In a room leading to the Senate in the Ducal Palace of Venice I was
looking at a picture by Contarini of the conquest of Verona by the
Venetians in 1405.
’Twas a farrago of fine confused painting, horses asprawl over the dead
and wounded, men in armour driving their daggers home in the prostrate
huddled forms, galloping chargers viciously spurred by helmeted knights
with swirling swords, in brief an orgie of wild and whirling devilry.
The pity of it, I thought, Verona and Venice, those two fairy sisters,
each magically enthroned on beauty, members of the same Venetia, peopled
with the same stock, speaking almost the same dialect, why must they be
at each other’s throat? And this revelry of devilry might, I knew,
equally serve for Venice’s conquest of any other of her neighbours in
that wonderful fighting fifteenth century of hers, when she must needs
set up her winged lion in every market place.
And these rivalries of Venice and her neighbour-towns, I recalled, were
only part of the universal urban warfare—Genoa against Pisa, Siena
against Florence, Gubbio against Perugia; these again breaking into
smaller circles of contention, or intersected with larger, party against
party, faction against faction, guild against guild, Guelph against
Ghibelline, Montague against Capulet, Oddi against Baglioni, _popolani_
against _grandi_, provinces against invaders, blood-feuds horrific,
innumerable, the Guelph-Ghibelline contest alone involving 7200
revolutions and 700 massacres in its three centuries! And yet there is a
reverse to the shield, and a iewelled scabbard to the sword.
I stood later in the Palazzo Malaspina of Pavia where, tradition says,
the imprisoned Boëthius composed “The Consolations of Philosophy,” and
here in a vestibule my eye was caught by a fragment of gilded gate hung
aloft, and running to read the explanatory inscription, I found it—in
translation—as follows:
“These Remnants of the Old Gates of Pavia
Thrice Trophies in Civil Wars
By a Magnanimous Thought Restored by Ravenna
Are To-day an Occasion for Rejoicing
Betwixt the Two Cities Desirous
Of Changing the Vestiges of the Old Discords
Into Pledges of Union & Patriotic Love
The XIII day of September MDCCCLXXVIII”
_Un magnanimo pensiero_, indeed! And—like the chains of Pisa’s ancient
harbour restored by Genoa—a pleasant sequel to the noble common
struggle for Italian independence. And yet—the _advocatus diaboli_
whispered me, or was it the shade of Boëthius in quest of “The
Consolations of Phlebotomy”?—“What has become of Pavia, what of
Ravenna, since they ceased to let each other’s blood? Where is the Pavia
of a hundred towers, where is the Castello reared and enriched by
generations of Visconti Dukes, and its University, once the finest in
Italy, at which Petrarch held a chair; where is the opulence of life
that flowed over into the Certosa, now arid in its mausolean
magnificence? Where is the Ravenna whose lawyers were as proverbial in
the eleventh century as Philadelphia’s are to-day, where is that hotbed
of heresy which nourished the great anti-Pope Guibert? Where is even the
Ravenna of Guido da Polenta, protector of Dante? Apt indeed to hold only
Dante’s tomb. And its young men who bawl out choruses of a Sunday night
till the small hours—do they even deserve the shrine of the poet of
Christendom? And Venice? And Verona? And the Rimini of the sixty
galleys? What have they gained from their colourless absorption into a
United Italy, compared with what they have lost—had indeed already
lost—of peculiar and passionate existence? Are there two gentlemen of
Verona now in whom we take a scintilla of interest? Is there a merchant
of Venice whose ventures concern us a jot? Is there a single Antonio
with argosies bound for Tripolis and the Indies?” “Your Ben Jonson,” and
by his wide posthumous reading I knew ’twas Boëthius speaking now, “said
‘in short measures life may perfect be.’ He should have said ‘in small
circles’ and, perhaps, ‘_only_ in small circles.’ All America—with its
vasty breadths—stands to-day without a single man of the first order.”
“’Tis not even”—put in the _advocatus diaboli_, betrayed by his
unphilosophic chuckle—“as if the destruction of small patriotisms meant
the destruction of war. Pavia and Ravenna,” he pointed out
mischievously, “must continue to fight—as part of the totality, Italy.
And behold,” quoth he, drawing my eyes towards the Piazza Castello, “the
significance of that old castle’s metamorphosis into a barrack—the
poetry of war turned to prose, the frescoes of the old Pavian and
Cremonese painters faded, perhaps even whitewashed over, and rough
Government soldiers drilling where the Dukes played pall-mall. Gone is
that rich concreteness of local strife, attenuated by its expansion into
a national animosity; not insubstantial indeed under stress of invasion,
but shadowy and unreal when the _casus belli_ is remote, and by the
manœuvres of my friends, the international diplomatists, the Pavian or
Ravennese finds himself fighting on behalf of peoples with whom alliance
is transitory and artificial.”
“But he will not find himself fighting so often,” I rejoined. “Countries
do not join battle as recklessly as cities. The larger the bulk the
slower the turning to bite.” “And meantime,” interposed the philosophic
shade, “the war-tax in peace is heavier than anciently in war. And
neither in war nor in peace can there be the joy of fighting that comes
from personal keenness in the issue. The wars of town with town, of sect
with sect, of neighbour with neighbour, so far from being fratricidal
and unnatural, are the only human forms of war. ’Tis only neighbours
that can feel what they are fighting for, ’tis only brothers that can
fight with unction. The very likeness of brothers, their intimate
acquaintance with the points of community, gives them an acute sense of
the points of difference, and provides their combat with a solid
standing-ground at the bar of reason. Least irrational of all
internecion were the fratricide of twins. Save the war of self-defence,
civil war is the only legitimate form of war. Military war—how
monstrous the sound, what a clanking of mailed battalions! Your Bacon
betrays but a shallow and conventional sense of ‘The True Greatness of
Kingdoms,’ when he compares civil war to the heat of a fever, and
foreign war to the heat of exercise which serves to keep the body in
health. For what is foreign war but an arrogance of evil life, an
inhuman sport, a fiendish trial of skill? Why should a home-born Briton
ever fight a Russian? His boundaries are nowhere contiguous with the
Russian’s, his very notion of a Russ is mythical. ’Tis a cold-blooded
war-game into which he is thrust from above. What’s Hecuba to him or he
to Hecuba? Other is it with warfare that is personal, profoundly felt.
Civil war—how sacred, how close to men’s bosoms! When Greek meets
Greek, _then_ comes the tug of war.”
“In religious wars, too,” eagerly interrupted the _advocatus diaboli_,
“’tis nearness that is the justification—Homoousian versus Homoiousian.
Why in heaven’s name,” he added with a spice of malice, “should a
Mussulman cry haro against a Parsee, or a Shintoist against a Mormon?
Here, too, the boundaries are not contiguous; ’twere the duel of whale
and elephant. ’Tis the Christian sects that must naturally torture and
murder one another,” he wound up triumphantly.
“Ay indeed,” serenely assented the shade of Boëthius. “If fighting is to
be done at all, let it be between brothers and not between strangers.
Where ‘a hair perhaps divides the False and True’ ’tis of paramount
importance to determine on which side of the hair we should stand. This
rigid accuracy is the glory of Science—why should not our decimal be
correct to nine places even in Religion? Why wave aside these sharp
differences for which the men of my day were willing to pay with their
lives? When your Alfred the Great translated my _magnum opus_, or even
as late as when your Chaucer honoured me with a modern version, these
questions could vie in holy intensity, almost with your latter-day
questions of Free Trade and Tariff Reform.”
“Ah, the palmy days of martyrdom,” sighed the _advocatus diaboli_, “when
men were literally aflame for _filioque_ or Immaculate Conception. O for
the fiery Arians, Gnostics, Marcionites, Valentinians, Socinians,
Montanists, Donatists, Iconoclasts, Arnoldites, Pelagians, Monophysites,
Calixtines, Paulicians, Hussites, Cathari, Albigenses, Waldenses,
Bogomilians, Calvinists, Mennonites, Baptists, Anabaptists——”
“Surely you would not call Baptists fiery?” I interjected feebly. He had
apparently no sense of humour, this _advocatus_, for he went on coldly:
“How tame and disappointing these latter-day sectarians: these
Methodists, Plymouth Brethren, Christian Scientists, Irvingites,
Christadelphians, ‘et hoc genus omne.’ I did have a flash of hope when
your Methodists began to split up into Wesleyans, Protestant Methodists,
Reformers, Primitives, Bryanites and the like, whose bitter brotherly
differences seemed to show the old sacrosanct concern for the minutiæ of
Truth and Practice. But no! no one believes nowadays, for nobody burns
his fellow-Christian. Even the burning words of your King’s
Declaration——!”
“August shade,” I interrupted, pointedly addressing myself to the last
of the Roman philosophers, “I concede that when Christianity founded
itself on texts, an infinite perspective of homicidal homiletics lay
open to the ingenuous and the ingenious. And so long as Heaven and Hell
turned on dogma and ritual, an infinite significance attached to the
difference between the theological tweedledum and the theological
tweedledee, so that it is just dimly conceivable one might murder one’s
neighbour for his own good or the greater glory of God. But do not tell
me that to-day, too, the test of belief is bloodshed.”
“_Immo vero_,” cried the Roman shade emphatically. “Was I not clubbed to
death because I believed in Justice and combated the extortions of the
Goths? A belief for which we would not die or kill, what is it?”
“A bloodless belief,” chuckled the _advocatus diaboli_, who, I suddenly
remembered, was more legitimately entitled the _defensor fidei_.