Carnival! What a whirling word! What a vision of masks and gaiety,
militant flowers and confetti! Not farewell to meat, but hail to
merriment! Never, in sooth, does Italy show so earthly as when, bidding
adieu to the flesh and the world, she enters into the contemplation of
the tragic mystery of the self-sacrifice of God. And yet in this
grossness of popular rejoicing lies more faith than in the frigid
pieties of the established English Church. Even the brutalities and
Jew-baitings that marked the old Roman carnival, even the profane
parodies of the Mass, sprang from a naïve vividness of belief. Parody is
merely the obverse side of reverence, and ’tis only when you do not
believe in your God that you dare not make fun of Him or with Him. The
gargoyled gutter is as characteristic of the cathedral as the mystic
rose-window. Our revivals of miracle plays are performed in an
atmosphere of glacial awe, which was by no means the atmosphere of their
birth. This sort of reverence is too often faith fallen to
freezing-point. We remove our sense of humour as we take off our
slippers at alien mosques.
It was when faith was at its full—near the year 1000—and in connection
with the Christmas season, that the Patriarch of Constantinople
instituted the Feast of Fools and the Feast of the Ass, travestying the
most sacred persons and offices. The Lord of Misrule is no heathen
deity, but a most Christian majesty; and King Carnival is the spiritual
successor of the old King of Saturnalia, whether Frazer be correct or
not in attributing to him the direct succession. For the truly religious
the carnival is necessary to the sanity of things. It is an expression
of the breadth and complexity of the Cosmos, which would otherwise be
missing from the Easter ritual. The God of the grotesque is as real as
the God of Gethsemane and the Cosmos cannot be stretched on a crucifix.
It bulges too oddly for that. And it is this grotesque side of life that
finds quasi-religious expression in the Carnival processions, with their
monsters known and unknown to Nature, with their fanciful hybrids and
quaint permutations of the elements of reality. Humanity herein records
its joyous satisfaction and sympathy with that freakish mood of Nature
which produced the ornithorhynchus and the elephant, and shaped to
uncouthness, instead of to symmetry and beauty. Alas! I fear humanity is
only too acquiescent in these deviations of the great mother into the
grotesque; the folk-spirit runs more fluently to gross pleasantry and
comic tawdriness than to the Beautiful, and many a Carnival procession
is a nightmare of concentrated ugliness.
The suspicion takes me that our St. Valentine’s Day, so dominatingly
devoted to grotesque caricature, and so coincident with the Carnival
period, is really the Catholic Carnival in another guise and that
prudish Protestantism has entertained the devil unawares.
But the Carnival—like St. Valentine’s Day—is dying. It is more alive
in the ex-Italian Riviera than in Italy proper. I have a memory of a
Carnival at Siena which consisted mainly of one imperturbable
merry-maker stumping with giant wooden boots through the stony alleys. A
Carnival at Modena has left even less trace—some dim sense of more
crowded streets with a rare mask. At Mantua, too, there was no set
procession—children in fancy dress, with a few adult masqueraders,
alone paid fealty to the season. At Bologna the last night of Carnival
was almost vivacious, and in the sleety colonnades branching off from
the Via Ugo Bassi there was quite a dense crowd of promenaders defying
the bitter wind, while muffled groups, with their coat-collars up, sat
drinking at the little tables. There were some children, fantastically
pranked, attended by prosaic mothers, there was a small percentage of
masked faces, while a truly gallant cavalier (escorting a dame in a
domino) paraded his white stockings, that looked icy, across the snowy
roads. No confetti, and only an infrequent scream of hilarity. That the
old plaster missiles, with other crudities, have disappeared, is indeed
no cause for lamentation, but a Carnival without confetti is like an
omelette without eggs.
Well might a writer in the local paper, _Il Resto del Carlino_, lament
the brave days of old when a vast array of carriages and masks coursed
through the Via S. Mamolo, and the last days of the Carnival were marked
by jousts and tourneys, and tiltings at the quintain, with a queen of
beauty in white satin and magnificent masqueraders showering flowers,
fruits, and perfumes, and nymphs carrying Cupid tied hand and foot.
In Cremona I made trial of a _Veglione_ whose allurements had been
placarded for days. A _Trionfo di Diana_, heralded in large letters,
peculiarly suggested pomp and revelry. And indeed I found a theatre
almost as large as La Scala, illumined by a dazzling chandelier, with
four tiers of boxes resplendent with the shoulders of women and the
shirt fronts of men—tiaras, uniforms, orders, all the spectacular
social sublime. I had not imagined that obscure Cremona—no longer
famous, even for violins—held these glittering possibilities, and it
set me to the analysis that Italian theatres—above the _platea_—are
all shop-front, making a brave show of a shallow audience, for the
encouragement of the actors and its own gratification, instead of
obscuring and dissipating it over back benches.
The stage and the _platea_ had been united by an isthmus of steps and in
an enclosure sat a full orchestra. Around the musicians danced men in
evening-dress and a few ladies in masks, most of whom, notwithstanding
the superabundance of males, preferred to dance with their own sex. This
was largely what the spectators had come out for to see, and the
disproportion of the dancers to the wilderness of onlookers was the only
comic feature of this Carnival Ball. True, a few clownish figures
clothed in green and wearing little basket hats improvised mild romps on
the stage, and occasionally from the unexpected vantage of a box shouted
down some facetious remark, but there was no unction in them, nay not
even when they capped the joke by clapping large baskets on their heads.
However, the _Trionfo di Diana_ still remained to account for the vast
audience, and there came a moment when an electric thrill ran through
the packed theatre, the dancing ceased, and the dancers ranged
themselves, looking eagerly towards the doors. After a period of tense
expectation, there came slowly up the _platea_ a few huntsmen with live
dogs and stuffed hawks, and one melancholy horn that gave a few
spasmodic single toots, whereupon appeared Diana in a scanty white robe,
recumbent on a floral car of foliage and roses, drawn by six hounds, one
of which alone rose to the humour of the occasion, and by his inability
to remain on his own side of the shaft achieved a rare ripple of
laughter, while the applause that followed his adjustment brought quite
a wave of warmth. But the chill fell afresh, as the procession, after a
cheerless turn or two on the stage, made its exit as tamely as a spent
squib. A paltrier spectacle was never seen in a penny show.
A runner, accompanied by a cyclist, who pumped him up with his pump,
made a fresh onslaught upon our sense of fun, but when he too trailed
off equally into nothingness, I quitted the dazzling midnight scene,
leaving the beauty and fashion of Cremona to its Carnival dissipations.
Yes, the Italian Carnival is dying. Unregretted, adds the Anglo-French
paper that serves the select circles of Rome. For it is only the
Carnival of the streets that is passing, this genteel authority tells us
reassuringly. “A far more glorious Carnival is replacing it. In the
grand cosmopolitan hotels _fête_ succeeds _fête_.”
Alas, so even the Carnival has passed over to the Magnificent Ones, who
not content with annexing the best things in their own lands sail under
their pirate flag in quest of the spoils of every other, moving from
Rome to Switzerland, from Ascot to Cairo, with the movement of Sport or
the Sun. What a change from the days of the Roman Fathers, when religion
circled round one’s own hearth, and exile was practically
excommunication! The mother-land is no longer a mother but a mistress,
to be visited only for pleasure, and every other land is only another
odalisque, devoid of sanctities, ministress to appetites. The
Magnificent Ones of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance at least stayed
at home and minded their serfs and their business: our modern
Magnificent Ones go abroad, make new serfs everywhere, and mind only
their pleasures. And hence it is that the _festa_ of the Carnival whose
only _raison d’être_ was religious, whose only justification was its
spontaneity, is to be annexed by the Magnificent Mob, ever in search of
new pretexts for new clothes and new vulgarities. The froth of pleasure
is to be skimmed off, and the cup of seriousness thrown away. The
joyousness that ushers in Lent is to be torn from its context as the
fine feathers are torn from a bird, to flutter on the hat of a
demi-mondaine. The grand cosmopolitan hotels with the grand cosmopolitan
rabble will usher in with grand cosmopolitan dances the period of prayer
and fasting, and the dying Carnival will achieve resurrection.