De: ITALIAN FANTASIES
I might cite in proof of woman’s retrogression since the Dark Ages the glorification of womanhood through “The Divine Comedy,” but the Italian poet’s translation of life into literature is, I fear, no more legal evidence of the real status of woman in the Middle Ages than her chivalrous deification at the hands of the Germanic or Provençal poets is a proof that she was treated even as an equal of her worshippers. Dante’s unknown Beatrice sounds like a woman who was snubbed by her husband and brothers. But Matilda, who plays second fiddle to her, and who is equally drawn by Dante as a mild flower-culling “bella Donna” was in reality the warrior Countess of Tuscany, and the fact that Dante feminises and floralises her shows that he had no real respect for feminine dominance in the actual shapes it took in life, and that he was only prepared to idealise woman on condition of her conforming to his ideal.
The scholars and commentators who have always been so puzzled at the metamorphosis of Matilda have forgotten man’s tendency to break off woman’s beak, whether in reality or in imagination. But even if Preger be correct in identifying Dante’s Matilda, not with the armoured Amazon of Tuscany, but with Mechtilde, the nun, whose mystic visions are the flowers she culls, it remains true that Dante’s ideal was never the “Virago,” a title of honour which was inscribed on her tomb, and which even at the epoch of the Renaissance implied nothing but praise. The word may serve to remind us that there is no sharp bisection of qualities between the sexes.
Matilda was, in fact, a sufficient refutation in herself of the notion that there is a rigid division between the qualities of men and women. Such a difference as is implied does, indeed, exist, but it is between men and men, and between women and women, as well as between men and women, and the popular nomenclature, which calls certain women mannish and certain men effeminate, recognises the possibility of deviation from the normal. Indeed, considering that both parents affect their child, the attempt to breed a special feminine psychology, immune from politics and fighting, must be perpetually thwarted by the criss-cross action of heredity, as upon the daughters of warriors and statesmen. Matilda—sired by the Magnificent Monster, Boniface—was a man in ten thousand. She led her own armies. She patronised learning and founded the law schools of Bologna. If she kept her husbands in subjection, casting off one after the other, she had none of the vices of the male despot; indeed, her second marriage-contract stipulated only a sexless union. There was nothing, indeed, except these vices in which she ranks below the Magnificent Monsters who preceded her in the lordship of Lucca or Lombardy. I must admit that the Countess of Tuscany fell under the influence of her spiritual director (as the Male Magnificent falls under the influence of his unspiritual directress), and that she used her power, and her treasure, as it is feared women will, to bolster up the Church; in fact, she, with her mother Beatrice, attended the Council of Rome in 1074, at which investiture by lay hands was declared illegal, and hers was the Castle of Canossa, to which Henry IV came to abase himself before the Pope. And that dubious temporal power of the Pope’s might not have come into such solid being had she not left her possessions to the See of Rome, and thus practically founded the States of the Church. This, of course, is the secret of her high position in the earthly paradise of the Purgatory. But, after all, religious zeal is not a female monopoly, and even Bloody Mary could not hold a candle to Torquemada.
Catherine of Siena exercised an equally critical influence upon the fortunes of the Papacy and upon European history when she persuaded Gregory XI to move the Papal seat back from Avignon to Rome; a mission in which Rienzi had failed a generation earlier. Catherine, for all her ecstasies and self-scourgings, had far more common sense than the male mystics.
It was in allowing for such divergences from the normal that the Dark Ages surpassed our electric-lit era, whose logic confounds the optional with the compulsory, and the individual with the general. It was not pretended that every woman can or must be a warrior, but she who had military genius was not debarred from developing it. It was not claimed that every woman can or must be a saint, but St. Clara stood equal with St. Francis, and St. Catherine of Siena with St. Dominic. And at the Renaissance Boccaccio devotes a book to celebrated females, and Michelangelo writes most humble love-sonnets to the poetess, Vittoria Colonna (whose _Rime_ still sell, and who unlike Matilda stood for religious reform). Vittoria’s noble classic head, especially as seen helmeted in Michelangelo’s design, suggests a very Minerva, and from various quarters we hear of the political woman, the learned woman, the patroness of the arts, and the female physician, while at the foot of the staircase of Padua University stands a statue of a lady Professor, a happier Hypatia. I forget if this is Lucrezia Cornaro, who was made a Doctor of this University and a member of so many learned societies throughout Europe, but no enumeration of Italian heroines should omit her brilliant ancestress, Caterina Cornaro, Queen of Cyprus, whose court at Asolo was one of the centres of the Renaissance.
“The education given to women in the upper classes,” says Burckhardt, the learned historian of “The Renaissance in Italy,” “was essentially the same as that given to men. . . . There was no question of ‘women’s rights’ or female emancipation, because the thing in itself was a matter of course. The educated woman no less than the man strove naturally after a characteristic and complete individuality.”
When one remembers the struggle in nineteenth century England for the higher education of women, and particularly the desperate resistance to their studying and practising medicine, one realises the fallacy of expecting melioration from the mere movement of time. There is no automatic progress. What is automatic is retrogression, so that the price even of stability is perpetual vigilance.
But what has St. Giulia, born at Carthage and crucified in Corsica, to do with Brescia? I have already pointed out the free trade in saints, by which they were liable to posthumous export. St. Giulia’s body was transported from Corsica by Desiderio, a noble Brescian, who ascended the Longobardian throne in 735. She was placed in the church dedicated to St. Michael, the patron saint of the Longobardi, whom she ousted in 915, from which date the Church was known as St. Giulia’s. A Nunnery of S. Giulia had existed from about 750, and remained in being for over a thousand years, till its suppression in 1797 by the inevitable Napoleon. Coryat, who visited it in 1608, describes it as having been in time past “a receptacle of many royall Ladies.” It is now a Museum of Christian Art, and there I saw St. Giulia depicted in sculpture by Giovanni Carra, her figure nude to the waist and stretched on a real wooden cross with real nails in her hands and feet. Alas for Christian Art!
To-day our St. Giulias, in revolt against a social order founded on prostitution and sex-inequality, demand political rights as leverage for a nobler society, and, despite the advice of kindly Rulers, they are as ready as in the seventh century to be martyred for their faith, though they have replaced the passivity of St. Giulia by measures of aggression. Guariento foresaw the modern militant type when he drew those charming female angels with red and gold shields and long lances, and wings of green and gold, who stand on clouds—“suffragette” seraphs, they seem to me. You may see a battalion of them in the Museo Civico of Padua, filling a whole corridor, like a procession in the lobby at Westminster. One of these fair warriors trails by a cord a black demon with two quills like white horns, doubtless some literary Cabinet Minister. Another weighs two souls on scales, and Female Suffrage does indeed weigh men’s souls in the balance, to find them mostly wanting. For of all forms of modern vulgarity, I deem nothing more dreadful than the scoffing callousness towards the sufferings of the “Suffragettes.” They are only self-inflicted, we are told, as if this was not their supreme virtue. That in this age of blatant materialism women should still show that they possess souls is wondrous comforting to the idealist, tempted to believe that the fount of living waters had run dry, and that Giulia’s only travels were now made by motor-car to smart country houses.
There is nothing which at first sight seems more puzzling than the wickedness of good people. For it has often been said that the truly devout and respectable Christians are the very ones who would crucify Christ afresh if he appeared again, as indeed Arnold of Brescia, who had a touch of his spirit, was crucified by Emperor, Pope, and Church. And St. Bernard, the inspirer of the Second Crusade to recover the dead bones of Christ, played a leading part in hounding him down, as the Franciscans played a leading part in hounding down Savonarola.
Now why was St. Bernard—that _santo sene_ who was chosen by Dante to induct him into the last splendours of the Paradise, and whose noble hymns to Jesus still edify the faithful—so blind to the divine aspects of his victim? And why is it that the citizens of Ferrara, whose excellent statue and eloquent tribute to their illustrious townsman Savonarola faced my hotel window, could not be trusted not to stone their next prophet in a cruder sense of the words?
A converse question will conduct us to the answer. Why is the hooligan in the gallery of the theatre ever the chief friend of virtue? Why is the wife-bruiser the most fervid applauder of the domestic sentiment? Because the man in the gallery looks down on the tangle of life like the god his name implies: he sees it in as clear perspective as the aeronaut sees the network of alleys through which the pedestrian blunders; the plot is straightened out for him, the villain duly coloured, virtue in distress plainly marked by beauty and white muslin, and through no mists of prejudice or interest or passion he beholds the great outlines of right and wrong. ’Tis to the credit of human nature that, confronted with the bare elementals of ethics, and freed from egoistic bias, the human conscience, even the conscience most distorted in life, reacts accurately and returns a correct verdict with the unfailingness of a machine. This it is that preserves the self-respect of the blackest of us, this capacity of ours for seeing our neighbours’ sins, which is the chief bulwark of public virtue. Wherefore, could St. Bernard have seen Arnold of Brescia as history sees him, or as a dramatist of insight would have drawn him, St. Bernard would have been the first to be horrified at St. Bernard’s behaviour. But a Saint, no more than a hooligan, is free from passions, interests, and prejudices of his own, especially an ecclesiast and a theologian and a founder of monasteries. Wilful and obstinate as are all the saints of my acquaintance, the most domineering are the clerical. For all St. Bernard’s genius and holiness, he could not endure a rival point of view. By him, and not by this interloping Italian monk, this pupil of the critical Abélard, must the world be turned to righteousness; nay the heresies of Abélard himself—“who raves not reasons”—must be condemned by the Council of Sens.
St. Bernard, if he lived to-day, would write the life of Arnold of Brescia with holy horror at his tragic fate, and to-morrow, when the passions and mists of to-day are cleared away, some future Asquith will find a fresh stimulus to rebellion against the Peers in the noble sufferings of some St. Giulia of the Suffrage.
ICY ITALY: WITH VENICE RISING FROM THE SEA
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 in the days before trains _de luxe_; nay, this Platonic concept swamps even the Aristotelian experience. For I have seen Florence in a London fog and Venice in a Siberian snowfall. I have seen St. Mark’s Square turned into a steppe, without pigeons, without pleasure-pilgrims, snow-muffled, immaculate, bleak, given over to raw-knuckled scrapers and shovellers, knee-deep in crumbling hummocks, or pushing snow-heaped wheelbarrows towards the providential water-ways, the snow-crusted Campanile towering over the desolate glacial plain like the North Pole of childish fancy. Yea, and on the water-ways floated—O horror of desecration—white gondolas! Nature, like some vulgar millionaire, had defied the sumptuary edict consecrated by immemorial tradition, and, amazed as the Australian pioneer who first beheld black swans, I watched these white gondolas gliding along the swollen canals. And I recall Bologna in a blizzard—a snowfall so persistent that it closed the Pinacoteca by the curious method of solidly overlaying the skylight of the main Gallery and rendering the pictures invisible. It was a _festa_ for the janitors, a holiday fallen from heaven. In the Piazza Nettuno the big fountain was snowed over, and the cab-drivers sat under great hoary umbrellas that had hitherto been green, their cabs looking like frosted cakes. A white hearse passed still whiter. The snow slashed its way even under the colonnades, and formed a slippery coating of ice on their pavements. Bran, scattered copiously in these arcades and at all the street-crossings, maintained a feeble colour-fight against the all-pervading white.
There is an icy Italy more boreal than Britain, inasmuch as less equipped against winter. For the native, too, partakes of the Platonic fallacy, and because his cold season is briefer than his warm, and oft infused with a quickening radiance, he shrugs it out of existence, especially when Carnival invites to _al fresco_ conviviality. The beggar, indeed, recognises the winter, as becomes a practical professional man, and squats at the church-porch with his private pan of burning charcoal; but the more irresponsible burgher, with his stone floors, and his stoveless, chimneyless rooms, treats winter as an annual exception, calling for improvised measures. He is an æstival animal that builds for the summer, though his brigand-cloak, whose left fold is so sardonically thrown over his right shoulder, betrays to the scientific observer its prosaic origin as the throat-protector of an Arctic creature. Of late, under the pressure of foreign finance, the better hotels have veined themselves with steam-pipes. But the steam rises late, and the pipes are only hot when the guest has departed.
Never have I seen the pretence of perpetual summer carried further than at Rimini, where in a blinding snowstorm, when every narrow archaic street was bordered with four-foot mounds of dirty snow, and the traffic was limited to donkey-carts dragging snow through the Porta Aurea to pitch it into the river, the congealing cabmen sat all day on their powdered boxes cheerfully crying in competitive chorus—every time they caught a glimpse of me—“To San Marino? To San Marino?” That little Republic—one of the last political curios left, like a fly in amber, in modern Europe—is a drive of many hours, even when “the white road to Rimini” is a shimmering sun-path, yet there was no suspicion of pleasantry in the cabmen’s eagerness to crawl through the niveous morass. They seriously expected me to set forth on this summer expedition, with at most the carriage closed against the driving flakes. It sorted better with my humour to plough afoot over the muffled Boulevard to the new Rimini which has grown out of the old rotting Rimini of Cæsar and the Malatestas.
For there is a sham Rimini as well as a real Rimini—one of those toadstools of cities which flourish so rankly in our century of comfort. This is the Lido—an Italian Ostend, sacred to modern villas, mammoth hotels, bathing establishments, restaurants, the surgy shore tamed into a Parade for parasols. There is a staring, many-windowed, many-balconied Grand Hotel, crowned by two baroque domes, with busts on its façade and vases at its corners tapering up into rods. There is a little Lawn-Tennis Club-Bar and a big Casino, with a restaurant terrace back and front. There are pretentious _Palazzini_. There is a huddle of flaring houses, recalling the grotesque “new architecture” of Madrid, and a large uncouth hydropathic establishment in terra-cotta, and a long row of green bathing-huts.
Perhaps the profoundest observation of Dickens in Italy was that the marvellous quartette of buildings outside the life of Pisa—the Cathedral, the Campo Santo, the Baptistery, and the leaning Tower—is like the architectural essence of a rich old city, filtered from its prosaic necessities. Of the Lido of Rimini (and of its likes) it may be said that they are the architectural essence of a rich new city, filtered of all spiritual and poetical values.
But the Lido I saw was purged of all this vulgarity, buried under stainless snow, which lay deep and virgin over every street and grassy space, and shrouded every flaunting structure in primeval purity. The Parade was blotted out, restored to Nature, and deep drifts of snow defended it from re-invasion. The Casino lay forsaken, wrapped in the same soft spotless mantle, the dual stone steps leading to its twin drinking-terraces transformed into frozen cascades, its central gates uselessly guarded by blanched barbed wire. Desolate was even the great garage, with its cheap fresco of our modern goddess in the car, her flamboyant robe turned ermine. Beyond the buried Parade, the Adriatic rolled in sullenly, scarce visible save by a gleaming line of surf that lit up a narrow riband of its foreground; all but the breaking wave was hidden by a wild whirl of flakes that misted sea and sky into a grey nullity. Throughout the whole pleasure-city not a dog prowled nor a cat slunk nor a bird fluttered; not a footstep profaned the splendour of its snow. Its myriad casement-eyes were closed in heavy sleep; not a shutter open, not a blind raised. It was a city hibernating like some monstrous Polar animal. Not a few pleasure-cities thus abate their vitality in the winter, but so absolute a dormitation I have never witnessed. It seemed incredible that with the Spring it would stir in its sleep, it would shake the snow off its lubberly limbs, loose its gay swarm of butterfly-parasols. How could that frost-bound terrace ever ring again with the clink of glasses and the tinkle of laughter? How could bathers ever again lie basking on that frigid strand? No, it was a dead city I saw, a city overwhelmed by a new ice-age. And the seas and lands that radiated from this snowy centre were freezing too, as science had foretold; swiftly the deadly chill was spreading through every vein and artery of the nipped earth, curdling its springs and coagulating its vast oceans and crusting over even its petty oases of continents with thick-ribbed ice in which a rare microscopic rotifer alone preserved a germ of vitality. The Arctic and Antarctic zones expanded towards each other, like two blind walls closing in on life, and with a clash of giant icebergs in a biting equatorial blast, the last rift of green earth and blue water was blotted out. And now the globe was spinning again in a glacial void, as unconscious of the absence of its skin-parasites as it had been of their presence. Fated for fresh adventures and new cosmic combinations, the planet rolled its impassive whiteness through the dumb heavens. But mortals had put on mortality, and of all the haughty hopes and splendid dreams of man there remained zero. Earth, his cradle and his pasture, was become his frigidarium and his cemetery, and the snow fell silently over the few faint traces of his passing. His million, million tears had been frozen into a few icicles.
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 straight, across which rises the high, bare, dreary endless wall of blank brick surrounding the monastery. On the other hand stretch the vast fields with leafless thin trees. It was of this region that Jehan d’Auton wrote when Pavia was taken by the French: “Truly this is Paradise upon earth.” Even allowing for the flowery meadows and running springs of the end of the fifteenth century, the worthy Benedictine could have found fairer Paradises nearer Paris. Much of Northern Italy is still monotonous marshland. Over the bald brick wall of Mantua, nine feet thick, that backs the Piazza sacred to Virgil, I gazed one morning at a dismal swampy lake, a couple of barges, a factory chimney, and spectral, leafless stumps of trees, the brownish soil of the lake showing through the dead sullen water, a ghost of sun hovering over rows of pollarded planes. Here, methought, had Virgil found a suggestion for his Stygian marsh. I would not say a word against Mantua itself, which is most lovable, with side-canals that might be Venetian, and ever-flowing taps and old arches, arcades and buildings. But from Mantua to Modena I saw naught but ugly brown grass over flat lands, with pollarded elms and vines stretched from tree to tree. Here and there a little canal relieved the dismal plain. Near Modena a few poplars appeared. A team of lovely oxen drawing a cart gave the landscape its one touch of beauty.
Rimini proper is picturesque enough, with its Porto Canale full of small barques with tall masts. But between it and Ravenna, what desolation! Outside the town the gaunt ruins of the Malatesta Castle—a bare wall and a bare squarish rock—were the prelude to the same bare snowy plains, the same little pollarded elms, varied by tall skeleton poplars. Once a copse of firs, bowed down by snow, broke the white flatness. Near Classe, famous for Sant’ Appolinare, the waste became even marshier, sparse twigs of desolate shrubs alone peeping through the white blanket. Nearer Ravenna a few signs of life appeared, a dead cottage, or a living hovel, or a few spectral trees, or a brick bridge over an ice-laden river. On such a light brown marsh specked with stagnant pools the modern Italians have put up hoardings with advertisements of cognac. A little further East their remote progenitors put up Venice!
Never was there so apparently hopeless a site as those islands of the lagoons, preserved from malaria only by a faint pulse of the “tideless, dolorous midland sea.” How so marvellous a city rose on the wooden piles of the refugees, how out of so dire a necessity they made so rare a beauty and so mighty a force, was always a puzzle to me till I read that these fugitives before the Lombard Conquerors were Romans! Then it all leapt into clearness. Venice is Rome in the key of water! The same indomitable racial energy that had built up Rome and the Roman Empire built up Venice and the Venetian Empire. Hunted from Padua, the Romans are able to express themselves in water as powerfully as in earth—to create a new empire in Italy and the East, and build a mighty fleet, and crush the Turks, and hold the carrying trade of the world, and for six centuries keep the Adriatic as a private lake. And in this new Empire they are touched by the shimmering spell of water to new creations of joyous colour on canvas, to fairy convolutions in marble, and a church that rises as lightly as a sea-flower. For here all that is sternly Roman
“Doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange.”
But let us not forget that despite her seven hills Rome also began as a pile-village, and that the Campagna is of the same marshy character as the soil around Venice. I have more faith in Goethe’s intuition that Rome was built up by herdsmen and a rabble than in the thesis, expounded by Guglielmo Ferrero at Rome’s last birthday celebration, that it was the carefully chosen site of a colony from Alba, with Romulus and Remus in their traditional rôles. For though her seven hills enabled Rome to keep her head above water, they did not enable her to keep her feet dry. The Forum Augusti was anciently swamp and became a swamp again in the Middle Ages, and once some earlier form of gondola plied between the Capitol and the Palatine Hill. Thus the races who hailed from Rome had water in their blood, and the instinct to build on piles. It is a strange instinct which races have preserved and obeyed—in the foolish human fashion—even on land that was high and dry. What wonder if it survived in latency in these ex-Romans! Yes, Venice was Rome in the key of water, as Rome was Venice in the key of earth. And the Roman Church—is she not Rome in the key of heaven? Is it not always the same racial mastery that confronts us, the same instinct for dominance? Does the Church not hold the after-world as Rome held the ancient world, does she not own the lake of fire as the Doges owned the Adriatic? Drive Rome from her throne on the hills and she builds up her pedestal again on sea-soaked piles: hound her from the lagoons, and of a few acres around the piazza of St. Peter she makes the seat of a sovereignty even more boundless and majestic.
Hardly had I written this when I opened by hazard my first edition of Byron’s “The Two Foscari” (1821), and was startled to read in his appendix as follows: “In Lady Morgan’s fearless and excellent work upon ‘Italy’ I perceive the expression of ‘Rome of the Ocean’ applied to Venice. The same phrase occurs in ‘The Two Foscari.’ My publisher can vouch for me that the tragedy was written and sent to England some time before I had seen Lady Morgan’s work, which I only received on the 16th of August. I hasten, however, to notice the coincidence and to yield the originality of the phrase to her who first placed it before the public.” Byron goes on to explain that he is the more anxious to do this because the Grub Street hacks accuse him of plagiarism. But turning to the tragedy itself, I find that Byron has rather plagiarised _me_ than the admirable “Gloriana,” for her phrase might be a mere metaphor, whereas Marina observes explicitly:
“And yet you see how from their banishment Before the Tartar into these salt isles, Their antique energy of mind, all that Remain’d of Rome for their inheritance, Created by degrees an ocean-Rome.”
But Byron’s over-anxiety to disavow originality was due to the morbid state of mind induced by the aforesaid hacks, one of whom had even accused him of having “received five hundred pounds for writing advertisements for Day and Martin’s patent blacking.”
“That accusation,” says Byron, “is the highest compliment to my literary powers which I ever received.” I can only say the same of Byron’s plagiarism from myself.
But Byron need not have been so apologetic to Lady Morgan, for ’twas the very boast of Venice to be “the legitimate heir of Rome,” whose Empire Doge Dandolo re-established in that Nova Roma of Constantinople with whose art and architecture her own is so delectably crossed.
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 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.