by Ouida
To pull down the Palazzo Venezia and the Palazzo Torlonia, which it is decided to do in Rome, in order that the statue of Victor Emmanuel, for which the funds have not even yet been raised, may be visible from the Corso, is as contemptible as it is childish. The beauty of the Campidoglio is already ruined in order to place that statue there: might not that suffice? To throw down the Tower of the Amadei to put in its place a restaurant, or a drinking-shop, is so stupid an act that the enormity of the offence to history and art is almost forgotten in its imbecility. To cut off a portion of the Archbishop’s Palace to widen a road, and destroy half the gardens of the Orti Oricellari to make a mean street, and to place the stations and rails of tramway companies on the macigno pavement under the Campanile, the Battistero, and the Duomo of Florence, are outrages to the whole educated world and the history of five centuries. To destroy the Ponte del Paradiso in order to put a cast-iron pontoon in its place, is an abomination which should only seem possible to a company of clowns crazy with drink; whilst to turn the lovely isle of Sant’ Elena into a heap of cinders for the pleasure of a carriage-building company, which company was not even guaranteed from bankruptcy, was unquestionably as unbusinesslike and as unprofitable as it was impious.
There is neither common sense, nor common decency, in the chief part of the measures taken within the last decade to humiliate and imbastardise the cities and towns of Italy. The process of destruction began indeed much earlier; but within the last ten years the pace has been increased from a leisurely walk to a furious gallop. The scramble to be first to outrage, to deface, to despoil, has become a St Vitus’s dance amongst the syndics, assessors, and councilmen; each deliriously eager for the approving smile of the various ministers in whose hands the destinies of these great and unrivalled Urbes unfortunately are placed.
It must be remembered by the foreign reader that there is no Minister of Fine Arts in Italy. There is a Minister of Education, another of Public Works, and another of Agriculture, and between these three all questions of art and architecture are divided, and are decided in agreement with the various municipalities. The mischief the trio does is incalculable, for they are seldom selected with any regard to their æsthetic qualifications. Indeed, if ever anyone of them show any scholarly capacity and aptitude for his office, like that which was shown by Villari, his possession of power is very short. Of a recent minister of agriculture it is related that, as he looked over a valley planted with magnificent olives near Brescia, he exclaimed, ‘What fine willows!’
A similar ignorance in matters belonging to their respective departments is expected of the Ministers of Education and Public Works. Were there a Minister of Fine Arts, he would undoubtedly be chosen from the attorneys, the manufacturers, the scientists, or the rural Bœotians.
Another minister of agriculture, Count Francesco Guicciardini, had an admirable and thorough command of the objects of his Dicastero; skilled in agriculture himself, and the owner of large estates, he knew what to do and how to do it; and by his energy an outbreak of phylloxera was arrested before any great losses had ensued. But outside agriculture, his influence was less excellent, because he was unfortunately enabled to meddle with matters not agricultural and beyond his knowledge; as when he ordered the destruction of a whole quarter of the martial and ancient city of Pistoia, and the waste of the town funds in the erection of a new savings bank. Over the choice of a design for this building, the townspeople of Pistoia are now violently quarrelling, whilst many of their finest and noblest palaces are left to go empty to decay!
A minister of the strictest probity, of the strongest desire to do what is just and wise, is never long able to resist the pressure of those around him, the force of example, the persuasions of local magnates, and the insistence of the crowd of hungry perquisite-hunters. It is such shocking and wicked waste of money as was this in Pistoia which impoverishes every town, and disfigures each with vulgar piles of brick and iron, and grotesque monuments of black metal, whilst a miserable woman at their gates pays four centimes duty on a pint of milk before she can take it past the guards to sell, and a wretched man, who owns a little road-fed flock of goats, is taxed two hundred francs a year before he may drive them into the streets to yield the little nourishment which they can afford to invalids and children. Should the law now under consideration pass, and the debts of the Communes be paid by the State, and monies be henceforth lent lavishly by the State to the Communes, this expenditure will increase tenfold, and the jobbery accompanying it will be multiplied in similar measure.
No one of the governing classes is guiltless in the matter; cabinets, senators, deputies, prefects, mayors, town councils, provincial councils, each and all, sin alike in this matricide, and seem to vie with each other in suggesting and executing the abominable projects which disgrace the close of the century.
In this day, in everything appertaining to municipal government, the greater is sacrificed to the lesser; the smug, the ordinary, the expedient, the venal are first of all considered; the kind of man who pushes to the front in affairs is bustling, sharp, keen, insensible, in whose own existence no necessity for anything except vulgar prosperity, as ugly as you will, is felt for an hour. To speak to such men of such impersonal desires as moved the makers of the great cities of old, is to speak in an unknown tongue, which they appraise as gibberish. They are, for the present time, the rulers of the world, and the material they are made of is the same clay, whether its shape take that of an emperor or a contractor, of a king or a beadle, of a minister or a vestryman. At the present hour the earth is given over to them.
Wyzewa accepts this insatiable mania for destruction as a characteristic, which of course it undoubtedly is, of the general disease of modernity; but he does not seem to trace it to what is surely its source, the greed of gain. All these engineers, builders, contractors, town councillors, bankers, usurers, speculators, chairmen, shareholders, and directors of companies, can make nothing out of the ancient glory and grace of beautiful cities; the mayors can get no savoury morsel to compensate them for all their servility and time-serving; the deputies can find no useful plunder to enrich the crew who have voted for them; in respecting the beauty of the past, syndicates and tradesmen and gamblers on ’Change would reap no harvest of gold whatever.
What else but greed has been the motive of that shameless desecration of Rome against which Geoffroy has raised his voice from the tomb to protest?
What else but greed the motive of that infamous destruction of the entire centre of Florence, its historic towers and churches and palaces, torn down with blind rage to be replaced by hideous hotels, and monster shops, and grotesque monuments? the most piteous, and the most inexcusable, injury ever done to the rights of history and of art.
What else the motive of that wanton disfigurement of Venice which has disgraced the last fifteen years of the municipal rule, and is about to continue the work of ruin merely to enrich the men of greed, the English and American tradesmen, the Hebrew speculators, the German hucksters, the cosmopolitan inflators of bubble companies?
The motive of all these destructions is always the same, and always of the lowest kind: gain. Everyone concerned in them gains, or hopes to gain. There is no other instinct or idea than this. It is, like the present diplomacy of Europe, an all-round game of grab; and a large percentage of the gains goes to the doctors who label the gambling ‘Hygiene.’
The plea of health is a falsehood usually advanced in excuse of such destructions as those of the Florentine centre and the Venetian Calli and Campielli. Those who allege it know, as well as I do, that the unhealthiness lies not in the habitations but in the habits of the people. Water never touches their bodies; tight-lacing is a female rule in even the peasant class; the field-worker is as tightly cased in her leather stays as the duchess in her satin corset. The favourite foods of the populace are such as give worms, dysentery, and skin diseases; their drinks are adulterated and poisonous; their general habits are unwholesome and injurious beyond all descript
ion; they are saved only by the purity of the air which the municipalities, who chatter of hygiene, do their best to pollute with acid and chemical fumes, and the stench of noxious trades.
The men who prate of hygiene know these facts as well as I do; they know, I repeat, that the insalubrity is in the habits, not in the habitations; but the conventional lie passes muster and serves its end: it enables landlords to sell, and lawyers to pocket fees, and contractors to make profits, and all the troops of middlemen to fatten on the demolition of noble and ancient places and the creation of shoddy stucco architecture in their stead.
The sense of beauty has died with the public destruction of beauty: it is dead in the ruling classes; and what is far worse, dead in the populace; dead, or nearly so, in the writers, the painters, the sculptors. If in this latter class there were any strong, true, and delicate instinct of what is noble and beautiful, Molmenti would not stand alone in the Council of Venice; Prince Corsini would not alone have resisted the destruction of the Florence of the Renaissance; D’Annunzio would not alone repeat the denunciations of two dead foreigners, Geoffroy and Gregorovius, of the violation of ancient and of mediæval Rome. The voices of the artists (were they artists in feeling indeed) would be, and would have been, so powerful that no ministry and no municipality would have ventured to ignore them.
But most modern artists are afraid to offend their public, their patrons, the town councils, the mayors, and communes, or the Ministers of Education or of Public Works, to which or to whom they look for employment; they have the decoration-hunger, which is one of the chief curses of Continental Europe, and decorations only come from the powers above; and in these powers above there is not the faintest glimmer of taste or feeling, there is only jealousy of a great and unapproachable Past.
Therefore, the few who do feel indignation do not speak; and the speculator, the jerry builder, the cunning lawyer and conveyancer, the vast body of greedy and gross spoilers, have their way unchecked.
In the case of Rome, of course, that cruellest and ugliest of all passions, religious antagonism, has had much to do with the atrocious ruin of the Prati del Castello, of the Trastevere generally, of the passage of the four trams in derision in face of St Peter’s, of the hideous gimcrack houses built under the walls of the Lateran, of the destruction of street shrines and votive chapels and ancient chapels, of the erection of the entire quarters of what is called New Rome; but religious hatred cannot be the cause of the barbarous scraping and daubing of classic buildings, of the degradation of the Via Nomentana, and of Porta Pia, of the ruin of such glory and grace as that of the Ludovisi and the Farnesina villas, of the bedaubing and beplastering, the dwarfing and disfiguring, the vulgarising and disfiguring of everything which is touched by the modern ædiles of Rome. No matter what the syndic be called, whether Ruspoli or Guiccioli, or Torlonia, or Colonna, no matter whether the cabinet be headed by Rudini or Giolitti, by Crispi or Pelloux, the pickaxe is never at rest, and the hammer and hatchet sound ceaselessly in street and garden, on desecrated altars, and in devastated groves.
To what end have served the fury and haste with which ancient ecclesiastical buildings have been razed to the ground in both the cities and the provinces? To none whatever, so far as any diminution of the funds and the numbers of ecclesiastical foundations can be counted.
The suppression of the monasteries and convents was actuated by love of gain as much as by polemical rancour, by the hunger of the newly-created kingdom, for their treasures and riches, for their rich endowments and saleable possessions. There was no sincerity about it; there could be none in a nation then almost entirely Catholic; and this insincerity is proved by the indifference with which the State allows the re-establishment of these buildings and these orders. At this moment the bare-footed Carmelites, a most bigoted order, have lately opened a new church and convent in Milan, which are endowed with three millions of money, and have been opened with great pomp by the Archbishop. Similar institutions are being re-created in all directions, possessing all the evils of those which were suppressed, without their artistic beauty, and largely without their good faith and munificent charity. Rich and lovely maidens continue to take the veil when too young to have any realisation of what they do, and the Church is as enriched as of old by their dowers; whilst the monk is not the less dangerous to intellectual liberty because, when he goes out of the gates for a few hours, he wears a coat and trousers like those of the layman of the adjacent town.
The ancient monasteries and convents were at least an education to the eye: who could daily see the Certosa of Pavia, or of the Val d’Ema, and not be purified and instructed in visual memory and artistic instinct? The new revivals of the old orders teach nothing except a base and strictly modern union of superstition and compromise. Indeed, the State forces the priest to be base; it makes it the condition of allowing his existence. If he do not succumb to the State in all things (even in those most opposed to his conscience), he is deprived of his placet; and Zanardelli has in these last few days desired to deprive him of it without such legal forms as have hitherto been observed. For one of the greatest of the misfortunes of Italy is that, not in the Radicals nor in the Conservatives, nor in any one of the groups into which political life is divided, is there the slightest trace of any respect for individual freedom; liberty of action and of opinion obtain no fair play whatever from any one of the parties of the State.
True, it is not in Italy alone that the sense of symmetry and harmony is leaving the terrestial race; the want of beauty, as the daily bread of life, grows less and less felt every year by the modern mind wherever that mind has been unhinged by the manias of modernity. Beauty, natural and artistic, has become entirely indifferent to the majority of even highly-educated modern men and women. They have no leisure to contemplate it, no temperament capable of feeling it; it is in no sense necessary to them; it makes no impression either on their retina or their memory. Their lives pass before a revolving panorama, so rapidly dissolving and changing that they have no distinct impression of any of the scenes or subjects. Every year modern habits become more unlovely, and modern sensibilities more blunted. The preservation of what is beautiful, per se, at the present time is almost always ridiculed, unless it can be shown to be joined to some profit or utility. The characteristic passion of the hour is greed; greed of possession, desire of acquisition, and passion for ostentation. Trade has become an octopus embracing the whole world; the thirst for gain engrosses all classes; beauty, unless it be a means of gain, is to this temper a useless, or worse than a useless, thing: it is regarded as a stumbling-block and encumbrance.
It is doubtful if even the power of perceiving what is beautiful has not in a great measure left a large part of the population in all countries. Modern cities would not be what they are now had not the race to a great extent grown colour-blind, and become without the sense of proportion. Modern builders and modern engineers would remain unoccupied were not the generations, which employ and enrich them, destitute of all artistic feelings.
Many of the prevailing fashions would be so intolerable to persons with any delicate or accurate perception, that such fashions could never have become general had any perception of this kind been general. Even the deformity of their bodies awakens no aversion in the modern public; if it did, the bicycle would never have been in demand.
Such blindness and deadness to the charm of beauty is to be noted in every nation, and is developed even in the extreme East whenever modern European and American usage influences the Oriental.
Japan is rapidly becoming the rival in vulgarity and hideousness of Chicago.
It is no doubt general and inevitable, the low tone of susceptibility, the dense, thick-skinned temper, which accompany what is called Civilisation, which are to be seen everywhere from cold to warm latitudes, wherever the steam-engine screams and the shoddy suits are worn.
The modern temper is something even worse than inartistic; it is brutally and aggressively hostile to beauty, whether natur
al or architectural. It will go out of the way to injure, to deface, to uproot, to level with the dust.
To the cold, bald, hard, derisive temper of the modern majority there is something offensive and irritating in beauty, whether it be seen in the stately verdure of a tree in its summer glory, or of an ancient tower, brown and grey in the light of evening. To fell the tree, to pull down the tower, is the first instinct of the modern mind, and it is an instinct clamorous, savage, insatiable, born of incapacity and triviality, of the hunger for destruction, and of a secret and ignoble jealousy.
There can, I think, be no doubt that modern education implants and increases this insensibility. If it did not, modern municipalities would not be what they are, would not do what they do. The only resistance to this insensibility is found, and this but rarely, at the two extremes of the social scale — the peasant and the noble, i.e., in those who are least subjected to the pressure of general education. In the man, absolutely uneducated, and in the man reared by an individual and highly-cultured education, are alone now to be found any appreciation of beauty, natural or artistic.
A French writer, with no pity for the lovers of teas and porcelains, has said recently that he looks forward with joy to the time when the whole empire of China will be covered with factories and mines as thickly as blades of grass grow in a meadow. Most modern persons have no higher ideal than his. In similar phrase, Ferrero, whose political writings I have often cited with approval, and whose striking abilities I greatly admire, but with whose narrow socialist temper I have no sympathy, actually states that the plain of Lombardy was created by nature to be studded with factory chimneys!
Even into remote mountain towns, and in small forgotten cities, on the edge of lonely lakes, or deep-sunk in chestnut woods, or ilex-forests, the same desecration creeps, and sullies, and pollutes. Gimcrack, gaudy villas, and pasteboard houses, show their pert and paltry forms amidst noble palaces, or beside patrician towers. Pistachio green paint makes day hideous everywhere, daubed on deal shutters and blinds, accompanied by the paltry stained doors, and the stucco mouldings, of the epoch. The modern municipality displays its whitewashed and belettered frontage, unashamed, on some grand old piazza, which has seen centuries of strife and splendour. Silent sunlit bays of Tyrrhene or Adriatic, lovely as a poem of Shelley, are made vulgar and ludicrous by lines of habitations such as the jerry-builder of the end of the nineteenth century procreates, wearing an air of smug imbecility which makes one long to slap their stucco faces; of course the drinking-shop, the cycling-casino, and the shooters’ club have been run up beside them so that their patrons and frequenters may befoul the roseate evening, and insult the ethereal night.