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                           ITALIAN FANTASIES




[Illustration: AN ITALIAN FANTASY

BY STEFANO DA ZEVIO (VERONA).]




                           ITALIAN FANTASIES


                                   BY

                            ISRAEL ZANGWILL

                               AUTHOR OF
                        “CHILDREN OF THE GHETTO”
                    “BLIND CHILDREN” “THE GREY WIG”
                               ETC. ETC.


                             [Illustration]


                       WITH  FRONTISPIECE


                                 LONDON
                           WILLIAM HEINEMANN
                                  1910




          _Copyright, London, 1910, by William Heinemann, and_
             _Washington, U.S.A., by The Macmillan Company_




                             AUTHOR’S NOTE


    The germ of this book may be found in three essays under the
    same title published in “Harper’s Magazine” in 1903 and 1904,
    which had the inestimable advantage of being illustrated by the
    late Louis Loeb, “the joyous comrade” to whose dear memory this
    imperfect half of what was planned as a joint labour of love
    must now be dedicated.

                                                             I. Z.




                        ALL ROADS LEAD FROM ROME




                                CONTENTS


                                                       PAGE
              OF BEAUTY, FAITH, AND DEATH: A RHAPSODY
                BY WAY OF PRELUDE                         1

              FANTASIA NAPOLITANA: BEING A REVERIE OF
                AQUARIUMS, MUSEUMS, AND DEAD CHRISTS     17

              THE CARPENTER’S WIFE: A CAPRICCIO          43

              THE EARTH THE CENTRE OF THE UNIVERSE: OR
                THE ABSURDITY OF ASTRONOMY               77

              OF AUTOCOSMS WITHOUT FACTS: OR THE
                EMPTINESS OF RELIGIONS                   84

              OF FACTS WITHOUT AUTOCOSMS: OR THE
                IRRELEVANCY OF SCIENCE                  104

              OF FACTS WITH ALIEN AUTOCOSMS: OR THE
                FUTILITY OF CULTURE                     120

              ST. FRANCIS: OR THE IRONY OF
                INSTITUTIONS                            137

              THE GAY DOGES: OR THE FAILURE OF SOCIETY
                AND THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF SOCIALISM      159

              THE SUPERMAN OF LETTERS: OR THE
                HYPOCRISY OF POLITICS                   172

              LUCREZIA BORGIA: OR THE MYTH OF HISTORY   186

              SICILY AND THE ALBERGO SAMUELE BUTLER:
                OR THE FICTION OF CHRONOLOGY            195

              INTERMEZZO                                205

              LACHRYMÆ RERUM AT MANTUA: WITH A
                DENUNCIATION OF D’ANNUNZIO              214

              OF DEAD SUBLIMITIES, SERENE
                MAGNIFICENCES, AND GAGGED POETS         227

              VARIATIONS ON A THEME                     241

              HIGH ART AND LOW                          249

              AN EXCURSION INTO THE GROTESQUE: WITH A
                GLANCE AT OLD MAPS AND MODERN
                FALLACIES                               259

              AN EXCURSION INTO HEAVEN AND HELL: WITH
                A DEPRECIATION OF DANTE                 280

              ST. GIULIA AND FEMALE SUFFRAGE            298

              ICY ITALY: WITH VENICE RISING FROM THE
                SEA                                     307

              THE DYING CARNIVAL                        315

              NAPOLEON AND BYRON IN ITALY: OR LETTERS
                AND ACTION                              320

              THE CONSOLATIONS OF PHLEBOTOMY: A
                PARADOX AT PAVIA                        331

              RISORGIMENTO: WITH SOME REMARKS ON SAN
                MARINO AND THE MILLENNIUM               337

       Transcriber’s Notes can be found at the end of this eBook.




       OF BEAUTY, FAITH, AND DEATH: A RHAPSODY BY WAY OF PRELUDE


I too have crossed the Alps, and Hannibal himself had no such baggage of
dreams and memories, such fife-and-drum of lyrics, such horns of ivory,
such emblazoned standards and streamered gonfalons, flying and
fluttering, such phalanxes of heroes, such visions of cities to spoil
and riches to rifle—palace and temple, bust and picture, tapestry and
mosaic. My elephants too matched his; my herds of mediæval histories,
grotesque as his gargoyled beasts. Nor without fire and vinegar have I
pierced my passage to these green pastures. “_Ave Italia, regina
terrarum!_” I cried, as I kissed the hem of thy blue robe, starred with
white cities.

There are who approach Italy by other portals, but these be the true
gates of heaven, these purple peaks snow-flashing as they touch the
stainless sky; scarred and riven with ancient fires, and young with jets
of living water. Nature’s greatness prepares the heart for man’s glory.

I too have crossed the Rubicon, and Cæsar gathered no such booty. Gold
and marble and sardonyx, lapis-lazuli, agate and alabaster, porphyry,
jasper and bronze, these were the least of my spoils. I plucked at the
mystery of the storied land and fulfilled my eyes of its loveliness and
colour. I have seen the radiant raggedness of Naples as I squeezed in
the squirming, wriggling ant-heap; at Paestum I have companied the
lizard in the forsaken Temple of Poseidon. (O the soaring Pagan pillars,
divinely Doric!) I have stood by the Leaning Tower in Bologna that gave
a simile to Dante; and by the long low wall of Padua’s university,
whence Portia borrowed her learned plumes, I have stayed to scan a
placarded sonnet to a Doctor of Philology; I have walked along that
delectable Riviera di Levante and left a footprint on those wind-swept
sands where Shelley’s mortal elements found their fit resolution in
flame. I have lain under Boccaccio’s olives, and caressed with my eye
the curve of the distant Duomo and the winding silver of the Arno.
Florence has shown me supreme earth-beauty, Venice supreme water-beauty,
and I have worshipped Capri and Amalfi, offspring of the love-marriage
of earth and water.

O sacredness of sky and sun! Receive me, ye priests of Apollo. I am for
lustrations and white robes, that I may kneel in the dawn to the
Sun-God. Let me wind in the procession through the olive groves. For
what choking Christian cities have we exchanged the lucid Pagan
hill-towns? Behold the idolatrous smoke rising to Mammon from the
factory altars of Christendom. We have sacrificed our glad sense of the
world-miracle to worldly miracles of loaves and fishes. Grasping after
the unseen, we have lost the divinity of the seen. Ah me! shall we ever
recapture that first lyric rapture?

O consecration of the purifying dawn, O flame on the eastern altar, what
cathedral rose-window can replace thee? O trill of the lark, soaring
sunward, O swaying of May boughs and opening of flower chalices, what
tinkling of bells and swinging of censers can bring us nearer the divine
mystery? What are our liturgies but borrowed emotions, grown cold in the
passing and staled by use—an anthology for apes!

But I wrong the ape. Did not an Afric explorer—with more insight than
most, albeit a woman—tell me how even an ape in the great virgin
forests will express by solemn capers some sense of the glory and
freshness of the morning, his glimmering reason struggling towards
spiritual consciousness, and moving him to dance his wonder and
adoration? Even so the Greek danced his way to religion and the drama.
Alas for the ape’s degenerate cousin, the townsman shot to business
through a tube!

I grant him that the shortest distance between two points is a straight
line, yet ’tis with the curve that beauty commences. Your crow is the
scientific flier, and a dismal bird it is. Who would demand an austere,
unbending route ’twixt Sorrento and Amalfi instead of the white road
that winds and winds round that great amphitheatre of hills, doubling on
itself as in a mountain duet, and circumvoluting again and yet again,
till the intertangled melody of peaks becomes a great choral burst, and
all the hills sing as in the Psalmist, crag answering crag! Do you grow
impatient when chines yawn at your feet and to skirt them the road turns
inland half a mile, bringing you back on the other side of the chasm, as
to your mere starting-point? Do you crave for an iron-trestled American
bridge to span the gap? Nay; science is the shortest distance between
two points, but beauty, like art, is long.

What is this haste to arrive? Give me to walk and walk those high paths
hung ’twixt mountain and sea: the green wild grass, with its dots of
daisy and dandelion; cactus and asphodel overhanging from the
mountain-side, figs, olives, vines, sloping in terraced patches to the
sea, which through bronze leafy tunnels shows blue and sparkling at the
base of contorted cliffs. A woman’s singing comes up from the green and
grey tangle of gnarled trunks, and mingles with the sweet piping of the
birds. A brown man moves amid the furrows. A sybil issues from a pass,
leaning on her staff, driving a pair of goats, her head swathed in a
great white handkerchief. I see that the Italian painters have copied
their native landscape as well as their fellow men and women, though
they pictured Palestine or Hellas or the land of faery. Not from inner
fancy did Dosso Dossi create that glamorous background for his Circe.
That sunny enchantment, that redolence of mediæval romaunt, exhales from
many a haunting spot in these castled crags. Not from mere technical
ingenuity did the artists of the Annunciation and other sacred indoor
subjects introduce in their composition the spaces of the outer world
shining through doors or windows or marble porticoes, vistas of earthly
loveliness fusing with the holy beauty. Geology is here the handmaiden
of Art and Theology. The painters found these effects to hand, springing
from the structure of cities set upon ridges, as in a humble smithy of
Siena whose entrance is in a street, but whose back, giving upon a sheer
precipice, admits the wide purpureal landscape; or in that church in
Perugia, dominating the Umbrian valley, where the gloom of the Old
Masters in the dim chapel is suddenly broken by the sunlit spaciousness
of an older Master, framed in a little window. Do you wonder that the
Perugian Pintoricchio would not let his St. Jerome preach to a mere
crowded interior, or that the Umbrian school is from the first alive to
the spirit of space? Such pictures Italy makes for us not only from
interiors, but from wayside peep-holes, from clefts in the rock or gaps
in the greenery. The country, dark with cypresses or gleaming with domes
and campaniles, everywhere composes itself into a beautiful harmony; one
needs not eye-points of vantage. The peep-hole simply fixes one’s point
of view, frames the scene in one’s horizon of vision, and suggests by
its enhancement of Nature the true task of Art in unifying a sprawling
chaos of phenomena. And if to disengage the charm of space, Raphael and
Perugino and Francia and even Mariotto Albertinelli make such noble use
of the arch, was it not that its lovely limitation and definition of the
landscape had from early Roman antiquity been revealed by Architecture?
Arches and perspectives of arches, cloisters and colonnades, were
weaving a rhythm of space round the artists in their daily walks. Where
Nature was beautiful and Art was second Nature, the poets in paint were
made as well as born.

Paradox-mongers have exalted Art above Nature, yet what pen or brush
could reproduce Amalfi—that vibrant atmosphere, that shimmer and
flicker of clouds, sunshine, and water; the ruined tower on the spit,
the low white town, the crescent hills beyond, the blue sky bending over
all as over a great glimmering cup? Beethoven, who wrote always with
visual images in his mind, might have rendered it in another art,
transposing it into the key of music; for is not beauty as mutable as
energy, and what were the music of the spheres but the translation of
their shining infinitude?

Truer indeed such translation into singing sound than into the
cacophonies of speech, particularly of scientific speech.

I saw a great angel’s wing floating over Rimini, its swan-like feathers
spread with airy grace across the blue—but I must call it cirrus
clouds, forsooth—ruffling themselves on a firmament of illusion. We
name a thing and lo! its wonder flies, as in those profound myths where
all goes well till scientific curiosity comes to mar happiness. Psyche
turns the light on Cupid, Elsa must know Lohengrin’s name. With what
subtle instinct the Hebrew refused to pronounce the name of his deity! A
name persuades that the unseizable is seized, that leviathan is drawn
out with a hook. “Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without
knowledge?” Primitive man projected his soul into trees and
stones—animism the wise it call—but we would project into man the
soullessness of stones and trees. Finding no soul in Nature, we would
rob even man of his, desperately disintegrating it back to mechanic
atoms. The savage lifted Nature up to himself; we would degrade
ourselves to Nature. For scientific examination read unscientific
ex-animation. And now ’tis the rare poet and artist for whom river and
tree incarnate themselves in nymphs and dryads. Your Böcklin painfully
designs the figures once created by the painless mythopoiesis of the
race; your Kipling strives to breathe back life into ships and engines.
As philosophy is but common sense by a more circuitous route, so may Art
be self-conscious savagery. And herein lies perhaps the true inwardness
of the Psyche legend. The soul exchanges the joys of _naïveté_ for the
travails of self-consciousness, but in the end wins back its simple
happiness, more stably founded. Yet, so read, the myth needs the
supplement of an even earlier phase—it might well have occupied a
spandrel at least in those delicious decorations for the ceiling of the
Villa Farnesina that Raphael drew from the fable of Apuleius—in which
Psyche, innocent of the corporeal Cupid, should dream of Amor. For me at
least the ecstasy of vision has never equalled the enchantment of the
visionary. O palm and citron, piously waved and rustled by my father at
the Feast of Tabernacles, you brought to my grey garret the whisper and
aroma of the sun-land. (Prate not of your Europes and Asias; these be no
true geographic cuts; there is but a sun-life and an ice-life, and the
grey life of the neutral zones.) But the solidities cannot vie with the
airy fantasies. Where is the magic morning-freshness that lay upon the
dream-city? Dawn cannot bring it, though it lay its consecrating gold
upon the still lagoons of a sea-city, or upon the flower-stones of a
Doge’s palace. Poets who have sung best of soils and women have not
always known them: the pine has dreamed of the palm, and the palm of the
pine.

“Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard...” Ah, those unheard!
Were it not better done—as poets use—never to sport with Beatrice in
the shade, nor with the tangles of loved Laura’s hair? Shall Don Quixote
learn that Dulcinea del Toboso is but a good, likely country lass? I
would not marry the sea with a ring, no, not for all the gold and purple
of the Bucentaur. What should a Doge of dreams be doing in that galley?
To wed the sea—and know its mystery but petulance, its unfathomed caves
only the haunt of crude polypi; no mermaids, no wild witchery, and
pearls but a disease of the oyster!

Mayhap I had been wiser to keep my Italian castles in Spain than to
render myself obnoxious to the penalties of the actual. Rapacity,
beggary, superstition, hover over the loveliness of the land like the
harpies and evil embodiments in Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s homely _Allegory
of Bad Government_ in the Sala della Pace of Siena. To-day that
fourteenth-century cartoonist would have found many a new episode for
his frescoed morality-play, whereof the ground-plot would run: how, to
be a Great Power with martial pride of place, Italy sacrifices the
substance. Incalculably rich in art, her every village church bursting
with masterpieces beyond the means of millionaires, she hugs her
treasures to her ragged bosom with one skinny hand, the other extended
for alms. Adorable Brother Francis of Assisi, with thy preachment of
“holy poverty,” didst thou never suspect there could be an unholy
poverty? ’Tis parlous, this beatitude of beggary. More bandits bask at
thy shrine than at almost any other spot in Christendom. Where the
pilgrims are, there the paupers are gathered together; there must be
rich prey in those frenzied devotees who crawl up thy chapel, licking
its rough stones smooth. Thou hadst no need of food: if two small loaves
were provided for thy forty days’ Lent in that island in the Lake of
Perugia, one and a half remained uneaten; and even if half a loaf seemed
better to thee than no bread, ’twas merely because the few mouthfuls
chased far from thee the venom of a vainglorious copy of thy Master.
Perchance ’tis from some such humility the beggars of Assisi abstain
from a too emulous copy of thee. Thou didst convert thy brother, the
fierce wolf of Agobio, and give the countryside peace, but what of this
pack of wolves thou hast loosed—in sheep’s clothing! With what joy did
I see in a church at Verona an old barefoot, naked-kneed beggar, who was
crouching against a pillar, turn into marble!

Or shall we figure Italia’s beggars as her mosquitos, inevitable
accompaniment of her beauties? The mosquito-mendicant, come he as
<DW36> or cicerone, buzzes ever in one’s ears, foe to meditation and
enkindlement. Figure me seeking refuge in a Palazzo of once imperial
Genoa; treading pensively the chambers of Youth and Life, the Arts, and
the Four Seasons, through which duchesses and marchese had trailed
silken skirts. With gaze uplifted at the painted ceilings, I ponder on
that magnificence of the world and the flesh which the Church could not
wither—nay, which found consummate expression in the Pope’s own church
in St. Peter’s, where the baldachino of twinkling lights supplies the
one touch of religious poetry. I pass into the quiet library and am
received by the venerable custodian, a Dr. Faustus in black skull-cap
and white beard. He does the honours of his learned office, brings me
precious Aldines. Behold this tome of antique poetry, silver-typed—a
“limited edition,” twenty-four copies made for the great families. He
gloats with me over Ovid’s “Metamorphoses”; over the fantasy of the
title-page, the vignettes of nymphs and flowers, the spacious folio
pages. Here is Homer in eight languages. My heart goes out to the
scholarly figure as we bend over the parallel columns, bookworms both. I
envy the gentle Friar of Letters his seclusion and his treasures. He
lugs out a mediæval French manuscript, a poem on summer—“Saison aussi
utile que belle,” he adds unexpectedly. We discourse on manuscripts: of
the third-century Virgil at Florence and its one missing leaf in the
Vatican; how French manuscripts may be found as early as the tenth
century, while the Italian scarcely precede Dante, and demonstrate his
creation of the language. We laud the Benedictines for their loving
labour in multiplying texts—he is wrought up to produce the apple of
his eye, an illuminated manuscript that had belonged to a princess. It
is bound in parchment, with golden clasps. “Figures de la Bible” I seem
to remember on its ornate title-page. I bend lovingly over the quaint
letters, I see the princess’s white hand turning the polychrome pages,
her lace sleeve ruffled exquisitely as in a Bronzino portrait. Suddenly
Dr. Faustus ejaculates in English: “Give me a drink!”

My princess fled almost with a shriek, and I came back to the sordid
Italy of to-day. Of to-day? Is not yesterday’s glamour equally
illusionary? But perhaps Genoa with her commercial genius is no typical
daughter of Italia. Did not Dante and the Tuscan proverb alike denounce
her? Does not to-day’s proverb say that it takes ten Jews to make one
Genoese? And yet it was Genoa that produced Mazzini and sped Garibaldi.

Would you wipe out this bookish memory by a better? Then picture the
library of a monastery, that looks out on the cypressed hills, whose
cloisters Sodoma and Signorelli frescoed with naïve legends of St.
Benedict and Satan. See under the long low ceiling, propped on the cool
white pillars, those niched rows of vellum bindings guarding the
leisurely Latin lore of the Fathers. Behold me meditating the missals
and pontificals, pageants in manuscript, broidered and illuminated, all
glorious with gold initials and ultramarine and vermilion miniatures; or
those folio processions of sacred music, each note pranked in its
bravery and stepping statelily amid garlands of blue and gold and the
hovering faces of angels; dreaming myself into that mystic peace of the
Church, till the vesper bell calls to paternosters and genuflexions, and
the great organ rolls out to drown this restless, anchorless century.
Now am I for nones and primes, for vigils and sackcloth, for breviaries
and holy obedience. In shady cloisters, mid faded frescoes, round sleepy
rose-gardens, I will pace to papal measures, while the serene sun-dial
registers the movement of the sun round the earth. Who speaks of a
religion as though it were dependent upon its theology? Dogmas are but
its outward show; inwardly and subtly it lives by its beauty, its
atmosphere, its inracination in life, and its creed is but a poor
attempt to put into words a thought too large for syllables, too elusive
for phrases. Language is a net that catches the fish and lets the ocean
stream through. Again that fallacy of the Name.

Beautiful I will call that service I saw at Bologna on Whitsun Sunday,
though you must dive deep to find the beauty. Not in S. Petronio itself
will you find it, in those bulbous pillars swathed in crimson damask,
though there is a touch of it in the vastness, the far altar, the remote
choir and surpliced priests on high, the great wax candle under the big
baldachino, the congregation lost in space. Nor will you easily
recognise it in the universal disorder, in that sense of a church parade
_within_ the church, in the _brouhaha_ that drowns the precentor’s
voice, in the penny chairs planted or stacked as the worshippers ebb or
flow, in the working men and their families sprawling over the
altar-steps, in the old women coifed in  handkerchiefs, with
baskets that hold bottles as well as prayer-books; not even in the
pretty women in Parisian hats, or the olive-skinned girls in snoods,
least of all in the child’s red balloon, soaring to the roof at the very
moment of the elevation of the Host, and followed with