armed sentry, as though in command of a gang of
convicts, here and there an official of some society for the protection
of animals, but he is quite useless. Whether he be armed to quell a
rebellion or to put the injured animals out of their pain, I know not.
In any case, he is a sign of the state of life in these valleys of
marble. Out of this insensate hell come the impossible statues that grin
about our cities. Here, cut by the most hideous machinery with a noise
like the shrieking of iron on iron, the mantelpieces and washstands of
every jerry-built house and obscene emporium of machine-made furniture
are sawn out of the rock. There is no joy in this labour, and the
savage, harsh yell of the machines drowns any song that of old might
have lightened the toil. Blasted out of the mountains by slaves, some
13,000 of them, dragged by tortured and groaning animals, the marble
that might have built a Parthenon is sold to the manufacturer to
decorate the houses of the middle classes, the studios of the
incompetent, the streets of our trumpery cities. Do you wonder why
Carrara has never produced a sculptor? The answer is here in the
quarries that, having dehumanised man, have themselves become obscene.
The frightful leprous glare of crude whiteness that shines in every
cemetery in Europe marks only the dead; the material has in some
strange way lost its beauty, and with the loss of beauty in the material
the art of sculpture has been lost. These thousands of slaves who are
hewing away the mountains are ludicrous and ridiculous in their
brutality and absurdity. They have sacrificed their humanity for no end.
The quarries are worked for money, not for art. The stone is cut not
that Rodin may make a splendid statue, but that some company may earn a
dividend. As you climb higher and higher, past quarry after quarry, it
is a sense of slavery and death that you feel. Everywhere there is
struggle, rebellion, cruelty; everywhere you see men, bound by ropes,
slung over the dazzling face of the cliffs, hacking at the mountains
with huge iron pikes, or straining to crash down a boulder for the ox
wagons. As you get higher an anxious and disastrous silence surrounds
you, the violated spirit of the mountains that has yielded itself only
to the love of Michelangelo seems to be about to overwhelm you in some
frightful tragedy. In the shadowless cool light of early morning, these
pallid valleys, horrid with noise of struggle and terror, the sn