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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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