'Our cities are fast losing their best characteristics,' said Pompeo
Molmenti at Montecitorio, in one of those eloquent speeches which the
Chamber hears often from him, and hears, alas! always in vain. His name
is no doubt known to many English readers although his beautiful books
are not as widely read outside the peninsula as they merit. His
conspicuous position as President of the Venetian Academy has perhaps in
a manner obscured, out of Italy, his infinite merits and vast erudition
as a writer on history and art, and even Wyzewa reproaches him with
making Venice too exclusively his universe. But surely Venice is wide
enough, and great enough, to be the world of a man penetrated from his
earliest years with her beauty, and with the grandeur of her past, and
who, in his childhood, saw, accomplished by his seniors, that union of
Venice to northern and central Italy, which raised such high hopes and
caused such glorious dreams.
His works are, as I have said, but little known in England, not known at
least as the classic scholarship, the historic learning and the artistic
erudition of their writer deserve; nor are the debates of the Italian
Chamber truthfully enough represented in the English press for the
brilliant oratory of the deputy for Salo to have found any echo in
English ears. Many-sided as great Italians usually are, politics,
literature, and history alike claim his allegiance, and art is his
adored mistress. Eloquent, dauntless, and sarcastic, his periods pierce
like arrows and lash like scourges, whether he condemns the miserable
blasphemies of the modern spirit, or holds up to mockery such individual
vanity as that of the Under-Secretary of State, who caused his own name
and titles to be cut under a verse of Dante's on one of the stones of
the church of S. Francesco at Assisi!
I can imagine nothing more painful than for a man of fine taste and high
culture, born and bred in such a city as Venice, venerating every shadow
on its waters, the moss upon its walls, to be forced to see, day by day,
roll up and break over it the mud-wave of modern barbarism. So may have
watched, from the marble atrium of his villa, some Roman patrician of
the days of Honorius the approach, upon the golden horizon, of the
unlettered tribes drawing nearer and nearer as the sun descended, to
burn, to slaughter, to deflour, to desecrate. 'Great and sublime
attainment would be his who should save Venice from the dreadful menace
now hanging over her!' cries Pompeo Molmenti, with the bitter
consciousness that none will succeed in that endeavour, since her lot is
now cast in times when her treasures of art are in the hands of
tradesmen and speculators, to whom her past glory is naught.
His years have been passed amongst her art and her disciples of art; he
has watched the spoilers at their work amongst her treasures, and, with
the grief of a son who beholds his mother dishonoured, he has been
overwhelmed in these most recent times by the indignity and injustice of
her lot.
She shares that lot with her sisters; the burden of her chains lies also
on them; every city throughout the peninsula from Monte Rosa to Mount
Etna has been insulted, dishonoured, defamed, defiled, even as she
herself. But Venice is threatened with something still more than this;
she is threatened with absolute extinction. There are schemes now
simmering in the brains of speculators by which she will disappear as
completely as one of her own fishing-boats, when it is sucked under the
sea, canvas, and timbers, and crew, in a night of storm.
A few weeks ago, Molmenti gave the solitary vote against the destruction
of more of the Calle, and the establishment of a night service of
steamers on the Canalezzo. The record of that single unsupported vote is
his own highest honour, and the shame of his contemporaries and
co-citizens. But he wrestles in vain with the forces of cupidity and
stupidity. Whether in the Council Chamber of Venice, or in the
Parliament of Montecitorio, he strives in vain to resist the trampling
hoofs of those devastating barbaric hordes which a pseudo civilisation
vomits over his country.
What he justly calls the burial of the lagoons goes on every day; loads
of clay and sand and stones being poured into that silent water which so
lately mirrored walls which were green with the hart's-tongue,
penny-wort, and ivy-leaved toad's-flax, and reflected statues white
through ages in the dustless air, shining acacia leaves, boughs of fig
and laurel, carved niches, illumined shrines; the rubble and the rubbish
are shot down into the canals which are chosen for extinction, and the
walls are scraped, the acacias, the fig-trees, the laurels are cut down,
the fruit-boat, the _sandalo_, the bridal gondola, are pushed out of the
way by the brick-laden launches; where marble fretwork crossed the air,
there is a cast-iron pontoon, and higher still a telephone wire; under
foot there is a paved or macadamised way. Marco Polo could not find his
house now; it still exists, but all around it is disfigured, dismantled,
defaced.
The Palazzo Narni and the Ponte del Paradiso made, a few years ago,
together one of the most beautiful corners in the world; go look at that
spot now; it is enough to make the grey-beard of Cadore rise from his
grave. There still remains on high, between the two houses, the
admirable cuspide of the Trecento, on which there is sculptured the
Madonna, who opens wide her mantle and her cloak to receive the kneeling
people; but the beautiful bridge has been destroyed, and in its place
has been built a frightful structure, with asphalte roadway and painted
metal parapet. In similar manner the elegant, yet bold, arches of the
three bridges at S. Nicolo di Tolentino exist nowhere, now, except upon
the canvases of painters, and the three banks, near the Campo di Marte,
which those graceful arches united, are now basely conjoined by three
erections of stucco and cast-iron.
'In the _Arzere_ of Santa Marta,' Molmenti writes in his latest
work, 'once so green and gay and sunlit, a poor quarter no
doubt, but one intensely interesting by customs and traditions,
there blocks the way now, in all its stolid vulgarity, a cotton
factory. Between the public gardens and the Lido, instead of
the lovely verdure of the island of Sant' Elena, in its grace
and its green twilight of drooped boughs, is a shapeless
expanse of mud and cinders, which spreads farther every season,
and threatens to invade the water-space which separates it from
the gardens and S. Pietro di Castello. On this desert of coke
and dirt there have been lately erected offices, sheds,
warehouses, chimneys, engines, in the midst of which there
still stands, hiding as though ashamed, the beautiful church of
the Quattro Cento. But the invasion has been useless; the
speculations have failed; and art and history mourn
unavailingly the senseless and profitless destruction of this
fairest gem of the lagoons: _insularum ocellus_. The ruin of
Sant' Elena, of the view of San Giorgio, of the bridge of San
Lio, the hideous new wing added to the noble brown marbles of
the Pal Tiepolo, the hideous iron warehouse fronting and
affronting the Ca d'Oro, the whitewash daubed on the Pal
Sagredo, the indecent alterations and additions to that jewel
of Pietro Lombardo the Pal Corner-Spinelli, the new red (like
ruddle or red ochre) with which the Pal Foscari has been
insulted, these are all offences which every traveller of
taste, every artist of culture, can see, and number, and
denounce. But countless, and unknown to the world in general,
and undreamed of by those who knew not Venice fifteen years
ago, is the enormous loss to the city by the destruction at the
hands of the Muncipal Councillors of the _Calli_, of the
_Arzere_, of the mediaeval bridges, as of those of which I have
spoken above, of innumerable nooks and corners, historical and
beautiful; old wells, old fountains, old shrines, beautiful
fragments of sculpture and fresco, solemn convent walls,
graceful church spires and monastic belfries, parapets, arches,
doorways, spiral staircases winding up to hand-forged iron
balconies, lamps of metal-work fine as lace-work, all these in
innumerable numbers have been effaced, pulled down, built over,
or sold; and, above all, there have been destroyed those lovely
quiet green places, called each _il Campo_ or _il Campiello_
(the field or the little field), where, of old, the Venetians
fed their sheep, stretches of grass enclosed by old houses, old
convents, old towers, old quays, old bridges, with always a
sculptured well in the centre of each, and the splash of oars
near at hand.'
These have nearly all had a similar fate to that of the beautiful house
in the Campo di S. Margherita, which Molmenti especially laments, of
which the Venetian colouring, the carven galleries, the climbing vines,
the bronze railing, the falling water with its spouting jets, have all
disappeared, to give place to a yellow, plastered modern building, while
its basso-relievo of the Virgin, so long dear to all artists, has been
sold to a picture dealer.
'One must be blind indeed,' writes Molmenti, 'not to see the
horrible misgovernment of Venice in this latter half of the
century, and persons still young can remember a Venice poetic,
picturesque, filled with fascination and mysterious charm, now
destroyed for no other reason than a senseless and brutal craze
for novelty.'
What language can strongly enough denounce such wicked and insensate
acts?
He quotes the well-known lines of Philippe de Commines as to the 'most
triumphant city' that he had ever seen, 'the most beautiful street' (the
Canal Grande) 'that there could be found in all the world'; and he adds,
'the stranger who comes now into this street only finds himself in a
vast alley of shopkeepers.'
The Canalezzo is now, indeed, as he says, little more than a huge bazaar
of tradesmen and dealers in curios, in which hundreds of advertisements,
in many-coloured posters, announce the wares which are now for sale
within the ancient palaces. The syndicate of foreign traders, now being
established in Venice, will achieve its degradation.
Italian ministers and Italian municipalities are often accused of not
encouraging warmly enough English, German, and American tradesmen and
manufacturers to establish themselves in Italy, and of putting upon
foreign commercial establishments in Italy a prohibitive taxation; the
truth is that it would be much better were such foreign firms
discouraged more effectively. It is urged on their behalf that they
bring capital into the country; they may do so, but only to take it out
again for their own profit, and Italian labour sweats and groans only
that some millionaire of Eaton Square or Fifth Avenue may increase his
wealth, whilst at the same time Italian tradespeople, trading in their
own right, on their own soil, are undersold by the shop-keeping and
store-keeping Briton and Yankee.
I am far from entire agreement with Molmenti in many of his views (as
for instance his admiration of English pre-Raphaelism), but I am wholly
with him in his views of the claims of Venice, and of the sacrilege
which is destroying her; wholly with him in his severe and scornful
denunciation of what he rightly calls the _gretta e meschina arte dei
nostre tempi_ (the mean and trivial art of modern times), and of the
modern density of perception and invulnerable self-conceit which render
it impossible for the modern mind to appreciate harmony of hues and of
proportions, and impossible for the modern architect to place a new
building beside an ancient one without injury or vulgarity. Giotto could
place his church at Padua on the remains of the Roman amphitheatre, with
perfect unity, although in absolute contrast. When a modern mind has
sufficient intuition to enable it to admire a work of other times, it
can think of no better way of showing its admiration than to desire to
pull down all the houses in its vicinity to lay it bare.
Molmenti says, with entire truth, 'It is a supreme duty for the few, who
are capable of feeling them, to assert the sentiment of, and respect
for, Art against the destructive and impious tendencies of the time.'
But, alas! it is labour of Sisyphus.
There is now under consideration a scheme to make a tramway-road raised
on piles from Mestre to Venice parallel with the line now followed
across the lagoon by the railway. It is difficult to comprehend the
motives and views of persons who desire to turn a beautiful water-city
into a commonplace land one, or rather it is easy to perceive that the
motive inspires the views, since nothing but the greed of
concessionaires and of contractors could ever have evolved such a plan
out of any human mind.
The concessionaire and the contractor are the modern representatives of
ghouls and vampires of old-world romance. Truly, to them, as to the
Sabreur of Offenbach, nothing is sacred. They are guided entirely by
their lust of percentage, and to this they are ready to sacrifice every
other consideration; indeed, no other consideration exists for them.
They have settled on Italy for many years past as they are now settling
on Abyssinia. Venice is essentially a water-city; dealt with as land
cities are, under the present system, it will not only be disfigured and
mutilated like them, but it will be swept away; it will cease to be. The
world will have in its stead a dreary, dingy, trading port, with
warehouses, factories, docks, grain elevators, electric works, all the
polluted, crowded, discoloured, monotonous frightfulness which you can
have now at any moment on any coastline of the United States of America.
The Venice of Giambellini and the Veronese will be no more; you will
have in its stead a petty maritime Pittsburg.
At the present moment Molmenti has successfully combated this Mestre
project, but as the abominable scheme of the night steamers on the
Canalezzo, and the pontoon under S. Zeno, was almost unanimously
_rejected_ four times by the Venetian Council, yet, on its presentation
a fifth time, was _accepted_ (unacknowledged influences having been at
work), it is impossible to all those who love Venice as she merits not
to feel the greatest anxiety. For these speculators resemble the Roentgen
rays, and find means to penetrate through closed doors and all other
barriers. Iron still resists the Roentgen rays, and such iron the
speculators find now and then opposed to them in the scorn of such men
as the Count Antonio Dona della Rosa, who dismissed with offence and
disdain the offer of two millions in gold for the purchase of the
historic tapestries of his palace in Venice.
Were there only fifty such men as Count Dona in every Italian province
they would be able to hold in check the rage of destruction. But the
character of Count Dona is very rare in these days anywhere, and grows
rarer with every decade. The sordid Mephistopheles of a buyer usually
finds as sordid a temper in the Faust of a seller whom he tempts. This
may be a temper which enriches individuals; it is not one which ennobles
or elevates a nation: and frequently not even individual wealth is
realised for any length of time by the base barter, for the gambling on
the Bourse, or at the club-house, often makes the ill-got gains vanish
almost as soon as they are obtained. Such persons as find no attraction
in either form of gambling, unhappily for the most part, shrink from
action and from public life. Few have the courage of Molmenti, who
throws himself into the strife careless of what enmity he incurs, and
rarely even buoyed up by any hope of success in his efforts, since to
weave ropes of sand were scarcely more hopeless labour: it is impossible
to succeed in any public work where there is no response to your appeal
from the multitudes. And the voices of those who do secretly respond in
feeling are dumb in Italy; people are afraid to speak; they are
intimidated by the cry cast against them of want of energy, and of
enmity to progress (progress, good heavens! a gin-shop instead of a
temple!); they are afraid to be called reactionary, romantic,
unpatriotic; and in municipal government, as in other government,
everything is done by the wire-pullers, the money-grubbers, the
speculators.
The timid public huddles together, mute, submissive, and afraid, shorn
of its fleeces like a flock of sheep, but not daring to complain.
Those who do so dare are either ignored, or, if they give trouble, are
repressed. The gondoliers of Venice have again and again risen against
the ruin of their livelihood by the 'black devils' of the _vaporetti_,
but force is at once called in and they are brutally silenced, flung
into prison, and deprived of their licence, _i.e._, of their daily
bread. Because it is so picturesque a calling, and the balancing of the
oar looks so easy a work, those who are outside it do not realise the
hardships of a gondolier. In summer, if Venice be full, it is well
enough, and brings a fair, though never a high, wage; but in the other
seasons it is a life of great and continual exposure and fatigue. In
cold weather, and Venice is intensely cold in the winter solstice, the
long vigils on the _traghetto_ are most tedious and trying, especially
through the long chill nights. When the icy winds blow in from the Alps
or the Adriatic, the gondolier stands exposed to all their fury, whilst
the passenger he carries sits warm and sheltered under the felze.
Strong and lithe in form, often handsome in feature, almost invariably
intelligent and acquainted with legend and verse, invariably courteous
and well-bred, the gondolier should have received the utmost attention
from his rulers. It is painful to know that no body of men has ever been
so slighted, so injured, and so wantonly outraged.
There is nowhere any more interesting and deserving community than the
Venetian gondoliers, and few more worthy of regard; yet they have been
dealt with as though they were no more than so much scum of the sea.
Their long-established rights receive no consideration, and their
injuries no compensation.
If the vote of Venice could have been honestly polled, no steam-boat
would ever have been allowed on the Grand Canal, as, if the vote of
Florence could have been honestly polled, the centre of Florence would
be now standing untouched, and would have remained untouched for many a
generation.
Meanwhile, it is said, by those competent to judge, that the great
Murazzi, which protect Venice from the onslaught of the sea in winter
storm, and which we all know so well as we pass out from the Lido by the
Bar of Malamocco to Chioggia, are being dangerously undermined by the
attacks of the high tides in rude weather, and require costly and
immediate repair. It is in vain that this most necessary work is urged
upon the Government in Rome. The Government neither undertakes it
itself, nor allows Venetians to undertake it. For any foolish, needless
disfiguring work, such as the installation of the electric light in the
ducal palace, against which Venetians in vain protested, the Government
is always ready to waste millions. But for a work of obvious and vital
necessity, such as that of the strengthening of the Murazzi, it has not
a soldo to spare.
The architecture of Venice has the fragility as it has the fairness of
the dianthus or the gemmia of the sea; its walls and buttresses and
foundations are plunged into salted, sanded mud; its piles grow green
and brown and purple with weed; its snowy marbles and its ruddy stones
are mirrored in rippling or in stagnant water; they tremble under the
vibrations caused by the accursed paddle-boats; they quiver, like living
things, under the knife, as the engines roar and the cog-wheels turn.
Assailed as the city is within by the invasion of steam and barbarism,
it is entirely certain that she could not resist the force of the
inrushing waters if the Murazzi were ever to yield to the pressure of a
winter sea; and it is unhappily quite possible that the gigantic barrier
of the sea-walls may give way on some day of unusually high tides and
violent tempest, and the city herself will then be overwhelmed beneath
the Adriatic waters.
Who would care if this were her fate?
The contractors, and concessionaires, and jerry-builders, and
bureaucratic thieves, and foreign speculators would have the pleasure
and profit of building a spick and span new town, north-east of Mestre:
all tiresome reminiscences of the Lion of St Mark would have sunk with
the bronze horses underneath the waves.
Many public men would breathe more freely were Venice but a memory of
the past entombed in seaweed and in sand. For there is nothing so
curiously malignant or so restlessly jealous as the enmity of a feeble
Present of a great Past. It is such malignity, it is such jealousy,
which, even more than greed of gain, and vitiated taste, caused, and
causes, and will cause, the destruction of the great cities of Italy by
Italian deputies, syndics, and municipalities, and by those foreign
companies and alien speculations to which they unhappily open their
gates.
If the fact did not face us at every step, it would seem incredible
that, even in this age, such cities as Venice and Florence and Rome
could have been sacrificed to the ignominious interests of wire-pullers.
Each possessed, to protect it, unique beauty, splendour of association
and tradition, an heroic past: and for each had the greatest of men
laboured, in each had the charm of atmosphere and horizon lent a more
than mortal loveliness to the architecture of man. And each is now
wrecked, and ransacked, and despoiled, and obliterated, and destroyed as
though a horde of savages had been let loose in their precincts.
There is no language strong enough to condemn the injuries from which
they suffer.
On the walls of the Flavian Amphitheatre there grew in marvellous
fertility countless plants unknown elsewhere; survivors of sylvan worlds
destroyed, of botanical kingdoms for ever perished, the seeds of which
perchance had lodged in the sandals of the legions as they came from
Palmyra or Babylon; this most precious legacy of nature was, as everyone
knows, mercilessily destroyed in the first years of the Italian
occupation of Rome.
The uprooting with knives and acids of the unique flora of the Colosseum
was a type of the acts which, for the last fifteen years, have hacked
away and corroded and destroyed off the face of the earth the supreme
flowers of human genius.
In the present debasement and desecration of Italian cities there is not
even such motive and excuse as that which was urged by archaeologists
for the ruin of these plants. There is everything lost, nothing whatever
gained, in the debasement of classic and artistic cities to the level of
Buluwayo or Klondyke.
To pull down the Palazzo Venezia and the Palazzo Torlonia, which it is
decided to do in Rome, in order that the statue of Victor Emmanuel, for
which the funds have not even yet been raised, may be visible from the
Corso, is as contemptible as it is childish. The beauty of the
Campidoglio is already ruined in order to place that statue there: might
not that suffice? To throw down the Tower of the Amadei to put in its
place a restaurant, or a drinking-shop, is so stupid an act that the
enormity of the offence to history and art is almost forgotten in its
imbecility. To cut off a portion of the Archbishop's Palace to widen a
road, and destroy half the gardens of the Orti Oricellari to make a mean
street, and to place the stations and rails of tramway companies on the
macigno pavement under the Campanile, the Battistero, and the Duomo of
Florence, are outrages to the whole educated world and the history of
five centuries. To destroy the Ponte del Paradiso in order to put a
cast-iron pontoon in its place, is an abomination which should only seem
possible to a company of clowns crazy with drink; whilst to turn the
lovely isle of Sant' Elena into a heap of cinders for the pleasure of a
carriage-building company, which company was not even guaranteed from
bankruptcy, was unquestionably as unbusinesslike and as unprofitable as
it was impious.
There is neither common sense, nor common decency, in the chief part of
the measures taken within the last decade to humiliate and imbastardise
the cities and towns of Italy. The process of destruction began indeed
much earlier; but within the last ten years the pace has been increased
from a leisurely walk to a furious gallop. The scramble to be first to
outrage, to deface, to despoil, has become a St Vitus's dance amongst
the syndics, assessors, and councilmen; each deliriously eager for the
approving smile of the various ministers in whose hands the destinies of
these great and unrivalled Urbes unfortunately are placed.
It must be remembered by the foreign reader that there is no Minister of
Fine Arts in Italy. There is a Minister of Education, another of Public
Works, and another of Agriculture, and between these three all
questions of art and architecture are divided, and are decided in
agreement with the various municipalities. The mischief the trio does is
incalculable, for they are seldom selected with any regard to their
aesthetic qualifications. Indeed, if ever anyone of them show any
scholarly capacity and aptitude for his office, like that which was
shown by Villari, his possession of power is very short. Of a recent
minister of agriculture it is related that, as he looked over a valley
planted with magnificent olives near Brescia, he exclaimed, 'What fine
willows!'
A similar ignorance in matters belonging to their respective departments
is expected of the Ministers of Education and Public Works. Were there a
Minister of Fine Arts, he would undoubtedly be chosen from the
attorneys, the manufacturers, the scientists, or the rural Boeotians.
Another minister of agriculture, Count Francesco Guicciardini, had an
admirable and thorough command of the objects of his Dicastero; skilled
in agriculture himself, and the owner of large estates, he knew what to
do and how to do it; and by his energy an outbreak of phylloxera was
arrested before any great losses had ensued. But outside agriculture,
his influence was less excellent, because he was unfortunately enabled
to meddle with matters not agricultural and beyond his knowledge; as
when he ordered the destruction of a whole quarter of the martial and
ancient city of Pistoia, and the waste of the town funds in the erection
of a new savings bank. Over the choice of a design for this building,
the townspeople of Pistoia are now violently quarrelling, whilst many
of their finest and noblest palaces are left to go empty to decay!
A minister of the strictest probity, of the strongest desire to do what
is just and wise, is never long able to resist the pressure of those
around him, the force of example, the persuasions of local magnates, and
the insistence of the crowd of hungry perquisite-hunters. It is such
shocking and wicked waste of money as was this in Pistoia which
impoverishes every town, and disfigures each with vulgar piles of brick
and iron, and grotesque monuments of black metal, whilst a miserable
woman at their gates pays four centimes duty on a pint of milk before
she can take it past the guards to sell, and a wretched man, who owns a
little road-fed flock of goats, is taxed two hundred francs a year
before he may drive them into the streets to yield the little
nourishment which they can afford to invalids and children. Should the
law now under consideration pass, and the debts of the Communes be paid
by the State, and monies be henceforth lent lavishly by the State to the
Communes, this expenditure will increase tenfold, and the jobbery
accompanying it will be multiplied in similar measure.
No one of the governing classes is guiltless in the matter; cabinets,
senators, deputies, prefects, mayors, town councils, provincial
councils, each and all, sin alike in this matricide, and seem to vie
with each other in suggesting and executing the abominable projects
which disgrace the close of the century.
In this day, in everything appertaining to municipal government, the
greater is sacrificed to the lesser; the smug, the ordinary, the
expedient, the venal are first of all considered; the kind of man who
pushes to the front in affairs is bustling, sharp, keen, insensible, in
whose own existence no necessity for anything except vulgar prosperity,
as ugly as you will, is felt for an hour. To speak to such men of such
impersonal desires as moved the makers of the great cities of old, is to
speak in an unknown tongue, which they appraise as gibberish. They are,
for the present time, the rulers of the world, and the material they are
made of is the same clay, whether its shape take that of an emperor or a
contractor, of a king or a beadle, of a minister or a vestryman. At the
present hour the earth is given over to them.
Wyzewa accepts this insatiable mania for destruction as a
characteristic, which of course it undoubtedly is, of the general
disease of modernity; but he does not seem to trace it to what is surely
its source, the greed of gain. All these engineers, builders,
contractors, town councillors, bankers, usurers, speculators, chairmen,
shareholders, and directors of companies, can make nothing out of the
ancient glory and grace of beautiful cities; the mayors can get no
savoury morsel to compensate them for all their servility and
time-serving; the deputies can find no useful plunder to enrich the crew
who have voted for them; in respecting the beauty of the past,
syndicates and tradesmen and gamblers on 'Change would reap no harvest
of gold whatever.
What else but greed has been the motive of that shameless desecration of
Rome against which Geoffroy has raised his voice from the tomb to
protest?
What else but greed the motive of that infamous destruction of the
entire centre of Florence, its historic towers and churches and palaces,
torn down with blind rage to be replaced by hideous hotels, and monster
shops, and grotesque monuments? the most piteous, and the most
inexcusable, injury ever done to the rights of history and of art.
What else the motive of that wanton disfigurement of Venice which has
disgraced the last fifteen years of the municipal rule, and is about to
continue the work of ruin merely to enrich the men of greed, the English
and American tradesmen, the Hebrew speculators, the German hucksters,
the cosmopolitan inflators of bubble companies?
The motive of all these destructions is always the same, and always of
the lowest kind: gain. Everyone concerned in them gains, or hopes to
gain. There is no other instinct or idea than this. It is, like the
present diplomacy of Europe, an all-round game of grab; and a large
percentage of the gains goes to the doctors who label the gambling
'Hygiene.'
The plea of health is a falsehood usually advanced in excuse of such
destructions as those of the Florentine centre and the Venetian Calli
and Campielli. Those who allege it know, as well as I do, that the
unhealthiness lies not in the habitations but in the habits of the
people. Water never touches their bodies; tight-lacing is a female rule
in even the peasant class; the field-worker is as tightly cased in her
leather stays as the duchess in her satin corset. The favourite foods of
the populace are such as give worms, dysentery, and skin diseases; their
drinks are adulterated and poisonous;[15] their general habits are
unwholesome and injurious beyond all description; they are saved only by
the purity of the air which the municipalities, who chatter of hygiene,
do their best to pollute with acid and chemical fumes, and the stench of
noxious trades.
[Footnote 15: Contadini drink the _vinaccia_, or _vinella_, made from
the dregs of the wine-vats; but others drink (and often the contadino
does so also) the chemical stuffs sold at drinking-houses and taverns
with which the streets and roads are studded.]
The men who prate of hygiene know these facts as well as I do; they
know, I repeat, that the insalubrity is in the habits, not in the
habitations; but the conventional lie passes muster and serves its end:
it enables landlords to sell, and lawyers to pocket fees, and
contractors to make profits, and all the troops of middlemen to fatten
on the demolition of noble and ancient places and the creation of shoddy
stucco architecture in their stead.
The sense of beauty has died with the public destruction of beauty: it
is dead in the ruling classes; and what is far worse, dead in the
populace; dead, or nearly so, in the writers, the painters, the
sculptors. If in this latter class there were any strong, true, and
delicate instinct of what is noble and beautiful, Molmenti would not
stand alone in the Council of Venice; Prince Corsini would not alone
have resisted the destruction of the Florence of the Renaissance;
D'Annunzio would not alone repeat the denunciations of two dead
foreigners, Geoffroy and Gregorovius, of the violation of ancient and of
mediaeval Rome. The voices of the artists (were they artists in feeling
indeed) would be, and would have been, so powerful that no ministry and
no municipality would have ventured to ignore them.
But most modern artists are afraid to offend their public, their
patrons, the town councils, the mayors, and communes, or the Ministers
of Education or of Public Works, to which or to whom they look for
employment; they have the decoration-hunger, which is one of the chief
curses of Continental Europe, and decorations only come from the powers
above; and in these powers above there is not the faintest glimmer of
taste or feeling, there is only jealousy of a great and unapproachable
Past.
Therefore, the few who do feel indignation do not speak; and the
speculator, the jerry builder, the cunning lawyer and conveyancer, the
vast body of greedy and gross spoilers, have their way unchecked.
In the case of Rome, of course, that cruellest and ugliest of all
passions, religious antagonism, has had much to do with the atrocious
ruin of the Prati del Castello, of the Trastevere generally, of the
passage of the four trams in derision in face of St Peter's, of the
hideous gimcrack houses built under the walls of the Lateran, of the
destruction of street shrines and votive chapels and ancient chapels, of
the erection of the entire quarters of what is called New Rome;[16] but
religious hatred cannot be the cause of the barbarous scraping and
daubing of classic buildings, of the degradation of the Via Nomentana,
and of Porta Pia, of the ruin of such glory and grace as that of the
Ludovisi and the Farnesina villas, of the bedaubing and beplastering,
the dwarfing and disfiguring, the vulgarising and disfiguring of
everything which is touched by the modern aediles of Rome. No matter what
the syndic be called, whether Ruspoli or Guiccioli, or Torlonia, or
Colonna, no matter whether the cabinet be headed by Rudini or Giolitti,
by Crispi or Pelloux, the pickaxe is never at rest, and the hammer and
hatchet sound ceaselessly in street and garden, on desecrated altars,
and in devastated groves.
[Footnote 16: It is now almost forgotten that the Ludovisi gardens ever
existed as the motley fashion of the new Roman world flocks to the
American Legation in the Pal. Piombino!]
To what end have served the fury and haste with which ancient
ecclesiastical buildings have been razed to the ground in both the
cities and the provinces? To none whatever, so far as any diminution of
the funds and the numbers of ecclesiastical foundations can be counted.
The suppression of the monasteries and convents was actuated by love of
gain as much as by polemical rancour, by the hunger of the newly-created
kingdom, for their treasures and riches, for their rich endowments and
saleable possessions. There was no sincerity about it; there could be
none in a nation then almost entirely Catholic; and this insincerity is
proved by the indifference with which the State allows the
re-establishment of these buildings and these orders. At this moment the
bare-footed Carmelites, a most bigoted order, have lately opened a new
church and convent in Milan, which are endowed with three millions of
money, and have been opened with great pomp by the Archbishop. Similar
institutions are being re-created in all directions, possessing all the
evils of those which were suppressed, without their artistic beauty, and
largely without their good faith and munificent charity. Rich and lovely
maidens continue to take the veil when too young to have any realisation
of what they do,[17] and the Church is as enriched as of old by their
dowers; whilst the monk is not the less dangerous to intellectual
liberty because, when he goes out of the gates for a few hours, he wears
a coat and trousers like those of the layman of the adjacent town.
[Footnote 17: A few months ago the Prime Minister, then the Marquis di
Rudini, was present at the taking of the veil by a young relative in
Naples.]
The ancient monasteries and convents were at least an education to the
eye: who could daily see the Certosa of Pavia, or of the Val d'Ema, and
not be purified and instructed in visual memory and artistic instinct?
The new revivals of the old orders teach nothing except a base and
strictly modern union of superstition and compromise. Indeed, the State
forces the priest to be base; it makes it the condition of allowing his
existence. If he do not succumb to the State in all things (even in
those most opposed to his conscience), he is deprived of his _placet_;
and Zanardelli has in these last few days desired to deprive him of it
without such legal forms as have hitherto been observed. For one of the
greatest of the misfortunes of Italy is that, not in the Radicals nor in
the Conservatives, nor in any one of the groups into which political
life is divided, is there the slightest trace of any respect for
individual freedom; liberty of action and of opinion obtain no fair
play whatever from any one of the parties of the State.
True, it is not in Italy alone that the sense of symmetry and harmony is
leaving the terrestial race; the want of beauty, as the daily bread of
life, grows less and less felt every year by the modern mind wherever
that mind has been unhinged by the manias of modernity. Beauty, natural
and artistic, has become entirely indifferent to the majority of even
highly-educated modern men and women. They have no leisure to
contemplate it, no temperament capable of feeling it; it is in no sense
necessary to them; it makes no impression either on their retina or
their memory. Their lives pass before a revolving panorama, so rapidly
dissolving and changing that they have no distinct impression of any of
the scenes or subjects. Every year modern habits become more unlovely,
and modern sensibilities more blunted. The preservation of what is
beautiful, _per se_, at the present time is almost always ridiculed,
unless it can be shown to be joined to some profit or utility. The
characteristic passion of the hour is greed; greed of possession, desire
of acquisition, and passion for ostentation. Trade has become an octopus
embracing the whole world; the thirst for gain engrosses all classes;
beauty, unless it be a means of gain, is to this temper a useless, or
worse than a useless, thing: it is regarded as a stumbling-block and
encumbrance.
It is doubtful if even the power of perceiving what is beautiful has not
in a great measure left a large part of the population in all countries.
Modern cities would not be what they are now had not the race to a
great extent grown colour-blind, and become without the sense of
proportion. Modern builders and modern engineers would remain unoccupied
were not the generations, which employ and enrich them, destitute of all
artistic feelings.
Many of the prevailing fashions would be so intolerable to persons with
any delicate or accurate perception, that such fashions could never have
become general had any perception of this kind been general. Even the
deformity of their bodies awakens no aversion in the modern public; if
it did, the bicycle would never have been in demand.
Such blindness and deadness to the charm of beauty is to be noted in
every nation, and is developed even in the extreme East whenever modern
European and American usage influences the Oriental.
Japan is rapidly becoming the rival in vulgarity and hideousness of
Chicago.
It is no doubt general and inevitable, the low tone of susceptibility,
the dense, thick-skinned temper, which accompany what is called
Civilisation, which are to be seen everywhere from cold to warm
latitudes, wherever the steam-engine screams and the shoddy suits are
worn.
The modern temper is something even worse than inartistic; it is
brutally and aggressively hostile to beauty, whether natural or
architectural. It will go out of the way to injure, to deface, to
uproot, to level with the dust.
To the cold, bald, hard, derisive temper of the modern majority there is
something offensive and irritating in beauty, whether it be seen in the
stately verdure of a tree in its summer glory, or of an ancient
tower,[18] brown and grey in the light of evening. To fell the tree, to
pull down the tower, is the first instinct of the modern mind, and it is
an instinct clamorous, savage, insatiable, born of incapacity and
triviality, of the hunger for destruction, and of a secret and ignoble
jealousy.
[Footnote 18: The other day I saw from a railway train a grand old
Longobardo tower which had been coloured a bright pink!]
There can, I think, be no doubt that modern education implants and
increases this insensibility. If it did not, modern municipalities would
not be what they are, would not do what they do. The only resistance to
this insensibility is found, and this but rarely, at the two extremes of
the social scale--the peasant and the noble, _i.e._, in those who are
least subjected to the pressure of general education. In the man,
absolutely uneducated, and in the man reared by an individual and
highly-cultured education, are alone now to be found any appreciation of
beauty, natural or artistic.
A French writer, with no pity for the lovers of teas and porcelains, has
said recently that he looks forward with joy to the time when the whole
empire of China will be covered with factories and mines as thickly as
blades of grass grow in a meadow. Most modern persons have no higher
ideal than his. In similar phrase, Ferrero, whose political writings I
have often cited with approval, and whose striking abilities I greatly
admire, but with whose narrow socialist temper I have no sympathy,
actually states that the plain of Lombardy was created by nature to be
studded with factory chimneys!
Even into remote mountain towns, and in small forgotten cities, on the
edge of lonely lakes, or deep-sunk in chestnut woods, or ilex-forests,
the same desecration creeps, and sullies, and pollutes. Gimcrack, gaudy
villas, and pasteboard houses, show their pert and paltry forms amidst
noble palaces, or beside patrician towers. Pistachio green paint makes
day hideous everywhere, daubed on deal shutters and blinds, accompanied
by the paltry stained doors, and the stucco mouldings, of the epoch. The
modern municipality displays its whitewashed and belettered frontage,
unashamed, on some grand old piazza, which has seen centuries of strife
and splendour. Silent sunlit bays of Tyrrhene or Adriatic, lovely as a
poem of Shelley, are made vulgar and ludicrous by lines of habitations
such as the jerry-builder of the end of the nineteenth century
procreates, wearing an air of smug imbecility which makes one long to
slap their stucco faces; of course the drinking-shop, the
cycling-casino, and the shooters' club have been run up beside them so
that their patrons and frequenters may befoul the roseate evening, and
insult the ethereal night.
Moreover, it is strange to note how, with the vulgarisation of the towns
and of the landscapes in this classic land, the human physiognomy loses
its classic unity and grace, grows heavier, coarser, meaner, commoner,
changes indeed entirely its type and colouring; the camus or the snub
nose replaces the aquiline, the scrofulous mouth replaces the lips
shaped like a Cupid's bow; the eyes diminish in size and grow
lack-lustre; the beautiful oval outline of cheek and chin alters to the
bull-dog jaw and puffy cheeks; the clear and pure skin alters to the
sodden, pallid, unwholesome complexion of the new type. This is no
exaggerated statement; anyone can see the change for himself who will
take the trouble to observe such young Italians as throng the
second-rate and the third-rate _cafes_ and dining-saloons of cities, and
then go into the more remote country, and see the Italiote race still in
its integrity, in old-world hamlets of the Abruzzi or the Apennines, in
forest-sheltered nooks of the Sabine or the Carrara mountains, in
sea-faring, wind-swept villages of the Veneto, in nomad sheep-folds on
the oak-studded grass plains of the Basilicata, or in old walled towns,
calm and venerable, in the lap of the high hills, where the shriek of
the engine has not yet been heard; where it is still unknown, that which
Loti calls in his latest work, 'cette chose de laid, de noiratre, de
tapageur, d'idiotement empressee, qui passe vite vite, ebranle la terre,
trouble ce calme delicieux par des sifflets et des bruits de ferailles,
le chemin de fer, le chemin de fer!--plus nivelant que le temps,
propageant la basse camelote de l'industrie, deversant chaque jour de la
banalite et des imbeciles.'
In the provinces he will still find, in thousands of living creatures,
the youths of Luca Signorelli, the knights of Giorgione and Carpaccio,
the young gods of Paolo Veronese, the noble grey-beards of Tiziano, the
stately women of Michelangiolo, the enchanting children of Raffaelle,
and Correggio. But in the towns, and in the country where it receives
the moral and physical miasma of the towns, he will find little else but
the debased modern type, with its snigger of conceit, its cynical grin,
its criminal's jaw, its cutaneous eruptions, its dull and insolent eyes,
its stunted growth, and its breath foul with nicotine and chemical
drinks, such as the modern schools, and the modern scientists, and the
modern dram-shops have made it.
Commerce, from being beneficent, is fast becoming a curse. It usurps and
absorbs all place and all energy. Its objects are allowed to push out of
existence all higher aims; armies and navies exist only to protect it;
and an English Premier was not ashamed at a Lord Mayor's banquet to
declare that this was their unique aim: to conquer fresh fields for
trading, and protect the trader in his invasion of the rights of others.
His Secretary of State for the Colonies and his Chancellor of the
Exchequer have, still more recently, repeated after him this singularly
ignoble view of a nation's duty, and of a soldier's and sailor's
obligation.
The Secretary of the Colonies, indeed, rising to unwonted enthusiasm,
added that all the greatness of Great Britain lies in its commerce. No
doubt this may be a fact; but it is not an ennobling fact; and it is one
which is the parent of gross sins, and the enemy of high ideals; in the
name of commerce, murder, theft, and torture are all legalised, and the
most brutal egotism deified; it can be at best only a material greatness
which is thus consolidated.
To measure the virtue of a nation by its commerce alone is like
measuring the virtue of a man solely by the amount of his income. This
manner of estimation is one common in the world, but it can never be
considered a high standard. However, this excuse of the prior and
dominant claims of commerce which may be put forward in the case of
Great Britain for the sacrifice to it of all other interests cannot be
alleged by Italy except in some districts of the north. What requires
protection in five-sixths of Italy, and only suffers extinction through
fiscal pressure, is small commerce: personal arts, crafts, and trades,
which flourished so happily in past times, and would still live in fair
peace and comfort were they not stoned out of existence by a merciless
taxation, direct and indirect. These neither disfigure nor offend the
beautiful and venerable little towns in which they dwell; the smith has
his anvil under a Lombard arch, the apothecary keeps his ointments and
simples in old majolica vases, the barber's pole slants under a shrine
of the Renascence, the cloth-seller piles his bales against the
sculpture of a Seicento wall, the seedsman's sacks show the shining
berries in their gaping mouths behind the iron scroll-work of mediaeval
kneeling-windows. It is not they who have hurt their birthplaces. It is
the English syndicate, the Jew syndicate, the German money-changer, the
American tram-contractor, the foreign electric company, the foreign
co-operative store-keeper, who have no end but their own gain, and who
tempt to shameful acts those native to the soil, in whose hands lie the
fate of these historic, and late happy, places.
Ferrero has, concerning this, a true and touching passage which is much
worthier of him than his views regarding Lombardy and the factories. He
says, in a recent able article on the 'Miseria e Richezza in Italia':--
'The tendencies of new commercial life, in its immense
enterprises, is to send money and movement into a very few
amongst the cities of Italy, the others live content with their
small traffic and trade; though trembling when the fleet
well-springs of their small fortunes are menaced or run dry.
Many of these towns were in other days rich, and still preserve
the evidences of their splendid past in sumptuous palaces,
spacious squares, monumental churches; a sense of venerable
years, of profound repose lie on them; yet a sad and cruel
tragedy often passes between these walls; beneath the
magnificent palaces of the Renascence and the beautiful
mediaeval Lombard churches, the populace perishes slowly of
hunger. The small ancient industries disappear, crushed out by
the victorious rivalry of the great tradesmen of the north. The
ruin of these small industries and of these individual crafts
began some decades ago; but it was much less cruelly felt then
than it is now, and the sole recourse or solace now left to it
is in revolt. A revolt to which the Government only replies by
fixed bayonets, and a duty on corn, which is a crime.'
Ferrero, as a political economist is bound to do, considers that no
means should be taken to artificially sustain ancient methods of work
and trade, but he says with entire truth that to artificially depress
and deplete them is on the part of the State an abominable act. To wear
out the temper and patience of the populace with harassing edicts; to
drive to desperation those who are cheerful and contented in an honestly
supported poverty; to starve them by artificially raised food-prices,
and by gate-taxes, which ruin the small trader, the modest householder,
and the rural vendor alike; to render it, by a monstrous taxation,
impossible for small industries to exist; to levy income-tax
(_focatico_) on the poorest labourer--this is the terrible error, the
inexcusable cruelty, of which the actual, and every preceding, Italian
Cabinet is, and has been, guilty. If there be revolution in the air, who
can wonder? The granaries are guarded by battalions, whilst millions are
thrown away on bad statues to Savoy princes. These are facts which it is
not necessary for a man to know his A B C to read. But they are the
primer which is daily placed before the eyes of the many various peoples
of Italy from the Col de Tenda to Cape Sorano; and these peoples are of
rare intelligence even where wholly illiterate: often, indeed, most
intelligent where most illiterate.
There were, not many years ago, a great measure of mirth and contentment
in all the minor cities of Italy, and in the small towns and the big
walled villages; much harmless merry-making and pastime, much simple and
neighbourly pleasure, much enjoyment of that 'ben' di Dio,' the blessed
air and sunshine. Most of it has been killed now; starved out,
strangled by regulations and penalties and imposts, and a fiendish
fiscal tyranny; dead like the poor slaughtered forgotten conscripts in
Africa.
But this opens out a political question, and it is not of politics that
these pages treat, but of art and its outrage: above all, of such
outrage in Venice; since the President of her Academy did me, of late,
the honour to say to me, 'Non puo Lei far nulla per salvare la nostra
povera Venezia?' Alas! how powerless are all our forces against the
ever-rising tide of modern barbarism!
A precious intaglio of exquisite workmanship is being broken up and
pulverised under our eyes; and no one cares.
I know a wide plain, intersected by many streams, and lying full in the
light of the west; these streams are filled from August to October with
millions of white water-lilies.
Nothing more beautiful can be beheld than these countless water-courses
covered with these cups of snow, which share the clear, slowly-rippling
streams only with the water-wagtail and the sedge-warbler, the bullrush,
and the flag. They resemble exactly the river on which the Virgine delle
Rocce drift with their brothers and Claudio. But the peasants push their
black, flat-bottomed boats recklessly amongst the silver goblets of the
flowers, crashing into them and breaking them with brutal indifference,
and raking them into heaps in their boats, to be cast up on to the
oozing banks to rot and serve as land manure; the boorish insensibility
of the boatmen is typical of their time; the lilies would serve quite
as well for manure were they allowed to live out their lovely life, and
were not gathered until they were yellow and faded; but they who rake
them in do not wait for their natural season of decay; they smash and
break them in full flower as they kill birds on the nest in the fields
and hedges.
Their fate is like the fate of that greater lily, rosy-red at sunset,
which lies cradled on the waters between Mestre and Murano; and which is
roughly and painfully being uprooted and destroyed that a pack of
foreign traders and native attorneys may wax fat and lay up gold.
No doubt the fate of Venice is common in these days; no doubt, all over
the world, capitalists and socialists join hands across the gulf of
their differences to unite in the destruction of all that is beautiful,
graceful, harmonious, and venerable.
But in Italy such destruction is more sad and shameful than anywhere
else in Europe, by reason of the magnificence and glory of her past, and
in view of the pitiful fact that the land, which was a Pharos of light
and leading to the earth, is now every year and every day receding
farther and farther into darkness: that dreadful darkness of the modern
world which comes of polluted waters and polluted air, of the breath of
poisoned lungs, and the pressure of starving crowds. The basest form of
venality, the lowest form of greed, have fastened on her with the
tentacles of the devil-fish; and are every hour devouring her.
_Colston & Coy, Limited, Printers, Edinburgh._