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AUTHOR’S NOTE
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The germ of this book may be found in three essays under the same title published in “Harper’s Magazine” in 1903 and 1904, which had the inestimable advantage of being illustrated by the late Louis Loeb, “the joyous comrade” to whose dear memory this imperfect half of what was planned as a joint labour of love must now be dedicated. I. Z. All roads lead from Rome Transcriber’s Notes can be found at the end of this eBook....
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OF BEAUTY, FAITH, AND DEATH: A RHAPSODY BY WAY OF PRELUDE
OF BEAUTY, FAITH, AND DEATH: A RHAPSODY BY WAY OF PRELUDE
I too have crossed the Alps, and Hannibal himself had no such baggage of dreams and memories, such fife-and-drum of lyrics, such horns of ivory, such emblazoned standards and streamered gonfalons, flying and fluttering, such phalanxes of heroes, such visions of cities to spoil and riches to rifle—palace and temple, bust and picture, tapestry and mosaic. My elephants too matched his; my herds of mediæval histories, grotesque as his gargoyled beasts. Nor without fire and vinegar have I pierced my
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I
I
Of all the excursions I made from Naples—renowned headquarters for excursions—none led me through more elemental highways than that which started from the Aquarium, at a fee of two lire. Doubtless the Aquarium of Naples exists for men of science, but men of art may well imagine it has been designed as a noble poem in colour. Such chromatic splendours, such wondrous greens and browns and reds, subtly not the colour scale of earth, for over all a mystic translucence, a cool suffusion, every hue su
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II
II
I saw the sea-serpent at Naples, though not in the Aquarium. Its colossal bulk was humped sinuously along the bay. ’Twas the Vesuvius range, stretching mistily. Mariners have perchance constructed the monster from such hazy glimpses of distant reefs. Still, no dragon has wrought more havoc than this mountain, which smokes imperturbably while the generations rise and fall. Beautiful the smoke, too, when it grows golden in the setting sun, and the monstrous mass turns a marvellous purple. We wonde
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III
III
No object in the Naples Museum fascinates the philosophic mind more than Salpion’s vase. Who was Salpion? I know not, though his once living hand signed his work, in bold sprawling letters, ΣAΛΠIΩN AΘHNAIOΣ EΠOIHΣE An Athenian made you, then, I muse, gazing upon its beautiful marble impassivity, and studying the alto-relievo of Mercury with his dancing train giving over the infant Bacchus to a seated nymph of Nysa. He who conceived you made you for sacrifices to Bacchus, lived among those white
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IV
IV
There are two torrents that amaze me to consider—the one is Niagara, and the other the stream of prayer falling perpetually in the Roman Catholic Church. What with masses and the circulating exposition of the Host, there is no day nor moment of the day in which the praises of God are not being sung somewhere: in noble churches, in dim crypts and underground chapels, in cells and oratories. I have been in a great cathedral, sole congregant, and, lo! the tall wax candles were lit, the carven stall
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V
V
It is as the Bambino that Christ chiefly lives in Art, and at this extreme, too, we miss his true inwardness. Yet the tenderness of the conception of the Christ-babe makes atonement. What can be more touching than Gentile da Fabriano’s enchanting altar-piece of the Adoration of the Magi , in which—even as the glamorous procession of the Three Kings resteeps the earth in the freshness and dew of the morning—the dominance of holy innocence seems to bathe the tired world in a wistful tenderness tha
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THE CARPENTER’S WIFE: A CAPRICCIO
THE CARPENTER’S WIFE: A CAPRICCIO
“Habent sua fata—feminæ.” Although the Pilgrims’ Way is a shady arcade, yet the ascent from Vicenza was steep enough to be something of a penance that sultry spring evening, and I was weary of the unending pillars and the modern yet already fading New Testament frescoes between them. But I was interested to see which parish or family had paid for each successive section, and what new name for the Madonna would be left to inscribe upon it. For even the Litany of Loreto seemed exhausted, and still
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THE EARTH THE CENTRE OF THE UNIVERSE: OR THE ABSURDITY OF ASTRONOMY
THE EARTH THE CENTRE OF THE UNIVERSE: OR THE ABSURDITY OF ASTRONOMY
From the swinging of the bronze lamp in the nave of Pisa Cathedral Galileo caught the idea of measuring Time by the pendulum; by the telescope he made at Padua he mapped Space. Within a decade of the burning of Giordano Bruno the heavens were opened up to show the infinity of worlds, and the heliocentric teaching of Copernicus was confirmed by the revelation of Jupiter’s satellites. What the Sidereus Nuncius of Galileo announced was the end of an era. By this terrible book and his terrible teles
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OF AUTOCOSMS WITHOUT FACTS: OR THE EMPTINESS OF RELIGIONS
OF AUTOCOSMS WITHOUT FACTS: OR THE EMPTINESS OF RELIGIONS
And what is the invasion of our consciousness by the extended stellar system to its invasion by the intensive infinities of our own globular parish? The endless galaxy of the centuries and the civilisations has opened out before our telescopic thought. We are no longer at the centre of our cosmos—we can no longer snuggle in a cosy conceptual world, Classical or Christian, nor can we make the best of both these worlds, like Raphael or Milton. The dim populations have become lurid. Japan pours her
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OF FACTS WITHOUT AUTOCOSMS: OR THE IRRELEVANCY OF SCIENCE
OF FACTS WITHOUT AUTOCOSMS: OR THE IRRELEVANCY OF SCIENCE
I did not need the lesson of the Scala ballet—Civiltà inspired by Luce and chasing Tenebre. I know that that light is electric. Have I not found it in the deepest crypt of the underground cathedral of Brescia, illuminating the two Corinthian pillars from the Temple of Vespasius? Have I not seen in the quaint sleepy alleys of rock-set Orvieto the wayside shrine of the Madonna utilised to hold an electric lamp? And have I not seen that ancient marble shrine between Carrara and Avenza supporting th
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OF FACTS WITH ALIEN AUTOCOSMS: OR THE FUTILITY OF CULTURE
OF FACTS WITH ALIEN AUTOCOSMS: OR THE FUTILITY OF CULTURE
When I betake me to a zoological garden, equipped with a pennyworth of popcorn, a food strangely popular even among the carnivora, I am touched by a prescience of all the pleasure and dumb gratitude to be evoked by those humble grains. And in truth how many eager caged creatures are destined to have a joyous thrill of sniffing suspense, followed by the due titillation of the palate! My proffering fingers shall meet the gentle nose of the deer, the sensitive arching trunk of the elephant, the kin
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I
I
So eccomi back in Assisi, after heaven knows how many years, and here is the same bland Franciscan—or his brother—to show me the same tiny monastery garden with the same rusty rose-bushes and tell me the same story of how its native thorns and briars turned into thornless roses with blood-specked leaves after St. Francis had rolled in them to subdue the flesh, and the same anecdote of the neophyte who refused to plant cabbages with their roots upward and was rejected by the saint as insufficient
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II
II
Erasmus dreamed once—so he writes to Charles Utenhove—that St. Francis came to thank him for chastising the Franciscans. The Founder had not the scrupulous stage-costume of his degenerate followers: his brown frock was of undyed wool; the hood was not peaked, but merely hung behind to cover the head in bad weather; the cord was a piece of rope from a farmyard; the feet were bare. Of the five wounds of the stigmata there was as little trace in St. Francis as of the six virtues in the Franciscans.
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I
I
But if Absolute Poverty is less worshipful than St. Francis imagined, Magnificence as an ideal will, I fear, always be found to connote defective moral sympathies, as of the Pharaohs building their treasure-cities on the labour of lashed slaves. For how in our world of sorrow and mystery can magnanimity and magnificence meet? What great soul could find expression in gilt, or even in gold? ’Tis a reflection on the character of the Doges of Venice that everywhere in their palace is a sense of over
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II
II
But if the galley of old Venice stimulates my Socialism, the cinematograph of modern Venice torpifies it again. For be it known that in Venice there are scores of halls and theatres devoted to delectable visions at prices to suit the poorest, and open to ragazzi for a couple of soldi . And in every city of Italy the fever rages; one performance follows on the heels of another, and the wretched manipulator of the magic lantern must subsist on sandwiches while the theatre is clearing and re-fillin
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THE SUPERMAN OF LETTERS: OR THE HYPOCRISY OF POLITICS
THE SUPERMAN OF LETTERS: OR THE HYPOCRISY OF POLITICS
Arrestive was it in an aisle of Santa Croce—the Florentine Church of the Holy Cross—to come upon a monument to Niccolò Machiavelli, anathema alike for Catholicism and Protestantism, the “Old Nick” of the Hudibras rhyme. ’Twas as if Mephisto had managed not only to slip into the Cathedral, but to achieve canonisation. But even a devil is not given his due at the hands of his own countrymen: it was reserved for an English earl, more than two and a half centuries after Mephisto’s passing, to provid
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I
I
It was with a thrill that I came upon a holograph of Lucrezia Borgia in the library of the University of Ferrara. I had already seen in a little glass case at Milan, in the Ambrosian library, a lock of her notorious yellow hair, and this wishy-washy tress, so below the flamboyance of its fame, should have prepared me for the Ferrara relic. For the document was—of all things in the world—a washing list! The lurid lady—the heroine of Donizetti’s opera, the Medea of Victor Hugo’s drama—checked, per
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II
II
Parisina, the Marchioness d’Este, that other heroine whom Ferrara has contributed to romance, or—if you will—to history, for she makes her first English appearance in Gibbon’s “Antiquities of the House of Brunswick,” has been less fortunate in finding defenders; perhaps because her guilt was less. Very shadowy appears that ill-starred Malatesta bride, of whom nothing seems recorded save that she and her paramour, Hugo, her husband’s natural son, were beheaded by her righteously indignant spouse.
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I
I
To cycle in Sicily is to experience the joys or the sorrows of the pioneer, to pedal backward on the road of Time, and revisit the pre-bicycle period ere man had evolved into a rotiferous animal. Palermo has witnessed the landing of many tribes and races: Phœnician and Greek, Roman and Goth, Saracen and Norman, Spaniard and Savoyard. But not till my comrade and I disembarked with our wheels had any cyclist troubled the Custom House. Others, indeed, had preceded us by land, but we hold the record
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II
II
I was not aware that any English writer had achieved the distinction of stamping his name upon a Sicilian street, or even—quainter, if lesser glory—upon a Sicilian inn. Yet at Calatafimi, a little town so obscure (despite its heroic Garibaldi memories) that it had not yet reached the picture-postcard stage, a town five miles from a railway station, up one of the steepest and stoniest roads of the island, I lodged at the Albergo Samuele Butler, and walked through the Via Samuele Butler. Yes, this
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I
I
Here have I been in Italy half a book, and scarcely a page about the Pictures or the “National Monuments.” Ci vuol pazienza. I fear you will soon cry “hold enough,” as I have cried many a time in these endless galleries congested with bad pictures, yet apparently never to be weeded. For the bad Masters were just as prolific as the good, besides having the advantage of numbers. Civerchio, Crespi, Garofalo, the Caracci, Penni, Guercino, Domenichino—the very names recall acres of vast glaring canva
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II
II
A prophet is never without honour in his own country after his fame has been recognised by the world; indeed, his own country will cling piously to him after the tide of his larger reputation has receded, being as slow to unlearn as to learn. Particularly is this true of painters. And when the artist has achieved the feat of substituting himself for a town in the popular imagination, like Bassano, Garofalo, Luini, Sassoferrato, Correggio, the town thus snubbed is usually prudent enough to identi
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III
III
If a painter’s skull is so offensive artistically and so futile scientifically, what shall we say of a poet’s heart? “Look into thy heart and write” may be a sound maxim, but to look into somebody else’s heart, is another matter. Separate sepulture for the poet’s heart is not unknown. But the exhibition of a poet’s heart as a literal literary asset, or library decoration, is, I imagine, only to be seen in the University of Ferrara. ’Tis the heart of the poet Monti who died in 1828, after having
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IV
IV
But from the heart in a more romantic sense the most learned atmosphere is not safe, and I am reminded of another University affair of the heart which I stumbled upon in Bologna. As we know from old coins, Bononia docet . But somewhere about 1320 Bologna ceased to teach. For there was a strike of students. An old stone relief in the Museo Civico, representing a crowned figure holding a little scholar in his lap and stretching his hands to a kneeling group, celebrates the reconciliation of the Re
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LACHRYMÆ RERUM AT MANTUA: WITH A DENUNCIATION OF D’ANNUNZIO
LACHRYMÆ RERUM AT MANTUA: WITH A DENUNCIATION OF D’ANNUNZIO
Befitting was it at Mantua to feel so poignantly the lachrymæ rerum . I should perhaps have felt it at Virgil’s own tomb at Naples, had that not been so vague and rambling a site that no moment of concentration or even of conviction was possible. But the ancient Ducal Palace of the Gonzagas in the Piazza Sordello had the pathos of the unexpected. Nothing in its exterior suggested ruin and desolation, nay the scaffolding across the façade spoke rather of restoration and repair. The tall red brick
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OF DEAD SUBLIMITIES, SERENE MAGNIFICENCES, AND GAGGED POETS
OF DEAD SUBLIMITIES, SERENE MAGNIFICENCES, AND GAGGED POETS
There are few livelier expressions of vitality than tombs, especially tombs designed or commissioned by their occupants. These be projections of personality beyond the grave, extensions of egotism beyond the body. The Magnificent Ones have invariably the mausolean habit. It is another of their humilities. The majesty of death, they know, is not enough to cover their nakedness. Moses, the true Superman, had his sepulchre hidden that none might worship at it. The false Superman ostentates his sepu
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VARIATIONS ON A THEME
VARIATIONS ON A THEME
Among these multitudinous Madonnas , and countless Crucifixions , and Entombments innumerable, who shall dare award the palm for nobility of conception? But there is a minor theme of Renaissance Art as to which I do not hesitate. It is the Pietà theme, but with angels replacing or supplementing the Madonna who cherishes the dead Christ, and it is significant that the finest treatment of it I have seen comes from the greatest craftsman who treated it—to wit, Giovanni Bellini. His Cristo Sorretto
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HIGH ART AND LOW
HIGH ART AND LOW
“Pictures Of this Italian master and that Dutchman.” James Shirley : The Lady of Pleasure . To come in the Uffizi upon a Dutch collection, to see the boors of Jan Steen, the tavern peasants of Heemskerck, the pancake-seller of Gerard Dou, the mushrooms and butterflies of Marcellis Ottone, is to have, first a shock of discord and then a breath of fresh air and to grow suddenly conscious of the artificial atmosphere of all this Renaissance art. Where it does not reek
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AN EXCURSION INTO THE GROTESQUE: WITH A GLANCE AT OLD MAPS AND MODERN FALLACIES
AN EXCURSION INTO THE GROTESQUE: WITH A GLANCE AT OLD MAPS AND MODERN FALLACIES
Touching is that quaint theological tree in the cell of sainted Antoninus in San Marco, upon whose red oval leaves grow the biographies of the brethren. They lived, they prayed, they died—that is all. One little leaf suffices to tell the tale. This brother conversed with the greatest humility, and that excelled in silence. A third was found after his death covered with a rough hair shirt ( aspro cilicio ). In the holy shade of this goodly tree sits St. Dominic, separating—as though symbolically—
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AN EXCURSION INTO HEAVEN AND HELL: WITH A DEPRECIATION OF DANTE
AN EXCURSION INTO HEAVEN AND HELL: WITH A DEPRECIATION OF DANTE
In that volume on the grotesque a chapter—nay, a section—would deal with the attempts of Art to give form and colour to that after-world “from whence no traveller returns.” The grotesquerie belongs more to the thought than to the picture, for in eschatological æsthetics the horrible can be reconciled to the decorative, as it is in Giotto’s Last Judgment at Padua, which I suppose is the earliest treatment of the theme that counts, and which, as Giotto and Dante were in Padua together, was probabl
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ST. GIULIA AND FEMALE SUFFRAGE
ST. GIULIA AND FEMALE SUFFRAGE
Vastly strange are the wanderings of saints and pictures. When a Magnificent One ordered for his gilded sala a Madonna—even with himself and his consort superadded—he was, for aught he knew, helping to decorate Hampton Court in Inghilterra, or the mansion of a master-butcher in undiscovered and unchristened Pennsylvania. And when a saint was born, an equal veil hid the place of his death or of his ultimate patronage. The fate of St. Francis, to live and die and be canonised in his birthplace, wa
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I
I
Peccavi. I have painted Italy, as others use, in sun-colour solely. My pen has been heliographic. That were worthy of the tourist who knows Italy only in her halcyon season. ’Tis the obsession of the alliterative image of the Sunny South, overriding one’s historic memories—stories of the Po frozen over from November to April, of penitents standing barefoot in the snow, bitter adventures of mediæval brides brought tediously to their lords across icy, wind-swept ways in a sort of Irish honeymoon i
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II
II
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 straigh
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THE DYING CARNIVAL
THE DYING CARNIVAL
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 t
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I
I
As I creep humbly through this proud and prodigious Italy, peeping into palaces and passing yearningly before masterpieces, to the maddening chatter of concierges and sacristans, I am constantly stumbling upon the footsteps of him who made the grand tour in the high sense of the words. Not the British heir of bygone centuries with his mentor and his letters of introduction, not even his noble father with the family coach. No, these were pigmies little taller than myself. Your sublime tourist was
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II
II
Only second to the impact of Napoleon on Europe was the impact of Byron. ’Tis Cæsar and Hamlet in contemporary antithesis, for Professor Minto has well said that Byron played Hamlet with the world for his stage. While Byron was soliloquising with his pen, Napoleon was energising with his sword, and whether the pen was really the mightier of the twain is a nice thesis for debating societies. But in Italy, and by the greatest modern Italian poet, Byron has been acclaimed as a man of action. In my
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THE CONSOLATIONS OF PHLEBOTOMY: A PARADOX AT PAVIA
THE CONSOLATIONS OF PHLEBOTOMY: A PARADOX AT PAVIA
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
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I
I
“Italy is too long,” said the Italian. We were coming into Turin in the dawn, amid burning mountains of rosy snow, and the train was moving slowly, in hesitation, with pauses for reflection. “The line is single in places,” he explained. “Italy is too narrow, too cramped by mountain-chains, and above all too long. It is the trouble behind all our politics. There are three Italies, three horizontal strata, that do not interfuse—the industrial and intelligent North, the stagnant and superstitious S
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II
II
Any one who goes to Italy for the Renaissance will find the Risorgimento a discordant obsession; flaunting itself as it does in brand new statues and monuments whose incongruity of colour or form destroys the mellow unity of old Cathedral-Piazzas or Castello-courtyards. Florence has managed to hush up the Risorgimento in back streets or unobtrusive tablets, and Venice with her abundance of Campi has stowed it out of sight, though Victor Emmanuel ramps on horseback not far from the Bridge of Sigh
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III
III
And, in addition to all these busts, statues, allegories, tablets, pillars, cairns, lions, bas-reliefs, wreaths, lists of heroes, records of plébiscites anent annexations, loggias whence Garibaldi orated; in addition to all the Piazze Garibaldi and Victor Emmanuel, all the Corsi Cavour and Mazzini, all the streets of the Twentieth of September and other heroic dates, there is the specific Museum of the Risorgimento from which no tiniest town is immune. To see one is practically to see all. With
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IV
IV
Even those streets or buildings that are free from the Risorgimento are pitted with records or statues. Padua records with equal pride how Dante had his exile sweetened by the hospitality of Carrara da Giotto, and how Giovanni Prati, the singer of to-day, lived in the Via del Santo. Verona celebrates impartially Catullus and some minor poet whose name I forget, if I ever knew it, “who by making sweet verses obtained a fame more than Italian.” Ferrara has a positive leprosy of white plaques. Bass
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V
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 “D
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VI
VI
I went to San Marino to get away from Garibaldi. For here—I said to myself—is the one spot in Italy that is not Italy, that has kept its pristine Republicanism. Here on the Titan Mount is the one spot that cannot possibly acclaim the Union. At most I may encounter a memorial to Mazzini. I left Rimini by the Gate of the Via Garibaldi which leads straight to San Marino, and trudging for the better part of a day I saw it impending horribly some two thousand five hundred feet above me, and after dra
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VII
VII
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 fantasti
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VIII
VIII
So despite the slow black cigar, the ubiquitous farmacia and pasticceria , despite the pervasive petrifaction of past glory, I feel that a vigorous breeze of young thought moves through Italy, and that Mazzini is not entirely swallowed up in the belly of the Great Horse. “ Il nullismo ” was an Asti election-poster’s shrewd summary of the programme of the Clerical Moderates, “ lo star quieti—forma ipocrita di reazione .” If Italy escapes the reaction involved in standing still, we may yet see a T
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IX
IX
“ Rome of the Cæsars gave the Unity of Civilisation that force imposed on Europe. Rome of the Popes gave a Unity of Civilisation that Authority imposed on a great part of the human race. Rome of the People will give, when you Italians are nobler than you are now, a Unity of civilisation accepted by the free consent of the nations for Humanity.” In this magnificent synthesis, written in 1844, Mazzini proclaimed the mission of Rome to the world. His mental outlook was infinitely broader than Lazza
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X
X
But if spiritual Imperialism has made little progress in the land of Mazzini, Rome does not lack its party of material Imperialism, ever egging on Italy to deeds of derringdo and to the fulfilment of its “manifest destiny” in Tripoli and Cyrenaica, whose arid deserts flow with milk and honey under the imperialistic pen. More in sorrow than in anger a writer in the Tribuna rebukes these hotheads as merely literary: conquistadors by fury of metaphor and prosopopœia, whereas real Imperialism—France
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XI
XI
No, it was a road of quagmires and quicksands into which Depretis and Crispi led Italy. The less she knows and thinks of Empire the better for her and for mankind. Latin self-consciousness, if it has its faults of rhetoric, at least enables Young Italy to see that Empire is not to be bought without an ethic of blood and iron, which is foreign to the home ethic. Imperialism is only for races strong or stupid enough to run a double standard. Italy has given her blood prodigally enough for the righ
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XII
XII
Neither the reformed Vatican of Gioberti nor the kingless Quirinal of Mazzini can provide the next phase in human evolution. Profound was that teaching of Jesus—you cannot put the new wine in the old bottles. It was not unnatural that an Italian should look to Rome for the third mission. Rome of the Cæsars, Rome of the Popes, Rome of the People! What a fascinating trinity! The conception of a Rome that having lived twice as a world-force must live again, seized Mazzini in his youth, enthralled h
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