Views and Opinions

by Ouida

It might be deplorable, unwise, possibly thankless, if the country dismissed the House of Savoy; but in so doing the country would be wholly within its rights. The act would be in no sense whatever lesa alla patria; it might, on the contrary, be decided on, and carried out, through the very truest patriotism. The error of the House of Savoy is the same error as that of the House of Bonaparte; they forget that what has been given by a plebiscite, a later plebiscite has every right and faculty to withdraw. The English nation, when it put William of Orange on the throne, would have been as entirely within its rights and privileges had it put him down from it. When a sovereign accepts a crown from the vote of a majority, he must in reason admit that another larger and later majority can withdraw it from his keeping. A plebiscite cannot confer Divine Right. It cannot either confer any inalienable right at all. It is, therefore, entirely illogical and unjust to visit the endeavour and desire to make Italy a republic as a crime of high treason. An Italian has as much right to wish for a republican form of government, and to do what he can to bring it about, as the Americans of the last century had to struggle against the taxation of George III. And if the Casa Savoia be driven from the Quirinale, it will owe this loss of power entirely to its own policy, which has impoverished the nation beyond all endurance. The present King’s lamentable and inexplicable infatuation for the German alliance, and all the frightful expenditure and sacrifice to which this fatal alliance has led, have brought the country to its present ruin.

At the moment at which these lines are written, the flames of revolution are destroying the public buildings of the city of Bari; before even these lines can be printed, who shall say that these flames may not have spread to every town in the Peninsula? Of course, the present revolts may be crushed by sheer armed force; but if a reign of terror paralyse the movement for awhile, if a military despotism crush and gag the life out of Palermo and Naples and Rome, as it has been crushed and gagged by similar means in Warsaw and in Moscow, the causes which have led to revolution will continue to exist, and its fires will but die down awhile, to break forth in greater fury in a near future. The Crispi of Montecitorio is now busy throwing into prison all over the country a large number of citizens, for doing precisely the same things as the Crispi of Aspromonte did himself, or endeavoured to do. But in the present age a man may abjure and ignore his own past with impunity. As it is always perfectly useless to refute Mr Gladstone’s statements by quotations from his own earlier utterances, so it would be quite useless to hope to embarrass the Italian premier by any reminder of his own younger and revolutionary self. Renegades always are impervious to sarcasm, and pachydermatous against all reproach.

Crispi is very far from a great man in any sense of those words, Au pays des aveugles le borgne est roi, and he has had the supreme good fortune to have outlived all Italian men of eminence. If Cavour and Victor Emmanuel were living still, or even Sella and Minghetti and La Marmora, it is extremely probable that the costly amusement of making Crispi of Aspromonte First Minister of the Crown would never have been amongst the freaks of fate. He has had ‘staying power,’ and so has buried all those who would have kept him in his proper place. It is possible that if he had adhered to his earlier creeds he might have been by this time President of an Italian Republic, for his intelligence is keen and versatile, and his audacity is great and elastic. But he has preferred the more prosperous and less glorious career of a minister and a maire du palais. He has emerged with amazing insolence from financial discredit which would have made any other man ashamed to face the social and political worlds; and, mirabile dictu! having dragged his King and country into an abyss of poverty, shame and misery, he is still adored by the one and suffered to domineer over the other.

Successful in the vulgar sense of riches, of decorations, of temporary power, and of overweening Court favour, the Sicilian man of law is; successful in the higher sense of statesmanship, and the consolation of a suffering nation, he never will be. And that he has been permitted to return to power is painful proof of the weakness of will and the moral degradation of the country. There is no great man in Italy at the present hour, no man with the magnetism of Garibaldi, or the intellect of D’Azeglio, or even the rough martial talent of Victor Emmanuel, and in the absence of such the sly, subtle, fox-like lawyers, by whom the country is overrun, come to the front, and add one curse more to the many curses already lying on the head of Leopardi’s beloved Mater Dolorosa. It is possible that, for want of a man of genius who would be able to gather into one the scattered forces, and fuse them into irresistible might by that magic which genius alone possesses, the cause of liberty will be once more lost in Italy. If such a leader do not appear, the present movement, which is not a revolt but a revolution in embryo, will probably be trampled out by armed despotism, and the present terror of the ruling classes of Europe before the bugbear of anarchy will be appealed to in justification of the refusal to a ruined people of the reforms and the atonement which they have, with full right, demanded.

January 1894.

BLIND GUIDES

Amongst the famous gardens of the world, the Orti Oricellari[^[D]] must take a foremost place, alike for sylvan beauty and for intellectual tradition. Second only to the marvellous gardens of Rome, they were first, for loveliness and for association, amongst the many great and carefully-cultured gardens which once adorned Tuscany. Under the Rucellai their superb groves and glades sheltered the most intellectual meetings which Florence has ever seen. The Società Oricellari (which continued that imitation of the Platonic Academy created by Cosimo and Lorenzo) assembled here under the shade of the great forest trees. Here Machiavelli read aloud his Art of War, and here Giovanni Rucellai composed his Rosamunda. The house built for Bernardo Rucellai by Leon Battista Alberti was a treasure-house of art, ancient and contemporary; and learning, literature and philosophy found their meet home under the ilex and cedar shadows, and in the fragrant air of the orange and myrtle boughs. High thoughts and scholarly creation were never more fitly housed than here. Their grounds, covered with trees, plants, fruits and flowers, were then known as the Selva dei Rucellai, and must have been of much larger extent in the time of Machiavelli than they had become even in the eighteenth century; for when Palla Rucellai fled in fear of being compromised in the general hatred of all the Medici followers and friends, he left the Selva by a little postern door in its western wall which opened on to the Porta Prato and the great meadow then surrounding that gateway. Therefore they must then have covered all the space now occupied by the detestable modern streets called Magenta, Solferino, Montebello, Garibaldi, etc., and I have myself indeed conversed with persons who remember, in their youth, the orchards appertaining to these gardens existing where there are now the ugly boulevards and the dirt and lumber of the railway and tramway works.

On this unfortunate flight of Palla in 1527, the populace broke into the gardens, and destroyed the statues, obelisks and temples which ornamented them, but the woods and orchards they appear to have spared; for, some thirty years later, the park seems to have been in its full perfection still, when Ferdinand, in the height of a violent and devoted passion, gave it to his Venetian mistress as her casin de piacere, and Bianca brought a mode of life very unlike that of the grave and scholarly Rucellai into its classic groves; for although her fate was tragic, and her mind must have been ever apprehensive of foul play, she was evidently of a gay, mirthful, pleasure-loving temperament.

The jests and pranks, the sports and pastimes, the conjuring and comedy, the mirth and music, the dances and mummeries, which pleased the taste of Bianca and her women, replaced the ‘noble sessions of free thought’ and the illustrious fellowship of the Academicians. The gravity and decorum of the philosophical society departed, but the floral and sylvan beauty remained. At the time when she filled its glades with laughter and song and the beauty of her women, the Selva was what was even then called an English garden, with dense woods, wide lawns, deep shade, and mighty trees which towered to the skies. But when it passed into the hands of Giancarlo de’ Medici that Cardinal decorated it with a grotto, a giant, and other gentilezze, and changed it into an Italian garden, with many sculptural and architectural wonders, and plants and flowers from foreign countries, employing in his designs Antonio Novelli, who, amongst other feats, brought water to it from the Pitti, and built up an artificial mountain in its midst. He must have done much to disfigure it, more than the mob of 1527 had done; but soon after these ill-considered works were completed the gardens passed to the Ridolfi, who, preserving the rare flowers and fruits, with which the Cardinal had planted it, allowed the woodland growth to return to its freedom and luxuriance. Of him who ultimately restricted the park to its present limits, and robbed the house of all its treasures of art and admirable ornament, there is, I believe, no record. From the Ridolfi it went to a family of Ferrara, of the name of Canonici, and from them to the Stiozzi, who sold it in our own time to Prince Orloff, by whose heir it has once more been put up for sale. Amidst all these changes the beauty of the park, though impaired, has existed much as it was when it was celebrated in Latin and Italian prose and verse, although diminished in size and shorn of its grandeur, invaded on all sides by bricks and mortar, and cruelly violated, even in its inmost precincts. The house has been miserably modernised, and the gardens and glades miserably lopped, yet still there is much left; and many of their historic trees still lift their royal heads to morning dawn and evening stars. Enough remains to make a green oasis in the desert of modern bricks and stucco; enough remains for the student to realise that he stands beneath boughs of cedar and ilex which once sheltered the august brows of Leone X. and cast their shade on the gathered associates of that literary society of which no equal has ever since been seen. The gardens, even in their shrunken and contracted space and verdure, are still there, priceless in memories and invaluable to the artist, the student and the lover of nature and of history.

It seems scarcely credible, yet such is the fact, that these treasures of natural beauty and storehouses of historical association should have already once been invaded to build the ordinary modern house called Palazzo Sonnino, and that now the municipality is about to purchase half of them—for what purpose?—to cut the trees down and cover the ground with houses for the use of its own office-holders, those multitudinous and pestilent impiegati who are the curse of the public all over Italy, and feed on it like leeches upon flesh. That the destruction of such gardens as these for such a purpose can even be for an instant spoken of is proof enough of the depths of degradation to which public indifference and municipal vandalism have sunk in the city of Lorenzo. It can only be equalled by the destruction of the Farnesina and Ludovisi gardens. Few places on earth have such intellectual memories as the Oricellari gardens; yet these are disregarded as nought, and the cedars and elms which shaded the steps of philosophers and poets, of scholarly princes and mighty Popes, are to be felled, as though they were of no more value than worm-eaten mill-posts.