And there is an ugly Italy, an Italy veiled by the blue heaven, but
revealing itself under sullen sunless skies in all its naked
hideousness.
Nothing could be more unlike the popular conception of Italy than the
environs of the Carthusian Monastery of Pavia in mid-February. Slushy
roads about two yards wide, here and there encumbered with fragments of
brick and stone, and everywhere bordered by heaps of snow. By one side
of the road runs a narrow ice-bound irrigation canal, geometrically
straight, across which rises the high, bare, dreary endless wall of
blank brick surrounding the monastery. On the other hand stretch the
vast fields with leafless thin trees. It was of this region that Jehan
d’Auton wrote when Pavia was taken by the French: “Truly this is
Paradise upon earth.” Even allowing for the flowery meadows and running
springs of the end of the fifteenth century, the worthy Benedictine
could have found fairer Paradises nearer Paris. Much of Northern Italy
is still monotonous marshland. Over the bald brick wall of Mantua, nine
feet thick, that backs the Piazza sacred to Virgil, I gazed one morning
at a dismal swampy lake, a couple of barges, a factory chimney, and
spectral, leafless stumps of trees, the brownish soil of the lake
showing through the dead sullen water, a ghost of sun hovering over rows
of pollarded planes. Here, methought, had Virgil found a suggestion for
his Stygian marsh. I would not say a word against Mantua itself, which
is most lovable, with side-canals that might be Venetian, and
ever-flowing taps and old arches, arcades and buildings. But from Mantua
to Modena I saw naught but ugly brown grass over flat lands, with
pollarded elms and vines stretched from tree to tree. Here and there a
little canal relieved the dismal plain. Near Modena a few poplars
appeared. A team of lovely oxen drawing a cart gave the landscape its
one touch of beauty.
Rimini proper is picturesque enough, with its Porto Canale full of small
barques with tall masts. But between it and Ravenna, what desolation!
Outside the town the gaunt ruins of the Malatesta Castle—a bare wall
and a bare squarish rock—were the prelude to the same bare snowy
plains, the same little pollarded elms, varied by tall skeleton poplars.
Once a copse of firs, bowed down by snow, broke the white flatness. Near
Classe, famous for Sant’ Appolinare, the waste became even marshier,
sparse twigs of desolate shrubs alone peeping through the white blanket.
Nearer Ravenna a few signs of life appeared, a dead cottage, or a living
hovel, or a few spectral trees, or a brick bridge over an ice-laden
river. On such a light brown marsh specked with stagnant pools the
modern Italians have put up hoardings with advertisements of cognac. A
little further East their remote progenitors put up Venice!
Never was there so apparently hopeless a site as those islands of the
lagoons, preserved from malaria only by a faint pulse of the “tideless,
dolorous midland sea.” How so marvellous a city rose on the wooden piles
of the refugees, how out of so dire a necessity they made so rare a
beauty and so mighty a force, was always a puzzle to me till I read that
these fugitives before the Lombard Conquerors were Romans! Then it all
leapt into clearness. Venice is Rome in the key of water! The same
indomitable racial energy that had built up Rome and the Roman Empire
built up Venice and the Venetian Empire. Hunted from Padua, the Romans
are able to express themselves in water as powerfully as in earth—to
create a new empire in Italy and the East, and build a mighty fleet, and
crush the Turks, and hold the carrying trade of the world, and for six
centuries keep the Adriatic as a private lake. And in this new Empire
they are touched by the shimmering spell of water to new creations of
joyous colour on canvas, to fairy convolutions in marble, and a church
that rises as lightly as a sea-flower. For here all that is sternly
Roman
“Doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.”
But let us not forget that despite her seven hills Rome also began as a
pile-village, and that the Campagna is of the same marshy character as
the soil around Venice. I have more faith in Goethe’s intuition that
Rome was built up by herdsmen and a rabble than in the thesis, expounded
by Guglielmo Ferrero at Rome’s last birthday celebration, that it was
the carefully chosen site of a colony from Alba, with Romulus and Remus
in their traditional rôles. For though her seven hills enabled Rome to
keep her head above water, they did not enable her to keep her feet dry.
The Forum Augusti was anciently swamp and became a swamp again in the
Middle Ages, and once some earlier form of gondola plied between the
Capitol and the Palatine Hill. Thus the races who hailed from Rome had
water in their blood, and the instinct to build on piles. It is a
strange instinct which races have preserved and obeyed—in the foolish
human fashion—even on land that was high and dry. What wonder if it
survived in latency in these ex-Romans! Yes, Venice was Rome in the key
of water, as Rome was Venice in the key of earth. And the Roman
Church—is she not Rome in the key of heaven? Is it not always the same
racial mastery that confronts us, the same instinct for dominance? Does
the Church not hold the after-world as Rome held the ancient world, does
she not own the lake of fire as the Doges owned the Adriatic? Drive Rome
from her throne on the hills and she builds up her pedestal again on
sea-soaked piles: hound her from the lagoons, and of a few acres around
the piazza of St. Peter she makes the seat of a sovereignty even more
boundless and majestic.
Hardly had I written this when I opened by hazard my first edition of
Byron’s “The Two Foscari” (1821), and was startled to read in his
appendix as follows: “In Lady Morgan’s fearless and excellent work upon
‘Italy’ I perceive the expression of ‘Rome of the Ocean’ applied to
Venice. The same phrase occurs in ‘The Two Foscari.’ My publisher can
vouch for me that the tragedy was written and sent to England some time
before I had seen Lady Morgan’s work, which I only received on the 16th
of August. I hasten, however, to notice the coincidence and to yield the
originality of the phrase to her who first placed it before the public.”
Byron goes on to explain that he is the more anxious to do this because
the Grub Street hacks accuse him of plagiarism. But turning to the
tragedy itself, I find that Byron has rather plagiarised _me_ than the
admirable “Gloriana,” for her phrase might be a mere metaphor, whereas
Marina observes explicitly:
“And yet you see how from their banishment
Before the Tartar into these salt isles,
Their antique energy of mind, all that
Remain’d of Rome for their inheritance,
Created by degrees an ocean-Rome.”
But Byron’s over-anxiety to disavow originality was due to the morbid
state of mind induced by the aforesaid hacks, one of whom had even
accused him of having “received five hundred pounds for writing
advertisements for Day and Martin’s patent blacking.”
“That accusation,” says Byron, “is the highest compliment to my literary
powers which I ever received.” I can only say the same of Byron’s
plagiarism from myself.
But Byron need not have been so apologetic to Lady Morgan, for ’twas the
very boast of Venice to be “the legitimate heir of Rome,” whose Empire
Doge Dandolo re-established in that Nova Roma of Constantinople with
whose art and architecture her own is so delectably crossed.