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.
It was when faith was at its full—near the year 1000—and in connection with the Christmas season, that the Patriarch of Constantinople instituted the Feast of Fools and the Feast of the Ass, travestying the most sacred persons and offices. The Lord of Misrule is no heathen deity, but a most Christian majesty; and King Carnival is the spiritual successor of the old King of Saturnalia, whether Frazer be correct or not in attributing to him the direct succession. For the truly religious the carnival is necessary to the sanity of things. It is an expression of the breadth and complexity of the Cosmos, which would otherwise be missing from the Easter ritual. The God of the grotesque is as real as the God of Gethsemane and the Cosmos cannot be stretched on a crucifix. It bulges too oddly for that. And it is this grotesque side of life that finds quasi-religious expression in the Carnival processions, with their monsters known and unknown to Nature, with their fanciful hybrids and quaint permutations of the elements of reality. Humanity herein records its joyous satisfaction and sympathy with that freakish mood of Nature which produced the ornithorhynchus and the elephant, and shaped to uncouthness, instead of to symmetry and beauty. Alas! I fear humanity is only too acquiescent in these deviations of the great mother into the grotesque; the folk-spirit runs more fluently to gross pleasantry and comic tawdriness than to the Beautiful, and many a Carnival procession is a nightmare of concentrated ugliness.
The suspicion takes me that our St. Valentine’s Day, so dominatingly devoted to grotesque caricature, and so coincident with the Carnival period, is really the Catholic Carnival in another guise and that prudish Protestantism has entertained the devil unawares.
But the Carnival—like St. Valentine’s Day—is dying. It is more alive in the ex-Italian Riviera than in Italy proper. I have a memory of a Carnival at Siena which consisted mainly of one imperturbable merry-maker stumping with giant wooden boots through the stony alleys. A Carnival at Modena has left even less trace—some dim sense of more crowded streets with a rare mask. At Mantua, too, there was no set procession—children in fancy dress, with a few adult masqueraders, alone paid fealty to the season. At Bologna the last night of Carnival was almost vivacious, and in the sleety colonnades branching off from the Via Ugo Bassi there was quite a dense crowd of promenaders defying the bitter wind, while muffled groups, with their coat-collars up, sat drinking at the little tables. There were some children, fantastically pranked, attended by prosaic mothers, there was a small percentage of masked faces, while a truly gallant cavalier (escorting a dame in a domino) paraded his white stockings, that looked icy, across the snowy roads. No confetti, and only an infrequent scream of hilarity. That the old plaster missiles, with other crudities, have disappeared, is indeed no cause for lamentation, but a Carnival without confetti is like an omelette without eggs.
Well might a writer in the local paper, Il Resto del Carlino, lament the brave days of old when a vast array of carriages and masks coursed through the Via S. Mamolo, and the last days of the Carnival were marked by jousts and tourneys, and tiltings at the quintain, with a queen of beauty in white satin and magnificent masqueraders showering flowers, fruits, and perfumes, and nymphs carrying Cupid tied hand and foot.