Critical Studies Part 18

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 cla.s.sic 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 t.i.tles to be cut under a verse of Dante's on one of the stones of the church of S. Francesco at a.s.sisi!

I can imagine nothing more painful than for a man of fine taste and high culture, born and bred in such a city as Venice, venerating every shadow on its waters, the moss upon its walls, to be forced to see, day by day, roll up and break over it the mud-wave of modern barbarism. So may have watched, from the marble atrium of his villa, some Roman patrician of the days of Honorius the approach, upon the golden horizon, of the unlettered tribes drawing nearer and nearer as the sun descended, to burn, to slaughter, to deflour, to desecrate. 'Great and sublime attainment would be his who should save Venice from the dreadful menace now hanging over her!' cries Pompeo Molmenti, with the bitter consciousness that none will succeed in that endeavour, since her lot is now cast in times when her treasures of art are in the hands of tradesmen and speculators, to whom her past glory is naught.

His years have been pa.s.sed amongst her art and her disciples of art; he has watched the spoilers at their work amongst her treasures, and, with the grief of a son who beholds his mother dishonoured, he has been overwhelmed in these most recent times by the indignity and injustice of her lot.

She shares that lot with her sisters; the burden of her chains lies also on them; every city throughout the peninsula from Monte Rosa to Mount Etna has been insulted, dishonoured, defamed, defiled, even as she herself. But Venice is threatened with something still more than this; she is threatened with absolute extinction. There are schemes now simmering in the brains of speculators by which she will disappear as completely as one of her own fishing-boats, when it is sucked under the sea, canvas, and timbers, and crew, in a night of storm.

A few weeks ago, Molmenti gave the solitary vote against the destruction of more of the Calle, and the establishment of a night service of steamers on the Ca.n.a.lezzo. The record of that single unsupported vote is his own highest honour, and the shame of his contemporaries and co-citizens. But he wrestles in vain with the forces of cupidity and stupidity. Whether in the Council Chamber of Venice, or in the Parliament of Montecitorio, he strives in vain to resist the trampling hoofs of those devastating barbaric hordes which a pseudo civilisation vomits over his country.

What he justly calls the burial of the lagoons goes on every day; loads of clay and sand and stones being poured into that silent water which so lately mirrored walls which were green with the hart's-tongue, penny-wort, and ivy-leaved toad's-flax, and reflected statues white through ages in the dustless air, shining acacia leaves, boughs of fig and laurel, carved niches, illumined shrines; the rubble and the rubbish are shot down into the ca.n.a.ls which are chosen for extinction, and the walls are sc.r.a.ped, the acacias, the fig-trees, the laurels are cut down, the fruit-boat, the _sandalo_, the bridal gondola, are pushed out of the way by the brick-laden launches; where marble fretwork crossed the air, there is a cast-iron pontoon, and higher still a telephone wire; under foot there is a paved or macadamised way. Marco Polo could not find his house now; it still exists, but all around it is disfigured, dismantled, defaced.

The Palazzo Narni and the Ponte del Paradiso made, a few years ago, together one of the most beautiful corners in the world; go look at that spot now; it is enough to make the grey-beard of Cadore rise from his grave. There still remains on high, between the two houses, the admirable cuspide of the Trecento, on which there is sculptured the Madonna, who opens wide her mantle and her cloak to receive the kneeling people; but the beautiful bridge has been destroyed, and in its place has been built a frightful structure, with asphalte roadway and painted metal parapet. In similar manner the elegant, yet bold, arches of the three bridges at S. Nicolo di Tolentino exist nowhere, now, except upon the canvases of painters, and the three banks, near the Campo di Marte, which those graceful arches united, are now basely conjoined by three erections of stucco and cast-iron.

'In the _Arzere_ of Santa Marta,' Molmenti writes in his latest work, 'once so green and gay and sunlit, a poor quarter no doubt, but one intensely interesting by customs and traditions, there blocks the way now, in all its stolid vulgarity, a cotton factory. Between the public gardens and the Lido, instead of the lovely verdure of the island of Sant' Elena, in its grace and its green twilight of drooped boughs, is a shapeless expanse of mud and cinders, which spreads farther every season, and threatens to invade the water-s.p.a.ce which separates it from the gardens and S. Pietro di Castello. On this desert of c.o.ke and dirt there have been lately erected offices, sheds, warehouses, chimneys, engines, in the midst of which there still stands, hiding as though ashamed, the beautiful church of the Quattro Cento. But the invasion has been useless; the speculations have failed; and art and history mourn unavailingly the senseless and profitless destruction of this fairest gem of the lagoons: _insularum ocellus_. The ruin of Sant' Elena, of the view of San Giorgio, of the bridge of San Lio, the hideous new wing added to the n.o.ble brown marbles of the Pal Tiepolo, the hideous iron warehouse fronting and affronting the Ca d'Oro, the whitewash daubed on the Pal Sagredo, the indecent alterations and additions to that jewel of Pietro Lombardo the Pal Corner-Spinelli, the new red (like ruddle or red ochre) with which the Pal Foscari has been insulted, these are all offences which every traveller of taste, every artist of culture, can see, and number, and denounce. But countless, and unknown to the world in general, and undreamed of by those who knew not Venice fifteen years ago, is the enormous loss to the city by the destruction at the hands of the Munc.i.p.al Councillors of the _Calli_, of the _Arzere_, of the mediaeval bridges, as of those of which I have spoken above, of innumerable nooks and corners, historical and beautiful; old wells, old fountains, old shrines, beautiful fragments of sculpture and fresco, solemn convent walls, graceful church spires and monastic belfries, parapets, arches, doorways, spiral staircases winding up to hand-forged iron balconies, lamps of metal-work fine as lace-work, all these in innumerable numbers have been effaced, pulled down, built over, or sold; and, above all, there have been destroyed those lovely quiet green places, called each _il Campo_ or _il Campiello_ (the field or the little field), where, of old, the Venetians fed their sheep, stretches of gra.s.s enclosed by old houses, old convents, old towers, old quays, old bridges, with always a sculptured well in the centre of each, and the splash of oars near at hand.'

These have nearly all had a similar fate to that of the beautiful house in the Campo di S. Margherita, which Molmenti especially laments, of which the Venetian colouring, the carven galleries, the climbing vines, the bronze railing, the falling water with its spouting jets, have all disappeared, to give place to a yellow, plastered modern building, while its ba.s.so-relievo of the Virgin, so long dear to all artists, has been sold to a picture dealer.

'One must be blind indeed,' writes Molmenti, 'not to see the horrible misgovernment of Venice in this latter half of the century, and persons still young can remember a Venice poetic, picturesque, filled with fascination and mysterious charm, now destroyed for no other reason than a senseless and brutal craze for novelty.'

What language can strongly enough denounce such wicked and insensate acts?

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 Ca.n.a.l 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 Ca.n.a.lezzo is now, indeed, as he says, little more than a huge bazaar of tradesmen and dealers in curios, in which hundreds of advertis.e.m.e.nts, 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 munic.i.p.alities 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 a.s.sert 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 l.u.s.t 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 Ca.n.a.lezzo, 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 Rontgen rays, and find means to penetrate through closed doors and all other barriers. Iron still resists the Rontgen rays, and such iron the speculators find now and then opposed to them in the scorn of such men as the Count Antonio Dona 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 Dona in every Italian province they would be able to hold in check the rage of destruction. But the character of Count Dona 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 enn.o.bles 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 mult.i.tudes. 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 munic.i.p.al government, as in other government, everything is done by the wire-pullers, the money-grubbers, the speculators.

The timid public huddles together, mute, submissive, and afraid, shorn of its fleeces like a flock of sheep, but not daring to complain.

Those who do so dare are either ignored, or, if they give trouble, are repressed. The gondoliers of Venice have again and again risen against the ruin of their livelihood by the 'black devils' of the _vaporetti_, but force is at once called in and they are brutally silenced, flung into prison, and deprived of their licence, _i.e._, of their daily bread. Because it is so picturesque a calling, and the balancing of the oar looks so easy a work, those who are outside it do not realise the hardships of a gondolier. In summer, if Venice be full, it is well enough, and brings a fair, though never a high, wage; but in the other seasons it is a life of great and continual exposure and fatigue. In cold weather, and Venice is intensely cold in the winter solstice, the long vigils on the _traghetto_ are most tedious and trying, especially through the long chill nights. When the icy winds blow in from the Alps or the Adriatic, the gondolier stands exposed to all their fury, whilst the pa.s.senger he carries sits warm and sheltered under the felze.

Strong and lithe in form, often handsome in feature, almost invariably intelligent and acquainted with legend and verse, invariably courteous and well-bred, the gondolier should have received the utmost attention from his rulers. It is painful to know that no body of men has ever been so slighted, so injured, and so wantonly outraged.

There is nowhere any more interesting and deserving community than the Venetian gondoliers, and few more worthy of regard; yet they have been dealt with as though they were no more than so much sc.u.m of the sea.

Their long-established rights receive no consideration, and their injuries no compensation.

If the vote of Venice could have been honestly polled, no steam-boat would ever have been allowed on the Grand Ca.n.a.l, as, if the vote of Florence could have been honestly polled, the centre of Florence would be now standing untouched, and would have remained untouched for many a generation.

Meanwhile, it is said, by those competent to judge, that the great Murazzi, which protect Venice from the onslaught of the sea in winter storm, and which we all know so well as we pa.s.s out from the Lido by the Bar of Malamocco to Chioggia, are being dangerously undermined by the attacks of the high tides in rude weather, and require costly and immediate repair. It is in vain that this most necessary work is urged upon the Government in Rome. The Government neither undertakes it itself, nor allows Venetians to undertake it. For any foolish, needless disfiguring work, such as the installation of the electric light in the ducal palace, against which Venetians in vain protested, the Government is always ready to waste millions. But for a work of obvious and vital necessity, such as that of the strengthening of the Murazzi, it has not a soldo to spare.

The architecture of Venice has the fragility as it has the fairness of the dianthus or the gemmia of the sea; its walls and b.u.t.tresses and foundations are plunged into salted, sanded mud; its piles grow green and brown and purple with weed; its snowy marbles and its ruddy stones are mirrored in rippling or in stagnant water; they tremble under the vibrations caused by the accursed paddle-boats; they quiver, like living things, under the knife, as the engines roar and the cog-wheels turn.

a.s.sailed as the city is within by the invasion of steam and barbarism, it is entirely certain that she could not resist the force of the inrushing waters if the Murazzi were ever to yield to the pressure of a winter sea; and it is unhappily quite possible that the gigantic barrier of the sea-walls may give way on some day of unusually high tides and violent tempest, and the city herself will then be overwhelmed beneath the Adriatic waters.

Who would care if this were her fate?

The contractors, and concessionaires, and jerry-builders, and bureaucratic thieves, and foreign speculators would have the pleasure and profit of building a spick and span new town, north-east of Mestre: all tiresome reminiscences of the Lion of St Mark would have sunk with the bronze horses underneath the waves.

Many public men would breathe more freely were Venice but a memory of the past entombed in seaweed and in sand. For there is nothing so curiously malignant or so restlessly jealous as the enmity of a feeble Present of a great Past. It is such malignity, it is such jealousy, which, even more than greed of gain, and vitiated taste, caused, and causes, and will cause, the destruction of the great cities of Italy by Italian deputies, syndics, and munic.i.p.alities, and by those foreign companies and alien speculations to which they unhappily open their gates.

If the fact did not face us at every step, it would seem incredible that, even in this age, such cities as Venice and Florence and Rome could have been sacrificed to the ignominious interests of wire-pullers.

Each possessed, to protect it, unique beauty, splendour of a.s.sociation and tradition, an heroic past: and for each had the greatest of men laboured, in each had the charm of atmosphere and horizon lent a more than mortal loveliness to the architecture of man. And each is now wrecked, and ransacked, and despoiled, and obliterated, and destroyed as though a horde of savages had been let loose in their precincts.

There is no language strong enough to condemn the injuries from which they suffer.

On the walls of the Flavian Amphitheatre there grew in marvellous fertility countless plants unknown elsewhere; survivors of sylvan worlds destroyed, of botanical kingdoms for ever perished, the seeds of which perchance had lodged in the sandals of the legions as they came from Palmyra or Babylon; this most precious legacy of nature was, as everyone knows, mercilessily destroyed in the first years of the Italian occupation of Rome.

The uprooting with knives and acids of the unique flora of the Colosseum was a type of the acts which, for the last fifteen years, have hacked away and corroded and destroyed off the face of the earth the supreme flowers of human genius.

In the present debas.e.m.e.nt and desecration of Italian cities there is not even such motive and excuse as that which was urged by archaeologists for the ruin of these plants. There is everything lost, nothing whatever gained, in the debas.e.m.e.nt of cla.s.sic and artistic cities to the level of Buluwayo or Klond.y.k.e.

To pull down the Palazzo Venezia and the Palazzo Torlonia, which it is decided to do in Rome, in order that the statue of Victor Emmanuel, for which the funds have not even yet been raised, may be visible from the Corso, is as contemptible as it is childish. The beauty of the Campidoglio is already ruined in order to place that statue there: might not that suffice? To throw down the Tower of the Amadei to put in its place a restaurant, or a drinking-shop, is so stupid an act that the enormity of the offence to history and art is almost forgotten in its imbecility. To cut off a portion of the Archbishop's Palace to widen a road, and destroy half the gardens of the Orti Oricellari to make a mean street, and to place the stations and rails of tramway companies on the macigno pavement under the Campanile, the Battistero, and the Duomo of Florence, are outrages to the whole educated world and the history of five centuries. To destroy the Ponte del Paradiso in order to put a cast-iron pontoon in its place, is an abomination which should only seem possible to a company of clowns crazy with drink; whilst to turn the lovely isle of Sant' Elena into a heap of cinders for the pleasure of a carriage-building company, which company was not even guaranteed from bankruptcy, was unquestionably as unbusinesslike and as unprofitable as it was impious.

There is neither common sense, nor common decency, in the chief part of the measures taken within the last decade to humiliate and imb.a.s.t.a.r.dise the cities and towns of Italy. The process of destruction began indeed much earlier; but within the last ten years the pace has been increased from a leisurely walk to a furious gallop. The scramble to be first to outrage, to deface, to despoil, has become a St Vitus's dance amongst the syndics, a.s.sessors, and councilmen; each deliriously eager for the approving smile of the various ministers in whose hands the destinies of these great and unrivalled Urbes unfortunately are placed.

It must be remembered by the foreign reader that there is no Minister of Fine Arts in Italy. There is a Minister of Education, another of Public Works, and another of Agriculture, and between these three all questions of art and architecture are divided, and are decided in agreement with the various munic.i.p.alities. The mischief the trio does is incalculable, for they are seldom selected with any regard to their aesthetic qualifications. Indeed, if ever anyone of them show any scholarly capacity and apt.i.tude for his office, like that which was shown by Villari, his possession of power is very short. Of a recent minister of agriculture it is related that, as he looked over a valley planted with magnificent olives near Brescia, he exclaimed, 'What fine willows!'

A similar ignorance in matters belonging to their respective departments is expected of the Ministers of Education and Public Works. Were there a Minister of Fine Arts, he would undoubtedly be chosen from the attorneys, the manufacturers, the scientists, or the rural Boeotians.

Another minister of agriculture, Count Francesco Guicciardini, had an admirable and thorough command of the objects of his Dicastero; skilled in agriculture himself, and the owner of large estates, he knew what to do and how to do it; and by his energy an outbreak of phylloxera was arrested before any great losses had ensued. But outside agriculture, his influence was less excellent, because he was unfortunately enabled to meddle with matters not agricultural and beyond his knowledge; as when he ordered the destruction of a whole quarter of the martial and ancient city of Pistoia, and the waste of the town funds in the erection of a new savings bank. Over the choice of a design for this building, the townspeople of Pistoia are now violently quarrelling, whilst many of their finest and n.o.blest palaces are left to go empty to decay!

A minister of the strictest probity, of the strongest desire to do what is just and wise, is never long able to resist the pressure of those around him, the force of example, the persuasions of local magnates, and the insistence of the crowd of hungry perquisite-hunters. It is such shocking and wicked waste of money as was this in Pistoia which impoverishes every town, and disfigures each with vulgar piles of brick and iron, and grotesque monuments of black metal, whilst a miserable woman at their gates pays four centimes duty on a pint of milk before she can take it past the guards to sell, and a wretched man, who owns a little road-fed flock of goats, is taxed two hundred francs a year before he may drive them into the streets to yield the little nourishment which they can afford to invalids and children. Should the law now under consideration pa.s.s, and the debts of the Communes be paid by the State, and monies be henceforth lent lavishly by the State to the Communes, this expenditure will increase tenfold, and the jobbery accompanying it will be multiplied in similar measure.