Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842, and 1843/Part 3/Letter 15
LETTER XV.
Tuscany.
Nothing is more difficult than for a foreigner to give a correct account of the state of a country—its laws, manners, and customs;—the first often so different in their operation from what outwardly appears; the latter, never fully understood, Proteus-like, assume a thousand contradictory appearances, and elude investigation. A stranger can only glance at the surface of things—often deceptive—and put down the results of conversations, which, after all, if carefully examined, by no means convey the whole truth, even if they are free from some bias, however imperceptible, either in speaker or hearer, the result of which is a false impression—a false view.
An English person, accustomed to the gigantic fortunes and well-ordered luxury,—to the squalid penury, hard labour and famine,—which mark the opposite orders of society in his own country, is struck by the appearance of ease and equality that reigns in Tuscany, and especially at Florence. There is poverty of course—but penury cannot be said to exist; there is work—but there is also rest: nay, there is no lack of enjoyment for the poor—while the nobility, for the most part, scarcely rise above the middling orders; bankers and foreigners being those who make most figure in society, and that, except on particular and infrequent occasions, on no magnificent scale.
Many reasons may be assigned for this equality. During the flourishing days of the republic of Florence, a blow was given to the nobility of the city and surrounding country, from which it never recovered. Those nobles who still preserved their titles and fortunes, were obliged to conceal all pride in the former, in order to preserve the influence naturally resulting from the latter. The Medici were merchants; and when an Austrian prince succeeded to the extinct family, no change was operated. On the contrary, it was, I believe, one of them, Leopold I., who abolished the law of primogeniture in Tuscany. It is true, that the usual result of the prohibition against entails in subdividing estates, is frequently eluded. A father possesses absolute power over his property, with the exception of a tenth or twelfth, which is called the quota legitima, which must descend to his children, and be divided among them in equal portions. The same law appertains even to the mother’s dowry—which becomes her hushand’s property. A man may, therefore, accumulate and leave the whole of his possessions to his eldest son, with the exception of the above-named quota; and, when this has been done for some generations, large fortunes are preserved. But it seldom is: and as a man has absolute propriety in his estates, a spendthrift can alienate the whole for ever. The nobles of Tuscany being for the most part without pride of order, have readily yielded to the spirit of their country, which absorbs them in the democracy. At the same time, the feeling of accumulation being extinct, no barrier exists to prevent the dissipation of property: in the hands of a young heir, extravagance and play (the bane of Italy), soon bring to an end the fortunes of an ancient name. Thus, I am assured, many of the noblest families in Tuscany are reduced to poverty: the capital of the country has fallen into the hands of bankers, the majority of whom are of Jewish origin. A number of illustrious names, consecrated in the pages of history, have almost disappeared. They only mark the walls of palaces, empty of the impoverished descendants of their former possessors.
This absence of accumulated riches, of course, checks the arts of luxury, mechanical improvements, and all progress in the framework of society; it multiplies the numbers of those who are just raised above poverty; while the benignant nature of the climate, and the abstemious habits of the Italians, prevent the poor from suffering want. The country is, for the most part, divided into small farms (podere), cultivated by the family of the countryman (contadino) who holds them—he giving his labour, the crops, and tools—the owner the land, dwellings, and substantial repairs; the profits are divided, and the rent, for the most part, paid in kind—a circumstance which aids the farmer, and limits the fortune of the owner. The country-people labour hard—very hard, and live poorly, but they do not suffer want; and if there are no farmers so rich as with us, there is no absolute agricultural distress.
In Florence itself the common people are well to do. They are, perhaps, the least agreeable people to deal with in Italy; self-opiniated, independent, and lazy, they can often scarcely be brought to work at all; and, when they do, it is in their own way and at their own time. They love their ease, and they enjoy it: they are full of humour and intelligence, though their conceit too often acts as a drawback on the latter. I speak especially of the Florentines, as they are represented to me; for conceit is not a usual fault among the Italians.
As I have said, an English person, accustomed to heart-piercing accounts of suffering, hard labour, and starvation among our poor, gladly hails a sort of golden age in this happy country. We must look on the state of society from a wholly different point of view—we must think of the hunger of the mind; of the nobler aspirations of the soul, held in check and blighted—of the tendency of man to improve, here held down—of the peculiar and surpassing gifts of genius appertaining to this people, who are crushed and trod under foot by the jealousy of government—to understand, with how dead and intolerable a weight King Log hangs round the necks of those among them, who regret the generous passions and civic virtues of bygone times. The Florentine reads of Filippo Strozzi, of Ferruccio Ferruccini, of Michael Angelo. He remembers the pure and sacred spirit that Savanarola lighted up among the free and religious citizens; he thinks of the slavery that followed, when genius and valour left the land indignant, and
“For deeds of violence
Done in broad day; and more than half redeemed
By many a great and generous sacrifice of self to others,”
what has come? The poet speaks of—
“the unpledged bowl,
The stab of the stiletto.”[1]
life as the flocks lead on the mountain sides—such life as the idle, graceful fallow-deer may spend, from spring-tide to rainy autumn, under the noble trees of some abundant park; but where is the soul of man? In the hands of those who teach him to fast and tell his beads—to bend the neck to the yoke—to obey the church, not God.
Nor is this all; especially among the rich; far—far from it; for men, unless tamed by labour, can never lead the innocent lives of the beasts of the field: if darker crimes are unfrequent, yet vice flourishes, rank and unchecked: the sense of honour is destroyed; the nobler affections are crushed; mental culture is looked on with jealousy, and dies blighted. In the young may be found gleams of inextinguishable genius—a yearning for better things, which terrifies the parents, who see in such the seeds of discontent and ruin: they prefer for their sons the safer course of intrigue, play, idleness—the war of the passions, rather than the aspirations of virtue.
To do nothing has been long the motto of the Tuscan government; had it been strictly observed, still much might be said against it. Leopold I. was a good sovereign, a clever and liberal man; Ferdinand, who succeeded to him, suffered many vicissitudes of fortune during the period of the empire of Napoleon; but he was not, like his namesake of Naples, driven by adversity to cruelty and arbitrary violence. When he was restored to his throne, still it was his wish to keep his people happy and contented. It is his praise, that if authority sheathed its sword and veiled its terrors, nor even used the wholesome restraint of the law to punish crime, it acted simply as a torpedo on the energies of the land, nor used any concealed weapons. Fedinand constantly and resolutely refused to institute a secret police in Tuscany. It was a story I remember, told at the time, during the revolutionary period of 1821, that the Austrian minister at Florence presented a list of sixty Carbonari to the Grand Duke, and begged that they might be arrested. “I do not know whether these men are Carbonari,” said Ferdinand; “but I am sure, if I imprison them, I shall make them such,” and rejected the list. His successor, Leopold II., has not had the wisdom to pursue the same course. The bane of Italy is the absence of truth, of honour, of straightforwardness; the vices opposite to these nobler virtues have now the additional culture which must ensue from the circulation of a system of secret police, of spies, of traitors.
Yet still the government is mild. In 31—32, the throne of Leopold II. was shaken by several conspiracies; and the revolutionary spirit of Romagna, which tended to unite all Italy in one bond, had numerous proselytes in Tuscany. But for a traitor, it is supposed, that on one occasion the person of the Grand Duke would have fallen into the hands of the conspirators: at the eleventh hour the leader took fright, and discovered all. On this, and on other occasions, the arrests were not numerous; the sentences (to us to whom treason and the gallows are quick following cause and effect,) mild; and these even, after a few months, softened. Leopold wishes his people to be quiet and happy—he hates violence: to pay a traitor to betray, and so to crush a conspiracy noiselessly, appears to him wise and judicious policy. In all respects he is averse to strong measures. For many years no capital punishment has been inflicted in Tuscany; a fact, which of itself demands our admiration, and must be replete with good effects.
“All this is true,” said an Italian to me; “and yet I, who wish my countrymen to cultivate manly habits of thought and action, regard our state as almost worse than any other. Tyranny is, with us, a serpent hid among flowers; and I, for one, sympathise with the sentiment of a Florentine poet—odio il tiranno che col sonno uccide. There are other evils besides those which press upon the material part of our nature, and the new generation in Tuscany feels wrongs of another description. The better spirits of our country pine for the intellectual food of which they are deprived. Thus they tend towards a new and better order of things, the more difficult to realise, because a timid and absurd policy endeavours to throw every obstacle in the way to its attainment.”
- ↑ Rogers’s “Italy.”