There is no more magnificent absurdity than Venice. To build a city where
it is impossible to build a city is madness in itself; but to build there
one of the most elegant and grandest of cities is the madness of genius.
The water, the sea, their sparkle and glimmer, call for a peculiar
sumptuousness. Moluscs adorn their shells with mother-of-pearl and pearls.
A single superficial glance at Venice will show one that it is a city of
strong character, of vigorous mind, republican, trading, oligarchical;
that it is the knot tying something together over the waters—a warehouse
for merchandise under a military flag, a city of noisy popular assemblies
and a silent city of secret councils and measures; in its squares the
whole population is jostling from morning till night, while the rivers of
its streets flow silently to the sea. While the crowd surges and clamours
in Saint Mark’s Square, the boat glides by and vanishes unobserved. Who
knows what is under its black awning? The very place to drown people,
within hail of lovers’ trysts.
The men who felt at home in the Palazzo Ducale must have been of a
special caste of their own. They did not stick at anything. There is
no earth, there are no trees, what does it matter? Give us more carved
stones, more ornaments, gold, mosaics, sculptures, pictures, frescoes.
Here there is an empty corner left; put a thin, wet sea-god with a beard
in the corner! Here is a porch; get in another lion with wings, and a
gospel of Saint Mark! There it is bare and empty; put a carpet of marble
and mosaic! and here, lacework of porphyry! Is there a victory over the
Turks or over Genoa? does the Pope seek the friendship of the city? then
more marble. A whole wall is covered with a curtain of carving, and above
all, more pictures. Paul Veronese, Tintoretto, Titian must mount the
scaffold with their brushes: every step of the triumphal progress of the
Beauty of the Sea must be depicted for posterity in paint or sculpture.
And so full of life was the spirit that dwelt in these stones that new
routes and new seaports, Columbus and Vasco da Gama, were not enough to
crush it. For its destruction the ‘One and Indivisible’ republic had
to rise up on the ruins of the French throne, and on the ruins of that
republic the soldier who in Corsican fashion stabbed the lion with a
stiletto poisoned by Austria. But Venice survived the poison and is alive
again after half a century.
But is she alive? It is hard to say what has survived except the grand
shell, and whether there is another future for Venice.... And, indeed,
what future can there be for Italy at all? For Venice, perhaps, it lies
in Constantinople, in the free federation of the rising Slav-Hellenic
nationalities, which begins to stand out in vague outlines from the mists
of the East.
And Italy?... Of that later. Just now there is the carnival in Venice,
the first carnival in freedom after seventy years’ captivity. The Square
has been transformed into the hall of the Parisian Opera. Old Saint Mark
gladly takes his part in the fête with his pictures of saints and his
gilt, with his patriotic flags and his pagan horses. Only the doves who
come at two o’clock every day to the Square to be fed are shy and flutter
from cornice to cornice to convince themselves that this really is their
dining-room in such disorder.
The crowd keeps growing, _le peuple s’amuse_, plays the fool heartily
with all its might, with great comic talent in declamation and language,
in action and gesticulation, without the spiciness of the Parisian
pierrots, without the vulgar jokes of the German, without our native
filth. The absence of everything indecent surprises one, though the
significance of it is clear. This is the recreation, the diversion, the
playfulness of a whole people, and not the dress-parade of the brothels,
of their _succursales_, whose inmates, while they strip off so much else,
put on a mask, like Bismarck’s needle on a gun, to intensify and make
sure their aim. Here they would be out of place; here the people are
amusing themselves; here their sister, wife and daughter are diverting
themselves, and woe to him who insults a mask. For the time of carnival
the mask is for the woman what the Stanislav ribbon in his buttonhole
used to be for a stationmaster.[55]
At first the carnival left me in peace, but it kept growing, and with its
elemental force was bound to draw every one in.
Nothing is too nonsensical to happen when Saint Vitus’ Dance takes hold
of a whole population in fancy dress. Hundreds, perhaps more, of mauve
dominoes were sitting in the big hall of a restaurant; they had sailed
across the Square in a gilt ship drawn by bulls (everything that walks
on dry land and with four legs is a luxury and rarity in Venice), now
they were eating and drinking. One of the guests suggested a curiosity to
entertain them, and undertook to obtain it; that curiosity was myself.
The gentleman, who scarcely knew me, ran to me at the Albergo Danieli,
and begged and besought me to go with him for a minute to the
masqueraders. It was silly to go, it was silly to make a fuss. I went, I
was greeted with ‘_Evviva!_’ and full glasses. I bowed in all directions
and talked nonsense, the ‘_Evvivas_’ were more hearty than ever; some
shouted: ‘_Evviva el amico de Garibaldi_,’ others drank to the _poeta
Russo_! Afraid that the mauve masks would drink to me as the _pittore
Slavo scultore i maestro_, I beat a retreat to the Piazza San Marco.
In the Square there was a thick wall of people. I leaned against a
pilaster, proud of the title of poet; beside me stood my conductor who
had carried out the dominoes’ _mandat d’amener_. ‘My God, how lovely she
is!’ broke from my lips as a very young lady made her way through the
crowd. My guide without a word seized me and at once set me before her.
‘This is that Russian,’ my Polish count began. ‘Will you give me your
hand after that word?’ I interrupted. Smiling, she held out her hand and
said in Russian that she had long wanted to see me, and glanced at me so
sympathetically that I pressed her hand once more and followed her with
my eyes so long as she was in sight.
‘A blossom, torn by the hurricane, carried by the tide of blood from her
Lithuanian fields!’ I thought, looking after her. ‘Your beauty shines for
strangers now.’
I left the Square and went to meet Garibaldi. On the water everything
was still ... the noise of the carnival came in discordant snatches.
The stern, frowning blocks of the houses pressed closer and closer upon
the boat, peeped at it with their lanterns; at an entry the rudder
splashes, the steel hook gleams, the gondolier shouts: ‘_Apri—sia
stati_’ ... and again the water flows quietly in a side-street, and all
at once the houses move apart, we are in the Grand Canal.... ‘_Ferrovia
Signore_,’ says the gondolier, lisping, as all the town does. Garibaldi
had not arrived, he was still at Bologna. The engine that was going to
Florence moaned, awaiting the whistle. ‘I had better go too,’ I thought;
‘to-morrow I shall be tired of the masks. To-morrow I shall not see my
Slav beauty.’
The city gave Garibaldi a brilliant reception. The Grand Canal was almost
transformed into a single bridge; to get into our boat we had to step
across dozens of others. The Government and its retainers did everything
possible to show that they were sulky with Garibaldi. If Prince Amadeus
had been commanded by his father to show all those petty indelicacies,
all that vulgar resentment, how was it the Italian boy’s heart did not
speak, how was it that he did not for the moment reconcile the city with
the king and the king’s son with his conscience? Why, Garibaldi had
bestowed the crowns of the two Sicilies upon them.
I found Garibaldi neither ill nor any older since our meeting in London
in 1864. But he was depressed, worried, and not ready to talk with the
Venetians who were presented to him next day. The masses of the common
people were his real followers; he grew more lively in Chioggia, where
boatmen and fishermen were waiting for him. Mingling with the crowd, he
said to those poor and simple people: ‘How happy and at home I am with
you, how deeply I feel that I was born a working man and have been a
working man; the misfortunes of our country tore me away from peaceful
work. I too grew up on the sea-coast and know all about your work....’
A murmur of delight drowned the former boatman’s words, the people
surged about him. ‘Give a name to my new-born child,’ cried a woman.
‘Bless mine.’ ‘And mine,’ shouted the others. You valiant general, La
Marmora,[56] and you inconsolable widower, Ricasoli,[57] with all your
Cialdinis[58] and Depretises,[59] you may as well give up your efforts to
destroy that bond; it is tied by peasant working hands, and with a cord
which you can never break with the help of all the Tuscan and Sardinian
hirelings, of all your halfpenny Machiavellis.
Let us return to the question: what then lies before Italy, what future
awaits her now that she is renewed, united, independent? Is it the future
preached by Mazzini, or that to which Garibaldi is leading her, or
perhaps that which Cavour has created?
This question at once leads us far away, into all the difficulties of the
most painful and most disputed subjects. It touches directly upon those
inner convictions which lie at the foundations of our life, and upon that
conflict which so often divides us from our friends and sometimes sets us
on the same side as our opponents.
I doubt of the _future of the Latin peoples_. I doubt their fertility
in the future; they like the process of revolutions, but are bored by
progress when they have attained it. They love to move headlong towards
it without reaching it.
The ideal of Italian emancipation is poor. On the one hand, it lacks the
essential element that makes for life, and unhappily, on the other hand,
retains the old dying and dead element that makes for decay. The Italian
revolution has been hitherto the struggle for independence.
Of course, if the terrestrial globe does not crack, if a comet does not
come too close and overheat our atmosphere, Italy in the future too
will be Italy, the land of the blue sky and the blue sea, of graceful
outlines, of a lovely, attractive race of people, musical and artistic
by nature. Of course, the changes in military and civilian government,
and victory and defeat, and fallen frontiers, and rising assemblies will
all be reflected in her life; she will change (and is changing) from
clerical despotism to bourgeois parliamentarianism, from a cheap mode of
living to an expensive one, from discomfort to comfort, and so on, and so
on. But that is not much, and it does not take one far. There is another
fine country whose shores are washed by the same blue sea, a fine race,
valiant and stern, living beyond the Pyrenees; it has no internal enemy,
it has an assembly, it has external unity ... but with all that, what is
Spain?
Nations are of strong vitality; they can lie fallow for ages, and again
under favourable circumstances show themselves full of sap and vigour.
But do they rise up the same as they were?
How many centuries, I had almost said thousands of years, was the Greek
people wiped off the face of the earth as a nation, and still it remained
alive, and at the moment when the whole of Europe was stifling in the
fumes of Reaction, Greece awoke and stirred the whole world. But were the
Greeks of Capo d’Istrias[60] like the Greeks of Pericles or the Greeks
of Byzantium? All that was left of them was the name and a remote memory.
Italy too may be renewed, but then she will have to begin a new history.
Her emancipation is no more than her right to existence.
The example of Greece is very apt; it is so far away from us that
it awakens less passion. The Greece of Athens, of Macedon, deprived
of independence by Rome, appears again politically independent in
the Byzantine period. What does she create in it? Nothing, or worse
than nothing: theological controversy, seraglio revolutions _par
anticipation_. The Turks come to the help of backward nature and give
the glow of conflagration to her death by violence. Ancient Greece _had
lived out her life_ when the Roman empire covered and preserved her as
the lava and ashes of the volcano preserved Pompeii and Herculaneum. The
Byzantine period only lifted the coffin-lid, and the dead remained dead,
controlled by popes and monks as every tomb is, ordered about by eunuchs
who were quite in place as types of barrenness. Who does not know the
tales of crusaders in Byzantium? Incomparably inferior in culture, in
refinement of manners, these savage warriors, these rude swashbucklers,
were yet full of strength, daring, force; they were advancing, the _god
of history_ was with them. To him, men are precious, not for their good
qualities but for their sturdy vigour and for their coming upon the stage
_à propos_. That is why as we read the tedious chronicles we rejoice when
the Varangians sweep down from their northern snows, or the Slavs float
down in cockle-shells and brand with their shields the proud walls of
Byzantium. As a schoolboy, I was overjoyed at the savage in his shirt[61]
paddling his canoe and going with a gold earring in his ear to an
interview with the effeminate, luxurious, scholastic Emperor,[62] John
Zimisces.
Think a little about Byzantium. Until our Slavophils have brought out
another new chronicle adorned with old ikon paintings, and until it has
received the sanction of Government, Byzantium will explain a great deal
of what it is hard to put into words.
Byzantium could _live_, but there was nothing for her to _do_; and
nations in general only take a place in history while they are on the
stage, that is while they are doing something.
I remember I have mentioned already the answer Thomas Carlyle gave to me
when I spoke to him of the severities of the Parisian censorship. ‘But
why are you so angry with it?’ he said. ‘In compelling the French to keep
quiet, Napoleon has done them the greatest service. They have nothing to
say, but they want to talk.... Napoleon has given them a justification
in their own eyes....’ I do not say how far I agree with Carlyle, but I
do ask myself: Will the Italians have anything to say and do on the day
after the taking of Rome?
And sometimes, without finding an answer, I begin to hope that Rome may
remain a long time their living desideratum.
Till Rome is taken, everything will go fairly well; there will be energy
and strength enough, if only there is money enough.... Till then,
Italy will put up with a great deal: taxes and the yoke of Piedmont
and the pillaging administration and the quarrelsome and vexatious
bureaucracy; while waiting for Rome, everything seems unimportant. To
gain it, her people may be cramped, they must stand together. Rome is the
boundary-line, the flag; it is always before their eyes, it prevents
their sleeping, it prevents their attending to business, it keeps up the
fever. In Rome all will be changed, everything will snap.... There, they
fancy, is the end, the crown; not at all ... there is the beginning.
Nations that are redeeming their independence never know (and it is a
very good thing too) that independence of itself gives them nothing
except the rights of mature age, except a place among their peers, except
the recognition of their rights as citizens to act for themselves, and
that is all.
What acts will be announced to us from the heights of the Capitol and the
Quirinal? What will be proclaimed to the world from the forum or from the
balcony, where for ages the Pope has blessed the ‘Universe and the City’?
To proclaim ‘independence’ _sans phrase_ is not enough. But there is
nothing else.... And at times it seems to me that on the day when
Garibaldi flings aside his sword, no longer needed, and puts the _toga
virilis_ on the shoulders of Italy, there will be nothing left for him
to do but publicly to embrace his _maestro_ Mazzini on the banks of the
Tiber and to repeat with him: ‘Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart
in peace!’