Happy the
prince of whom some not malodorous shred of reputation
remains a century after his death. The evil that men do
VARIATIONS ON A THEME 275
lives after them, the good they have not done is oft interred
with their bones.
Yes, there is a pathos in the Magnificent Ones. When
I consider how their autocosm ensnared tliem with a sense
of their own perdurability, lured them into engaging
painters and architects and statuaries to express their
triumphant sense of timeless energising, and then ebbed
away from them, leaving them putrid carbonates, phos-
phates, and silicates, while the work of Beauty lived on
and lives, having used these momentarily swollen creatures
as its channel and tool, then I find it in me to pity these
frog-bulls of egotism, so cruelly bemocked and deluded.
Before parting with the Pietd theme I would remark
that in the Italian galleries the name Pietd is often — with
apparent inaccuracy — given to pictures of the dead Christ
alone in his tomb. One of the most curious pictures of
this sort I came upon in the gallery of Faenza, where
Christ stands in his tomb, yet still nailed on the Cross,
from either end of which depends a scourge. I found the
same design in the centre of a little stone shield over a
building marked as the " Mons Pietatis " of Faenza. And
this set me speculating whether such an image as a symbol
of the Monte di Pieta was due to the mere suggestiveness
of the word Pietd, or whether there was a more mystical
connection implied between the Crucifixion and the loan-
offices instituted in Italy by Bernardino da Feltre to frus-
trate the usury of the Jews. It is the Monte di Pieta of
Treviso that shelters the Entombment ascribed to Giorgione.
It seems a long way from Golgotha to the pawn-shop, yet
we still talk of pledges being redeemed.
HIGH ART AND LOW
" Pictures
Of this Italian master and that Dutchman."
James Shirley : " The Lady of Pleasure."
To come in the Uffizi upon a Dutch collection, to see the
boors of Jan Steen, the tavern peasants of Heemskerck,
the pancake-seller of Gerard Dou, the mushrooms and but-
terflies of Marcellis Ottone, is to have first a shock of
discord and then a breath of fresh air and to grow suddenly
conscious of the artificial atmosphere of all this Renais-
sance art. Where it does not reek of the mould of crypts
or the incense of cathedrals or the pot-pourri of the cloister,
it is redolent of marmoreal sa/ows, it is the art of the
Magnificent Ones. Moroni's Tailor marks almost the
social nadir of its lay subjects, and our sartor was no
doubt a prosperous member of his guild. There are two
courtesans in Carpaccio, but indistinguishable from count-
esses, in a rich setting of pilasters and domestic pets.
Guido Reni painted his foster-mother, but it is the ex-
ception which proves the rule. And the rule is that
Demos shall appear in Art only as the accessory in a
sacred picture, like the old woman with the basket of
eggs in Titian's Presentation in the Temple^ or the servants
in the many sacred suppers and banquetings beloved of
Veronese. That the Holy Family itself was of lowly
status is, of course, ignored except here or there by Tin-
toretto or Signorelli or Giovanni Bellini, and the wonderful
gowns and jewels worn by the carpenter's wife, according
to Fra Angelico or Crivelli, would be remarkable even on
a Beatrice d'Este or a Marie de' Medici. Who would
ever think that Raphael's Sposalizio of the Virgin was the
276
HIGH ART AND LOW 277
marriage of a Bethlehem artisan to a peasant girl ? Even
the carpenter's barefootedness — the one touch of naked
truth — seems a mere piece of hymeneal ritual, in face of
that royal company of princesses and their suites, that
functioning High Priest. No ; insistence on the humble-
ness of the Holy Family hardly tallied with the Christian-
ity of the Renaissance, or even with the psychology of the
poor believer, who loves to dress up his gods as Magnificent
Ones and for whom to adore is to adorn. Aristocracy is the
note of Italian painting — the Holy Family takes formal
precedence, but the Colonnas and the Medicis rank their
families no less select. Tlie outflowering of Dutch art
was like the change from the airless Latin of the scholars
to the blowy idioms with which real European literature
began. Italian art expressed dignity, beauty, religion ;
Dutch art went back to life, to find all these in life itself.
It was the efiflorescence of triumphant democracy, of the
Dutch Republic surgent from the waves of Spain and
Catholicism as indomitably as she had risen from the
North Sea. Hence this sturdy satisfaction with reality.
Rembrandt painted with equal hand ribs of beef and ribs
of men. The Low Countries invented the fruit and flower
piece and the fish and game piece. That Low Art hails
from the nether lands is not a mere coincidence. Holland
was less a country than a piece of the bed of the sea to
which men stuck instead of limpets. Cowper says, " God
made the country and man made the town," but the Dutch
proverb sa3's, "God made the sea and we made the shore."
'Twas no braggart boast. The Dutchman had made for
himself a sort of anchored sliip, and the damps and va-
pours drove him oft from the deck to the warm cabin,
where, asquat on plump cushions with bnxom vroio and
solid food and stout liquor, he met the mists with an an-
swering cloud from his placid pipe. And the art he en-
gendered reflected this love for cosy realities, and found
a poetry in the very peeling of potatoes. No voice of
278 ITALIAN FANTASIES
croaking save from the frogs of his marshes. Let your
Leopardis croak 'mid their suuny vineyards, let your
Oberuianns sulk on their stable mountains ; Mynheer is
grateful to be here at all, to have outwitted the waters and
dished the Dons. And so never has earthiness found more
joyous expression than in his pictures. What gay content
witli the colours of clothes and the shafts of sunshine, and
the ripe forms of women, and the hues of meats and fishes I
O the joy of skating on the frozen canals ! O the jolly
revels in village taverns! Hail the ecstasy of the Ker-
messe ! " How good is man's life, the mere living." " It
is a pleasant thing to have beheld the sun." These are
the notes of Dutch art, which is like a perpetual grace to
God for the beauty of common things. And if the painters
are concerned so much with the problems of light, if
Rembrandt was the poet of light, was it not because the
Dutchman had always in his eye varying effects of light,
shifting reflections and scintillations in the ubiquitous
canals, kaleidoscopic struggles of sunlight with mist and
fog ? The Venetians too, those Hollanders of Italy, are
notable for their colour, in contrast with the Florentines.
Even in the Dutch and Flemish images of doom I have
thought to detect a note of earth-laughter, almost an irre-
sponsible gaiety. Pierre Breughel paints the Fall of the
Angels as a descent to lower forms — the loyal angels beat
the rebels down, and they change as they fall into birds,
beasts and fishes, into frogs and lizards, and even into
vegetables. There are bipedal carrots, and winged ar-
tichokes and bird-tailed pomegranates. 'Tis as if the
worthy painter was anxious to return to the kitchen, to his
genre subjects. Or may we sniff a belated Buddhism or a
premature Darwinism ? Instead of a sacred picture we
get a pantomimic transformation scene : metamorphosis
caught grotesquely in the act. This Fall of the Angels
seems a favourite Flemish subject — one reads almost an
allegory of Art hurled down from heaven to earth.
HIGH ART AND LOW 279
The same sportive fantasy frolics it over the Flemish hell.
De Vos gives us a devil playing on the fluted nose of a
metamorphosed sinner. In a triptych of Jerome Bosch,
the Last Judgment is the judgment of a Merry Andrew who
turns the damned into bell-clappers, strings them across
harpstrings or claps their mouth to the faucets of barrels
till they retch. So far goes the painter's free fancy that
he invents airships and submarines for the lost souls to
cower in, unwitting of the day when these would hold no
terrors for the manes of erring aeronauts and torpedoists.
Italian art even in the childish grotesqueries of its In-
ferno never falls so low as this freakish farrago. One
cannot help feeling that the Italians believed in hell and
the Netherlanders made fun of it.
One of these extravaganzas of Bosch has drifted to Ven-
ice, though this Temptation of St. Antony (of which there
is a replica in Brussels) is also attributed to Van Bles.
The nude ladies coming to the saint with gifts are most
unprepossessing, and what temptation there is in the whirl
of carnival grotesques I cannot understand. No doubt
some allegory of sin lurks in these goblin faces, with their
greedy mouths full of strange creatures, and in this great
head with black-tailed things creeping in through eye and
mouth, with frogs suspended from its earrings and a little
town growing out of its head. Such uncouth ugliness has
no parallel in Venice, unless it be a German Inferno with
a belled devil. From such puerilities one turns with relief
to the coldest and stateliest conventions of High Art.
And yet Dutch art and Italian are not wholly discrepant :
the link, as I have said, comes through the minor figures
of religious scenes, or even occasionally through the major.
A Dutch homeliness lurks shyly in the background of
Italian art, and at times appears boldly in the foreground.
From one point of view nothing could be more Dutch
than the innumerable jNladonnas who suckle their Bambini.
Nor do their haloes destroy their homeliness. The peas-
280 ITALIAN FANTASIES
ant girl of Tintoretto's Annunciation in S. Rocco wears a
halo, but neither that nor the angel bursting through the
crumbling brick of the door can prevent this scene from
being a Dutch interior with a cane chair. Realism,
smuggled in under the cloak of religion, is none the less
realism, and when Moretto shows us the Bambino about
to be bathed by mother and nurse, and paints us a basket
of belly-bands, he has given us a genre picture none the
less because rapt saints and monks look on in defiance of
chronology, and, perched on a bank of cloud over a ro-
mantic landscape, angels sing on high. Even as early as
Giotto the nurse who presides at The Birth of the Virgin
is washing the baby's eyes. Very curious and realistic is
the pastoral study which Luca Cambiaso styled Adoration
of the Shepherds. And in Veronese, for all his magnifi-
cence, and in Carpaccio, for all his fairy-tale atmosphere,
and above all in Bassano, for all his golden glow, we get
well-established half-way houses between High Art and
Low. Under the pretext of The Supper in Emmaus
Bassano anticipates all Dutch art. Here be cats, dogs,
plucked geese, meat in the pan, shining copper utensils
scattered around, the pot over the glow of the fire, the
rows of plates in the kitchen behind. What loving study
of the colour of the wine in the glasses of the guests, and
of their robes and their furs ! These things it is that,
with the busy figures behind the bar or stooping on the
floor, fill up the picture, while the Christ on a raised plat-
form in the corner bulks less than the serving-maid, and
the centre of the stage is occupied by a casual eater, his
napkin across his knees. If this sixteenth-century picture
is Venetian in its glowing colour and its comparative in-
difference to form, it is Dutch in its minuteness and home-
liness.
The same love of pots and pans and animals glows in
The Departure of Jacob., with his horse and his ass and his
sheep and his goats and his basket of hens, and even
HIGH ART AND LOW 281
beguiles Bassano into attempting a faint peering camel.
But not even the presence of God in a full white beard
can render this a sacred picture. It is, however, in his
favourite theme of The Animah going into the Ark that
Bassano brings the line between the sacred and secular
almost to vanishing point. Although Savonarola preached
on the Ark with such unction, as became the prophet of a
new deluge, the just Noah himself seems the least religious
figure in the Old Testament, perhaps because — after so
mucli water — he took too much wine. There is even a
tradition recorded by Ibn Yachya that after the Flood he
emigrated to Italy and studied science. At any rate
Bassano always treated him as a mere travelling showman,
packing his animals and properties for the next stage. In
a picture at Padua Noah's sons and daughters are doing
up their luggage — one almost sees the labels — and Noah,
with his few thin white hairs, remonstrates agitatedly
with Shem — or it may be Ham or Japhet — who is appar-
ently muddling the boxes. A lion and lioness are treading
the plank to the Ark, into which a Miss Noah is just push-
ing the leisurely rump of a pig, which even the lions at its
tail fail to accelerate. Countless other pairs of every
description, including poultry, jostle one another amid a
confusion of pots, wash-tubs, sacks, and bundles, the birds
alone finding comfortable perching-room on the trees.
Mrs. Noah wears her hair done up in a knot with pearls
just like the Venetian ladies, and a billy-cock hat lies on one
of the bundles. In his Sheep-shearing (in the Pinacoteca
Estense of Modena) Bassano throws over all pious pre-
tences and becomes unblushingly Dutch — nay, double-
Dutch, for he drags in agricultural operations and cooking
as well as sheep-shearing.
But it is in Turin that Bassano's Batavianism runs riot.
For his market-place is a revel of fowls, onions, prezels^
eggs, carcases, sheep, rams, mules, dogs gnawing bones,
market-women, chafferers, with a delicious little boy whose
282 ITALIAN FANTASIES
sliirt hangs out behind his vivid red trousers. And his
Cupid at the Forge of Vulcan is an extravaganza in copper
pots and pans ; and yet another market masterpiece is an
inventory of all he loved — butcher's meat and rabbits and
geese and doves, and lungs and livers, and gherkins and
melons, and cocks and hens, and copper pans and pewter
spoons, and a coav and a horse and an owl and lambs, all
jostling amid booths and stalls on a pleasant rustic back-
ground as in a Tintoretto Paradise of luscious paint-
abilities.
Gaudenzio Ferrari has the same love of sheep, and these,
with horses and dogs, force their way into his pictures.
The Bible is an encyclopasdia of themes, and even had any
subject been wanting, apocrypha and sacred legend would
have provided it. For his pet lambs Ferrari goes to the
copious broidery on the Gospel, and his Angels predicting
the Birth of Maria is really a study in sheep on the back-
ground of a domed and towered Italian city. Giotto too
had attempted sheep, though they are more like pigs, and
dogs, though they are elongated and skinny ; his camel
with grotesque ears and a sun-bonnet one can forgive.
The lives of the saints supplied other opportunities for
" Dutch" pictures in the shape of miracles at home. Tit-
ian himself stooped to record the miracle of putting on
again the foot which the man who had kicked his mother
cut off in remorse. And in the same Scuola of the Confra-
ternity of St. Antony at Padua you may see the neglectful
nurse carrying safely to its parents at table the babe she
had allowed to boil.
And yet despite all these manifold opportunities, no
Italian seems quite to get the veracious atmosphere of the
Dutch and to achieve the dignity of Art without depart-
ing from the homeliness of Nature. No Italian has brought
Christ into the street so boldly as Erasmus Quellinus in
that picture in the Museo Vicenza in which a girl with a
basket of live hens on her head stops to watch the fat
HIGH ART AND LOW 283
Dutch baby sleeping in its mother's arms. Despite the
unreal presence of adoring saints in the crowd, there is
here a true immanence of divinity in everyday reality.
The sixteenth-century Italian Baroccio did indeed depict
a Dutch peasant-feast in his Last Supper in the cathedral
of Urbino, with its bare-legged boy cook stooping for plat-
ters from a basket and its dog drinking at a bronze dish, but
its homeliness is marred by the hovering of angels. Realism
unadorned is essayed by Fogolino in his Holy Family in
Vicenza, with the carpenter's shop, the rope of yarn, the
hammer ; with a boy Christ in a black tunic saying grace
before a meal of boiled eggs, pomegranate, and grapes,
washed down by a beaker of red wine ; with the Madonna
bending solicitously over him, her wooden spoon poised
over her bowl; but, alas ! the whole effect is of a cheap
oleograph.
But then Fogolino was not a great painter, and it would
have been interesting to see a superb craftsman like Paul
Veronese try his hand at homely nature, unadorned by
great space-harmonies and decorative magnificences. As
it was, he had the delight of a Dutchman in dogs and cats,
copper pots and jugs, and earthen pans and groaning ta-
bles and glittering glasses, and these it is which fascinate
him, far more than the spiritual aspect of the Supper in
the House of the Pharisee^ so that even when lie wishes
to paint the soul of the pink-gowned Venetian Magdalen,
he paints it through a little bowl which she overturns in
her emotion at kissing the feet of Christ. This is why
meals are the prime concern of Veronese, obsess him more
than even his noble pillared rhythms and arclied perspec-
tives. How eagerly he grasps at The Marriage of Cana
and Tlie Disciples at Emmaus and The Meal in the House
of Levi, with wiiich that hold-all of the Bible supplied him !
Spaces and staircases, arches and balconies and lordly
buildings, all the palatial poetry of Verona, with its fair
women and rich-robed men — these are his true adoration.
284 ITALIAN FANTASIES
and he paints, not Jesus, but the loaves and fishes. Nay,
it may ahnost be said that unless there be food in the pic-
ture Veronese grows feeble, and must have pillars at least
to prop him up. See, for example, his Susannah and the
Elders, with no trace of food and only a wall to sustain him.
When the Biblical cornucopia was wholly depleted of its
food-stuffs, he had to forage for manna, especially when
the need of decorating a monastic refectory was added to
his own passion for provender. One of his discoveries was
Tfie Banquet of Gregory the G-reat, which is in the Monas-
tery of the Madonna del Monte outside Vicenza and which
is based on the legend that Gregory invited twelve poor
men to eat with him and Christ turned up as one of them.
But Christ, who is removing the cover from a fowl, is less
striking than Paul Veronese himself — who stands on the
inevitable balcony with his own little boy — and at best a
mere item in the rhythm of pillars and staircases and sky-
effects. Nothing brings out the defect of Veronese as a
religious painter so clearly as a comparison of his Disciples
at Emmaus with Titian's. Titian too gives us fine shades
of bread and fruit and wine, and even a little " Dutch "
dog under the table ; Titian too plays with pillars and a
romantic background. But how his picture is suffused
with the spirit I These things know their place, are ab-
sorbed in the luminous whole. A certain blurred softness
in the modelling, a certain subdued glow in the colouring
— as of St. Mark's — give mystery and atmosphere. The
food is, so to speak, transubstantiated.
Even Moretto's Supper at Emmaus (in Brescia) is supe-
rior to Veronese's, though his Christ in pilgrim's cockle-hat
and cloak has to the modern eye the look of an officer with
a cocked hat and a gold epaulette.
But Veronese is not the only Italian who would have
been happier as a lay painter. I am convinced that some
of the romanticists of the Renaissance were born with
the souls of Dutchmen, and these, as it happens, the
HIGH ART AND LOW 285
very men who have not worn well ; a proof that they
were out of their element and gave up to romance
and religion what was meant for realism. Take Guido
Reni, the very synonym of a fallen star, the Aurora in
Rome, perhaps his one enduring success — though even
here Aurora's skirt is of too crude a blue, and there is
insufficient feeling of mountain and sea below her. His
portrait by Simone Cantarini da Pesaro shows him with
a short grey beard, a black doublet, a lawn collar, and
a rather pained look — there is nothing of the Aurora
in this sedate and serious figure. And better than
either his violent Caravaggio martyrology or his later
mythologic poesy I find his portraits of his mother and
his foster-mother ; the mother in black with a black
turn-down collar, a muslin coif, and grey hair thinning
at the temples, and tlie foster-mother a peasant woman
with bare and brawny arms. The St. Peter Reading
in the Brera is also a strong study of an old man's head.
Moroni had the good sense or the good fortune to
shake himself almost free of religious subjects and to
produce a Tailor who is worth tons of Madonnas, but
even he did not utterly escape the church-market, and
when one examines such a picture as his lladonna and
Son, St. Catherine, St. Francis and the Donor in the
Brera, one rejoices even more that an overwhelming
percentage of his product is pure portraiture. For the
holy women in this picture are quite bad ; St. Francis
is rather better, but the real Moroni appears only in the
smug donor who prays, his clasped hands showing his
valuable ring. Here, of course, the painter had simply
to reproduce his sitter. As much can be said of Garofalo
and many another religious painter, whose "Donors"
often constitute the sole success of their pious composi-
tions.
Lorenzo Lotto, too, should perhaps have confined him-
self to portraiture, if of a fashionable clientele. His pretty
286 ITALIAN FANTASIES
Adoration of the Infant might be any mother adoring
any infant. Near it — in the Palazzo Martinengo in
Brescia — Girolamo Romanino has a frightful fresco in
tlie grand manner, and quite a good portrait of an old
gentleman ; which suggests that Romanino too should
have avoided the classic. There is an altar-piece of his
in Padua which, although by no means devoid of beauty,
confirms this suggestion, for the Madonna and Child
lack character and originality, and are infinitely inferior
to the Dutch painting of the robes. The whole compo-
sition, indeed, glows and has depth only in its lower
and more terrestrial part, including in that term the
little girl angel who plays a tambourine below the
throne.
Bronzino was another victim to his pious epoch, though
he emancipated himself almost as largely as Moroni.
His Madonna in the Brera is remarkable for the secular
modernity of the Virgin's companions. On her right
is an ultra-realistic old woman ; on her left Bernard
Shaw looks down with his sarcastic, sceptical gaze.
Even the Netherlanders who had had the fortune to
be born free would, after their wander-years in Italy,
come back as Italians and paint in the grand manner.
Hence the religious and historic Van Dycks which com-
pare so poorly with the portraits, hence Rembrandt's fat
vrow as Madonna, hence the Lenten attempts of Ru-
bens to bant.
AN EXCURSION INTO THE GROTESQUE : WITH
A GLANCE AT OLD MAPS AND MODERN
FALLACIES
Touching is that quaint theological tree in the cell of
sainted Antoninus in San Marco, upon whose red oval
leaves grow the biographies of the brethren. They lived,
they prayed, they died — that is all. One little leaf
suffices to tell the tale. This brother conversed with the
greatest humility, and that excelled in silence. A third
was found after his death covered with a rough hair shirt
(^aspro eilieio'). In the holy shade of this goodly tree sits
St. Dominic, separating — as though symbolically — the
monks on his right from the nuns on his left.
Naivete can no further go. And, indeed, if one were to
regard the naivete and forget the sweet simplicity, there is
much in the mediaeval world that one would relegate to
the merely absurd. The masterpieces of Art have been
sufficiently described. What a book remains to be written
upon its grotesques !
The word is said to derive from the arabesques found in
grottoes or excavated Roman tombs ; those fantastic com-
binations of the vegetable and animal worlds by which the
art of Islam avoided the representation of the real. But
by the art of Christendom the grotesque was achieved
with no such conscientious search after the unreal. Nor
have I in mind its first fumblings, its crudities of the cata-
combs, its simplicities of the missal and the music-book,
its Byzantine paintings with their wooden figures and gold
embroidery. I am not even thinking of those early
Masters whose defects of draughtsmanship were balanced
287
288 ITALIAN FANTASIES
by a delicious primitive poetry, which makes a Sienese
Madonna preferable to a Raphael, and the early mosaics of
St. Mark's more desirable than the sixteenth-century work
that has replaced them. The grotesque lies deeper than
unscientific drawing ; it mingles even with the work
of the most scholarly Masters, and springs from the
absence of a sense of history or a sense of humour. That
the Gospel incidents should be depicted in Italian land-
scape and with Italian costumes was perhaps not unnatural,
since, as I have already pointed out, every nation remakes
the Christ in its own image — psychologically when not
physically. Even the Old Testament was de-Orientalised
by Raphael and his fellow-illustrators. Bonifacio Vero-
nese, for example, put Italian hills and music-books into
The Finding of Moses, and his Egypt is less Eastern
than the Venice he lived in. But that the fancy-dress
Bible should include also Doges and Cardinals and Magni-
ficent Families, and that a Tintoretto in everyday clothes
should look on at his own Miracle of St. Mark or a Moretto
come to his own Supper at Emmaus, this it is that lifts the
eyebrows of a modern. One can permit Dominican friars
to witness The Incredulity of St. Thomas, or Franciscans
to assist — as in Marco Basaiti's picture — at The Agony
in the Garden. These holy brethren are at least in the
apostolic chain ; and in the latter picture, which is becom-
ingly devotional, the scene is suggested as a mystic vision
to justify the presence of these anachronistic spectators.
But how is it possible to tolerate proud Venetian senators
at The Ascension of Christ, or to stomach the Medici at
the building of the Tower of Babel ? It is true sacred
subjects had become a mere background for lay portraits,
but what absence of perspective !
It would be an interesting excursion to trace the steps
by which the objective conception of a picture — true to
its own time and place — was reached, or the evolution by
which singleness of subject was substituted for exuberance
, EXCURSION INTO THE GROTESQUE 289
of episodes arid ideas, till at last Art could flower in a
lovely simplicity like that of Simone Martini's Annuncia-
tion. You shall see St. Barbara throned at the centre of
her anecdotal biography, or the Madonna della Misericordia
sheltering virtues under her robe, while her history circles
around her. Even when the picture itself is simple and
single, the predella is often a congested commentary upon
the text, if, indeed, it has any relevant relation to the text
at all. What can be more charming than the little angels
round the throne of the Madonna in Benaglio Francesco's
picture in Verona — angels with golden vases of red and
white roses, angels playing spinets and harps and pipes
and lutes and little drums and strange stringed instruments
that have passed away ! But what can be more grotesque
than the predella of this delightful picture, the Entomb-
ment and the saints with the insignia of their martyrdom
(hammer and tongs and fiery braziers), and the cock that
crew and the kiss of Judas !
In a picture by Lorenzo Monaco at Florence the Virgin
and St. John raise Christ out of his tomb, and above are
not only a cross and the instruments of martyrdom, but a
bust and floating hands, while spice vessels figure below.
To a modern the mere treatment of God the Father
suffices to create a category of the grotesque, even though
His head has usually the venerable appearance of the aged
Ruskin and He is kept a discreet kit-kat or a half-length.
But Fra Bartolommeo in Lucca paints Him at full length
with His toes on a little angel and a placard in His hand
bearing the letters alpha and omega. And Lorenzo Ve-
neziano parts His hair neatly in the middle.
Our catalogue of grotesques is swollen by the explana-
tory scrolls and inscriptions of the early pictures ; by the
crude religious allegories, in which devils gnash teeth
when Virtue routs Temptation ; by the political cartoons
at Siena — of Good and Bad Government (though these
are more primitive than comic) ; by the literal genealogic
290 ITALIAN FANTASIES
trees — like that of Jesse in St. Mark's, or on the stone
door-posts of the Baptistery of Parma ; by the Tree of the
Cross in Florence, which shoots out branches with round
leaves containing scenes from the life of the central cruci-
fied figure, and supports a pyramid of saints and celestials ;
by the devices of symbolism for representing abstract ideas
or identifying saints. All haloes are proleptic even from
childhood, and a martyr and his passion can never be
parted. Those poor martyrs, what they suffered at the
hands of painters without a gleam of humour !
'Twas not till I had found out for myself that the over-
whelming preponderance in Art of the Crucifixion^ the
Descent from the Cross, the Entombment, and the Pietd
were due in no small measure to the opportunities they
afforded of painting the nude figure, that I discovered why
St. Sebastian was the most popular of all the saints, ex-
ploited in every other sacred picture, and — naked and
unashamed — the almost inseparable attejidant of the Ma-
donna when she sits in saintly society. The superiority
of his martyrdom at the hands of a troop of archers to
other paintable forms of death leaps to the eye, for the
arrows must be seen quivering in the target of his naked
figure, though I have seen this pictorially precious nudity
marred by such a plethora of arrows — as in the Opera del
Duomo at Florence — that the saint is become a porcupine.
The grim humour of the situation lies in the fact that St.
Sebastian recovered from his arrows to be subsequently
clubbed to death, but this deutero-martyrdom is hushed
up by the Italian painters. To add to St. Sebastian's suf-
ferings at their hands, he has been made a plague-saint
and his invaluable nudity haled into plague-pictures and
plague-churches, as by Bartolommeo Montagna, who turned
his arrows into the metaphoric shafts of the Pest. Not
that I can blame the Italian painters. If I had ever been
inclined to underrate the artistic significance of the nude,
I should have been converted by the full-dressed angelets
EXCURSION INTO THE GROTESQUE 291
of Borgognone's GresH Moriente in the Pavian Certosa.
These delicious little creatures were once without a fig-
leaf, but at the Father Superior's protest they were clad
in belted tunics and skirts, thus becoming squat little
figures whose wings burst comically through their clothes.
What might have been a masterpiece is thus a grotesque.
But if St. Sebastian must go serapiternally branded with
arrows, like a British convict, it is St. Lawrence who has
the clumsiest symbol to drag about. He and his gridiron
are as inseparable as Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.
Often it stands on end and seems the iron framework of
a bed. Like his halo, it is with him long before his mar-
tyrdom, as it accompanies him to heaven. Only once in
all Florence do I remember seeing it in its proper place
— under the grilling saint — and then he is turning his
other side to the flame in true culinary Christianity (" Jam
versa: assatiis es^"). The artist has spared us nothing
except the towels with which the angels wiped his face,
and these may be seen at Rome in S. Giovanni in Laterano.
St. Stephen is also heavily burdened with the stones that
still keep falling on his head. In Bernardo Daddi's fres-
coes in S. Croce they stick to him like burrs. St. John,
transformed to an angel, contemplates his own (haloed)
head on a platter, as if thinking two heads are better than
one. Lucy keeps her eyes in a dish. St. Bartholomew
holds his skin. St. Nicholas — the patron of commerce
and the pawnbroker — is known by his three golden balls.
Even families had their symbols, and the Colonnas, the
complacent Colonnas, had themselves painted as soaring
heaven Wc\rds at the last trump, each with a small column
rising from his shoulder — literal pillars of Church and
State.
These symbols, and many others less grotesque, dis-
appear either with the gradual obscuration of the legends
or the development of purer artistic ideas. There is an-
other kind of symbolism, which may be called the short-
292 ITALIAN FANTASIES
hand of primitive art, and which may be studied in the
archaic mosaics of St. Mark's. Egypt dwindles to a gate
(as though it and not Turkey were the Porte). Alexan-
dria is expressed by its Pharos. Trees stand for the Mount
of Olives. There is much of the rebus in these primitive
representations. The Byzantine symbolism of St. Mark's
reaches its most curious climax in the representation of
the four rivers that watered the Biblical Garden of Eden
by classical river gods. The palm branch as the short-
hand for martyrdom is a more congruous convention. In
the mosaics of S. Vitale in Ravenna Jerusalem and Bethle-
hem are expressed by towers, in Sant' Appolinare Nuovo
a few Roman buildings stand for Classe. In a Venetian
painting ascribed to Carpaccio, Bethlehem is spelt by
palm-trees and a queer beast tied to one of them, probably
meant for a camel.
A more pretentious form of symbolism lies in the allegory
proper, but even when the painting avoids the grotesque,
the meaning is often hopelessly obscure. Such popular
pictures as Botticelli's Spring^ Titian's Sacred and Profane
Love and Paris Bordone's Lovers are still unsolved puzzles,
and perhaps only the more satisfactory for that. But
allegories that are enigmatic without being beautiful are
merely bores. Such are the two pictures of the school of
Lazzaro Sebastiani in Venice, in which a company of
figures holding scrolls is perched in the boughs of a tree,
looking at a distance like a full orchestra. Both of these
pictures come from monasteries, and are therefore to be
presumed sacred. And in one of them Adam and Eve
are unmistakable under the tree, with mice and lizards
gambolling around them, so that the tree must be the Tree
of Life or of Knowledge ; but who is the youth who stands
beneath the other tree in a strange city of spires and towers
and plays on a golden 'cello, while a maiden offers him an
apple ? Such intellectually faded pictures illustrate
clearly the limitations of painting as a medium for in-
EXCURSION INTO THE GROTESQUE 293
tellectual propositions. But the most lucid of allegories
or symbolisms has its own peculiar pitfalls. Luca
Mombella introduces into a Coronation of the Virgin a
figure of " Humilitas " who is magnificently attired and
wears pearls in her hair, while Montagna's Nestor Victorious
over the Vices (in the Louvre) proves that most of the
Vices are at least devoted mothers, for they burden their
flight by snatching up their satyr-like .brood.
But these confused or unintelligible allegories are far
preferable to symbolisms which are perfectly decipherable
yet perfectly repellent, like Giovanni da Modena's fresco
in S. Petronio which shows us Christ on his cross adonis-
ing between two female figures, one bestriding a fuU-maned
lion (the Catholic Church) and the other riding blindfold
on a goat (Heresy). The lion has four different feet —
a pedal man (St. Matthew), a pedal ox (St. Luke), an
eagle's claw (St. John), and a real foot (St. Mark). The
blood from the side of Christ flows into the chalice held
by the Church, and in the middle of the stream is formed
the wafer. The four ends of the cross turn into hands :
the upper hand opens with a key the gate of Paradise —
strangely like a church ; the lower hand opens Hell with
a winch ; the right hand blesses the Catholic Church, the
left stabs Heresy. Garofalo has a vast but still poorer
fresco of this sort in Ferrara, brought from a refectory.
Each arm of the cross branches into two hands engaged in
much the same occupations as in the Bolognese fresco save
that one hand crowns Wisdom. The foot of the cross
also turns into hands, the right holding a cross towards
Limbo, the function of the left fortunately faded. It is
refreshing to turn from such geometrical symbolisms to
the meaningless flower-patterns of F. dei Libri, in which
Crucifixions, cherubs reading, satyrs blowing brass instru-
ments and jDif^^i playing citharas or puffing at bagpipes
are interwoven with wriggling snakes, contemporary poets
and ecclesiasts, and shaven monks performing service.
294 ITALIAN FANTASIES
This, of course, is the conscious grotesque, like the
borders which Girolamo dei Libri put round a serious
picture of the Magi — vignettes of other scenes, hands of
donors, floral patterns and scutcheons with strange ramping
beasts.
To the deliberate grotesque belong, of course, the stone
beasts that crouch before the old cathedrals, the griffin of
Perugia, and the heraldic beasts of Tura. I should have
added Raphael's dragons to the same category were it not
that though deliberately drawn and though delightfully
grotesque, they are mere representation of an object
that happens to be grotesque in itself, and this is no more
the artistic grotesque than the portrait of a beautiful
woman is necessarily the artistic beautiful. There is a
deal of movement, spirit, and invention in these great
worms of Raphael, and every individual St. George, St.
Michael or St. Margaret is handsomely provided with an
original and unique dragon, each with an elegant precision
of fearsome form. But Raphael drew with equal hand
and the same loving seriousness a monster or a ]\Iadonna.
Equally conscientious is the Medusa's head once ascribed
to Da Vinci, with its carefully combed snaky locks and its
frogs and bats and toads. Carpaccio's dragon has far
more fun in him, for all his grisly litter of skulls and
skeletons.
And I like Vasari's dragon in his St. Creorge in Arezzo,
with its spitting double tongue and its half-eaten man, and
the gorgeous dragon on a piece of majolica in Urbino,
into whose mouth St. George is driving his spear, and the
fierce-clawed, winged dragon of the spirited Tintoretto in
the National Gallery, and above all the dragon of Piero
di Cosimo's Andromeda in Florence, with that delightful
curling tail and that broad back on which Perseus can
stand securely while delivering his stroke.
But the deliberate grotesque without fun — this, I con-
fess, is a note in Italian art which I find disquieting. For
EXCURSION INTO THE GROTESQUE 295
into this polished and palatial world there intrudes at times
a touch of something sinister, cynical and mocking, as
though the artist, constricted by pompous conventions,
sought relief by sticking out his tongue. Leonardo —
whatever Mona Lisa's smile may mean — kept his grotes-
querie for his caricatures. But other of the Masters were
less discriminating. This something of enigmatic and per-
turbing — perhaps it is only the acute Renaissance con-
sciousness of the skeleton at the feast — I find most of all
in Crivelli — Venetian soldier, as he once signed himself
— whose rich lacquer work has had more attention than
this diablerie of his. Nobody else touches the grotesque
so consciously, dares to give us such quaint, ill-drawn angels
as those in his Madonna and Child in Verona, with that
bird-pecked giardinetto of fruits over the Virgin's head,
and Christ in a gold frock as in some Byzantine mosaic.
The microscopic Crucifixion is perhaps no more incon-
gruous with. the subject of this picture than its landscapes
seen through arches, its chivalry and pomp of horses.
But one cannot help feeling that Crivelli had a grim joy
in perching that vulture on the large gaunt tree. And in
his Brera Madonna, in which St. Peter holds two heavy
real keys, gilded and silvered, he gives the celestial door-
keeper a crafty ecclesiastical look, while his St. Dominic
looks sawny. Even his baby Christ is cruelly squeezing a
little bird. There is a leer in the whole picture. The
accident of juxtaposition has accentuated the wilfulness of
Crivelli's grimace, for in the Brera there are two Madonnas,
side by side, yet at the extreme poles of his genius. In
the Madonna della Candeletta we have beauty unalloyed.
The tiny candle standing at the foot of the Madonna's
throne strikes, indeed, a note of bizarrerie, but it is beauti-
ful bizarrerie, and the Madonna, marvellously robed and
embowered in fruit and leaves, who is offering a great
pear to a charming child, is less the Mother of God than
a crowned queen of faery with an infant prince in a
296 ITALIAN FANTASIES
golden robe and a golden halo, and less a queen with a
prince than a wonderful decorative pattern, a study in
gold and marble and precious stones and brocaded gowns,
broidered, rich-dyed, and fantastic with arabesques. And
beside this poem hangs the other Crivelli, a gaunt crucifix
with ugly, contorted figures of the Madonna and St. John.
And it is sardonic humour, not naivete^ that has turned
his St. Sebastian (in the Museo Poldi Pezzoli) into a
porcupine.
But even Giovanni Bellini, with his sense of restful
perfection and unity of theme, cannot resist putting in
microscopic accessories that only catch the eye from
anear, as into his green-throned Madonna and Child in the
Brera he introduces horseman, two men talking by a tree,
a shepherd, a flock of sheep, and, strangest of all, a
shadowy ape crouching on a tomb which bears his signa-
ture : " Johannes Bellinus." What is the significance of
this shadowy ape ? What mockery of the theme, or of
humanity or of himself was here shadowed forth ?
And that even more sinister ape in Tura's Virgin sup-
porting the Dead Christ — what does he here ? The
mother, seated on the tomb, holds the poor bleeding figure
as though it were again her baby. The}'^ are alone, they
and the thieves and the cross ; other men are moving
away, bearing a ladder. The picture is complete, a grim,
solemn, soul-moving unity. Why then did Tura, that
master of the conscious grotesque, throw in that grinning
monkey on that strange fruit-tree ? Was he, who lived to
see the Borgian Pope become the Vicar of Christ, suggest-
ing sardonically what quaint sequels of orgiastic splendour,
what pride and lust of life, were to spring from this tragic
sacrifice ?
A less perturbing monkey looks on with other creatures
at The Creation of Man in a Venetian picture now in
Ravenna. A red-girt, blue-mantled Deity floats over a
huge recumbent Adam, whose thigh he touches, while the
EXCURSION INTO THE GROTESQUE 297
monkey, eating an apple, appears to follow with interest
the next phase in evolution, when fruit would be forbid-
den.
Apes appear again in Fogolino's Adoration of the Magi
in Vicenza ; squatting below the castled rocky ways and
mountain-bridges, over which winds the great procession
with its beautifully caparisoned horses. These apes, like
the ape on the elephant's back in Raphael's treatment of
the same theme, might be merely designed to suggest the
East, were it not for the disconcerting, mysterious,
lobster-red, sprawling wings? What further note of
discord do we catch here ?
But it is in the unconscious grotesque that Italian art
is richest. I have already shown some of the trap-doors
that lead to it, but to enumerate them all is impossible.
There are so many ways in which humour can be absent.
Perhaps one might generalise as a source of the uncon-
scious grotesque the convention dating from the Bj'zan-
tine period which expresses souls as small swaddled dolls.
See, for example, Paolo da Venezia's Death of Mari/, where,
by a seeming inversion of rSles, Christ flies up to heaven
with his mother-doll. Perhaps, too, all pictures connected
with stigmata or vernicles are foredoomed to farce.
There may be a noble way of expressing this material
transference, but I have never seen one. St. Veronica
receiving on a handkerchief a head with neatly parted
hair is prosaic if not comic, while St. Francis receiving
the stigmata is simply ludicrous.
In a picture in the Museum of Vicenza the kneeling
saint is apparently flying a kite by red strings passing
through holes in his hands and feet. The seeming kite
is really a small winged nude flgure, feathered at head
and feet like a cock — the six-winged seraph of the
Legenda Trium Sociorum that bears the crucified figure,
— red strings passing through corresponding holes in his
head and feet. The treatment of the same scene by
298 ITALIAN FANTASIES
Giotto (in the Louvre) gives this kite-like appearance to
Jesus himself.
Even more absurdly geometrical is Gentile da Fabriano's
handling of the theme at Urbino, five strong red cords
passing to the saint's breast, hands and feet from an
eight-winged figure on a cross, naked to its waist. It
is a relief to find these Euclidian lines absent from the
representation in the church of Assisi itself, though it is
only in seventeenth-century painters like Sisto Badaloc-
chio in Parma or Rochetti in Faenza that the stigmata are
transmitted from a celestial glory or down a broad ray
of golden light. Macrino d'Alba at Turin shows the
saint receiving the image of a praying Christ on a slate
with a golden frame, and this image has the tonsured head
of a monk !
And what can be quainter than the six-winged cherubs
who hover round the Madonna in a picture of the Botti-
celli school at Parma ? Two of their red wings are spread,
the second pair crossed like legs, and the last pair crossed
over the head, making a sort of pointed cap. The faces
attached to these wings are mature, as of elderly, clean-
shaven barristers. Another comical circle of these ser-
aphs, a few with blue wings, tends to spoil a charming
fifteenth-century Coronation of the Virgin in Florence.
Martyrdoms, too, are a rich mine of the grotesque, as
witness the boiling of St. John in the National Gallery,
with its accessories of the bellows and the blowpipe, and
God lifting the saint bodily up to heaven.
In the exhilarating frescoes of Montagna in the church
of the Eremitani at Padua, St. James's hair, which is yel-
lowish throughout, turns black, apparently, under the hor-
ror of an impending mallet, despite that his halo seems
like a protective plate of yellow armour. A very gay
and pleasing picture this.
Another source of the grotesque is the angelic aero-
plane. In an Adoration of the Shepherds by Francesco
EXCURSION INTO THE GROTESQUE 299
Zaganelli in Ravenna three wingless angels employ cher-
ubs to bear them aloft, balancing themselves upon the
winged heads. One needs a cherub for each foot, the
second places both feet upon the same head, the third,
expertest gymnast of all, maintains himself upon one foot.
Another primitive aeroplane may be seen at Ferrara, in
The Assumption of St. Mary of Egypt. St. Mary rises on
a platform supported from beneath by a series of nude
and clothed angels, to the amaze of a worthy signor walk-
ing in the field of strange palms amid quaint green build-
ings. A rabbit, a pigeon and a bird continue absolutely
indifferent to the phenomenon.
In a Carpaccio in the same town the cherubs fly, three
heads together, like a celestial molecule. In Zacchia da
Vezzano's Assumption of the Virgin at Lucca she rides on
cherubs. There is an angelic aeroplane in a painted re-
lief at San Frediano in Lucca, and in Guido Reni's Im-
maculate Conception at Forli (where the Virgin stands on
a leaf on a cherub's head), and in Lippo Lippi's picture at
Prato of the Madonna handing down her girdle to St.
Thomas. Zuccari Taddeo in the Pitti uses the angelic
aeroplane to carry up ?dary Magdalen, who is further pro-
vided with a number of fussy heralds and avant-coureurs.
Marco Antonio Franceschini in the Palazzo Durazzo-Palla-
vicini of Genoa likewise carries up the Magdalen on the
backs of angels, her familiar hair streaming over her fa-
miliar breast. Raphael's Jlsion of Ezekiel suggests to
the profane, God the Father holding up His arms as if to
start a flying competition.
But when every generalisation is made, it is the individ-
ual genius for blundering that opens up the most spa-
cious vistas of humourless humour. Byzantine art affords,
of course, the most naive illustrations. In the sarcophagi
of the Christian emperors at Ravenna you may see sheep
eating dates from tall palms. In the mosaics of tlie vesti-
bule of St. Mark's you may see humanity unconcernedly
300 ITALIAN FANTASIES
drowning in the Deluge. Some, it is true, are whirled
helplessly on their backs, but others are quite apathetic
among the blue, curly waves. Noah looking out of the
little folding doors of the Ark is as quaint as in the mo-
saics of Monreale Cathedral in Sicily. In the ancient
church of S. Zeno at Verona there is an eleventh-century
fresco of the Resurrection of Lazarus in which the by-
standers hold their noses — a poetic touch that was re-
peated in later treatments of the theme.
In the Scuola of the Confraternity of St. Antony at
Padua, Domenico Campagnola has a fresco, A Hungry
She-Ass adores the Eucharistic Sacrament hy a Miracle
of the Saint, in order to convert a Heretic. In vain are
heaps of green stuffs and corn spread and baskets ten-
dered her and piles of beans ; the ass, on her front knees,
adores the Eucharist on a priestly table, so that even the
baby lad is wrought up to adoration. One is irresistibly
reminded of Goethe's landlady at Rome calling him to see
her cat adore God the Father like a Christian, when it
was licking the beard of the bust, probably because of
the grease that had sunk into it. In the same Scuola
there is a representation of the saint's preaching which
liberates his hearers from an approaching rain-storm.
People all around are flying to get out of the rain, not
knowing that the saint's sermon is dry. There are
charming figures of mothers and children in the audience
which atone for the unconscious humour.
But when one considers the libraries written on Italy,
it is strange that that book on her grotesques should be as
yet merely an impious aspiration, and that nobody has
mocked even at those horrid little waxworks that represent
the plague-stricken. Meseems the blessed word "Renais-
sance" has hypnotised student and pleasure-pilgrim alike,
but some day an irreverent refugee from the Renaissance
will gather up the threads I but indicate. In that delec-
table volume of his there will be a chapter on the camel.
EXCURSION INTO THE GROTESQUE 301
For the advent of the camel marks the faint beginnings
of an historic and geographic sense, and stands for all the
fantastic wonder-world of the East. Strange that the
Crusades or Venice's Eastern Empire should not have
earlier awakened the comparative consciousness. But the
East, with its quaintness and its barbaric colour, broke
very slowly upon the culture of Europe — Victor Hugo
had to rediscover it even for modern France. Despite
Altichiero's pig-tailed Tartars, it was not till the Byzan-
tine Empire was destroj^ed in 1453 and the Turks were
firmly established in Europe that the Christian world
became really aware that the East was a world of its own.
That conquest of Constantinople, from which the blessed
Renaissance is popularly dated, by sending so many Italians
flying home, must have provided Italy with Oriental
information as well as Greek manuscripts. And the
Renaissance (or re-born) camel represents the quickened
sense of local colour. At first, indeed, there is little im-
provement on the Giotto breed. Apparently none of the
fugitives rode off on camels. Such fat creatures as take
part in The Reception of the Venetian Ambassador (a pic-
ture of the school of Gentile Bellini) were never seen on
sand or land. The Magian kings should have come riding
on camels with swart servitors, but only a rare artist like
the animal-lover Gaudenzio Ferrari is bold enough to
attempt this local truth. And the result belongs to
comedy. But a people without circuses or zoological
gardens, to which the camel was as remote as the centaur,
was not keenly aware of the anatomical details of this
exotic beast, grotesque enough at its truest. And in
the hands of Gentile Bellini himself the creature be-
came quite possible, if still curious, and in that great
decorative picture St. Mark preaching in the Piazza of
Alexandria there is a real feeling of the turbaned,
shrouded and minareted East, even if the head-shawls
of the women do appear to cover top-hats and the
302 ITALIAN FANTASIES
giraffe strolls about the piazza and the dromedary is
led by a string.
Nor is Eusebio di San Giorgio's camel impossible in his
Adoration of the Magi in San Pietro, Perugia, though
immeasurably inferior to his oxen and his horses. Car-
paccio, too, gets something of Eastern architecture and
dress, if more of Venetian, into his St. Stephen at Jeru-
salem.
But after all there is more fascination in the primitive
artistry which knew no differences of Space or Time, no
colour but universal — id est, Italian — no place wwlike
home. The whole temper of these early painters seems to
me summed up in a picture in the Uf&zi by Pietro Loren-
zetti, who lived about 1350, Gli Anacoreti nella Tehaide.
A green water borders a white, curving shore, and land
and sea are a chaos of trees, houses, steeples, people, skiffs,
sailing-boats, all of the same size and brightness. A like
absence of perspective — geometrical, spiritual or humor-
ous — is seen in Benagilio's fresco in Verona of Christ
preaching hy the Lake of Galilee, or Giotto's fresco in
Santa Croce depicting the Apocalypse of St. John. In
the Lake of Galilee float two gigantic ducks and a gondola,
while the audience includes mediteval falconers and pipers.
Patmos is a vague turtle-shaped island, and the saint
squats in the middle of it, while above hover the celestial
figures. Temporal perspective is as confounded as spatial.
Hence all those anachronisms which give us pause. Cima-
bue's Madonna consorts with the Doctors of the Church,
Fra Angelico's with Dominicans, Alvise Vivarini's with
Franciscans. As Dante exf)lains, the imagination can
ignore Time, just as — though his dubious comparison
weakens his explanation — it can conceive two obtuse
angles in one triangle. A truer simile may perhaps be
drawn from the Baptistery of Pisa, where the janitor —
humble link in the " nutritive chain " — chants a note to
show the wonderful echo, and after its long reverberation
EXCURSION INTO THE GROTESQUE 303
has been sufficiently demonstrated he sounds the notes of a
simple chord, one after another, so that the earlier notes
remain alive and enter into harmony with the new ones,
and one hears an enchanting quartet — yea, even a quintet
or a sextet. Sometimes he will set an even more complex
chord in vibration, and all the air is full of delicious har-
mony. Even so the mediseval thinkers conceived of the
dead and the quick, the pioneers and the successors, all liv-
ing in unison, vibrating simultaneously though they had
started in sequence, all harmoniously at one in the echoing
halls of Fame. And so things disparate could be pictured
united — anachronism was merely man putting together
what blind Time had put asunder. Everything happened
in the timeless realm of ideas. And often — as we saw in
Sicily — the strictly chronological aspect of things is,
indeed, irrelevant. Space and Time are shifting illusions
that the spirit disregards. Those who are in harmony are
of the same hour and of the same place.
Nor do I know where to look for a better map of the
world as it figured itself in the mediaeval mind — for your
atlas with its assumption that man inhabits mere mounds
of earth fantastically patterned is as absurd as your school
chronology — than that naive Mappamondo which Pietro
di Puccio frescoed on the walls of the Campo Santo of
this same white Pisa. The universe is held in the literal
hands of God, whose haloed head appears dominatingly
above, not without a suggestion of a clerical band. In
the centre of the cosmos — note the geocentric glorifica-
tion — stands the earth, mapped out into continents by a
couple of single straight lines. (If Asia lies north of
Europe that is a mere turn to express its hyberborean
barbarism ; in Era Mauro's map in the Doge's Palace the
south has got to the top, perhaps because Venice was
there.) America, of course, is not. And yet there are
compensations even for the absence of America. For this
old world is circumscribed by circle on circle. On the
304 ITALIAN FANTASIES
rim of the third are perched the mere figures of the zodiac,
but the spaces between the remoter extra-terrestrial circles
are a-swarm with cherubs, all heads and wings, and float-
ing robed saints and endless haloed heads of the beatified.
The dim spaces below the cosmos are solidly garrisoned
by bishop with crozier and monk with breviary, and the
predella is full of suggestions of beauty and sanctity.
Thus the whole world lies serenely in the palms of God,
and saints and angels girdle it with circles of holiness.
This is, indeed, the true way to make a map — for the
actual shape of the world is only one of the factors of our
habitation, just as the actual features of a beloved face do
not constitute its total reality for us. 'Tis not eyes or
nose one sees so much as those mental circles due to
loving habit in which the face swims for us — the dear
haloing circles of tender experience. Rivers and moun-
tains have, indeed, an influence on life, just as the real
eyes and nose, but the world we live in is always more
mental than geographical, and the same rivers and moun-
tains serve the life of successive races. The Red Man's
America is not different from the White Man's on the
atlas — save by the black dots which mark the ephemeral
tumuli called cities — yet the America of the Trust and
the America of the Tomahawk are two different contin-
ents. The same thin curve marks the Thames up which
the pirate Vikings sailed and the Thames of Sunday
picnics. More veraciously did the Arab geographers
conceive of a country by its autochthones and not by its
configuration. For our country lives in us much more
than we live in our country.
And so, to-day, too, a true map would circumscribe our
globe — not with the equally non-existent circles of the
spatial latitude and longitude, but with those of the spirit-
ual latitude and longitude in which we float — only, I fear,
our modern Mappamondo would be girdled with dark rings
marked " Survival of the Fittest," " The Necessity for
EXCURSION INTO THE GROTESQUE 305
Navies," "The Need of Expansion," "The Divinity of the
DoUar " ; soldiers and syndicates would float around in
lieu of cherubs, nor would any divine hands appear up-
bearing us amid the infinite spaces.
That old Pisan map leads me to suspect that Swift saw
only half a fact when he complained that
" Geographers in Afric maps
With savage pictures fill their gaps."
True, many an old map might seem to attest the truth of
the accusation. There is a map of the Dark Continent in
the Museum of Venice, dated 1G51, with a camel, a uni-
corn, a dromedary, and a lion's tail — all put in by hand.
But in another map of " Apphrica " in the Arsenal of Venice
there are not only lions and tigers, but tents and veiled
figures, and the turrets and spires of strange buildings,
and a gay sprinkling of flags. Surely the old cartographer
was less concerned to fill his gaps than to express the poetry
of geography. Maps were, in truth, of mediocre use in
ancient times when the old Roman roads took one from
town to town. What profited an aeronaut's panorama?
Maps were only indispensable on the roadless seas. The
first maps in tlie modern sense were thus pragmatic, not
scientific, for it was from the mariner's map, or Portolano^
that rigid cartography arose. But even these coast charts
refused to be prosaic. There is one in the Venice Museum
— a view of Italy lying sideways, as if its famous foot were
asleep. Never have I seen a more joyous chart. It is all
glorious with the gold and vermilion of compasses and
crests and flying banners, while mountains stand out
in red and gold. It must have belonged to a jolly mariner.
In a complete Portolano of Europe each country flies its
national flag, amid a whirl of crests and compasses. And
the " Portolano del 1561 di Giacomo Maggiolo," which
may be seen in the Palazzo Bianco of Genoa, is illuminated
in gold, and blue and vermilion and green, sprinkled with
306 ITALIAN FANTASIES
compasses, sown with towered cities crowned by golden
flags and a-flutter with flying angels and banners and the
bellying sails of carracks, with kings seated on their thrones
in the middle of the sea, under glorious canopies crowned
with angels, while over the whole presides the Madonna
in her golden chair. IMost taking of the monarchs is the
King of Tartary, wearing a large moustaclie and surrounded
by golden scimitars.
There were no gaps to fill up in these Portolani. No,
the cynical Swift has missed the inwardness of these old
maps, in which Art was called in to give the touch of life
and reality and to eke out, not the barrenness of knowledge
in particular, but of science in general. There is in the
Ufiizi an old map of Italy which fills the Mediterranean
with boats and compasses, draws the mountains, sketches
the towered cities, and illumines the names with gold-leaf.
There is an old map of Venice which perches Father 2^ eptune
dominatingly in the middle, and symbolises the winds by
the curly locks of children blowing every way, and fills
the canals with sailing-boats and galleys and gondolas.
This is something like a map of Venice. On another,
which is more of a plan of the city with its buildings
named, Venice is alive with heraldic figures, and over the
roofs and domes fly winged lions and Neptune and Venus
and angels and warriors, while a stout-lunged angel blows
two trumpets at once. And the spaces of the sea are full
of brave beflagged vessels with swelling sails, and galleys
with many oars. Surely all this is less false than the dead
reticulation which expresses Venice in your modern map.
The map of Genoa, too, shows the arms of the city float-
ing over a sea crowded with red galleys and black merchant
ships and white sailing-boats.
In these old maps the dull spaces of the world are lit up
by fiery stars, trumpeting angels, and allegorical figures,
while another symbolic group, upholding a titulary tablet,
serves, as it were, to introduce the territory to the spectator.
EXCURSION INTO THE GROTESQUE 307
A wreathed lady and a male student thus combine to
present Arabia. Greece is introduced and presided over
by angels. " Terra nova detecta et Floridce promonto-
rium " are presented by a man holding a tablet, which records
how Henry VII. of England sent out John Cabot and his
son Sebastian, while the dry details are further vivified by
a superdominant figure of a gallant signor in a feathered
cap, hand on globe and learned tome at feet. Asia, as a
nymph with a camel, presides over a map of her continent,
while a prodigious Latin title — " Qua Asipe Regna et
Provincice Hac Tabula Continentur a Propopontide usque
ad Indos," &c. &c. — records how its three makers were
sent to Russia in the fifteenth century and how they ripped
up {dissuerunt} much in the published itineraries. One
of the trio, Ambrosius Contaremus, remained long in
Russia to study the less-known portions ; another, Josaphat
Barbarus, devoted himself for sixteen years to the provinces
round the Euxine and the Mseotian marsh. '•'•Perlustratos
commentariolo exposunt.''^
That old map of Frau Mauro which I have already
mentioned belongs to this same century, being dated
1459 ; a circular map this, in a gilded frame, with little
ships floating around and America away from home,
perhaps enjoying itself in Paris. Here our familiar
world shows upside down, which is, of course, as scien-
tific as being downside up. It is notable how Anglia
and Caledonia (or Anglia Barbara, as she is styled in
Church Latin) are disguised by this simple shifting of
the point of view, and how much like herself Hibernia
looks, even topsy-turvy. Another pre-American map
in the University of Ferrara pictures the winds per-
sonified, blowing from every quarter.
The Stones of Venice also assume the forms of maps,
as in those stone reliefs on the rococo fagade of S. Maria
Zobenigo opposite the Traghetto of the Lily. These
are town-maps — Candia, its name upborne by a flying
308 ITALIAN FANTASIES
boy angel ; Roma with its twin brethren at the wolf's
breast ; Corfu, characterised by its castle and its be-
flagged galleys. The symbolic shorthand, which I have
already noted in pictures, spread also to map-decoration
as in a map at the Arsenal, wherein iEgyptus is figured
by an elephant, Libia by giraffes, Judea by the crescent
and minarets, Germany by a winged sage, and " Holy
Russia" by churches.
If these old maps erred in the courses of rivers and
the lines of mountains and in ratios of space, they are
not so misleading as your modern atlas with its all too
accurate earth-measurements. For even your most primi-
tive map, your mediaeval figment, with Paradise on the
East, a gigantic Jerusalem in the centre, great spaces for
Gryphons and Cynocephali, Sciapodes and Anthropophagi,
and St. Brendan's Isles of the Blest marked clearly west
of the Canaries, gave in its way a less distort! ve im-
pression than that which we obtain from the most sci-
entific chart on Mercator's projection. Your modern
cartographer would persuade you that Canada is fifty
times as large as Italy, and Canada, contemplating her-
self on a school globe, already pouts her breast with
the illusion. In a true map, as distinguished from a
geographical, dead Space would shrink to its spiritual
nullity, and for its contribution to the human spirit,
for its amplitude of history and poesy, Sicily — Italy's
mere foot-note — would loom larger than all the prov-
inces of the Canadian Confederation.
And this misleading potency of the map scientific
engenders political as well as spiritual dangers. Tariff
Reform in Britain rests on the notion of exchanging
products preferentially with these great British colonies
which bulk on the map like continents, but which, as
yet in their infancy, only represent in all some poor ten
million souls against the homeland's forty millions.
Australia, beholding her unified contours from the Gulf
EXCURSION INTO THE GROTESQUE 309
of Carpentaria to Bass Strait, persists in the heroic
delusion that, despite the torridity and drought of her
Northern Territory, she is a single country, and that
country a white man's — nay, a Briton's exclusively.
For it is from the surplus population of the little island
in the Northern Sea that all these continents into which
Britain has blundered are to be filled up : a notion
which hives in the same brains that fever with alarm
over the exodus from her shores. And all save the
spherical maps foster an infinity of fallacies of dimen-
sion : drawn to fill the like-sized page in the atlas,
South America seems a twin of India ; Ireland and
Madagascar (which contains seven Erins) look much of a
muchness ; and Brazil, which is almost another Europe,
bulges in the imagination less than the Balkan Peninsula.
What wonder if statesmen have misguided the destinies
of nations and misdirected wars by false impressions
derived from atlases, with their deceptive distances and
their obscurations of the real character of territories,
rivers, or harbours. Seoul, the capital of Corea, Lord
Curzon tells us, seems on the river, yet it is three or
four miles away, and approachable only by a canal at
times shallow. "Get large maps," advised the late Lord
Salisbury ; but I would say, beware of maps altogether.
For your school map would foist upon you the delu-
sion that Morocco is not the East at all, but actually
ten degrees more westerly than London ! Whereas every
schoolboy knows that it is in the middle of the "Arabian
Nights." With the Orient thus thrown south-west of
Europe, we are as befogged by the atlas of to-day as by
the old maps which put the Orient on tlie top. In truth,
the Orient, like heaven, is not a place, but a state of
mind.
To the deuce with your parallels of longitude ! Fez in
the West, forsooth 1
AN EXCURSION INTO HEAVEN AND HELL :
WITH A DEPRECIATION OF DANTE
In tliat volume on tlie grotesque a chapter — nay, a
section — would deal with the attempts of Art to give form
and colour to that after-world " from whence no traveller
returns." The grotesquerie belongs more to the thought
than to the picture, for in eschatological aesthetics the
horrible can be reconciled to the decorative, as it is in
Giotto's Last Judgment at Padua, which I suppose is the
earliest treatment of the theme that counts, and which,
as Giotto and Dante were in Padua together, was probably
painted under the personal influence of that great authority
and explorer. There is no justification in Dante's own
work, however, for the Father's supersession by the Son,
who — while II Padre Eterno is relegated to the choir-arch
— occupies, as so often, the judicial bench, and looms
dominant in a large polychromatic oval like an incomplete
spectrum, with saints at either hand on golden chairs, and
golden companies of hovering angels, the Cross beneath
his feet making a decorative division of Heaven from Hell,
and its arms providing clinging-points for floating angels.
Among the beatific company on the celestial side of the
Cross are monks presenting their monastery to lady saints,
and fussy nude corpses of all ages and both sexes bobbing
up out of their coffins, some looking round in surprise,
some instinctively begging for grace, and one looking back
into his coffin, as into a cab for something forgotten. The
Hell is a chaos of tortures, overdusked by the Personal
Hell, the fee-fi-fo-fum ogre (with whom I came to grow
very familiar) who gulps down sinners like oysters. You
see their legs protruding, and others ready for his maw
310
EXCURSION INTO HEAVEN AND HELL 311
clutched ill his greedy hands. Still other sinners stand
on their heads or hang by their hair or quiver under
the tortures of gorilla-like devils and strange serpentine
beasts, or whirl like Paolo and Francesca. And over
all the agony, with beautiful serene face, floats the angel,
clinging to the Cross, and the saints sit placid on their
golden chairs, perhaps, as in that ecstatic prevision of
Tertullian, finding their bliss enhanced by these wails of
woe, as one's enjoyment of one's warm hearth is spiced by
the howling of the winds about.
The mere ardour of life was immoral to the mediceval
mind, as we may see from the celebrated anonymous
frescoes of 11 Trionfo della Morte in the Campo Santo
of Pisa — as if a cemetery needed any enforcement of
Death's triumph ! But the opportunity is seized of
besmirching " The Triumph of Life," and by way of prel-
ude to the tomb and its terrors a gay cavalcade of hunters
rides to the chase, with hound and horn, winding through
a lovely landscape. Their horses are arrested by three
open coffins on the roadside, precisely of the shape of
horse-troughs, but containing corpses, apparently a king's,
a priest's, and a layman's. The last is a mere skeleton ;
the others are fully robed and serpents curl spitefully
about them. A stag, a rabbit, and a partridge rest serenely
upon a little plateau, as if conscious there will be no
danger to-day from these disconcerted sportsmen. A
cowled monk holds out a long scroll to the leader of the
chase, like an official presenting an address. Other holy
hermits read ostentatiously beneath the trees outside
their humble cottage, and one milks a quaint goat. As
if the hermit were more immune from death than the
hunter ! Overhead hover fearful fire-breathing demons
bearing beautiful women head downwards to their doom.
Towards the centre of the entire picture, of which this
forms but a half, sweeps Death, a sombre flying figure
with a great scythe, whom cripples and the sorrowful
312 ITALIAN FANTASIES
invoke in vain; underneath are his slain, upon whose
bodies swoop demons with long pitchforks and angels
with long crosses, fighting furiously for the spoil, in a
game of pull devil, pull angel. In one case the angel has
gripped tlie arms, the devil the feet, and they tug and
lug with wings distended to their fullest, every muscle
a-strain ; even if the angel succeeds, the racked ghost
will have known the Inferno. Let us pray the poor soul
may recover breath in the Hesperidean garden, where sit
the meek sainted playing on lutes and lyres or nursing
pet doves and spaniels.
A companion fresco devotes itself to The Last Judgment.
To the sound of angel-trumpets the dead rise from their
coffins, to be marched right or left by stern sworded arch-
angels, as the great arbiter — again in a surmounting
oval — may determine. Haloed saints occupy a safe
platform on high and watch the suppliant, panic-stricken
sinners in the dock. Hell in many compartments takes
half the picture, Satan throned at centre, a grisly Colossus,
horned and fanged, and each compartment a chamber of
horrors unspeakable, or a caldron of stewing sinners,
most noteworthy of whom are the three arch-heretics of
the fourteenth century, Mohammed, Anti-Christ, and
Averroes (the last grown much less respectable since
Dante put him with Plato). This composition — the
heretics apart — is obviously on the general lines of
Giotto's, which may be considered the archetype of all
the Judgment pictures, and the crudity of the conception
is apparent. It is a mere parody of earthly tribunals.
In the hands of a Signorelli — as at Orvieto — the vigour
of the technique dominates and sweeps away the naivetS.
It is the sublimity of terror —
"Where the bright Seraphim in burning row
Their loud uplifted angel trumpets blow."
But this conventional and crowded rendering has
always impressed me far less than Maso di Bianco's in
EXCURSION INTO HEAVEN AND HELL 313
S. Croce, where a solitary soul appears for judgment in a
wild gorge under the throne of Christ, while two down-
sweeping angels, blowing their trumpets perpendicularly,
assist the awesomeness of the design. What a pity
Michelangelo did not handle the theme with this massive
simplicity, and give us one naked, shivering soul with
the fierce light of judgment beating upon him, instead of
the stereotyped arrangement of the Judge on high, the
blessed on his right, the damned on his left, the rising
dead at his feet, with Hell opening underneath ! His
colossal fresco, with its huddle of naked saints — to which
the clothes provided by later Popes lent the last touch of
gloom — is, with the possible exception of Tintoretto's
Paradise^ the dismallest picture in the world, and it is
even worse placed than Tintoretto's stupendous canvas.
The angel Michael, whose scales weigh souls, must have
been hard at work ere he could find enough good people
to fill this Paradise. When I last peeped into it in the
Palace of the Doges, it was conveniently on the fioor,
having been removed from its wall for repair, and, stand-
ing thus propped up in the centre of the Sala del Maggior
Consiglio, it loomed even more gigantic than my recollec-
tion of it, filling half the vast hall and extending to the
ceiling. Its precise dimensions, according to a buzzing
attendant, were twenty-two metres broad by seven metres
high. Here surely is the prize of prizes for the American
millionaire. The largest picture in the world ! Think
of it ! But, alas I a pauperised Government arrogantly
clings to its treasures, forbids exportation. How smuggle
it out? What railway carriage could hold it? How get
it even across the Grand Canal to the station? What
gondola, what barea, what vapore even, could carry it?
Perhaps a bridge of boats might be built, as for the passing
of an army. And an army indeed it holds.
Tintoretto's Heaven is, in fact, congested beyond any
hygienic standard. 'Tis a restless, jostling place, unpleas-
314 ITALIAN FANTASIES
ing and muddy in colour, where you are doomed to carry
for ever the emblems of your life, where Moses must
eternally uphold his Tables of the Law and St. George
sport his armour, and martyrs shiver in perpetual undress.
As usual, God the Father is an absentee Lord, and Christ
and the Madonna — in equal authority, not with the
woman subordinate, as in a Veronese in the same Sala —
dominate the chaos of figures, flying, whirling, praying,
playing, or reading. To see this Heaven is to be recon-
ciled with Earth. Some parts of it are already destroyed,
and I look forward to the day when it shall pass away
with a great noise. Smaller but far more select is
Tintoretto's impressionist Paradiso in the Louvre, with
its rainbow swirls or celestial vortices, its curving sweeps
of figures flying on clouds, only prosaic by its plat-
form where Christ, the Madonna, and the greater saints
sit like the distinguished persons at a public meeting. His
Purgatorio in Parma is equally imaginative, a whirl of fig-
ures and wild cliffs and rugged, lurid, serpent-haunted
chasms, down which angels plunge to bring up souls to
the Madonna, who sits alone in her gloriole. Bartolommeo
Spranger's Heaven — which maybe seen in Turin — is a
place where saintly companies link hands as in a child's
game, while grimacing demons or snakes tear at sinners.
Palma Giovane tried to cover the entrance wall of the
Sala dello Scrutinio of the Doge's Palace with an emula-
tion of Tintoretto, but the main renown of his Last Judg-
ment seems to rest on his humorous idea of putting his
wife both into Heaven and Hell. The use of Hell to pay
off private scores is not unique with Palma, and of course
everybody can plead the precedent of Dante.
In another Venetian Paradise — that of Jacobello del
Flore — the symmetrical groups of haloed saints in blue
and red and gold recall exactly the groups in the La Scala
ballet. The Paradise in Botticelli's Assumption of the
Virgin in tlie National Gallery is also somewhat geometric,
EXCURSION INTO HEAVEN AND HELL 315
though the empty liliecl court below gives beautiful re-
lief. Era Bartolommeo's large faded fresco of The Last
Judgment^ in Florence, with its sworded archangel to greet
the poor souls as they rise from their graves, is inspired
by the Pisan fresco, and is less interesting than that of
Fra Angelico, his fellow Dominican at San Marco, in
whom we breathe a serener, clearer air, though his sweet-
ness and finish accentuate again the intellectual naivete.
His series of little panels in the Accademia of Florence
has a quaint originality, the Judge sitting over a mystic
red and green wheel, with the blessed on either hand.
Angels welcome newcomers or lament over the rejected,
while demons poke spears into the damned. More con-
ventional in composition is his large easel-picture in the
same room — a miracle of detailed loveliness, except for
the Hell, which is botched, as tliough unsuited to his
artistic temperament. Indeed we know he made his devil
hideous out of sheer dislike of the theme. The sheep
are divided from the goats by a curious row of open
graves resembling sky-lights. The Judge is superdomi-
nant, angels and babes hovering round him, the trumpeting
angels at his feet. In the Paradise of flowers walk the
saints in couples and companies ; the sinners — in crowns,
mitres, or mere caps — are driven Hell ward at the points
of a pitchfork into their respective circles, where some are
eaten of the horrible horned Satan, some are eating one
another, and others are gnawing their own bloody hands.
There are sinners seething in pots, sinners starving at a
laden table, sinners hung up, sinners holding their own
heads in their hands. Demons like brown bears gnash
white teeth, and in the north-north-east corner of Hell a
capacious big-toothed gullet — horrible in its suggestion
of more behind — is gulping down two red-headed
wretches. In his Christ in Hades the gentle painter,
following an apocryphal gospel, incarnates Hell in a demon
crushed beneath its door.
316 ITALIAN FANTASIES
In the Strozzi Chapel of S. Maria Novella the theme is
repeated by the brothers Orcagna. Andrea took Paradise
and suffused it with tender beauty, fitting it with row
upon row of seraphim and saintly figures, whose serried
symmetrical haloes suggest, however, a marshalling of
saints for inspection, while Bernardo made of Hell a chart
of ugliness — a compartmental chaos of strange fading
horrors — fading though the Heaven has lasted. But it
is not easy to get decorative beauty into the Inferno, espe-
cially when broken up into parishes of pain and not part
of a complete Last Judgment such as that by Andrea
single-handed in the same Chapel. In this last, angels
carrying the cross and the thorns make a variant in the
composition. In the Spanish Chapel of the same church
The Way to Paradise is treated as of more concern to
mortals than the nature of the goal, of which we get the
merest peep ; and perhaps the artist's own concern was
Beauty, for the central pattern of the picture is woven by
a procession on richly caparisoned horses winding round
and round. Tj-anquilly beautiful are the figures at the
Passion, even apart from the tender figure of Christ,
whose halo hides the form of the decorative polished cross
he bears.
The Paradise is, however, a Dominican Paradise, for
this noble fresco on examination turns out to be a compli-
cated allegory in glorification of the order, even including
the pictorial pun or rebus of black-and-white dogs (^domini
canes')^ guarding the faithful sheep and worrying the
heretical wolves. The Dominican Heaven has always a
marked preference for Dominican dogma, as the Dominican
Hell is particularly hospitable to rival forms of teaching.
Incidentally this great anonymous painting is a social
Mappamondo of the mediaeval, including every type in
Church and State from Pope to pauper ; the vanities and
pomps, the penances and renunciations. A lovely peace
broods over this picture, as over all the Chapel. Hell
EXCURSION INTO HEAVEN AND HELL 317
does not disturb its restful walls, save as the niilJ Limbo
to which Christ descends to redeem Adam, Noah, and
other figures, proleptically haloed. He hovers majes-
tically over the vague scene, carrying a red-cross flag over
his left shoulder. It is only the demons who give gro-
tesquerie to the picture, but they are unsurpassable. One
of these baffled imps falls prostrate in the void, another is
tearing his goatee beard, a third stands scowling, with
folded wings, the hair of a fourth stands on end, a bristle
of wires. This last demon is livid in hue ; his fellows
are more or less fiery.
Bronzino has dealt less happily, if less grotesquely,
with the same theme, for to his later vision it was a good
opportunity for studying the nude and the half-nude.
But to follow out the theme of Christ iti Hades would
carry me too far. I must, however, refer to the touching
conception of Christ rushing to the rescue : as in the
picture by Andrea Previtali in which Christ is seen in a
whirl of drapery with a streaming flag, pulling up an old
woman and a girl. A large cross occupies the centre of
this Limbo, to which cling or pray rescued nude figures,
while St. John stands by witli a smaller cross.
The after-world was rendered not only in painting, but
in other art-media. In his famous pulpit in the Baptistery
of Pisa Niccolo Pisano carved it in relief, imaginatively
rendering the faces of the damned almost animal with sin.
Byzantine art treated it in mosaic and enamel, in stone
and bronze, while on the rich-jewelled Pala d'Oro of
St. Mark's, Christ in Hades has called forth the craft of
the goldsmith. An exhaustive study of eschatological
aesthetics would include also the innumerable apotheoses
and receptions in Heaven, would involve a comparison
with Teutonic and other pictorial conceptions, and would
range from the pious sincerities of the primitives to the
decorative compositions of the decadents.
I do not know if any scholar has yet thus treated the
318 ITALIAN FANTASIES
genesis and evolution of these pictorial images. They cer-
tainly did not derive from Dante, for Dante's poem itself
contains an allusion to a Florentine calamity, which we
know to have been the collapse in ISO-t of a wooden bridge
over the Arno, holding spectators of a popular represen-
tation of the horrors of the Inferno.
Moreover — apart from the demons and chimeeras dire
on the old Etruscan tombs — fumblings at the theme exist
in art prior to Dante, as, for instance, those rude bronze
reliefs in the Byzantine manner on the doors of S. Zeno
in Verona, which mark, as it were, the Bronze Age of the
concept. These, I was assured, were ninth-century, but
even dating them at the eleventh or twelfth — and the
church contains frescoes as early — they were in time for
Dante to have seen them when enjoying Can Grande's
hospitality in Verona. His denunciation of Alberto della
Scala for appointing his bastard as abbot of the monastery
shows his interest in S. Zeno. In these rude bronzes Dante
beheld the bare elements of that Hell which he furnished
so handsomely. Here is already the giant fee-fi-fo-fum
figure holding — O primeval irony! — a quaking monk.
Here is the sinner upside down whose legs are disappear-
ing within a caldron. Here also, in another bronze relief,
is Christ in Limbo, haling figures out. Christ's halo is
novel, consisting of three tufts, one sticking out on either
side of his head, the other on top. It may interest the
decadent to learn that there is also a relief of Salome
dancing, in which she anticipates all the modern contor-
tionists.
To pass back from the Bronze Age of the Last Judgment
to the Stone Age, that fine old Lombardic cathedral of
Ferrara, whose lateral facades date from 1135, shows in a
lunette over one of them a stone relief of The Day of
Judgment. Flanked by saints, " God's in his Heaven,"
holding the saved souls in his lap in a sort of sheet, while
the devil in his Hell pokes up his busy fire and an acolyte
EXCURSION INTO HEAVEN AND HELL 319
shoves a sinner down a dragon's mouth. The Baptistery
of Farma, a structure less ancient, but still antecedent to
Dante, shows on its left portal three dead men coming out
of their tombs, to be received by the angels or the execu-
tioner, according to the dictum of the Judge on high, who
is nursing a saved soul. The guilty lean anxiously out of
curious stone buildings, apparently awaiting their turn to
be decapitated.
With such compositions existing in Italy, it seems super-
erogatory of M. Didron to have counted more than fifty
French illustrations of the "Divine Comedy," before
Dante, painted on church windows or sculptured on church
portals, or for M. Lafitte to seek for Dante's inspiration
in the western portal of Notre-Dame, which he must have
seen during his stay in Paris.
Giotto, then, did not altogether originate his conception
of the Judgment scene. Indeed, already in the alleged
discourse of Josephus to the Greeks concerning Hades, we
have a word-picture of the Hebrew Day of Judgment in
which the souls of the just are marshalled to the right and
the souls of the sinners to the left.
Dante may equally be exonerated from the crime of
having originated these grotesque notions of the after-
world, if he cannot be exonerated from the crime of cor-
roborating them. These infantile images were made in
the brains of fasting monks and terror-stricken sinners —
for brains make day-dreams as well as nightmares — on a
confused basis of the classic Hades and Tartarus and
Elysium and the Egyptian after-world and the Hebrew
Gehennah, supplemented by misapplied texts and misun-
derstood metaphors. They drew their appeal from that
conflict 'twixt good and evil which every man felt raging
in his own soul, and which made plausible the externalisa-
tion of these forces as angels and demons fighting for its
possession.
But though the first sketch of the Christian Hell
320 ITALIAN FANTASIES
appears in literature as early as the apocryphal " Acts of
St. Thomas," Dante may be said to have systematised these
chaotic conceptions, drawn the chart of the Hereafter, and
determined the scientific frontiers between Hell and
Limbo, Purgatory and Paradise. His are the nine con-
centric circles of the Inferno, though Acheron and Minos,
Charon and Cerberus, are borrowed from his guide and
master; he is the sole discoverer and surveyor of the
island-mountain of Purgatory, so precisely antipodal to
Jerusalem, with its seven parishes corresponding to the
seven deadly sins ; his are the nine Heavens, ascending
to the Beatific Vision, that is circumscribed by the thrice
tliree orders of the angelic hierarchies. Nevertheless,
marvellous as is the sustained imaginativeness of the
achievement, his contribution to the stock of eschatologi-
cal ideas is comparatively small. The vulgar imagination
is quite capable of bodying forth these grimacing, horned
demons, these imps with prongs and lashes, those swoop-
ing fiends, that heavy head-gear — not unlike the English
high hat in August — those fiery floods, those gibbering,
wailing ghosts, those wretches immersed in ordure, those
ghastly sinners munching each other, those disgustful
stenches and itchings. Dante would not be remembered
for such nurser}' horrors. Happily, he enriched the theme
with finer imaginings. They meet us at the very thresh-
old of the dolorous city in those neutral souls good enough
neither for Heaven nor Hell ; like the abdicating Pope
Celestine V., neither rebels against God nor true to Him.
Yet Dante almost spoilt liis own conception by adding
the material pains inflicted by wasps and hornets to their
eternal nullity. Kipling, in his probabl}^ unconscious ap-
proximation to the idea in " Tomlinson," had a sounder
instinct, though perhaps Ibsen's idea of returning Peer
Gynt to the Button-Moulder hits the truer penology.
Dante's touch is more satisfying when he pictures the
doom of those who were sad in sunny air, and must now
EXCURSION INTO HEAVEN AND HELL 321
continue sad in the more appropriate surroundings of
slime. Yet there is here a touch of the Gilbertiau gro-
tesque ; a foreshadowing of the Mikado, whose "object
all sublime" was "to make the punishment fit the crime."
This suggestion is even stronger in the twenty-seventh
canto, where Mohammed and the arch-heretics who pro-
voked schisms are ripped and cleft from chin to forelock.
Savagery, too, is met by savage punishment, as in the
Ugolino episode.
There are a few inventions, indeed, beyond the vulgar im-
agination : the six-footed serpent that transmutes the sin-
ner to its own form, a passage palpitating with j3^schylean
genius; the monstrous-paunched coiner, consumed with
a terrible hate ; the shore " turreted with giants ; " the
tears that cannot be shed. Nor could the vulgar — pre-
occupied with lire — have conceived a Hell of ice, though
Dante's Arctic circle is bettered in the Gospel of Barnabas
preserved in an Italian MS., which compounds a Hell of
fire and ice united by the Justice of God, " so that neither
tempers the other, but each gives its separate torment to
the infidel," and in Vondel's " Lucifer " the archfiend is
condemned to
" The eternal fire
Unquenchable, with chilling frosts commingled."
But neither the Dutch poet nor his contemporary, Milton,
condescended to the fee-fi-fo-fum infantility of Dante's
three-headed King of Hell, that fantastic fiend who holds
in each of his mouths one of the three archetypal traitors,
Judas, Brutus, and Cassius. And that Dante's " Judg-
ment " was not considered " The Last " is shown by the
popularity of Brutus — as a tyrannicide — in the Florence
of the Medici. The beauty of the verse and the imagina-
tive intensity alone render Dante's " Inferno " bearable.
Translated into the images of Signorelli or Michelangelo
— and these more truly than Botticelli were Dante's illus-
trators — the grossness of his " Inferno" leaps to the eye,
322 ITALIAN FANTASIES
while his finer imaginings are not capable of interpreta-
tion by brush or pencil.
The paradox of the " Divina Commedia," indeed, is that
it lives less by its supernatural visionings, sombre and
splendid as these occasionally are, than by its passages of
the earth, earthy, when the world the poet has left behind
breaks in upon the starless gloom of Hell or upon the too
ardent radiancy of Paradise. Nor need I prove my case
by the familiar episodes of Paolo and Francesca, and of
Ugolino, though Dante's fame rests so largely upon them.
Never was poem more terrestrial, more surcharged with
the beauty and grossness of earth-life. The delicious
touches of natural beauty, the splendid descriptions of
sunrise and moonlight, the keen observation of animal and
insect life, of starlings and doves, of storks and frogs, of
falcons and goshawks, the pictures of the jousts at Arezzo,
or of the busy arsenal of Venice, the homely similes paint-
ing indirectly the labours of ploughmen and shepherds,
warriors and sailors, even the demeanour of dicers — tliis
last Dante's sole approach to humour — it is by these that
Dante will live when his Heaven and Hell are rolled up
like a scroll. The sound of the vesper bell that touches
the earthly pilgrim moves us more than all the celestial
music of the Purgatory ; the vision of beatific goodness,
beside the lovely picture of the ancient virtue of Florence
in the homely ages, is an airy nothing — one is more inter-
ested even to hear the ladies of the day rebuked for their
low-necked dresses. The dazzling circles of Paradise
leave us lethargic compared with the irrelevant intrusion
therein of the lark's rapture of song or the earthly pain of
exile.
" Til proverai s\, come sa di sale
Lo pane altrui, e com'e duro calle
Lo scendere e'l salir per I'altrui scale."
To prov^e how salt is others' bread, how hard the passage
up and down others' stairs ! How impotent all the
EXCURSION INTO HEAVEN AND HELL 323
laboured strivings to shadow forth the vision celestial
compared with this touch of the terrestrial concrete ! In
truth Dante did not go "out of his senses," even in his
most transcendental moments of insj^iration. His five
senses were all he had wherewith to obtain the raw ma-
terial of his imaginings, and out of his sensations of touch
and sight, of smell and taste and hearing, he wove both
his Hell and his Heaven. The stored repugnances of man-
kind, the shudders and horrors at beasts and serpents, at
bites and wounds and loathsome diseases, the dread of fire —
he himself was condemned to be burnt alive — the chill
of ice, the nausea of stinks and dizzying motions — these
are factors of his Hell, as the odour of flowers and incense,
the shimmer of jewels, the sound of music, and the pains and
pleasures of anticipation are the factors of his Purgatory.
As for his Paradise, it is merely the sublimation of the
philosophic Elysium Aristotle and Cicero had conceived
before Christianity ; his very ecstasy of Light is antici-
pated by Seneca.
Restlessness is a recurring image of doom with Dante
— and perhaps his own wander-years of exile lent vivid-
ness to the onward drifting of the neutral spirits, the
unrepose of the learned sinners, the eternal whirl of Paolo
and Francesca. Yet there are moments in which Dante
rises beyond his gross scale of punishments to a more
spiritual plane.
" Thou art more punished in that this thy pride
Lives yet unquenched ; no torrent, save thy rage,
Were to thy fiery pain proportioned full."
In addressing this observation to Capaneus, Virgil, says
Dante, spoke in a higher-raised accent than ever before.
In a less literal sense, it is indeed a higher accent : it is
even the note of modern thinking, from Spinoza onwards.
The wages of sin is — sin ! It is probably even the note
of an earlier and still more misunderstood Master. But
this note is only heard once and faintly. The wages of
324 ITALIAN FANTASIES
sin is physical torture. But surely such a Hell is unjustly
balanced by such a Heaven — all Platonic intellection,
Plotinian ecstasy, and ethereal Light. If the wages of sin
is physical torture, then the wages of virtue should be
physical rapture. Dante's Hell requires Mohammed's
Heaven, just as Christ's Heaven requires an immaterial
Hell. For if the Kingdom of God is within you, the
Kingdom of the Devil cannot be without. This thought
broke dimly on Milton when, despite his material Hell, he
wrote of Satan :
" But the hot Hell that always in him burns,
Though iu mid-heaven. . . ."
Dante's Purgatory possesses, indeed, some of the
material attractions a logical Heaven needs : it has all
the makings of an Earthly Paradise not inferior to Addi-
son's in his "Vision of Mirza." There are even great set
pieces of painting, and much that might well tempt the
soul to linger on its upward way.
The soul of the present critic is also tempted to seek
superiority by preferring the Paradise to the Inferno.
Alas! a law of psychology has ordained that pleasures
shall be less exciting than tortures, and hence the Purga-
tory is far duller than the Inferno, while the Paradise is
hopelessly swamped in sweetness and light. The splendid
vision of the snow-white Rose — wonderful as poetry —
retains little spiritual value under analysis, though the
majestic passion of the close of the great poem almost car-
ries up the spirit with closed eyes to this dazzling infinitude
of Light and Love.
Read as a poem of earth, the " Divine " Comedy has for
us a value quite other than Dante — iu his political and
prophetic passion — designed. What we see in it is the
complete Mappamondo of the mediaeval, a complete vision
of the world, with its ethics, its philosophy and its science,
as it reflected itself in the shining if storm-tossed soul of
EXCURSION INTO HEAVEN AND HELL 325
the poet, whose epic was alike the climax and the conclu-
sion of the Middle Ages. No wonder the Italian quotes
it with the finality of a Gospel text. For this epic is less
of a people than of humanity. Though the Florentine
background is of the pettiest — including even Dante's
apologia for breaking a font in the church of St. John —
it is really world-history with which the poem is concerned ;
not world-history as the modern conceives it, for Dante's
Mappamondo held neither America nor China, neither
Russia nor Japan, but that selected conceptual world —
that autocosm — in which the cultured of his day lived
and had their being : a world in which classic and chival-
ric legend had their equal part — as they have in the
poetry of Milton — so that the very " Paradiso " could
open with an invocation to Apollo ! And this world-his-
tory is unified by being strung together on a moral plan,
precisely as in the Hebrew Bible, Judas and Brutus find-
ing themselves equally in Lucifer's avenging fangs. The
flames of righteous indignation redeem the crude brim-
stone, and if we bleed for the sinners, the sins under chas-
tisement are mainly those we would wish purged from the
universe in the white flame of righteousness. Indeed, this
great sensuous, sinful Tuscan, who went unscathed through
the dolorous city, is a soul on fire. He is taken up to
Heaven, like Elijah, but in the fiery chariot of his own
ardour. His passion is the stars, visible symbol of beauty
and infinity. Each of his three great sections ends with
the very words. " The stars " shine again in that noble
letter refusing the Republic's terms of pardon. " What ! "
cries the exile, " shall I not everywhere enjoy the sight of
the sun and the stars ? " "The love that moves the sun
and the other stars " is, indeed, the great doctrine of the
poem — its literal last word. How this love, "this good-
ness celestial, whose signature is writ large on the uni-
verse," is to be reconciled with the spirit that moves the
flame and the other dooms, he does not explain. Though
326 ITALIAN FANTASIES
ever and anon his own tears of pity flow, the doctrine of
eternal hopeless torture does not appall him ; not even
though, at the Day of Judgment, worse is in store, for the
sufferers shall by then liave subtilised their practised nerves
for the final damnation. It does not disconcert him —
any more than it disconcerts his great admirer, Michelan-
gelo — that unbaptised infants and heathens whose only
crime was chronological should sigh in Limbo, and that
Adam and Noah, Abraham and Moses themselves, should
need for their salvation the special descent of Christ.
For all his sublimity, his passionate metaphysic insight
into the Godhead, he falls below the homely Rabbis of the
Talmud, who taught eight or ten centuries earlier, " The
righteous of all nations have a share in the World-to-Come."
Yet there are broken lights of this truth here and there.
" But lo ! of those
Who call, 'Christ, Christ,' there shall be many found
In judgment, further off from Him by far
Than such to whom His name was never known."
And the fine temper of the man is shown in his struggle
against the pitiful obsessions of a provincial theology ; in
his gratitude towards the great Teachers of Antiquity, his
reverence for whom anticipated the Renaissance, albeit
the Greeks among them were probably known to him only
in Latin translations. A Dante of the Renaissance — if
such were possible — might have placed Aristotle and
Plato in Paradise hy interposition of a Christ loving his
Gospel tongue. Bernardo Pulci did, indeed, place Cicero
and sundry Roman heroes in Heaven. But even during
the Renaissance Savonarola proclaimed that Plato and
Aristotle were in Hell, and the best that Dante in his
rigider century could do for them was to put them in a
painless Limbo, which they perambulate " with slow majes-
tic port," acquiring from their continuous earthly repu-
tation grace which holds them thus far advanced, and which
it seems not beyond all hoping may ultimately exalt them
EXCURSION INTO HEAVEN AND HELL 327
to bliss. And with Aristotle, the " maestro di color che
siiiino," walk not only Homer and Euclid, but his Mo-
hammedan commentator, Averroes, and even mythical
figures like Orpheus and Hector. A Christendom that
had never altogether lost touch with the classical world —
were it only by way of Virgil, mediseval saint and sorcerer
— a Christendom whose philosophers found ingenious
inspiration in Aristotle, could not easily relegate to the
flames either the classical writers or their works. Classic
literature and mythology made a second Bible, as the lore
of chivalry and general history, a third ; indeed, these
were the three great circles in which swam the world of
the mediaeval Mappamondo, the Biblical circle outermost
and nearest to Heaven. Yet it was a bold stroke of tol-
erance on Dante's part to make Virgil his guide, chro-
nology giving him no chance, as it gave with Statins, of a
legendary conversion to Christianity, And this penchant
for the great Pagans accentuates his intolerance to the
great Christian heretics. But if Virgil himself was ex-
cluded from Heaven " for no sin save lack of faith " —
Virgil who could not possibly have believed — if even the
merits of those who lived before the Gospel could not
profit them because they had missed baptism, it is not sur-
prising to find the Christian heretics collected in the ninth
canto in burning sepulchres of carefully graduated tem-
peratures. One wishes that they, rather than Farinata
degli Uberti, had held their heads high, with a fine dis-
dain foreshadowing Milton's Satan. How Socrates would
have smiled over the perverted morality of the Christian
poet, as we smile over the constricted foot of a Chinese
lady! Despite the attempt of a recent writer to moralise
his scheme of salvation, the best that can be said for
Dante is that he probably followed Aquinas in holding
that there is no positive pain in that absence of the divine
vision which St. Chrysostom made the severest part of
the punishment of the damned. But in tolerance as well
328 ITALIAN FANTASIES
as humour he falls far below the Ha-Tofet weha Eden
(" Hell and Paradise ") of liis Jewish friend and imitator,
Iramanuel. It is in vain that Emile Gebhart (in " L'ltalie
Mystique ") points to his revolutionary liberalism in plac-
ing Ripheus the Pagan and Trajan the Roman Emperor
in Paradise. These apparent exceptions only bring out liis
lack of tolerance and humour more vividly. For, though
the ^neid describes the fallen hero, Ripheus, as " justis-
simus unus " among the Trojans and " the most observant
of right," yet it is not by the simple force of his own good-
ness but by some complex operation of grace under which
he believes in the Christ that has not yet been born, and
even turns missionary, that he penetrates among the "luci
sante." As for the Emperor Trajan, complexity is still
worse confounded, for he — despite the title he had won
of Optimus — must serve his time in hell, and is only
popped into Paradise after being resuscitated, converted
and baptized by St. Gregory four hundred years after his
first decease. Thus both Ripheus and Trajan died Chris-
tians, Dante assures us gravely, not Gentiles as the world
imagines ; one believing in the Crucifixion that was to be,
and the other in the Crucifixion that had been.
" Cristiani, in ferma fede
Quel de' passuri, e quel de' passi piedi."
With all Dante's stippling and geometric chart-draAV-
ing, his conception of the after-world is not really clear.
The sinners are able to deliver long monologues, amid all
their agony ; they foreknow things terrestrial, exactly like
the Manes of Paganism ; they quarrel with one another;
there are even high jinks in Hell, which according to
Burckhardt show an Aristophanic humour. (But then
Burckhardt is a German.) Moreover, a certain free will
reigns. The undefined powers of the demons import into
Dante's excursion through their dominions a deal of breath-
lessness and terror from which one should be exempt who
EXCURSION INTO HEAVEN AND HELL 329
travels with a " safe-conduct " acquired by the interposition
of powerful personages in Paradise.
Such are the nebulous rings hovering round Dante's
Mappamondo Infernale. But the circles of his Mappamondo
Terrestre are clear and resplendent. 'Twas within the
illumination of these circles — unnecessarily narrowing
though they were — that the Middle Ages, and even Ages
later, built their sublime cathedrals, painted their lovely
Madonnas, and wrote their great poems. For though
doubtless much sacred art is merely splendid sensuous
decoration, and some even of that which is indubitably
spiritual may have been the work of free-thinking and
free-living artists, it remains true that the Dark Ages had
a light which electricity cannot replace.
But is our modern Mappamondo as scientific as we think
it ? Can we girdle it with no circles amid which to sail
securely again through the infinities ?
ST. GIULIA AND FEMALE SUFFRAGE
Vastly strange are the wanderings of saints and pictures.
When a Magnificent One ordered for his gilded sala a
Madonna — even with himself and his consort superadded
— he was, for aught he knew, helping to decorate Hampton
Court in Inghilterra, or the mansion of a master-butcher
in undiscovered and unchristened Pennsylvania. And
when a saint was born, an equal veil hid the place of his
death or of his ultimate patronage. The fate of St.
Francis, to live and die and be canonised in his birthplace,
was of the rarest. His pendant, St. Dominic, came from
Old Castile, and was buried in Bologna.
It is no surprise, therefore, to find St. Giulia, of Car-
thage, in possession of Brescia, though I must confess that
until I stumbled upon the frescoes consecrated to her in
the Church of S. Maria del Solario her name and fame
were unknown to me. Luini painted these frescoes, the
sacristan said, though the connoisseurs omit to chronicle
them and will doubtless repudiate the attribution. The
date of 1520 appended to the somewhat free and easy
Latin epigraph beneath does indeed bring them well
within Luini's working period, but their authenticity
interests me less than the story they tell.
St. Giulia, it would appear, was born in the seventh
century of a noble Carthaginian family, and was endowed
with holy learning and every spiritual grace.
" Stemate praesignis Carthagine nata libellos
Docta sacros, anima, corpus gestuque pudica,
Curatu patiens, humilis, jejuniaque pollens."
330
ST. GIULIA AND FEMALE SUFFRAGE 331
Such a maiden could only become an apostle to the heathen.
Accordingly, we see her arrive at Corsica in a boat with
neither oar nor sail, and start praying to the true God. A
good-natured citizen warns her of the risks of such heresy,
and the kindly ruler of Corsica himself adjures her to
discretion, his monitions being emphasised by a man with
an axe who stands behind him. But holding her prayer-
book, and already crowned with her halo, she prays on.
The next fresco shows the inevitable sequel. She is hang-
ing by her hair to the bough of a pretty tree, while an ex-
ecutioner prods at her bleeding breasts with a three-pronged
fork, though his head is turned away, as if he were not
over-proud of his job. The kindly ruler, however, con-
tinues his remonstrances. In the distance a small, dim
angel wings his way to her. Finally, she is stretched on
a cross, and two ruffians batter her with massive clubs,
but angels hold the palm and wreath over her head, and
the Dove flies towards her. These celestial visions are a
true interpretation and externalisation of the psychology
of the martyr : these alone could support her. In our
own day the visions of our martyrs are less concrete ; they
die for some far-seen ideal of Justice or Freedom, and this
suffices to sustain them in Spanish prisons or under the
Russian knout.
But what is peculiarly noteworthy in the story of Giulia
is the status of woman in the Dark Ages and under the
Catholic Church. St. Giulia appears to enjoy as great a
roving licence as St. Augustine, her fellow-citizen in
Carthage and "The City of God." She is not considered
unsexed, nor does her teaching rank below man's, and she
is canonised equally with the male. In fact, in leaving
the home-nest to preach to the heathen, she is only follow-
ing the model of Thekla in the Apocryphal "Acts of St.
Paul," whose story, though it was forged by a pious elder,
is none the less proof of woman's position in that highest
of all ancient spheres. Religion. " I recommend unto you
332 ITALIAN FANTASIES
Phoebe, our sister," says the misogynous St. Paul himself
(Romans xvi.), " for she hath been a suecourer of many
and of myself also. Greet Priscilla and Aquila, my help-
ers in Christ Jesus: who have for my life laid down their
own necks."
It is, indeed, doubtful whether Christianity would ever
have been established but for the courage and companion-
.ship of women. I feel sure they tidied up the catacombs
and gave a feeling of home to the crypts and caves. " It
was the women who spread Christianity in the family,"
says Harnack. St. Augustine's father was a heathen ; it
was his mother, Monica, who taught him to pray. The
Virgin Martyr, like Santa Reparata of Florence, or St.
Catherine of Alexandria, is a stock figure of the Roman
calendar. As in all great movements, differences of
station were forgotten, and Blandine, the servant-girl of
Lyons, played as majestic a part as the royal-blooded St.
Catherine, whose wheel of martyrdom finds such quaint
perpetuation as a firework.
Popular imagination added the Madonna to the Trinity as
a sort of female representative. In Tintoretto's Paradise,
as I have already noted, she figures as authoritatively as
the Christ, and in a picture at Vicenza, attributed to Tiepolo,
she stands on the world, crushing the snake with her foot.
Her companions were usually divided in sex and united
in glory. Luca della Robbia, in his charming relief in
the cathedral of Arezzo, scrupulously places one male and
one female saint on her either hand, and even one male and
female angel : doubtless had cherubs possessed sex possibili-
ties, his cherubs too would have been impartially distributed.
In the Accademia of Florence, Cimabue's Madonna is en-
tirely surrounded by female saints, though a few males
loom below her throne; Giotto's shows a female surplus;
Bernardo Daddi's redresses the balance. Fra Angelico
gives us Jesus carried to the Tomb by nine women to four
men.
ST. GIULIA AND FEMALE SUFFRAGE 333
Italian art is full of symmetrical paradises of sex-equality,
and if a church was decorated with male saints down one
aisle, they would be scrupulously balanced by female saints
along the other. An old Byzantine Basilica of Ravenna,
which displays twenty-two virgins arrayed against thirty
saints of the dominant sex, first set me wondering whether,
since the Dark Ages, woman has not gone back in Christen-
dom instead of forward. Here at least was the atmo-
sphere for the legend, if not for the reality, of a Pope
Joan, whereas at the period in which I first opened my
eyes upon the world and wpraan, she appears to have be-
come reduced to an absolute industrial dependence upon
her lord, like the fifteenth-century chicken in Giambattista
della Porta's " Book of Natural Magic." For according
to the delightful recipe (cited by Corvo) for inducing
affection towards you in a chicken, you must — before it
has its feathers — "break off its lower beak even to the
jaw. Then, having not the wherewithal to peck up food,
it must come to its master to be fed."
I might cite in proof of woman's retrogression since the
Dark Ages the glorification of womanhood through " The
Divine Comedy," but the Italian poet's translation of life
into literature is, I fear, no more legal evidence of the real
status of woman in the Middle Ages than her chivalrous
deification at the hands of the Germanic or Provencal
poets is a proof that she was treated even as an equal of
her worshippers. Dante's unknown Beatrice sounds like
a woman who was snubbed by her husband and brothers.
But Matilda, who plays second fiddle to her, and who is
equally drawn by Dante as a mild flower-culling " bella
Donna " was in reality the warrior Countess of Tuscany,
and the fact that Dante feminises and floralises her shows
that he had no real respect for feminine dominance in the
actual shapes it took in life, and that he was only prepared
to idealise woman on condition of her conforming to his
ideal.
334 ITALIAN FANTASIES
The scholars and commentators who have always been
so puzzled at the metamorphosis of Matilda have forgotten
man's tendency to break off woman's beak, whether in
reality or in imagination. But even if Preger be correct
in identifying Dante's Matilda, not with the armoured
Amazon of Tuscany, but with Mechtilde, the nun, whose
mystic visions are the flowers she culls, it remains true that
Dante's ideal was never the " Virago," a title of honour
which was inscribed on her tomb, and which even at the
epoch of the Renaissance implied nothing but praise. The
word may serve to remind us that there is no sharp bisec-
tion of qualities between the sexes.
Matilda was, in fact, a sufficient refutation in herself of
the notion that there is a rigid division between the
qualities of men and women. Such a difference as is
implied does, indeed, exist, but it is between men and men,
and between women and women, as well as between men
and women, and the popular nomenclature, which calls
certain women mannish and certain men effeminate, re-
cognises the possibility of deviation from the normal.
Indeed, considering that both parents affect their child,
the attempt to breed a special feminine psychology, immune
from politics and fighting, must be perpetually thwarted
by the criss-cross action of heredity, as upon the daughters
of warriors and statesmen. Matilda — sired by the Magni-
ficent Monster, Boniface — was a man in ten thousand.
She led her own armies. She patronised learning and
founded the law schools of Bologna. If she kept her hus-
bands in subjection, casting off one after the other, she
had none of the vices of the male despot ; indeed, her
second marriage-contract stipulated only a sexless union.
There was nothing, indeed, except these vices in which she
ranks below the Magnificent Monsters who preceded her
in the lordship of Lucca or Lombardy. I must admit that
the Countess of Tuscany fell under the influence of her
spiritual director (as the Male Magnificent falls under the
ST. GIULIA AND FEMALE SUFFRAGE 335
influence of his unspiritual directress), and that she used
her power, and her treasure, as it is feared women will, to
bolster up the Church ; in fact, she, with her mother
Beatrice, attended the Council of Rome in 1074, at which
investiture by lay hands was declared illegal, and hers was
the Castle of Canossa, to which Henry IV. came to abase
himself before the Pope. And that dubious temporal
power of the Pope's might not have come into such solid
being had she not left her possessions to the See of Rome,
and thus practically founded the States of the Church.
This, of course, is the secret of her high position in the
earthly paradise of the Purgatory. But, after all, religious
zeal is not a female monopoly, and even Bloody Mary
could not hold a candle to Torquemada.
Catherine of Siena exercised an equal critical influence
upon the fortunes of the Papacy and upon European
history when she persuaded Gregory XI. to move the
Papal seat back from Avignon to Rome ; a mission in
which Rienzi had failed a generation earlier. Catherine,
for all her ecstasies and self-scourgings, had far more com-
mon sense than the male mystics.
It was in allowing for such divergences from the normal
that the Dark Ages surpassed our electric-lit era, whose
logic confounds the optional with the compulsory, and the
individual with the general. It was not pretended that
every woman can or must be a warrior, but she who had
military genius was not debarred from developing it. It
was not claimed that every woman can or must be a saint,
but St. Clara stood equal with St. Francis and St. Cath-
erine of Siena with St. Dominic. And at the Renaissance
Boccaccio devotes a book to celebrated females and Michel-
angelo writes most humble love-sonnets to the poetess,
Vittoria Colonna (whose Rime still sell, and who unlike
Matilda stood for religious reform). Vittoria's noble
classic head, especially as seen helmeted in Michelangelo's
design, suggests a very Minerva, and from various quarters
336 ITALIAN FANTASIES
we hear of the political woman, the learned woman, the
patroness of the arts, and the female physician, while at
the foot of the staircase of Padua University stands a
statue of a lady Professor, a happier Hypatia. I forget if
this is Lucrezia Cornaro, who was made a Doctor of this
University and a member of so many learned societies
throughout Europe, but no enumeration of Italian heroines
should omit her brilliant ancestress, Caterina Cornaro,
Queen of Cyprus, whose court at Asolo was one of the
centres of the Renaissance.
" The education given to women in the upper classes,"
says Burckhardt, the learned historian of " The Renais-
sance in Italy," " was essentially the same as that given to
men. . . . There was no question of ' women's rights' or
female emancipation, because the thing in itself was a mat-
ter of course. The educated woman no less than the man
strove naturally after a characteristic and complete in-
dividuality."
When one remembers the struggle in nineteenth-century
England for the higher education of women, and particu-
larly the desperate resistance to their studying and prac-
tising medicine, one realises the fallacy of expecting
melioration from the mere movement of time. There is
no automatic progress. What is automatic is retrogres-
sion, so that the price even of stability is perpetual vigi-
lance.
But what has St. Giulia, born at Carthage and crucified
in Corsica, to do with Brescia? I have already pointed
out the free trade in saints, by which they were liable to
posthumous export. St. Giulia's body was transported
from Corsica by Desiderio, a noble Brescian, who ascended
the Longobardian throne in 735. She was placed in the
church dedicated to St. Michael, the patron saint of the
Longobardi, whom she ousted in 915, from which date
the church was known as St. Giulia's. A Nuimery of S.
Giulia had existed from about 750, and remained in being
ST. GIULIA AND FEMALE SUFFRAGE 337
for over a thousand years, till its suppression in 1797, by
the inevitable Napoleon. Coryat, who visited it in 1608,
describes it as having been in time past " a receptacle of
many royall Ladies." It is now a Museum of Christian
Art, and there I saw St. Giulia depicted in sculpture by
Giovanni Carra, her figure nude to the waist and stretched
on a real wooden cross with real nails in her hands and
feet. Alas for Christian Art !
To-day our St. Giulias, in revolt against a social order
founded on prostitution and sex-inequality, demand politi-
cal rights as leverage for a nobler society, and, despite the
advice of kindly Rulers, they are as ready as in the
seventh century to be martyred for their faith, though
they have replaced the passivity of St. Giulia by measures
of aefsfression. Guariento foresaw the modern militant
type when he drew those charming female angels with red
and gold shields and long lances, and wings of green and
gold, who stand on clouds — "suffragette" seraphs, they
seem to me. You may see a battalion of them in the
Museo Civico of Padua, filling a whole corridor, like a
procession in the lobby at Westminster. One of these
fair warriors trails by a cord a black demon with two
quills like white horns, doubtless some literary Cabinet
Minister. Another weighs two souls on scales, and
Female Suffrage does indeed weigh men's souls in the bal-
ance, to find them mostly wanting. For of all forms of
modern vulgarity, I deem nothing more dreadful than the
scoffing callousness towards the sufferings of the " Suffra-
gettes." They are only self-inflicted, we are told, as if
this was not their supreme virtue. That in this age of
blatant materialism women should still show that they
possess souls is wondrous comforting to the idealist,
tempted to believe that the fount of living waters had run
dry, and that Giulia's only travels were now made by
motor-car to smart country houses.
There is nothing which at first sight seems more puz-
338 ITALIAN FANTASIES
zling than the wickedness of good people. For it has
often been said that the truly devout and respectable
Christians are the very ones who would crucify Christ
afresh if he appeared again, as indeed Arnold of Bres-
cia, who had a touch of his spirit, was crucified by Em-
peror, Pope and Church. And St. Bernard, the inspirer
of the Second Crusade to recover the dead bones of Christ,
played a leading part in hounding him down, as the Fran-
ciscans played a leading part in hounding down Savona-
rola.
Now why was St. Bernard — that santo sene who was
chosen by Dante to induct him into the last splendours of
the Paradise, and whose noble hymns to Jesus still edify
the faithful — so blind to the divine aspects of his victim?
And why is it that the citizens of Ferrara, whose excellent
statue and eloquent tribute to their illustrious townsman,
Savonarola, faced my hotel window, could not be trusted
not to stone their next prophet in a cruder sense of the
words ?
A converse question will conduct us to the answer.
Why is the hooligan in the gallery of the theatre ever
the chief friend of virtue ? Why is the wife-bruiser the
most fervid applauder of the domestic sentiment? Be-
cause the man in the gallery looks down on the tangle of
life like the god his name implies : he sees it in as clear
perspective as the aeronaut sees the net-work of alleys
through which the pedestrian blunders ; the plot is
straightened out for him, the villain duly coloured, virtue
in distress plainly marked by beauty and white muslin,
and through no mists of prejudice or interest or passion
he beholds the great outlines of right and wrong. 'Tis
to the credit of human nature that, confronted with the
bare elementals of ethics, and freed from egoistic bias,
the human conscience, even the conscience most distorted
in life, reacts accurately and returns a correct verdict
with the unfailingness of a machine. This it is that
ST. GIULIA AND FEMALE SUFFRAGE 339
preserves the self-respect of the blackest of us, this capac-
ity of ours for seeing our neighbours' sins, which is the
chief bulwark of public virtue. Wherefore, could St.
Bernard have seen Arnold of Brescia as history sees him,
or as a dramatist of insight would have drawn him, St.
Bernard would have been the hrst to be horrified at St.
Bernard's behaviour. But a saint, no more than a hooli-
gan, is free from passions, interests and prejudices of his
own, especially an ecclesiast and theologian and a founder
of monasteries. Wilful and obstinate as are all the saints
of my acquaintance, the most domineering are the cleri-
cal. For all St. Bernard's genius and holiness, he could
not endure a rival point of view. By him, and not by
this interloping Italian monk, this pupil of the critical
Abelard, must the world be turned to righteousness ; nay,
the lieresies of Abelard himself — " who raves not reasons "
— must be condemned by the Council of Sens.
St. Bernard, if he lived to-day, would write the life of
Arnold of Brescia with holy horror at his tragic fate, and
to-morrow, when the passions and mists of to-day are
cleared away, some future Asquith will find a fresh stimu-
lus to rebellion against the Peers in the noble sufferings
of some St. Giulia of the Suffrage.
ICY ITALY : WITH VENICE RISING FROM
THE SEA
Peccavi. I have painted Italy, as others use, in sun-
colour solely. My pen has been heliographic. That were
worthy of the tourist who knows Italy only in her halcj^on
season. 'Tis the obsession of the alliterative image of the
Sunny South, over-riding one's historic metDories — stories
of the Po frozen over from November to April, of penitents
standing barefoot in the snow, bitter adventures of medi-
aeval brides brought tediously to their lords across icy,
wind-swept ways in a sort of Irish honeymoon in the
days before trains de luxe ; nay, this Platonic concept
swamps even the Aristotelian experience. For I have
seen Florence in a London fog and Venice in a Siberian
snowfall. I have seen St. Mark's Square turned into a
steppe, without pigeons, without pleasure-pilgrims, snow-
muffled, immaculate, bleak, given over to raw-knuckled
scrapers and shovellers, knee-deep in crumbling hum-
mocks, or pushing snow-heaped wheelbarrows towards the
providential water-ways, the snow-crusted Campanile
towering over the desolate glacial plain like the North
Pole of childish fancy. Yea, and on the water-ways
floated — O horror of desecration — white gondolas !
Nature, like some vulgar millionaire, had defied the
sumptuary edict consecrated by immemorial tradition,
and, amazed as the Australian pioneer who first beheld
black swans, I watched these white gondolas gliding along
the swollen canals. And I recall Bologna in a blizzard —
340
ICY ITALY 341
a snowfall so persistent that it closed the Pinacoteca by
the curious method of solidly overlaying the skylight of
the main gallery and rendering the pictures invisible. It
was afesta for the janitors, a holiday fallen from heaven.
In the Piazza Nettuno the big fountain was snowed over,
and the cab-drivers sat under great hoary umbrellas that
had hitherto been green, their cabs looking like frosted
cakes. A white hearse passed still whiter. The snow
slashed its way even under the colonnades, and formed a
slippery coating of ice on their pavements. Bran, scat-
tered copiously in these arcades and at all the street-
crossings, maintained a feeble colour-fight against the all-
pervading white.
There is an icy Italy more boreal than Britain, inasmuch
as less equipped against winter. For the native, too,
partakes of the Platonic fallacy, and because his cold
season is briefer than his warm, and oft infused with a
quickening radiance, he shrugs it out of existence, especi-
ally when Carnival invites to alfresco conviviality. The
beggar, indeed, recognises the winter, as becomes a practi-
cal professional man, and squats at the church-porch with
his private pan of burning charcoal ; but the more irre-
sponsible burgher, with his stone floors, and his stoveless,
chimneyless rooms, treats winter as an annual exception,
calling for improvised measures. He is an festival animal
that builds for the summer, though his brigand-cloak,
whose left fold is so sardonically thrown over his right
shoulder, betrays to the scientific observer its prosaic
origin as the throat-protector of an Arctic creature. Of
late, under the pressure of foreign finance, the better hotels
have veined themselves with steam-pipes. But the steam
rises late, and the pipes are only hot when the guest has
departed.
Never have I seen the pretence of perpetual summer
carried further than at Rimini, where in a blinding snow-
storm, when every narrow archaic street was bordered with
342 ITALIAN FANTASIES
four-foot mounds of dirty snow, and the traffic was limited
to donkey-carts dragging snow through the Porta Aurea
to pitch it into the river, the congealing cabmen sat all
day on their powdered boxes cheerfully crying in competi-
tive chorus — every time they caught a glimpse of me —
" To San Marino ? To San Marino ? " That little
Republic — one of the last political curios left, like a fly
in amber, in modern Europe — is a drive of many hours,
even when " the white road to Rimini " is a shimmering
sun-path, yet there was no suspicion of pleasantry in the
cabmen's eagerness to crawl through the niveous morass.
They seriously expected me to set forth on this summer
expedition, with at most the carriage closed against the
driving flakes. It sorted better with my humour to
plough afoot over the muffled Boulevard to the new
Rimini which has grown out of the old rotting Rimini
of Csesar and the Malatestas.
For there is a sham Rimini as well as a real Rimini —
one of those toadstools of cities which flourish so rankly
in our century of comfort. This is the Lido — an Italian
Ostend, sacred to modern villas, mammoth hotels, bathing
establishments, restaurants, the surgy shore tamed into a
Parade for parasols. There is a staring, many-windowed,
many-balconied Grand Hotel, crowned by two baroque
domes, with busts on its fagade and vases at its corners
tapering up into rods. There is a little Lawn-Tennis
Club- Bar and a big Casino, with a restaurant terrace back
and front. There are pretentious Palazzini. There is a
huddle of flaring houses, recalling the grotesque "new
architecture " of Madrid, and a large uncouth hydro-
pathic establishment in terra-cotta, and a long row of
green bathing huts.
Perhaps the profoundest observation of Dickens in Italy
was that the marvellous quartette of buildings outside the
life of Pisa — the Cathedral, the Campo Santo, the Bap-
tistery, and the leaning Tower — is like the architectural
ICY ITALY 343
essence of a rich old city, filtered from its prosaic necessi-
ties. Of the Lido of Rimini (and of its likes) it may be
said that they are the architectural essence of a rich new
city, filtered of all spiritual and poetical values.
But the Lido I saw was purged of all this vulgarity,
buried under stainless snow, which lay deep and virgin
over every street and grassy space, and shrouded every
flaunting structure in primeval purity. The Parade was
blotted out, restored to Nature, and deep drifts of snow
defended it from re-invasion. The Casino lay forsaken,
wrapped in the same soft spotless mantle, the dual stone
steps leading to its twin drinking-terraces transformed
into frozen cascades, its central gates uselessly guarded
by blanched barbed wire. Desolate was even the great
garage, with its cheap fresco of our modern goddess in
the car, her flamboyant robe turned ermine. Beyond the
buried Parade, the Adriatic rolled in sullenly, scarce visi-
ble save by a gleaming line of surf that lit up a narrow
riband of its foreground ; all but the breaking wave was
hidden by a wild whirl of flakes that misted sea and sky
into a grey nullity. Throughout the whole pleasure-city
not a dog prowled nor a cat slunk nor a bird fluttered ;
not a footstep profaned the splendour of its snow. Its
myriad casement-eyes were closed in heavy sleep ; not a
shutter open, not a blind raised. It was a city hibernat-
ing like some monstrous Polar animal. Not a few pleasure-
cities thus abate their vitality in the winter, but so absolute
a dormitation I have never witnessed. It seemed incredi-
ble that with the Spring it would stir in its sleep, it would
shake the snow off its lubberly limbs, loose its gay swarm
of butterfly-parasols. How could that frost-bound terrace
ever ring again with the clink of glasses and the tinkle of
laughter ? How could bathers ever again lie basking on
that frigid strand ? No, it was a dead city I saw, a city
overwhelmed by a new ice-age. And the seas and lands
that radiated from this snowy centre were freezing too, as
344 ITALIAN FANTASIES
science had foretold ; swiftly the deadly chill was spread-
ing through every vein and artery of the nipped earth,
curdling its springs and coagulating its vast oceans and
crusting over even its petty oases of continents with thick-
ribbed ice in which a rare microscopic rotifer alone pre-
served a germ of vitality. The Arctic and Antarctic zones
expanded towards each other, like two blind walls closing
in on life, and with a clash of giant icebergs in a biting
equatorial blast, the last rift of green earth and blue water
was blotted out. And now the globe was spinning again
in a glacial void, as unconscious of the absence of its skin-
parasites as it had been of their presence. Fated for fresh
adventures and new cosmic combinations, the j)lanet rolled
its impassive whiteness through the dumb heavens. But
mortals had put on mortality, and of all the haughty hopes
and splendid dreams of man there remained zero. Earth,
his cradle and his pasture, was become his frigidarium and
his cemetery, and the snow fell silently over the few faint
traces of his passing. His million, million tears had been
frozen into a few icicles.
II
And there is an ugly Italy, an Italy veiled by the blue
heaven, but revealing itself under sullen sunless skies in
all its naked hideousness.
Nothing could be more unlike the popular conception of
Italy than the environs of the Carthusian Monastery of
Pavia in mid-February. Slushy roads about two yards
wide, here and there encumbered with fragments of brick
and stone, and everywhere bordered by heaps of snow.
By one side of the road runs a narrow ice-bound irrigation
canal, geometrically straight, across which rises the high,
bare, dreary endless wall of blank brick surrounding the
monastery. On the other hand stretch the vast fields
with leafless thin trees. It was of this region that Jehan
d'Auton wrote when Pavia was taken by the French :
ICY ITALY 345
"Truly this is Paradise upon earth." Even allowing for
the flowery meadows and running springs of the end of
the fifteenth century, the worthy Benedictine could have
found fairer Paradises nearer Paris. Much of Northern
Italy is still monotonous marshland. Over the bald brick
wall of Mantua, nine feet thick, that backs the Piazza
sacred to Virgil, I gazed one morning at a dismal swampy
lake, a couple of barges, a factory chimney, and spectral,
leafless stumps of trees, the brownish soil of the lake show-
ing through the dead sullen water, a ghost of sun hovering
over rows of pollarded planes. Here, methought, had Virgil
found a suggestion for his Stygian marsh. I would not
say a word against Mantua itself, which is most lovable,
with side-canals that might be Venetian, and ever-flowing
taps and old arches, arcades and buildings. But from
Mantua to Modena I saw naught but ugly brown grass
over flat lands, with pollarded elms and vines stretched
from tree to tree. Here and there a little canal relieved
the dismal plain. Near Modena a few poplars appeared.
A team of lovely oxen drawing a cart gave the landscape
its one touch of beauty.
Rimini proper is picturesque enough, with its Porto
Canale full of small barques with tall masts. But between
it and Ravenna, what desolation ! Outside the town the
gaunt ruins of the Malatesta Castle — a bare wall and a
bare squarish rock — were the prelude to the same bare
snowy plains, the same little pollarded elms, varied by tall
skeleton poplars. Once a copse of firs, bowed down by
snow, broke the white flatness. Near Classe, famous for
Sant' Appolinare, the waste became even marshier, sparse
twigs of desolate shrubs alone peeping through the white
blanket. Nearer Ravenna a few signs of life appeared, a
dead cottage, or a living hovel, or a few spectral trees, or
a brick bridge over an ice-laden river. On such a light
brown marsh specked with stagnant pools the modern
Italians have put up hoardings with advertisements of
346 ITALIAN FANTASIES
cognac. A little further East their remote progenitors
put up Venice !
Never was there so apparently hopeless a site as those
islands of the lagoons, preserved from malaria only by a
faint pulse of the " tideless, dolorous midland sea." How
so marvellous a city rose on the wooden piles of the
refugees, how out of so dire a necessity they made so rare
a beauty and so mighty a force, was always a puzzle to me
till I read that these fugitives before the Lombard Con-
querors were Romans ! Then it all leapt into clearness.
Venice is Rome, in the key of water ! The same indomi-
table racial energy that had built up Rome and the Roman
Empire built up Venice and the Venetian Empire. Hunted
from Padua, the Romans are able to express themselves in
water as powerfully as in earth — to create a new empire
in Italy and the East, and build a mighty fleet, and crush
the Turks, and hold the carrying trade of the world, and
for six centuries keep the Adriatic as a private lake. And
in this new Empire they are touched by the shimmering
spell of water to new creations of joyous colour on canvas,
to fairy convolutions in marble, and a church that rises as
lightly as a sea-flower. For here all that is sternly Ro-
man
" Doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange."
But let us not forget that despite her seven hills Rome
also began as a pile-village, and that the Campagna is of
the same marshy character as the soil around Venice. I
have more faith in Goethe's intuition that Rome was
built up by herdsmen and a rabble than in the thesis,
expounded by Guglielmo Ferrero at Rome's last birthday
celebration, that it was the carefully chosen site of a
colony from Alba, with Romulus and Remus in their
traditional roles. For though her seven hills enabled
Rome to keep her head above water, they did not enable
ICY ITALY 347
her to keep her feet dry. The Forum August! was
anciently swamp and became a swamp again in the Middle
Ages, and once some earlier form of gondola plied be-
tween the Capitol and the Palatine Hill. Thus the races
who hailed from Rome had water in their blood, and the
instinct to build on piles. It is a strange instinct which
races have preserved and obeyed — in the foolish human
fashion — even on land that was high and dry. What
wonder if it survived in latency in these ex-Romans !
Yes, Venice was Rome in the key of water, as Rome
was Venice in the key of earth. And the Roman Church
— is she not Rome in the key of heaven ? Is it not
always the same racial mastery that confronts us, the
same instinct for dominance ? Does the Church not hold
the after-world as Rome held the ancient world, does she
not own the lake of fire as the Doges owned the Adriatic ?
Drive Rome from her throne on the hills and she builds
up her pedestal again on sea-soaked piles : hound her
from the lagoons, and of a few acres around the piazza of
St. Peter she makes the seat of a sovereignty even more
boundless and majestic.
Hardly had I written this when I opened by hazard
my first edition of Byron's " The Two Foscari " (1821),
and was startled to read in his appendix as follows : " In
Lady Morgan's fearless and excellent work upon ' Italy '
I perceive the expression of ' Rome of the Ocean ' applied
to Venice. The same phrase occurs in ' The Two Foscari.'
My publisher can vouch for me that the tragedy was
written and sent to England some time before I had seen
Lady Morgan's work, which I only received on the 16th
of August. I hasten, however, to notice the coincidence
and to yield the originality of the phrase to her who first
placed it before the public." Byron goes on to explain
that he is the more anxious to do this because the Grub
Street hacks accuse him of plagiarism. But turning to
the tragedy itself, I find that Byron has rather plagiarised
348 ITALLOs' F.lXTASIES
me than the admirable " Gloriana," for her phrase might
be a mere metaphor, whereas Marina observes explicitly :
" And yet you see how from their banishment
Before the Tartar into these salt isles,
Their antique energy of mind, all that
Remain 'd of Rome for their inheritance.
Created by degrees an ocean-Rome."
But Byron's over-anxiety to disavow originality was due
to the morbid state of mind induced by the aforesaid
hacks, one of whom had even accused him of having
" received five hundred pounds for writing advertisements
for Day and Martin's patent blacking."
" That accusation," says Byron, " is the highest compli-
ment to my literary powers which I ever received.*' I
can only say the same of Byron's plagiarism from myself.
But Byron need not have been so apologetic to Lady
Morgan, for 'twas the very boast of Venice to be " the
legitimate heir of Rome," whose Empire Doge Dandolo
re-established in that Nova Roma of Constantinople with
whose art and architecture her own is so delectably
crossed.
THE DYING CARNIVAL
Carnival! What a whirling word I What a vision of
masks and gaiety, militant flowers and confetti ! Not fare-
well to meat, but hail to merriment ! Never, in sooth, does
Italy show so earthly as when, bidding adieu to the flesh and
the world, she enters into the contemplation of the tragic
mystery of the self-sacrifice of God. And yet in this gross-
ness of popular rejoicing lies more faith than in the frigid
pieties of the established English Church. Even the brutali-
ties and Jew-baitings that marked the old Roman carnival,
even the profane parodies of the Mass, sprang from a
naive vividness of belief. Parody is merel}^ the obverse
side of reverence, and 'tis only when you do not believe
in your God that you dare not make fun of Him or with
Him. The gargoyled gutter is as characteristic of the
cathedral as the mystic rose-window. Our revivals of
miracle plays are performed in an atmosphere of glacial
awe, which was by no means the atmosphere of their
birth. This sort of reverence is too often faith fallen to
freezing-point. We remove our sense of humour as we
take off our slippers at alien mosques.
It was when faith was at its full — near the 3'ear 1000
— and in connection with the Christmas season, that the
Patriarch of Constantinople instituted the Feast of Fools
and the Feast of the Ass, travestying the most sacred
persons and offices. The Lord of Misrule is no heathen
deity, but a most Christian majesty ; and King Carnival
is the spiritual successor of the old King of Saturnalia,
whether Frazer be correct or not in attributing to him
the direct succession. For the truly religious the carnival
349
350 ITALIAN FANTASIES
is necessar}^ to the sanity of things. It is an expression of
the breadth and complexity of the Cosmos, whicli would
otherwise be missing from the Easter ritual. The God of
the grotesque is as real as the God of Gethsemane and the
Cosmos cannot be stretched on a crucifix. It bulges too
oddly for that. And it is this grotesque side of life that
finds quasi-religious expression in the Carnival processions,
with their monsters known and unknown to Nature, with
their fanciful hybrids and quaint permutations of the
elements of reality. Humanity herein records its joyous
satisfaction and sympathy with that freakish mood of
Nature which produced the ornithorhynchus and the
elephant, and shaped to uncouthness, instead of to sym-
metry and beauty. Alas ! I fear humanity is only too
acquiescent in these deviations of the great mother into
the grotesque ; the folk-spirit runs more fluently to gross
pleasantry and comic tawdriness than to the Beautiful,
and many a Carnival procession is a nightmare of concen-
trated ugliness.
The suspicion takes me that our St. Valentine's Day,
so dominatingly devoted to grotesque caricature, and so
coincident with the Carnival period, is really the Catholic
Carnival in another guise and that prudish Protestantism
has entertained the devil unawares.
But the Carnival — ^like St. Valentine's Day — is dying.
It is more alive in the ex-Italian Riviera than in Italy
proper. I have a memory of a Carnival at Siena which
consisted mainly of one imperturbable merry-maker
stumping with giant wooden boots through the stony alleys.
A Carnival at Modena has left even less trace — some dim
sense of more crowded streets with a rare mask. At
Mantua, too, there was no set procession — children in
fancy dress, with a few adult masqueraders, alone paid
fealty to the season. At Bologna the last night of Car-
nival was almost vivacious, and in the sleety colonnades
branching off from the Via Ugo Bassi there was quite a
THE DYING CARNIVAL 351
dense crowd of promenaders defying the bitter wind,
while muffled groups, with their coat collars up, sat drink-
ing at the little tables. There were some children, fantas-
tically pranked, attended by prosaic mothers, there was a
small percentage of masked faces, while a truly gallant
cavalier (escorting a dame in a domino) paraded his white
stockings, that looked icy, across the snowy roads. No
confetti, and only an infrequent scream of hilarity. That
the old plaster missiles, with other crudities, have dis-
appeared, is indeed no cause for lamentation, but a
Carnival without confetti is like an omelette without
eggs.
Well might a writer in the local paper, II Resto del
Carlino, lament the brave days of old when a vast array
of carriages and masks coursed through the Via S.
Mamolo, and the last days of the Carnival were marked
by jousts and tourneys, and tiltings at the quintain, with
a queen of beauty in white satin and magnificent masquer-
aders showering flowers, fruits and perfumes, and nymphs
carrying Cupid tied hand and foot.
In Cremona I made trial of a Veglione whose allure-
ments had been placarded for days. A Trionfo di Diana,
heralded in large letters, peculiarly suggested pomp and
revelry. And indeed I found a theatre almost as large as
La Scala, illumined by a dazzling chandelier, with four
tiers of boxes resplendent with the shoulders of women
and the shirt fronts of men — tiaras, uniforms, orders, all
the spectacular social sublime. I had not imagined that
obscure Cremona — no longer famous, even for violins —
held these glittering possibilities, and it set me to the
analysis that Italian theatres — above the platea — are all
shop-front, making a brave show of a shallow audience,
for the encouragement of the actors and its own gratifica-
tion, instead of obscuring and dissipating it over back
benches.
The stage and the platea had been united by an isthmus
352 ITALIAN FANTASIES
of steps and in an enclosure sat a full orchestra. Around
the musicians danced men in evening-dress and a few
ladies in masks, most of whom, notwithstanding the super-
abundance of males, preferred to dance with their own
sex. This was largely what the spectators had come out
for to see, and the disproportion of the dancers to the
wilderness of onlookers was the only comic feature of this
Carnival Ball. True, a few clownish figures clothed in
green and wearing little basket hats improvised mild
romps on the stage, and occasionally from the unexpected
vantage of a box shouted down some facetious remark,
but there was no unction in them, nay not even when
they capped the joke by clapping large baskets on their
heads. However, the Trionfo di Diana still remained to
account for the vast audience, and there came a moment
when an electric thrill ran through the packed theatre,
the dancing ceased, and the dancers ranged themselves,
looking eagerly towards the doors. After a period of tense
expectation, there came slowly up the platea a few hunts-
men with live dogs and stuffed hawks, and one melancholy
horn that gave a few spasmodic single toots, whereupon
appeared Diana in a scanty white robe, recumbent on a
floral car of foliage and roses, drawn by six hounds, one of
which alone rose to the humour of the occasion, and by
his inability to remain on his own side of the shaft
achieved a rare ripple of laughter, while the applause that
followed his adjustment brought quite a wave of warmth.
But the chill fell afresh, as the procession, after a cheerless
turn or two on the stage, made its exit as tamely as a
spent squib. A paltrier spectacle was never seen in a
penny show.
A runner, accompanied by a cyclist, who pumped him
up with his pump, made a fresh onslaught upon our sense
of fun, but when he too trailed off equally into nothing-
ness, I quitted the dazzling midnight scene, leaving the
beauty and fashion of Cremona to its Carnival dissipations.
THE DYING CARNIVAL 353
Yes, the Italian Carnival is dying. Unregretted, adds
the Anglo-French paper that serves the select circles of
Rome. For it is only the Carnival of the streets that is
passing, this genteel authority tells us reassuringly. " A
far more glorious Carnival is replacing it. In the grand
cosmopolitan hotels fete succeeds /e^e."
Alas, so even the Carnival has passed over to the Mag-
nificent Ones, who not content with annexing the best
things in their own lands sail under their pirate flag in
quest of the spoils of every other, moving from Rome to
Switzerland, from Ascot to Cairo, with the movement of
Sport or the Sun. What a change from the days of the
Roman Fathers, when religion circled round one's own
hearth, and exile was practically excommunication ! The
mother-land is no longer a mother but a mistress, to be
visited only for pleasure, and every other land is only
another odalisque, devoid of sanctities, ministress to appe-
tites. The Magnificent Ones of the Middle Ages and the
Renaissance at least stayed at home and minded their
serfs and their business : our modern Magnificent Ones go
abroad, make new serfs everywhere, and mind only their
pleasures. And hence it is that the festa of the Carnival,
whose only raison d'etre was religious, whose only justifica-
tion was its spontaneity, is to be annexed by the Magnifi-
cent Mob, ever in search of new pretexts for new clothes
and new vulgarities. The froth of pleasure is to be
skimmed off and the cup of seriousness thrown away. The
joyousness that ushers in Lent is to be torn from its con-
text as the fine feathers are torn from a bird, to flutter on
the hat of a demi-mondaine. The grand cosmopolitan
hotels with the grand cosmopolitan rabble will usher in
with grand cosmopolitan dances the period of prayer and
fasting, and the dying Carnival will achieve resurrection.
2a
NAPOLEON AND BYRON IN ITALY : OR
LETTERS AND ACTION
As I creep humbly through this proud and prodigious
Italy, peeping into palaces and passing yearningly before
masterpieces, to the maddening chatter of concierges and
sacristans, I am constantly stumbling upon the footsteps of
him who made the grand tour in the high sense of the
words. Not the British heir of bygone centuries with his
mentor and his letters of introduction, not even his noble
father with the family coach. No, these were pygmies
little taller than myself. Your sublime tourist was Napo-
leon, who strode over the holy land of Beauty like a Brob-
dingnagian over Lilliput. He came, he saw, he com-
manded. He looked at a picture, a pillar, a statue — and
despatched it to France. He gazed at Lombard's iron
crown — and put it on. He beheld Milan Cathedral —
and it became the scene of his coronation, with blessing of
clergy and the old feudal homage. He perceived an or-
nate ducal bed — and slept in it, the poor duke a-cold.
He rode through the ancient streets, not Baedeker but
cocked hat in hand, graciously acknowledging the loyal
cheers of the ancient stock. He examined the Sacro
Catino in Genoa Cathedral and bore it off with its precious
blood ; he espied the rich treasure of Loreto, and lo ! it
was his ; he saw Lucca that it was fair, and it became his
sister Elisa's. He visited Venice — and wound up the
Republic. He admired St. Mark's — and haled its bronze
horses to Paris, transferring to it the Patriarchate as in
364
NAPOLEON AND BYRON IN ITALY 355
compensation. The Patriarchal Palace itself he turned
into barracks ; superfluous monasteries and churches were
shut up and their lands confiscated. He even destroyed,
doubtless in the same righteous indignation, the lion's
head over " the lion's mouth " in the Palace of the Doges,
while the Bucentaur, their gorgeous galley, he burnt to
extract the gold.
But he was not merely destructive and rapacious. The
founder of the Code Napoleon repaired the amphitheatre of
"Verona, and resumed the neglected building of the fagade
of Milan Cathedral, and opened up the Simplon route to
Italy, and marked its terminus by the Triumphal Arch of
Milan. He surveyed the harbour of Spezia for a war-har-
bour and projected to drain Lake Trasimeno away — con-
ceptions which to-day are realities. And all this and a
hundred other feats of construction in the breathing-
spaces of his Titanic single-handed fight against embattled
Europe. Not seldom, as I passed my woodshop in Venice,
with its caligraphic placard AW Ingrosso e al Minuto, did
I think of the Corsican Superman, with his wholesale and
retail dealings with the little breed of mankind. Perhaps
to establish '* the Kingdom of Italy," with twenty-four
departments and his step-son as viceroy, and to turn the
little district of Bassano into a duchy for his secretary
were, to Napoleon, feats of the same apparent calibre.
Even so we stride as carelessly over a brooklet as over a
puddle. Surely there is a fascinating book to be written
on Napoleon in Italy, as a change from the countless
Napoleons in St. Helena or the flood of foolish volumes
upon his mistresses.
And a final appraisement of Napoleon still remains to
seek. The little fat man who had "the genius to be
loved " — except by Josephine and Marie Louise — and who
provided for his family by distributing thrones, has long
since ceased to be the ogre with whom British babes were
frighted, though he has not yet become Heine's divine
356 ITALIAN FANTASIES
being done to death by British Philistinism. Carlyle
classed him among his "Heroes" and credited him with
insight because, when those around him proved there was
no God, he looked up at the stars and asked, " Who made
all that ? " But this was surely no index of profundity
— merely a theism of Pure Reason and an illustration of
Napoleon's peculiar interest in action. "Who made all
that ? " Making, doing, that was his essential secret —
unresting activity, rapid striking, utilisation of every
moment. He was as alert the moment after victory as
others after defeat. Was one combination destroyed, his
nimble and exhaustless energy instantly fashioned an al-
ternative. Mobility of brain and immobility of soul —
these were his gifts in a crisis. When all was lost and
himself a captive, " What is the use of grumbling ? " he
asked his attendants. "Nothing can be done.'" The
tragedy of Napoleon was thus the obverse of the tragedy
of Hamlet, whose burden lay precisely in there being
something to be done. Imagine the great demiurge at
work in these days of telegraphy and steam, motor-cars
and aeroplanes. What might he not have achieved ! As
it was, he just missed creating the United States of
Europe. Anatole France accuses him of having taken
soldiers too seriously. As well accuse an engineer of tak-
ing cranes and levers too seriously. Soldiers were the
indispensable instruments by which Napoleon raised him-
self to the level of those more commonplace rulers of
Europe who had found their cradles suspended on the
heights. It is the German Emperor who takes soldiers
too seriously, who marshals them with the solemnity of a
child playing with his wooden regiments. And the
Kaiser, already in the purple, has not Napoleon's excuse.
His is simply a false and reactionary view of life, as of a
housemaid who adores uniforms. But Napoleon would
have played his Machiavellian game equally with grocers;
and, indeed, his lifelong ambition to sap British commerce
NAPOLEON AND BYRON IN ITALY 357
was conceived in the spirit of a Titanic tradesman, who
knows better than to count corpses. He was the fifteenth-
century condottiere magnified many diameters, playing
with countries and nations instead of with towns and
tribes, and sweeping in his winnings across the green table
of earth as in some game of the gods. As a Messiah of
Pure Reason, an Apostle of the People, he was able, like
Mohammed, to back the Word with the Sword, and, less
veracious than the prophet of the desert, to combine for
the making of History its two great factors of Force and
Fraud. Through liim, accordingly. History made a leap,
proceeding by earthquake and catastrophe instead of by
patient cumulation and attrition. He was a cosmic force
— a force of Nature, as he truthfully claimed — a terre-
moto that tumbled the stagnant old order about the ears
of Courts and Churches.
True, after the earthquake the old slow, stubborn forces
reassert themselves ; but the configuration of the land has
been irrevocably changed. The Maya, the illusion of
Royalty, comes slowly back, for it is a world of unreason,
and even Bismarck believed in the divine right of the
princes he despised. But the feudal order throughout
Europe will never wholly recover from the shock of
Napoleon. Unfortunately, from a Messiah he glided into
a Magnificent One, and the marriage with Marie Louise,
at first perhaps a mere cold-blooded chess-move to estab-
lish his dynasty, subtly reduced him into accepting
Royalty at its own and the popular valuation. He had mar-
ried beneath him, and Nemesis followed. The dyer's hand
was subdued to that it worked in, and Napoleon sank into
a snob. His true Waterloo was spiritual. The actual
Waterloo was a moral victory.
Had he remained representative of the Republican or
any other principle, exile would have had no power over
him ; on the contrary, it would have aggrandised his in-
fluence. But his exile represented nothing but the moping
358 ITALIAN FANTASIES
of a banished Magnificent, so that a generous spirit like
Byron could find in his " Ode to Napoleon," no words too
excoriating for this fallen meanness.
And while Napoleon pined in St. Helena, Marie Louise
found promotion as Duchess of Parma, becoming her own
mistress instead of the world's, and finding husbands nearer
down to her own level than the Corsican ex-corporal.
Quite happy she must have been, sitting on her throne
under a great red baldachino, giving audience, surrounded
by her suite and her soldiers — as Antonio Pock painted
her — or smothered in diamonds at neck, waist, earrings
and hair, smirking in a low-necked dress at her crimson
and jewelled crown, as in the picture of Gian Battisti
Borghesi. Parma preserves both these portraits, but they
are not so quaint a deposit of the great Napoleonic wave
as Canova's bust of Marie Louise as Concord !
There is in Milan a queer museum called " The Gallery
of Knowledge and Study," the collection of which was
begun by a " Noble Milanese," and the first catalogue of
which was published in Latin in 1666. Here, amid sea-
shells, miniatures, old maps, pottery, bronzes, silkworm
analyses, and old round mirrors in great square frames,
may now be seen a pair of yellow gloves which once cov-
ered the iron hands, together with the cobbler's measure
of that foot which once stamped on the world. There is an
air of coquetry about the pointed toe. A captain's brevet,
signed by the " First Consul " and headed " French Re-
public," serves as a reminder of the earlier phase. The
humour of museums has placed these relics in a case with
those of other " illustrious men " — to wit, two Popes and
St. Carlo, the dominant saint of the district (who is just
celebrating his tercentenary).
But the Triumphal ^rch remains Napoleon's chief monu-
ment at Milan, though it is become a sort of Vicar of Bray
in stone. For when Napoleon fell, the Austrian Emperor
replaced the chronicle of French victories by bas-reliefs of
NAPOLEON AND BYRON IN ITALY 359
defeats, and re-christened it an Arch of Peace. And when
in turn Lombardy was liberated by Victor Emmanuel, new
inscriptions converted it into an Arch of Freedom. One
can imagine the stone singing, like the Temple of Memnon
at sunrise :
" But whatsoever king shall reign,
Still 7'11 be the Arch of Triumph."
And in Ferrara there is a Triumphal Column no less
inconstant. Designed to support the statue of Duke
Ercole I., it was annexed by Pope Alexander VII., who
was deposed by Napoleon, whose statue has now been
replaced by Ariosto's. Whether the-ducal-papal-military-
poetic pillar supports its ultimate statue, we may doubt,
though a poet seems less obnoxious to political passion
than the other sorts of hero.
Such mutations in the significance of monuments, how-
ever they deface and blur history, are not unnatural
amid the vicissitudes of Italy : and, after all, an arch or a
pillar is but an arch or a pillar.
But even a statue that keeps its place is not safe from
supersession. In Rimini in 1614 the Commune, grateful
to the Pope (Paolo V.), commemorated him in bronze in
the beautiful Piazza of the Fountain, the Fountain whose
harmonious fall pleased the ear of Leonardo da Vinci.
The monument is elaborate and handsome, with bas-reliefs
in the seat and in the Papal mantle, showing in one place
the city in perspective. But during the Cisalpine Re-
public, thanks again to Napoleon, no Pope could keep his
place in Rimini, and as the simplest way of preserving him
on this favoured site, the municipality erased his epitaph
and re-christened him St. Gaudenzo. Gaudenzo was
the martyr Bishop of Rimini, the Protector of the City.
This unearned increment was not the Saint's first, for the
Church of S. Gaudenzo had been erected on the basis of a
Temple of Jove. To annex the glories of both Jove and
Pope is indeed a singular fortune, even in the ironic
360 ITALIAN FANTASIES
changes and chances we call history. But Napoleon, in
the days when he ordered the Temple of Malatesta to be
the Cathedral of Rimini, was annexing even the functions
of both Pope and Jove. For he was also rearranging
Europe after Austerlitz and giving the quietus to the
Holy Roman Empire.
II
Only second to the impact of Napoleon on Europe was the
impact of Byron. 'Tis Csesar and Hamlet in contemporary
antithesis, for Professor Minto has well said that Byron
played Hamlet with the world for his stage. While Byron
was soliloquising with his pen, Napoleon was energising
with his sword, and whether the pen was really the mightier
of the twain is a nice thesis for debating societies. But in
Italy, and by the greatest modern Italian poet, Byron has
been acclaimed as a man of action. In my hotel in Bologna
the landlord had piously — or witli an eye to custom —
suspended a tablet, commissioned from Carducci, whereof
a translation would run as follows:
" Here
In August and September 1819
Lodged
And Conspired for Liberty
George Gordon, Lord Byron,
"Who Gave to Greece His Life,
To Italy His Heart and Talent,
Than Who
None Arose Among The Moderns More Potent
To Accompany Poetry With Action,
None IMore Piously Inclined
To Sing The Glories and Adventures
Of our People."
An epigraph, I fear, involving some poetic licence.
True, of course, that no modern poet's life or work, save
Browning's, is so interpenetrated with Italy. But Byron's
amateur relation with the futile Italian conspirators of the
NAPOLEON AND BYRON IN ITALY 361
generation before Garibaldi was a somewhat shadowy con-
tact with action, however generous his impatient ardour
for Italy's resurrection. Vaporous, too, was the conspiracy
of " The Liberal " to pour new wine into the old British
beer-bottle. But even his membership of the Greek com-
mittee or the equipment of a bellicose brig against Turkey,
or his abortive appointment as Commander-in-Chief in an
expedition against Lepanto, scarcely brings Byron into the
category of men of action. He had never the chance of
sloughing Hamlet for Ceesar or even for the Corsair. It
was not even given him to die in battle, as he so ardently
desired in the last verse of his last poem. And though
his Hellenic fervour redeemed his closing days from de-
spair and degradation, still the fever which slew him at
Missolonghi hardly warrants the claim that he gave his
life for Greece. Had his microbe met him in marshy
Ravenna instead of marshy Missolonghi, would it have
been said that he died for Italy? For aught we know his
sea voyage from Genoa to Greece may have lengthened his
life.
Moreover it was as an ideologue that Byron plunged
into affairs. For the Greeks whom he set out to deliver
figured in his mind as direct, if degenerate, descendants of
the great free spirits of old, the creators of Hellenic culture:
the reality was a priestridden population debased by Slav
stocks.
Byron had indeed an opulence of temperament which
naturally spilt over into action. Like Sir Walter Scott,
he was larger than a writing man, and he brought the
Scott sanity rather than the Byronic ebullience into his
three months' work at Missolonghi, holding himself aloof
from factions and thus reconciling them in him, throwing
his weight on the side of humanity, and even rising beyond
his disappointment in the Greeks to perceive that their
very failings made their regeneration only the more neces-
sary. There was certainly in him the making of a leader
362 ITALIAN FANTASIES
of men. Nevertheless cerebral ferment and not conspir-
ing for liberty was his essential form of activity. That
cerebral ferment was never more ebullient and continuous
than in those years of Italy and the Countess Guiccioli.
Ravenna was his favourite town, and action is not precisely
the note of Ravenna at whose town-gate I read with my
own eyes a fabulous prohibition against vehicular traffic
in the streets.
But did we concede Carducci's claim to the full, and
even suj^plement it by Byron's passing eagerness to mould
British politics, the Italian poet's characterisation of him
as the most striking modern instance of the union of
poetry and action, is a startling reminder of the poverty
and vacuousness of the chronicle of singing men of affairs.
If Byron be indeed Eclipse, truly the rest are nowhere.
And the question arises, why the modern man should be
so artificially bifurcated, ^schylus was both soldier and
poet. Caesar not only made history but wrote it. Dante
was Prior of Florence.
" In rebus publicis administrans," says the inscription
on the absurd tomb of Ariosto, and we know that Duke
Alfonso sent him to suppress bands of robbers in lawless
Garfagnana as well as on that even more formidable ex-
pedition to the Terrible Pontiff who had excommunicated
the ruler of Ferrara. Chaucer was a diplomatist and
Government OfGcial. The ethereal singer of " The Faerie
Queene " shared in the bloody attempt at the Pacification
of Ireland. Milton, that virulent pamphleteer, barely
escaped the block. Goethe administered Weimar. Victor
Hugo, like Dante, achieved exile. Bjornson contributed
to the independence of Norway. The notion of a poet as
aloof from life seems to be largely modern and peculiarly
British. Shelley is probably responsible for this concep-
tion of the " beautiful and ineffectual angel," and in our
own day Swinburne has helped to carry on the legend.
But Swinburne's fellow-poet, the self-styled " Singer of an
NAPOLEON AND BYRON IN ITALY 363
empty day," was precisely the poet who had the largest
relations with life, and whose wall-papers have spread to
circles where his poetry is unknown or unread.
You may say that Virgil, who was neither modern nor
British, practised the same attitude of detachment, the
same exclusive self-consecration to letters as Words-
worth or Tennyson. But Virgil had a people to express,
and Wordsworth and Tennyson were passionate politicians,
if they made no incursions into action proper. You may
urge that the bards, skalds, minstrels, troubadours, ballad-
mongers, jongleurs, have always been a class apart from
action, but these were at least landers of action, laureates
of lords, while even the Minnesingers celebrated less their
own mistresses than those of the heroes. 'Tis a parasitism
upon action, to which indeed the meek and prostrate Kip-
ling would confine the role of letters.
But why should the power to feel and express the finer
flavours of life and language paralyse the capacity for ac-
tion ? In the sanest souls both functions would co-exist
in almost equal proportions. Sword in one hand and
trowel in the other, Ezra's Jews rebuilt the Temple, and
the new Jerusalem will not rise till we can hold both trowel
and tablet. In that Platonic millennium poets must be
kings and kings poets.
That fantastic, mutilated, myopic and inefficient being,
known as " the practical man," sniffs suspiciously at all
movements that have thought or imagination, or an ideal
for their inspiration. It may be conceded to this crippled
soul that action can never take the rigid lines of theory,
and that the forces of deflection must modify, if not indeed
prevail over, the a priori pattern. But he is not truly a
thinker whose thought cannot allow for these deviations in
practice, which are as foreseeable (if not as exactly comput-
able) as the retardation, acceleration or aberration of a
planet by the pull of every other within whose attraction
it rolls. Action is not pure thought, but applied thinking
364 ITALIAN FANTASIES
— a species of engineering over, through or around moun-
tains, and opposing private domains. " Life caricatures
our concepts," a dreamer complained to me, after lie had
stepped down into politics. Is it not perhaps that our
concepts caricature life ? Life is too fluid and asymmetric
to bear these fixed forms of constructive polity, and Lord
Acton tells us that in the whole course of history no such
rounded scheme has ever found fulfilment. I do not
wonder.
But the poet who has never acted on the stage of affairs
is moving in a padded world of words, and the hero who
has never sung, or at least thrilled with the music in him,
is only subhuman. The divorce of life and letters tends
to sterilise letters and to brutalise life. The British mis-
trust of poetry in affairs has a solid basis — of stupidity.
Imagination, which is the essential factor in all science, is
esteemed a Jack o' Lantern to lure astray. And to tap
one's way along, inch by inch, without any light at all, is
held the surest method of progression.
But Italy, which has known Mazzini, is, I trust, for ever
saved from this Anglo-Saxon shallowness.
" A Revolution is the passing of an idea from theory
into practice," said Mazzini. And again, " Those who
sunder Thought and Action dismember God and deny the
eternal Unity of things." Pensiero e Azione was the sig-
nificant title of the journal he founded to bring about the
redemption of Italy. Garibaldi too was a dreamer, who
even wrote poetry. Cavour, the most worldly of the trio
of Italian saviours, owes his greatness precisely to the
imagination which could use all means and all men to educe
the foreseen end.
A sharp distinction should be drawn between those who
dream with their eyes open, and those who dream with
their eyes shut. What Cavour saw was in congruity with
fact and possibility. Prevision is not perversion. As our
modern watcher of the skies received the photograph of
NAPOLEON AND BYRON IN ITALY 365
Halley's Comet upon his plate half a year before it became
visible to the eye, and months before it revealed itself to
the farthest-piercing telescope, so upon the sensitised soul
coming events cast their configurations before. This
foresight of insight has naught in common with the night-
mares and chimoeras of sleep. " The prophetic soul of the
wide world dreaming on things to come " admits the elect
to glimpses of its dream. These be the prophets, conduits
through which the universe arrives at self-consciousness,
as the heroes are the conduits through which it arrives at
self-amelioration.
THE CONSOLATIONS OF PHLEBOTOMY: A
PARADOX AT PAVIA
In a room leading to the Senate in the Ducal Palace of
Venice I was looking at a picture by Contarini of the
conquest of Verona by the Venetians in 1405.
'Twas a farrago of fine confused painting, horses asprawl
over the dead and wounded, men in armour driving their
daggers home in the prostrate huddled forms, galloping
chargers viciously spurred by helmeted knights with
swirling swords, in brief an orgie of wild and whirling
devilry. The pity of it, I thought, Verona and Venice,
those two fairy sisters, each magically enthroned on beauty,
members of the same Venetia, peopled with the same stock,
speaking almost the same dialect, why must they be at
each other's throat ? And this revelry of devihy might,
I knew, equally serve for Venice's conquest of any other
of her neighbours in that wonderful fighting fifteenth cen-
tury of hers, when she must needs set up her winged lion
in every market place.
And these rivalries of Venice and her neighbour-towns,
I recalled, were only part of the universal urban warfare
— Genoa against Pisa, Siena against Florence, Gubbio
against Perugia ; these again breaking into smaller circles
of contention, or intersected with larger, party against
party, faction against faction, guild against guild, Guelph
against Ghibelline, Montague against Capulet,Oddi against
Baglioni, popolani against grandi, provinces against in-
vaders, blood-feuds horrific, innumerable, the Guelph-
Ghibelline contest alone involving 7200 revolutions and
700 massacres in its three centuries! And yet there is
366
THE CONSOLATIONS OF PHLEBOTOMY 367
a reverse to the shield, and a jewelled scabbard to the
sword.
I stood later in the Palazzo Malaspina of Pavia where,
tradition says, the imprisoned Boethius composed " The
Consolations of Philosophy," and here in a vestibule my
eye was caught by a fragment of gilded gate hung aloft,
and running to read the explanatory inscription, I found
it — in translation — as follows:
" These Remnants of the Old Gates of Pavia
Thrice Trophies in Civil Wars
By a Magnanimous Thought Restored by Ravenna
Are To-day an Occasion for Rejoicing
Betwixt the Two Cities Desirous
Of Changing the Vestiges of the Old Discords
Into Pledges of Union & Patriotic Love
The XIII day of September MDCCCLXXVIII."
Un magnanimo pensiero, indeed ! And — like the chains of
Pisa's ancient harbour restored by Genoa — a pleasant se-
quel to the noble common struggle for Italian indepen-
dence. And yet — the advocatus diahoU whispered me, or
was it the shade of Boethius in quest of " The Consolations
of Phlebotomy " ? — " What has become of Pavia, what of
Ravenna, since they ceased to let each other's blood?
Where is the Pavia of a hundred towers, where is the
Castello reared and enriched by generations of Visconti
Dukes, and its University, once the finest in Italy, at which
Petrarch held a chair ; where is the opulence of life that
flowed over into the Certosa, now arid in its mausolean
magnificence ? Where is the Ravena whose lawyers were
as proverbial in the eleventh century as Philadelphia's are
to-day, where is that hotbed of heresy which nourished the
great anti-Pope Guibert ? Where is even the Ravenna
of Guido da Polenta, protector of Dante? Apt indeed to
hold only Dante's tomb. And its young men who bawl
out choruses of a Sunday night till the small hours — do
they even deserve the shrine of the poet of Christendom ?
368 ITALIAN FANTASIES
And Venice? And Verona? And the Rimini of the
sixty galle3's ? What have they gained from their cokjur-
less absorption into a United Italy, compared with what
they have lost — had indeed already lost — of peculiar and
passionate existence ? Are there two gentlemen of Verona
now in whom we take a scintilla of interest ? Is there a
merchant of Venice whose ventures concern us a jot? Is
there a single Antonio with argosies bound for Tripolis
and the Indies ? " Your Ben Jonson," and by his wide
postliumous reading I knew 'twas Boethius speaking now,
"said 'in short measures life may perfect be.' He should
have said ' in small circles ' and perhaps ' onli/ in small
circles.' All America — with its vasty breadths — stands
to-day without a single man of the first order."
" 'Tis not even" — put in the advocatus c?^aJo?^, betrayed
by his unphilosophic chuckle — "as if the destruction of
small patriotisms meant the destruction of war. Pavia
and Ravenna," he pointed out mischievously, "must con-
tinue to fight — as part of the totality, Italy. And be-
hold," quoth he, drawing my eyes towards the Piazza
Castello, " the significance of that old castle's metamor-
phosis into a barrack — the poetry of war turned to prose,
the frescoes of the old Pavian and Cremonese painters
faded, perhaps even whitewashed over, and rough Govern-
ment soldiers drilling where the Dukes played pall-mall.
Gone is that rich concreteness of local strife, attenuated
by its expansion into a national animosity ; not insubstan-
tial indeed under stress of invasion, but shadowy and
unreal when the casus belli is remote, and by the man-
oeuvres of my friends, the international diplomatists, the
Pavian or Ravennese finds himself fighting on behalf of
peoples with whom alliance is transitory and artificial."
" But he will not find himself fighting so often," I
rejoined. "Countries do not join battle as recklessly as
cities. The larger the bulk the slower the turning to
bite." "And meantime," interposed the philosophic
THE CONSOLATIONS OF PHLEBOTOMY 369
shade, " the war-tax in peace is heavier than anciently in
war. And neither in war nor in peace can there be the
joy of fighting that comes from personal keenness in the
issue. The wars of town with town, of sect with sect, of
neighbour with neighbour, so far from being fratricidal
and unnatural, are the only human forms of war. 'Tis
only neighbours that can feel what they are fighting for,
'tis only brothers that can fight with unction. The very
likeness of brothers, their intimate acquaintance with
the points of community, gives them an acute sense of the
points of difference, and provides their combat with a
solid standing-ground at the bar of reason. Least irra-
tional of all internecion were the fratricide of twins.
Save the war of self-defence, civil war is the only legiti-
mate form of war. Military war — how monstrous the
sound, what a clanking of mailed battalions! Your Bacon
betrays but a shallow and conventional sense of ' The
True Greatness of Kingdoms,' when he compares civil
war to the heat of a fever, and foreign war to the heat of
exercise which serves to keep the body in health. For
what is foreign war but an arrogance of evil life, an
inhuman sport, a fiendish trial of skill? Why should a
home-born Briton ever fight a Russian? His boundaries
are nowhere contiguous with the Russian's, his very notion
of a Russ is mythical. 'Tis a cold-blooded war-game into
which he is thrust from above. What's Hecuba to him
or he to Hecuba ? Other is it with warfare that is per-
sonal, profoundly felt. Civil war — how sacred, how
close to men's bosoms ! When Greek meets Greek, then
comes the tug of war."
"In religious wars, too," eagerly interrupted the advoca-
tus diaboli, "'tis nearness that is the justification — Ho-
moousian versus Homoiousian. Why in heaven's name,"
he added with a spice of malice, "should a Mussulman
cry haro against a Parsee or a Shintoist against a Mor-
mon? Here, too, the boundaries are not contiguous;
2b
370 ITALIAN FANTASIES
'twere the duel of whale and elephant. 'Tis the Christian
sects that must naturally torture and murder one another,"
he wound up triumphantly.
" Ay indeed," serenely assented the shade of Boethius.
" If fighting is to be done at all, let it be between brothers
and not between stranger. Where ' but a hair divides
the False and True ' 'tis of paramount importance to de-
termine on which side of the hair we should stand. This
rigid accuracy is the glory of Science — why should not
our decimal be correct to nine places even in Religion ?
Why wave aside these sharp differences for which the
men of my day were willing to pay with their lives?
When your Alfred the Great translated my magnum opus,
or even as late as when your Chaucer honoured me with a
modern version, these questions could vie in holy intensity,
almost with your latter-day questions of Free Trade and
Tariff Reform."
" Ah, the palmy days of martyrdom," sighed the advo-
catus diaboU, "when men were literally aflame for filioque
or Immaculate Conception. O for the fiery Arians,
Gnostics, Marcionites, Valentinians, Socinians, Montanists,
Donatists, Iconoclasts, Arnoldites, Pelagians, Monophy-
sites, Calixtines, Paulicians, Hussites, Cathari, Albigenses,
Waldenses, Bogomilians, Calvinists, Mennonites, Baptists,
Anabaptists "
" Surely you would not call Baptists fiery? " I interjected
feebly. He had apparently no sense of humour, this ad-
vocatus, for he went on coldly : " How tame and disap-
pointing these latter-day sectarians : these Methodists,
Plymouth Brethren, Christian Scientists, Irvingites,
Christadelphians ' et hoc genus omne.' I did have a flash
of hope when your Methodists began to split up into
Wesleyans, Protestant Methodists, Reformers, Primitives,
Bryanites and the like, whose bitter brotherly differences
seemed to show the old sacrosanct concern for the minutiae
of Truth and Practice. But no I no one believes nowa-
THE CONSOLATIONS OF PHLEBOTOMY 371
days, for nobody burns his fellow- Christian. Even the
burning words of your King's Declaration ! "
" August shade," I interrupted, pointedly addressing
myself to the last of the Roman philosophers, " I concede
that when Christianity founded itself on texts, an infinite
perspective of homicidal homiletics lay open to the in-
genuous and the ingenious. And so long as Heaven and
Hell turned on dogma and ritual, an infinite significance
attached to the difference between the theological twee-
dledum and the theological tweedledee, so that it is just
dimly conceivable one might murder one's neighbour for
his own good or the greater glory of God. But do not
tell me that to-day, too, the test of belief is bloodshed."
" Immo vero,'" cried the Roman shade emphatically.
" Was I not clubbed to death because I believed in Justice
and combated the extortions of the Goths ? A belief for
which we would not die or kill, what is it ? "
" A bloodless belief," chuckled the advocafus diaholi,
who, I suddenly remembered, was more legitimately en-
titled the defensor fidei.
RISORCxIMENTO : WITH SOME REMARKS ON
SAN MARINO AND THE MILLENNIUM
" II Calavrese abate Giovacchino
Di spirito profetico dotato."
Dante : Paradiso, Canto xii.
"Pater imposuit laborem legis, qui tinior est; filius
imposuit laborem discipliupe, qui sapientia est; spiritus
sanctus exhibet libertatein, quse amor est."
JoAcniM OF Flora : Liber Concordice, ii.
" Italy is too long," said the Italian. We were coming
into Turin in the dawn, amid burning mountains of rosy
snow, and the train was moving slowly, in hesitation,
with pauses for reflection. " The line is single in places,"
he explained. " Italy is too narrow, too cramped by
mountain-chains, and above all too long. It is the trouble
behind all our politics. There are three Italics, three
horizontal strata, that do not interfuse — the industrial
and intelligent North, the stagnant and superstitious
South, and the centre with Rome which is betwixt and be-
tween."
" But there is far more clericalism in the North than
the South," I said. " The Church party is a political
force."
" Precisely what proves my case. In the North every-
thing is more efficient, even to the forces of reaction.
The clericals are better organised, and are, moreover, sup-
ported by the propertied atlieists in the interests of order.
But the North is Europe — Germany, if you will — the
South is already Africa." The train stopped again.
He groaned. " No unity possible."
372
RISORGIMENTO 373
" No unity ? " I exclaimed. " And what about Gari-
baldi and Mazzini and United Italy ? "
" It is a phrase. Italy is too long."
I pondered over his words, and in imagination I saw
again all the Risorgimento museums, all the tablets in all
the loggias and town halls recording those who had died
for the Union of Italy, all the statues of all the heroes, all
the streets and piazzas dedicated to them, while in my ears
resounded all the artillery of applause booming at that
very moment throughout the length and narrowness of
Italy in celebration of the Jubilee of the Departure of the
Thousand from Quarto.
II
Any one who goes to Italy for the Renaissance will find
the Risorgimento a discordant obsession ; flaunting itself
as it does in brand new statues and monuments whose incon-
gruity of colour or form destroys the mellow unity of old
Cathedral-piazzas or Castello-courtyards. Florence has
managed to hush up the Risorgimento in back streets or
unobtrusive tablets, and Venice with her abundance of
Campi has stowed it out of sight, though Victor Emmanuel
ramps on horseback not far from the Bridge of Sighs, and
" three youths who died for their country " intrude among
the tombs of the Doges. The essence of Pisa is preserved
by its isolation from life, leaving Mazzini to dominate the
city of his death. But the majority of the old towns are
devastated by the new national heroes — admirable and
vigorous as the sculpture sometimes is — even as the old
historic landmarks are obliterated by the new street names.
And in addition to the pervasive quartette — Garibaldi,
Cavour, Victor Emmanuel, Mazzini — local heroes aggra-
vate the ruin of antiquity. Daniele Manin thrones in
Venice over a winged lion sprawling beneath a triton ;
Ricasoli, " the iron Baron," rules in Tuscany ; Pavia is
sacred to the Cairoli; Minghetti runs through the Romagna;
374 ITALIAN FANTASIES
Crispi through the South ; Genoa devotes a street, a square,
and a bronze statue to Bixio, the Boanerges of the epic ;
Viareggio has just put up a tablet to Rosolino Pilo and
Giovanni Corrao, the daring precursors of the Thousand ;
even Rubattino — patriot in his own despite — has his
statue in Genoa harbour, on the false ground that he put
his shipping line at Garibaldi's disposal. 'Tis a very
shower of stones, falling on the just and the unjust alike.
And sometimes — as at Asti — all the Heroes are United be-
neath a riot of granite monoliths and marble lions.
And even the ubiquitous heroes have peculiar glory in
their peculiar haunts. Cavour is gigantic at Ancona
(probably because the town was freed by Piedmontese
troops) ; he stands in the castle of Verona, over-brooded
by snow mountains : at Turin, his birthplace. Fame wildly
clasps him to her breast in a mammoth monument, crying,
" Audace, j)rudente, libero Italia."
A Vanity Fair without a hero I have never chanced on.
Little Chiavari has its grandiose angel-strewn monument
to Victor Emmanuel, whom Parma likewise exhibits flour-
ishing his sword ; Pesaro breaks out in tablets to those who
died fighting " the hirelings of the Tlieocracy " ; Rimini has
a Piazza Cavour ; priest-ridden Vicenza shelters a statue of
Mazzini ; Assisi itself, waking from its saintly slumber,
consecrates a Piazzetta to Garibaldi, and a street to the
Twentieth of September, on which Italian troops broke
into Rome !
Ah, Garibaldi, Garibaldi, how thou didst weigh on my
wanderings ! From Mantua to Ferrara, from Spoleto to
Perugia, Garibaldi, always Garibaldi. I fled to dead Ra-
venna, lo ! thou didst tower in the very Piazza of Byron ;
to Parma, and rugged, imposing, in thy legendary cap,
leaning on thy sword, thou didst obsess the Piazza Gari-
baldi ; to Rome itself, and twenty feet high, thou impend-
edst in bronze, with battle pieces and allegories around
thee ; I retreated to the extremest point of the Peninsula,
RJSORGIMENTO 375
and found myself in the Corso Garibaldi of Reggio ; I
crossed to Sicily, only to stumble against thy great horse
in Palermo and the monument to thy valour in Calatafimi.
For of the statesman, the monarch, the prophet and the
soldier who combined to redeem Italy, it is naturally the
soldier that is stamped most vividly on the popular imagi-
nation, the noble freelance whom the mob deemed divine
even before his death, whose memory the people has res-
cued from the anti-climax of his end, selecting away his
follies and mistakes and idealising his virtues, under the
artistic law of mythopoiesis, till, shaped and perfected for
eternal service, the national hero shines immaculate in his
sacred niche.
And yet, as the streets show, even the popular imagina-
tion has realised that the soldier would not have sufficed.
Thrice blessed, indeed, was Italy to possess Cavour and
Mazzini at the same hour as Garibaldi. It is a fallacy to
suppose that the hour always finds the man, or the man
the hour, or that "il n'y a pas d'homme indispensable."
Many an hour passes away without its man, as many a man
without his hour. Great men perish, wasted, because there
are no forces for them to synthetise : great forces remain
inarticulate, unorganised and ineffective, because they have
found no leader to be their conduit. All the more marvel-
lous that Italy should have produced simultaneously three
indispensable men, Mazzini, Cavour, and Garibaldi, each
of whom had something of the other two, yet something
unique of his own. None of the three quite understood
the others, and Mazzini, who was much like Ibsen's Brand,
was even more intolerant than Garibaldi of the Machia-
vellian policies of Cavour, and had to be swept aside as a
visionary. For one heroic, impossible moment, indeed,
the spirit triumphed, the Republic of Rome was born, and
idealism enjoyed perhaps its sole run of power in human
history. But with the disappearance of the Republic,
Mazzini might have disappeared too, for all his influence
376 ITALIAN FANTASIES
upon the political Risorgimento ; did indeed practically
disappear by acquiescing in the battle-flag of Monarchy.
Garibaldi and Cavour sufficed to create the combination
of Force and Fraud by which political history is made.
For though, if any sword might ever bear the words I saw
on a sword graven by Donatello — " Valore e Giustitia "
— that sword was Garibaldi's, and if ever passion was
patriotic it was Cavour's, nevertheless the liberation of
Italy did not escape being achieved by the usual factors
of Force and Fraud.
Ill
And, in addition to all these busts, statues, allegories,
tablets, pillars, cairns, lions, bas-reliefs, wreaths, lists of
heroes, records of plebiscites anent annexations, loggias
whence Garibaldi orated ; in addition to all the Piazze
Garibaldi and Victor Emmanuel, all the Corsi Cavour and
Mazzini, all the streets of the Twentieth of September
and other heroic dates, there is the specific Museum of the
Risorgimento from which no tiniest town is immune. To
see one is practically to see all. With the same piety with
which their ancestors collected the relics of the saints, the
modern Italians have collected the relics of their heroes
and the war — swords, sticks, photographs, crude paint-
ings and engravings, old hats, letters, tricoloured scarves,
medals, pictures, patriotic money, helmets, epaulettes,
broken bombs, cannon-balls, cartoons, caricatures, faded
wreaths, autographs, sculptures, crosses, proclamations,
prayer-books, pictures of steamers conveying insurgents !
And Garibaldi ! What town has not some shred of the
" Genius of Liberty," as the tablet in the old castle of Fer-
rara styles him — his flask, his sword, his shirt, his gun,
his letters, his telegrams ! Peculiarly sacred is the red
shirt which he wore at Aspromonte, though it recalls the
ironic fact that when the charmed, invincible hero was at
last wounded and captured, it was by soldiers of the king
RISORGIMENTO 377
he had created and of the Italy whose triumph he was seek-
ing to consummate. Something Miltonic seems to emanate
from that red shirt :
" That flaming shirt which Garibaldi wore
At Aspromonte."
But for the rest, all these relics are as ugly as the relics of
the saints. Beautiful and exalting as are the Museums in
reality, with their record of sacrifice and patriotism in one
of the most wonderful chapters of history, infinitely touch-
ing as is every yellow letter or worn glove, when imagi-
nation has transfused it, these glass cases are outwardly
depressing to the last degree — a warning to the Realist,
and a proof that Art in expressing the soul of a phenome-
non is infinitely truer in its beauty than Nature unselected
and unadorned. The wooden-legged curator of Bologna,
who lost his leg at Solferino, is a mere stumping old bore ;
the little photograph of twenty-four Garibaldians minus
arms or with crutches is simply discomforting. Even the
story of the modern mother of the Gracchi, Adelaide Cairoli,
who gave four sons to her country, exhales but tepidly from
the picture at Pavia of a middle-aged lady in a bonnet sur-
rounded by young soldiers in variegated costumes.
" Leonessa d'ltalia," cried Carducci to Brescia, and the
one word of the poet wipes out all the crude photographs
and grandiose inscriptions by which that seemingly pro-
saic town asserts its heroism ; one ceases even to smile at
the tablet at the foot of the castle hill, veiling a defeat
in the guise of ferocious Austrian charges, " frequently "
repulsed. From a mock passport of Radetsky in the Vi-
cenza Museum I got a more vivid sense of the racial hatred
than from all the relics and tablets : " Birth : Bastard of
the seven deadly sins. Age : Eighty-two, sixty-five of
which have been passed in robbing Austria of the money
she stole. Eyes : Of a bird of prey. Nose : Of a Jew.
Mouth : Open for the swallowing of divorce! Beard :
Nothing. Hair : Enough. Visage : Not human. Occupa-
378 ITALIAN FANTASIES
tion : Projector of Conquests. On the field of battle
always at the tail ; in the destruction of unarmed cities
always at the head. Country: No country will own
him. Signature : The last five days of his stay in Milan
have paralysed him and he cannot sign. Vise: Good for
nowhere." And my most lively realisation of the trans-
formation wrought in Europe since 1820 came, not from a
Risorgimento museum nor from an official history, but
from a black-and-white engraving of Raphael's Sposa-
lizio "dedicated humbly" by Giuseppe Longhi in 1820
" to the Imperial Royal Apostolical Majesty of Francesco
I., Emperor of Austria, King of Jerusalem, Hungary, Bo-
hemia, Lombardy, Venice, Dalmatia, Sclavonia, . Galicia,
Laodomiria, lUyria, &c. &c."
IV
Even those streets or buildings that are free from the
Risorgimento are pitted with records or statues. Padua
records with equal pride how Dante had his exile sweet-
ened by the hospitality of Carrara da Giotto, and how
Giovanni Prati, the singer of to-day, lived in the Via del
Santo. Verona celebrates impartially Catullus and some
minor poet whose name I forget, if I ever knew it, " who
by making sweet verses obtained a fame more than Italian."
Ferrara has a positive leprosy of white plaques. Bassano
is not a great city, but " there is enough celebrity in Bas-
sano," writes Mr. Howells, "to supply the whole world."
Things were apparently not always thus ; for when Childe
Harold went on his pilgrimage he demanded to know
where Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio were buried.
" Are they resolved to dust,
And have their country's marbles naught to say?
Could not her quarries furnish forth one bust ? "
Could her quarries possibly furnish forth one more bust,
was the question that came to me on my later pilgrimage.
RISORGIMENTO 379
Too much to say have their country's marbles. No poet
could lodge a night at a house but for all time his visit
must be graven ; every local lawyer or engineer is be-
come a world- wonder ; it is recorded where " the inventor
of the perpetual electric motor " died ; even an assassina-
tion must be eternalised in a tablet. As for a room in
which conspirators met to smoke and plot, it is for ever
glorified and sanctified.
I was relieved, when I did go to Carrara,
" Nei monti di Luni, dove ronca
Lo Carrarese,"
to find the supply of marble from its fabular mountains
still held out, but the chief occupation of the town seemed
to consist in cutting it into slabs with great many-bladed
machines. Slowly the grim knives descended, slicing the
stone, while a spray moved to and fro to prevent its over-
heating by friction. And as I watched these plaques
gradually grinding into separate existence, I heard them
beginning to babble their lapidary language, bursting into
eloquent inscriptions to unknown celebrities — chemists,
town councillors, hydrographers, economists — nay, com-
memorating the Risorgimento itself in some village yet
ungrown. " Rome or Death," they cried stonily, and
"Italy to her Sons," and "Ci siamo e ci resteremo."
And the knives sank lower and lower, and the glories
rose higher and higher, and the spray, hissing, continued
to throw cold water on the enthusiasm, like some cynic
observing it was easier to celebrate the old heroism than
under its continuous inspiration to create the new. Car-
rara itself — though one would think it took marbles as a
confectioner takes tarts — has its memorials of Garibaldi
and Mazzini, besides that more ancient monument to
Maria Beatrice overbrooded by the magic mountains.
To what cause shall we ascribe this hypertrophy of self-
consciousness since Childe Harold's day ? Is it due to the
Risorgimento, or the pleasure-pilgrims, or is some of it
380 ITALIAN FANTASIES
inspired by William Walton, canny British Guglielmo, to
whom the municipality of Carrara has erected one of his
own tablets for his services in stimulating the industry?
Is it William Walton who forces all this glory upon Italy?
Is it he who creates all this hero-worship? Perugino is
no new discovery, yet not till 1865 — 341 years after his
death — did the Commune of Perugia put up a tablet on
that steep street which leads to his modest one-storied
house, while Carducci, though not even a native, already
looks out from the Carducci Gardens towards the rolling
snow-mountains on the horizon. To this same 1865 be-
longs the imposing Dante Monument in the Piazza Santa
Croce of Florence. But the six-hundredth anniversary
of a poet is a trifle late for his appearance in his native
city. True, it had taken him only two hundred years to
force his way into Florence Cathedral, but that was merely
as a painting on wood. The statue of Correggio in Parma
(of course in the Piazza Garibaldi) was not erected till
1870. Tasso has been "the great unhappy poet" for
three centuries. Yet not till 1895 did Urbino think it
necessary to record his visit to the city as the guest of
Federigo Bonaventura. As for Raphael, Urbino's own
wonder-child, that thirty-six foot monument to him dates
only from 1897 ! All these testimonials to Art would be
a little more convincing if the straight iron bridges with
which Venice and Verona have insulted their fairy waters
did not prove — like the flamboyant technique of the
modern Italian painter — that Italy has left her art period
irrevocably behind.
And the great knives of Carrara go grinding on, " ohne
Hast, ohne Rast," inexorably supplying celebrity. Like
the Greece of the decadence, Italy has reached its stone
age, an age which seems the symptom of spent vigour,
the petrifaction of what once was vital. Nor is it easy to
recognise Mazzini's soldiers of humanity in a nation
whose prophet is d'Annunzio, whose " smart set " repeats
RISORGIMENTO 381
the morals of the Renaissance without its genius, whose
masses appear to spend their lives in lounging about
the streets smoking long black slow-lighting cigars, or
patronising the innumerable pastrycooks. It seems a
slight return for all the heroic agony of the Risorgimento
that Europe should be supplied with an efficient type of
restaurant, and a vividly gesturing waiter, who dissects
himself in discussing tlie carving of the joint.
" Scuola di inagnanimi Sen si,
Auspicata promessa dell' Avvenire,"
cries a memorial tablet at Brescia, but the ennoblement
and the promise of the future are less obvious than the
orgy of nationalistic sentiment. And when I read how
at the recent meeting in North Italy between their King
and the Czar, Italian citizens submitted to being treated
like Russians during a royal progress ; herded outside
the town while within it every door was bolted and every
blind drawn, as though 'twas indeed the funeral of
freedom, I felt how justified was Mazzini's unwillingness
to resurrect under a monarchy. And when I think of
the great equestrian monument to Victor Emmanuel II.
which is to commemorate in 1911 the jubilee of the
dynasty's sovereignty over United Italy — the monument
that will cost a hundred million lire, and in the belly of
whose horse a lunch d'onore was recently offered by the
proprietor of the foundry to the engineers and artisans,
" twenty-six persons in all " — I see how wise was
Mazzini's protest against the narrowing down of a great
spiritual movement to the acquisition of more territory
by a reigning house. It was a commercial traveller who
proudly directed my attention to this equine lunch, and
this standard of greatness just suits a commercial nation.
In this Gargantuan horse the whole millennial dream of
Mazzini may end, and those young heroes of freedom,
whose deaths lay so heavy on his conscience in his black
moments, may have died but to add another to the family
382 ITALIAN FANTASIES
party of monarchs who regard the rest of humanity as
a subject-race, transferable from one to the other by con-
quest or treaty.
However valuable a king may be to Italy as a symbol
of Unity, Mazzini was historically accurate when he
pointed out that the conception of kingship has no roots
in Italy, the one epoch of imperial sway being a mere
degeneration of the Roman Republic. It was a fine
stroke of tactics to celebrate Mazzini's centenary in 1905
as a national festival, in which the King himself took
part. But these centennial tablets and statues were
Italy's way of stoning its prophet ; this festival was
Mazzini's real funeral, burying his aspirations out. of sight
so effectively that the man in the street has forgotten that
for Mazzini the goal of Garibaldi and Cavour was only a
starting-point, and a popular British Encyclopaedia assures
us that Mazzini " lived to see all his dreams realised."
Not that there is a word to be said against the charm-
ing and intelligent young man who presides over Italy,
and who has signalised himself among his peers by found-
ing an International Agricultural Institute. But what a
climax to the long struggle against tyranny, this meeting
of King and Czar ! To be sure Italy had already made
friends with Austria in the very year after Garibaldi's
death — " in the interests of the peace of Europe."
Poor Europe. They make a spiritual desert and call
it peace.
" Songs before Sunrise " — yes, but where is the sun ?
More instinct with vitality than the most eloquent
tablets to the Risorgimento are the mural inscriptions of
hatred to Austria rudely chalked up by anonymous hands,
especially on the Adriatic side. " Down with Austria ! "
" Death to Austria ! " " Death to Trent and Trieste ! " is
RISORGIMENTO 383
the general tenor, varied by the name of Francis Joseph
scrawled between skulls and cross-bones. 'Tis a strange
comment on the Triple Alliance, and the authorities do
not seem hurried to remove this glaring contradiction.
Even "Death to the Czar" survives the royal meeting.
But the Irredenta is not to be taken seriously. Not
along political lines does the Risorgimento proceed, any
more than along the moral lines for which Mazzini worked.
The second phase, the second Risorgimento it may indeed
be called, is the Industrial Resurrection. Resurrection —
because Italy, whose Merchant of Venice reminds us that
the Italian nobleman was always a trader, and whose
leading Florentines were Magnificent Moneylenders, can
hardly be regarded as an Arcadia transformed by the
cult of the dollar. Even Mazzini demanded revival of
" the old commercial greatness " ; perhaps he might have
been content to wait patiently through this materialistic
epoch, if he were sure it would lead to a third Risorgi-
mento.
Hygiene has yet to penetrate and suffuse the new pros-
perity. But if even Perugia still stinks in places and
Foligno everywhere, the country is getting perceptibly
cleaner, and perhaps godliness is next to cleanliness. But
the severest moralist cannot grudge Italy her rise in wealth
and happiness : the poverty of the peasantry, accentuated
by the extravagant ambition of Italy to be a Great Power
in tlie smallest of senses, has been terrible. At what a
cost has Italy achieved her first Dreadnought, so perversely
christened Dayite Alighieri !
Beggars abound — blind, crippled, or with hideous
growths — especially in the South. Doubtless the influx
of the pleasure-pilgrim has increased the deformity of the
population, and the Italian beggar pushes forward his
monstrosity as though it were for sale, but there is real
physical degeneration all the same. The discovery of
New York and South America by the Italian has fortu-
384 ITALIAN FANTASIES
nately co-operated with the discovery of Italy by the
pleasure-pilgrim and the foreign investor, and some
600,000 Italians in the South of Brazil provide the makings
of a Trans-atlantic Italy. Even the semi-savage villages
of Sicily are sown with steamer advertisements, and batches
going and returning for jobs or harvests make an ever-
weaving shuttle across the Atlantic.
And if the monuments of the First Risorgimento clash
with the old historic background of Italy, still more is the
Second Risorgimento in discord with it. One almost sees
a new Italy, infinitely less beautiful but not devoid of
backbone, struggling out of the old architectural shell
which does not in the least express it. The old ducal and
seignorial cities, the old republics, are developing suburbs,
sometimes prosperous if prosaic, like the new quarters of
Florence and Parma ; sometimes grotesque, like Pesaro's
sea-side resort, with its " new " architecture — lobster-red
and mustard-green lattices, and sham golden doors,
carved with busts ; sometimes hideous, like the outskirts
of Verona, where under the blue, brooding mountains
rises a quarter of electrical workshops and chemical fac-
tories. Ancient towered Asti grows sparkling with its new
brick Banca dTtalia, and its blued and gilded capitals in
the Church of S, Secondo Martire. Look down on Genoa,
with its fantasia of spires, campaniles, roof-gardens, green
lattices, marble balconies, chimneys decorated with figures
of doges and opening out like flowers, and see how the
old narrow alleys are almost roofed with telegraph and
telephone wires. Go down to the widened harbour and
see the warehouses, the American sky-scrapers, the smok-
ing chimneys, the great steamers sailing out for Buenos
Ayres and New York, the emigrants with their bundles.
The blue bird sings here no more ; you hear only the
bang of the hammer, which Young Italy declares is the
voice of the century.
I look out of my window at Forli (in the Via Garibaldi !)
RISORGIMENTO 385
and see a white minaret and a white campanile gleaming
fantastically in the moonlight over a panorama of russet
roofs. There is a stone floor in my bedroom and no
chimney. In the Piazza all is heavy and mediteval : dull
stone colonnades and a rough cobbled road. In a church
a grotesque griffin ramps over a pavement tomb. Yet
through these cumbersome stone forms I feel the new Italy
struggling. The Ginnasio Communale of the town shelters
with equal pomp and spaciousness the picture-gallery and
the chemical laboratory. These colonnades and cobbles
have no more congruity with the new spirit than the old
seignorial and episcopal Palazzi with the poor " tenement
families " whom they house to-day. Presently life will
slough off these forms altogether. Where an old castle
like that of Ferrara or an old palace like that of Lucca or
Pistoja can be tamed to civic uses, it becomes a town-hall ;
where no old building is available, an adequate modern
form is created as in the handsome post-offices with their
almost military sense of the dignity of the common life.
At Pesaro I lodged in a Bishop's Palace with " steam-
heat, telephone, electric light in all the chambers, garage
for automobiles, motor omnibus to all the trains ! " Pala-
tial was it indeed, so absurdly spacious that the dining-
room Avas only accessible through vast, empty, domed and
frescoed halls, and I could have held a political meeting
in my bedroom, where I slept with a sense of camping out
under the infinities. I had no notion that provincial
Churchmen were thus magnificent, and I do not wonder
that the Lord Cardinal of Ostia, when he saw how the
Franciscans of the Portiuncula slept on ragged mattresses
and straw, without pillows or bedsteads, burst into tears,
exclaiming : " We wretches use so many unnecessary
things ! " And yet the Cardinal did not use a single
thing advertised by the ex-Palace of Pesaro.
Nowhere do new and old clash or combine more disa-
greeably than in Modena, where crumbling marble-pillared
2o
386 ITALIAN FANTASIES
colonnades are painted red, and meet continuations in
new brick. The Cathedral, begun in 1099, guarded and
flanked by quaint stone lions, bears on its ancient cam-
panile a tablet to Victor Emmanuel. In the great Piazza,
church, picture-gallery and war-monument swear at one
another. The Ducal Palace is a military school, the moat
round the old rampart — where once resounded that
archaic song of the war-sentinels — is a public laundry.
And the statues, tablets, monuments, of the Second
Risorgimento begin to vie with those of the first. Pro
Nervi^ painted on the benches on that desolate cactus-
grown shore, among the Leonardesque sea-sprayed rocks
by the old Gropallo tower, attests the activity of a. society
created to boom the summer resort, while a tablet cele-
brates the Marchese who, foreseeing the future of Nervi,
put up the first hotel and died with the name of the
municipality on his lips. I do not think the Marchese
himself foresaw how far Nervi would go. I know I walked
miles along its tramway amid monotonous streets, with no
sign of an end. Indeed the tram-line reaches Genoa.
Nor is the Marchese the only hero of the Second Risorgi-
mento. Trust Carrara for that — Carrara and Guglielmo
Walton !
And the creations of this Risorgimento rival those of
the Renaissance in costliness. Where in all Europe will
you find a street as luxurious as Genoa's Via XX Set-
tembre — the long colonnade, the granite 2:)illars, the gilded
and frescoed roof, the mosaic pavement where the poorest
may tread more magnificently than Agamemnon.
And the great Gallery of Victor Emmanuel in Milan,
what is it but a secular parody of the Cathedral it faces
— nave, transept, dome, complete even to the invisible
frescoes, a CathSdrale de luxe? Very sad and solemn
looked the old Cathedral at night, for all its faery fretwork,
as Life passed it by for its glittering counterpart.
RISORGIMENTO 387
VI
I went to San Marino to get away from Garibaldi. For
here — I said to myself — is the one spot in Italy that is
not Italy, that has kept its pristine Republicanism. Here
on the Titan Mount is the one spot that cannot possibly
acclaim the Union. At most I may encounter a memorial
to Mazzini.
I left Rimini by the Gate of the Via Garibaldi which
leads straight to San Marino, and trudging for the better
part of a day I saw it impending horribly some two thou-
sand five hundred feet above me, and after dragging my-
self through the Borgo or lower suburb, I toiled in the
darkness up a narrow, steep, slippery, jagged path, on the
brink of a sheer precipice, into — the Via Garibaldi! And
in a bedroom looking down on it — for the only hotel is
in a Piazzetta abutting on it — I passed the night.
In the morning I found a Garibaldi garden and a Gaffe
Garibaldi and a Piazza Garibaldi and a Garibaldi bust and
a Garibaldi bas-relief and two Garibaldi tablets; item, a
tablet to Victor Emmanuel and a centennial tablet and
street to Mazzini, even a Via of Giosue Carducci, the
laureate of the Risorgimento.
Part of the explanation is that Garibaldi sought refuge
here in 1849, escaping from " the Roman Republic " to
the Ravenna pine-wood where poor Anita died, and his
order for the day — " Soldiers, we are on a Soil of Refuge,"
and his letter of thanks from Caprera — " I go away proud
to be a citizen of so virtuous a Republic " — are reproduced
on the tablets. But the deeper cause of this sympathy is
that San Marino is Italian through and through, and its
hoary independence, real enough in the days of the city
states, is become a farce solemnly played with separate
postage stamps and currency, Regents, Councils, militia,
peers, commons, Home and Foreign Secretaries, ribbons,
orders, treaties, extradition treaties and a diplomatic corps
388 ITALIAN FANTASIES
in England, Austria-Hungary, Spain, France and Italy, all
to cover its budget of .£11,000 and its population of 10,422
souls, enumerated from week to week in the toy press and
decreasing by dozens. 'Tis a game into which all Europe
has entered in high good humour, the grand fargeur^
Napoleon, even proposing to extend the Republic's boun-
daries, which comprise only thirty-three square miles. But
the Sammarinese had sense enough to see that a greater
realm would be treated more seriously. Mount Titan, as
the seat not of a toy capital but of something answering
less humorously to its name, would cease to be a joke,
whereas a State less than one-fourth of the Isle of Wight
might remain for Europe a blessed land of diversion from
the eternal earnestness of the sword, might even save
Europe's self-respect as a region of civilisation, regardful
of treaties and ancient rights. So serious in fact did the
Sammarinese consider the danger of being taken seri-
ously, that Antonio Onofri who advised against this Na-
poleonic inflation stands immortalised as Pater Patriae.
No doubt the inaccessibility of Mount Titan must have
been the origin of San Marino's existence in those dim days
of the Diocletian persecution, when the Roman Matron,
Felicita, whom the stone-cutter Marinus had converted to
Christianity, " made him a present of the mountain." And
the same inaccessibility which suited it for a Christian
colony contributed later to the success of its traditional
policy of balancing between the Rimini Malatestas and
the Dukes of Urbino. But what prevented Austria from
following Garibaldi into San Marino? What but its en-
joyment of the game, or its desperate clinging to that
shred of self-respect? To-day when the cycle of history
has brought us round again to the period of Ezzelino,
when the intellectual or religious concepts which anciently
veiled usurpations, are contemptuously thrown aside, and
the iron hand crushes in mockery of the combined Jurists
of Europe, what stands between San Marino and extinction?
RISORGIMENTO 389
Only the environing Italy. And Italy plays with the
tiny Republic as a father plays with a child. San Marino
has two mortars in the fortress of La Rocca — for what is
a State without artillery to fire on solemn occasions? —
and these mortars were presented by Victor Emmanuel III.
Italy also receives the more desperate criminals, who are
boarded out in its prisons, as it supplies the police from
its reserve soldiers, and the Judge from its lawyers. Italy
has provided its only distinguished citizens — they are
honorary, — its national hymn was taken from Guido of
Arezzo, the inventor of the musical scale, and when the
beautiful if mimetic Palazzo Pubblico for the Regents and
the Council was opened in 1894, it was with a speech of
Carducci.
Yet " Liberty," I found, was the keynote of San Marino.
Liberty was the motto of its arms, with their three mountains
and plumed towers. Liberty waved in the white and blue
flag and was painted on the shields of the palace corridors.
S. Marino, the author of Liberty, was commemorated in
the cathedral fagade with its flourish of Sen. P. Q., and
Liberty cried from the scroll his statue flourished. " In
tuenda Libertate vigilis " warned the inscription over the
court room ; " animus in consulendo Liber " counselled
the medallion near the tribune, and in choice Latin epi-
graphs the transient tyrant, Caesar Borgia, impugner of
Liberty, was denounced and derided. Sublime it was to
stand before the Gothic Palace of the Regents, on this
dizzy Piazza della Liberta with its gigantic statue of
Liberty (her hand on her bannered spear), and to behold
the sheer abyss below, and as from an aeroplane the mar-
vellous panorama of sea and mountain around, Liberty
written in every rugged convolution and glacial peak, and
shimmering in every masterless wave. And yet my imagi-
nation refused to play the game ; refused to take with be-
coming reverence the crowned and gilded pew of the
Regents, the historic frescoes and friezes, the blue and
390 ITALIAN FANTASIES
orange of the " Guarda Nobile," the kepis and bayonets
of the militia, the red facings of the police. All this
parade of " Libertas " was in inverse proportion to the
substance, or even to the power of securing it. The Re-
public appeared like a banknote without gold behind it,
and an Italian banknote at that ; never so essentially
Italian as in the lapidary literature asserting its separato-
ness. This grand Palace, this costly Cathedral, both built
only within the last few years simultaneously with the
motor road that has destroyed the last semblance of isola-
tion, seemed like that spasm of self-assertiveness which
so often precedes extinction. And I thought that con-
quering nations might well mark how easily love can melt
what hate would only harden. Imagine if Italy had
brought her mortars against San Marino instead of pre-
senting them to it, or if she had made a road for her
mortars instead of for her motors.
But as an antique curio San Marino is delightful. I
love to muse on the pomp of its Regents who are elected
— like the Doges of Venice — by a mixture of choice and
chance, and go in state to celebrate Mass, clothed in satin
breeches and velvet mantle, in doublet and sword and
ermined cap, accompanied by the Noble Guard and the
high officers of State, and then from the Cathedral, still
to the clashing of church bells and the strains of military
music, to their semestral thrones in the Palazzo Pubblico ;
there to hear a speech from the Government Orator —
whose fee is four shillings — and to take tlie Latin oath
not to tamper with the Libertas of the Constitution, and to
receive the State seals and keys and the insignia of Grand
INIasters of the Order of San Marino, perhaps even the first
instalment of the royal budget of a pound a month.
No autocrats are these Regents, despite their regal
salary. They are mere constitutional monarchs, official
headpieces to the Arringo or sovereign Council in which
the real power resides. But though Republican, San
RISORGIMENTO 391
Marino is not Democratic, for the Arringo fills up its
vacancies by option. Liberty is not flouted, however, for
may not every head of a family — after the half-yearly
elections — give the Arringo a piece of his mind? Time
was when the citizen could stroll into its sittings and
tender it the benefit of his advice, but this form of Liberty
seems to have been found too excessive and cumbersome
even for the land of Libertas.
Happy are the nations that have no history, and San
Marino seems to have escaped almost without an anecdote.
In 1461 Pope Pius II. invited it to make war with the
Magnificent Monster, Sigismondo Malatesta of Rimini,
and rewarded its aid with four castles. Caesar Borgia
came and went in 1503, a nocturnal attack by Fabiano del
Monte was repulsed in 1543, and after that nothing ap-
pears to have happened till 1739, when the Cardinal Leg-
ate, Giulio Alberoni, occupied the Republic. But the
Republic having appealed to the Pope was left free again,
Clement XII. thus becoming a national hero with his bust
in the Palazzo. But national heroes of its own it has none.
It has adopted the cult of Garibaldi, though he preaches
Italian Unity, and made honorary citizens of Canova, Ros-
sini and Verdi, and it has almost appropriated the famous
numismatist, Bartolommeo Borghesi, who did at least live
here, if he omitted to be born here, and who dominates
one of the wonderful mountain-terraces, holding a book
and gazing carefully at the only point where there is no
view. But as to the " Viri Clarissimi et Illustres Castri
Sancti Marini " blazoned on the Palazzo staircase, between
shields of " Libertas," I fear their celebrity had not reached
me. Doctors, artists, counts, dignitaries of the Church —
I was impartially ignorant of them all.
What is to account for this paucity of personalities?
Had a great saint or a great poet arisen here, we should
have explained it glibly by the pious isolation among the
eternal mountains, looking down upon the eternal sea,
392 ITALIAN FANTASIES
under the everlasting stars. Had a new Acropolis or a
new Parthenon risen on this hill of the Titan, we should
not have lacked proofs of the inevitability of the new
Athens. But nothing has arisen. Giambittisti Belluzzi,
the military architect of its walls and of the Imperial Castle
at Pesaro, is San Marino's highest name in art, while in
literature its chroniclers point to Canon Ignazio Belzoppi,
" letterato di molta fama," born in 1762, author of the
heroi-comic poem, " II Bertuccino " (The Little Monkey)
— unpublished!
For life to be perfect then, small circles are not enough,
pace my friend Boethius. They must tingle with life,
perhaps even with death. Can it be that the advocatus
diaboli was right, and that the snug security of a diplomatic
mountain-fastness has bred mediocrity ? I tell him angrily
that the place is a Paradise and he answers calmly that it
is only a Parish. Can it be that the only Paradise pos-
sible is a Fools' Paradise ?
But a serpent has entered Eden, crawling probably by
the motor-car road. He has insinuated doubt of holy au-
thority and the Samraarinese begin to eat of the Tree of
Knowledge. 11 Titano is the organ of the Socialists — a
Titan in revolt — and the Somarino serves the Clericals —
with the accent on the Santo. "Preti ! ! ! " is the ejacu-
latory title of an article in the number of II Titano that
came into my hands (April 24,1910). "We might say
impostors, falsifiers, canaille^'''' it begins pleasantly, "but
we say instead 'Priests,' which is a substantive that com-
prises all the others."
And thus across its precipices San Marino joins hands
with " Young Italy," whose programme according to the
organ of that name embraces the exiling of the Vatican
beyond the frontiers of Italy, the sweeping away of the
bankrupt remains of Christianity, and the abandonment of
Imperialism and the African adventure. I will engage
there are even Futurists in San Marino.
RISORGIMENTO 393
VII
I must confess to a smiling sympathy with this " Young-
est Italy " party — if the little half-baked literary and
artistic clique of Futurists can be called a party. I can
understand the oppression of all the glorious Italian past, all
those massive buildings and masterpieces, and stereotyped
forms of thought. Like the son of a genius, modern Italy
is cramped and overshadowed. Hence the rabid yearning
for some new form of energising, this glorification of the
moment and perpetual change. In a fantastic fury of
iconoclasm the Futurists demand even the destruction of
the creations of ancient genius that overhang their lives
— they would make an art-pyre as fervently as Savona-
rola. Climbing the Clock Tower of St. Mark's Square,
they threw down coloured hand bills repudiating the vulgar
voluptuous Venice of the tourist. " Hasten to fill its fetid
little canals with the ruins of its tumbling and leprous
palaces. Burn the gondolas, those see-saws for fools ! "
So far so good. But mark the beatific vision that is to
replace this putrefying beauty. " Raise to the sky the
rigid geometry of large metallic bridges, and manufac-
tories with waving hair of smoke. Abolish everywhere
the languishing curves of the old architectures." How
characteristic of the Second Risorgimento ! It must bo
by an oversight that the smoke is still permitted to be
" waving." I imagine that the resurrection of the old
Campanile of Venice must have been the last straw. For
ten hundred and fourteen years this gloomy old tower had
impended, and when it did at last fall of its own sheer
decrepitude, lo ! it must be stood up again, exact to the
last massy inch, and even with the same inscription — •
" Verbum caro factum est'' — on its bells. As if a bell could
have no new message after a millennium ! Let the his-
torian, at any rate, mark that the Futurists did not rise
till the Campanile was not allowed to fall. The police,
394 ITALIAN FANTASIES
taking the Futurists seriously, prohibit their meetings,
which will end in making them take themselves seriously.
But the}'' are a useful counteractive to the Zealots of the
Zona Monumentale, who, in their passion for the ruins of
Rome, forget the claims of life. When the Present says,
" I must live," the artist and the archaeologist too often
reply : " Je rCen vois pas la necessite." Carducci even
called on Fever to guard the Appian Way. But cities
exist for citizens, not for spectators, and when the tele-
phone bell of the Present rings, we should reply like the
Italian waiter: ^'•Pronto! Desideraf'' We cannot do in
Rome as the Romans do, for they have to live, not look at
Ruins. And let us not expect the Romans to do in Rome
as we do. If tramways must run along the Via Appia, at
least Fever will retire before them. How long is it our
duty to guard the ruins of the Past ? Suppose the tombs
and temples of the Appian Way should threaten to col-
lapse altogether, have we to keep them in a state of arti-
ficial ruin ? Augustus boasted that he found Rome brick
and made it marble. If the industrial Risorgimento found
Rome marble and made it brick, I suppose there are com-
pensations for Augustus. Imperial Rome never thought
of dedicating a slab of that marble to the nameless pauper
dead, worn out in the obscure service of their country, as
Industrial Rome has done in a touching inscription. And
should Rome extend the tale of its bricks to house the
homeless troglodytes who pig in the remains of that ancient
marble, I will throw up my cap with the Futurists.
Pisa is to me a dream-city, but to the Pisans it is
a centre of the glass industry and the cloth industry,
with municipalised gas. They have done handsomely
in leaving me my dream-city outside the town life.
If topographical obstacles prevent other ancient cities
from thus surviving themselves, let me be thankful for
small mercies. There was one old inn at Perugia
which had escaped the electric light and the pleasure-
RISORGIMENTO 395
pilgrims, and where the porter peeled the potatoes, but
as I sat this very Spring, dining in the quaint court-
yard, lo ! to my chagrin the light of modernity flooded
it for the first time. But there chanced too that night
so joyous a band of University students, on gymnastic
business bent, the old courtyard resounded with such
pranks, and songs, and cheers, such fulness of young
new life, that I felt Perugia could not for ever live on
griffins and Peruginos and Baglioni horrors. In that
moment even the joyous madness of the Futurists ap-
peared to me saner than the gloom of a Gissing con-
cluding his Italian journeys "By the Ionian Sea" with
the wish that he could live for ever in the Past, the
Present and its interests blotted out.
It is a cheap aesthetic to retire to the Past, too
blind to see beauty in the Present, and too ancemic to
build it for the Future. But humanity is not a
museum-curator; the cult of ancestors, once the back-
bone of Hindu-Aryan civilisation, survives only in China.
The cult of descendants has taken its place, the Golden
Age is before, not behind, and the debt we owe to our
fathers we pay to our sons, not necessarily in the same
currency. No doubt the Past is ivy-clad, the Present
raw and the Future dim. But as happiness does not
come from the search for happiness, neither does beauty
come from the search for beauty. "Rather seek ye the
Kingdom of God and all these things shall be added
unto you."
VIII
So despite the slow black cigar, the ubiquitous farmacia
and pasticceria, despite the pervasive petrifaction of
past glory, I feel that a vigorous breeze of young thought
moves through Italy, and that Mazzini is not entirely
swallowed up in tlie belly of the Great Horse. "-11
nuUismo'" was an Asti election-poster's shrewd summary
of the programme of the Clerical Moderates, ''lo star
396 ITALIAN FANTASIES
quieti — forma ipocrita di reazione.^^ If Italy escapes the
reaction involved in standing still, we may yet see a Third
Risorgimento that will resurrect Mazzini. Even a Repub-
lican Congress has met freely, if with closed doors.
The popular Italian newspapers, like the windows of
the bookshops, are far more intellectual than our own,
and there is a healthy readiness to try social experi-
ments under the popular referendum. If the nation-
alisation of the railways does not yet pay, on account
of the multiplicity of officials, it has at least provided
a more punctual service than of yore, and the third-
class passenger is treated as a human being. A Jew
as Premier and another as Syndic of Rome constitute
an amende honorable for the Italy which established
the Ghetto and, cramping a prolific race, produced in
Venice the first specimen of the American sky-scraper.
Capital punishment is abolished — the apostle, Beccaria,
duly petrified at Milan — and despite the legend of the
stiletto and the vendetta nobody demands its restora-
tion. Phlebotomy prevails alarmingly, through the habit
of using a knife as if it were the mere point of the fist,
but it is a peaceable and polite people. The niente
with which the veriest vagabond deprecates your thanks,
the prego of the courtlier defence against gratitude, are the
outer and audible sign of an inner gentleness. Irritatingly
vague as regards time and space and money, a foe to
definite agreements, a lover of the horizon and the
huona mano, running restaurants Math unpriced menus,
and shops with unmarked goods, the Italian has always
the saving grace of respect for things of the mind. Who
ever saw a picture of Tennyson labelled — like the
photographs of Carducci — " Mighty Master, Sublime
Poet, Refulgent National Glory ! " There are moods in
which I could applaud even the stones.
But it is the revolt against Rome which stirs most furi-
ously the intelligenza of Italy — as of all the Latin world.
RISORGIMENTO 397
While in England the fight against Christianity is con-
lined to a few guerilla papers in low esteem, in Italy it is
a pitched battle. And the modern Anti-Pope is far more
formidable to the Vatican than the mediaeval, being a
rival idea, not a rival man. The Vatican handicaps itself
superfluously by sneering at the Risorgimento — though
I am told its haughty refusal to recognise the Unity of
Italy brings in shekels from Mexico, Colombia and other
strongholds of the spirit. Instead of joining in the recent
Garibaldi jubilation, it asked through its organ whether
the prosperity of the South had not been sacrificed to the
interests of the North. And so far from making conces-
sions to Modernism, it is sitting tighter than ever, issuing
lamentable Syllabuses and Encyclicals, accumulating lists
of suspects. It censured Minocchi for allegorising the
first three chapters of Genesis, and excommunicated Murri
for saying the Pope ought not to play at politics. The
freethinkers complain uneasily of its aggressiveness,
lamenting — with unconscious humour — that it makes
propaganda! The army itself — ay, even the old Gari-
baldians — are not safe from its guiles ! As if the Con-
gregation of the Propaganda were of to-day I
But the confiscation of monasteries and churches to
military and civil uses — to barracks, agricultural colleges,
gymnasia, hospitals, what-not — the transformation of
elaborate historic shrines into State Monuments, are indi-
cations of the ground lost to the Church in its own
peculiar land. Strange was it to see squads of half -nude
lads at gymnastics in the old Renaissance church of St.
Mary Magdalen at Pesaro. Still more surprising to see a
carpenter sawing away in the lofty, well-preserved Church
of the Jesuits in Pavia, his wood stacked in the forsaken
frescoed chapels, as in a strange return of Christendom to
its origins, or an illustration of the new Logion^ " Cleave
the wood and ye shall find me." I bought coal at a still
more decayed church, taking off my hat involuntarily.
398 ITALIAN FANTASIES
The journalism of the street-nomenclature keeps pace
with the progress of anti-Clericalism. " Sons of an age
which you foresaw," the epitaph on Giordano Bruno's
tomb assures that victim of the Inquisition, and many a
Via or Piazza Giordano Bruno in places apparently re-
mote from the currents of thouglit — Pesaro, Perugia,
Foligno, Urbino on its isolated rock — testifies that even
a tombstone may speak the truth, provided that it is
only posthumous enough. Urbino indeed, lonely rugged
Urbino, is compelled to put up in the Church of S.
Francesco the significant warning : " The law punishes
disturbers of religious functions." And even more illu-
minating than the Giordano Bruno streets or the Giordano
Bruno societies is the mushroom rapidity with which
streets of Francesco Ferrer have sprung up all over Italy.
Florence, with biting sarcasm, has made its Via Francesco
Ferrer out of its Archbishop Street. Tiny San Gimi-
gnano of the many towers has inserted a tablet to Ferrer
in the wall of an open loggia of a theatre, " in order that
Thought should be fruitful and survive Death." . . .
"Victim," it cries, "of the sacerdotal tyranny, inaugurat-
ing the not distant time when there shall be neither
oppressed nor oppressors ! "
Such millennial dreams in such mediaeval cities prove
that Mazzini was no sport of nature, but a true son of
Italy ; seed-plot of all the mysticisms and aspirations from
St. Francis and Dante to Gioberti and David Lazzaretti.
IX
" Rome of the C^sars gave the Unity of Civilisation
that force imposed on Europe. Rome of the Popes
gave a Unity of Civilisation that Authority imposed on a
great part of the human race. Rome of the People
will give, when you Italians are nobler than you are now,
a Unity of Civilisation accepted by the free consent of the
RISORGIMENTO 399
nations for Humanity." In this magnificent synthesis,
written in 1844, Mazzini proclaimed the mission of Rome to
the world. His mental outlook was infinitely broader than
Lazzaretti's, whose story is one of Life's many plagiarisms
of the Palestinian original, complete even to martyr-
dom and an awaited Resurrection. Yet Mazzini shared
with the peasant-prophet of Monte Amiata the assurance of a
not distant Millennium to be inaugurated by his followers.
'Twas a blindness due to standing in his own white light.
The simplest observation of the facts reveals that humanity
is only at its alphabet, that we are living in the mere
infancy of our planet's human history, in a Dark Age to
which the millennial century will look back with incre-
dulity, though a few Gissings will be anxious to live in it.
The overwhelming majority of mankind to-day abides
religiously in primitive autocosms, which have little resem-
blance to the cosmos as it is, and every variety of savagery
from African cannibalism to European rubber-hunting
and American negro-lynching is still in vogue. Half
the land of the globe is still in undisturbed possession of
our animal and insect inferiors. Canada, Australia and
South America show a few human figures dotting the
endless spaces — in Matto Grosso in Brazil a hundred
thousand people occupy half a million square miles, in
Patagonia each man may have a San Marino Republic to
himself, in Alaska the population of a small English
country town is spread over six hundred thousand square
miles. Even the United States, which are sixty times as
large as England, have only double its population. In
Asia, the cradle of so-called civilisation, there are still
nomad populations, and large tracts, as of Arabia and
Tibet, have never been penetrated by the foot of an ex-
plorer. The bulk of Africa as of Russia — which is half
Europe j9Zm8 half Asia — is still given over to barbarism.
One third of the whole human race is packed into China,
a land where torture is still legal. Decidedly there is
400 ITALIAN FANTASIES
plenty of scope for " the mission of Rome," nor need the
lover of the picturesque yet apprehend the monotony of
the Millennium, as, girdled by stars and infinities, crossed
by the tails of comets, rent and seamed by earthquakes, our
planet continues its amazing adventure.
X
But if spiritual Imperialism has made little progress in
the land of Mazzini, Rome does not lack its party of mate-
rial Imperialism, ever egging on Italy to deeds of der-
ringdo and to the fulfilment of its " manifest destiny " in
Tripoli and Cyrenaica, whose arid deserts flow with milk
and honey under the imperialistic pen. More in sorrow
than in auger a writer in the Trihuna rebukes these hot-
heads as merely literary : conquistadors by fury of
metaphor and prosopopoeia, whereas real Imperialism —
Francesco Coppola perceives with envy — is the irresistible
instinct of an imperial race, whose expansion is uncon-
scious or even anti-conscious, and which is rich in strong
silent Kiplingesque heroes. Italy, a young nation, whose
bones are not yet set, whose teeth are not yet sprouted, is
falling, he laments, into the senile decay of socialistic
rhetoric, and pacifical and humanitarian doctrine. The
degenerate Italians have pulled ujj the railway lines to
prevent the soldiers going off to the wars of expansion,
have made a pother about "slavery," and have diverted
the world by setting Civil and Military Governors cock-
fighting before Commissions of Inquiry. "And then we
call ourselves the heirs of Rome! "
But, prithee, good Signor Coppola, is it not enough to
be the heirs of Italy? Is it not enough to inhabit the
most beautiful land in the world, the richest-dyed in his-
toric tints, the greatest breeder of great men, the garden
of the arts, the temple of religion ? Is there no such
thing as Intensive Imperialism ? To produce the highest
RISORGIMENTO 401
life per square mile is surely infinitely more Imperial than
to multiply Saharas of mediocrity, to follow Stock Ex-
change adventures in Abyssinia or to decimate the der-
vishes of Benadir ? In the village of my home there is
only a single shop, and it writes over its windows the
proud legend : " To lead in every department is our am-
bition." But Italy, in open competition with the world,
achieved the hegemony of civilisation in every depart-
ment. What, beside this, is the military heirship of
Rome?
And has England, the heir of Rome, so enviable a posi-
tion? Far from it, alas ! That unconscious or anti-con-
scious instinct of hers has landed her in the gravest
situation of which consciousness was ever called upon to
take stock. Holding nearly a quarter of the globe with
a white population — outside these islands — of only ten
millions ; with a heterogeneous empire of Colonies, Crown
Colonies and Possessions, incapable of being brought
under a single constitution or concept but that of force,
and tending to destroy such constitutions or ethical con-
cepts as survive at home ; with manifold subject races
which she is too proud to make freemen of the Empire as
Rome did ; threatened and troubled in Europe by Ger-
many, in Asia by India, in Africa by Egypt, in America
by the States, in Australia by the Chinese and Japanese,
the heir of Rome has seen her palmy days. The equili-
brium is too unstable, and the part that came with the
sword must perish with the sword. The Russo-Japanese
war — the most important event in history since the fall of
Rome — by destroying the glamour of the white man and
showing that Christianity is not essential to success in
slaughter — has shaken the foundations of her Indian and
Egyptian Empire. The old apprehension that Russia
was the menace to India is justifying itself, but it is Rus-
sia's weakness, not her strength, that has provided the
menace. Britain's only future — no mean one indeed —
2d
402 ITALIAN FANTASIES
lies in Canada, Australia and South Africa, and even
here it is impossible for her to fill tliese great continents
or sub-continents with the emigrating surplus of her de-
caying population, especially as her emigrants prefer the
United States and are often excluded from her own Colo-
nies. Her utmost hope is to keep these colonies British
in constitution. They cannot be British in language —
French Canada and Dutch South Africa forbid that, —
they cannot even be predominantly white, for North Aus-
tralia is tropical and South Africa is not a white man's
country but a whited sepulchre — an aristocracy exploit-
ing the coloured labour it despises, a society poised peril-
ously on its Pipex. How unwieldy such an Empire at its
best beside the United States — one continuous area, one
language, one constitution, and but for the hereditary
curse of the negro problem, one free and equal brother-
hood ! But how cumbrous even the United States, only
kept from breaking into separate States with separate
dialects by the modern network of railways, telegraphs
and newspapers ! How much more favourable to inten-
sive and exalted living, a compact little country like
Italy, rich in all the essentials of greatness and happi-
ness !
There was the epic sweep of a statesman in Chamber-
lain's vision of a true British Empire of federated freemen,
but even with him Ireland was incongruously excluded,
and the first fine prophetic rapture has chilled into com-
mercialism under the British incapacity for imaginative
synthesis. What was originally a consummation devoutly
to be desired, and to be achieved only by sacrifice, is now
presented as a policy that will pay, and even pay immedi-
ately. In the same breath we have an heroic trumpet-call
and an estimate of the profits. It would, indeed, be strange
if the good coincided so closely with the lucrative. But
that is the trickery of all forms of Protectionist teaching,
to dazzle with two alternative advantages simultaneously.
RISORGIMENTO 403
Matilda is the heiress and Madge is beautiful — who would
remain a bachelor when wealth and beauty are to be had
for the asking ?
Meantime the British Empire — so envied of the
Italian Imperialist — is fast being conquered by Germany.
For what is the mere absence of the German flag from
our shores to our Germanisation in ideas, our transforma-
tion to German notions of conscription, our permeation
by the doctrine of blood and iron ? Already a pamphle-
teer calls for Lord Kitchener to "take away that bauble."
Whether the new German province which is replacing the
old land of freedom continues to be called British or not,
is a secondary matter. The formal consummation of the
conquest would even relieve England of nightmares of
unmanly terror and mountains of taxation. I like to
think that it was this German province, and not the Eng-
land of Edward VII. which, ensuing Peace before Honour,
made a compact with the Power of Darkness and put back
the clock of Europe. It could not surely be the old
Colossus of Freedom, whose untold millions fertilise every
soil on earth and whose ships outnumber overwhelmingly
the united vessels of the world — it could not surely be
" the England of our dreams." which grasped the hand of
Russia and sent Finland and Persia to their dooms, and
now trembles to stir a finger for any cause, however
forlorn, and any ideal, however British.
Let the nation of Mazzini take heed before it loses its own
soul to gain the world.
XI
No, it was a road of quagmires and quicksands into which
Depretis and Crispi led Italy. The less she knows and
thinks of Empire the better for her and for mankind.
Latin self-consciousness, if it has faults of rhetoric, at least
enables Young Italy to see that Empire is not to be
bought without an ethic of blood and iron, which is
404 ITALIAN FANTASIES
foreign to the home ethic. Imperialism is only for races
strong or stupid enough to run a double standard. Italy
has given her blood prodigally enough for the right to be
Italy, but she has given it of her own free will. And
volunteer armies, self-inspired, are the only sort that a
true civilisation can tolerate. Despicable is the nation
which sends mercenaries to do its fighting. The soldier, like
the priest — whose black robe makes the eternal ground-
bass of Italy — is one of the unfortunate differentiations of
humanity — a type that should never have been evolved.
Specialisation — division of labour — is all very well when
it gives us doctors, carpenters, engineers, lawyers, but
every man must do his own praying and his own fighting.
It is comforting to find Young Italy as set against
soldiers as against priests.
Though United Italy has followed the normal path
of nationhood — large army, large navy, large taxes, and
my country right or wrong — there is still a saving rem-
nant to justify Mazzini's prophetic faith in his people.
And, indeed, one does not know where else to look for
"the saviours of the world." The French — once the
favourites in the role — have too hobbledehoy ish a devo-
tion to the sex-joke, the Germans are too tamed, the
Americans too untamed, the Spaniards and Russians too
brutalised by bull-fights or pograms, the English too
inconsequent. Possibly the New Zealanders may be the
first to build the model State, possibly some people of
Latin America, that land of sociology and secular educa-
tion. But these are too remote for their results to leaven
the Old World, and on the whole the Italians with their
ancient civilisation and tlieir renewed youth appear least
unfitted to lead humanity onwards.
But the notion that the Millennium can be reached
through a people with a mission, inspiring as it may yet
prove to Italy, is a notion not without its limitations and
drawbacks. It may easily degenerate into aggression as
RISORGIMENTO 405
with th6 English or into inactive vanity as with the
Jews.
True that the Jews — the original missionary people,
in whom the families of the earth were to be blessed —
have made the Millennium possible by their creation of
the bourse. In their Bank of Amsterdam, founded in
1609 by the refugees from Spain and Portugal, the in-
finitely complex system of international finance took its
rise. Professor Sombart, the German professor of eco-
nomics, credits the Jews with the entire invention of the
apparatus of the Stock Exchange. And the Stock Ex-
change, in criss-crossing with threads of gold all these
noisy nationalities, is turning war into a ridiculous de-
struction of one's own wealth. In the security necessary
for international investments lies the prime hope of the
world's peace. But it was an evolution whose form was
not foreseen by the Hebrew prophets. Isaiah predicted
that the peoples would beat their swords into plough-
shares ; he should have said shares in ploughs.
The success of Esperanto — likewise invented by a Jew
— the spread of World Congresses, and even of World
Sports, constitute, like Science and Art, a valuable cor-
rective to the excesses of Nationalism, which has been
sadl}'' overdone in the reaction against the cosmopolitanism
of the eighteenth century. Nationality, born as it is of
historical, biological, and geographical differences, is a
natural division of human groups, though a division devoid
of the rigidity which patriots pretend, inasmuch as all
nationalities are constantly intermarrying both ph3^sically
and spiritually. But Nationalism — as Bernard Shaw has
pointed out — is a disease. It is a morbid state due to
defect of the organs of Nationality — to wit, territory and
liberty. In health we are not conscious of our organs, it
is dyspepsia not digestion that forces itself upon our
attention. Nationalism rages in Poland or in Ireland as
it once raged in Italy. But for Italy, which has won
406 ITALIAN FANTASIES
back territory and liberty, to continue at fever heat would
be sickness, not liealtli. Even too much self-admonition
to do noble things for national reasons rather than for their
own sakes is a morbid self-consciousness. To make history
too consciously is to make histrionics.
XII
Neither the reformed Vatican of Gioberti nor the king-
less Quirinal of Mazzini can provide the next phase in
human evolution. Profound was that teaching of Jesus
— you cannot put the new wine in the old bottles. It was
not unnatural that an Italian should look to Rome for the
third mission. Rome of the Ciesars, Rome of the Popes,
Rome of the People ! What a fascinating trinity ! The
conception of a Rome that having lived twice as a world-
force must live again, seized Mazzini in his youth, en-
thralled his maturity, and was the key-note of his speech
to the Roman Assembly in the brief hour of his glory.
" After the Rome of conquering soldiers, after the Rome of
the triumphant Word, the Rome of virtue and of example."
And he repeated it, not yet disillusioned, in the very last
years of his life ; founding a journal to bring Roma del
Popolo into being. And yet he had in the interim pub-
lished " From the Council to God," that wonderful sketch
of the new religion for which the world is thirsting, had
added one of the grandest pages to the unclosed Bible of
humanity. That page, indeed, is perhaps still theology
rather than theonomy, still too saturated with the old
optimism — humanity may have to part even with the
assurance of personal immortality, and go, starred with
sorrows and sacrifices, to its obscure doom. But this opti-
mism, this burning conviction of a new heaven and a new
earth, is the very stuff of which great religions are made,
and Mazzini appears like the mighty prophet of the next
phase of the spirit, the divine iconoclast whose fuller faith
RISORGIMENTO 407
was to give the death-blow to the old theology. And the
real miscarriage of Mazzini's career is not that he laboured
for a Republic and begot a Monarchy, not that he sowed
for a new social order and reaped stones and statues, but
that he spent himself on the doubtful means instead of the
certain end, on the creation of a United Italy which was to
be the organon of the new spirit, but which is only a
nation like the others. The great soul that might have
kindled the new faith wore itself out in futile political
conspiracies and vain exiles. How much grander, how
much worthier of his genius and saintliness, might have
been Mazzini's achievement, had he not been obsessed,
like the Middle Ages, by the figment of the Holy Roman
Empire ; had he, instead of working through Nationalism,
gone straight for the foundation of a new international
Church. Moses, a greater than Mazzini, had failed in this
dream of prophet-people, nor is there any more assurance
that the Law will go forth from Rome than from Zion.
Mazzini himself protested against the notion that the
French continued to be the chosen people ; after 1814
their initiative ended, he urged. He protested, too,
against the notion that an instrument created for one pur-
pose can be used for another. Why, then, did he, whose
organising powers might have found supreme scope in
establishing the religion of the future, throw away his life
for Nationalism ? Valuable instrument of world-progress
as nationality within sane limits may be, alluring as is the
idea of working through one's own nation, perfecting a
model people, in whom all the families of the earth shall
be blessed, the instruments of the new order exist insuffi-
ciently in any one people, if indeed they exist sufficiently
in the whole population of the globe. More insistently
even than nationalities the world needs a new Church.
By giving up to Italy what was meant for mankind,
Mazzini missed creating what he prophesied, missed ful-
filling and purging of its monastic and medieeval limita-
408 ITALIAN FANTASIES
tions that earlier prophecy of the twelfth-century Calabrian
abbot whom Dante placed in Paradise. " The Kingdom
of the Father has passed, the Kingdom of the Son is
passing," taught Joachim of Flora. " The Third King-
dom will be the Kingdom of the Holy Ghost."
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