I must confess to a smiling sympathy with this “Youngest Italy”
party—if the little half-baked literary and artistic clique of
Futurists can be called a party. I can understand the oppression of all
the glorious Italian past, all those massive buildings and masterpieces,
and stereotyped forms of thought. Like the son of a genius, modern Italy
is cramped and overshadowed. Hence the rabid yearning for some new form
of energising, this glorification of the moment and perpetual change. In
a fantastic fury of iconoclasm the Futurists demand even the destruction
of the creations of ancient genius that overhang their lives—they would
make an art-pyre as fervently as Savonarola. Climbing the Clock Tower of
St. Mark’s Square, they threw down coloured handbills repudiating the
vulgar voluptuous Venice of the tourist. “Hasten to fill its fetid
little canals with the ruins of its tumbling and leprous palaces. Burn
the gondolas, those see-saws for fools!” So far so good. But mark the
beatific vision that is to replace this putrefying beauty. “Raise to the
sky the rigid geometry of large metallic bridges, and manufactories with
waving hair of smoke. Abolish everywhere the languishing curves of the
old architectures.” How characteristic of the Second Risorgimento! It
must be by an oversight that the smoke is still permitted to be
“waving.” I imagine that the resurrection of the old Campanile of Venice
must have been the last straw. For ten hundred and fourteen years this
gloomy old tower had impended, and when it did at last fall of its own
sheer decrepitude, lo! it must be stood up again, exact to the last
massy inch, and even with the same inscription—_Verbum caro factum
est_—on its bells. As if a bell could have no new message after a
millennium! Let the historian, at any rate, mark that the Futurists did
not rise till the Campanile was not allowed to fall. The police, taking
the Futurists seriously, prohibit their meetings, which will end in
making them take themselves seriously. But they are a useful
counteractive to the Zealots of the Zona Monumentale, who, in their
passion for the ruins of Rome, forget the claims of life. When the
Present says, “I must live,” the artist and the archæologist too often
reply: “_Je n’en vois pas la nécessité_.” Carducci even called on Fever
to guard the Appian Way. But cities exist for citizens, not for
spectators, and when the telephone bell of the Present rings, we should
reply like the Italian waiter: “_Pronto! Desidera?_” We cannot do in
Rome as the Romans do, for they have to live, not look at Ruins. And let
us not expect the Romans to do in Rome as we do. If tramways _must_ run
along the Via Appia, at least Fever will retire before them. How long is
it our duty to guard the ruins of the Past? Suppose the tombs and
temples of the Appian Way should threaten to collapse altogether, have
we to keep them in a state of artificial ruin? Augustus boasted that he
found Rome brick and made it marble. If the industrial Risorgimento
found Rome marble and made it brick, I suppose there are compensations
for Augustus. Imperial Rome never thought of dedicating a slab of that
marble to the nameless pauper dead, worn out in the obscure service of
their country, as Industrial Rome has done in a touching inscription.
And should Rome extend the tale of its bricks to house the homeless
troglodytes who pig in the remains of that ancient marble, I will throw
up my cap with the Futurists.
Pisa is to me a dream-city, but to the Pisans it is a centre of the
glass industry and the cloth industry, with municipalised gas. They have
done handsomely in leaving me my dream-city outside the town life. If
topographical obstacles prevent other ancient cities from thus surviving
themselves, let me be thankful for small mercies. There was one old inn
at Perugia which had escaped the electric light and the
pleasure-pilgrims, and where the porter peeled the potatoes, but as I
sat this very Spring, dining in the quaint courtyard, lo! to my chagrin
the light of modernity flooded it for the first time. But there chanced
too that night so joyous a band of University students, on gymnastic
business bent, the old courtyard resounded with such pranks, and songs,
and cheers, such fulness of young new life, that I felt Perugia could
not for ever live on griffins and Peruginos and Baglioni horrors. In
that moment even the joyous madness of the Futurists appeared to me
saner than the gloom of a Gissing concluding his Italian journeys “By
the Ionian Sea” with the wish that he could live for ever in the Past,
the Present and its interests blotted out.
It is a cheap æsthetic to retire to the Past, too blind to see beauty in
the Present, and too anæmic to build it for the Future. But humanity is
not a museum-curator; the cult of ancestors, once the backbone of
Hindu-Aryan civilisation, survives only in China. The cult of
descendants has taken its place, the Golden Age is before, not behind,
and the debt we owe to our fathers we pay to our sons, not necessarily
in the same currency. No doubt the Past is ivy-clad, the Present raw and
the Future dim. But as happiness does not come from the search for
happiness, neither does beauty come from the search for beauty. “Rather
seek ye the Kingdom of God and all these things shall be added unto
you.”