A Rogue's Tragedy by Bernard Capes — Read

Turin, wedged into a corner between the Po and Dora, with all its ranks of lines and squares criss-crossing the angle like the meshes of a snow-shoe, was a depressing city to be abroad in on a rainy night. It was characteristic of it, of its unenterprise and unoriginality, that it had never deviated from the pattern set by its Roman founders. It suggested, when the rain poured persistently, a vast congeries of waterworks, with reservoirs and pumping-stations all drawing from the rivers. Its barrack-like uniformity of buildings; its shyness of imposing facade; its system of parcelled-out dwelling-blocks, called appropriately "Islands," which were ruled, scrupulously rectangular, along the wide channels of its streets; its eternal monotonous brick and heavy porticoes, all combined to produce an effect of unlovely utilitarianism. Artistry, struggling here and there to emancipate itself, and soar above the level roofs on wings of brass and timber, had always halted, in the end, on a blank expression of futility, and retired within doors, there to fulfil its soul of the splendour which it had shrunk from daring without. For some reason, of taste or policy, architectural display was not favoured in Turin. Its fanes and palaces were all so many uncut diamonds -- dull surfaces to hearts of fire.

There was something in all this, no doubt, significant of the character of its government; for, as art flowers at its richest under despotisms, so, oppositely, its growth is most stunted in the temperate climate of democracies. Turin, it is true, was not of those latter; yet it was as true that its lords had never learned to rule independently of their people. Even as kings, though when sovereign by a generation or two, they had not come to take themselves very seriously. They seemed to reign, self-consciously, by virtue of a plebiscite; they avoided superficial ostentation; they kept all their grandeurs for privacy.