Italian Fantasies

by Israel Zangwill

And thus across its precipices San Marino joins hands with “Young Italy,” whose programme according to the organ of that name embraces the exiling of the Vatican beyond the frontiers of Italy, the sweeping away of the bankrupt remains of Christianity, and the abandonment of Imperialism and the African adventure. I will engage there are even Futurists in San Marino.

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 fantastic fury of iconoclasm the Futurists demand even the destruction of the creations of ancient genius that overhang their lives—they would make an art-pyre as fervently as Savonarola. Climbing the Clock Tower of St. Mark’s Square, they threw down coloured handbills repudiating the vulgar voluptuous Venice of the tourist. “Hasten to fill its fetid little canals with the ruins of its tumbling and leprous palaces. Burn the gondolas, those see-saws for fools!” So far so good. But mark the beatific vision that is to replace this putrefying beauty. “Raise to the sky the rigid geometry of large metallic bridges, and manufactories with waving hair of smoke. Abolish everywhere the languishing curves of the old architectures.” How characteristic of the Second Risorgimento! It must be by an oversight that the smoke is still permitted to be “waving.” I imagine that the resurrection of the old Campanile of Venice must have been the last straw. For ten hundred and fourteen years this gloomy old tower had impended, and when it did at last fall of its own sheer decrepitude, lo! it must be stood up again, exact to the last massy inch, and even with the same inscription—Verbum caro factum est—on its bells. As if a bell could have no new message after a millennium! Let the historian, at any rate, mark that the Futurists did not rise till the Campanile was not allowed to fall. The police, taking the Futurists seriously, prohibit their meetings, which will end in making them take themselves seriously. But they are a useful counteractive to the Zealots of the Zona Monumentale, who, in their passion for the ruins of Rome, forget the claims of life. When the Present says, “I must live,” the artist and the archæologist too often reply: “Je n’en vois pas la nécessité.” Carducci even called on Fever to guard the Appian Way. But cities exist for citizens, not for spectators, and when the telephone bell of the Present rings, we should reply like the Italian waiter: “Pronto! Desidera?” We cannot do in Rome as the Romans do, for they have to live, not look at Ruins. And let us not expect the Romans to do in Rome as we do. If tramways must run along the Via Appia, at least Fever will retire before them. How long is it our duty to guard the ruins of the Past? Suppose the tombs and temples of the Appian Way should threaten to collapse altogether, have we to keep them in a state of artificial ruin? Augustus boasted that he found Rome brick and made it marble. If the industrial Risorgimento found Rome marble and made it brick, I suppose there are compensations for Augustus. Imperial Rome never thought of dedicating a slab of that marble to the nameless pauper dead, worn out in the obscure service of their country, as Industrial Rome has done in a touching inscription. And should Rome extend the tale of its bricks to house the homeless troglodytes who pig in the remains of that ancient marble, I will throw up my cap with the Futurists.

Pisa is to me a dream-city, but to the Pisans it is a centre of the glass industry and the cloth industry, with municipalised gas. They have done handsomely in leaving me my dream-city outside the town life. If topographical obstacles prevent other ancient cities from thus surviving themselves, let me be thankful for small mercies. There was one old inn at Perugia which had escaped the electric light and the pleasure-pilgrims, and where the porter peeled the potatoes, but as I sat this very Spring, dining in the quaint courtyard, lo! to my chagrin the light of modernity flooded it for the first time. But there chanced too that night so joyous a band of University students, on gymnastic business bent, the old courtyard resounded with such pranks, and songs, and cheers, such fulness of young new life, that I felt Perugia could not for ever live on griffins and Peruginos and Baglioni horrors. In that moment even the joyous madness of the Futurists appeared to me saner than the gloom of a Gissing concluding his Italian journeys “By the Ionian Sea” with the wish that he could live for ever in the Past, the Present and its interests blotted out.

It is a cheap æsthetic to retire to the Past, too blind to see beauty in the Present, and too anæmic to build it for the Future. But humanity is not a museum-curator; the cult of ancestors, once the backbone of Hindu-Aryan civilisation, survives only in China. The cult of descendants has taken its place, the Golden Age is before, not behind, and the debt we owe to our fathers we pay to our sons, not necessarily in the same currency. No doubt the Past is ivy-clad, the Present raw and the Future dim. But as happiness does not come from the search for happiness, neither does beauty come from the search for beauty. “Rather seek ye the Kingdom of God and all these things shall be added unto you.”

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 Third Risorgimento that will resurrect Mazzini. Even a Republican Congress has met freely, if with closed doors.

The popular Italian newspapers, like the windows of the bookshops, are far more intellectual than our own, and there is a healthy readiness to try social experiments under the popular referendum. If the nationalisation of the railways does not yet pay, on account of the multiplicity of officials, it has at least provided a more punctual service than of yore, and the third-class passenger is treated as a human being. A Jew as Premier and another as Syndic of Rome constitute an amende honorable for the Italy which established the Ghetto and, cramping a prolific race, produced in Venice the first specimen of the American sky-scraper. Capital punishment is abolished—the apostle, Beccaria, duly petrified at Milan—and despite the legend of the stiletto and the vendetta nobody demands its restoration. Phlebotomy prevails alarmingly, through the habit of using a knife as if it were the mere point of the fist, but it is a peaceable and polite people. The niente with which the veriest vagabond deprecates your thanks, the prego of the courtlier defence against gratitude, are the outer and audible sign of an inner gentleness. Irritatingly vague as regards time and space and money, a foe to definite agreements, a lover of the horizon and the buona mano, running restaurants with unpriced menus, and shops with unmarked goods, the Italian has always the saving grace of respect for things of the mind. Who ever saw a picture of Tennyson labelled—like the photographs of Carducci—“Mighty Master, Sublime Poet, Refulgent National Glory!” There are moods in which I could applaud even the stones.

But it is the revolt against Rome which stirs most furiously the intelligenza of Italy—as of all the Latin world. While in England the fight against Christianity is confined to a few guerilla papers in low esteem, in Italy it is a pitched battle. And the modern Anti-Pope is far more formidable to the Vatican than the mediæval, being a rival idea, not a rival man. The Vatican handicaps itself superfluously by sneering at the Risorgimento—though I am told its haughty refusal to recognise the Unity of Italy brings in shekels from Mexico, Colombia, and other strongholds of the spirit. Instead of joining in the recent Garibaldi jubilation, it asked through its organ whether the prosperity of the South had not been sacrificed to the interests of the North. And so far from making concessions to Modernism, it is sitting tighter than ever, issuing lamentable Syllabuses and Encyclicals, accumulating lists of suspects. It censured Minocchi for allegorising the first three chapters of Genesis, and excommunicated Murri for saying the Pope ought not to play at politics. The freethinkers complain uneasily of its aggressiveness, lamenting—with unconscious humour—that it makes propaganda! The army itself—ay, even the old Garibaldians—are not safe from its guiles! As if the Congregation of the Propaganda were of to-day!

But the confiscation of monasteries and churches to military and civil uses—to barracks, agricultural colleges, gymnasia, hospitals, what-not—the transformation of elaborate historic shrines into State Monuments, are indications of the ground lost to the Church in its own peculiar land. Strange was it to see squads of half-nude lads at gymnastics in the old Renaissance church of St. Mary Magdalen at Pesaro. Still more surprising to see a carpenter sawing away in the lofty, well-preserved Church of the Jesuits in Pavia, his wood stacked in the forsaken frescoed chapels, as in a strange return of Christendom to its origins, or an illustration of the new Logion, “Cleave the wood and ye shall find me.” I bought coal at a still more decayed church, taking off my hat involuntarily.