In a room leading to the Senate in the Ducal Palace of Venice I was looking at a picture by Contarini of the conquest of Verona by the Venetians in 1405.

’Twas a farrago of fine confused painting, horses asprawl over the dead and wounded, men in armour driving their daggers home in the prostrate huddled forms, galloping chargers viciously spurred by helmeted knights with swirling swords, in brief an orgie of wild and whirling devilry. The pity of it, I thought, Verona and Venice, those two fairy sisters, each magically enthroned on beauty, members of the same Venetia, peopled with the same stock, speaking almost the same dialect, why must they be at each other’s throat? And this revelry of devilry might, I knew, equally serve for Venice’s conquest of any other of her neighbours in that wonderful fighting fifteenth century of hers, when she must needs set up her winged lion in every market place.

And these rivalries of Venice and her neighbour-towns, I recalled, were only part of the universal urban warfare—Genoa against Pisa, Siena against Florence, Gubbio against Perugia; these again breaking into smaller circles of contention, or intersected with larger, party against party, faction against faction, guild against guild, Guelph against Ghibelline, Montague against Capulet, Oddi against Baglioni, popolani against grandi, provinces against invaders, blood-feuds horrific, innumerable, the Guelph-Ghibelline contest alone involving 7200 revolutions and 700 massacres in its three centuries! And yet there is a reverse to the shield, and a iewelled scabbard to the sword.

I stood later in the Palazzo Malaspina of Pavia where, tradition says, the imprisoned Boëthius composed “The Consolations of Philosophy,” and here in a vestibule my eye was caught by a fragment of gilded gate hung aloft, and running to read the explanatory inscription, I found it—in translation—as follows:

Un magnanimo pensiero, indeed! And—like the chains of Pisa’s ancient harbour restored by Genoa—a pleasant sequel to the noble common struggle for Italian independence. And yet—the advocatus diaboli whispered me, or was it the shade of Boëthius in quest of “The Consolations of Phlebotomy”?—“What has become of Pavia, what of Ravenna, since they ceased to let each other’s blood? Where is the Pavia of a hundred towers, where is the Castello reared and enriched by generations of Visconti Dukes, and its University, once the finest in Italy, at which Petrarch held a chair; where is the opulence of life that flowed over into the Certosa, now arid in its mausolean magnificence? Where is the Ravenna whose lawyers were as proverbial in the eleventh century as Philadelphia’s are to-day, where is that hotbed of heresy which nourished the great anti-Pope Guibert? Where is even the Ravenna of Guido da Polenta, protector of Dante? Apt indeed to hold only Dante’s tomb. And its young men who bawl out choruses of a Sunday night till the small hours—do they even deserve the shrine of the poet of Christendom? And Venice? And Verona? And the Rimini of the sixty galleys? What have they gained from their colourless absorption into a United Italy, compared with what they have lost—had indeed already lost—of peculiar and passionate existence? Are there two gentlemen of Verona now in whom we take a scintilla of interest? Is there a merchant of Venice whose ventures concern us a jot? Is there a single Antonio with argosies bound for Tripolis and the Indies?” “Your Ben Jonson,” and by his wide posthumous reading I knew ’twas Boëthius speaking now, “said ‘in short measures life may perfect be.’ He should have said ‘in small circles’ and, perhaps, ‘only in small circles.’ All America—with its vasty breadths—stands to-day without a single man of the first order.”

“’Tis not even”—put in the advocatus diaboli, betrayed by his unphilosophic chuckle—“as if the destruction of small patriotisms meant the destruction of war. Pavia and Ravenna,” he pointed out mischievously, “must continue to fight—as part of the totality, Italy. And behold,” quoth he, drawing my eyes towards the Piazza Castello, “the significance of that old castle’s metamorphosis into a barrack—the poetry of war turned to prose, the frescoes of the old Pavian and Cremonese painters faded, perhaps even whitewashed over, and rough Government soldiers drilling where the Dukes played pall-mall. Gone is that rich concreteness of local strife, attenuated by its expansion into a national animosity; not insubstantial indeed under stress of invasion, but shadowy and unreal when the casus belli is remote, and by the manœuvres of my friends, the international diplomatists, the Pavian or Ravennese finds himself fighting on behalf of peoples with whom alliance is transitory and artificial.”

“But he will not find himself fighting so often,” I rejoined. “Countries do not join battle as recklessly as cities. The larger the bulk the slower the turning to bite.” “And meantime,” interposed the philosophic shade, “the war-tax in peace is heavier than anciently in war. And neither in war nor in peace can there be the joy of fighting that comes from personal keenness in the issue. The wars of town with town, of sect with sect, of neighbour with neighbour, so far from being fratricidal and unnatural, are the only human forms of war. ’Tis only neighbours that can feel what they are fighting for, ’tis only brothers that can fight with unction. The very likeness of brothers, their intimate acquaintance with the points of community, gives them an acute sense of the points of difference, and provides their combat with a solid standing-ground at the bar of reason. Least irrational of all internecion were the fratricide of twins. Save the war of self-defence, civil war is the only legitimate form of war. Military war—how monstrous the sound, what a clanking of mailed battalions! Your Bacon betrays but a shallow and conventional sense of ‘The True Greatness of Kingdoms,’ when he compares civil war to the heat of a fever, and foreign war to the heat of exercise which serves to keep the body in health. For what is foreign war but an arrogance of evil life, an inhuman sport, a fiendish trial of skill? Why should a home-born Briton ever fight a Russian? His boundaries are nowhere contiguous with the Russian’s, his very notion of a Russ is mythical. ’Tis a cold-blooded war-game into which he is thrust from above. What’s Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba? Other is it with warfare that is personal, profoundly felt. Civil war—how sacred, how close to men’s bosoms! When Greek meets Greek, then comes the tug of war.”

“In religious wars, too,” eagerly interrupted the advocatus diaboli, “’tis nearness that is the justification—Homoousian versus Homoiousian. Why in heaven’s name,” he added with a spice of malice, “should a Mussulman cry haro against a Parsee, or a Shintoist against a Mormon? Here, too, the boundaries are not contiguous; ’twere the duel of whale and elephant. ’Tis the Christian sects that must naturally torture and murder one another,” he wound up triumphantly.

“Ay indeed,” serenely assented the shade of Boëthius. “If fighting is to be done at all, let it be between brothers and not between strangers. Where ‘a hair perhaps divides the False and True’ ’tis of paramount importance to determine on which side of the hair we should stand. This rigid accuracy is the glory of Science—why should not our decimal be correct to nine places even in Religion? Why wave aside these sharp differences for which the men of my day were willing to pay with their lives? When your Alfred the Great translated my magnum opus, or even as late as when your Chaucer honoured me with a modern version, these questions could vie in holy intensity, almost with your latter-day questions of Free Trade and Tariff Reform.”

“Ah, the palmy days of martyrdom,” sighed the advocatus diaboli, “when men were literally aflame for filioque or Immaculate Conception. O for the fiery Arians, Gnostics, Marcionites, Valentinians, Socinians, Montanists, Donatists, Iconoclasts, Arnoldites, Pelagians, Monophysites, Calixtines, Paulicians, Hussites, Cathari, Albigenses, Waldenses, Bogomilians, Calvinists, Mennonites, Baptists, Anabaptists——”

“Surely you would not call Baptists fiery?” I interjected feebly. He had apparently no sense of humour, this advocatus, for he went on coldly: “How tame and disappointing these latter-day sectarians: these Methodists, Plymouth Brethren, Christian Scientists, Irvingites, Christadelphians, ‘et hoc genus omne.’ I did have a flash of hope when your Methodists began to split up into Wesleyans, Protestant Methodists, Reformers, Primitives, Bryanites and the like, whose bitter brotherly differences seemed to show the old sacrosanct concern for the minutiæ of Truth and Practice. But no! no one believes nowadays, for nobody burns his fellow-Christian. Even the burning words of your King’s Declaration——!”

“August shade,” I interrupted, pointedly addressing myself to the last of the Roman philosophers, “I concede that when Christianity founded itself on texts, an infinite perspective of homicidal homiletics lay open to the ingenuous and the ingenious. And so long as Heaven and Hell turned on dogma and ritual, an infinite significance attached to the difference between the theological tweedledum and the theological tweedledee, so that it is just dimly conceivable one might murder one’s neighbour for his own good or the greater glory of God. But do not tell me that to-day, too, the test of belief is bloodshed.”

“Immo vero,” cried the Roman shade emphatically. “Was I not clubbed to death because I believed in Justice and combated the extortions of the Goths? A belief for which we would not die or kill, what is it?”

“A bloodless belief,” chuckled the advocatus diaboli, who, I suddenly remembered, was more legitimately entitled the defensor fidei.

I

“Italy is too long,” said the Italian. We were coming into Turin in the dawn, amid burning mountains of rosy snow, and the train was moving slowly, in hesitation, with pauses for reflection. “The line is single in places,” he explained. “Italy is too narrow, too cramped by mountain-chains, and above all too long. It is the trouble behind all our politics. There are three Italies, three horizontal strata, that do not interfuse—the industrial and intelligent North, the stagnant and superstitious South, and the centre with Rome which is betwixt and between.”

“But there is far more clericalism in the North than the South,” I said. “The Church party is a political force.”

“Precisely what proves my case. In the North everything is more efficient, even to the forces of reaction. The clericals are better organised, and are, moreover, supported by the propertied atheists in the interests of order. But the North is Europe—Germany, if you will—the South is already Africa.” The train stopped again. He groaned. “No unity possible.”

“No unity?” I exclaimed. “And what about Garibaldi and Mazzini and United Italy?”

“It is a phrase. Italy is too long.”

I pondered over his words, and in imagination I saw again all the Risorgimento museums, all the tablets in all the loggias and town halls recording those who had died for the Union of Italy, all the statues of all the heroes, all the streets and piazzas dedicated to them, while in my ears resounded all the artillery of applause booming at that very moment throughout the length and narrowness of Italy in celebration of the Jubilee of the Departure of the Thousand from Quarto.

II

Any one who goes to Italy for the Renaissance will find the Risorgimento a discordant obsession; flaunting itself as it does in brand new statues and monuments whose incongruity of colour or form destroys the mellow unity of old Cathedral-Piazzas or Castello-courtyards. Florence has managed to hush up the Risorgimento in back streets or unobtrusive tablets, and Venice with her abundance of Campi has stowed it out of sight, though Victor Emmanuel ramps on horseback not far from the Bridge of Sighs, and “three youths who died for their country” intrude among the tombs of the Doges. The essence of Pisa is preserved by its isolation from life, leaving Mazzini to dominate the city of his death. But the majority of the old towns are devastated by the new national heroes—admirable and vigorous as the sculpture sometimes is—even as the old historic landmarks are obliterated by the new street names. And in addition to the pervasive quartette—Garibaldi, Cavour, Victor Emmanuel, Mazzini—local heroes aggravate the ruin of antiquity. Daniele Manin thrones in Venice over a winged lion sprawling beneath a triton; Ricasoli, “the iron Baron,” rules in Tuscany; Pavia is sacred to the Cairoli; Minghetti runs through the Romagna; Crispi through the South; Genoa devotes a street, a square, and a bronze statue to Bixio, the Boanerges of the epic; Viareggio has just put up a tablet to Rosolino Pilo and Giovanni Corrao, the daring precursors of the Thousand; even Rubattino—patriot in his own despite—has his statue in Genoa harbour, on the false ground that he put his shipping line at Garibaldi’s disposal. ’Tis a very shower of stones, falling on the just and the unjust alike. And sometimes—as at Asti—all the Heroes are United beneath a riot of granite monoliths and marble lions.

And even the ubiquitous heroes have peculiar glory in their peculiar haunts. Cavour is gigantic at Ancona (probably because the town was freed by Piedmontese troops); he stands in the castle of Verona, over-brooded by snow mountains: at Turin, his birthplace, Fame wildly clasps him to her breast in a mammoth monument, crying, “Audace, prudente, libero Italia.”

A Vanity Fair without a hero I have never chanced on. Little Chiavari has its grandiose angel-strewn monument to Victor Emmanuel, whom Parma likewise exhibits flourishing his sword; Pesaro breaks out in tablets to those who died fighting “the hirelings of the Theocracy”; Rimini has a Piazza Cavour; priest-ridden Vicenza shelters a statue of Mazzini; Assisi itself, waking from its saintly slumber, consecrates a Piazzetta to Garibaldi, and a street to the Twentieth of September on which Italian troops broke into Rome!

Ah, Garibaldi, Garibaldi, how thou didst weigh on my wanderings! From Mantua to Ferrara, from Spoleto to Perugia, Garibaldi, always Garibaldi. I fled to dead Ravenna, lo! thou didst tower in the very Piazza of Byron; to Parma, and rugged, imposing, in thy legendary cap, leaning on thy sword, thou didst obsess the Piazza Garibaldi; to Rome itself, and twenty feet high, thou impendedst in bronze, with battle pieces and allegories around thee; I retreated to the extremest point of the Peninsula, and found myself in the Corso Garibaldi of Reggio; I crossed to Sicily, only to stumble against thy great horse in Palermo and the monument to thy valour in Calatafimi. For of the statesman, the monarch, the prophet and the soldier who combined to redeem Italy, it is naturally the soldier that is stamped most vividly on the popular imagination, the noble freelance whom the mob deemed divine even before his death, whose memory the people has rescued from the anti-climax of his end, selecting away his follies and mistakes and idealising his virtues, under the artistic law of mythopoiesis, till, shaped and perfected for eternal service, the national hero shines immaculate in his sacred niche.

And yet, as the streets show, even the popular imagination has realised that the soldier would not have sufficed. Thrice blessed, indeed, was Italy to possess Cavour and Mazzini at the same hour as Garibaldi. It is a fallacy to suppose that the hour always finds the man, or the man the hour, or that “il n’y a pas d’homme indispensable.” Many an hour passes away without its man, as many a man without his hour. Great men perish, wasted, because there are no forces for them to synthetise: great forces remain inarticulate, unorganised and ineffective, because they have found no leader to be their conduit. All the more marvellous that Italy should have produced simultaneously three indispensable men, Mazzini, Cavour, and Garibaldi, each of whom had something of the other two, yet something unique of his own. None of the three quite understood the others, and Mazzini, who was much like Ibsen’s Brand, was even more intolerant than Garibaldi of the Machiavellian policies of Cavour, and had to be swept aside as a visionary. For one heroic, impossible moment, indeed, the spirit triumphed, the Republic of Rome was born, and idealism enjoyed perhaps its sole run of power in human history. But with the disappearance of the Republic, Mazzini might have disappeared too, for all his influence upon the political Risorgimento; did indeed practically disappear by acquiescing in the battle-flag of Monarchy. Garibaldi and Cavour sufficed to create the combination of Force and Fraud by which political history is made. For though, if any sword might ever bear the words I saw on a sword graven by Donatello—“Valore e Giustitia”—that sword was Garibaldi’s, and if ever passion was patriotic it was Cavour’s, nevertheless the liberation of Italy did not escape being achieved by the usual factors of Force and Fraud.

III

And, in addition to all these busts, statues, allegories, tablets, pillars, cairns, lions, bas-reliefs, wreaths, lists of heroes, records of plébiscites anent annexations, loggias whence Garibaldi orated; in addition to all the Piazze Garibaldi and Victor Emmanuel, all the Corsi Cavour and Mazzini, all the streets of the Twentieth of September and other heroic dates, there is the specific Museum of the Risorgimento from which no tiniest town is immune. To see one is practically to see all. With the same piety with which their ancestors collected the relics of the saints, the modern Italians have collected the relics of their heroes and the war—swords, sticks, photographs, crude paintings and engravings, old hats, letters, tricolour scarves, medals, pictures, patriotic money, helmets, epaulettes, broken bombs, cannon-balls, cartoons, caricatures, faded wreaths, autographs, sculptures, crosses, proclamations, prayer-books, pictures of steamers conveying insurgents! And Garibaldi! What town has not some shred of the “Genius of Liberty,” as the tablet in the old castle of Ferrara styles him—his flask, his sword, his shirt, his gun, his letters, his telegrams! Peculiarly sacred is the red shirt which he wore at Aspromonte, though it recalls the ironic fact that when the charmed, invincible hero was at last wounded and captured, it was by soldiers of the king he had created and of the Italy whose triumph he was seeking to consummate. Something Miltonic seems to emanate from that red shirt:

But for the rest, all these relics are as ugly as the relics of the saints. Beautiful and exalting as are the Museums in reality, with their record of sacrifice and patriotism in one of the most wonderful chapters of history, infinitely touching as is every yellow letter or worn glove, when imagination has transfused it, these glass cases are outwardly depressing to the last degree—a warning to the Realist, and a proof that Art in expressing the soul of a phenomenon is infinitely truer in its beauty than Nature unselected and unadorned. The wooden-legged curator of Bologna, who lost his leg at Solferino, is a mere stumping old bore; the little photograph of twenty-four Garibaldians minus arms or with crutches is simply discomforting. Even the story of the modern mother of the Gracchi, Adelaide Cairoli, who gave four sons to her country, exhales but tepidly from the picture at Pavia of a middle-aged lady in a bonnet surrounded by young soldiers in variegated costumes.

“Leonessa d’Italia,” cried Carducci to Brescia, and the one word of the poet wipes out all the crude photographs and grandiose inscriptions by which that seemingly prosaic town asserts its heroism; one ceases even to smile at the tablet at the foot of the castle hill, veiling a defeat in the guise of ferocious Austrian charges, “frequently” repulsed. From a mock passport of Radetsky in the Vicenza Museum I got a more vivid sense of the racial hatred than from all the relics and tablets: “Birth: Bastard of the seven deadly sins. Age: Eighty-two, sixty-five of which have been passed in robbing Austria of the money she stole. Eyes: Of a bird of prey. Nose: Of a Jew. Mouth: Open for the swallowing of divorce! Beard: Nothing. Hair: Enough. Visage: Not human. Occupation: Projector of Conquests. On the field of battle always at the tail; in the destruction of unarmed cities always at the head. Country: No country will own him. Signature: The last five days of his stay in Milan have paralysed him and he cannot sign. Visé: Good for nowhere.” And my most lively realisation of the transformation wrought in Europe since 1820 came, not from a Risorgimento museum nor from an official history, but from a black-and-white engraving of Raphael’s Sposalizio “dedicated humbly” by Giuseppe Longhi in 1820 “to the Imperial Royal Apostolical Majesty of Francesco I, Emperor of Austria, King of Jerusalem, Hungary, Bohemia, Lombardy, Venice, Dalmatia, Sclavonia, Galicia, Laodomiria, Illyria, &c. &c.”

IV

Even those streets or buildings that are free from the Risorgimento are pitted with records or statues. Padua records with equal pride how Dante had his exile sweetened by the hospitality of Carrara da Giotto, and how Giovanni Prati, the singer of to-day, lived in the Via del Santo. Verona celebrates impartially Catullus and some minor poet whose name I forget, if I ever knew it, “who by making sweet verses obtained a fame more than Italian.” Ferrara has a positive leprosy of white plaques. Bassano is not a great city, but “there is enough celebrity in Bassano,” writes Mr. Howells, “to supply the whole world.” Things were apparently not always thus; for when Childe Harold went on his pilgrimage he demanded to know where Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio were buried.

Could her quarries possibly furnish forth one more bust, was the question that came to me on my later pilgrimage. Too much to say have their country’s marbles. No poet could lodge a night at a house but for all time his visit must be graven; every local lawyer or engineer is become a world-wonder; it is recorded where “the inventor of the perpetual electric motor” died; even an assassination must be eternalised in a tablet. As for a room in which conspirators met to smoke and plot, it is for ever glorified and sanctified.

I was relieved, when I did go to Carrara,

to find the supply of marble from its fabular mountains still held out, but the chief occupation of the town seemed to consist in cutting it into slabs with great many-bladed machines. Slowly the grim knives descended, slicing the stone, while a spray moved to and fro to prevent its overheating by friction. And as I watched these plaques gradually grinding into separate existence, I heard them beginning to babble their lapidary language, bursting into eloquent inscriptions to unknown celebrities—chemists, town councillors, hydrographers, economists—nay, commemorating the Risorgimento itself in some village yet ungrown. “Rome or Death,” they cried stonily, and “Italy to her Sons,”and “Ci siamo e ci resteremo.” And the knives sank lower and lower, and the glories rose higher and higher, and the spray, hissing, continued to throw cold water on the enthusiasm, like some cynic observing it was easier to celebrate the old heroism than under its continuous inspiration to create the new. Carrara itself—though one would think it took marbles as a confectioner takes tarts—has its memorials of Garibaldi and Mazzini, besides that more ancient monument to Maria Beatrice overbrooded by the magic mountains.

To what cause shall we ascribe this hypertrophy of self-consciousness since Childe Harold’s day? Is it due to the Risorgimento, or the pleasure-pilgrims, or is some of it inspired by William Walton, canny British Guglielmo, to whom the municipality of Carrara has erected one of his own tablets for his services in stimulating the industry? Is it William Walton who forces all this glory upon Italy? Is it he who creates all this hero-worship? Perugino is no new discovery, yet not till 1865—341 years after his death—did the Commune of Perugia put up a tablet on that steep street which leads to his modest one-storied house, while Carducci, though not even a native, already looks out from the Carducci Gardens towards the rolling snow-mountains on the horizon. To this same 1865 belongs the imposing Dante Monument in the Piazza Santa Croce of Florence. But the six-hundredth anniversary of a poet is a trifle late for his appearance in his native city. True, it had taken him only two hundred years to force his way into Florence Cathedral, but that was merely as a painting on wood. The statue of Correggio in Parma (of course in the Piazza Garibaldi) was not erected till 1870. Tasso has been “the great unhappy poet” for three centuries. Yet not till 1895 did Urbino think it necessary to record his visit to the city as the guest of Federigo Bonaventura. As for Raphael, Urbino’s own wonder-child, that thirty-six foot monument to him dates only from 1897! All these testimonials to Art would be a little more convincing if the straight iron bridges with which Venice and Verona have insulted their fairy waters, did not prove—like the flamboyant technique of the modern Italian painter—that Italy has left her art period irrevocably behind.

And the great knives of Carrara go grinding on, “ohne Hast, ohne Rast,” inexorably supplying celebrity. Like the Greece of the decadence, Italy has reached its stone age, an age which seems the symptom of spent vigour, the petrifaction of what once was vital. Nor is it easy to recognise Mazzini’s soldiers of humanity in a nation whose prophet is d’Annunzio, whose “smart set” repeats the morals of the Renaissance without its genius, whose masses appear to spend their lives in lounging about the streets smoking long black slow-lighting cigars, or patronising the innumerable pastrycooks. It seems a slight return for all the heroic agony of the Risorgimento that Europe should be supplied with an efficient type of restaurant, and a vividly gesturing waiter, who dissects himself in discussing the carving of the joint.

cries a memorial tablet at Brescia, but the ennoblement and the promise of the future are less obvious than the orgy of nationalistic sentiment. And when I read how at the recent meeting in North Italy between their King and the Czar, Italian citizens submitted to being treated like Russians during a royal progress; herded outside the town while within it every door was bolted and every blind drawn, as though ’twas indeed the funeral of freedom, I felt how justified was Mazzini’s unwillingness to resurrect under a monarchy. And when I think of the great equestrian monument to Victor Emmanuel II which is to commemorate in 1911 the jubilee of the dynasty’s sovereignty over United Italy—the monument that will cost a hundred million lire, and in the belly of whose horse a lunch d’onore was recently offered by the proprietor of the foundry to the engineers and artisans, “twenty-six persons in all”—I see how wise was Mazzini’s protest against the narrowing down of a great spiritual movement to the acquisition of more territory by a reigning house. It was a commercial traveller who proudly directed my attention to this equine lunch, and this standard of greatness just suits a commercial nation. In this Gargantuan horse the whole millennial dream of Mazzini may end, and those young heroes of freedom, whose deaths lay so heavy on his conscience in his black moments, may have died but to add another to the family party of monarchs who regard the rest of humanity as a subject-race, transferable from one to the other by conquest or treaty.

However valuable a King may be to Italy as a symbol of Unity, Mazzini was historically accurate when he pointed out that the conception of kingship has no roots in Italy, the one epoch of imperial sway being a mere degeneration of the Roman Republic. It was a fine stroke of tactics to celebrate Mazzini’s centenary in 1905 as a national festival, in which the King himself took part. But these centennial tablets and statues were Italy’s way of stoning its prophet; this festival was Mazzini’s real funeral, burying his aspirations out of sight so effectively that the man in the street has forgotten that for Mazzini the goal of Garibaldi and Cavour was only a starting-point; and a popular British Encyclopædia assures us that Mazzini “lived to see all his dreams realised.”

Not that there is a word to be said against the charming and intelligent young man who presides over Italy, and who has signalised himself among his peers by founding an International Agricultural Institute. But what a climax to the long struggle against tyranny, this meeting of King and Czar! To be sure Italy had already made friends with Austria in the very year after Garibaldi’s death—“in the interests of the peace of Europe.”

Poor Europe. They make a spiritual desert and call it peace.

“Songs before Sunrise”—yes, but where is the sun?

V

More instinct with vitality than the most eloquent tablets to the Risorgimento are the mural inscriptions of hatred to Austria rudely chalked up by anonymous hands, especially on the Adriatic side. “Down with Austria!” “Death to Austria!” “Death to Trent and Trieste!” is the general tenor, varied by the name of Francis Joseph scrawled between skulls and crossbones. ’Tis a strange comment on the Triple Alliance, and the authorities do not seem hurried to remove this glaring contradiction. Even “Death to the Czar” survives the royal meeting.

But the Irredenta is not to be taken seriously. Not along political lines does the Risorgimento proceed, any more than along the moral lines for which Mazzini worked. The second phase, the second Risorgimento it may indeed be called, is the Industrial Resurrection. Resurrection—because Italy, whose Merchant of Venice reminds us that the Italian nobleman was always a trader, and whose leading Florentines were Magnificent Moneylenders, can hardly be regarded as an Arcadia transformed by the cult of the dollar. Even Mazzini demanded revival of “the old commercial greatness”; perhaps he might have been content to wait patiently through this materialistic epoch, if he were sure it would lead to a third Risorgimento.

Hygiene has yet to penetrate and suffuse the new prosperity. But if even Perugia still stinks in places and Foligno everywhere, the country is getting perceptibly cleaner, and perhaps godliness is next to cleanliness. But the severest moralist cannot grudge Italy her rise in wealth and happiness: the poverty of the peasantry, accentuated by the extravagant ambition of Italy to be a Great Power in the smallest of senses, has been terrible. At what a cost has Italy achieved her first Dreadnought, so perversely christened Dante Alighieri!

Beggars abound—blind, crippled, or with hideous growths—especially in the South. Doubtless the influx of the pleasure-pilgrim has increased the deformity of the population, and the Italian beggar pushes forward his monstrosity as though it were for sale, but there is real physical degeneration all the same. The discovery of New York and South America by the Italian has fortunately co-operated with the discovery of Italy by the pleasure-pilgrim and the foreign investor, and some 600,000 Italians in the South of Brazil provide the makings of a Trans-atlantic Italy. Even the semi-savage villages of Sicily are sown with steamer advertisements, and batches going and returning for jobs or harvests make an ever-weaving shuttle across the Atlantic.

And if the monuments of the First Risorgimento clash with the old historic background of Italy, still more is the Second Risorgimento in discord with it. One almost sees a new Italy, infinitely less beautiful but not devoid of backbone, struggling out of the old architectural shell which does not in the least express it. The old ducal and seignorial cities, the old republics, are developing suburbs, sometimes prosperous if prosaic, like the new quarters of Florence and Parma; sometimes grotesque, like Pesaro’s sea-side resort, with its “new” architecture—lobster-red and mustard-green lattices, and sham golden doors, carved with busts; sometimes hideous, like the outskirts of Verona, where under the blue, brooding mountains rises a quarter of electrical workshops and chemical factories. Ancient towered Asti grows sparkling with its new brick Banca d’Italia, and its blued and gilded capitals in the Church of S. Secondo Martire. Look down on Genoa, with its fantasia of spires, campaniles, roof-gardens, green lattices, marble balconies, chimneys decorated with figures of doges and opening out like flowers, and see how the old narrow alleys are almost roofed with telegraph and telephone wires. Go down to the widened harbour and see the warehouses, the American sky-scrapers, the smoking chimneys, the great steamers sailing out for Buenos Ayres and New York, the emigrants with their bundles. The blue bird sings here no more; you hear only the bang of the hammer, which Young Italy declares is the voice of the century.

I look out of my window at Forli (in the Via Garibaldi!) and see a white minaret and a white campanile gleaming fantastically in the moonlight over a panorama of russet roofs. There is a stone floor in my bedroom and no chimney. In the Piazza all is heavy and mediæval: dull stone colonnades and a rough cobbled road. In a church a grotesque griffin ramps over a pavement tomb. Yet through these cumbersome stone forms I feel the new Italy struggling. The Ginnasio Communale of the town shelters with equal pomp and spaciousness the picture-gallery and the chemical laboratory. These colonnades and cobbles have no more congruity with the new spirit than the old seignorial and episcopal Palazzi with the poor “tenement families” whom they house to-day. Presently life will slough off these forms altogether. Where an old castle like that of Ferrara or an old palace like that of Lucca or Pistoja can be tamed to civic uses, it becomes a town-hall; where no old building is available, an adequate modern form is created, as in the handsome post-offices with their almost military sense of the dignity of the common life.

At Pesaro I lodged in a Bishop’s Palace with “steam-heat, telephone, electric light in all the chambers, garage for automobiles, motor omnibus to all the trains!” Palatial was it indeed, so absurdly spacious that the dining-room was only accessible through vast, empty, domed and frescoed halls, and I could have held a political meeting in my bedroom, where I slept with a sense of camping out under the infinities. I had no notion that provincial churchmen were thus magnificent, and I do not wonder that the Lord Cardinal of Ostia, when he saw how the Franciscans of the Portiuncula slept on ragged mattresses and straw, without pillows or bedsteads, burst into tears, exclaiming: “We wretches use so many unnecessary things!” And yet the Cardinal did not use a single thing advertised by the ex-Palace of Pesaro.

Nowhere do new and old clash or combine more disagreeably than in Modena, where crumbling marble-pillared colonnades are painted red, and meet continuations in new brick. The Cathedral, begun in 1099, guarded and flanked by quaint stone lions, bears on its ancient campanile a tablet to Victor Emmanuel. In the great Piazza, church, picture-gallery and war-monument swear at one another. The Ducal Palace is a military school, the moat round the old rampart—where once resounded that archaic song of the war-sentinels—is a public laundry.

And the statues, tablets, monuments, of the Second Risorgimento begin to vie with those of the first. Pro Nervi, painted on the benches on that desolate cactus-grown shore, among the Leonardesque sea-sprayed rocks by the old Gropallo tower, attests the activity of a society created to boom the summer resort, while a tablet celebrates the Marchese who, foreseeing the future of Nervi, put up the first hotel and died with the name of the municipality on his lips. I do not think the Marchese himself foresaw how far Nervi would go. I know I walked miles along its tramway amid monotonous streets, with no sign of an end. Indeed the tram-line reaches Genoa.

Nor is the Marchese the only hero of the Second Risorgimento. Trust Carrara for that—Carrara and Guglielmo Walton!

And the creations of this Risorgimento rival those of the Renaissance in costliness. Where in all Europe will you find a street as luxurious as Genoa’s Via XX Settembre—the long colonnade, the granite pillars, the gilded and frescoed roof, the mosaic pavement where the poorest may tread more magnificently than Agamemnon.

And the great Gallery of Victor Emmanuel in Milan, what is it but a secular parody of the Cathedral it faces—nave, transept, dome, complete even to the invisible frescoes, a Cathédrale de luxe? Very sad and solemn looked the old Cathedral at night, for all its fairy fretwork, as Life passed it by for its glittering counterpart.

VI

I went to San Marino to get away from Garibaldi. For here—I said to myself—is the one spot in Italy that is not Italy, that has kept its pristine Republicanism. Here on the Titan Mount is the one spot that cannot possibly acclaim the Union. At most I may encounter a memorial to Mazzini.

I left Rimini by the Gate of the Via Garibaldi which leads straight to San Marino, and trudging for the better part of a day I saw it impending horribly some two thousand five hundred feet above me, and after dragging myself through the Borgo or lower suburb, I toiled in the darkness up a narrow, steep, slippery, jagged path, on the brink of a sheer precipice, into—the Via Garibaldi! And in a bedroom looking down on it—for the only hotel is in a Piazzetta abutting on it—I passed the night.

In the morning I found a Garibaldi garden and a Caffè Garibaldi and a Piazza Garibaldi and a Garibaldi bust and a Garibaldi bas-relief and two Garibaldi tablets; item, a tablet to Victor Emmanuel and a centennial tablet and street to Mazzini, even a Via of Giosuè Carducci, the laureate of the Risorgimento.

Part of the explanation is that Garibaldi sought refuge here in 1849, escaping from “the Roman Republic” to the Ravenna pine-wood where poor Anita died, and his order for the day—“Soldiers, we are on a Soil of Refuge,” and his letter of thanks from Caprera—“I go away proud to be a citizen of so virtuous a Republic”—are reproduced on the tablets. But the deeper cause of this sympathy is that San Marino is Italian through and through, and its hoary independence, real enough in the days of the city states, is become a farce solemnly played with separate postage stamps and currency, Regents, Councils, militia, peers, commons, Home and Foreign Secretaries, ribbons, orders, treaties, extradition treaties and a diplomatic corps in England, Austria-Hungary, Spain, France and Italy, all to cover its budget of £11,000 and its population of 10,422 souls, enumerated from week to week in the toy press and decreasing by dozens. ’Tis a game into which all Europe has entered in high good humour, the grand farçeur, Napoleon, even proposing to extend the Republic’s boundaries, which comprise only thirty-three square miles. But the Sammarinese had sense enough to see that a greater realm would be treated more seriously. Mount Titan, as the seat not of a toy capital but of something answering less humorously to its name, would cease to be a joke, whereas a State less than one-fourth of the Isle of Wight might remain for Europe a blessed land of diversion from the eternal earnestness of the sword, might even save Europe’s self-respect as a region of civilisation, regardful of treaties and ancient rights. So serious in fact did the Sammarinese consider the danger of being taken seriously, that Antonio Onofri who advised against this Napoleonic inflation stands immortalised as Pater Patriæ.

No doubt the inaccessibility of Mount Titan must have been the origin of San Marino’s existence in those dim days of the Diocletian persecution, when the Roman Matron, Felicita, whom the stone-cutter Marinus had converted to Christianity, “made him a present of the mountain.” And the same inaccessibility which suited it for a Christian colony contributed later to the success of its traditional policy of balancing between the Rimini Malatestas and the Dukes of Urbino. But what prevented Austria from following Garibaldi into San Marino? What but its enjoyment of the game, or its desperate clinging to that shred of self-respect? To-day when the cycle of history has brought us round again to the period of Ezzelino, when the intellectual or religious concepts, which anciently veiled usurpations, are contemptuously thrown aside, and the iron hand crushes in mockery of the combined Jurists of Europe, what stands between San Marino and extinction? Only the environing Italy. And Italy plays with the tiny Republic as a father plays with a child. San Marino has two mortars in the fortress of La Rocca—for what is a State without artillery to fire on solemn occasions?—and these mortars were presented by Victor Emmanuel III. Italy also receives the more desperate criminals, who are boarded out in its prisons, as it supplies the police from its reserve soldiers, and the Judge from its lawyers. Italy has provided its only distinguished citizens—they are honorary,—its national hymn was taken from Guido of Arezzo, the inventor of the musical scale, and when the beautiful if mimetic Palazzo Pubblico for the Regents and the Council was opened in 1894, it was with a speech of Carducci.

Yet “Liberty,” I found, was the keynote of San Marino. Liberty was the motto of its arms, with their three mountains and plumed towers. Liberty waved in the white and blue flag and was painted on the shields of the palace corridors. S. Marino, the author of Liberty, was commemorated in the cathedral façade with its flourish of Sen. P. Q., and Liberty cried from the scroll his statue flourished. “In tuenda Libertate vigilis” warned the inscription over the court room; “animus in consulendo Liber” counselled the medallion near the tribune, and in choice Latin epigraphs the transient tyrant, Cæsar Borgia, impugner of Liberty, was denounced and derided. Sublime it was to stand before the Gothic Palace of the Regents, on this dizzy Piazza della Libertà with its gigantic statue of Liberty (her hand on her bannered spear), and to behold the sheer abyss below, and as from an aeroplane the marvellous panorama of sea and mountain around, Liberty written in every rugged convolution and glacial peak, and shimmering in every masterless wave. And yet my imagination refused to play the game; refused to take with becoming reverence the crowned and gilded pew of the Regents, the historic frescoes and friezes, the blue and orange of the “Guarda Nobile,” the képis and bayonets of the militia, the red facings of the police. All this parade of “Libertas” was in inverse proportion to the substance, or even to the power of securing it. The Republic appeared like a banknote without gold behind it, and an Italian banknote at that; never so essentially Italian as in the lapidary literature asserting its separateness. This grand Palace, this costly Cathedral, both built only within the last few years simultaneously with the motor road that has destroyed the last semblance of isolation, seemed like that spasm of self-assertiveness which so often precedes extinction. And I thought that conquering nations might well mark how easily love can melt what hate would only harden. Imagine if Italy had brought her mortars against San Marino instead of presenting them to it, or if she had made a road for her mortars instead of for her motors!

But as an antique curio San Marino is delightful. I love to muse on the pomp of its Regents who are elected—like the Doges of Venice—by a mixture of choice and chance, and go in state to celebrate mass, clothed in satin breeches and velvet mantle, in doublet and sword and ermined cap, accompanied by the Noble Guard and the high officers of State, and then from the Cathedral, still to the clashing of church bells and the strains of military music, to their semestral thrones in the Palazzo Pubblico; there to hear a speech from the Government Orator—whose fee is four shillings—and to take the Latin oath not to tamper with the Libertas of the Constitution, and to receive the State seals and keys and the insignia of Grand Masters of the Order of San Marino, perhaps even the first instalment of the royal budget of a pound a month.

No autocrats are these Regents, despite their regal salary. They are mere constitutional monarchs, official headpieces to the Arringo or sovereign Council in which the real power resides. But though Republican, San Marino is not Democratic, for the Arringo fills up its vacancies by option. Liberty is not flouted however, for may not every head of a family—after the half-yearly elections—give the Arringo a piece of his mind? Time was when the citizen could stroll into its sittings and tender it the benefit of his advice, but this form of Liberty seems to have been found too excessive and cumbersome even for the land of Libertas.

Happy are the nations that have no history, and San Marino seems to have escaped almost without an anecdote. In 1461 Pope Pius II invited it to make war with the Magnificent Monster, Sigismondo Malatesta of Rimini, and rewarded its aid with four castles. Cæsar Borgia came and went in 1503, a nocturnal attack by Fabiano del Monte was repulsed in 1543, and after that nothing appears to have happened till 1739, when the Cardinal Legate, Giulio Alberoni, occupied the Republic. But the Republic having appealed to the Pope was left free again, Clement XII thus becoming a national hero with his bust in the Palazzo. But national heroes of its own it has none. It has adopted the cult of Garibaldi, though he preaches Italian Unity, and made honorary citizens of Canova, Rossini and Verdi, and it has almost appropriated the famous numismatist, Bartolommeo Borghesi, who did at least live here, if he omitted to be born here, and who dominates one of the wonderful mountain-terraces, holding a book and gazing carefully at the only point where there is no view. But as to the “Viri Clarissimi et Illustres Castri Sancti Marini” blazoned on the Palazzo staircase, between shields of “Libertas,” I fear their celebrity had not reached me. Doctors, artists, counts, dignitaries of the Church—I was impartially ignorant of them all.

What is to account for this paucity of personalities? Had a great saint or a great poet arisen here, we should have explained it glibly by the pious isolation among the eternal mountains, looking down upon the eternal sea, under the everlasting stars. Had a new Acropolis or a new Parthenon risen on this hill of the Titan, we should not have lacked proofs of the inevitability of the new Athens. But nothing has arisen. Giambittisti Belluzzi, the military architect of its walls and of the Imperial Castle at Pesaro, is San Marino’s highest name in art, while in literature its chroniclers point to Canon Ignazio Belzoppi, “letterato di molta fama,” born in 1762, author of the heroi-comic poem, “Il Bertuccino” (The Little Monkey)—unpublished!

For life to be perfect then, small circles are not enough, pace my friend Boëthius. They must tingle with life, perhaps even with death. Can it be that the advocatus diaboli was right, and that the snug security of a diplomatic mountain-fastness has bred mediocrity? I tell him angrily that the place is a Paradise and he answers calmly that it is only a Parish. Can it be that the only Paradise possible is a Fools’ Paradise?

But a serpent has entered Eden, crawling probably by the motor-car road. He has insinuated doubt of holy authority and the Sammarinese begin to eat of the Tree of Knowledge. Il Titano is the organ of the Socialists—a Titan in revolt—and the Somarino serves the Clericals—with the accent on the Santo. “Preti!!!” is the ejaculatory title of an article in the number of Il Titano that came into my hands (April 24, 1910). “We might say impostors, falsifiers, canaille,” it begins pleasantly, “but we say instead ‘Priests,’ which is a substantive that comprises all the others.”

And thus across its precipices San Marino joins hands with “Young Italy,” whose programme according to the organ of that name embraces the exiling of the Vatican beyond the frontiers of Italy, the sweeping away of the bankrupt remains of Christianity, and the abandonment of Imperialism and the African adventure. I will engage there are even Futurists in San Marino.

VII

I must confess to a smiling sympathy with this “Youngest Italy” party—if the little half-baked literary and artistic clique of Futurists can be called a party. I can understand the oppression of all the glorious Italian past, all those massive buildings and masterpieces, and stereotyped forms of thought. Like the son of a genius, modern Italy is cramped and overshadowed. Hence the rabid yearning for some new form of energising, this glorification of the moment and perpetual change. In a fantastic fury of iconoclasm the Futurists demand even the destruction of the creations of ancient genius that overhang their lives—they would make an art-pyre as fervently as Savonarola. Climbing the Clock Tower of St. Mark’s Square, they threw down coloured handbills repudiating the vulgar voluptuous Venice of the tourist. “Hasten to fill its fetid little canals with the ruins of its tumbling and leprous palaces. Burn the gondolas, those see-saws for fools!” So far so good. But mark the beatific vision that is to replace this putrefying beauty. “Raise to the sky the rigid geometry of large metallic bridges, and manufactories with waving hair of smoke. Abolish everywhere the languishing curves of the old architectures.” How characteristic of the Second Risorgimento! It must be by an oversight that the smoke is still permitted to be “waving.” I imagine that the resurrection of the old Campanile of Venice must have been the last straw. For ten hundred and fourteen years this gloomy old tower had impended, and when it did at last fall of its own sheer decrepitude, lo! it must be stood up again, exact to the last massy inch, and even with the same inscription—Verbum caro factum est—on its bells. As if a bell could have no new message after a millennium! Let the historian, at any rate, mark that the Futurists did not rise till the Campanile was not allowed to fall. The police, taking the Futurists seriously, prohibit their meetings, which will end in making them take themselves seriously. But they are a useful counteractive to the Zealots of the Zona Monumentale, who, in their passion for the ruins of Rome, forget the claims of life. When the Present says, “I must live,” the artist and the archæologist too often reply: “Je n’en vois pas la nécessité.” Carducci even called on Fever to guard the Appian Way. But cities exist for citizens, not for spectators, and when the telephone bell of the Present rings, we should reply like the Italian waiter: “Pronto! Desidera?” We cannot do in Rome as the Romans do, for they have to live, not look at Ruins. And let us not expect the Romans to do in Rome as we do. If tramways must run along the Via Appia, at least Fever will retire before them. How long is it our duty to guard the ruins of the Past? Suppose the tombs and temples of the Appian Way should threaten to collapse altogether, have we to keep them in a state of artificial ruin? Augustus boasted that he found Rome brick and made it marble. If the industrial Risorgimento found Rome marble and made it brick, I suppose there are compensations for Augustus. Imperial Rome never thought of dedicating a slab of that marble to the nameless pauper dead, worn out in the obscure service of their country, as Industrial Rome has done in a touching inscription. And should Rome extend the tale of its bricks to house the homeless troglodytes who pig in the remains of that ancient marble, I will throw up my cap with the Futurists.

Pisa is to me a dream-city, but to the Pisans it is a centre of the glass industry and the cloth industry, with municipalised gas. They have done handsomely in leaving me my dream-city outside the town life. If topographical obstacles prevent other ancient cities from thus surviving themselves, let me be thankful for small mercies. There was one old inn at Perugia which had escaped the electric light and the pleasure-pilgrims, and where the porter peeled the potatoes, but as I sat this very Spring, dining in the quaint courtyard, lo! to my chagrin the light of modernity flooded it for the first time. But there chanced too that night so joyous a band of University students, on gymnastic business bent, the old courtyard resounded with such pranks, and songs, and cheers, such fulness of young new life, that I felt Perugia could not for ever live on griffins and Peruginos and Baglioni horrors. In that moment even the joyous madness of the Futurists appeared to me saner than the gloom of a Gissing concluding his Italian journeys “By the Ionian Sea” with the wish that he could live for ever in the Past, the Present and its interests blotted out.

It is a cheap æsthetic to retire to the Past, too blind to see beauty in the Present, and too anæmic to build it for the Future. But humanity is not a museum-curator; the cult of ancestors, once the backbone of Hindu-Aryan civilisation, survives only in China. The cult of descendants has taken its place, the Golden Age is before, not behind, and the debt we owe to our fathers we pay to our sons, not necessarily in the same currency. No doubt the Past is ivy-clad, the Present raw and the Future dim. But as happiness does not come from the search for happiness, neither does beauty come from the search for beauty. “Rather seek ye the Kingdom of God and all these things shall be added unto you.”

VIII

So despite the slow black cigar, the ubiquitous farmacia and pasticceria, despite the pervasive petrifaction of past glory, I feel that a vigorous breeze of young thought moves through Italy, and that Mazzini is not entirely swallowed up in the belly of the Great Horse. “Il nullismo” was an Asti election-poster’s shrewd summary of the programme of the Clerical Moderates, “lo star quieti—forma ipocrita di reazione.” If Italy escapes the reaction involved in standing still, we may yet see a Third Risorgimento that will resurrect Mazzini. Even a Republican Congress has met freely, if with closed doors.

The popular Italian newspapers, like the windows of the bookshops, are far more intellectual than our own, and there is a healthy readiness to try social experiments under the popular referendum. If the nationalisation of the railways does not yet pay, on account of the multiplicity of officials, it has at least provided a more punctual service than of yore, and the third-class passenger is treated as a human being. A Jew as Premier and another as Syndic of Rome constitute an amende honorable for the Italy which established the Ghetto and, cramping a prolific race, produced in Venice the first specimen of the American sky-scraper. Capital punishment is abolished—the apostle, Beccaria, duly petrified at Milan—and despite the legend of the stiletto and the vendetta nobody demands its restoration. Phlebotomy prevails alarmingly, through the habit of using a knife as if it were the mere point of the fist, but it is a peaceable and polite people. The niente with which the veriest vagabond deprecates your thanks, the prego of the courtlier defence against gratitude, are the outer and audible sign of an inner gentleness. Irritatingly vague as regards time and space and money, a foe to definite agreements, a lover of the horizon and the buona mano, running restaurants with unpriced menus, and shops with unmarked goods, the Italian has always the saving grace of respect for things of the mind. Who ever saw a picture of Tennyson labelled—like the photographs of Carducci—“Mighty Master, Sublime Poet, Refulgent National Glory!” There are moods in which I could applaud even the stones.

But it is the revolt against Rome which stirs most furiously the intelligenza of Italy—as of all the Latin world. While in England the fight against Christianity is confined to a few guerilla papers in low esteem, in Italy it is a pitched battle. And the modern Anti-Pope is far more formidable to the Vatican than the mediæval, being a rival idea, not a rival man. The Vatican handicaps itself superfluously by sneering at the Risorgimento—though I am told its haughty refusal to recognise the Unity of Italy brings in shekels from Mexico, Colombia, and other strongholds of the spirit. Instead of joining in the recent Garibaldi jubilation, it asked through its organ whether the prosperity of the South had not been sacrificed to the interests of the North. And so far from making concessions to Modernism, it is sitting tighter than ever, issuing lamentable Syllabuses and Encyclicals, accumulating lists of suspects. It censured Minocchi for allegorising the first three chapters of Genesis, and excommunicated Murri for saying the Pope ought not to play at politics. The freethinkers complain uneasily of its aggressiveness, lamenting—with unconscious humour—that it makes propaganda! The army itself—ay, even the old Garibaldians—are not safe from its guiles! As if the Congregation of the Propaganda were of to-day!

But the confiscation of monasteries and churches to military and civil uses—to barracks, agricultural colleges, gymnasia, hospitals, what-not—the transformation of elaborate historic shrines into State Monuments, are indications of the ground lost to the Church in its own peculiar land. Strange was it to see squads of half-nude lads at gymnastics in the old Renaissance church of St. Mary Magdalen at Pesaro. Still more surprising to see a carpenter sawing away in the lofty, well-preserved Church of the Jesuits in Pavia, his wood stacked in the forsaken frescoed chapels, as in a strange return of Christendom to its origins, or an illustration of the new Logion, “Cleave the wood and ye shall find me.” I bought coal at a still more decayed church, taking off my hat involuntarily.

The journalism of the street-nomenclature keeps pace with the progress of anti-Clericalism. “Sons of an age which you foresaw,” the epitaph on Giordano Bruno’s tomb assures that victim of the Inquisition, and many a Via or Piazza Giordano Bruno in places apparently remote from the currents of thought—Pesaro, Perugia, Foligno, Urbino on its isolated rock—testifies that even a tombstone may speak the truth, provided that it is only posthumous enough. Urbino, indeed, lonely rugged Urbino, is compelled to put up in the Church of S. Francesco the significant warning: “The law punishes disturbers of religious functions.” And even more illuminating than the Giordano Bruno streets or the Giordano Bruno societies is the mushroom rapidity with which streets of Francesco Ferrer have sprung up all over Italy. Florence, with biting sarcasm, has made its Via Francesco Ferrer out of its Archbishop Street. Tiny San Gimignano of the many towers has inserted a tablet to Ferrer in the wall of an open loggia of a theatre, “in order that Thought should be fruitful and survive Death.” . . . “Victim,” it cries, “of the sacerdotal tyranny, inaugurating the not distant time when there shall be neither oppressed nor oppressors!”

Such millennial dreams in such mediæval cities prove that Mazzini was no sport of nature, but a true son of Italy; seed-plot of all the mysticisms and aspirations from St. Francis and Dante to Gioberti and David Lazzaretti.

IX

“Rome of the Cæsars gave the Unity of Civilisation that force imposed on Europe. Rome of the Popes gave a Unity of Civilisation that Authority imposed on a great part of the human race. Rome of the People will give, when you Italians are nobler than you are now, a Unity of civilisation accepted by the free consent of the nations for Humanity.” In this magnificent synthesis, written in 1844, Mazzini proclaimed the mission of Rome to the world. His mental outlook was infinitely broader than Lazzaretti’s, whose story is one of Life’s many plagiarisms of the Palestinian original, complete even to martyrdom and an awaited Resurrection. Yet Mazzini shared with the peasant-prophet of Monte Amiata the assurance of a not distant Millennium to be inaugurated by his followers. ’Twas a blindness due to standing in his own white light. The simplest observation of the facts reveals that humanity is only at its alphabet, that we are living in the mere infancy of our planet’s human history, in a Dark Age to which the millennial century will look back with incredulity, though a few Gissings will be anxious to live in it. The overwhelming majority of mankind to-day abides religiously in primitive autocosms, which have little resemblance to the cosmos as it is, and every variety of savagery from African cannibalism to European rubber-hunting and American negro-lynching is still in vogue. Half the land of the globe is still in undisturbed possession of our animal and insect inferiors. Canada, Australia and South America show a few human figures dotting the endless spaces—in Matto Grosso in Brazil a hundred thousand people occupy half a million square miles, in Patagonia each man may have a San Marino Republic to himself, in Alaska the population of a small English country town is spread over six hundred thousand square miles. Even the United States, which are sixty times as large as England, have only double its population. In Asia, the cradle of so-called civilisation, there are still nomad populations, and large tracts, as of Arabia and Tibet, have never been penetrated by the foot of an explorer. The bulk of Africa as of Russia—which is half Europe plus half Asia—is still given over to barbarism. One third of the whole human race is packed into China, a land where torture is still legal. Decidedly there is plenty of scope for “the mission of Rome,” nor need the lover of the picturesque yet apprehend the monotony of the Millennium, as, girdled by stars and infinities, crossed by the tails of comets, rent and seamed by earthquakes, our planet continues its amazing adventure.