However valuable a King may be to Italy as a symbol of Unity, Mazzini was historically accurate when he pointed out that the conception of kingship has no roots in Italy, the one epoch of imperial sway being a mere degeneration of the Roman Republic. It was a fine stroke of tactics to celebrate Mazzini’s centenary in 1905 as a national festival, in which the King himself took part. But these centennial tablets and statues were Italy’s way of stoning its prophet; this festival was Mazzini’s real funeral, burying his aspirations out of sight so effectively that the man in the street has forgotten that for Mazzini the goal of Garibaldi and Cavour was only a starting-point; and a popular British Encyclopædia assures us that Mazzini “lived to see all his dreams realised.”
Not that there is a word to be said against the charming and intelligent young man who presides over Italy, and who has signalised himself among his peers by founding an International Agricultural Institute. But what a climax to the long struggle against tyranny, this meeting of King and Czar! To be sure Italy had already made friends with Austria in the very year after Garibaldi’s death—“in the interests of the peace of Europe.”
Poor Europe. They make a spiritual desert and call it peace.
“Songs before Sunrise”—yes, but where is the sun?
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 “Death to the Czar” survives the royal meeting.
But the Irredenta is not to be taken seriously. Not along political lines does the Risorgimento proceed, any more than along the moral lines for which Mazzini worked. The second phase, the second Risorgimento it may indeed be called, is the Industrial Resurrection. Resurrection—because Italy, whose Merchant of Venice reminds us that the Italian nobleman was always a trader, and whose leading Florentines were Magnificent Moneylenders, can hardly be regarded as an Arcadia transformed by the cult of the dollar. Even Mazzini demanded revival of “the old commercial greatness”; perhaps he might have been content to wait patiently through this materialistic epoch, if he were sure it would lead to a third Risorgimento.
Hygiene has yet to penetrate and suffuse the new prosperity. But if even Perugia still stinks in places and Foligno everywhere, the country is getting perceptibly cleaner, and perhaps godliness is next to cleanliness. But the severest moralist cannot grudge Italy her rise in wealth and happiness: the poverty of the peasantry, accentuated by the extravagant ambition of Italy to be a Great Power in the smallest of senses, has been terrible. At what a cost has Italy achieved her first Dreadnought, so perversely christened Dante Alighieri!
Beggars abound—blind, crippled, or with hideous growths—especially in the South. Doubtless the influx of the pleasure-pilgrim has increased the deformity of the population, and the Italian beggar pushes forward his monstrosity as though it were for sale, but there is real physical degeneration all the same. The discovery of New York and South America by the Italian has fortunately co-operated with the discovery of Italy by the pleasure-pilgrim and the foreign investor, and some 600,000 Italians in the South of Brazil provide the makings of a Trans-atlantic Italy. Even the semi-savage villages of Sicily are sown with steamer advertisements, and batches going and returning for jobs or harvests make an ever-weaving shuttle across the Atlantic.
And if the monuments of the First Risorgimento clash with the old historic background of Italy, still more is the Second Risorgimento in discord with it. One almost sees a new Italy, infinitely less beautiful but not devoid of backbone, struggling out of the old architectural shell which does not in the least express it. The old ducal and seignorial cities, the old republics, are developing suburbs, sometimes prosperous if prosaic, like the new quarters of Florence and Parma; sometimes grotesque, like Pesaro’s sea-side resort, with its “new” architecture—lobster-red and mustard-green lattices, and sham golden doors, carved with busts; sometimes hideous, like the outskirts of Verona, where under the blue, brooding mountains rises a quarter of electrical workshops and chemical factories. Ancient towered Asti grows sparkling with its new brick Banca d’Italia, and its blued and gilded capitals in the Church of S. Secondo Martire. Look down on Genoa, with its fantasia of spires, campaniles, roof-gardens, green lattices, marble balconies, chimneys decorated with figures of doges and opening out like flowers, and see how the old narrow alleys are almost roofed with telegraph and telephone wires. Go down to the widened harbour and see the warehouses, the American sky-scrapers, the smoking chimneys, the great steamers sailing out for Buenos Ayres and New York, the emigrants with their bundles. The blue bird sings here no more; you hear only the bang of the hammer, which Young Italy declares is the voice of the century.