The End of the Tunnel
THE ENDURING ITALY
By CHARLES MORGAN EVERYONE, I suppose, has a few books that he reads and dips into continually and has come to think of as parts of his personal life. Other books, however much they are admired or loved, have their place in a different compartment of the mind; they have been read, they are put back on their shelf with no certain assurance that they will be taken down again ; I do not know, for example, whether I shall read again either Madame Bovary or The Charterhouse of Parma, though each is a book that I could not be without ; but I do know that, as long as I live, Trelawny's Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron will come to hand again and again, sometimes for five minutes at random, sometimes for an evening, sometimes for a journey, and never will there be any sense of finality in the encounter. The best proof that a book has become, in this sense, " per- sonal " is that thousands of seemingly irrelevant impulses may send one to it. Lately, Trelawny came down from my shelf for no better reason than that I had been thinking about the Italian fleet the Mediterranean—and how, - since my last meeting with him, Trelawny seems to have changed! Always before, he was telling of a civilisation which, though greatly altered in a hundred years, had evident links with our own— which, if I may put it so, had surviving offspring—and it was pos- sible, while reading, to think happily that the debt of English writers to Italy was still being increased. Now, suddenly, Trelawny appears to be writing of another world than ours, and that this should be so defines with terrible clearness the nature of the Italian tragedy. The question that presents itself is whether the tragedy is final or whether the essential values of Trelawny's Italy may survive in another form. Nothing is ever restored ; it is now more than ever certain that, of outward things, " nothing can ever be the same again " ; but it did not need a second world- war to make this true ; the outward forms of the Italy of Shelley and Byron were gone long ago. The essential values nevertheless survived. English artists of succeeding genera- tions found happiness or inspiration or both under Italian skies. What was it, in this strange country, which, at such different times, could draw to it such differing human beings as the Shelleys and the Brownings, and could continue, down to our own day, to give to English poets and painters renewal and freedom? What is this Italian essence that seems to have so extraordinary a power to survive political and social change? We receive a hint of its nature very early in Trelawny's narrative. " Our icy islanders," he says, " thaw rapidly when they have drifted into warmer latitudes : broken loose from its anti-social system, mystic castes, coteries, sets and sects, they lay aside their purse-proud, tuft-hunting, and toadying ways, and are very apt to run riot in the enjoyment of all their senses. Besides we are compelled to talk in strange company, if not from good breeding, to prove our breed. . . ." This is typical of Trelawny's generalisations—rash, hasty, often truculent, but always alive. A dozen holes can be picked in it- by anyone who remembers how often English travellers are more purse- proud and tuft-hunting abroad than at home, but it remains true that Englishmen who live in Italy or stay there long enough to enter into Italian life do undergo an experience of release—a release not of the senses only, nor particularly of the intellect, which appears sometimes to slacken, but of the imagination. The reason is not so much that they venerate the Italian past ; moonlight and ruins are seldom a vital stimulus.
The effective and enduring influence is something at once childlike and expressive in the Italians, something spontaneously dramatic in them, which, though it may not be greatly produc- tive in itself, strikes on the English box and liberates English artists from their domestic tendency to respect—or, what is worse, to resent—rules and aspects of life which, however appropriate to the " coteries, sets and sects," have nothing to do with art. The first of Italy's virtues is, then, that she enables men to stop dressing their souls for dinner and teaches them how to recognise the irrelevant and cast it off.
In this she differs from France in her attitude towards artists. I have never found that modern Italians, apart from those who were themselves artists, have been deeply interested in art, as nearly all cultivated Frenchmen are interested in it. The English, when they do not practise it, regard it, if they are frivolous, as a pastime, or, if they are solemn, as an educative or moral force ; the French consider it as a human activity valuable in itself that has no need of external justification ; the Italians think of it—or thought of it—quite simply in a spirit of laissez-faire, with the consequence that, among them, an English writer has always been, in a sense, even freer than in France—freer to discover and develop hinicelf without feeling, as English artists are liable to feel within the artistic intellec- tualism of Paris, that they have somehow become enrolled in a gigantic university—though the lecture-room be not the Sorbonne but a table at the Deux Magots or the Nouvelle Athens. Paris is a delight because no one there considers it a waste of time to discuss for a couple of hours the texture of a paragraph, the form of a verse or the balance of a scene ; a student will learn mere there than anywhere else in the world ; but a mature artist like Byron or a passionately creative one like Shelley may well prefer the Italian freedom which, being less well-informed, is less instructive, less insistent, and intel- lectually looser.
And it is by no means impossible that this Italian quality may survive, just because it is passive rather than active and has its root in the character of the people—their instinct to tolerate whatever is not a disturbance of their personal life— rather than in a positive energy that may be perverted. It is easier to believe that Germany may persuade • France to invent —what the Germans have been unable to invent for them- selves—a totalitarian philosophy of art, than to suppose that Fascism will cver be able to lash the inhabitants of Pisa and Lucca into an active hatred of artists. I will confess that, among my dreams of the future, none, except the imagining of a France reconstituted in her individualism, is dearer or more persistent than the dream of an Italy again feminine in her virtues and her faults. I have suggested that there is, in her life, something spontaneously dramatic, and I would go further in saying that her role, in its nobility as well as in its charm, is a feminine one. The success of the Fascist Revo- lution, and its difference from the dreary, systematised oppres- sion of the Nazis, has consisted in Mussolini's quickness to perceive, and his power to turn to account, the dramatic characteristic of his countrymen. He has provided stage and limelight such as they had not enjoyed for many years before his coming, and they have responded with a childlike, and now a tragic, enthusiasm to the energy of this spectacular regisseur. But he has cast Italy for a masculine part in which, to foreign observers, she has always appeared a little ridiculous. Long before the present war, one would encounter in trains and at street-corners harmless men who, before the Revolution, would have been laughing, bright-eyed and free in all the gestures of limb and mind,- but who, under Fascism, seemed to have swaddled themselves in a costumier's toga, whose shoulders were set, whose mouth was clipped and whose eyes were somehow persuaded to bulge and stare like the Duce's own.
This is by no means the impression that one received in Germany. There, men were transformed not by the putting on of a mental fancy-dress but by a mental disease evidently incurable. In Italy, the toga would nearly always come off. The fiercest Duce of the railway-train would, if addressed in tolerable Italian, unfold his arms and turn into the goldsmith of Lucca—a man so proud of his native city that he had no imperial dreams beyond its ramparts and so delighted in his own craft and his own children that his eyes would dazzle at talk of Cellini, and he would never be so happy as when, in his little shop, he was being artificer and nursemaid at the same time. The memory of him encourages me in my dream that his country is not lost to civilisation and that the time will come again when creative artists, and not antiquarians only, will go there, as they have in the past, to find—what? Not, indeed, Trelawny's Italy, nor Browning's, nor, in outward form, the Italy of the immediate past, but still an Italy playing,in the world a part natural to her, a receptive and a giving Italy what men of genius, and men less than they, may discover a renais- sance of themselves.
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