Icy Italy: With Venice Rising From the Sea
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
“Doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.”
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:
“And yet you see how from their banishment
Before the Tartar into these salt isles,
Their antique energy of mind, all that
Remain’d of Rome for their inheritance,
Created by degrees an ocean-Rome.”
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.