“Nei monti di Luni, dove ronca
Lo Carrarese,”
to find the supply of marble from its fabular mountains still held out,
but the chief occupation of the town seemed to consist in cutting it
into slabs with great many-bladed machines. Slowly the grim knives
descended, slicing the stone, while a spray moved to and fro to prevent
its overheating by friction. And as I watched these plaques gradually
grinding into separate existence, I heard them beginning to babble their
lapidary language, bursting into eloquent inscriptions to unknown
celebrities—chemists, town councillors, hydrographers, economists—nay,
commemorating the Risorgimento itself in some village yet ungrown. “Rome
or Death,” they cried stonily, and “Italy to her Sons,”and “Ci siamo e
ci resteremo.” And the knives sank lower and lower, and the glories rose
higher and higher, and the spray, hissing, continued to throw cold water
on the enthusiasm, like some cynic observing it was easier to celebrate
the old heroism than under its continuous inspiration to create the new.
Carrara itself—though one would think it took marbles as a confectioner
takes tarts—has its memorials of Garibaldi and Mazzini, besides that
more ancient monument to Maria Beatrice overbrooded by the magic
mountains.
To what cause shall we ascribe this hypertrophy of self-consciousness
since Childe Harold’s day? Is it due to the Risorgimento, or the
pleasure-pilgrims, or is some of it inspired by William Walton, canny
British Guglielmo, to whom the municipality of Carrara has erected one
of his own tablets for his services in stimulating the industry? Is it
William Walton who forces all this glory upon Italy? Is it he who
creates all this hero-worship? Perugino is no new discovery, yet not
till 1865—341 years after his death—did the Commune of Perugia put up
a tablet on that steep street which leads to his modest one-storied
house, while Carducci, though not even a native, already looks out from
the Carducci Gardens towards the rolling snow-mountains on the horizon.
To this same 1865 belongs the imposing Dante Monument in the Piazza
Santa Croce of Florence. But the six-hundredth anniversary of a poet is
a trifle late for his appearance in his native city. True, it had taken
him only two hundred years to force his way into Florence Cathedral, but
that was merely as a painting on wood. The statue of Correggio in Parma
(of course in the Piazza Garibaldi) was not erected till 1870. Tasso has
been “the great unhappy poet” for three centuries. Yet not till 1895 did
Urbino think it necessary to record his visit to the city as the guest
of Federigo Bonaventura. As for Raphael, Urbino’s own wonder-child, that
thirty-six foot monument to him dates only from 1897! All these
testimonials to Art would be a little more convincing if the straight
iron bridges with which Venice and Verona have insulted their fairy
waters, did not prove—like the flamboyant technique of the modern
Italian painter—that Italy has left her art period irrevocably behind.
And the great knives of Carrara go grinding on, “ohne Hast, ohne Rast,”
inexorably supplying celebrity. Like the Greece of the decadence, Italy
has reached its stone age, an age which seems the symptom of spent
vigour, the petrifaction of what once was vital. Nor is it easy to
recognise Mazzini’s soldiers of humanity in a nation whose prophet is
d’Annunzio, whose “smart set” repeats the morals of the Renaissance
without its genius, whose masses appear to spend their lives in lounging
about the streets smoking long black slow-lighting cigars, or
patronising the innumerable pastrycooks. It seems a slight return for
all the heroic agony of the Risorgimento that Europe should be supplied
with an efficient type of restaurant, and a vividly gesturing waiter,
who dissects himself in discussing the carving of the joint.
“Scuola di magnanimi Sensi,
Auspicata promessa dell’ Avvenire”
cries a memorial tablet at Brescia, but the ennoblement and the promise
of the future are less obvious than the orgy of nationalistic sentiment.
And when I read how at the recent meeting in North Italy between their
King and the Czar, Italian citizens submitted to being treated like
Russians during a royal progress; herded outside the town while within
it every door was bolted and every blind drawn, as though ’twas indeed
the funeral of freedom, I felt how justified was Mazzini’s unwillingness
to resurrect under a monarchy. And when I think of the great equestrian
monument to Victor Emmanuel II which is to commemorate in 1911 the
jubilee of the dynasty’s sovereignty over United Italy—the monument
that will cost a hundred million lire, and in the belly of whose horse a
_lunch d’onore_ was recently offered by the proprietor of the foundry to
the engineers and artisans, “twenty-six persons in all”—I see how wise
was Mazzini’s protest against the narrowing down of a great spiritual
movement to the acquisition of more territory by a reigning house. It
was a commercial traveller who proudly directed my attention to this
equine lunch, and this standard of greatness just suits a commercial
nation. In this Gargantuan horse the whole millennial dream of Mazzini
may end, and those young heroes of freedom, whose deaths lay so heavy on
his conscience in his black moments, may have died but to add another to
the family party of monarchs who regard the rest of humanity as a
subject-race, transferable from one to the other by conquest or treaty.
However valuable a King may be to Italy as a symbol of Unity, Mazzini
was historically accurate when he pointed out that the conception of
kingship has no roots in Italy, the one epoch of imperial sway being a
mere degeneration of the Roman Republic. It was a fine stroke of tactics
to celebrate Mazzini’s centenary in 1905 as a national festival, in
which the King himself took part. But these centennial tablets and
statues were Italy’s way of stoning its prophet; this festival was
Mazzini’s real funeral, burying his aspirations out of sight so
effectively that the man in the street has forgotten that for Mazzini
the goal of Garibaldi and Cavour was only a starting-point; and a
popular British Encyclopædia assures us that Mazzini “lived to see all
his dreams realised.”
Not that there is a word to be said against the charming and intelligent
young man who presides over Italy, and who has signalised himself among
his peers by founding an International Agricultural Institute. But what
a climax to the long struggle against tyranny, this meeting of King and
Czar! To be sure Italy had already made friends with Austria in the very
year after Garibaldi’s death—“in the interests of the peace of Europe.”
Poor Europe. They make a spiritual desert and call it peace.
“_Songs before Sunrise_”—yes, but where is the sun?
V
More instinct with vitality than the most eloquent tablets to the
Risorgimento are the mural inscriptions of hatred to Austria rudely
chalked up by anonymous hands, especially on the Adriatic side. “Down
with Austria!” “Death to Austria!” “Death to Trent and Trieste!” is the
general tenor, varied by the name of Francis Joseph scrawled between
skulls and crossbones. ’Tis a strange comment on the Triple Alliance,
and the authorities do not seem hurried to remove this glaring
contradiction. Even “Death to the Czar” survives the royal meeting.
But the Irredenta is not to be taken seriously. Not along political
lines does the Risorgimento proceed, any more than along the moral lines
for which Mazzini worked. The second phase, the second Risorgimento it
may indeed be called, is the Industrial Resurrection.
Resurrection—because Italy, whose Merchant of Venice reminds us that
the Italian nobleman was always a trader, and whose leading Florentines
were Magnificent Moneylenders, can hardly be regarded as an Arcadia
transformed by the cult of the dollar. Even Mazzini demanded revival of
“the old commercial greatness”; perhaps he might have been content to
wait patiently through this materialistic epoch, if he were sure it
would lead to a third Risorgimento.
Hygiene has yet to penetrate and suffuse the new prosperity. But if even
Perugia still stinks in places and Foligno everywhere, the country is
getting perceptibly cleaner, and perhaps godliness is next to
cleanliness. But the severest moralist cannot grudge Italy her rise in
wealth and happiness: the poverty of the peasantry, accentuated by the
extravagant ambition of Italy to be a Great Power in the smallest of
senses, has been terrible. At what a cost has Italy achieved her first
Dreadnought, so perversely christened _Dante Alighieri_!
Beggars abound—blind, crippled, or with hideous growths—especially in
the South. Doubtless the influx of the pleasure-pilgrim has increased
the deformity of the population, and the Italian beggar pushes forward
his monstrosity as though it were for sale, but there is real physical
degeneration all the same. The discovery of New York and South America
by the Italian has fortunately co-operated with the discovery of Italy
by the pleasure-pilgrim and the foreign investor, and some 600,000
Italians in the South of Brazil provide the makings of a Trans-atlantic
Italy. Even the semi-savage villages of Sicily are sown with steamer
advertisements, and batches going and returning for jobs or harvests
make an ever-weaving shuttle across the Atlantic.
And if the monuments of the First Risorgimento clash with the old
historic background of Italy, still more is the Second Risorgimento in
discord with it. One almost sees a new Italy, infinitely less beautiful
but not devoid of backbone, struggling out of the old architectural
shell which does not in the least express it. The old ducal and
seignorial cities, the old republics, are developing suburbs, sometimes
prosperous if prosaic, like the new quarters of Florence and Parma;
sometimes grotesque, like Pesaro’s sea-side resort, with its “new”
architecture—lobster-red and mustard-green lattices, and sham golden
doors, carved with busts; sometimes hideous, like the outskirts of
Verona, where under the blue, brooding mountains rises a quarter of
electrical workshops and chemical factories. Ancient towered Asti grows
sparkling with its new brick Banca d’Italia, and its blued and gilded
capitals in the Church of S. Secondo Martire. Look down on Genoa, with
its fantasia of spires, campaniles, roof-gardens, green lattices, marble
balconies, chimneys decorated with figures of doges and opening out like
flowers, and see how the old narrow alleys are almost roofed with
telegraph and telephone wires. Go down to the widened harbour and see
the warehouses, the American sky-scrapers, the smoking chimneys, the
great steamers sailing out for Buenos Ayres and New York, the emigrants
with their bundles. The blue bird sings here no more; you hear only the
bang of the hammer, which Young Italy declares is the voice of the
century.
I look out of my window at Forli (in the Via Garibaldi!) and see a white
minaret and a white campanile gleaming fantastically in the moonlight
over a panorama of russet roofs. There is a stone floor in my bedroom
and no chimney. In the Piazza all is heavy and mediæval: dull stone
colonnades and a rough cobbled road. In a church a grotesque griffin
ramps over a pavement tomb. Yet through these cumbersome stone forms I
feel the new Italy struggling. The Ginnasio Communale of the town
shelters with equal pomp and spaciousness the picture-gallery and the
chemical laboratory. These colonnades and cobbles have no more congruity
with the new spirit than the old seignorial and episcopal Palazzi with
the poor “tenement families” whom they house to-day. Presently life will
slough off these forms altogether. Where an old castle like that of
Ferrara or an old palace like that of Lucca or Pistoja can be tamed to
civic uses, it becomes a town-hall; where no old building is available,
an adequate modern form is created, as in the handsome post-offices with
their almost military sense of the dignity of the common life.
At Pesaro I lodged in a Bishop’s Palace with “steam-heat, telephone,
electric light in all the chambers, garage for automobiles, motor
omnibus to all the trains!” Palatial was it indeed, so absurdly spacious
that the dining-room was only accessible through vast, empty, domed and
frescoed halls, and I could have held a political meeting in my bedroom,
where I slept with a sense of camping out under the infinities. I had no
notion that provincial churchmen were thus magnificent, and I do not
wonder that the Lord Cardinal of Ostia, when he saw how the Franciscans
of the Portiuncula slept on ragged mattresses and straw, without pillows
or bedsteads, burst into tears, exclaiming: “We wretches use so many
unnecessary things!” And yet the Cardinal did not use a single thing
advertised by the ex-Palace of Pesaro.
Nowhere do new and old clash or combine more disagreeably than in
Modena, where crumbling marble-pillared colonnades are painted red, and
meet continuations in new brick. The Cathedral, begun in 1099, guarded
and flanked by quaint stone lions, bears on its ancient campanile a
tablet to Victor Emmanuel. In the great Piazza, church, picture-gallery
and war-monument swear at one another. The Ducal Palace is a military
school, the moat round the old rampart—where once resounded that
archaic song of the war-sentinels—is a public laundry.
And the statues, tablets, monuments, of the Second Risorgimento begin to
vie with those of the first. _Pro Nervi_, painted on the benches on that
desolate cactus-grown shore, among the Leonardesque sea-sprayed rocks by
the old Gropallo tower, attests the activity of a society created to
boom the summer resort, while a tablet celebrates the Marchese who,
foreseeing the future of Nervi, put up the first hotel and died with the
name of the municipality on his lips. I do not think the Marchese
himself foresaw how far Nervi would go. I know I walked miles along its
tramway amid monotonous streets, with no sign of an end. Indeed the
tram-line reaches Genoa.
Nor is the Marchese the only hero of the Second Risorgimento. Trust
Carrara for that—Carrara and Guglielmo Walton!
And the creations of this Risorgimento rival those of the Renaissance in
costliness. Where in all Europe will you find a street as luxurious as
Genoa’s Via XX Settembre—the long colonnade, the granite pillars, the
gilded and frescoed roof, the mosaic pavement where the poorest may
tread more magnificently than Agamemnon.
And the great Gallery of Victor Emmanuel in Milan, what is it but a
secular parody of the Cathedral it faces—nave, transept, dome, complete
even to the invisible frescoes, a _Cathédrale de luxe_? Very sad and
solemn looked the old Cathedral at night, for all its fairy fretwork, as
Life passed it by for its glittering counterpart.