But if Absolute Poverty is less worshipful than St. Francis imagined, Magnificence as an ideal will, I fear, always be found to connote defective moral sympathies, as of the Pharaohs building their treasure-cities on the labour of lashed slaves. For how in our world of sorrow and mystery can magnanimity and magnificence meet? What great soul could find expression in gilt, or even in gold? ’Tis a reflection on the character of the Doges of Venice that everywhere in their palace is a sense of over-gilded ceilings. Even when the Masters have made a firmament of frescoes, the massive flamboyant framing weighs like a torrid haze on a weary land. Art is overlaid and obliterated by gold. What wonder Religion too is soon asphyxiated in these flaming halls of Council—the Doge ceases to kneel to the Madonna, he stands before Venice Enthroned between Mars and Neptune. It is Juno who from a ceiling-fresco pours gold on Venice, and in the heavy gilded picture of Zelotti, the Magnificent Ten could behold Venice Seated on the World. What sly satirist was it who—over the choir of St. Mark’s—crucified Christ on a cross of gold?

In “The Merchant of Venice,” ’tis the Duke of Morocco who chooses the golden casket; I feel sure ’twas Bassanio, the Venetian. Not that I do not hate the leaden casket more. Portia should have gone with a field of buttercups in June.

Of all expressions of human greatness, metallic sheen is the most banal. I have never recovered from the shock of learning that the Greeks gilded their temples, and though I can now with even a spice of zest imagine them shining afar from their headlands in a golden glory, I would have preferred to keep my vision of austere columns and noble pediments; and I am grateful to Time, that truer artist, for having refined away that assertive aureola.

On the water, indeed—which is beneath one’s feet, and not sagging on one’s head—metallic sheen may exhilarate, subtilising and softening itself, as it does, in its own wavering reflections, and I find the Doge’s gilded galley more endurable than his lacunar aureum. It may be because Shakespeare (or rather Plutarch) has reconciled me to Cleopatra’s barge by those magnificent burnished lines. The Lord Mayor of London, too, had anciently his gilded barge, and if you will look at an eighteenth-century picture in the Guildhall by a pair of forgotten painters, representing the Lord of Cockaigne sailing in state on the Thames on the ninth of November, on the way to be sworn at Westminster, you will see how easily London, with her old boatmen and barges, and water-gates and water-parties, singing as in Pepys, might have paralleled the water-pomp of Venice, and how completely we have now thrown away the gorgeous possibilities of our proud water-way, lining it with warehouses in lieu of stately mansions, and cutting out of our lives all that shimmering vitality of ever-moving water. Man does not live by bread alone, and “Give us this day our daily water” were no unfitting prayer in our arid city. The Henley Week is our one approach to the colour of a Venetian festa. Yet what a Grand Canal the Thames might have been! I vow that at a distance I should take that old Guildhall picture, with its gay old costumes, its pageant of gilded galleys, each flying a brave array of rich-dyed flags and manned with rowers in white, its spires and turrets, and the noble dome of St. Paul’s swelling into sunny spaces of air and cloud, all suffused in a golden mellowness, to represent the Doge of Venice going to a “solemn rite” at the Salute. Alas! the Lord Mayor has now only a gilded coach, and the Doge of Venice has vanished away, and only fragments of galleys in the Arsenal and a model of the last of the Bucentaurs remain to tell the tale of his marine glories, and his marriage to the Adriatic on Ascension Day.

One mast of the Bucentoro—the very mast that upbore the flag of the winged lion and the proud inscription, In hoc signo vinces—survives in tragic recumbency, while a morsel of frieze shows in gold, on a basis of dark wood, delicious angels playing trumpet and harp at the prow. The relics of other galleys, pranked with figures about half life-size, enable us to gather what exuberance of fancy and grotesquerie went to grace the Bucentoro which Napoleon burnt, while the fact that he extracted the gold of 80,000 Napoleons from its ashes shows with what prodigality the Republic blazoned its sense of itself.

But the marvellous model reconstructed by Ferdinand of Austria in 1837 at a cost of 152,000 francs, reveals, if it be exact, that seamy side which is always the obverse of Magnificence. At first the eye is taken up with its opulence of decoration, as it seems to take the water with its proud keel, and its great all-topping flag of the lion and the cross. For its upper deck is of mosaic, over-hinged by a huge lid, red velvet without and gold relief within, and from the water-line rise winged figures, and over the arch through which pass the many-flashing oars of red and gold is a frieze of flying horses, the rape of Europa, Centaurs, and what not; and above this are winged figures flying towards a gold sky, and gold figures on a balcony, which is supported at the prow by winged lions and a pair of mermen, and at the bowsprit couches the winged lion with two little angels playing behind him; and on the hull is a naiad pouring out her urn, and a merman blowing his trumpet, and the protrusive heads of alligators; and lest you should think Venice meant nothing but gold and fantasy and the pride of life, behold dominant over these Justice with her sword and her scales, and Peace with her dove and her olive-branch.

But below, hidden away behind and beneath the gilding, at the unseen end of the red and gold oars

sat one hundred and seventy-eight galley-slaves, chained four to an oar; and here in this fuscous interior the benches are no longer of plush, but of rough deal; here is no play of Fancy—here in the hard seats we touch Reality. But not herein lies the supreme sordidness of the Bucentoro—the crowning touch is given by the oars, which, at the very point where they disappear over the rowlocks under the gay arches, turn from their red and gold into a plain dirty white, like shirt-cuffs that give on soiled sleeves. ’Tis the very magnificence of meanness! The horny-handed wretches, to the rhythm of whose tired muscles this golden vessel moved along in its music and sunshine, to whose caged gloom no glimpse came of the flags and the purple, the angels and the naiads, could not even be conceded the coloured end of an oar. But could there be an apter symbol of civilisation, ancient, mediÆval, or modern, than this gilded oar, whose gaudiness fades as it passes from the bravery of the outer spectacle to the grimness of the inner labour? Upon such sweating slaves rested all the glitter and pageantry of the ancient world—not only Babylon and Carthage, but even the spiritual and artistic greatness of Greece. In hoc signo vinces—in the sign of slavery; in the sign of the lion and the cross—the lion for yourself and the cross for the people. And in every land of to-day the same State-Galley glides along in bannered pomp, parading its decorative images of Peace and Justice, and the radiant creations of its Art, while below are the hard bare benches and the labouring, groaning serfs. The serfs are below, even in another sense, for it is their unsightly hands that have built up every square inch of this splendour. Beatrice d’Este went to see a galley a-building, her velvet cap and her embroidered vest stuck full of jewels; complacently recording the ejaculations of admiration for her diamonds and rubies, while the Venetian women, and even children, were toiling at making the sails and the ropes. Yes, the social order too must be gazetted bankrupt. It has, indeed, never been solvent. It has never paid its real creditors, the slaves of the uncoloured oar.

Nor does our civilisation hold much hope of a change for the fairer. Despite prophets and poets, despite Socialists, dry-as-dust or dithyrambic, despite philanthropists and preachers, the revel on the top-deck amid the velvet and the mosaics grows ever wilder, the flutes ever more Dionysiac, the fantasies on prow and poop ever more grotesquely golden. America, shorn of monarchy and feudalism and rank, and all that the friends of man screamed against, divides with Russia the hegemony of hotels and outdoes the worst extravagances and debaucheries of the Renaissance. Where in the Cinquecento a few despots and “humanists” wallowed in lust and luxury, we have now ten thousand private tyrants and loose-livers, restrained hardly by the penal law. The deeds of the Cenci or the Baglioni must be done in a glass-house in the fierce light that beats upon local greatness. The ruffians of the Renaissance had no such free field for vagaries and vices as the vagrom son of a millionaire enjoys in this modern world, where property in growing fluid has become dissolved from duty; where in every pleasure-city palaces invite and women allure and slaves grovel; where every port swarms with white-winged yachts to bear his indolent irresponsibility to glamorous shores; where in a million halls of light his world-strewn flunkeys proffer unseasonable food cooked by unsurpassable artists, and rare champagnes, oscillated for months in a strange daily ritual by troops of underground elves.

They tell us that this New Year’s Eve in New York alone some three million pounds were spent in suppers in the flaring restaurants, where between eleven and twelve o’clock only champagne could be served. Such is the New Era ushered in by the New World—the Era of Champagne. For this the Red Indian was uprooted and the wilderness tamed. For this Washington lived and Lincoln died. By the flood of champagne all standards of life and letters are swept away, save the one standard of financial success, save the ability to dine in that wonderful culinary cathedral where in a dim irreligious light as of a submarine world of faery, to a melting liturgical music, a fashionable congregation follows with absorbing zeal the lengthy order of service. What an Agapemone!

And this epidemic of vulgarity, spreading to our own country, has made the England of 1802, which Wordsworth denounced for “glittering like a brook,” the England where “plain living and high thinking” were no more, appear like an island of pristine simplicity. Even the old families surrender to the new standard and—in the plaint of Dante—“non heroico more, sed plebeo sequuntur superbiam.”

What is to be done? What is to be done about it all? We writing men, to whom the highest British manhood is still Wordsworth in that country cottage where visitors must pay for anything beyond bread and cheese, we to whom the greatest American personality is still Walt Whitman in his Camden shanty, must at least preserve our divine gift of laughter, our one poor power of laughing at these vulgarians, whom even the occasional smuggling of an Old Master out of Italy cannot redeem from barbarism.

The purple pomp of kings, blatant though it be in comparison with true grandeur, is at least the expression of a public dignity: it is an official costume like the judge’s wig and gown. But because greatness must accept office at the hands of its otherwise helpless inferiors, and office must be suitably apparelled, a certain confusion has been established between splendour and greatness, as though because greatness means splendour, splendour must mean greatness. Of this confusion those are promptest to take advantage to whom the high road to consideration is closed. Private pomp is a confession of personal pettiness. The little soul must needs inflate itself by a great house-shell, and protract itself by a long retinue of servants. ’Tis almost too pathetic a meekness, this humility of the Magnificent Ones.

Cannot I breathe into you—O Magnificent Ones—a little proper pride? Ye buy the Past, watching one another in jealous competition; will no one buy the Future? Why not buy with your millions an earth renewed and regenerated, a solvent social order? Why not build a true civilisation on this malarious marsh, that shall rise like the spires and domes of Venice from her swamps? Surely that were a dream worthy of Magnificence! Come, let us build together a State-Galley where the oars shall be red and gold from blade to handle, and every man shall take his turn at them, and the fantasies of Art shall adorn the hull of Righteousness, and Justice and Peace shall no longer be ironic images carved for the complacency of the top-deck. So shall there dawn an Ascension Day on which the Doge shall go out with banners and music, not to marry the sea with a ring, but to celebrate the nuptials of Earth with Heaven.

Private pomp is surely a questionable thing. MediÆval life centred round the Cathedral, the Castle, the Palace. And the masses touched the life at each and all. The Cathedral gave them their religion, their laws came from the Palace, their protection from the Castle. Dominating a feudal population, the towers of law and war uplifted and unified the people. The lowliest were of this greatness. To-day palaces flaunt themselves, divorced from moral meaning, magnificence without significance. The world, as I said, is full of private autocrats, without duties or dangers: an unhappy consequence of the fall of feudalism, ere a system as human was ready to replace it. And to-day the Cathedral is our one feudal relic, reconciling magnificence with morality: the light streaming through the rose-window haloes the grey head of the market-woman, and her prayer equals that of the Magnificent One himself. It is significant that no villa—whoever the architect—can attain the poetic quality of the simplest village church. The palace of Moses is nowhere mentioned, but we read many minute instructions concerning the Tabernacle and the Temple. In truth, art treasures are essentially public: the furniture of cathedrals, libraries, law-courts, market-places, and parks. The owners of collections do indeed often allow the public to visit them at inconvenient times, but that anybody should have exclusive rights is an absurdity. If Art were a form of property like any other, the owner could destroy it, and the righteous indignation of the world at the destruction of a Botticelli or a Velasquez would mark the boundaries of private property. Land comes under the same canon. Nothing, perhaps, should be owned which might not be destroyed at will.

In literature and music—which are more spirits than bodies, and which can be multiplied without loss—monopolies are unnecessary. If I write a book against Socialism, the world will applaud, and communistically possess itself thereof after a brief term. And this legal limitation of copyright which forcibly wrests epics, operas, and novels from the heirs might be extended to pictures and statues.