I

Peccavi. I have painted Italy, as others use, in sun-colour solely. My pen has been heliographic. That were worthy of the tourist who knows Italy only in her halcyon season. ’Tis the obsession of the alliterative image of the Sunny South, overriding one’s historic memories—stories of the Po frozen over from November to April, of penitents standing barefoot in the snow, bitter adventures of mediæval brides brought tediously to their lords across icy, wind-swept ways in a sort of Irish honeymoon in the days before trains de luxe; nay, this Platonic concept swamps even the Aristotelian experience. For I have seen Florence in a London fog and Venice in a Siberian snowfall. I have seen St. Mark’s Square turned into a steppe, without pigeons, without pleasure-pilgrims, snow-muffled, immaculate, bleak, given over to raw-knuckled scrapers and shovellers, knee-deep in crumbling hummocks, or pushing snow-heaped wheelbarrows towards the providential water-ways, the snow-crusted Campanile towering over the desolate glacial plain like the North Pole of childish fancy. Yea, and on the water-ways floated—O horror of desecration—white gondolas! Nature, like some vulgar millionaire, had defied the sumptuary edict consecrated by immemorial tradition, and, amazed as the Australian pioneer who first beheld black swans, I watched these white gondolas gliding along the swollen canals. And I recall Bologna in a blizzard—a snowfall so persistent that it closed the Pinacoteca by the curious method of solidly overlaying the skylight of the main Gallery and rendering the pictures invisible. It was a festa for the janitors, a holiday fallen from heaven. In the Piazza Nettuno the big fountain was snowed over, and the cab-drivers sat under great hoary umbrellas that had hitherto been green, their cabs looking like frosted cakes. A white hearse passed still whiter. The snow slashed its way even under the colonnades, and formed a slippery coating of ice on their pavements. Bran, scattered copiously in these arcades and at all the street-crossings, maintained a feeble colour-fight against the all-pervading white.

There is an icy Italy more boreal than Britain, inasmuch as less equipped against winter. For the native, too, partakes of the Platonic fallacy, and because his cold season is briefer than his warm, and oft infused with a quickening radiance, he shrugs it out of existence, especially when Carnival invites to al fresco conviviality. The beggar, indeed, recognises the winter, as becomes a practical professional man, and squats at the church-porch with his private pan of burning charcoal; but the more irresponsible burgher, with his stone floors, and his stoveless, chimneyless rooms, treats winter as an annual exception, calling for improvised measures. He is an æstival animal that builds for the summer, though his brigand-cloak, whose left fold is so sardonically thrown over his right shoulder, betrays to the scientific observer its prosaic origin as the throat-protector of an Arctic creature. Of late, under the pressure of foreign finance, the better hotels have veined themselves with steam-pipes. But the steam rises late, and the pipes are only hot when the guest has departed.

Never have I seen the pretence of perpetual summer carried further than at Rimini, where in a blinding snowstorm, when every narrow archaic street was bordered with four-foot mounds of dirty snow, and the traffic was limited to donkey-carts dragging snow through the Porta Aurea to pitch it into the river, the congealing cabmen sat all day on their powdered boxes cheerfully crying in competitive chorus—every time they caught a glimpse of me—“To San Marino? To San Marino?” That little Republic—one of the last political curios left, like a fly in amber, in modern Europe—is a drive of many hours, even when “the white road to Rimini” is a shimmering sun-path, yet there was no suspicion of pleasantry in the cabmen’s eagerness to crawl through the niveous morass. They seriously expected me to set forth on this summer expedition, with at most the carriage closed against the driving flakes. It sorted better with my humour to plough afoot over the muffled Boulevard to the new Rimini which has grown out of the old rotting Rimini of Cæsar and the Malatestas.

For there is a sham Rimini as well as a real Rimini—one of those toadstools of cities which flourish so rankly in our century of comfort. This is the Lido—an Italian Ostend, sacred to modern villas, mammoth hotels, bathing establishments, restaurants, the surgy shore tamed into a Parade for parasols. There is a staring, many-windowed, many-balconied Grand Hotel, crowned by two baroque domes, with busts on its façade and vases at its corners tapering up into rods. There is a little Lawn-Tennis Club-Bar and a big Casino, with a restaurant terrace back and front. There are pretentious Palazzini. There is a huddle of flaring houses, recalling the grotesque “new architecture” of Madrid, and a large uncouth hydropathic establishment in terra-cotta, and a long row of green bathing-huts.

Perhaps the profoundest observation of Dickens in Italy was that the marvellous quartette of buildings outside the life of Pisa—the Cathedral, the Campo Santo, the Baptistery, and the leaning Tower—is like the architectural essence of a rich old city, filtered from its prosaic necessities. Of the Lido of Rimini (and of its likes) it may be said that they are the architectural essence of a rich new city, filtered of all spiritual and poetical values.

But the Lido I saw was purged of all this vulgarity, buried under stainless snow, which lay deep and virgin over every street and grassy space, and shrouded every flaunting structure in primeval purity. The Parade was blotted out, restored to Nature, and deep drifts of snow defended it from re-invasion. The Casino lay forsaken, wrapped in the same soft spotless mantle, the dual stone steps leading to its twin drinking-terraces transformed into frozen cascades, its central gates uselessly guarded by blanched barbed wire. Desolate was even the great garage, with its cheap fresco of our modern goddess in the car, her flamboyant robe turned ermine. Beyond the buried Parade, the Adriatic rolled in sullenly, scarce visible save by a gleaming line of surf that lit up a narrow riband of its foreground; all but the breaking wave was hidden by a wild whirl of flakes that misted sea and sky into a grey nullity. Throughout the whole pleasure-city not a dog prowled nor a cat slunk nor a bird fluttered; not a footstep profaned the splendour of its snow. Its myriad casement-eyes were closed in heavy sleep; not a shutter open, not a blind raised. It was a city hibernating like some monstrous Polar animal. Not a few pleasure-cities thus abate their vitality in the winter, but so absolute a dormitation I have never witnessed. It seemed incredible that with the Spring it would stir in its sleep, it would shake the snow off its lubberly limbs, loose its gay swarm of butterfly-parasols. How could that frost-bound terrace ever ring again with the clink of glasses and the tinkle of laughter? How could bathers ever again lie basking on that frigid strand? No, it was a dead city I saw, a city overwhelmed by a new ice-age. And the seas and lands that radiated from this snowy centre were freezing too, as science had foretold; swiftly the deadly chill was spreading through every vein and artery of the nipped earth, curdling its springs and coagulating its vast oceans and crusting over even its petty oases of continents with thick-ribbed ice in which a rare microscopic rotifer alone preserved a germ of vitality. The Arctic and Antarctic zones expanded towards each other, like two blind walls closing in on life, and with a clash of giant icebergs in a biting equatorial blast, the last rift of green earth and blue water was blotted out. And now the globe was spinning again in a glacial void, as unconscious of the absence of its skin-parasites as it had been of their presence. Fated for fresh adventures and new cosmic combinations, the planet rolled its impassive whiteness through the dumb heavens. But mortals had put on mortality, and of all the haughty hopes and splendid dreams of man there remained zero. Earth, his cradle and his pasture, was become his frigidarium and his cemetery, and the snow fell silently over the few faint traces of his passing. His million, million tears had been frozen into a few icicles.

II

And there is an ugly Italy, an Italy veiled by the blue heaven, but revealing itself under sullen sunless skies in all its naked hideousness.

Nothing could be more unlike the popular conception of Italy than the environs of the Carthusian Monastery of Pavia in mid-February. Slushy roads about two yards wide, here and there encumbered with fragments of brick and stone, and everywhere bordered by heaps of snow. By one side of the road runs a narrow ice-bound irrigation canal, geometrically straight, across which rises the high, bare, dreary endless wall of blank brick surrounding the monastery. On the other hand stretch the vast fields with leafless thin trees. It was of this region that Jehan d’Auton wrote when Pavia was taken by the French: “Truly this is Paradise upon earth.” Even allowing for the flowery meadows and running springs of the end of the fifteenth century, the worthy Benedictine could have found fairer Paradises nearer Paris. Much of Northern Italy is still monotonous marshland. Over the bald brick wall of Mantua, nine feet thick, that backs the Piazza sacred to Virgil, I gazed one morning at a dismal swampy lake, a couple of barges, a factory chimney, and spectral, leafless stumps of trees, the brownish soil of the lake showing through the dead sullen water, a ghost of sun hovering over rows of pollarded planes. Here, methought, had Virgil found a suggestion for his Stygian marsh. I would not say a word against Mantua itself, which is most lovable, with side-canals that might be Venetian, and ever-flowing taps and old arches, arcades and buildings. But from Mantua to Modena I saw naught but ugly brown grass over flat lands, with pollarded elms and vines stretched from tree to tree. Here and there a little canal relieved the dismal plain. Near Modena a few poplars appeared. A team of lovely oxen drawing a cart gave the landscape its one touch of beauty.

Rimini proper is picturesque enough, with its Porto Canale full of small barques with tall masts. But between it and Ravenna, what desolation! Outside the town the gaunt ruins of the Malatesta Castle—a bare wall and a bare squarish rock—were the prelude to the same bare snowy plains, the same little pollarded elms, varied by tall skeleton poplars. Once a copse of firs, bowed down by snow, broke the white flatness. Near Classe, famous for Sant’ Appolinare, the waste became even marshier, sparse twigs of desolate shrubs alone peeping through the white blanket. Nearer Ravenna a few signs of life appeared, a dead cottage, or a living hovel, or a few spectral trees, or a brick bridge over an ice-laden river. On such a light brown marsh specked with stagnant pools the modern Italians have put up hoardings with advertisements of cognac. A little further East their remote progenitors put up Venice!

Never was there so apparently hopeless a site as those islands of the lagoons, preserved from malaria only by a faint pulse of the “tideless, dolorous midland sea.” How so marvellous a city rose on the wooden piles of the refugees, how out of so dire a necessity they made so rare a beauty and so mighty a force, was always a puzzle to me till I read that these fugitives before the Lombard Conquerors were Romans! Then it all leapt into clearness. Venice is Rome in the key of water! The same indomitable racial energy that had built up Rome and the Roman Empire built up Venice and the Venetian Empire. Hunted from Padua, the Romans are able to express themselves in water as powerfully as in earth—to create a new empire in Italy and the East, and build a mighty fleet, and crush the Turks, and hold the carrying trade of the world, and for six centuries keep the Adriatic as a private lake. And in this new Empire they are touched by the shimmering spell of water to new creations of joyous colour on canvas, to fairy convolutions in marble, and a church that rises as lightly as a sea-flower. For here all that is sternly Roman

But let us not forget that despite her seven hills Rome also began as a pile-village, and that the Campagna is of the same marshy character as the soil around Venice. I have more faith in Goethe’s intuition that Rome was built up by herdsmen and a rabble than in the thesis, expounded by Guglielmo Ferrero at Rome’s last birthday celebration, that it was the carefully chosen site of a colony from Alba, with Romulus and Remus in their traditional rôles. For though her seven hills enabled Rome to keep her head above water, they did not enable her to keep her feet dry. The Forum Augusti was anciently swamp and became a swamp again in the Middle Ages, and once some earlier form of gondola plied between the Capitol and the Palatine Hill. Thus the races who hailed from Rome had water in their blood, and the instinct to build on piles. It is a strange instinct which races have preserved and obeyed—in the foolish human fashion—even on land that was high and dry. What wonder if it survived in latency in these ex-Romans! Yes, Venice was Rome in the key of water, as Rome was Venice in the key of earth. And the Roman Church—is she not Rome in the key of heaven? Is it not always the same racial mastery that confronts us, the same instinct for dominance? Does the Church not hold the after-world as Rome held the ancient world, does she not own the lake of fire as the Doges owned the Adriatic? Drive Rome from her throne on the hills and she builds up her pedestal again on sea-soaked piles: hound her from the lagoons, and of a few acres around the piazza of St. Peter she makes the seat of a sovereignty even more boundless and majestic.

Hardly had I written this when I opened by hazard my first edition of Byron’s “The Two Foscari” (1821), and was startled to read in his appendix as follows: “In Lady Morgan’s fearless and excellent work upon ‘Italy’ I perceive the expression of ‘Rome of the Ocean’ applied to Venice. The same phrase occurs in ‘The Two Foscari.’ My publisher can vouch for me that the tragedy was written and sent to England some time before I had seen Lady Morgan’s work, which I only received on the 16th of August. I hasten, however, to notice the coincidence and to yield the originality of the phrase to her who first placed it before the public.” Byron goes on to explain that he is the more anxious to do this because the Grub Street hacks accuse him of plagiarism. But turning to the tragedy itself, I find that Byron has rather plagiarised me than the admirable “Gloriana,” for her phrase might be a mere metaphor, whereas Marina observes explicitly:

But Byron’s over-anxiety to disavow originality was due to the morbid state of mind induced by the aforesaid hacks, one of whom had even accused him of having “received five hundred pounds for writing advertisements for Day and Martin’s patent blacking.”

“That accusation,” says Byron, “is the highest compliment to my literary powers which I ever received.” I can only say the same of Byron’s plagiarism from myself.

But Byron need not have been so apologetic to Lady Morgan, for ’twas the very boast of Venice to be “the legitimate heir of Rome,” whose Empire Doge Dandolo re-established in that Nova Roma of Constantinople with whose art and architecture her own is so delectably crossed.

Carnival! What a whirling word! What a vision of masks and gaiety, militant flowers and confetti! Not farewell to meat, but hail to merriment! Never, in sooth, does Italy show so earthly as when, bidding adieu to the flesh and the world, she enters into the contemplation of the tragic mystery of the self-sacrifice of God. And yet in this grossness of popular rejoicing lies more faith than in the frigid pieties of the established English Church. Even the brutalities and Jew-baitings that marked the old Roman carnival, even the profane parodies of the Mass, sprang from a naïve vividness of belief. Parody is merely the obverse side of reverence, and ’tis only when you do not believe in your God that you dare not make fun of Him or with Him. The gargoyled gutter is as characteristic of the cathedral as the mystic rose-window. Our revivals of miracle plays are performed in an atmosphere of glacial awe, which was by no means the atmosphere of their birth. This sort of reverence is too often faith fallen to freezing-point. We remove our sense of humour as we take off our slippers at alien mosques.

It was when faith was at its full—near the year 1000—and in connection with the Christmas season, that the Patriarch of Constantinople instituted the Feast of Fools and the Feast of the Ass, travestying the most sacred persons and offices. The Lord of Misrule is no heathen deity, but a most Christian majesty; and King Carnival is the spiritual successor of the old King of Saturnalia, whether Frazer be correct or not in attributing to him the direct succession. For the truly religious the carnival is necessary to the sanity of things. It is an expression of the breadth and complexity of the Cosmos, which would otherwise be missing from the Easter ritual. The God of the grotesque is as real as the God of Gethsemane and the Cosmos cannot be stretched on a crucifix. It bulges too oddly for that. And it is this grotesque side of life that finds quasi-religious expression in the Carnival processions, with their monsters known and unknown to Nature, with their fanciful hybrids and quaint permutations of the elements of reality. Humanity herein records its joyous satisfaction and sympathy with that freakish mood of Nature which produced the ornithorhynchus and the elephant, and shaped to uncouthness, instead of to symmetry and beauty. Alas! I fear humanity is only too acquiescent in these deviations of the great mother into the grotesque; the folk-spirit runs more fluently to gross pleasantry and comic tawdriness than to the Beautiful, and many a Carnival procession is a nightmare of concentrated ugliness.

The suspicion takes me that our St. Valentine’s Day, so dominatingly devoted to grotesque caricature, and so coincident with the Carnival period, is really the Catholic Carnival in another guise and that prudish Protestantism has entertained the devil unawares.

But the Carnival—like St. Valentine’s Day—is dying. It is more alive in the ex-Italian Riviera than in Italy proper. I have a memory of a Carnival at Siena which consisted mainly of one imperturbable merry-maker stumping with giant wooden boots through the stony alleys. A Carnival at Modena has left even less trace—some dim sense of more crowded streets with a rare mask. At Mantua, too, there was no set procession—children in fancy dress, with a few adult masqueraders, alone paid fealty to the season. At Bologna the last night of Carnival was almost vivacious, and in the sleety colonnades branching off from the Via Ugo Bassi there was quite a dense crowd of promenaders defying the bitter wind, while muffled groups, with their coat-collars up, sat drinking at the little tables. There were some children, fantastically pranked, attended by prosaic mothers, there was a small percentage of masked faces, while a truly gallant cavalier (escorting a dame in a domino) paraded his white stockings, that looked icy, across the snowy roads. No confetti, and only an infrequent scream of hilarity. That the old plaster missiles, with other crudities, have disappeared, is indeed no cause for lamentation, but a Carnival without confetti is like an omelette without eggs.

Well might a writer in the local paper, Il Resto del Carlino, lament the brave days of old when a vast array of carriages and masks coursed through the Via S. Mamolo, and the last days of the Carnival were marked by jousts and tourneys, and tiltings at the quintain, with a queen of beauty in white satin and magnificent masqueraders showering flowers, fruits, and perfumes, and nymphs carrying Cupid tied hand and foot.

In Cremona I made trial of a Veglione whose allurements had been placarded for days. A Trionfo di Diana, heralded in large letters, peculiarly suggested pomp and revelry. And indeed I found a theatre almost as large as La Scala, illumined by a dazzling chandelier, with four tiers of boxes resplendent with the shoulders of women and the shirt fronts of men—tiaras, uniforms, orders, all the spectacular social sublime. I had not imagined that obscure Cremona—no longer famous, even for violins—held these glittering possibilities, and it set me to the analysis that Italian theatres—above the platea—are all shop-front, making a brave show of a shallow audience, for the encouragement of the actors and its own gratification, instead of obscuring and dissipating it over back benches.

The stage and the platea had been united by an isthmus of steps and in an enclosure sat a full orchestra. Around the musicians danced men in evening-dress and a few ladies in masks, most of whom, notwithstanding the superabundance of males, preferred to dance with their own sex. This was largely what the spectators had come out for to see, and the disproportion of the dancers to the wilderness of onlookers was the only comic feature of this Carnival Ball. True, a few clownish figures clothed in green and wearing little basket hats improvised mild romps on the stage, and occasionally from the unexpected vantage of a box shouted down some facetious remark, but there was no unction in them, nay not even when they capped the joke by clapping large baskets on their heads. However, the Trionfo di Diana still remained to account for the vast audience, and there came a moment when an electric thrill ran through the packed theatre, the dancing ceased, and the dancers ranged themselves, looking eagerly towards the doors. After a period of tense expectation, there came slowly up the platea a few huntsmen with live dogs and stuffed hawks, and one melancholy horn that gave a few spasmodic single toots, whereupon appeared Diana in a scanty white robe, recumbent on a floral car of foliage and roses, drawn by six hounds, one of which alone rose to the humour of the occasion, and by his inability to remain on his own side of the shaft achieved a rare ripple of laughter, while the applause that followed his adjustment brought quite a wave of warmth. But the chill fell afresh, as the procession, after a cheerless turn or two on the stage, made its exit as tamely as a spent squib. A paltrier spectacle was never seen in a penny show.

A runner, accompanied by a cyclist, who pumped him up with his pump, made a fresh onslaught upon our sense of fun, but when he too trailed off equally into nothingness, I quitted the dazzling midnight scene, leaving the beauty and fashion of Cremona to its Carnival dissipations.

Yes, the Italian Carnival is dying. Unregretted, adds the Anglo-French paper that serves the select circles of Rome. For it is only the Carnival of the streets that is passing, this genteel authority tells us reassuringly. “A far more glorious Carnival is replacing it. In the grand cosmopolitan hotels fête succeeds fête.”

Alas, so even the Carnival has passed over to the Magnificent Ones, who not content with annexing the best things in their own lands sail under their pirate flag in quest of the spoils of every other, moving from Rome to Switzerland, from Ascot to Cairo, with the movement of Sport or the Sun. What a change from the days of the Roman Fathers, when religion circled round one’s own hearth, and exile was practically excommunication! The mother-land is no longer a mother but a mistress, to be visited only for pleasure, and every other land is only another odalisque, devoid of sanctities, ministress to appetites. The Magnificent Ones of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance at least stayed at home and minded their serfs and their business: our modern Magnificent Ones go abroad, make new serfs everywhere, and mind only their pleasures. And hence it is that the festa of the Carnival whose only raison d’être was religious, whose only justification was its spontaneity, is to be annexed by the Magnificent Mob, ever in search of new pretexts for new clothes and new vulgarities. The froth of pleasure is to be skimmed off, and the cup of seriousness thrown away. The joyousness that ushers in Lent is to be torn from its context as the fine feathers are torn from a bird, to flutter on the hat of a demi-mondaine. The grand cosmopolitan hotels with the grand cosmopolitan rabble will usher in with grand cosmopolitan dances the period of prayer and fasting, and the dying Carnival will achieve resurrection.

I

As I creep humbly through this proud and prodigious Italy, peeping into palaces and passing yearningly before masterpieces, to the maddening chatter of concierges and sacristans, I am constantly stumbling upon the footsteps of him who made the grand tour in the high sense of the words. Not the British heir of bygone centuries with his mentor and his letters of introduction, not even his noble father with the family coach. No, these were pigmies little taller than myself. Your sublime tourist was Napoleon, who strode over the holy land of Beauty like a Brobdingnagian over Lilliput. He came, he saw, he commanded. He looked at a picture, a pillar, a statue—and despatched it to France. He gazed at Lombard’s iron crown—and put it on. He beheld Milan Cathedral—and it became the scene of his coronation, with blessing of clergy and the old feudal homage. He perceived an ornate ducal bed—and slept in it, the poor duke a-cold. He rode through the ancient streets, not Baedeker but cocked hat in hand, graciously acknowledging the loyal cheers of the ancient stock. He examined the Sacro Catino in Genoa Cathedral and bore it off with its precious blood; he espied the rich treasure of Loreto, and lo! it was his; he saw Lucca that it was fair, and it became his sister Elisa’s. He visited Venice—and wound up the Republic. He admired St. Mark’s—and haled its bronze horses to Paris, transferring to it the Patriarchate as in compensation. The Patriarchal Palace itself he turned into barracks; superfluous monasteries and churches were shut up and their lands confiscated. He even destroyed, doubtless in the same righteous indignation, the lion’s head over “the lion’s mouth” in the Palace of the Doges, while the Bucentaur, their gorgeous galley, he burnt to extract the gold.

But he was not merely destructive and rapacious. The founder of the Code Napoléon repaired the amphitheatre of Verona, and resumed the neglected building of the façade of Milan Cathedral, and opened up the Simplon route to Italy, and marked its terminus by the Triumphal Arch of Milan. He surveyed the harbour of Spezia for a war-harbour and projected to drain Lake Trasimeno away—conceptions which to-day are realities. And all this and a hundred other feats of construction in the breathing-spaces of his Titanic single-handed fight against embattled Europe. Not seldom, as I passed my wood-shop in Venice, with its caligraphic placard All’ Ingrosso e al Minuto, did I think of the Corsican superman, with his wholesale and retail dealings with the little breed of mankind. Perhaps to establish “the Kingdom of Italy,” with twenty-four departments and his step-son as viceroy, and to turn the little district of Bassano into a duchy for his secretary were, to Napoleon, feats of the same apparent calibre. Even so we stride as carelessly over a brooklet as over a puddle. Surely there is a fascinating book to be written on Napoleon in Italy, as a change from the countless Napoleons in St. Helena or the flood of foolish volumes upon his mistresses.

And a final appraisement of Napoleon still remains to seek. The little fat man who had “the genius to be loved”—except by Joséphine and Marie Louise—and who provided for his family by distributing thrones, has long since ceased to be the ogre with whom British babes were frighted, though he has not yet become Heine’s divine being done to death by British Philistinism. Carlyle classed him among his “Heroes” and credited him with insight because, when those around him proved there was no God, he looked up at the stars and asked, “Who made all that?” But this was surely no index of profundity—merely a theism of Pure Reason and an illustration of Napoleon’s peculiar interest in action. “Who made all that?” Making, doing, that was his essential secret—unresting activity, rapid striking, utilisation of every moment. He was as alert the moment after victory as others after defeat. Was one combination destroyed, his nimble and exhaustless energy instantly fashioned an alternative. Mobility of brain and immobility of soul—these were his gifts in a crisis. When all was lost and himself a captive, “What is the use of grumbling?” he asked his attendants. “Nothing can be done.” The tragedy of Napoleon was thus the obverse of the tragedy of Hamlet, whose burden lay precisely in there being something to be done. Imagine the great demiurge at work in these days of telegraphy and steam, motor-cars and aeroplanes. What might he not have achieved! As it was, he just missed creating the United States of Europe. Anatole France accuses him of having taken soldiers too seriously. As well accuse an engineer of taking cranes and levers too seriously. Soldiers were the indispensable instruments by which Napoleon raised himself to the level of those more commonplace rulers of Europe who had found their cradles suspended on the heights. It is the German Emperor who takes soldiers too seriously, who marshals them with the solemnity of a child playing with his wooden regiments. And the Kaiser, already in the purple, has not Napoleon’s excuse. His is simply a false and reactionary view of life, as of a house-maid who adores uniforms. But Napoleon would have played his Machiavellian game equally with grocers; and, indeed, his lifelong ambition to sap British commerce was conceived in the spirit of a Titanic tradesman, who knows better than to count corpses. He was the fifteenth-century condottiere magnified many diameters, playing with countries and nations instead of with towns and tribes, and sweeping in his winnings across the green table of earth as in some game of the gods. As a Messiah of Pure Reason, an Apostle of the People, he was able, like Mohammed, to back the Word with the Sword, and, less veracious than the prophet of the desert, to combine for the making of History its two great factors of Force and Fraud. Through him, accordingly, History made a leap, proceeding by earthquake and catastrophe instead of by patient cumulation and attrition. He was a cosmic force—a force of Nature, as he truthfully claimed—a terremoto that tumbled the stagnant old order about the ears of Courts and Churches.

True, after the earthquake the old slow, stubborn forces reassert themselves; but the configuration of the land has been irrevocably changed. The Maya, the illusion of Royalty, comes slowly back, for it is a world of unreason, and even Bismarck believed in the divine right of the princes he despised. But the feudal order throughout Europe will never wholly recover from the shock of Napoleon. Unfortunately, from a Messiah he glided into a Magnificent One, and the marriage with Marie Louise, at first perhaps a mere cold-blooded chess-move to establish his dynasty, subtly reduced him into accepting Royalty at its own and the popular valuation. He had married beneath him, and Nemesis followed. The dyer’s hand was subdued to that it worked in, and Napoleon sank into a snob. His true Waterloo was spiritual. The actual Waterloo was a moral victory.

Had he remained representative of the Republican or any other principle, exile would have had no power over him; on the contrary, it would have aggrandised his influence. But his exile represented nothing but the moping of a banished Magnificent, so that a generous spirit like Byron could find in his “Ode to Napoleon,” no words too excoriating for this fallen meanness.

And while Napoleon pined in St. Helena, Marie Louise found promotion as Duchess of Parma, becoming her own mistress instead of the world’s, and finding husbands nearer down to her own level than the Corsican ex-corporal. Quite happy she must have been, sitting on her throne under a great red baldachino, giving audience, surrounded by her suite and her soldiers—as Antonio Pock painted her—or smothered in diamonds at neck, waist, earrings and hair, smirking in a low-necked dress at her crimson and jewelled crown, as in the picture of Gian Battisti Borghesi. Parma preserves both these portraits, but they are not so quaint a deposit of the great Napoleonic wave as Canova’s bust of Marie Louise as Concord!

There is in Milan a queer museum called “The Gallery of Knowledge and Study,” the collection of which was begun by a “Noble Milanese,” and the first catalogue of which was published in Latin in 1666. Here, amid sea-shells, miniatures, old maps, pottery, bronzes, silkworm analyses, and old round mirrors in great square frames, may now be seen a pair of yellow gloves which once covered the iron hands, together with the cobbler’s measure of that foot which once stamped on the world. There is an air of coquetry about the pointed toe. A captain’s brevet, signed by the “First Consul” and headed “French Republic,” serves as a reminder of the earlier phase. The humour of museums has placed these relics in a case with those of other “illustrious men”—to wit, two Popes and St. Carlo, the dominant saint of the district (who is just celebrating his tercentenary).

But the Triumphal Arch remains Napoleon’s chief monument at Milan, though it is become a sort of Vicar of Bray in stone. For when Napoleon fell, the Austrian Emperor replaced the chronicle of French victories by bas-reliefs of defeats, and re-christened it an Arch of Peace. And when in turn Lombardy was liberated by Victor Emmanuel, new inscriptions converted it into an Arch of Freedom. One can imagine the stone singing, like the Temple of Memnon at sunrise:

And in Ferrara there is a Triumphal Column no less inconstant. Designed to support the statue of Duke Ercole I, it was annexed by Pope Alexander VII, who was deposed by Napoleon, whose statue has now been replaced by Ariosto’s. Whether the ducal-papal-military-poetic pillar supports its ultimate statue, we may doubt, though a poet seems less obnoxious to political passion than the other sorts of hero.

Such mutations in the significance of monuments, however they deface and blur history, are not unnatural amid the vicissitudes of Italy: and, after all, an arch or a pillar is but an arch or a pillar.

But even a statue that keeps its place is not safe from supersession. In Rimini in 1614 the Commune, grateful to the Pope (Paolo V), commemorated him in bronze in the beautiful Piazza of the Fountain, the Fountain whose harmonious fall pleased the ear of Leonardo da Vinci. The monument is elaborate and handsome, with bas-reliefs in the seat and in the Papal mantle, showing in one place the city in perspective. But during the Cisalpine Republic, thanks again to Napoleon, no Pope could keep his place in Rimini, and as the simplest way of preserving him on this favoured site, the municipality erased his epitaph and re-christened him Saint Gaudenzo. Gaudenzo was the martyr Bishop of Rimini, the Protector of the City. This unearned increment was not the Saint’s first, for the Church of S. Gaudenzo had been erected on the basis of a Temple of Jove. To annex the glories of both Jove and Pope is indeed a singular fortune, even in the ironic changes and chances we call history. But Napoleon, in the days when he ordered the Temple of Malatesta to be the Cathedral of Rimini, was annexing even the functions of both Pope and Jove. For he was also rearranging Europe after Austerlitz and giving the quietus to the Holy Roman Empire.

II

Only second to the impact of Napoleon on Europe was the impact of Byron. ’Tis Cæsar and Hamlet in contemporary antithesis, for Professor Minto has well said that Byron played Hamlet with the world for his stage. While Byron was soliloquising with his pen, Napoleon was energising with his sword, and whether the pen was really the mightier of the twain is a nice thesis for debating societies. But in Italy, and by the greatest modern Italian poet, Byron has been acclaimed as a man of action. In my hotel in Bologna the landlord had piously—or with an eye to custom—suspended a tablet, commissioned from Carducci, whereof a translation would run as follows:

An epigraph, I fear, involving some poetic licence. True, of course, that no modern poet’s life or work, save Browning’s, is so interpenetrated with Italy. But Byron’s amateur relation with the futile Italian conspirators of the generation before Garibaldi was a somewhat shadowy contact with action, however generous his impatient ardour for Italy’s resurrection. Vaporous, too, was the conspiracy of “The Liberal” to pour new wine into the old British beer-bottle. But even his membership of the Greek committee or the equipment of a bellicose brig against Turkey, or his abortive appointment as Commander-in-Chief in an expedition against Lepanto, scarcely brings Byron into the category of men of action. He had never the chance of sloughing Hamlet for Cæsar or even for the Corsair. It was not even given him to die in battle, as he so ardently desired in the last verse of his last poem. And though his Hellenic fervour redeemed his closing days from despair and degradation, still the fever which slew him at Missolonghi hardly warrants the claim that he gave his life for Greece. Had his microbe met him in marshy Ravenna instead of marshy Missolonghi, would it have been said that he died for Italy? For aught we know his sea voyage from Genoa to Greece may have lengthened his life.

Moreover it was as an ideologue that Byron plunged into affairs. For the Greeks whom he set out to deliver figured in his mind as direct, if degenerate, descendants of the great free spirits of old, the creators of Hellenic culture: the reality was a priest-ridden population debased by Slav stocks.

Byron had indeed an opulence of temperament which naturally spilt over into action. Like Sir Walter Scott, he was larger than a writing man, and he brought the Scott sanity rather than the Byronic ebullience into his three months’ work at Missolonghi, holding himself aloof from factions and thus reconciling them in him, throwing his weight on the side of humanity, and even rising beyond his disappointment in the Greeks to perceive that their very failings made their regeneration only the more necessary. There was certainly in him the making of a leader of men. Nevertheless cerebral ferment and not conspiring for liberty was his essential form of activity. That cerebral ferment was never more ebullient and continuous than in those years of Italy and the Countess Guiccioli. Ravenna was his favourite town, and action is not precisely the note of Ravenna at whose town-gate I read with my own eyes a fabulous prohibition against vehicular traffic in the streets.

But did we concede Carducci’s claim to the full, and even supplement it by Byron’s passing eagerness to mould British politics, the Italian poet’s characterisation of him as the most striking modern instance of the union of poetry and action, is a startling reminder of the poverty and vacuousness of the chronicle of singing men of affairs. If Byron be indeed Eclipse, truly the rest are nowhere. And the question arises, why the modern man should be so artificially bifurcated. Æschylus was both soldier and poet. Cæsar not only made history but wrote it. Dante was Prior of Florence.

“In rebus publicis administrans,” says the inscription on the absurd tomb of Ariosto, and we know that Duke Alfonso sent him to suppress bands of robbers in lawless Garfagnana as well as on that even more formidable expedition to the Terrible Pontiff who had excommunicated the ruler of Ferrara. Chaucer was a diplomatist and Government Official. The ethereal singer of “The Faerie Queene” shared in the bloody attempt at the Pacification of Ireland. Milton, that virulent pamphleteer, barely escaped the block. Goethe administered Weimar. Victor Hugo, like Dante, achieved exile. Björnson contributed to the independence of Norway. The notion of a poet as aloof from life seems to be largely modern and peculiarly British. Shelley is probably responsible for this conception of the “beautiful and ineffectual angel,” and in our own day Swinburne has helped to carry on the legend. But Swinburne’s fellow-poet, the self-styled “Singer of an empty day,” was precisely the poet who had the largest relations with life, and whose wall-papers have spread to circles where his poetry is unknown or unread.

You may say that Virgil, who was neither modern nor British, practised the same attitude of detachment, the same exclusive self-consecration to letters as Wordsworth or Tennyson. But Virgil had a people to express, and Wordsworth and Tennyson were passionate politicians, if they made no incursions into action proper. You may urge that the bards, skalds, minstrels, troubadours, ballad-mongers, jongleurs, have always been a class apart from action, but these were at least lauders of action, laureates of lords, while even the Minnesingers celebrated less their own mistresses than those of the heroes. ’Tis a parasitism upon action, to which indeed the meek and prostrate Kipling would confine the rôle of letters.

But why should the power to feel and express the finer flavours of life and language paralyse the capacity for action? In the sanest souls both functions would co-exist in almost equal proportions. Sword in one hand and trowel in the other, Ezra’s Jews rebuilt the Temple, and the new Jerusalem will not rise till we can hold both trowel and tablet. In that Platonic millennium poets must be kings and kings poets.

That fantastic, mutilated, myopic, and inefficient being, known as “the practical man,” sniffs suspiciously at all movements that have thought or imagination, or an ideal for their inspiration. It may be conceded to this crippled soul that action can never take the rigid lines of theory, and that the forces of deflection must modify, if not indeed prevail over, the à priori pattern. But he is not truly a thinker whose thought cannot allow for these deviations in practice, which are as foreseeable (if not as exactly computable) as the retardation, acceleration or aberration of a planet by the pull of every other within whose attraction it rolls. Action is not pure thought but applied thinking—a species of engineering over, through, or around mountains, and opposing private domains. “Life caricatures our concepts,” a dreamer complained to me, after he had stepped down into politics. Is it not perhaps that our concepts caricature life? Life is too fluid and asymmetric to bear these fixed forms of constructive polity, and Lord Acton tells us that in the whole course of history no such rounded scheme has ever found fulfilment. I do not wonder.

But the poet who has never acted on the stage of affairs is moving in a padded world of words, and the hero who has never sung, or at least thrilled with the music in him, is only sub-human. The divorce of life and letters tends to sterilise letters and to brutalise life. The British mistrust of poetry in affairs has a solid basis—of stupidity. Imagination, which is the essential factor in all science, is esteemed a Jack o’ Lantern to lure astray. And to tap one’s way along, inch by inch, without any light at all, is held the surest method of progression.

But Italy, which has known Mazzini, is, I trust, for ever saved from this Anglo-Saxon shallowness.

“A Revolution is the passing of an idea from theory into practice,” said Mazzini. And again, “Those who sunder Thought and Action dismember God and deny the eternal Unity of things.” Pensiero e Azione was the significant title of the journal he founded to bring about the redemption of Italy. Garibaldi too was a dreamer, who even wrote poetry. Cavour, the most worldly of the trio of Italian saviours, owes his greatness precisely to the imagination which could use all means and all men to educe the foreseen end.

A sharp distinction should be drawn between those who dream with their eyes open, and those who dream with their eyes shut. What Cavour saw was in congruity with fact and possibility. Prevision is not perversion. As our modern watcher of the skies received the photograph of Halley’s Comet upon his plate half a year before it became visible to the eye, and months before it revealed itself to the farthest-piercing telescope, so upon the sensitised soul coming events cast their configurations before. This foresight of insight has naught in common with the nightmares and chimæras of sleep. “The prophetic soul of the wide world dreaming on things to come” admits the elect to glimpses of its dream. These be the prophets, conduits through which the universe arrives at self-consciousness, as the heroes are the conduits through which it arrives at self-amelioration.