If it be true, as Professor Sergi considers, that Italy can never hope to extend her conquests and her commerce as northern and western nations will do, then it is surely all the more needful to hold her own place in the world by the culture and development of her own natural genius. A nation, like a person, should be always natural; to be fashioned on others is to be without any confidence in oneself, and lose one's equilibrium in the stress of every difficulty. The rigid and indigestible character of modern education is not adapted, I repeat, to the Italian temperament, which is prime-sautier, subtle but inflammatory, impressionable but unresisting, and loses enormously when it is shut down in the hot stove of the so-called 'highest studies.' Even the national manners, naturally so graceful and charming in all ranks of Italian society, lose their suavity, their ease, their elegance, under the influence of the foreigner and the vulgarity of modern habits. Good taste passes away with good manners; and pigeon-shooting, sleeping-cars, automobiles, bicycles and tramway crowds bring with them the breeding suitable to them; and the modern monuments, the modern squares, the modern houses, the whitewash daubed on old walls, the cast-iron bridges spanning classic waters, the straight, featureless, glaring, dusty streets, the electric trolleys cutting across ancient marbles, all conduce to make ignoble what was noble, and belittle all which was great.
All this is not the fault of a too reverent admiration for an incomparable Art, for a glorious history; it is a much worse thing; it is an oblivion of both history and art, ingrate, unworthy, and ruinous.
Many say that Italians are unfit for freedom; it is certain that they have never been tried by it. Whatever their government is called, freedom is unheard of under its rule. Year after year, century after century, all the Italian provinces, however differently governed, have been held down under an absolutism more or less disguised. The general character, with heroic exceptions, has been inevitably weakened. The man of easy temper and pleasure-loving disposition consoles himself with amusement; the serious man seeks refuge in study or in science; one and all accept inaction as their lot. A political camorra guides the chariot of the State, and the people draw aside, and stand silent, only hoping to escape being crushed under its wheels. Professor Sergi must be well aware of this sad truth; then why speak to Italy as if she were a free country, why speak to her of expansion and vitality when he sees her without power to purge herself of the fiscal and constitutional disease which is in her blood?
With as much reason might he chain up a greyhound, and bid him course the hare; clip the wings of a skylark, and bid it mount to the clouds.
XIII
ALMA VENIESIA
'Our cities are fast losing their best characteristics,' said Pompeo Molmenti at Montecitorio, in one of those eloquent speeches which the Chamber hears often from him, and hears, alas! always in vain. His name is no doubt known to many English readers although his beautiful books are not as widely read outside the peninsula as they merit. His conspicuous position as President of the Venetian Academy has perhaps in a manner obscured, out of Italy, his infinite merits and vast erudition as a writer on history and art, and even Wyzewa reproaches him with making Venice too exclusively his universe. But surely Venice is wide enough, and great enough, to be the world of a man penetrated from his earliest years with her beauty, and with the grandeur of her past, and who, in his childhood, saw, accomplished by his seniors, that union of Venice to northern and central Italy, which raised such high hopes and caused such glorious dreams.
His works are, as I have said, but little known in England, not known at least as the classic scholarship, the historic learning and the artistic erudition of their writer deserve; nor are the debates of the Italian Chamber truthfully enough represented in the English press for the brilliant oratory of the deputy for Salo to have found any echo in English ears. Many-sided as great Italians usually are, politics, literature, and history alike claim his allegiance, and art is his adored mistress. Eloquent, dauntless, and sarcastic, his periods pierce like arrows and lash like scourges, whether he condemns the miserable blasphemies of the modern spirit, or holds up to mockery such individual vanity as that of the Under-Secretary of State, who caused his own name and titles to be cut under a verse of Dante's on one of the stones of the church of S. Francesco at Assisi!