Israel Zangwill

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.

“Are they resolved to dust,

And have their country’s marbles naught to say?

Could not her quarries furnish forth one bust?”

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?