In Cremona I made trial of a Veglione whose allurements had been placarded for days. A Trionfo di Diana, heralded in large letters, peculiarly suggested pomp and revelry. And indeed I found a theatre almost as large as La Scala, illumined by a dazzling chandelier, with four tiers of boxes resplendent with the shoulders of women and the shirt fronts of men—tiaras, uniforms, orders, all the spectacular social sublime. I had not imagined that obscure Cremona—no longer famous, even for violins—held these glittering possibilities, and it set me to the analysis that Italian theatres—above the platea—are all shop-front, making a brave show of a shallow audience, for the encouragement of the actors and its own gratification, instead of obscuring and dissipating it over back benches.
The stage and the platea had been united by an isthmus of steps and in an enclosure sat a full orchestra. Around the musicians danced men in evening-dress and a few ladies in masks, most of whom, notwithstanding the superabundance of males, preferred to dance with their own sex. This was largely what the spectators had come out for to see, and the disproportion of the dancers to the wilderness of onlookers was the only comic feature of this Carnival Ball. True, a few clownish figures clothed in green and wearing little basket hats improvised mild romps on the stage, and occasionally from the unexpected vantage of a box shouted down some facetious remark, but there was no unction in them, nay not even when they capped the joke by clapping large baskets on their heads. However, the Trionfo di Diana still remained to account for the vast audience, and there came a moment when an electric thrill ran through the packed theatre, the dancing ceased, and the dancers ranged themselves, looking eagerly towards the doors. After a period of tense expectation, there came slowly up the platea a few huntsmen with live dogs and stuffed hawks, and one melancholy horn that gave a few spasmodic single toots, whereupon appeared Diana in a scanty white robe, recumbent on a floral car of foliage and roses, drawn by six hounds, one of which alone rose to the humour of the occasion, and by his inability to remain on his own side of the shaft achieved a rare ripple of laughter, while the applause that followed his adjustment brought quite a wave of warmth. But the chill fell afresh, as the procession, after a cheerless turn or two on the stage, made its exit as tamely as a spent squib. A paltrier spectacle was never seen in a penny show.
A runner, accompanied by a cyclist, who pumped him up with his pump, made a fresh onslaught upon our sense of fun, but when he too trailed off equally into nothingness, I quitted the dazzling midnight scene, leaving the beauty and fashion of Cremona to its Carnival dissipations.
Yes, the Italian Carnival is dying. Unregretted, adds the Anglo-French paper that serves the select circles of Rome. For it is only the Carnival of the streets that is passing, this genteel authority tells us reassuringly. “A far more glorious Carnival is replacing it. In the grand cosmopolitan hotels fête succeeds fête.”
Alas, so even the Carnival has passed over to the Magnificent Ones, who not content with annexing the best things in their own lands sail under their pirate flag in quest of the spoils of every other, moving from Rome to Switzerland, from Ascot to Cairo, with the movement of Sport or the Sun. What a change from the days of the Roman Fathers, when religion circled round one’s own hearth, and exile was practically excommunication! The mother-land is no longer a mother but a mistress, to be visited only for pleasure, and every other land is only another odalisque, devoid of sanctities, ministress to appetites. The Magnificent Ones of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance at least stayed at home and minded their serfs and their business: our modern Magnificent Ones go abroad, make new serfs everywhere, and mind only their pleasures. And hence it is that the festa of the Carnival whose only raison d’être was religious, whose only justification was its spontaneity, is to be annexed by the Magnificent Mob, ever in search of new pretexts for new clothes and new vulgarities. The froth of pleasure is to be skimmed off, and the cup of seriousness thrown away. The joyousness that ushers in Lent is to be torn from its context as the fine feathers are torn from a bird, to flutter on the hat of a demi-mondaine. The grand cosmopolitan hotels with the grand cosmopolitan rabble will usher in with grand cosmopolitan dances the period of prayer and fasting, and the dying Carnival will achieve resurrection.
NAPOLEON AND BYRON IN ITALY: OR LETTERS AND ACTION
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 Napoleon, who strode over the holy land of Beauty like a Brobdingnagian over Lilliput. He came, he saw, he commanded. He looked at a picture, a pillar, a statue—and despatched it to France. He gazed at Lombard’s iron crown—and put it on. He beheld Milan Cathedral—and it became the scene of his coronation, with blessing of clergy and the old feudal homage. He perceived an ornate ducal bed—and slept in it, the poor duke a-cold. He rode through the ancient streets, not Baedeker but cocked hat in hand, graciously acknowledging the loyal cheers of the ancient stock. He examined the Sacro Catino in Genoa Cathedral and bore it off with its precious blood; he espied the rich treasure of Loreto, and lo! it was his; he saw Lucca that it was fair, and it became his sister Elisa’s. He visited Venice—and wound up the Republic. He admired St. Mark’s—and haled its bronze horses to Paris, transferring to it the Patriarchate as in compensation. The Patriarchal Palace itself he turned into barracks; superfluous monasteries and churches were shut up and their lands confiscated. He even destroyed, doubtless in the same righteous indignation, the lion’s head over “the lion’s mouth” in the Palace of the Doges, while the Bucentaur, their gorgeous galley, he burnt to extract the gold.
But he was not merely destructive and rapacious. The founder of the Code Napoléon repaired the amphitheatre of Verona, and resumed the neglected building of the façade of Milan Cathedral, and opened up the Simplon route to Italy, and marked its terminus by the Triumphal Arch of Milan. He surveyed the harbour of Spezia for a war-harbour and projected to drain Lake Trasimeno away—conceptions which to-day are realities. And all this and a hundred other feats of construction in the breathing-spaces of his Titanic single-handed fight against embattled Europe. Not seldom, as I passed my wood-shop in Venice, with its caligraphic placard All’ Ingrosso e al Minuto, did I think of the Corsican superman, with his wholesale and retail dealings with the little breed of mankind. Perhaps to establish “the Kingdom of Italy,” with twenty-four departments and his step-son as viceroy, and to turn the little district of Bassano into a duchy for his secretary were, to Napoleon, feats of the same apparent calibre. Even so we stride as carelessly over a brooklet as over a puddle. Surely there is a fascinating book to be written on Napoleon in Italy, as a change from the countless Napoleons in St. Helena or the flood of foolish volumes upon his mistresses.
And a final appraisement of Napoleon still remains to seek. The little fat man who had “the genius to be loved”—except by Joséphine and Marie Louise—and who provided for his family by distributing thrones, has long since ceased to be the ogre with whom British babes were frighted, though he has not yet become Heine’s divine being done to death by British Philistinism. Carlyle classed him among his “Heroes” and credited him with insight because, when those around him proved there was no God, he looked up at the stars and asked, “Who made all that?” But this was surely no index of profundity—merely a theism of Pure Reason and an illustration of Napoleon’s peculiar interest in action. “Who made all that?” Making, doing, that was his essential secret—unresting activity, rapid striking, utilisation of every moment. He was as alert the moment after victory as others after defeat. Was one combination destroyed, his nimble and exhaustless energy instantly fashioned an alternative. Mobility of brain and immobility of soul—these were his gifts in a crisis. When all was lost and himself a captive, “What is the use of grumbling?” he asked his attendants. “Nothing can be done.” The tragedy of Napoleon was thus the obverse of the tragedy of Hamlet, whose burden lay precisely in there being something to be done. Imagine the great demiurge at work in these days of telegraphy and steam, motor-cars and aeroplanes. What might he not have achieved! As it was, he just missed creating the United States of Europe. Anatole France accuses him of having taken soldiers too seriously. As well accuse an engineer of taking cranes and levers too seriously. Soldiers were the indispensable instruments by which Napoleon raised himself to the level of those more commonplace rulers of Europe who had found their cradles suspended on the heights. It is the German Emperor who takes soldiers too seriously, who marshals them with the solemnity of a child playing with his wooden regiments. And the Kaiser, already in the purple, has not Napoleon’s excuse. His is simply a false and reactionary view of life, as of a house-maid who adores uniforms. But Napoleon would have played his Machiavellian game equally with grocers; and, indeed, his lifelong ambition to sap British commerce was conceived in the spirit of a Titanic tradesman, who knows better than to count corpses. He was the fifteenth-century condottiere magnified many diameters, playing with countries and nations instead of with towns and tribes, and sweeping in his winnings across the green table of earth as in some game of the gods. As a Messiah of Pure Reason, an Apostle of the People, he was able, like Mohammed, to back the Word with the Sword, and, less veracious than the prophet of the desert, to combine for the making of History its two great factors of Force and Fraud. Through him, accordingly, History made a leap, proceeding by earthquake and catastrophe instead of by patient cumulation and attrition. He was a cosmic force—a force of Nature, as he truthfully claimed—a terremoto that tumbled the stagnant old order about the ears of Courts and Churches.