Critical Studies

by Ouida

He quotes the well-known lines of Philippe de Commines as to the 'most triumphant city' that he had ever seen, 'the most beautiful street' (the Canal Grande) 'that there could be found in all the world'; and he adds, 'the stranger who comes now into this street only finds himself in a vast alley of shopkeepers.'

The Canalezzo is now, indeed, as he says, little more than a huge bazaar of tradesmen and dealers in curios, in which hundreds of advertisements, in many-coloured posters, announce the wares which are now for sale within the ancient palaces. The syndicate of foreign traders, now being established in Venice, will achieve its degradation.

Italian ministers and Italian municipalities are often accused of not encouraging warmly enough English, German, and American tradesmen and manufacturers to establish themselves in Italy, and of putting upon foreign commercial establishments in Italy a prohibitive taxation; the truth is that it would be much better were such foreign firms discouraged more effectively. It is urged on their behalf that they bring capital into the country; they may do so, but only to take it out again for their own profit, and Italian labour sweats and groans only that some millionaire of Eaton Square or Fifth Avenue may increase his wealth, whilst at the same time Italian tradespeople, trading in their own right, on their own soil, are undersold by the shop-keeping and store-keeping Briton and Yankee.

I am far from entire agreement with Molmenti in many of his views (as for instance his admiration of English pre-Raphaelism), but I am wholly with him in his views of the claims of Venice, and of the sacrilege which is destroying her; wholly with him in his severe and scornful denunciation of what he rightly calls the gretta e meschina arte dei nostre tempi (the mean and trivial art of modern times), and of the modern density of perception and invulnerable self-conceit which render it impossible for the modern mind to appreciate harmony of hues and of proportions, and impossible for the modern architect to place a new building beside an ancient one without injury or vulgarity. Giotto could place his church at Padua on the remains of the Roman amphitheatre, with perfect unity, although in absolute contrast. When a modern mind has sufficient intuition to enable it to admire a work of other times, it can think of no better way of showing its admiration than to desire to pull down all the houses in its vicinity to lay it bare.

Molmenti says, with entire truth, 'It is a supreme duty for the few, who are capable of feeling them, to assert the sentiment of, and respect for, Art against the destructive and impious tendencies of the time.'

But, alas! it is labour of Sisyphus.

There is now under consideration a scheme to make a tramway-road raised on piles from Mestre to Venice parallel with the line now followed across the lagoon by the railway. It is difficult to comprehend the motives and views of persons who desire to turn a beautiful water-city into a commonplace land one, or rather it is easy to perceive that the motive inspires the views, since nothing but the greed of concessionaires and of contractors could ever have evolved such a plan out of any human mind.

The concessionaire and the contractor are the modern representatives of ghouls and vampires of old-world romance. Truly, to them, as to the Sabreur of Offenbach, nothing is sacred. They are guided entirely by their lust of percentage, and to this they are ready to sacrifice every other consideration; indeed, no other consideration exists for them. They have settled on Italy for many years past as they are now settling on Abyssinia. Venice is essentially a water-city; dealt with as land cities are, under the present system, it will not only be disfigured and mutilated like them, but it will be swept away; it will cease to be. The world will have in its stead a dreary, dingy, trading port, with warehouses, factories, docks, grain elevators, electric works, all the polluted, crowded, discoloured, monotonous frightfulness which you can have now at any moment on any coastline of the United States of America. The Venice of Giambellini and the Veronese will be no more; you will have in its stead a petty maritime Pittsburg.

At the present moment Molmenti has successfully combated this Mestre project, but as the abominable scheme of the night steamers on the Canalezzo, and the pontoon under S. Zeno, was almost unanimously rejected four times by the Venetian Council, yet, on its presentation a fifth time, was accepted (unacknowledged influences having been at work), it is impossible to all those who love Venice as she merits not to feel the greatest anxiety. For these speculators resemble the Röntgen rays, and find means to penetrate through closed doors and all other barriers. Iron still resists the Röntgen rays, and such iron the speculators find now and then opposed to them in the scorn of such men as the Count Antonio Donà della Rosa, who dismissed with offence and disdain the offer of two millions in gold for the purchase of the historic tapestries of his palace in Venice.

Were there only fifty such men as Count Donà in every Italian province they would be able to hold in check the rage of destruction. But the character of Count Donà is very rare in these days anywhere, and grows rarer with every decade. The sordid Mephistopheles of a buyer usually finds as sordid a temper in the Faust of a seller whom he tempts. This may be a temper which enriches individuals; it is not one which ennobles or elevates a nation: and frequently not even individual wealth is realised for any length of time by the base barter, for the gambling on the Bourse, or at the club-house, often makes the ill-got gains vanish almost as soon as they are obtained. Such persons as find no attraction in either form of gambling, unhappily for the most part, shrink from action and from public life. Few have the courage of Molmenti, who throws himself into the strife careless of what enmity he incurs, and rarely even buoyed up by any hope of success in his efforts, since to weave ropes of sand were scarcely more hopeless labour: it is impossible to succeed in any public work where there is no response to your appeal from the multitudes. And the voices of those who do secretly respond in feeling are dumb in Italy; people are afraid to speak; they are intimidated by the cry cast against them of want of energy, and of enmity to progress (progress, good heavens! a gin-shop instead of a temple!); they are afraid to be called reactionary, romantic, unpatriotic; and in municipal government, as in other government, everything is done by the wire-pullers, the money-grubbers, the speculators.