Critical Studies

by Ouida

The sense of beauty has died with the public destruction of beauty: it is dead in the ruling classes; and what is far worse, dead in the populace; dead, or nearly so, in the writers, the painters, the sculptors. If in this latter class there were any strong, true, and delicate instinct of what is noble and beautiful, Molmenti would not stand alone in the Council of Venice; Prince Corsini would not alone have resisted the destruction of the Florence of the Renaissance; D'Annunzio would not alone repeat the denunciations of two dead foreigners, Geoffroy and Gregorovius, of the violation of ancient and of mediæval Rome. The voices of the artists (were they artists in feeling indeed) would be, and would have been, so powerful that no ministry and no municipality would have ventured to ignore them.

But most modern artists are afraid to offend their public, their patrons, the town councils, the mayors, and communes, or the Ministers of Education or of Public Works, to which or to whom they look for employment; they have the decoration-hunger, which is one of the chief curses of Continental Europe, and decorations only come from the powers above; and in these powers above there is not the faintest glimmer of taste or feeling, there is only jealousy of a great and unapproachable Past.

Therefore, the few who do feel indignation do not speak; and the speculator, the jerry builder, the cunning lawyer and conveyancer, the vast body of greedy and gross spoilers, have their way unchecked.

In the case of Rome, of course, that cruellest and ugliest of all passions, religious antagonism, has had much to do with the atrocious ruin of the Prati del Castello, of the Trastevere generally, of the passage of the four trams in derision in face of St Peter's, of the hideous gimcrack houses built under the walls of the Lateran, of the destruction of street shrines and votive chapels and ancient chapels, of the erection of the entire quarters of what is called New Rome;[16] but religious hatred cannot be the cause of the barbarous scraping and daubing of classic buildings, of the degradation of the Via Nomentana, and of Porta Pia, of the ruin of such glory and grace as that of the Ludovisi and the Farnesina villas, of the bedaubing and beplastering, the dwarfing and disfiguring, the vulgarising and disfiguring of everything which is touched by the modern ædiles of Rome. No matter what the syndic be called, whether Ruspoli or Guiccioli, or Torlonia, or Colonna, no matter whether the cabinet be headed by Rudini or Giolitti, by Crispi or Pelloux, the pickaxe is never at rest, and the hammer and hatchet sound ceaselessly in street and garden, on desecrated altars, and in devastated groves.

To what end have served the fury and haste with which ancient ecclesiastical buildings have been razed to the ground in both the cities and the provinces? To none whatever, so far as any diminution of the funds and the numbers of ecclesiastical foundations can be counted.

The suppression of the monasteries and convents was actuated by love of gain as much as by polemical rancour, by the hunger of the newly-created kingdom, for their treasures and riches, for their rich endowments and saleable possessions. There was no sincerity about it; there could be none in a nation then almost entirely Catholic; and this insincerity is proved by the indifference with which the State allows the re-establishment of these buildings and these orders. At this moment the bare-footed Carmelites, a most bigoted order, have lately opened a new church and convent in Milan, which are endowed with three millions of money, and have been opened with great pomp by the Archbishop. Similar institutions are being re-created in all directions, possessing all the evils of those which were suppressed, without their artistic beauty, and largely without their good faith and munificent charity. Rich and lovely maidens continue to take the veil when too young to have any realisation of what they do,[17] and the Church is as enriched as of old by their dowers; whilst the monk is not the less dangerous to intellectual liberty because, when he goes out of the gates for a few hours, he wears a coat and trousers like those of the layman of the adjacent town.

The ancient monasteries and convents were at least an education to the eye: who could daily see the Certosa of Pavia, or of the Val d'Ema, and not be purified and instructed in visual memory and artistic instinct? The new revivals of the old orders teach nothing except a base and strictly modern union of superstition and compromise. Indeed, the State forces the priest to be base; it makes it the condition of allowing his existence. If he do not succumb to the State in all things (even in those most opposed to his conscience), he is deprived of his placet; and Zanardelli has in these last few days desired to deprive him of it without such legal forms as have hitherto been observed. For one of the greatest of the misfortunes of Italy is that, not in the Radicals nor in the Conservatives, nor in any one of the groups into which political life is divided, is there the slightest trace of any respect for individual freedom; liberty of action and of opinion obtain no fair play whatever from any one of the parties of the State.

True, it is not in Italy alone that the sense of symmetry and harmony is leaving the terrestial race; the want of beauty, as the daily bread of life, grows less and less felt every year by the modern mind wherever that mind has been unhinged by the manias of modernity. Beauty, natural and artistic, has become entirely indifferent to the majority of even highly-educated modern men and women. They have no leisure to contemplate it, no temperament capable of feeling it; it is in no sense necessary to them; it makes no impression either on their retina or their memory. Their lives pass before a revolving panorama, so rapidly dissolving and changing that they have no distinct impression of any of the scenes or subjects. Every year modern habits become more unlovely, and modern sensibilities more blunted. The preservation of what is beautiful, per se, at the present time is almost always ridiculed, unless it can be shown to be joined to some profit or utility. The characteristic passion of the hour is greed; greed of possession, desire of acquisition, and passion for ostentation. Trade has become an octopus embracing the whole world; the thirst for gain engrosses all classes; beauty, unless it be a means of gain, is to this temper a useless, or worse than a useless, thing: it is regarded as a stumbling-block and encumbrance.

It is doubtful if even the power of perceiving what is beautiful has not in a great measure left a large part of the population in all countries. Modern cities would not be what they are now had not the race to a great extent grown colour-blind, and become without the sense of proportion. Modern builders and modern engineers would remain unoccupied were not the generations, which employ and enrich them, destitute of all artistic feelings.

Many of the prevailing fashions would be so intolerable to persons with any delicate or accurate perception, that such fashions could never have become general had any perception of this kind been general. Even the deformity of their bodies awakens no aversion in the modern public; if it did, the bicycle would never have been in demand.