CITIES OF ITALY

Whatever may be the opinion of Europe as to the political advantages

accruing to it from the independence of Italy, it must be mournfully

confessed that the losses to art and to history through it are greater

than any which could have been caused by centuries of neglect or long

years of hostile occupation and devastating war. It is scarcely to be

measured, indeed, what those losses are; so immense are they in their

extent, so incessant in their exercise, so terrible in their irreparable

infamy. No doubt it could never be foreseen, never be imagined, by those

who brought about and permitted the consolidation of Italy into one

kingdom, that the people, nominally free, would become the abject slaves

of a municipal despotism and of a barbarous civic greed. None of the

enthusiasts for Italian independence possessed that power of foresight

which would have told them that its issue would be the daily

destruction, by hordes of foreign workmen, of its treasures of art and

its landmarks of history. Yet there is no exaggeration in saying that

this, and nothing less than this, is its chief issue.

Hermann Grimm published a powerful appeal to the scholars and artists of

Europe against the Italian destruction of Rome. Having for thirty years

written on Italian cities and their art and history, with scholarship

and devotion, he had gained the right to raise his voice in indignant

protest and scorn against the mercenary and vulgar shamelessness with

which the Roman municipality is so dealing with the splendid heritage

which it has received, that soon scarcely one stone will be left upon

another of the sacred city. He said, and with truth, that the portion of

the Italian nation which has the eyes to perceive and the soul to abhor

all that is being done is so small a minority, and one so spiritless,

hopeless and discouraged, that it is for all practical purposes

non-existent. He appealed to what he termed that larger Rome which

exists in the hearts of all who have ever known Rome with a scholar’s

knowledge, or an artist’s love. The appeal may be powerless but at least

it may be heard; and though it will scarcely be able to pierce through

the thick hide of smug vanity and rapacity in which Italian

municipalities are enveloped, it will put on record the courage and the

scorn of one man for what is the greatest artistic iniquity of our time.

It is idle and untrue for Italians to say that the rest of Europe has no

right to interfere with what they do with the legacy they enjoy. In the

first place, without the aid and acquiescence of Europe, the Italian

kingdom as a unity could never have existed at all; without the

permission of Europe the entry into Rome could never have been made at

all. Europe has the title to observe and to condemn the manner in which

the superb gift, which she permitted to be given to those very various

peoples who are called Italians, is being squandered away and destroyed.

The United Kingdom of Italy may, as a political fact, disappear

to-morrow in any European war or any great Socialistic uprising; but

historic Italy, classic Italy, artistic Italy, is a treasure which

belongs to the whole world of culture, in which, indeed, the foreigner,

if he be reverent of her soil, is far more truly her son than those born

of her blood who violate her and desecrate her altars. Italy cannot be

narrowed to the petty bounds of a kingdom created yesterday; she has

been the mistress of all art, the muse and the priestess of all peoples.

What are the Italians doing with her? It is sickening to note and to

record. Nothing can ever give back to the world what, day by day,

municipal councillors having houses to sell, syndicates and companies

merely looking for spoliation and speculation, contractors who seize on

the land as a trooper seizes on a girl in a sacked town, are all taking

from the fairest and the most ancient cities and towns on earth. The

sound of the hatchet in the woods and gardens of Italy is incessantly

echoed by the sound of the pickaxe and hammer in the cities and towns.

The crash of falling trees is answered by the crash of falling marbles.

All over the land, destruction, of the vilest and most vulgar kind, is

at work; destruction before which the more excusable and more virile

destruction of war looks almost noble. For the present destruction has

no other motive, object, or mainspring than the lowest greed. It is

absolutely incomprehensible how, after having been the leaders and the

light of the far centuries, the Italians have, by common consent and

with pitiable self-congratulation, sunk to the position of the most

benighted barbarism in art. In everything which is now constructed the

worst and most offensive taste is manifest, whilst that which has

existed for centuries is attacked and pulled down without remorse. I

wholly fail to account, on any philosophic or psychological grounds, for

the utter deadness of soul which has come on the Italians as a nation.

Born with loveliness of all kinds, natural and architectural, around

them, the æsthetic sense should be as instinctive in them as their

movements of limbs or lungs. Instead of this, it is entirely gone out of

them. They have no feeling for colour, no sense of symmetry, and little

or no sense of reverence for the greatness and the gloriousness of the

past.

The only people in whom any of the native feeling for natural and

artistic beauty still exists are those country people who dwell far

removed from the contagion of the towns, and the marine populations of

the Veneto. But even in these it is slighter than any student of the

past would expect. The sense of colour is _nil_ in most Italians; they

might as well be colour-blind for any heed they take of harmony of

tones. They delight in _chinoiseries_, in photographs, in crétonnes, in

all the rubbish bought in modern Exhibitions. In the superb and immense

halls of a palace of the Renaissance one will see priceless tapestries

on the walls, antique marbles on the consoles, frescoes of Veronese, of

Giulio Romano, or of Sodoma on the ceilings; and at the same time see

arm-chairs and couches, some yellow, some blue, some green, some

scarlet; a table-cover of crimson; and the mosaic floor covered with a

worthless _moquette_ carpet of all hues, and of a set and staring

pattern. I call to mind a similar palace on the Tiber, whose very name

is as a trumpet-call to all the glories of the past; there the antique

statues have been coloured, ‘because white marble is so cold and sad;’

an admirable copy in bronze of the Mercury of Gian’ di Bologna has had

his wings, his petasus, and his caduceus gilded; and the marble floors

have been taken up to have French parquet flooring laid down in their

stead, and varnished so highly that the woods glisten like

looking-glasses; yet the owner of and dweller in this place is a great

noble, who, after his own fashion, cherishes art. I have seen a Greek

Venus, found in the soil at Baiæ, wreathed round with innumerable yards

of rose-coloured gauze by its owner, an Italian princess. The excuse

given is, ‘_Senza un’po di tinta sta cosi fredda!_’

It is the same feeling which makes the Italian peasant say of the

field-flowers which you have arranged in your rooms, ‘How well you have

made those vulgar weeds look! Any one would take them now for _fiori

secchi_!’ (artificial flowers). Whence comes it, this absolute blindness

of the eyes, this deadening absence of all consciousness of beauty? It

is the same thing in their villages and their fairs. Go to a fair on a

feast-day in any part of France; go to a kermesse in Belgium or

Luxembourg; go to a merry-making in Germany or Austria, and you will see

a picturesque and graceful sight; you will see a great deal of what the

eyes of Teniers, of Ostade, of Callot, of Mieris saw in their day. There

will be harmonised colours, unconscious grace of grouping, arrangements

of common goods and simple things so made that beauty is got out of

them. But in a village festival in Italy there is nothing, except in the

water pageants of Venice, which is not ugly; it is all dusty,

uninteresting, untempting; what colours there are, are arranged with the

same disregard of fitness as is shown in the yellow, red and green

arm-chairs of the palace chambers; and the whole effect is one of

squalor and of vulgarity. The carnivals, which used to be fine and

brilliant spectacles, are now, almost all, save that of Milan, mere

tawdry, trivial, unlovely follies. Who can account for this?

Are we to infer that all the transmitted influences of race count for

nothing? Would those who, rightly or wrongly, are tempted to explain all

the problems of life by the doctrines of heredity tell me why the living

representatives of the most artistic races on earth are almost

absolutely deprived of all artistic instincts? Some have suggested that

it is the outcome of the artificial habits and false taste of the

eighteenth century; but this can scarcely be correct, because this

artificiality existed all over Europe, not in Italy alone, and besides,

never touched the country people in any way or in any of their habits.

The excuse made for the utter disregard and destruction of beauty in

Italy is that the utility of all things is now preferred to beauty. But

this is no adequate explanation. It may explain why a dirty steamboat is

allowed to grind against the water-steps of the Ca’d’Oro, or why the

fair shores of Poselippo and the blue bays of Spezzia and Taranto are

made hideous by steam and bricks. But it will not explain why the

peasant thinks a wax or cambric flower more lovely than a field anemone

or daffodil, or why the nobleman paints his Athene and gilds the wings

of his Hermes. This can only be traced to the utter decay of all feeling

for beauty, natural or artistic, in the Italian mind, and, though we

see, we cannot adequately explain, we can only deplore, it. There is no

doubt a tendency all the world over to loss of the true sense of beauty;

despite the æsthetic pretences of nations, the real feeling for natural

and artistic perfection is very weak in most of them. If it were strong

and pure, the utilitarian (_i.e._, the money-getting spirit) would not

prevail as it does in architecture, and forest solitudes would not be

destroyed as they are; and men would see what hypocrites they be who

make millions out of some hideous desecration of nature by factories,

iron foundries, or petroleum wells, and think they can purchase

condonation, and a reputation for fine taste, by buying pictures for

their galleries or inlaying their halls with rare woods or stones. The

whole world which calls itself civilised is guilty more or less of the

most absolute barbarism; but modern Italy is guiltiest of all, even as

he who has inherited a fair home and cultured intelligence is guiltier

than he who has never known anything but a vitiated atmosphere and a

squalid house. It is the immensity of her heritage which makes her abuse

of all her opportunities so glaring and so utterly beyond pardon.

Nothing can ever give back to mankind what every day the Italian

municipalities and people are destroying, as indifferently as though

they were pulling down dead leaves or kicking aside anthills in the

sand. There is not even the pretext for these acts that they are done to

better the state of the people; to execute them the cheapest foreign

labour is called in, ousting the men of the soil off it: house-rent is

trebled and quadrupled, house-room narrowed, and in many instances

denied, to the native population: and contracts are given away right and

left to any foreign companies or syndicates who choose to bid for them.

The frightful blocks of new houses, the hideous new streets, the filthy

tramways, the naked new squares, are all made by foreign speculators who

purchase the right of spoliation from the municipalities as the private

owners of the soil. A few men are made temporarily richer: the country

is permanently beggared.

‘Rome’ wrote Hermann Grimm, ‘represents for humanity a spiritual value

which cannot be easily estimated, but which is none the less precious

because ideal.’ Yet the vulgar and petty administration of an ephemeral

moment is allowed to treat the capital of the world as though it were

some settlement of shanties in the backwoods of America, fit only to

disappear beneath the mallet and scaffolding of carpenters and masons.

He said with justice that to call it vandalism is an injustice to the

Vandals, for they, at least, were too ignorant to know the worth of what

they destroyed, and acted in mere fierce instinct of conquest, with no

ulterior greed; but they who are now destroying arch on arch, tower on

tower, temple and church and palace, piling the sacred stones one on

another like rubble, and effacing landmarks which had been respected

through a thousand years, have the excuse neither of ignorance nor of

war. They know not what to do, and we may add that they care not what

they do, so long as their gain is made, their pockets filled.

Of all the grotesque barbarisms committed in Rome, the destruction of

the cloister of Ara Cœli and of the tower of San Paolo upon the Capitol,

to make room for an equestrian statue of Victor Emmanuel, has been one

of the most offensive and ill-judged. All the world knows the beauty of

the Capitol, the immemorial memories connected with it, and the great

statue which for so many centuries has felt the Roman sunshine strike on

its golden bronze. The placing of a modern statue in juxtaposition with

the mighty Aurelian is an act so irredeemably vulgar, so pitiably

incongruous, that it is a matter of infinite regret, even for the repute

of the House of Savoy, that the present king did not peremptorily forbid

such use of his father’s manes. In the Superga, or on the mountain-side

of the Piedmontese Alps he loved so well, a statue of Victor Emmanuel

would be in keeping with his traditions, but it is a cruelty to him to

dwarf him by such surroundings and such memories as are there on the

Capitol of Rome. His fame is not of the kind which can bear, uninjured,

such comparisons; and were it even ten times greater than it is, there

could be no excuse for using the Capitol for such a purpose when there

is the whole width of the Campagna for it, and when, in perfect accord

with the abilities of modern sculptors, there are all the staring and

naked modern piazzas waiting for their works. Will it be credited that

it was actually proposed to place a statue of him between the columns of

St Mark? In these matters the king could and should, with perfect

propriety, intervene, and forbid a pretended homage for his father’s

memory being made a pretext and cover for the coarse and common

vandalism of the epoch. In Florence, the beautiful wooded entrance of

the Cascine was destroyed to make the bald, uninteresting square called

the Piazza degli Zuavi, and a large, stony, open place, shadeless and

unlovely, was reserved for a monument to Victor Emmanuel; for this the

oval brick basement of the pedestal was raised many years ago, and there

stands, unfinished and hideous, an eyesore to the city, an insult to the

royal House.

There is scarcely a little town, there is no provincial capital on the

whole peninsula, which has not some new, staring, stucco street named

Corso Vittorio Emmanuele, or some historic and ancient square made

absurd and pitiable by being re-baptised Piazza dell’ Independenza. The

effect is at once ludicrous and deplorable.

If it were necessary thus to deify the events of the last thirty years,

and magnify them out of their true proportions, it would have been easy

to build some wholly new city in some vacant spot, which might have

borne any name or names deemed fitting, and thus have left in peace the

great cities of the past, and not have made the present recall the fable

of the frog and the bull.

Around Rome, as well as within it, the most luxuriant vegetation, a few

years ago, alternated with the most sacred ruins: tombs and temples and

triumphal arches were framed in the most abundant foliage; the banksia

rose, the orange, the myrtle, the jessamine climbed and blossomed amidst

the ruins of the palace of the Cæsars. In all these grand gardens, in

these flowering fields, in these grass meadows, stretching between their

marble colonnades, there was, as the German scholar says, an infinite

calm, a loveliness and stillness in which the poet and the scholar could

draw near to the mighty dead who had once been there as living men.

There was nothing like it left on earth. Now it is destroyed for ever.

Now,—in the stead of that tender silence of the tombs, that exquisite

freshness of the spring, awakening in a thousand moss-grown dells and

myrtle thickets which had seen Ovid and St Paul, Augustine and

Raffael--now, in the stead of this there are the stench of engines, the

dust of shattered bricks, the scream of steam whistles, the mounds of

rubbish, the poles of scaffolding, long lines of houses raised in

frantic haste on malarious soil, enormous barracks, representative of

the martial law required to hold in check a liberated people: all is

dirt, noise, confusion, hideousness, crowding, clamour, avarice.

The leaders of an invading and victorious army would have been ashamed

to cause the havoc and the blasphemy which the Roman municipality have

carried out with shameless callousness; the indignant voice of Europe

would have bidden a Suwarrow, a Napoleon, a Constable de Bourbon stay

his hand, had he dared to level with the dust the august monuments of

which neither the majesty nor the memories have power to daunt the

impious hand of the nineteenth century Edilizia. Common faith, even, has

not been kept with the Roman people in the ruin of their city; the

completed plan, put before the public in 1880, of the works which were

intended, did not prepare the public for one-tenth of the devastation

which has been wrought. In the words of Grimm, those who put forth the

plan of ’80 proposed tranquil, moderate and decent measures, and never

contemplated the insensate haste, the brutal fury, the unsparing greed

shown by those who, professing to accept its propositions, have utterly

disregarded and far outstripped them. In the plan of ’80 it was, for

instance, expressly stated and provided that certain gardens, amongst

them the Ludovisi, should be purchased by the city, but kept intact in

their verdure and extent. This promise has been broken.

What traveller has not known the Ludovisi Gardens? What scholar,

dreamer, painter, has not found his heaven there? Those immemorial

pines, making twilight beneath them in the sunniest noon, those lofty

walls of bays and of arbutus, those dim, green, shadowy aisles leading

to velvet swards and violet-studded banks, the family of peacocks

spreading their purples, their emeralds, their gold, out in the glory of

the radiant light, the nightingales singing night and day in the

fragrant solitudes, Sappho’s angel in Corrinna’s gardens—who has not

known these? who has not loved these? And they are gone, gone forever;

gone through the greed of men, and in their stead will stand the vile

rows of cheap and staring houses: in their place will reign the devil of

centralisation.

Centralisation is the heart-disease of nations. The blood, driven by it

from the body and the limbs, becomes turgid and congested, overfills the

vessels of the heart, and chokes them up; there is no more health, and

later there is death. It has been the curse of France. It will be the

curse of Italy. The violated nymphs and the slaughtered nightingales of

the ruined gardens will be avenged. But what solace is that to us? We

have lost them forever. No power on earth can give them back to us.

There is a violation of that sentiment which the Latins called Piety, so

glaring, and so monstrous, in the destruction of Rome by the Italians,

that it dwarfs all similar ruin being wrought elsewhere. All over Italy

things are daily being done which might wring tears from the statues’

eyes of stone.[A]

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Footnote A:

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

Borghese!

-----

After the outrage to Rome, the injury done to Venice is the most

irreparable, the most inexcusable.

The wanton destruction of the island of Saint Elena is, after the

destruction of the Ludovisi and other historic gardens in Rome, the most

disgraceful act of the sacrilege of modern Italy. It is barbarism

without one shadow of excuse or plea of obligation. This loveliest isle

had been spared by all hostile fleets and armies. It lies at the very

mouth of the lagoon opening out from the Grand Canal. It arrests the

eyes of all who go to and fro the Lido. It was, a little while ago, a

little paradise of solitude, fragrance and beauty. Its thickets of wild

rose, of jessamine, and of myrtle, were filled with song-birds. Its old

church, the oldest in the Veneto, stood, grey and venerable, amidst the

shade of green acacias and flowering oleanders. The little world of

blossom and of melody, hung between the sea and sky, had a holiness, a

pathos, a perfection of woodland loveliness not to be told in words;

there no sound was heard except the bells of the matins and vespers, the

lapping of the waves, the whir of the white gulls’ wings, and the echo

of some gondolier’s boating song. To sit in its quiet cloisters, with

the fragrance of its wild gardens all around, and see the sun set beyond

Venice, and the deep rose of evening spread over the arch of the skies

and the silver plain of the waters, was to live a little while in the

same world that Giorgione and Veronese knew. It seems like a vision of a

nightmare to find these cloisters levelled and these gardens and trees

destroyed; the whole island made a grimy, smoking mound of clay and

ruins. Yet thus it is. The government has chosen to make it a site for a

factory and foundry; and, not content with this defilement, is throwing

up, upon it and beside it, acres of the stinking sand and clay dredged

up from the canals, intending in due time to cover this new soil with

other factories and foundries, full in the face of the Ducal Palace, a

few furlongs from the Piazza of St Mark. Viler devastation was never

more iniquitously or more unpardonably wrought.

Meantime the very commonest care is refused to such interesting and

priceless houses as the House of the Camel, which is let out to a number

of poor and dirty tenants, with its eponymus alto-relievo made the

target for the stones of the children; while in the same quarter of the

Madonna dell’ Orta, close at hand, a manufacturer is allowed to send the

mouths of his steam-tubes hissing through the iron arabesques and

between the carved foliage of a most noble Gothic doorway belonging to a

deserted church.

I am aware that it is useless to protest against these things. The soul

in the country is withered up by small greeds. All these irreparable

injuries are done that municipal councillors may pocket some gain, and

any stranger who has the money necessary can purchase from the Conscript

Fathers of the hour the right to defile, to annex, to violate, to

destroy the fairest and most sacred places in Italy. The goddess is

given over to the ravishing of any boor who brings a money-bag.

The scholar, the poet, the archæologist are all abhorred in modern

Italy; their protests are impatiently derided, their reverence is

contemptuously ridiculed, their love of art, of nature, or of history,

is regarded as a folly, ill-timed and inconvenient, lunatic and

hysterical. But the new-comer who proposes a machine, a chimney, a

monster hotel, a bubble company, or a tramway station, is welcomed with

open arms; it is considered that he means ‘progress,’ _i.e._, that he

means a subsidy for some one, a general scramble for gold pieces.

Emile de Lavaleye has demonstrated, in his recent _Lettres d’ Italie_,

that these works in Venice, so fatal to the city, cannot ever result in

any financial profit; that, with coal forty francs a ton, it is

impossible they should ever bring any; that all industry of the kind is

artificial and pernicious in Italy, and ends in impoverishing the many

to enrich a few.

It is a wanton love of destruction which can alone lead a people who

possess neither iron nor coal to make foundries and factories in Venice,

the most lovely and luminous city of the sea. These works cannot be ever

profitable at Venice, by reason of the immense cost of the transport

there of the metals and combustibles necessary for their development.

Yet in every direction their foul smoke is rising, and dimming that

translucent air so dear to every painter from Carpaccio to Aïvarnovski.

From the Zattere alone no less than fourteen factory chimneys are

visible.

The Fondamenté Nuové was in the days of the Doges the _riva_,

consecrated to the villas and pleasure-gardens of the Venetian nobles;

their palaces were only for winter habitation or ceremonious use, but

the beautiful garden-houses facing Murano were their retreat for mirth,

ease and recreation of all kinds, with nothing between them and the

silvery lagoon except the clouds of foliage and of blossom which then

covered these little isles. Nothing would have been easier than to make

this shore now what it was then, and it would even have been undoubtedly

profitable to have done so. Will it be credited that, instead, it has

been selected as the especial site of gas-works and iron-works and all

abominations of stench and smoke, whilst, instead of the laughing

loveliness of flowering lawns leaning to touch the sea, there is a long

and dreary brick embankment, on which you can walk if you choose, and

recall, if you can, the ‘tender grace of a day that is dead’?

‘_La lumière de Venise_‘ has been the theme of all poets and the

enchantment of all travellers for centuries; that opal-hued,

translucent, ethereal light has been the wonder of every wanderer who

has found himself in the enchantment of its silvery radiance. ’_On nage

dans la lumière_,’ is the just expression of Taine, to describe the

exquisite effulgence of the light in Venice. Yet this wonder, this

delight, this gift of Nature from sea and sky, the modern masters of the

fate of Venice deliberately sacrifice, that a few greedy commercial

adventurers may set up their chimneys on the shores consecrated to St

Mark.

The Venetian populace have still in themselves a sense of colour and a

passion for verdure; in every little _calle_ and at every _traghetto_ an

acacia grows and a vine climbs; on the sails of the fishing and fruit

boats there are painted figures, and in the garb of those who steer them

there is still picturesque choice of form and hue. But in the Venetian

municipality, as in every other Italian municipality, all taste is dead,

all shame is dead with it; and the only existence, the only passion,

left in their stead, are those of gain and of destruction. On the

Giudecca hideous factories, which belch out the blackest of smoke close

to the dome of the Church of the Redentore, have been allowed to pollute

the atmosphere and disgrace the view; and in every shed or outhouse

where anyone has a fancy to stick up the iron tube of an engine, similar

smoke passes forth, making day frightful and clouding the lagoon for

miles.

Reverence, and that sense of fitness which always goes with reverence,

are wholly lacking in the modern Italian mind. There is a kind of

babyish self-admiration in its stead, which is the most sterile of all

moral ground, and with which it is impossible to argue, because it is

deaf and blind, inwrapped in its own vanity. In a few years’ time, if

the Italian kingdom last, it will insist on its history being

re-written, and the debts that it owed to the French Emperor in ’59 and

to the German Emperor in ’70 being struck out of its balance-sheet

altogether. Nothing was more untrue, more bombastical, or more

misleading than the favourite phrase, _Italia fara da se_; but it is one

of those untruths which have been caressed and repeated until they are

accepted as facts; and the injury done by this conceit to the present

generation is very great.

Nature has done all for Italy; it is a soil which is indeed blessed of

the gods; from its pure and radiant air to its wildflowers, which spring

as though Aphrodite were still here ‘to sow them with her odorous foot,’

it is by Nature perfectly dowered and thrice blessed. In its roseate

dawns, its crystal, clear moonlight, its golden afternoons, it has still

the lovely light of an unworn world. Art joined hands with Nature, and

gave her best and her richest treasures to Italy. It is, to any scholar,

artist, poet, or reverent pilgrim to her shrines, a thing of intolerable

odium, of unutterable sorrow, that the very people born of her soil

should be thus ignorant of her exquisite beauty, thus mercenary, venal

and unshamed in their prostitution of it.

Even amongst those who follow art as their calling, there is no sense of

colour or of fitness. When the old houses of the Via degli Archibusieri

were pulled down in Florence, to lay bare the colonnade beneath them, a

committee of artists deliberated for three months as to the best method

of dealing with this colonnade. The result of their deliberations was to

cover the old stone with stucco and paint the stones brown, with white

borders! The effect is enhanced by upright lamp-posts, coloured brown,

stuck in the middle of the way. The excuse given for the demolition of

the houses was that the removal of them would widen a thoroughfare: as

the lamp-posts are much more obstructive to drivers than the houses

were, the correctness of the reasons given can be easily gauged. This is

an example of all the rest. ‘Are we to go in rags for sake of being

picturesque?’ said a syndic now ruling one of the chief cities of Italy,

to a person who complained to him of the destruction of art and beauty

now common throughout the peninsula. The reply is characteristic of that

illogical stupidity and that absolute colour-blindness which are common

to the modern Italian, or, let us say, the municipal Italian mind. They

are insensible themselves to the horror of their work, just as they are

unconscious why yellow, blue and green chairs on a red carpet offend a

delicate taste. To whitewash frescoed walls; to make old monasteries

look brand new; to scrub and peel and skin sculptured marbles; to daub

over beautiful arches and columns and cloisters with tempera paintings,

mechanically reproduced in one set pattern over and over again, over

miles of stucco; to outrage the past and vulgarise the present; to

respect nothing; to set the glaring seal of a despotic and bourgeois

administration over all which ages have made lovely and reverent—all

this they think an admirable and hygienic work, while they let human

excrement be strewn broadcast over the fields and emptied in the street

at midday under broiling heat, and set the guards of their rivers to

drive out with blows of the scabbard the poor children who would fain

splash and bathe in them under canicular suns. The excuse of hygiene is

only the parrot cry which covers the passion for iconoclasm and

destruction. To make their own _interessi_ while the moment lasts is the

only desire at the heart of all these civic councillors and engineers,

architects and contractors, house-owners and speculators. To petty

personal purposes and selfish personal profits everything is sacrificed

by the innumerable prefects, syndics, and town councillors, by whom

Italy is regarded as the Turkish pashas regarded the Egyptian fellah.

Florence, again, might, with great ease, have been made one of the most

beautiful cities of Europe: if there had been only moderate care and

decent taste displayed in its administration, its natural and

architectural charms were so great that it would have been a facile task

to keep them unharmed. If its suburbs, indeed, of ugliness and squalor,

could show good roads and shady avenues; if its river banks, instead of

brick walls, showed grass and trees; if its filthy cab-stands were kept

out of sight, and its city trees allowed to grow at the will of Nature,

Florence would be lovely and twice as healthy as it is. But there is no

attempt to preserve what is beautiful, or to make what is of necessity

modern accord in any manner with the old; whilst on trees there is waged

a war which can only oblige one to conclude that those who are entrusted

with the care of them have no eye except to the filling of their own

wood-cellars. It is a very common thing to see an avenue of plane or

lime trees with their heads cut off, whilst all the trees, whether in

the public gardens or on the boulevards, are chopped and hacked out of

all likeness to themselves, and of course dry up and perish long before

their time.

Nothing can be more criminal that what is actually now being proposed in

the Florence town council, i.e., to raise a loan of eight millions, at

four per cent., to destroy the entire old centre of the city.[B] I

repeat, nothing more criminal, more wasteful, or more senseless could be

done. Florence is very poor; a few years ago she was on the brink of

bankruptcy; taxation is enormous throughout Tuscany; the poorest are

taxed for the very bed they lie on; the amount which she has to pay to

the government from the _dazio consume_ (that is, the octroi duty at the

gates, on all food and produce of every kind entering the town) is

extravagant and intolerable. So cruelly are the simplest productions of

the soil mulcted by taxation that every class suffers, whether producer

or consumer. The annual interest payable on the new loan will add

immensely to the burdens which the city bears; and for what purpose is

such a loan to be contracted? For the purpose of pulling down the oldest

and most historic parts of Florence, to create a naked wilderness which

will be changed into one of those squares, dusty and hideous, with metal

lamp-posts round it and stunted shrubs in the centre of it, which

represent to the municipal Italian the _ne plus ultra_ of loveliness and

civilisation. The excuse given of hygienic reasons is a lie. All the

uncleanly classes which dwelt in the Ghetto have been bundled off

wholesale to the S. Frediano quarters, where they will continue to dwell

with unchanged habits, a few score of yards removed from where they were

before. The dirt of Italian cities is not due to the age or shape of the

streets, it is due to the filthy personal habits of the people, which

are the same in a wide and roomy farm-house in the pine woods as in a

garret of a town. They love dirt; water never touches their bodies all

the year round, and never touches even their faces or hands in winter;

they like their vegetables raw, their wine sour; their pipes are

eternally in their mouths, and their clothes reek with every stench

under heaven. It is the habits of the people, not the formation of the

streets, which constitute the standing peril of pestilence in Italy.

They would make a new house as filthy as an old one in a week. For what,

then, is this enormous, useless, and unpardonable addition to the civil

debt of Florence incurred? Only to put money in the pockets of a few

speculators, and a few owners of the soil, at the cost of destroying all

that is most interesting, valuable, and historical in the city.

-----

Footnote B:

Since this was written it has been done, entirely obliterating

republican Florence, and creating a new enormous debt for the town.

-----

Will it be credited by any readers of these words that it is actually in

contemplation to turn the old piazza behind the Palazzo Strozzi into a

range of glass-galleries like those of Milan or of Brussels? It is

incredible that a whole civil population can tranquilly permit such

outrage, and such grotesque outrage, to be committed in its name.

It is indeed very much as though the owner of Raffaeles and Titians tore

them up into tatters and bought chromo-lithographs and olegraphs to hang

in their places.

Oftentimes the populace itself is pained and mortified to see its old

heirlooms torn down and its old associations destroyed, but the populace

has no power; the whole civic power is vested in the bureaucracy, and

civic electoral rights are wholly misunderstood and practically unused

by the masses of the people. It is for the most part the smug and

self-complacent _bourgeoisie_ which rules, and which finds a curious

delight in the contemplation of everything which can destroy the cities

of the Renaissance, and the records of classic Latium, to replace them

with some gimcrack and brand-new imitation of a third-rate modern French

or Belgian town, glaring with plate-glass, gilding, dust, smoke, acres

of stucco, and oceans of asphalt.

The modern Italian has not the faintest conception of the kind of

religious reverence with which the English, the German, the American

scholar visits the cities of Italy. Such an emotion seems to the son of

the soil wholly inexplicable and grotesquely sentimental. If the

Englishman praise a monster hotel or a torpedo-boat, or the German the

march of a regiment, or the American the shafts of a factory, then, and

then only, will the Italian regard the travellers with complacency. And

what is done in the cities is repeated in the small towns, of which the

municipalities think it grand and ‘advanced’ to imitate the innovations

of larger ones, and where the house-owners and owners of the soil are

just as greedy as their town councillors, and just as eager to sacrifice

any classic beauty or mediæval memory for gain.

Could Dante come to life, no curse that he ever breathed upon his

countrymen would be one-half so fierce and deep as that with which he

would devote the Italian of the close of the nineteenth century to the

vengeance of the offended gods. But Dante’s self would say his curses to

deaf ears, wadded close with the wool of vanity and greed.

Meanwhile the taxation of all these towns is so high that tradespeople

are ruined in them, as the country proprietors are ruined in hundreds

and thousands by the imposts on land and all that land produces. Against

blind cupidity the gods themselves are impotent.

THE

FAILURE OF CHRISTIANITY

Very soon, as the history of the world counts time, Christianity will

have completed its two thousand years of existence. In some shape or

other its doctrines dominate the civilised portions of Europe and

America and Australasia; and even in Asia and in Africa its

representatives and its missionaries are busied in the endeavours to

diffuse them into the dark places of the earth. Whether we accept it as

what is called a revealed or supernatural religion, or whether we more

rationally consider it an offspring of the older and similar myths of

Asia united to Judaism, the fact remains the same of the immense area of

its adoption by the human race, and especially by the Aryan race.

Islamism is widespread, but has no continuous power of proselytism

similar to Christianity; and Judaism, though inexorably potent on the

Jewish tribes, whatever country they inhabit, can claim little or no

power of attracting strangers within its fold; does not, indeed, seek to

attract any.

To live and spread as it has done, Christianity must have some vital

force within itself superior to those possessed by other creeds. It must

be suited to the human race in some manner which the religion of

Mohammed and that of Israel have alike missed. Indeed, the whole history

of the acquisition of its dominion is very singular, and has probably

been due to the socialistic element contained in it; for the gospels are

a breviary intimately dear to the heart of every communist.

Mohammedanism is aristocratic; so is Judaism, so were the Greek and

Latin religions; but Christianity is the religion of democracy, of

universal equality, of the poor man consoled for privation on earth by

his belief that such privation is surely the narrow gate by which heaven

alone can be reached. Even in the moment when Christianity most nearly

approached an aristocratic worship, it still contained the germs of

democracy; it still held out hope to the poor man, hope both spiritual

and material; in the feudal ages, when it was the war-cry of knights and

ruling power of great kings and arrogant priests, it still whispered in

the ear of the swineherd and the scullion,—‘Take my tonsure and my

habit, and who knows that thou mayest not live to earn the triple

crown?’

Because Socialism is for a great part atheistic, it has been wholly

forgotten how socialistic have been the influences on society of

Christianity. The evangels are essentially the dream of a poor man; the

vision of a peasant asleep after a day of toil, and seeing in his vision

the angels come for him, whilst they spurn the rich man on whose fields

he has laboured. ‘Come to Me, all ye who sorrow and are heavy-laden, and

I will give you rest.’ It is the invitation to the poor; not to the

rich. The disciples are fishermen for the most part; Christ is himself a

carpenter; the whole dream is a passion-play of peasants as entirely as

that which represented it last year in Ammergau; and in it power,

intellect and law are all subverted and proved wrong when Pilate gets

down from the judgment-seat, and the watching fishers believe that they

behold the resurrection. This socialistic influence the doctrines of

Christianity have had, and have gradually made felt throughout many

ages, and are making felt more sharply and rudely in this our own than

in any other age. The most ‘pious’ of all sects are also always the most

democratic; the Nonconformists and the Wesleyans are always the most

intent on levelling the barriers and irregularities of social life.

Protestantism was the democratic daughter of the Papacy, but the Papacy

was also a democrat when it made it possible for a swineherd to hold the

keys of St Peter, and for a Becket to rule a Plantagenet, for a Wolsey

to rule a Tudor.

Again and again the humble vassal lived to thunder excommunication upon

monarchs, and the timid scribe who dared not lift his eyes from his

scroll became the most powerful, the most arrogant, the most inexorable

of churchmen. It was this hope contained within it for the lowliest,

this palm held out by it to the poorest, which made the enormous

influence of Christianity from the days of Basil and Augustine to the

days of Richelieu and Wolsey. The feudal lords who shouted Christian

war-cries, and the despotic kings who swore by the Holy Rood and by Our

Lady, were wholly unconscious that in the creed they cherished there

were the germs of the democratic influences which would in time to come

undermine thrones and make aristocracy an empty name; they did not know

that in Clement Marot’s psalm-books and in Wycliffe’s Bible there lay

folded that which would in time to come bring forth the thesis of

Bakounine and the demands of the Knights of Labour.

If we meditate on and realise the essentially socialistic tendencies of

the Christian creed, we may wonder that the ‘_grands de la terre_’ ever

so welcomed it, or ever failed to see in it the death-germs of their own

order; but we shall completely understand why it fascinated all the

labouring classes of mankind and planted in them those seeds of

communism which are now bearing forth full fruit. But what is almost

equally certain is that Christianity will be wholly powerless to

restrain the results of what it has inspired.

For of all absolutely powerless things on earth Christianity is the most

powerless, even though sovereigns are still consecrated, multitudes

still baptised, parliaments and tribunals still opened, and countless

churches and cathedrals still built in its name. It has become a

shibboleth, a husk, a robe with no heart beating within it, a winged

angel carved in dead wood. It has said that it is almost impossible for

the rich man to be just or inherit the kingdom of heaven: the Anarchists

insist that it is utterly impossible, and will, if they can, cast the

rich man into hell on earth.

Christianity has opened the flood-gates to Socialism; but it will not

have any power in itself to close them again. For nothing can be in more

complete contradiction than the prevalence of the profession of

Christianity with the impotency of that profession to colour and control

human life. The Buddha of Galilee has not one-thousandth part of the

direct influence on his professional disciples that is possessed by the

Buddha of India. Christianity is professed over the whole earth wherever

the Aryan race exists and rules, but all the kingdoms and republics

which make it their state creed are, practically, wholly unaffected by

its doctrines, except in so far as their socialistic members derive

precedent and strength from them.

Take, for instance, that which governs states and prescribes the duties

of men—the majesty of the law, as it is termed—the science and the

practice of legislation. Side by side with the religion enjoined by the

state there exists a code of legislation which violates every precept of

Christianity, and resembles only the _lex talionis_ of the old Hebrew

law, which the Christian creed was supposed to have destroyed and

superseded.

A savage insistence on having an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth

is the foundation of all modern law. The European, or the American, or

the Australasian, goes on Sunday to his church and says his formula,

‘Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us,’

and then on the Monday morning prosecutes a boy who stole a ball of

string, or a neighbour who has invaded a right of way, or an enemy whose

cow has strayed, or whose horse has kicked, or whose dog has bitten, and

exacts for one and all of these offences the uttermost penalty that the

law will permit him to demand. It may be said that such law is

absolutely necessary in civilised states: it may be so: but then the

empty formula of the Christian forgiveness of trespasses should be in

honesty abandoned.

Mr Ruskin never writes on Venice without dwelling on the vital influence

of the Christian creed on the men of the middle ages, and contrasting

the religious spirit of those whose cry was St Mark, and whose

admiration was St Jerome, with those of modern times, when these names

mean nothing on the ears of men. But, in truth, the influence was

architectural and artistic rather than moral; the memory neither of St

Mark nor St Jerome ever prevented the blinding of the eyes of doges who

had displeased the people, the treachery and brutality of their

inexorable decrees, the torture of the Foscari, the betrayal of

Carracciolo, the sale of slaves, or any one of the awful cruelties and

tyrannies of the Council of Ten.

As it was in the Venice of the middle ages, so has it been and is

wherever Christianity is nominally dominant. The cross is embroidered on

banners and its psalter is carried to churches in pious hands, but its

real influence on the life of nations is as slight as that of Mark and

Jerome on the Council of Ten. The whole practical life of nations lives,

breathes and holds its place by creeds and necessities which are the

complete antithesis of the Christian; they are selfish in their

policies, bloodthirsty in their wars, cunning in their diplomacy,

avaricious in their commerce, unsparing in their hours of victory. They

are so, and, alas! they must be so, or they would be pushed out of their

place amongst nations, and parcelled out, like Joseph’s coat, amongst

their foes.

The capitalist who makes millions by the manufacture of rifled cannon

sees no inconsistency in murmuring in his seat at Catholic mass or

Protestant service, ‘Return good for evil,’ ‘If one cheek be smitten,

turn the other,’ and all the rest of the evangelical injunctions to

peace and forbearance: were any to suggest to him the inconsistency of

his conduct, such an one would speak to deaf ears; that his whole life

was a violation of the precepts he professed would be an unintelligible

reproach to him: his soul would take refuge, smug and safe, in his

formulas. Yet who can deny that, if the commands of Christianity had in

the least penetrated beneath the surface of human life, to make weapons

of destruction would be viewed as a crime so frightful that none would

dare attempt it? Some writer has said that ‘singing psalms never yet

prevented a grocer from sanding his sugar.’ This rough joke expresses in

a grotesque form what may be said in all seriousness of the impotency of

Christianity to affect modern national life.

Christianity is a formula: it is nothing more. The nations in which

daily services in its honour are said in thousands and tens of thousands

of cathedrals and churches, sell opium to the Chinese, cheat and slay

red Indians, slaughter with every brutality the peaceful natives of

Tonquin and Anam, carry fire and sword into central Asia, kill Africans

like ants on expeditions, and keep a whole populace in the grip of

military service from the Spree to the Elbe, from the Zuider Zee to the

Tiber, from the Seine to the Neva. Whether the nation be England,

America, France, Russia, Italy, or Germany, the fact is the same; with

the gospels on its reading-desks and their shibboleth on its lips, every

nation practically follows the lusts and passions of its human greeds

for possession of territory and increase of treasure. Not one amongst

them is better in this matter than another. Krupp guns, shrapnel shells,

nitro-glycerine and submarine torpedoes are the practical issues of

evangelicism and Catholicism all over the civilised world. And the

nations are so sublimely unconscious of their own hypocrisy that they

have blessings on their warfare pronounced by their ecclesiastics, and

implore the Lord of Hosts for his sympathy before sending out armoured

cruisers.

This is inevitable, is the reply: in the present state of hostility

between all nations, the first one to renounce the arts of war would be

swallowed up by the others. So it would be, no doubt; but if this be the

chief fruit of Christianity, may not this religion justly be said to

have failed conspicuously in impressing itself upon mankind? It has

impressed its formulas; not its spirit. It has sewn a phylactery on the

hem of humanity’s robe: it has never touched the soul of humanity

beneath the robe. It has produced the iniquities of the Inquisition, the

egotism and celibacy of the monasteries, the fury of religious wars, the

ferocity of the Hussite, of the Catholic, of the Puritan, of the

Spaniard, of the Irish Orangeman and of the Irish Papist; it has divided

families, alienated friends, lighted the torch of civil war, and borne

the virgin and the greybeard to the burning pile, broken delicate limbs

upon the wheel and wrung the souls and bodies of innocent creatures on

the rack: all this it has done, and done in the name of God.

But of mercy, of pity, of forbearance, of true self-sacrifice, what has

it ever taught the world?

A while ago there was published an account of the manufacture of the

deadliest sort of dynamite on the shores of Arran. Full in the front of

the great sea, with all the majesty of a rock-bound and solitary shore

around them, these hideous works raise their blaspheming face to Nature

and pollute and profane her most solemn glories; and there, on this

coast of Arran, numbers of young girls work at the devilish thing in

wooden huts, with every moment the ever-present risk of women and huts

being blown into millions of atoms if so much as a shred of metal, or

even a ray of too warm sunshine, strike on the foul, sickly, infernal

compound which their fingers handle. A brief while since two girls were

thus blown into the air, and were so instantaneously and utterly

annihilated that not a particle of their bodies or of their clothing

could be recognised; and all the while the sea-gulls were circling, and

the waves leaping, and the clouds sailing, and deep calling to deep,

‘Lo! behold the devil and all his works.’ And there is no devil there at

all except man—man who makes money out of this fell thing which blasts

the beauties of Nature, and scars the faces of the hills, and has made

possible to civilisation a fashion of wholesale assassination so

horrible, so craven, and so treacherous that the boldness of open murder

seems almost virtue beside it.

The manufactory of nitro-glycerine on the Arran shore is the emblem of

the world which calls itself Christian. No doubt the canny Scots who are

enriched by it go to their kirk religiously, are elders of it, very

likely, and if they saw a boy trundle a hoop, or a girl use a needle on

the Sabbath day, would think they saw a crime, and would summon and

chastise the sinners. Pontius Pilate was afraid and ashamed when he had

condemned an innocent man; but the modern followers of Christ have

neither fear nor shame when they pile up gold on gold in their bankers’

cellars through the death which they have manufactured and sold,

indifferent though it should strike down a thousand innocent men.

Even of death Christianity has made a terror which was unknown to the

gay calmness of the Pagan and the stoical repose of the Indian. Never

has death been the cause of such craven timidity as in the Christian

world, to which, if Christians believed any part of what they profess,

it would be the harbinger of glad tidings, the welcome messenger of a

more perfect life. To visionaries like Catherine of Siena, it may have

been so at times, but to the masses of men and women professing the

Christian faith, death has been and is the King of Terrors, from whose

approach they cower in an agony which Petronius Arbiter would have

ridiculed, and Socrates and Seneca have scorned. The Greek and the Latin

gave dignity to death, and awaited it with philosophy and peace; but the

Christian beholds in it innumerable fears like a child’s terror of

ghosts in darkness, and by the manner of the funeral rites with which he

celebrates it contrives to make grotesque even that mute majesty which

rests with the dead slave as much as with the dead emperor.

Christianity has been cruel in much to the human race. It has quenched

much of the sweet joy and gladness of life; it has caused the natural

passions and affections of it to be held as sins; by its teaching that

the body should be despised, it has brought on all the unnamable filth

which was made a virtue in the monastic orders, and which in the

Italian, the Spanish, the Russian peoples, and the poor of all nations

is a cherished and indestructible habit. In its permission to man to

render subject to him all other living creatures of the earth, it

continued the cruelty of the barbarian and of the pagan, and endowed

these with what appeared a divine authority—an authority which Science,

despising Christianity, has yet not been ashamed to borrow and to use.

Let us, also, endeavour to realise the unutterable torments endured by

men and maidens in their efforts to subdue the natural desires of their

senses and their affections to the unnatural celibacy of the cloister,

and we shall see that the tortures inflicted by Christianity have been

more cruel than the cruelties of death. Christianity has ever been the

enemy of human love; it has forever cursed and expelled and crucified

the one passion which sweetens and smiles on human life, which makes the

desert blossom as the rose, and which glorifies the common things and

common ways of earth. It made of this, the angel of life, a shape of sin

and darkness, and bade the woman whose lips were warm with the first

kisses of her lover believe herself accursed and ashamed. Even in the

unions which it reluctantly permitted, it degraded and dwarfed the

passion which it could not entirely exclude, and permitted it coarsely

to exist for the mere necessity of procreation. The words of the

Christian nuptial service expressly say so. Love, the winged god of the

immortals, became, in the Christian creed, a thrice-damned and

earth-bound devil, to be exorcised and loathed. This has been the

greatest injury that Christianity has ever done to the human race. Love,

the one supreme, unceasing source of human felicity, the one sole joy

which lifts the whole mortal existence into the empyrean, was by it

degraded into the mere mechanical action of reproduction. It cut the

wings of Eros. Man, believing that he must no longer love his mistress,

woman, believing that she must no longer love her lover, loved

themselves, and from the cloisters and from the churches there arose a

bitter, joyless, narrow, apprehensive passion which believed itself to

be religion, but was in truth only a form of concentrated egotism, the

agonised desire to be ‘saved,’ to ascend into the highest heaven, let

who else would wait without its doors or pine in hell. The influence of

this is still with the world, and will long be with it; and its echo is

still loud in the sibilant voices which hiss at the poet who sings and

the poet who glorifies love.

And herein we approach that spurious offspring of Christianity which is

called cant.

Other religions have not been without it. The Mosaic law had the

Pharisee, who for a pretence made long prayers. The Greek and the Latin

had those who made oblations to the gods for mere show, and augurs who

served the sacred altars with their tongue in their cheek. But from

Christianity, alas! has arisen and spread a systematic hypocrisy more

general, more complete, more vain, more victorious than any other. The

forms of the Christian religion facilitate this. Whether in the Catholic

form of it, which cleanses the sinner in the confessional that he may go

forth and sin again freely, or in the Protestant form, which, so long as

a man listens to sermons and kneels at sacraments, does not disturb him

as to the tenor of his private life, the Christian religion says,

practically, to all its professors: ‘Wear my livery and assemble in my

courts; I ask no more of you in return for the moral reputation which I

will give to you.’

Its lip-service and its empty rites have made it the easiest of all

tasks for the usurer to cloak his cruelties, the miser to hide his

avarice, the lawyer to condone his lies, the sinner of all social sins

to purchase the social immunity from them by outward deference to

churches.

The Christian religion, outwardly and even in intention humble, does,

without meaning it, teach man to regard himself as the most important of

all created things. Man surveys the starry heavens and hears with his

ears of the plurality of worlds; yet his religion bids him believe that

his alone out of these innumerable spheres is the object of his master’s

love and sacrifice. To save his world—whose common multitudes can be no

more in the scale of creation than the billions of insects that build up

a coral-reef beneath the deep sea—he is told that God himself took human

shape, underwent human birth, was fed with human food, and suffered

human pains. It is intelligible that, believing this, the most arrogant

self-conceit has puffed up the human crowd, and that with the most cruel

indifference they have sacrificed to themselves all the countless

suffering multitudes which they are taught to call ‘the beasts which

perish.’ It is this selfishness and self-esteem which, fostered in the

human race by Christianity, have far outweighed and overborne the

humility which its doctrines in part strove to inculcate and the mercy

which they advocated.

It is in vain that the human race is bidden to believe that its

Creator cares for the lilies of the field and for the birds of the

air: it is the human race alone for which its God has suffered and

died, so it believes, and this solitary selection, this immense

supremacy, make it semi-divine in its own sight. It is the leaven of

egotism begotten by the Christian creed which has neutralised the

purity and the influence of its teachings. Here and there saintly men

and women have been guided by it solely in the ways of holiness and

unselfishness; but the great majority of mankind has drawn from it

chiefly two lessons—self-concentration and socialism. ‘Rock of ages,

cleft for _me_,’ sighs the Christian; and this ‘immense Me’ is, as

Emerson has said of it, the centre of the universe in the belief of

the unconscious egotist.

Christians repeat like a parrot’s recitative the phrase that no sparrow

falls uncounted by its Creator, and they go to their crops and scatter

poison, or load fowling-pieces with small shot to destroy hundreds of

sparrows in a morning. If they believed that their God saw the little

birds of the air fall, would they dare to do it? Of course they would

not; but they do not believe: it only suits them to use their formula,

and they are never prevented by it from strewing bird-poison or setting

bird-traps.

Behold their priests taking on themselves the vows of poverty, of

chastity, and of renunciation, and whether they be the Catholic

cardinal, stately, luxurious and arrogant, or whether they be the

Protestant bishop, with his liveried servants, his dinner parties, and

his church patronage, what can we see more widely removed in unlikeness

from all the precepts of the creed which they profess to obey? What

fiercer polemics ever rage than those which wrangle about the body of

religion? What judge would not be thought a madman who should from the

bench counsel the man who has received a blow to bear it in meekness and

turn the other cheek? What missionary would be excused for leaving his

wife and children chargeable on parish rates because he pointed to the

injunction to leave all that he had and follow Christ?

What attempt on the part of any community to put the precepts of

Christianity into practical observance would not cause them to be

denounced to magistrates as communists, as anarchists, as moonstruck

dreamers, as lunatics? There are sects in Russia which endeavour to do

so, and the police hunt them down like wild animals. They are only

logically trying to carry out the precepts of the gospels, but they are

regarded therefore as dangerous lunatics. They can have no place in the

conventional civilisation of the world. What judge who should tell the

two litigants in any lawsuit concerning property that they were

violating every religious duty in wrangling with each other about filthy

lucre would not be deemed a fool, and worse? The French Republic, in

tearing down from its courts of law and from its class-rooms the emblems

of Christianity, has done a rough, but sincere and consistent, act, if

one offensive to a great portion of the nation; and it may be alleged

that this act is more logical than the acts of those nations who open

their tribunals with rites of reverence towards a creed with which the

whole legislature governing these tribunals is in entire and militant

contradiction. ‘Religion is one thing; law is another,’ said a lawyer

once to whom this strange discrepancy was commented on; but so long as

law is founded on assumptions and principles wholly in violence with

those of religion, how can such religion be called the religion of the

state? It is as absurd a discrepancy as that with which the Italian

nation, calling itself Catholic, drove out thousands of Catholic monks

and Catholic nuns from their religious houses and seized their

possessions by the force of the secular arm. It is not here the question

whether the suppression of the male and female monastic orders was or

was not right or necessary; what is certain is that the state, enforcing

this suppression, can with no shadow of sense or of logic continue to

call itself a Catholic state; as it still does continue to call itself

in the person of its king and in its public decrees.

How is it to be accounted for—this impotence of Christianity to affect

the policies, politics, legislation and general life of the nations

which think their salvation lies in the profession of its creed? How is

it that a religion avowedly making peace and long-suffering of injury

the corner-stone of its temple has had as its principal outcome war,

both the fanaticism of religious war and the avarice of civil war; a

legislation founded on the _lex talionis_ and inexorable in its

adherence to that law; and a commerce which all the world over is

saturated with the base desire to overreach, outwit and outstrip all

competitors?

It is chiefly due to the absolutely ‘unworkable’ character of its

injunctions; and partly due to the Jewish laws entering so largely into

the creeds of modern Christians: also it is due to the fact that even in

the purer creeds of the evangelists there is so much of egotism. ‘What

shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?’

‘His own’—that throughout is to be the chief thought of his existence

and its constant end. The greatest of the Christian martyrs were but

egotists when they were not matoïdes. Their fortitude and constancy were

already rewarded, in their belief, by every sweetness of celestial joys

and glories. It may be doubted whether they even felt the scourge, the

torch, the iron, or the rods, so intensely in their exaltation was their

nervous system strung up to ecstasy. What could the poor offer of

earthly life seem worth to those who believed that by thus losing it

they would enter at once and forever into the exquisite consciousness of

a surpassing beatitude? An intense, though innocent, selfishness was at

the root of all the martyrdoms of the early Christian Church. There was

not one amongst them which approached for unselfishness the death of

Antinous. And it is surely this egotism which is an integral part of the

Christian creed, and which has been at once its strength and its

weakness; its strength in giving it dominion over human nature, and its

weakness in allying it with baser things. The alloy has made the gold

more workable, but has destroyed its purity.

Meanwhile, although the majority of Christian nations profess the

Christian faith more or less sincerely, and give it at least the homage

of hypocrisy, all the intellectual life of the world is leaving its

folds without concealment. There is in its stead either the hard and

soulless materialism of the scientist, or the sad, vague pantheism and

pessimism of the scholar and the poet. Neither will ever suffice for the

mass of mankind in general. The purely imaginative and intellectual mind

can be content to wait before the immense unexplained enigma of life; it

accepts its mystery, and sees the marvel of it, in the changing cloud,

the blossoming weed, the wistful eyes of the beasts of burden, as much

as it sees it in humanity itself. To such a mind the calmness and

sadness of patience, and the kind of universal divinity which it finds

in nature, can suffice: and to it the complacent conceit of science over

the discovery of a new poison, or a hitherto unsuspected action of the

biliary duct in mammals, must seem as childish and as narrow as does the

belief in the creeds of the Papist, the Evangelical, or the Baptist.

This is the only mental attitude which is at once philosophic and

spiritual; but it must ever remain the privilege of the few; it can

never be the possession of the multitude. The multitude will be forever

cast into the arms of science, or of faith, either of which will alike

flatter it with the assurance that it is the chief glory of creation,

before which all the rest of creation is bound to lie subject in bonds

and pain.

It is this selfishness and self-admiration which have neutralised in man

the good which he should have gained from the simple benevolence of the

Sermon on the Mount. A religion which is founded on the desire of men to

attain eternal felicity will be naturally seductive to them, but the

keynote of its motive power can never be a lofty one. The jewelled

streets of the New Jerusalem are not more luxuriously dreamed of than

the houris of the Mohammedan paradise. Each form of celestial recompense

is anticipated as reward for devotion to a creed. And as all loyalty,

all loveliness, all virtue _pêchent par la base_ when they are founded

on the expectation of personal gain, so the Christian religion has

contained the radical defect of inciting its followers to obedience and

faithfulness by a bribe—a grand bribe truly—nothing less than eternal

life; such life as the soul of man cannot even conceive; but still a

bribe. Therefore Christianity has been powerless to enforce its own

ethics on the world in the essence of their spirit, and has been

perforce contented with hearing it recite its formulas.

What will be its future? There is no prophet of vision keen enough to

behold. The intellect of mankind is every year forsaking it more

utterly, and the ever-increasing luxury which is possible with riches,

and the ever-increasing materialism of all kinds of life into which

mechanical labour enters, are forces which every year drive the

multitudes farther and farther from its primitive tenets. In a small,

and a poor, community Christianity may be a creed possible in its

practical realisation, and consistent in its simplicity of existence;

but in the mad world of modern life, with its overwhelming wealth and

its overwhelming poverty, with its horrible satiety and its horrible

hunger, with its fiendish greed and its ghastly crimes, its endless

lusts and its cruel bitterness of hatreds, Christianity can only be one

of two things—either a nullity, as it is now in all national life, or a

dynamic force allied with and ruling through socialism, and destroying

all civilisation as it, at present, stands.

Which will it be? There is no prophet to say. But whichever it be, there

will be that in its future which, if it remain dominant, will make the

cry of the poet the sigh of Humanity:

‘Thou hast triumphed Opale Gallilean,

And the world has grown grey with Thy breath!’