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diff --git a/.gitattributes b/.gitattributes new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6833f05 --- /dev/null +++ b/.gitattributes @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +* text=auto +*.txt text +*.md text diff --git a/6354-0.txt b/6354-0.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..cc46e9a --- /dev/null +++ b/6354-0.txt @@ -0,0 +1,11640 @@ +The Project Gutenberg EBook of Italian Hours, by Henry James + +This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with +almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + +Title: Italian Hours + +Author: Henry James + + +Release Date: August, 2004 [EBook #6354] +This file was first posted on November 29, 2002] +Last Updated: September 18, 2016 + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: UTF-8 + +*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ITALIAN HOURS *** + + + + +Produced by Richard Farris and the online team at +Distributed Proofreaders + + + + + + + + +ITALIAN HOURS + +By Henry James + + +Published November 1909 + + + + +PREFACE + +The chapters of which this volume is composed have with few exceptions +already been collected, and were then associated with others +commemorative of other impressions of (no very extensive) excursions and +wanderings. The notes on various visits to Italy are here for the first +time exclusively placed together, and as they largely refer to quite +other days than these--the date affixed to each paper sufficiently +indicating this--I have introduced a few passages that speak for a later +and in some cases a frequently repeated vision of the places and scenes +in question. I have not hesitated to amend my text, expressively, +wherever it seemed urgently to ask for this, though I have not pretended +to add the element of information or the weight of curious and critical +insistence to a brief record of light inquiries and conclusions. +The fond appeal of the observer concerned is all to aspects and +appearances--above all to the interesting face of things as it mainly +_used_ to be. + +H. J. + + + + + +CONTENTS + + VENICE + THE GRAND CANAL + VENICE: AN EARLY IMPRESSION + TWO OLD HOUSES AND THREE YOUNG WOMEN + CASA AL VISI + FROM CHAMBÉRY TO MILAN + THE OLD SAINT-GOTHARD + ITALY REVISITED + A ROMAN HOLIDAY + ROMAN RIDES + ROMAN NEIGHBOURHOODS + THE AFTER-SEASON IN ROME + FROM A ROMAN NOTE-BOOK + A FEW OTHER ROMAN NEIGHBOURHOODS + A CHAIN OF CITIES + SIENA EARLY AND LATE + THE AUTUMN IN FLORENCE + FLORENTINE NOTES + TUSCAN CITIES + OTHER TUSCAN CITIES + RAVENNA + THE SAINT’S AFTERNOON AND OTHERS + + + + + + ILLUSTRATIONS + + THE HARBOUR, GENOA (Frontispiece) + FLAGS AT ST. MARK’S, VENICE + A NARROW CANAL, VENICE + PALAZZO MOCENIGO, VENICE + THE AMPHITHEATRE, VERONA + CASA ALVISI, VENICE + THE SIMPLON GATE, MILAN + THE CLOCK TOWER, BERNE + UNDER THE ARCADES, TURIN + ROMAN GATEWAY, RIMINI + SANTA MARIA NOVELLA, FLORENCE + THE FAÇADE OF ST. JOHN LATERAN, ROME + THE COLONNADE OF ST. PETER’S, ROME + CASTEL GANDOLFO + ENTRANCE TO THE VATICAN, ROME + VILLA D’ ESTE, TIVOLI + SUBIACO + ASSISI + PERUGIA + ETRUSCAN GATEWAY, PERUGIA + A STREET, CORTONA + THE RED PALACE, SIENA + SAN DOMENICO, SIENA + ON THE ARNO, FLORENCE + THE GREAT EAVES, FLORENCE + BOBOLI GARDENS, FLORENCE + THE HOSPITAL, PISTOIA + THE LOGGIA, LUCCA + TOWERS OF SAN GIMIGNANO + SAN APOLLINARE NUOVO, RAVENNA + RAVENNA PINETA + TERRACINA + + + + + +VENICE + + +It is a great pleasure to write the word; but I am not sure there is not +a certain impudence in pretending to add anything to it. Venice has been +painted and described many thousands of times, and of all the cities of +the world is the easiest to visit without going there. Open the +first book and you will find a rhapsody about it; step into the first +picture-dealer’s and you will find three or four high-coloured “views” + of it. There is notoriously nothing more to be said on the subject. +Every one has been there, and every one has brought back a collection of +photographs. There is as little mystery about the Grand Canal as about +our local thoroughfare, and the name of St. Mark is as familiar as +the postman’s ring. It is not forbidden, however, to speak of familiar +things, and I hold that for the true Venice-lover Venice is always in +order. There is nothing new to be said about her certainly, but the +old is better than any novelty. It would be a sad day indeed when +there should be something new to say. I write these lines with the +full consciousness of having no information whatever to offer. I do not +pretend to enlighten the reader; I pretend only to give a fillip to his +memory; and I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in +love with his theme. + + +I + +Mr. Ruskin has given it up, that is very true; but only after extracting +half a lifetime of pleasure and an immeasurable quantity of fame from +it. We all may do the same, after it has served our turn, which it +probably will not cease to do for many a year to come. Meantime it is +Mr. Ruskin who beyond anyone helps us to enjoy. He has indeed lately +produced several aids to depression in the shape of certain little +humorous--ill-humorous--pamphlets (the series of _St. Mark’s Rest_) +which embody his latest reflections on the subject of our city and +describe the latest atrocities perpetrated there. These latter are +numerous and deeply to be deplored; but to admit that they have spoiled +Venice would be to admit that Venice may be spoiled--an admission +pregnant, as it seems to us, with disloyalty. Fortunately one reacts +against the Ruskinian contagion, and one hour of the lagoon is worth a +hundred pages of demoralised prose. This queer late-coming prose of +Mr. Ruskin (including the revised and condensed issue of the _Stones of +Venice_, only one little volume of which has been published, or perhaps +ever will be) is all to be read, though much of it appears addressed to +children of tender age. It is pitched in the nursery-key, and might +be supposed to emanate from an angry governess. It is, however, +all suggestive, and much of it is delightfully just. There is an +inconceivable want of form in it, though the author has spent his life +in laying down the principles of form and scolding people for departing +from them; but it throbs and flashes with the love of his subject--a +love disconcerted and abjured, but which has still much of the force of +inspiration. Among the many strange things that have befallen Venice, +she has had the good fortune to become the object of a passion to a man +of splendid genius, who has made her his own and in doing so has made +her the world’s. There is no better reading at Venice therefore, as I +say, than Ruskin, for every true Venice-lover can separate the wheat +from the chaff. The narrow theological spirit, the moralism _à tout +propos_, the queer provincialities and pruderies, are mere wild weeds in +a mountain of flowers. One may doubtless be very happy in Venice without +reading at all--without criticising or analysing or thinking a strenuous +thought. It is a city in which, I suspect, there is very little +strenuous thinking, and yet it is a city in which there must be almost +as much happiness as misery. The misery of Venice stands there for all +the world to see; it is part of the spectacle--a thoroughgoing devotee +of local colour might consistently say it is part of the pleasure. The +Venetian people have little to call their own--little more than the bare +privilege of leading their lives in the most beautiful of towns. Their +habitations are decayed; their taxes heavy; their pockets light; their +opportunities few. One receives an impression, however, that life +presents itself to them with attractions not accounted for in this +meagre train of advantages, and that they are on better terms with +it than many people who have made a better bargain. They lie in the +sunshine; they dabble in the sea; they wear bright rags; they fall into +attitudes and harmonies; they assist at an eternal _conversazione_. It +is not easy to say that one would have them other than they are, and it +certainly would make an immense difference should they be better fed. +The number of persons in Venice who evidently never have enough to eat +is painfully large; but it would be more painful if we did not equally +perceive that the rich Venetian temperament may bloom upon a dog’s +allowance. Nature has been kind to it, and sunshine and leisure +and conversation and beautiful views form the greater part of its +sustenance. It takes a great deal to make a successful American, but +to make a happy Venetian takes only a handful of quick sensibility. +The Italian people have at once the good and the evil fortune to be +conscious of few wants; so that if the civilisation of a society is +measured by the number of its needs, as seems to be the common opinion +to-day, it is to be feared that the children of the lagoon would make +but a poor figure in a set of comparative tables. Not their misery, +doubtless, but the way they elude their misery, is what pleases the +sentimental tourist, who is gratified by the sight of a beautiful race +that lives by the aid of its imagination. The way to enjoy Venice is +to follow the example of these people and make the most of simple +pleasures. Almost all the pleasures of the place are simple; this may be +maintained even under the imputation of ingenious paradox. There is no +simpler pleasure than looking at a fine Titian, unless it be looking at +a fine Tintoret or strolling into St. Mark’s,--abominable the way one +falls into the habit,--and resting one’s light-wearied eyes upon the +windowless gloom; or than floating in a gondola or than hanging over +a balcony or than taking one’s coffee at Florian’s. It is of such +superficial pastimes that a Venetian day is composed, and the pleasure +of the matter is in the emotions to which they minister. These are +fortunately of the finest--otherwise Venice would be insufferably dull. +Reading Ruskin is good; reading the old records is perhaps better; but +the best thing of all is simply staying on. The only way to care for +Venice as she deserves it is to give her a chance to touch you often--to +linger and remain and return. + + +II + +The danger is that you will not linger enough--a danger of which the +author of these lines had known something. It is possible to dislike +Venice, and to entertain the sentiment in a responsible and intelligent +manner. There are travellers who think the place odious, and those who +are not of this opinion often find themselves wishing that the others +were only more numerous. The sentimental tourist’s sole quarrel with his +Venice is that he has too many competitors there. He likes to be +alone; to be original; to have (to himself, at least) the air of making +discoveries. The Venice of to-day is a vast museum where the little +wicket that admits you is perpetually turning and creaking, and you +march through the institution with a herd of fellow-gazers. There is +nothing left to discover or describe, and originality of attitude is +completely impossible. This is often very annoying; you can only turn +your back on your impertinent playfellow and curse his want of delicacy. +But this is not the fault of Venice; it is the fault of the rest of the +world. The fault of Venice is that, though she is easy to admire, she is +not so easy to live with as you count living in other places. After you +have stayed a week and the bloom of novelty has rubbed off you wonder if +you can accommodate yourself to the peculiar conditions. Your old habits +become impracticable and you find yourself obliged to form new ones of +an undesirable and unprofitable character. You are tired of your gondola +(or you think you are) and you have seen all the principal pictures +and heard the names of the palaces announced a dozen times by your +gondolier, who brings them out almost as impressively as if he were +an English butler bawling titles into a drawing-room. You have walked +several hundred times round the Piazza and bought several bushels of +photographs. You have visited the antiquity mongers whose horrible +sign-boards dishonour some of the grandest vistas in the Grand Canal; +you have tried the opera and found it very bad; you have bathed at +the Lido and found the water flat. You have begun to have a +shipboard-feeling--to regard the Piazza as an enormous saloon and +the Riva degli Schiavoni as a promenade-deck. You are obstructed and +encaged; your desire for space is unsatisfied; you miss your usual +exercise. You try to take a walk and you fail, and meantime, as I say, +you have come to regard your gondola as a sort of magnified baby’s +cradle. You have no desire to be rocked to sleep, though you are +sufficiently kept awake by the irritation produced, as you gaze across +the shallow lagoon, by the attitude of the perpetual gondolier, with his +turned-out toes, his protruded chin, his absurdly unscientific stroke. +The canals have a horrible smell, and the everlasting Piazza, where you +have looked repeatedly at every article in every shop-window and found +them all rubbish, where the young Venetians who sell bead bracelets and +“panoramas” are perpetually thrusting their wares at you, where the same +tightly-buttoned officers are for ever sucking the same black weeds, at +the same empty tables, in front of the same cafés--the Piazza, as I say, +has resolved itself into a magnificent tread-mill. This is the state +of mind of those shallow inquirers who find Venice all very well for +a week; and if in such a state of mind you take your departure you act +with fatal rashness. The loss is your own, moreover; it is not--with +all deference to your personal attractions--that of your companions who +remain behind; for though there are some disagreeable things in Venice +there is nothing so disagreeable as the visitors. The conditions are +peculiar, but your intolerance of them evaporates before it has had time +to become a prejudice. When you have called for the bill to go, pay it +and remain, and you will find on the morrow that you are deeply attached +to Venice. It is by living there from day to day that you feel the +fulness of her charm; that you invite her exquisite influence to sink +into your spirit. The creature varies like a nervous woman, whom you +know only when you know all the aspects of her beauty. She has high +spirits or low, she is pale or red, grey or pink, cold or warm, fresh or +wan, according to the weather or the hour. She is always interesting +and almost always sad; but she has a thousand occasional graces and is +always liable to happy accidents. You become extraordinarily fond of +these things; you count upon them; they make part of your life. Tenderly +fond you become; there is something indefinable in those depths of +personal acquaintance that gradually establish themselves. The place +seems to personify itself, to become human and sentient and conscious of +your affection. You desire to embrace it, to caress it, to possess it; +and finally a soft sense of possession grows up and your visit becomes a +perpetual love-affair. It is very true that if you go, as the author +of these lines on a certain occasion went, about the middle of March, a +certain amount of disappointment is possible. He had paid no visit for +several years, and in the interval the beautiful and helpless city had +suffered an increase of injury. The barbarians are in full possession +and you tremble for what they may do. You are reminded from the moment +of your arrival that Venice scarcely exists any more as a city at all; +that she exists only as a battered peep-show and bazaar. There was a +horde of savage Germans encamped in the Piazza, and they filled +the Ducal Palace and the Academy with their uproar. The English and +Americans came a little later. They came in good time, with a great many +French, who were discreet enough to make very long repasts at the Caffè +Quadri, during which they were out of the way. The months of April and +May of the year 1881 were not, as a general thing, a favourable season +for visiting the Ducal Palace and the Academy. The _valet-de-place_ +had marked them for his own and held triumphant possession of them. He +celebrates his triumphs in a terrible brassy voice, which resounds all +over the place, and has, whatever language he be speaking, the accent +of some other idiom. During all the spring months in Venice these gentry +abound in the great resorts, and they lead their helpless captives +through churches and galleries in dense irresponsible groups. They +infest the Piazza; they pursue you along the Riva; they hang about +the bridges and the doors of the cafés. In saying just now that I was +disappointed at first, I had chiefly in mind the impression that assails +me to-day in the whole precinct of St. Mark’s. The condition of +this ancient sanctuary is surely a great scandal. The pedlars and +commissioners ply their trade--often a very unclean one--at the very +door of the temple; they follow you across the threshold, into the +sacred dusk, and pull your sleeve, and hiss into your ear, scuffling +with each other for customers. There is a great deal of dishonour about +St. Mark’s altogether, and if Venice, as I say, has become a great +bazaar, this exquisite edifice is now the biggest booth. + + +III + +It is treated as a booth in all ways, and if it had not somehow a great +spirit of solemnity within it the traveller would soon have little +warrant for regarding it as a religious affair. The restoration of the +outer walls, which has lately been so much attacked and defended, is +certainly a great shock. Of the necessity of the work only an expert +is, I suppose, in a position to judge; but there is no doubt that, if +a necessity it be, it is one that is deeply to be regretted. To no +more distressing necessity have people of taste lately had to resign +themselves. Wherever the hand of the restorer has been laid all +semblance of beauty has vanished; which is a sad fact, considering that +the external loveliness of St. Mark’s has been for ages less impressive +only than that of the still comparatively uninjured interior. I know not +what is the measure of necessity in such a case, and it appears indeed +to be a very delicate question. To-day, at any rate, that admirable +harmony of faded mosaic and marble which, to the eye of the traveller +emerging from the narrow streets that lead to the Piazza, filled all the +further end of it with a sort of dazzling silver presence--to-day this +lovely vision is in a way to be completely reformed and indeed well-nigh +abolished. The old softness and mellowness of colour--the work of the +quiet centuries and of the breath of the salt sea--is giving way to +large crude patches of new material which have the effect of a monstrous +malady rather than of a restoration to health. They look like blotches +of red and white paint and dishonourable smears of chalk on the cheeks +of a noble matron. The face toward the Piazzetta is in especial the +newest-looking thing conceivable--as new as a new pair of boots or +as the morning’s paper. We do not profess, however, to undertake a +scientific quarrel with these changes; we admit that our complaint is +a purely sentimental one. The march of industry in united Italy must +doubtless be looked at as a whole, and one must endeavour to believe +that it is through innumerable lapses of taste that this deeply +interesting country is groping her way to her place among the nations. +For the present, it is not to be denied, certain odd phases of the +process are more visible than the result, to arrive at which it seems +necessary that, as she was of old a passionate votary of the beautiful, +she should to-day burn everything that she has adored. It is doubtless +too soon to judge her, and there are moments when one is willing to +forgive her even the restoration of St. Mark’s. Inside as well there has +been a considerable attempt to make the place more tidy; but the general +effect, as yet, has not seriously suffered. What I chiefly remember is +the straightening out of that dark and rugged old pavement--those deep +undulations of primitive mosaic in which the fond spectator was thought +to perceive an intended resemblance to the waves of the ocean. Whether +intended or not the analogy was an image the more in a treasure-house +of images; but from a considerable portion of the church it has now +disappeared. Throughout the greater part indeed the pavement remains as +recent generations have known it--dark, rich, cracked, uneven, spotted +with porphyry and time-blackened malachite, polished by the knees of +innumerable worshippers; but in other large stretches the idea imitated +by the restorers is that of the ocean in a dead calm, and the model they +have taken the floor of a London club-house or of a New York hotel. +I think no Venetian and scarcely any Italian cares much for such +differences; and when, a year ago, people in England were writing to the +_Times_ about the whole business and holding meetings to protest against +it the dear children of the lagoon--so far as they heard or heeded the +rumour--thought them partly busy-bodies and partly asses. Busy-bodies +they doubtless were, but they took a good deal of disinterested trouble. +It never occurs to the Venetian mind of to-day that such trouble may be +worth taking; the Venetian mind vainly endeavours to conceive a state of +existence in which personal questions are so insipid that people have +to look for grievances in the wrongs of brick and marble. I must not, +however, speak of St. Mark’s as if I had the pretension of giving a +description of it or as if the reader desired one. The reader has been +too well served already. It is surely the best-described building in the +world. Open the _Stones of Venice_, open Théophile Gautier’s _Italia_, +and you will see. These writers take it very seriously, and it is only +because there is another way of taking it that I venture to speak of +it; the way that offers itself after you have been in Venice a couple of +months, and the light is hot in the great Square, and you pass in under +the pictured porticoes with a feeling of habit and friendliness and a +desire for something cool and dark. There are moments, after all, when +the church is comparatively quiet and empty, and when you may sit there +with an easy consciousness of its beauty. From the moment, of course, +that you go into any Italian church for any purpose but to say your +prayers or look at the ladies, you rank yourself among the trooping +barbarians I just spoke of; you treat the place as an orifice in the +peep-show. Still, it is almost a spiritual function--or, at the worst, +an amorous one--to feed one’s eyes on the molten colour that drops from +the hollow vaults and thickens the air with its richness. It is all so +quiet and sad and faded and yet all so brilliant and living. The strange +figures in the mosaic pictures, bending with the curve of niche and +vault, stare down through the glowing dimness; the burnished gold that +stands behind them catches the light on its little uneven cubes. St. +Mark’s owes nothing of its character to the beauty of proportion or +perspective; there is nothing grandly balanced or far-arching; there +are no long lines nor triumphs of the perpendicular. The church arches +indeed, but arches like a dusky cavern. Beauty of surface, of tone, +of detail, of things near enough to touch and kneel upon and lean +against--it is from this the effect proceeds. In this sort of beauty the +place is incredibly rich, and you may go there every day and find afresh +some lurking pictorial nook. It is a treasury of bits, as the painters +say; and there are usually three or four of the fraternity with their +easels set up in uncertain equilibrium on the undulating floor. It is +not easy to catch the real complexion of St. Mark’s, and these laudable +attempts at portraiture are apt to look either lurid or livid. But if +you cannot paint the old loose-looking marble slabs, the great panels +of basalt and jasper, the crucifixes of which the lonely anguish looks +deeper in the vertical light, the tabernacles whose open doors disclose +a dark Byzantine image spotted with dull, crooked gems--if you cannot +paint these things you can at least grow fond of them. You grow fond +even of the old benches of red marble, partly worn away by the breeches +of many generations and attached to the base of those wide pilasters of +which the precious plating, delightful in its faded brownness, with a +faint grey bloom upon it, bulges and yawns a little with honourable age. + +{Illustration: FLAGS AT ST. MARK’S VENICE} + + +IV + +Even at first, when the vexatious sense of the city of the Doges reduced +to earning its living as a curiosity-shop was in its keenness, there was +a great deal of entertainment to be got from lodging on Riva Schiavoni +and looking out at the far-shimmering lagoon. There was entertainment +indeed in simply getting into the place and observing the queer +incidents of a Venetian installation. A great many persons contribute +indirectly to this undertaking, and it is surprising how they spring +out at you during your novitiate to remind you that they are bound up +in some mysterious manner with the constitution of your little +establishment. It was an interesting problem for instance to trace the +subtle connection existing between the niece of the landlady and the +occupancy of the fourth floor. Superficially it was none too visible, as +the young lady in question was a dancer at the Fenice theatre--or when +that was closed at the Rossini--and might have been supposed absorbed by +her professional duties. It proved necessary, however, that she should +hover about the premises in a velvet jacket and a pair of black kid +gloves with one little white button; as also, that she should apply a +thick coating of powder to her face, which had a charming oval and a +sweet weak expression, like that of most of the Venetian maidens, +who, as a general thing--it was not a peculiarity of the land-lady’s +niece--are fond of besmearing themselves with flour. You soon recognise +that it is not only the many-twinkling lagoon you behold from a +habitation on the Riva; you see a little of everything Venetian. +Straight across, before my windows, rose the great pink mass of San +Giorgio Maggiore, which has for an ugly Palladian church a success +beyond all reason. It is a success of position, of colour, of the +immense detached Campanile, tipped with a tall gold angel. I know not +whether it is because San Giorgio is so grandly conspicuous, with a +great deal of worn, faded-looking brickwork; but for many persons the +whole place has a kind of suffusion of rosiness. Asked what may be the +leading colour in the Venetian concert, we should inveterately say Pink, +and yet without remembering after all that this elegant hue occurs +very often. It is a faint, shimmering, airy, watery pink; the bright +sea-light seems to flush with it and the pale whiteish-green of lagoon +and canal to drink it in. There is indeed a great deal of very evident +brickwork, which is never fresh or loud in colour, but always burnt out, +as it were, always exquisitely mild. + +Certain little mental pictures rise before the collector of memories at +the simple mention, written or spoken, of the places he has loved. When +I hear, when I see, the magical name I have written above these pages, +it is not of the great Square that I think, with its strange basilica +and its high arcades, nor of the wide mouth of the Grand Canal, with the +stately steps and the well-poised dome of the Salute; it is not of +the low lagoon, nor the sweet Piazzetta, nor the dark chambers of St. +Mark’s. I simply see a narrow canal in the heart of the city--a patch +of green water and a surface of pink wall. The gondola moves slowly; it +gives a great smooth swerve, passes under a bridge, and the gondolier’s +cry, carried over the quiet water, makes a kind of splash in the +stillness. A girl crosses the little bridge, which has an arch like +a camel’s back, with an old shawl on her head, which makes her +characteristic and charming; you see her against the sky as you float +beneath. The pink of the old wall seems to fill the whole place; it +sinks even into the opaque water. Behind the wall is a garden, out +of which the long arm of a white June rose--the roses of Venice are +splendid--has flung itself by way of spontaneous ornament. On the other +side of this small water-way is a great shabby facade of Gothic windows +and balconies--balconies on which dirty clothes are hung and under +which a cavernous-looking doorway opens from a low flight of slimy +water-steps. It is very hot and still, the canal has a queer smell, and +the whole place is enchanting. + +{Illustration: A NARROW CANAL, VENICE} + +It is poor work, however, talking about the colour of things in Venice. +The fond spectator is perpetually looking at it from his window, when he +is not floating about with that delightful sense of being for the moment +a part of it, which any gentleman in a gondola is free to entertain. +Venetian windows and balconies are a dreadful lure, and while you rest +your elbows on these cushioned ledges the precious hours fly away. But +in truth Venice isn’t in fair weather a place for concentration of mind. +The effort required for sitting down to a writing-table is heroic, +and the brightest page of MS. looks dull beside the brilliancy of your +_milieu_. All nature beckons you forth and murmurs to you sophistically +that such hours should be devoted to collecting impressions. Afterwards, +in ugly places, at unprivileged times, you can convert your impressions +into prose. Fortunately for the present proser the weather wasn’t always +fine; the first month was wet and windy, and it was better to judge +of the matter from an open casement than to respond to the advances +of persuasive gondoliers. Even then however there was a constant +entertainment in the view. It was all cold colour, and the steel-grey +floor of the lagoon was stroked the wrong way by the wind. Then there +were charming cool intervals, when the churches, the houses, the +anchored fishing-boats, the whole gently-curving line of the Riva, +seemed to be washed with a pearly white. Later it all turned warm--warm +to the eye as well as to other senses. After the middle of May the whole +place was in a glow. The sea took on a thousand shades, but they were +only infinite variations of blue, and those rosy walls I just spoke of +began to flush in the thick sunshine. Every patch of colour, every yard +of weather-stained stucco, every glimpse of nestling garden or daub of +sky above a _calle_, began to shine and sparkle--began, as the painters +say, to “compose.” The lagoon was streaked with odd currents, which +played across it like huge smooth finger-marks. The gondolas multiplied +and spotted it allover; every gondola and gondolier looking, at a +distance, precisely like every other. + +There is something strange and fascinating in this mysterious +impersonality of the gondola. It has an identity when you are in it, +but, thanks to their all being of the same size, shape and colour, and +of the same deportment and gait, it has none, or as little as possible, +as you see it pass before you. From my windows on the Riva there was +always the same silhouette--the long, black, slender skiff, lifting its +head and throwing it back a little, moving yet seeming not to move, with +the grotesquely-graceful figure on the poop. This figure inclines, +as may be, more to the graceful or to the grotesque--standing in the +“second position” of the dancing-master, but indulging from the waist +upward in a freedom of movement which that functionary would deprecate. +One may say as a general thing that there is something rather awkward in +the movement even of the most graceful gondolier, and something graceful +in the movement of the most awkward. In the graceful men of course the +grace predominates, and nothing can be finer than the large, firm way +in which, from their point of vantage, they throw themselves over +their tremendous oar. It has the boldness of a plunging bird and +the regularity of a pendulum. Sometimes, as you see this movement in +profile, in a gondola that passes you--see, as you recline on your own +low cushions, the arching body of the gondolier lifted up against the +sky--it has a kind of nobleness which suggests an image on a Greek +frieze. The gondolier at Venice is your very good friend--if you choose +him happily--and on the quality of the personage depends a good deal +that of your impressions. He is a part of your daily life, your double, +your shadow, your complement. Most people, I think, either like their +gondolier or hate him; and if they like him, like him very much. In this +case they take an interest in him after his departure; wish him to be +sure of employment, speak of him as the gem of gondoliers and tell their +friends to be certain to “secure” him. There is usually no difficulty in +securing him; there is nothing elusive or reluctant about a gondolier. +Nothing would induce me not to believe them for the most part excellent +fellows, and the sentimental tourist must always have a kindness for +them. More than the rest of the population, of course, they are the +children of Venice; they are associated with its idiosyncrasy, with its +essence, with its silence, with its melancholy. + +When I say they are associated with its silence I should immediately add +that they are associated also with its sound. Among themselves they are +an extraordinarily talkative company. They chatter at the _traghetti_, +where they always have some sharp point under discussion; they bawl +across the canals; they bespeak your commands as you approach; they defy +each other from afar. If you happen to have a _traghetto_ under your +window, you are well aware that they are a vocal race. I should go even +further than I went just now, and say that the voice of the gondolier is +in fact for audibility the dominant or rather the only note of Venice. +There is scarcely another heard sound, and that indeed is part of the +interest of the place. There is no noise there save distinctly human +noise; no rumbling, no vague uproar, nor rattle of wheels and hoofs. It +is all articulate and vocal and personal. One may say indeed that Venice +is emphatically the city of conversation; people talk all over the place +because there is nothing to interfere with its being caught by the ear. +Among the populace it is a general family party. The still water carries +the voice, and good Venetians exchange confidences at a distance of half +a mile. It saves a world of trouble, and they don’t like trouble. Their +delightful garrulous language helps them to make Venetian life a +long _conversazione_. This language, with its soft elisions, its +odd transpositions, its kindly contempt for consonants and other +disagreeables, has in it something peculiarly human and accommodating. +If your gondolier had no other merit he would have the merit that he +speaks Venetian. This may rank as a merit even--some people perhaps +would say especially--when you don’t understand what he says. But he +adds to it other graces which make him an agreeable feature in your +life. The price he sets on his services is touchingly small, and he +has a happy art of being obsequious without being, or at least without +seeming, abject. For occasional liberalities he evinces an almost +lyrical gratitude. In short he has delightfully good manners, a merit +which he shares for the most part with the Venetians at large. One +grows very fond of these people, and the reason of one’s fondness is the +frankness and sweetness of their address. That of the Italian family +at large has much to recommend it; but in the Venetian manner there is +something peculiarly ingratiating. One feels that the race is old, that +it has a long and rich civilisation in its blood, and that if it hasn’t +been blessed by fortune it has at least been polished by time. It hasn’t +a genius for stiff morality, and indeed makes few pretensions in that +direction. It scruples but scantly to represent the false as the +true, and has been accused of cultivating the occasion to grasp and +to overreach, and of steering a crooked course--not to your and my +advantage--amid the sanctities of property. It has been accused further +of loving if not too well at least too often, of being in fine as little +austere as possible. I am not sure it is very brave, nor struck with its +being very industrious. But it has an unfailing sense of the amenities +of life; the poorest Venetian is a natural man of the world. He is +better company than persons of his class are apt to be among the nations +of industry and virtue--where people are also sometimes perceived to lie +and steal and otherwise misconduct themselves. He has a great desire to +please and to be pleased. + + +V + +In that matter at least the cold-blooded stranger begins at last to +imitate him; begins to lead a life that shall be before all things easy; +unless indeed he allow himself, like Mr. Ruskin, to be put out of humour +by Titian and Tiepolo. The hours he spends among the pictures are his +best hours in Venice, and I am ashamed to have written so much of +common things when I might have been making festoons of the names of +the masters. Only, when we have covered our page with such festoons +what more is left to say? When one has said Carpaccio and Bellini, the +Tintoret and the Veronese, one has struck a note that must be left to +resound at will. Everything has been said about the mighty painters, and +it is of little importance that a pilgrim the more has found them to +his taste. “Went this morning to the Academy; was very much pleased with +Titian’s ‘Assumption.’” That honest phrase has doubtless been written +in many a traveller’s diary, and was not indiscreet on the part of +its author. But it appeals little to the general reader, and we must +moreover notoriously not expose our deepest feelings. Since I have +mentioned Titian’s “Assumption” I must say that there are some people +who have been less pleased with it than the observer we have just +imagined. It is one of the possible disappointments of Venice, and you +may if you like take advantage of your privilege of not caring for it. +It imparts a look of great richness to the side of the beautiful room of +the Academy on which it hangs; but the same room contains two or three +works less known to fame which are equally capable of inspiring a +passion. “The ‘Annunciation’ struck me as coarse and superficial”: that +note was once made in a simple-minded tourist’s book. At Venice, strange +to say, Titian is altogether a disappointment; the city of his adoption +is far from containing the best of him. Madrid, Paris, London, Florence, +Dresden, Munich--these are the homes of his greatness. + +There are other painters who have but a single home, and the greatest of +these is the Tintoret. Close beside him sit Carpaccio and Bellini, who +make with him the dazzling Venetian trio. The Veronese may be seen and +measured in other places; he is most splendid in Venice, but he shines +in Paris and in Dresden. You may walk out of the noon-day dusk of +Trafalgar Square in November, and in one of the chambers of the National +Gallery see the family of Darius rustling and pleading and weeping +at the feet of Alexander. Alexander is a beautiful young Venetian in +crimson pantaloons, and the picture sends a glow into the cold London +twilight. You may sit before it for an hour and dream you are floating +to the water-gate of the Ducal Palace, where a certain old beggar who +has one of the handsomest heads in the world--he has sat to a hundred +painters for Doges and for personages more sacred--has a prescriptive +right to pretend to pull your gondola to the steps and to hold out a +greasy immemorial cap. But you must go to Venice in very fact to see +the other masters, who form part of your life while you are there, who +illuminate your view of the universe. It is difficult to express one’s +relation to them; the whole Venetian art-world is so near, so familiar, +so much an extension and adjunct of the spreading actual, that it seems +almost invidious to say one owes more to one of them than to the other. +Nowhere, not even in Holland, where the correspondence between the +real aspects and the little polished canvases is so constant and so +exquisite, do art and life seem so interfused and, as it were, so +consanguineous. All the splendour of light and colour, all the Venetian +air and the Venetian history are on the walls and ceilings of the +palaces; and all the genius of the masters, all the images and visions +they have left upon canvas, seem to tremble in the sunbeams and dance +upon the waves. That is the perpetual interest of the place--that you +live in a certain sort of knowledge as in a rosy cloud. You don’t go +into the churches and galleries by way of a change from the streets; +you go into them because they offer you an exquisite reproduction of +the things that surround you. All Venice was both model and painter, +and life was so pictorial that art couldn’t help becoming so. With +all diminutions life is pictorial still, and this fact gives an +extraordinary freshness to one’s perception of the great Venetian works. +You judge of them not as a connoisseur, but as a man of the world, and +you enjoy them because they are so social and so true. Perhaps of all +works of art that are equally great they demand least reflection on the +part of the spectator--they make least of a mystery of being enjoyed. +Reflection only confirms your admiration, yet is almost ashamed to show +its head. These things speak so frankly and benignantly to the sense +that even when they arrive at the highest style--as in the Tintoret’s +“Presentation of the little Virgin at the Temple”--they are still more +familiar. + +But it is hard, as I say, to express all this, and it is painful as well +to attempt it--painful because in the memory of vanished hours so filled +with beauty the consciousness of present loss oppresses. Exquisite +hours, enveloped in light and silence, to have known them once is to +have always a terrible standard of enjoyment. Certain lovely mornings +of May and June come back with an ineffaceable fairness. Venice isn’t +smothered in flowers at this season, in the manner of Florence and Rome; +but the sea and sky themselves seem to blossom and rustle. The gondola +waits at the wave-washed steps, and if you are wise you will take your +place beside a discriminating companion. Such a companion in Venice +should of course be of the sex that discriminates most finely. An +intelligent woman who knows her Venice seems doubly intelligent, and it +makes no woman’s perceptions less keen to be aware that she can’t help +looking graceful as she is borne over the waves. The handsome Pasquale, +with uplifted oar, awaits your command, knowing, in a general way, +from observation of your habits, that your intention is to go to see +a picture or two. It perhaps doesn’t immensely matter what picture +you choose: the whole affair is so charming. It is charming to wander +through the light and shade of intricate canals, with perpetual +architecture above you and perpetual fluidity beneath. It is charming +to disembark at the polished steps of a little empty _campo_--a sunny +shabby square with an old well in the middle, an old church on one +side and tall Venetian windows looking down. Sometimes the windows are +tenantless; sometimes a lady in a faded dressing-gown leans vaguely on +the sill. There is always an old man holding out his hat for +coppers; there are always three or four small boys dodging possible +umbrella-pokes while they precede you, in the manner of custodians, to +the door of the church. + + +VI + +The churches of Venice are rich in pictures, and many a masterpiece +lurks in the unaccommodating gloom of side-chapels and sacristies. Many +a noble work is perched behind the dusty candles and muslin roses of a +scantily-visited altar; some of them indeed, hidden behind the altar, +suffer in a darkness that can never be explored. The facilities offered +you for approaching the picture in such cases are a mockery of your +irritated wish. You stand at tip-toe on a three-legged stool, you climb +a rickety ladder, you almost mount upon the shoulders of the _custode_. +You do everything but see the picture. You see just enough to be sure +it’s beautiful. You catch a glimpse of a divine head, of a fig tree +against a mellow sky, but the rest is impenetrable mystery. You +renounce all hope, for instance, of approaching the magnificent Cima da +Conegliano in San Giovanni in Bragora; and bethinking yourself of the +immaculate purity that shines in the spirit of this master, you renounce +it with chagrin and pain. Behind the high altar in that church hangs +a Baptism of Christ by Cima which I believe has been more or less +repainted. You make the thing out in spots, you see it has a fullness +of perfection. But you turn away from it with a stiff neck and promise +yourself consolation in the Academy and at the Madonna dell’ Orto, +where two noble works by the same hand--pictures as clear as a summer +twilight--present themselves in better circumstances. It may be said +as a general thing that you never see the Tintoret. You admire him, +you adore him, you think him the greatest of painters, but in the great +majority of cases your eyes fail to deal with him. This is partly +his own fault; so many of his works have turned to blackness and are +positively rotting in their frames. At the Scuola di San Rocco, where +there are acres of him, there is scarcely anything at all adequately +visible save the immense “Crucifixion” in the upper story. It is true +that in looking at this huge composition you look at many pictures; it +has not only a multitude of figures but a wealth of episodes; and you +pass from one of these to the other as if you were “doing” a gallery. +Surely no single picture in the world contains more of human life; there +is everything in it, including the most exquisite beauty. It is one of +the greatest things of art; it is always interesting. There are works of +the artist which contain touches more exquisite, revelations of beauty +more radiant, but there is no other vision of so intense a reality, an +execution so splendid. The interest, the impressiveness, of that whole +corner of Venice, however melancholy the effect of its gorgeous and +ill-lighted chambers, gives a strange importance to a visit to the +Scuola. Nothing that all travellers go to see appears to suffer less +from the incursions of travellers. It is one of the loneliest booths +of the bazaar, and the author of these lines has always had the good +fortune, which he wishes to every other traveller, of having it to +himself. I think most visitors find the place rather alarming and +wicked-looking. They walk about a while among the fitful figures that +gleam here and there out of the great tapestry (as it were) with which +the painter has hung all the walls, and then, depressed and bewildered +by the portentous solemnity of these objects, by strange glimpses of +unnatural scenes, by the echo of their lonely footsteps on the vast +stone floors, they take a hasty departure, finding themselves again, +with a sense of release from danger, a sense that the _genius loci_ was +a sort of mad white-washer who worked with a bad mixture, in the bright +light of the _campo_, among the beggars, the orange-vendors and the +passing gondolas. Solemn indeed is the place, solemn and strangely +suggestive, for the simple reason that we shall scarcely find four walls +elsewhere that inclose within a like area an equal quantity of genius. +The air is thick with it and dense and difficult to breathe; for it was +genius that was not happy, inasmuch as it, lacked the art to fix itself +for ever. It is not immortality that we breathe at the Scuola di San +Rocco, but conscious, reluctant mortality. + +Fortunately, however, we can turn to the Ducal Palace, where everything +is so brilliant and splendid that the poor dusky Tintoret is lifted in +spite of himself into the concert. This deeply original building is of +course the loveliest thing in Venice, and a morning’s stroll there is a +wonderful illumination. Cunningly select your hour--half the enjoyment +of Venice is a question of dodging--and enter at about one o’clock, when +the tourists have flocked off to lunch and the echoes of the charming +chambers have gone to sleep among the sunbeams. There is no brighter +place in Venice--by which I mean that on the whole there is none half so +bright. The reflected sunshine plays up through the great windows from +the glittering lagoon and shimmers and twinkles over gilded walls and +ceilings. All the history of Venice, all its splendid stately past, +glows around you in a strong sealight. Everyone here is magnificent, but +the great Veronese is the most magnificent of all. He swims before you +in a silver cloud; he thrones in an eternal morning. The deep blue sky +burns behind him, streaked across with milky bars; the white colonnades +sustain the richest canopies, under which the first gentlemen and ladies +in the world both render homage and receive it. Their glorious garments +rustle in the air of the sea and their sun-lighted faces are the very +complexion of Venice. The mixture of pride and piety, of politics and +religion, of art and patriotism, gives a splendid dignity to every +scene. Never was a painter more nobly joyous, never did an artist take a +greater delight in life, seeing it all as a kind of breezy festival and +feeling it through the medium of perpetual success. He revels in the +gold-framed ovals of the ceilings, multiplies himself there with the +fluttering movement of an embroidered banner that tosses itself into the +blue. He was the happiest of painters and produced the happiest picture +in the world. “The Rape of Europa” surely deserves this title; it is +impossible to look at it without aching with envy. Nowhere else in art +is such a temperament revealed; never did inclination and opportunity +combine to express such enjoyment. The mixture of flowers and gems and +brocade, of blooming flesh and shining sea and waving groves, of youth, +health, movement, desire--all this is the brightest vision that ever +descended upon the soul of a painter. Happy the artist who could +entertain such a vision; happy the artist who could paint it as the +masterpiece I here recall is painted. + +The Tintoret’s visions were not so bright as that; but he had several +that were radiant enough. In the room that contains the work just cited +are several smaller canvases by the greatly more complex genius of the +Scuola di San Rocco, which are almost simple in their loveliness, almost +happy in their simplicity. They have kept their brightness through the +centuries, and they shine with their neighbours in those golden rooms. +There is a piece of painting in one of them which is one of the sweetest +things in Venice and which reminds one afresh of those wild flowers of +execution that bloom so profusely and so unheeded in the dark corners +of all of the Tintoret’s work. “Pallas chasing away Mars” is, I believe, +the name that is given to the picture; and it represents in fact a young +woman of noble appearance administering a gentle push to a fine young +man in armour, as if to tell him to keep his distance. It is of the +gentleness of this push that I speak, the charming way in which she puts +out her arm, with a single bracelet on it, and rests her young hand, its +rosy fingers parted, on his dark breastplate. She bends her enchanting +head with the effort--a head which has all the strange fairness that the +Tintoret always sees in women--and the soft, living, flesh-like glow +of all these members, over which the brush has scarcely paused in its +course, is as pretty an example of genius as all Venice can show. +But why speak of the Tintoret when I can say nothing of the great +“Paradise,” which unfolds its somewhat smoky splendour and the wonder of +its multitudinous circles in one of the other chambers? If it were not +one of the first pictures in the world it would be about the biggest, +and we must confess that the spectator gets from it at first chiefly +an impression of quantity. Then he sees that this quantity is really +wealth; that the dim confusion of faces is a magnificent composition, +and that some of the details of this composition are extremely +beautiful. It is impossible however in a retrospect of Venice to specify +one’s happiest hours, though as one looks backward certain ineffaceable +moments start here and there into vividness. How is it possible to +forget one’s visits to the sacristy of the Frari, however frequent +they may have been, and the great work of John Bellini which forms the +treasure of that apartment? + + +VII + +Nothing in Venice is more perfect than this, and we know of no work of +art more complete. The picture is in three compartments; the Virgin sits +in the central division with her child; two venerable saints, standing +close together, occupy each of the others. It is impossible to imagine +anything more finished or more ripe. It is one of those things that sum +up the genius of a painter, the experience of a life, the teaching of +a school. It seems painted with molten gems, which have only been +clarified by time, and is as solemn as it is gorgeous and as simple as +it is deep. Giovanni Bellini is more or less everywhere in Venice, and, +wherever he is, almost certain to be first--first, I mean, in his own +line: paints little else than the Madonna and the saints; he has not +Carpaccio’s care for human life at large, nor the Tintoret’s nor the +of the Veronese. Some of his greater pictures, however, where several +figures are clustered together, have a richness of sanctity that is +almost profane. There is one of them on the dark side of the room at the +Academy that contains Titian’s “Assumption,” which if we could only see +it--its position is an inconceivable scandal--would evidently be one of +the mightiest of so-called sacred pictures. So too is the Madonna of San +Zaccaria, hung in a cold, dim, dreary place, ever so much too high, but +so mild and serene, and so grandly disposed and accompanied, that the +proper attitude for even the most critical amateur, as he looks at it, +strikes one as the bended knee. There is another noble John Bellini, +one of the very few in which there is no Virgin, at San Giovanni +Crisostomo--a St. Jerome, in a red dress, sitting aloft upon the rocks +and with a landscape of extraordinary purity behind him. The absence of +the peculiarly erect Madonna makes it an interesting surprise among the +works of the painter and gives it a somewhat less strenuous air. But it +has brilliant beauty and the St. Jerome is a delightful old personage. + +The same church contains another great picture for which the haunter +of these places must find a shrine apart in his memory; one of the most +interesting things he will have seen, if not the most brilliant. Nothing +appeals more to him than three figures of Venetian ladies which occupy +the foreground of a smallish canvas of Sebastian del Piombo, placed +above the high altar of San Giovanni Crisostomo. Sebastian was a +Venetian by birth, but few of his productions are to be seen in his +native place; few indeed are to be seen anywhere. The picture represents +the patron-saint of the church, accompanied by other saints and by the +worldly votaries I have mentioned. These ladies stand together on the +left, holding in their hands little white caskets; two of them are in +profile, but the foremost turns her face to the spectator. This face and +figure are almost unique among the beautiful things of Venice, and they +leave the susceptible observer with the impression of having made, +or rather having missed, a strange, a dangerous, but a most valuable, +acquaintance. The lady, who is superbly handsome, is the typical +Venetian of the sixteenth century, and she remains for the mind the +perfect flower of that society. Never was there a greater air of +breeding, a deeper expression of tranquil superiority. She walks a +goddess--as if she trod without sinking the waves of the Adriatic. It +is impossible to conceive a more perfect expression of the aristocratic +spirit either in its pride or in its benignity. This magnificent +creature is so strong and secure that she is gentle, and so quiet that +in comparison all minor assumptions of calmness suggest only a vulgar +alarm. But for all this there are depths of possible disorder in her +light-coloured eye. + +I had meant however to say nothing about her, for it’s not right to +speak of Sebastian when one hasn’t found room for Carpaccio. These +visions come to one, and one can neither hold them nor brush them aside. +Memories of Carpaccio, the magnificent, the delightful--it’s not for +want of such visitations, but only for want of space, that I haven’t +said of him what I would. There is little enough need of it for +Carpaccio’s sake, his fame being brighter to-day--thanks to the generous +lamp Mr. Ruskin has held up to it--than it has ever been. Yet there is +something ridiculous in talking of Venice without making him almost the +refrain. He and the Tintoret are the two great realists, and it is hard +to say which is the more human, the more various. The Tintoret had +the mightier temperament, but Carpaccio, who had the advantage of more +newness and more responsibility, sailed nearer to perfection. Here and +there he quite touches it, as in the enchanting picture, at the Academy, +of St. Ursula asleep in her little white bed, in her high clean room, +where the angel visits her at dawn; or in the noble St. Jerome in his +study at S. Giorgio Schiavoni. This latter work is a pearl of sentiment, +and I may add without being fantastic a ruby of colour. It unites the +most masterly finish with a kind of universal largeness of feeling, and +he who has it well in his memory will never hear the name of Carpaccio +without a throb of almost personal affection. Such indeed is the feeling +that descends upon you in that wonderful little chapel of St. George +of the Slaves, where this most personal and sociable of artists has +expressed all the sweetness of his imagination. The place is small +and incommodious, the pictures are out of sight and ill-lighted, the +custodian is rapacious, the visitors are mutually intolerable, but +the shabby little chapel is a palace of art. Mr. Ruskin has written a +pamphlet about it which is a real aid to enjoyment, though I can’t but +think the generous artist, with his keen senses and his just feeling, +would have suffered to hear his eulogist declare that one of his +other productions--in the Museo Civico of Palazzo Correr, a delightful +portrait of two Venetian ladies with pet animals--is the “finest picture +in the world.” It has no need of that to be thought admirable; and what +more can a painter desire? + + +VIII + +May in Venice is better than April, but June is best of all. Then the +days are hot, but not too hot, and the nights are more beautiful than +the days. Then Venice is rosier than ever in the morning and more golden +than ever as the day descends. She seems to expand and evaporate, to +multiply all her reflections and iridescences. Then the life of her +people and the strangeness of her constitution become a perpetual +comedy, or at least a perpetual drama. Then the gondola is your sole +habitation, and you spend days between sea and sky. You go to the Lido, +though the Lido has been spoiled. When I first saw it, in 1869, it was +a very natural place, and there was but a rough lane across the little +island from the landing-place to the beach. There was a bathing-place in +those days, and a restaurant, which was very bad, but where in the warm +evenings your dinner didn’t much matter as you sat letting it cool on +the wooden terrace that stretched out into the sea. To-day the Lido is +a part of united Italy and has been made the victim of villainous +improvements. A little cockney village has sprung up on its rural bosom +and a third-rate boulevard leads from Santa Elisabetta to the Adriatic. +There are bitumen walks and gas-lamps, lodging-houses, shops and a +_teatro diurno_. The bathing-establishment is bigger than before, +and the restaurant as well; but it is a compensation perhaps that +the cuisine is no better. Such as it is, however, you won’t scorn +occasionally to partake of it on the breezy platform under which bathers +dart and splash, and which looks out to where the fishing-boats, with +sails of orange and crimson, wander along the darkening horizon. The +beach at the Lido is still lonely and beautiful, and you can easily walk +away from the cockney village. The return to Venice in the sunset is +classical and indispensable, and those who at that glowing hour have +floated toward the towers that rise out of the lagoon will not easily +part with the impression. But you indulge in larger excursions--you go +to Burano and Torcello, to Malamocco and Chioggia. Torcello, like the +Lido, has been improved; the deeply interesting little cathedral of the +eighth century, which stood there on the edge of the sea, as touching +in its ruin, with its grassy threshold and its primitive mosaics, as the +bleached bones of a human skeleton washed ashore by the tide, has now +been restored and made cheerful, and the charm of the place, its strange +and suggestive desolation, has well-nigh departed. + +It will still serve you as a pretext, however, for a day on the lagoon, +especially as you will disembark at Burano and admire the wonderful +fisher-folk, whose good looks--and bad manners, I am sorry to say--can +scarcely be exaggerated. Burano is celebrated for the beauty of its +women and the rapacity of its children, and it is a fact that though +some of the ladies are rather bold about it every one of them shows +you a handsome face. The children assail you for coppers, and in their +desire to be satisfied pursue your gondola into the sea. Chioggia is +a larger Burano, and you carry away from either place a half-sad, +half-cynical, but altogether pictorial impression; the impression of +bright-coloured hovels, of bathing in stagnant canals, of young girls +with faces of a delicate shape and a susceptible expression, with +splendid heads of hair and complexions smeared with powder, faded yellow +shawls that hang like old Greek draperies, and little wooden shoes +that click as they go up and down the steps of the convex bridges; of +brown-cheeked matrons with lustrous tresses and high tempers, massive +throats encased with gold beads, and eyes that meet your own with a +certain traditional defiance. The men throughout the islands of +Venice are almost as handsome as the women; I have never seen so many +good-looking rascals. At Burano and Chioggia they sit mending their +nets, or lounge at the street corners, where conversation is always +high-pitched, or clamour to you to take a boat; and everywhere they +decorate the scene with their splendid colour--cheeks and throats as +richly brown as the sails of their fishing-smacks--their sea-faded +tatters which are always a “costume,” their soft Venetian jargon, and +the gallantry with which they wear their hats, an article that nowhere +sits so well as on a mass of dense Venetian curls. If you are happy you +will find yourself, after a June day in Venice (about ten o’clock), on +a balcony that overhangs the Grand Canal, with your elbows on the broad +ledge, a cigarette in your teeth and a little good company beside you. +The gondolas pass beneath, the watery surface gleams here and there from +their lamps, some of which are coloured lanterns that move mysteriously +in the darkness. There are some evenings in June when there are too many +gondolas, too many lanterns, too many serenades in front of the hotels. +The serenading in particular is overdone; but on such a balcony as I +speak of you needn’t suffer from it, for in the apartment behind +you--an accessible refuge--there is more good company, there are more +cigarettes. If you are wise you will step back there presently. + +1882. + + + + + +THE GRAND CANAL + + +The honour of representing the plan and the place at their best might +perhaps appear, in the City of St. Mark, properly to belong to the +splendid square which bears the patron’s name and which is the centre +of Venetian life so far (this is pretty well all the way indeed) as +Venetian life is a matter of strolling and chaffering, of gossiping and +gaping, of circulating without a purpose, and of staring--too often with +a foolish one--through the shop-windows of dealers whose hospitality +makes their doorsteps dramatic, at the very vulgarest rubbish in all the +modern market. If the Grand Canal, however, is not quite technically a +“street,” the perverted Piazza is perhaps even less normal; and I hasten +to add that I am glad not to find myself studying my subject under the +international arcades, or yet (I will go the length of saying) in the +solemn presence of the church. For indeed in that case I foresee I +should become still more confoundingly conscious of the stumbling-block +that inevitably, even with his first few words, crops up in the path +of the lover of Venice who rashly addresses himself to expression. +“Venetian life” is a mere literary convention, though it be an +indispensable figure. The words have played an effective part in the +literature of sensibility; they constituted thirty years ago the title +of Mr. Howells’s delightful volume of impressions; but in using +them to-day one owes some frank amends to one’s own lucidity. Let me +carefully premise therefore that so often as they shall again drop +from my pen, so often shall I beg to be regarded as systematically +superficial. + +Venetian life, in the large old sense, has long since come to an end, +and the essential present character of the most melancholy of cities +resides simply in its being the most beautiful of tombs. Nowhere else +has the past been laid to rest with such tenderness, such a sadness of +resignation and remembrance. Nowhere else is the present so alien, so +discontinuous, so like a crowd in a cemetery without garlands for +the graves. It has no flowers in its hands, but, as a compensation +perhaps--and the thing is doubtless more to the point--it has money +and little red books. The everlasting shuffle of these irresponsible +visitors in the Piazza is contemporary Venetian life. Everything else is +only a reverberation of that. The vast mausoleum has a turnstile at the +door, and a functionary in a shabby uniform lets you in, as per tariff, +to see how dead it is. From this _constatation_, this cold curiosity, +proceed all the industry, the prosperity, the vitality of the place. The +shopkeepers and gondoliers, the beggars and the models, depend upon +it for a living; they are the custodians and the ushers of the great +museum--they are even themselves to a certain extent the objects of +exhibition. It is in the wide vestibule of the square that the polygot +pilgrims gather most densely; Piazza San Marco is the lobby of the opera +in the intervals of the performance. The present fortune of Venice, the +lamentable difference, is most easily measured there, and that is why, +in the effort to resist our pessimism, we must turn away both from the +purchasers and from the vendors of _ricordi_. The _ricordi_ that we +prefer are gathered best where the gondola glides--best of all on the +noble waterway that begins in its glory at the Salute and ends in +its abasement at the railway station. It is, however, the cockneyfied +Piazzetta (forgive me, shade of St. Theodore--has not a brand new café +begun to glare there, electrically, this very year?) that introduces us +most directly to the great picture by which the Grand Canal works its +first spell, and to which a thousand artists, not always with a talent +apiece, have paid their tribute. We pass into the Piazzetta to look down +the great throat, as it were, of Venice, and the vision must console us +for turning our back on St. Mark’s. + +We have been treated to it again and again, of course, even if we have +never stirred from home; but that is only a reason the more for catching +at any freshness that may be left in the world of photography. It is in +Venice above all that we hear the small buzz of this vulgarising voice +of the familiar; yet perhaps it is in Venice too that the picturesque +fact has best mastered the pious secret of how to wait for us. Even +the classic Salute waits like some great lady on the threshold of her +saloon. She is more ample and serene, more seated at her door, than all +the copyists have told us, with her domes and scrolls, her scolloped +buttresses and statues forming a pompous crown, and her wide steps +disposed on the ground like the train of a robe. This fine air of the +woman of the world is carried out by the well-bred assurance with which +she looks in the direction of her old-fashioned Byzantine neighbour; +and the juxtaposition of two churches so distinguished and so different, +each splendid in its sort, is a sufficient mark of the scale and range +of Venice. However, we ourselves are looking away from St. Mark’s--we +must blind our eyes to that dazzle; without it indeed there are +brightnesses and fascinations enough. We see them in abundance even +while we look away from the shady steps of the Salute. These steps are +cool in the morning, yet I don’t know that I can justify my excessive +fondness for them any better than I can explain a hundred of the other +vague infatuations with which Venice sophisticates the spirit. Under +such an influence fortunately one need n’t explain--it keeps account +of nothing but perceptions and affections. It is from the Salute steps +perhaps, of a summer morning, that this view of the open mouth of +the city is most brilliantly amusing. The whole thing composes as if +composition were the chief end of human institutions. The charming +architectural promontory of the Dogana stretches out the most graceful +of arms, balancing in its hand the gilded globe on which revolves the +delightful satirical figure of a little weathercock of a woman. This +Fortune, this Navigation, or whatever she is called--she surely needs no +name--catches the wind in the bit of drapery of which she has divested +her rotary bronze loveliness. On the other side of the Canal twinkles +and glitters the long row of the happy palaces which are mainly +expensive hotels. There is a little of everything everywhere, in +the bright Venetian air, but to these houses belongs especially the +appearance of sitting, across the water, at the receipt of custom, +of watching in their hypocritical loveliness for the stranger and the +victim. I call them happy, because even their sordid uses and their +vulgar signs melt somehow, with their vague sea-stained pinks and drabs, +into that strange gaiety of light and colour which is made up of the +reflection of superannuated things. The atmosphere plays over them like +a laugh, they are of the essence of the sad old joke. They are almost +as charming from other places as they are from their own balconies, +and share fully in that universal privilege of Venetian objects which +consists of being both the picture and the point of view. + +This double character, which is particularly strong in the Grand Canal, +adds a difficulty to any control of one’s notes. The Grand Canal may +be practically, as in impression, the cushioned balcony of a high and +well-loved palace--the memory of irresistible evenings, of the +sociable elbow, of endless lingering and looking; or it may evoke the +restlessness of a fresh curiosity, of methodical inquiry, in a gondola +piled with references. There are no references, I ought to mention, in +the present remarks, which sacrifice to accident, not to completeness. +A rhapsody of Venice is always in order, but I think the catalogues +are finished. I should not attempt to write here the names of all the +palaces, even if the number of those I find myself able to remember in +the immense array were less insignificant. There are many I delight in +that I don’t know, or at least don’t keep, apart. Then there are the bad +reasons for preference that are better than the good, and all the sweet +bribery of association and recollection. These things, as one stands on +the Salute steps, are so many delicate fingers to pick straight out +of the row a dear little featureless house which, with its pale green +shutters, looks straight across at the great door and through the +very keyhole, as it were, of the church, and which I needn’t call by +a name--a pleasant American name--that every one in Venice, these many +years, has had on grateful lips. It is the very friendliest house in all +the wide world, and it has, as it deserves to have, the most beautiful +position. It is a real _porto di mare_, as the gondoliers say--a port +within a port; it sees everything that comes and goes, and takes it all +in with practised eyes. Not a tint or a hint of the immense iridescence +is lost upon it, and there are days of exquisite colour on which it may +fancy itself the heart of the wonderful prism. We wave to it from the +Salute steps, which we must decidedly leave if we wish to get on, a +grateful hand across the water, and turn into the big white church of +Longhena--an empty shaft beneath a perfunctory dome--where an American +family and a German party, huddled in a corner upon a pair of benches, +are gazing, with a conscientiousness worthy of a better cause, at +nothing in particular. + +For there is nothing particular in this cold and conventional temple to +gaze at save the great Tintoretto of the sacristy, to which we quickly +pay our respects, and which we are glad to have for ten minutes to +ourselves. The picture, though full of beauty, is not the finest of the +master’s; but it serves again as well as another to transport--there +is no other word--those of his lovers for whom, in far-away days when +Venice was an early rapture, this strange and mystifying painter was +almost the supreme revelation. The plastic arts may have less to say +to us than in the hungry years of youth, and the celebrated picture in +general be more of a blank; but more than the others any fine Tintoret +still carries us back, calling up not only the rich particular vision +but the freshness of the old wonder. Many things come and go, but this +great artist remains for us in Venice a part of the company of the mind. +The others are there in their obvious glory, but he is the only one for +whom the imagination, in our expressive modern phrase, sits up. “The +Marriage in Cana,” at the Salute, has all his characteristic and +fascinating unexpectedness--the sacrifice of the figure of our Lord, +who is reduced to the mere final point of a clever perspective, and the +free, joyous presentation of all the other elements of the feast. +Why, in spite of this queer one-sidedness, does the picture give us no +impression of a lack of what the critics call reverence? For no other +reason that I can think of than because it happens to be the work of its +author, in whose very mistakes there is a singular wisdom. Mr. Ruskin +has spoken with sufficient eloquence of the serious loveliness of the +row of heads of the women on the right, who talk to each other as they +sit at the foreshortened banquet. There could be no better example +of the roving independence of the painter’s vision, a real spirit of +adventure for which his subject was always a cluster of accidents; not +an obvious order, but a sort of peopled and agitated chapter of life, +in which the figures are submissive pictorial notes. These notes are all +there in their beauty and heterogeneity, and if the abundance is of a +kind to make the principle of selection seem in comparison timid, +yet the sense of “composition” in the spectator--if it happen to +exist--reaches out to the painter in peculiar sympathy. Dull must be the +spirit of the worker tormented in any field of art with that particular +question who is not moved to recognise in the eternal problem the high +fellowship of Tintoretto. + +If the long reach from this point to the deplorable iron bridge which +discharges the pedestrian at the Academy--or, more comprehensively, to +the painted and gilded Gothic of the noble Palazzo Foscari--is too much +of a curve to be seen at any one point as a whole, it represents the +better the arched neck, as it were, of the undulating serpent of which +the Canalazzo has the likeness. We pass a dozen historic houses, we note +in our passage a hundred component “bits,” with the baffled sketcher’s +sense, and with what would doubtless be, save for our intensely Venetian +fatalism, the baffled sketcher’s temper. It is the early palaces, of +course, and also, to be fair, some of the late, if we could take them +one by one, that give the Canal the best of its grand air. The fairest +are often cheek-by-jowl with the foulest, and there are few, alas, so +fair as to have been completely protected by their beauty. The ages and +the generations have worked their will on them, and the wind and the +weather have had much to say; but disfigured and dishonoured as they +are, with the bruises of their marbles and the patience of their ruin, +there is nothing like them in the world, and the long succession of +their faded, conscious faces makes of the quiet waterway they overhang +a _promenade historique_ of which the lesson, however often we read it, +gives, in the depth of its interest, an incomparable dignity to Venice. +We read it in the Romanesque arches, crooked to-day in their very +curves, of the early middle-age, in the exquisite individual Gothic of +the splendid time, and in the cornices and columns of a decadence almost +as proud. These things at present are almost equally touching in their +good faith; they have each in their degree so effectually parted with +their pride. They have lived on as they could and lasted as they might, +and we hold them to no account of their infirmities, for even those of +them whose blank eyes to-day meet criticism with most submission are far +less vulgar than the uses we have mainly managed to put them to. We have +botched them and patched them and covered them with sordid signs; we +have restored and improved them with a merciless taste, and the best of +them we have made over to the pedlars. Some of the most striking objects +in the finest vistas at present are the huge advertisements of the +curiosity-shops. + +The antiquity-mongers in Venice have all the courage of their opinion, +and it is easy to see how well they know they can confound you with an +unanswerable question. What is the whole place but a curiosity-shop, and +what are you here for yourself but to pick up odds and ends? “We pick +them up _for_ you,” say these honest Jews, whose prices are marked +in dollars, “and who shall blame us if, the flowers being pretty well +plucked, we add an artificial rose or two to the composition of the +bouquet?” They take care, in a word, that there be plenty of relics, and +their establishments are huge and active. They administer the antidote +to pedantry, and you can complain of them only if you never cross their +thresholds. If you take this step you are lost, for you have parted with +the correctness of your attitude. Venice becomes frankly from such a +moment the big depressing dazzling joke in which after all our sense +of her contradictions sinks to rest--the grimace of an over-strained +philosophy. It’s rather a comfort, for the curiosity-shops are amusing. +You have bad moments indeed as you stand in their halls of humbug and, +in the intervals of haggling, hear through the high windows the soft +splash of the sea on the old water-steps, for you think with anger of +the noble homes that are laid waste in such scenes, of the delicate +lives that must have been, that might still be, led there. You +reconstruct the admirable house according to your own needs; leaning on +a back balcony, you drop your eyes into one of the little green gardens +with which, for the most part, such establishments are exasperatingly +blessed, and end by feeling it a shame that you yourself are not in +possession. (I take for granted, of course, that as you go and come you +are, in imagination, perpetually lodging yourself and setting up your +gods; for if this innocent pastime, this borrowing of the mind, be not +your favourite sport there is a flaw in the appeal that Venice makes +to you.) There may be happy cases in which your envy is tempered, or +perhaps I should rather say intensified, by real participation. If you +have had the good fortune to enjoy the hospitality of an old Venetian +home and to lead your life a little in the painted chambers that still +echo with one of the historic names, you have entered by the shortest +step into the inner spirit of the place. If it did n’t savour of +treachery to private kindness I should like to speak frankly of one of +these delightful, even though alienated, structures, to refer to it as +a splendid example of the old palatial type. But I can only do so in +passing, with a hundred precautions, and, lifting the curtain at the +edge, drop a commemorative word on the success with which, in this +particularly happy instance, the cosmopolite habit, the modern sympathy, +the intelligent, flexible attitude, the latest fruit of time, adjust +themselves to the great gilded, relinquished shell and try to fill it +out. A Venetian palace that has not too grossly suffered and that is not +overwhelming by its mass makes almost any life graceful that may be +led in it. With cultivated and generous contemporary ways it reveals a +pre-established harmony. As you live in it day after day its beauty and +its interest sink more deeply into your spirit; it has its moods and +its hours and its mystic voices and its shifting expressions. If in +the absence of its masters you have happened to have it to yourself +for twenty-four hours you will never forget the charm of its haunted +stillness, late on the summer afternoon for instance, when the call of +playing children comes in behind from the campo, nor the way the old +ghosts seemed to pass on tip-toe on the marble floors. It gives you +practically the essence of the matter that we are considering, for +beneath the high balconies Venice comes and goes, and the particular +stretch you command contains all the characteristics. Everything has its +turn, from the heavy barges of merchandise, pushed by long poles and the +patient shoulder, to the floating pavilions of the great serenades, and +you may study at your leisure the admirable Venetian arts of managing a +boat and organising a spectacle. Of the beautiful free stroke with which +the gondola, especially when there are two oars, is impelled, you never, +in the Venetian scene, grow weary; it is always in the picture, and the +large profiled action that lets the standing rowers throw themselves +forward to a constant recovery has the double value of being, at the +fag-end of greatness, the only energetic note. The people from the +hotels are always afloat, and, at the hotel pace, the solitary gondolier +(like the solitary horseman of the old-fashioned novel) is, I confess, +a somewhat melancholy figure. Perched on his poop without a mate, he +re-enacts perpetually, in high relief, with his toes turned out, the +comedy of his odd and charming movement. He always has a little the +look of an absent-minded nursery-maid pushing her small charges in a +perambulator. + +But why should I risk too free a comparison, where this picturesque and +amiable class are concerned? I delight in their sun-burnt complexions +and their childish dialect; I know them only by their merits, and I am +grossly prejudiced in their favour. They are interesting and touching, +and alike in their virtues and their defects human nature is simplified +as with a big effective brush. Affecting above all is their dependence +on the stranger, the whimsical stranger who swims out of their ken, yet +whom Providence sometimes restores. The best of them at any rate are +in their line great artists. On the swarming feast-days, on the strange +feast-night of the Redentore, their steering is a miracle of ease. The +master-hands, the celebrities and winners of prizes--you may see them +on the private gondolas in spotless white, with brilliant sashes and +ribbons, and often with very handsome persons--take the right of way +with a pardonable insolence. They penetrate the crush of boats with +an authority of their own. The crush of boats, the universal sociable +bumping and squeezing, is great when, on the summer nights, the ladies +shriek with alarm, the city pays the fiddlers, and the illuminated +barges, scattering music and song, lead a long train down the Canal. The +barges used to be rowed in rhythmic strokes, but now they are towed by +the steamer. The coloured lamps, the vocalists before the hotels, are +not to my sense the greatest seduction of Venice; but it would be +an uncandid sketch of the Canalazzo that shouldn’t touch them with +indulgence. Taking one nuisance with another, they are probably the +prettiest in the world, and if they have in general more magic for the +new arrival than for the old Venice-lover, they in any case, at their +best, keep up the immemorial tradition. The Venetians have had from the +beginning of time the pride of their processions and spectacles, and +it’s a wonder how with empty pockets they still make a clever show. The +Carnival is dead, but these are the scraps of its inheritance. Vauxhall +on the water is of course more Vauxhall than ever, with the good fortune +of home-made music and of a mirror that reduplicates and multiplies. +The feast of the Redeemer--the great popular feast of the year--is a +wonderful Venetian Vauxhall. All Venice on this occasion takes to the +boats for the night and loads them with lamps and provisions. Wedged +together in a mass it sups and sings; every boat is a floating arbour, +a private _café-concert_. Of all Christian commemorations it is the most +ingenuously and harmlessly pagan. Toward morning the passengers repair +to the Lido, where, as the sun rises, they plunge, still sociably, into +the sea. The night of the Redentore has been described, but it would be +interesting to have an account, from the domestic point of view, of its +usual morrow. It is mainly an affair of the Giudecca, however, which is +bridged over from the Zattere to the great church. The pontoons are laid +together during the day--it is all done with extraordinary celerity and +art--and the bridge is prolonged across the Canalazzo (to Santa Maria +Zobenigo), which is my only warrant for glancing at the occasion. We +glance at it from our palace windows; lengthening our necks a little, as +we look up toward the Salute, we see all Venice, on the July afternoon, +so serried as to move slowly, pour across the temporary footway. It is +a flock of very good children, and the bridged Canal is their toy. All +Venice on such occasions is gentle and friendly; not even all Venice +pushes anyone into the water. + +But from the same high windows we catch without any stretching of the +neck a still more indispensable note in the picture, a famous pretender +eating the bread of bitterness. This repast is served in the open air, +on a neat little terrace, by attendants in livery, and there is no +indiscretion in our seeing that the pretender dines. Ever since the +table d’hôte in “Candide” Venice has been the refuge of monarchs in want +of thrones--she would n’t know herself without her _rois en exil._ The +exile is agreeable and soothing, the gondola lets them down gently. Its +movement is an anodyne, its silence a philtre, and little by little it +rocks all ambitions to sleep. The proscript has plenty of leisure to +write his proclamations and even his memoirs, and I believe he has +organs in which they are published; but the only noise he makes in the +world is the harmless splash of his oars. He comes and goes along the +Canalazzo, and he might be much worse employed. He is but one of the +interesting objects it presents, however, and I am by no means sure +that he is the most striking. He has a rival, if not in the iron +bridge, which, alas, is within our range, at least--to take an immediate +example--in the Montecuculi Palace. Far-descended and weary, but +beautiful in its crooked old age, with its lovely proportions, its +delicate round arches, its carvings and its disks of marble, is the +haunted Montecuculi. Those who have a kindness for Venetian gossip like +to remember that it was once for a few months the property of Robert +Browning, who, however, never lived in it, and who died in the splendid +Rezzonico, the residence of his son and a wonderful cosmopolite +“document,” which, as it presents itself, in an admirable position, but +a short way farther down the Canal, we can almost see, in spite of the +curve, from the window at which we stand. This great seventeenth century +pile, throwing itself upon the water with a peculiar florid assurance, +a certain upward toss of its cornice which gives it the air of a rearing +sea-horse, decorates immensely--and within, as well as without--the wide +angle that it commands. + +There is a more formal greatness in the high square Gothic Foscari, +just below it, one of the noblest creations of the fifteenth century, +a masterpiece of symmetry and majesty. Dedicated to-day to official +uses--it is the property of the State--it looks conscious of the +consideration it enjoys, and is one of the few great houses within our +range whose old age strikes us as robust and painless. It is visibly +“kept up”; perhaps it is kept up too much; perhaps I am wrong in +thinking so well of it. These doubts and fears course rapidly through my +mind--I am easily their victim when it is a question of architecture--as +they are apt to do to-day, in Italy, almost anywhere, in the presence +of the beautiful, of the desecrated or the neglected. We feel at such +moments as if the eye of Mr. Ruskin were upon us; we grow nervous and +lose our confidence. This makes me inevitably, in talking of Venice, +seek a pusillanimous safety in the trivial and the obvious. I am on +firm ground in rejoicing in the little garden directly opposite our +windows--it is another proof that they really show us everything--and in +feeling that the gardens of Venice would deserve a page to themselves. +They are infinitely more numerous than the arriving stranger can +suppose; they nestle with a charm all their own in the complications of +most back-views. Some of them are exquisite, many are large, and even +the scrappiest have an artful understanding, in the interest of colour, +with the waterways that edge their foundations. On the small canals, +in the hunt for amusement, they are the prettiest surprises of all. +The tangle of plants and flowers crowds over the battered walls, the +greenness makes an arrangement with the rosy sordid brick. Of all the +reflected and liquefied things in Venice, and the number of these is +countless, I think the lapping water loves them most. They are numerous +on the Canalazzo, but wherever they occur they give a brush to the +picture and in particular, it is easy to guess, give a sweetness to the +house. Then the elements are complete--the trio of air and water and of +things that grow. Venice without them would be too much a matter of the +tides and the stones. Even the little trellises of the _traghetti_ count +charmingly as reminders, amid so much artifice, of the woodland nature +of man. The vine-leaves, trained on horizontal poles, make a roof +of chequered shade for the gondoliers and ferrymen, who doze there +according to opportunity, or chatter or hail the approaching “fare.” + There is no “hum” in Venice, so that their voices travel far; they +enter your windows and mingle even with your dreams. I beg the reader +to believe that if I had time to go into everything, I would go into the +_traghetti_, which have their manners and their morals, and which +used to have their piety. This piety was always a _madonnina_, the +protectress of the passage--a quaint figure of the Virgin with the red +spark of a lamp at her feet. The lamps appear for the most part to have +gone out, and the images doubtless have been sold for _bric-a-brac_. +The ferrymen, for aught I know, are converted to Nihilism--a faith +consistent happily with a good stroke of business. One of the figures +has been left, however--the Madonnetta which gives its name to a +_traghetto_ near the Rialto. But this sweet survivor is a carven stone +inserted ages ago in the corner of an old palace and doubtless difficult +of removal. _Pazienza_, the day will come when so marketable a relic +will also be extracted from its socket and purchased by the devouring +American. I leave that expression, on second thought, standing; but I +repent of it when I remember that it is a devouring American--a lady +long resident in Venice and whose kindnesses all Venetians, as well as +her country-people, know, who has rekindled some of the extinguished +tapers, setting up especially the big brave Gothic shrine, of painted +and gilded wood, which, on the top of its stout _palo_, sheds its +influence on the place of passage opposite the Salute. + +If I may not go into those of the palaces this devious discourse has +left behind, much less may I enter the great galleries of the Academy, +which rears its blank wall, surmounted by the lion of St. Mark, well +within sight of the windows at which we are still lingering. This +wondrous temple of Venetian art--for all it promises little from +without--overhangs, in a manner, the Grand Canal, but if we were so much +as to cross its threshold we should wander beyond recall. It contains, +in some of the most magnificent halls--where the ceilings have all +the glory with which the imagination of Venice alone could over-arch a +room--some of the noblest pictures in the world; and whether or not +we go back to them on any particular occasion for another look, it is +always a comfort to know that they are there, as the sense of them on +the spot is a part of the furniture of the mind--the sense of them close +at hand, behind every wall and under every cover, like the inevitable +reverse of a medal, of the side exposed to the air that reflects, +intensifies, completes the scene. In other words, as it was the +inevitable destiny of Venice to be painted, and painted with passion, so +the wide world of picture becomes, as we live there, and however much we +go about our affairs, the constant habitation of our thoughts. The truth +is, we are in it so uninterruptedly, at home and abroad, that there +is scarcely a pressure upon us to seek it in one place more than in +another. Choose your standpoint at random and trust the picture to come +to you. This is manifestly why I have not, I find myself conscious, said +more about the features of the Canalazzo which occupy the reach between +the Salute and the position we have so obstinately taken up. It is +still there before us, however, and the delightful little Palazzo Dario, +intimately familiar to English and American travellers, picks itself out +in the foreshortened brightness. The Dario is covered with the loveliest +little marble plates and sculptured circles; it is made up of exquisite +pieces--as if there had been only enough to make it small--so that it +looks, in its extreme antiquity, a good deal like a house of cards that +hold together by a tenure it would be fatal to touch. An old Venetian +house dies hard indeed, and I should add that this delicate thing, +with submission in every feature, continues to resist the contact of +generations of lodgers. It is let out in floors (it used to be let as +a whole) and in how many eager hands--for it is in great +requisition--under how many fleeting dispensations have we not known and +loved it? People are always writing in advance to secure it, as they +are to secure the Jenkins’s gondolier, and as the gondola passes we +see strange faces at the windows--though it’s ten to one we recognise +them--and the millionth artist coming forth with his traps at the +water-gate. The poor little patient Dario is one of the most flourishing +booths at the fair. + +The faces in the window look out at the great Sansovino--the splendid +pile that is now occupied by the Prefect. I feel decidedly that I +don’t object as I ought to the palaces of the sixteenth and seventeenth +centuries. Their pretensions impose upon me, and the imagination peoples +them more freely than it can people the interiors of the prime. Was not +moreover this masterpiece of Sansovino once occupied by the Venetian +post-office, and thereby intimately connected with an ineffaceable first +impression of the author of these remarks? He had arrived, wondering, +palpitating, twenty-three years ago, after nightfall, and, the first +thing on the morrow, had repaired to the post-office for his letters. +They had been waiting a long time and were full of delayed interest, and +he returned with them to the gondola and floated slowly down the Canal. +The mixture, the rapture, the wonderful temple of the _poste restante_, +the beautiful strangeness, all humanised by good news--the memory of +this abides with him still, so that there always proceeds from the +splendid waterfront I speak of a certain secret appeal, something that +seems to have been uttered first in the sonorous chambers of youth. Of +course this association falls to the ground--or rather splashes into the +water--if I am the victim of a confusion. _Was_ the edifice in question +twenty-three years ago the post-office, which has occupied since, for +many a day, very much humbler quarters? I am afraid to take the proper +steps for finding out, lest I should learn that during these years I +have misdirected my emotion. A better reason for the sentiment, at any +rate, is that such a great house has surely, in the high beauty of its +tiers, a refinement of its own. They make one think of colosseums and +aqueducts and bridges, and they constitute doubtless, in Venice, the +most pardonable specimen of the imitative. I have even a timid kindness +for the huge Pesaro, far down the Canal, whose main reproach, more even +than the coarseness of its forms, is its swaggering size, its want +of consideration for the general picture, which the early examples so +reverently respect. The Pesaro is as far out of the frame as a modern +hotel, and the Cornaro, close to it, oversteps almost equally the +modesty of art. One more thing they and their kindred do, I must add, +for which, unfortunately, we can patronise them less. They make even the +most elaborate material civilisation of the present day seem woefully +shrunken and _bourgeois_, for they simply--I allude to the biggest +palaces--can’t be lived in as they were intended to be. The modern +tenant may take in all the magazines, but he bends not the bow of +Achilles. He occupies the place, but he doesn’t fill it, and he has +guests from the neighbouring inns with ulsters and Baedekers. We are +far at the Pesaro, by the way, from our attaching window, and we take +advantage of it to go in rather a melancholy mood to the end. The long +straight vista from the Foscari to the Rialto, the great middle stretch +of the Canal, contains, as the phrase is, a hundred objects of interest, +but it contains most the bright oddity of its general Deluge air. In all +these centuries it has never got over its resemblance to a flooded city; +for some reason or other it is the only part of Venice in which the +houses look as if the waters had overtaken them. Everywhere else they +reckon with them--have chosen them; here alone the lapping seaway seems +to confess itself an accident. + +{Illustration: PALAZZO MONCENIGO, VENICE} + +There are persons who hold this long, gay, shabby, spotty perspective, +in which, with its immense field of confused reflection, the houses have +infinite variety, the dullest expanse in Venice. It was not dull, we +imagine, for Lord Byron, who lived in the midmost of the three Mocenigo +palaces, where the writing-table is still shown at which he gave the +rein to his passions. For other observers it is sufficiently enlivened +by so delightful a creation as the Palazzo Loredan, once a masterpiece +and at present the Municipio, not to speak of a variety of other +immemorial bits whose beauty still has a degree of freshness. Some of +the most touching relics of early Venice are here--for it was here she +precariously clustered--peeping out of a submersion more pitiless than +the sea. As we approach the Rialto indeed the picture falls off and a +comparative commonness suffuses it. There is a wide paved walk on either +side of the Canal, on which the waterman--and who in Venice is not a +waterman?--is prone to seek repose. I speak of the summer days--it is +the summer Venice that is the visible Venice. The big tarry barges are +drawn up at the _fondamenta_, and the bare-legged boatmen, in faded blue +cotton, lie asleep on the hot stones. If there were no colour anywhere +else there would be enough in their tanned personalities. Half the low +doorways open into the warm interior of waterside drinking-shops, and +here and there, on the quay, beneath the bush that overhangs the door, +there are rickety tables and chairs. Where in Venice is there not the +amusement of character and of detail? The tone in this part is very +vivid, and is largely that of the brown plebeian faces looking out of +the patchy miscellaneous houses--the faces of fat undressed women and of +other simple folk who are not aware that they enjoy, from balconies once +doubtless patrician, a view the knowing ones of the earth come thousands +of miles to envy them. The effect is enhanced by the tattered clothes +hung to dry in the windows, by the sun-faded rags that flutter from the +polished balustrades--these are ivory-smooth with time; and the whole +scene profits by the general law that renders decadence and ruin +in Venice more brilliant than any prosperity. Decay is in this +extraordinary place golden in tint and misery _couleur de rose_. The +gondolas of the correct people are unmitigated sable, but the poor +market-boats from the islands are kaleidoscopic. + +The Bridge of the Rialto is a name to conjure with, but, honestly +speaking, it is scarcely the gem of the composition. There are of course +two ways of taking it--from the water or from the upper passage, where +its small shops and booths abound in Venetian character; but it mainly +counts as a feature of the Canal when seen from the gondola or even from +the awful _vaporetto_. The great curve of its single arch is much to +be commended, especially when, coming from the direction of the +railway-station, you see it frame with its sharp compass-line the +perfect picture, the reach of the Canal on the other side. But the backs +of the little shops make from the water a graceless collective hump, and +the inside view is the diverting one. The big arch of the bridge--like +the arches of all the bridges--is the waterman’s friend in wet weather. +The gondolas, when it rains, huddle beside the peopled barges, and +the young ladies from the hotels, vaguely fidgeting, complain of the +communication of insect life. Here indeed is a little of everything, and +the jewellers of this celebrated precinct--they have their immemorial +row--make almost as fine a show as the fruiterers. It is a universal +market, and a fine place to study Venetian types. The produce of +the islands is discharged there, and the fishmongers announce their +presence. All one’s senses indeed are vigorously attacked; the whole +place is violently hot and bright, all odorous and noisy. The churning +of the screw of the _vaporetto_ mingles with the other sounds--not +indeed that this offensive note is confined to one part of the Canal. +But Just here the little piers of the resented steamer are particularly +near together, and it seems somehow to be always kicking up the water. +As we go further down we see it stopping exactly beneath the glorious +windows of the Ca’d’Oro. It has chosen its position well, and who +shall gainsay it for having put itself under the protection of the +most romantic facade in Europe? The companionship of these objects is +a symbol; it expresses supremely the present and the future of Venice. +Perfect, in its prime, was the marble Ca’d’Oro, with the noble recesses +of its _loggie_, but even then it probably never “met a want,” like the +successful _vaporetto_. If, however, we are not to go into the Museo +Civico--the old Museo Correr, which rears a staring renovated front +far down on the left, near the station, so also we must keep out of the +great vexed question of steam on the Canalazzo, just as a while since we +prudently kept out of the Accademia. These are expensive and complicated +excursions. It is obvious that if the _vaporetti_ have contributed to +the ruin of the gondoliers, already hard pressed by fate, and to that of +the palaces, whose foundations their waves undermine, and that if +they have robbed the Grand Canal of the supreme distinction of its +tranquillity, so on the other hand they have placed “rapid transit,” in +the New York phrase, in everybody’s reach, and enabled everybody--save +indeed those who wouldn’t for the world--to rush about Venice as +furiously as people rush about New York. The suitability of this +consummation needn’t be pointed out. + +Even we ourselves, in the irresistible contagion, are going so fast now +that we have only time to note in how clever and costly a fashion the +Museo Civico, the old Fondaco dei Turchi, has been reconstructed and +restored. It is a glare of white marble without, and a series of showy +majestic halls within, where a thousand curious mementos and relics of +old Venice are gathered and classified. Of its miscellaneous treasures +I fear I may perhaps frivolously prefer the series of its remarkable +living Longhis, an illustration of manners more copious than the +celebrated Carpaccio, the two ladies with their little animals and their +long sticks. Wonderful indeed today are the museums of Italy, where +the renovations and the _belle ordonnance_ speak of funds apparently +unlimited, in spite of the fact that the numerous custodians +frankly look starved. What is the pecuniary source of all this civic +magnificence--it is shown in a hundred other ways--and how do the +Italian cities manage to acquit themselves of expenses that would be +formidable to communities richer and doubtless less aesthetic? Who pays +the bills for the expressive statues alone, the general exuberance +of sculpture, with which every _piazzetta_ of almost every village +is patriotically decorated? Let us not seek an answer to the puzzling +question, but observe instead that we are passing the mouth of the +populous Canareggio, next widest of the waterways, where the race of +Shylock abides, and at the corner of which the big colourless church of +San Geremia stands gracefully enough on guard. The Canareggio, with its +wide lateral footways and humpbacked bridges, makes on the feast of St. +John an admirable noisy, tawdry theatre for one of the prettiest and the +most infantile of the Venetian processions. + +The rest of the course is a reduced magnificence, in spite of +interesting bits, of the battered pomp of the Pesaro and the Cornaro, +of the recurrent memories of royalty in exile which cluster about the +Palazzo Vendramin Calergi, once the residence of the Comte de Chambord +and still that of his half-brother, in spite too of the big Papadopoli +gardens, opposite the station, the largest private grounds in Venice, +but of which Venice in general mainly gets the benefit in the usual form +of irrepressible greenery climbing over walls and nodding at water. The +rococo church of the Scalzi is here, all marble and malachite, all a +cold, hard glitter and a costly, curly ugliness, and here too, opposite, +on the top of its high steps, is San Simeone Profeta, I won’t say +immortalised, but unblushingly misrepresented, by the perfidious +Canaletto. I shall not stay to unravel the mystery of this prosaic +painter’s malpractices; he falsified without fancy, and as he apparently +transposed at will the objects he reproduced, one is never sure of the +particular view that may have constituted his subject. It would look +exactly like such and such a place if almost everything were not +different. San Simeone Profeta appears to hang there upon the wall; but +it is on the wrong side of the Canal and the other elements quite fail +to correspond. One’s confusion is the greater because one doesn’t +know that everything may not really have changed, even beyond all +probability--though it’s only in America that churches cross the street +or the river--and the mixture of the recognisable and the different +makes the ambiguity maddening, all the more that the painter is almost +as attaching as he is bad. Thanks at any rate to the white church, domed +and porticoed, on the top of its steps, the traveller emerging for +the first time upon the terrace of the railway-station seems to have a +Canaletto before him. He speedily discovers indeed even in the presence +of this scene of the final accents of the Canalazzo--there is a charm in +the old pink warehouses on the hot _fondamenta_--that he has something +much better. He looks up and down at the gathered gondolas; he has his +surprise after all, his little first Venetian thrill; and as the terrace +of the station ushers in these things we shall say no harm of it, though +it is not lovely. It is the beginning of his experience, but it is the +end of the Grand Canal. + +1892. + + + + + +VENICE: AN EARLY IMPRESSION + + +There would be much to say about that golden chain of historic cities +which stretches from Milan to Venice, in which the very names--Brescia, +Verona, Mantua, Padua--are an ornament to one’s phrase; but I should +have to draw upon recollections now three years old and to make my short +story a long one. Of Verona and Venice only have I recent impressions, +and even to these must I do hasty justice. I came into Venice, just as +I had done before, toward the end of a summer’s day, when the shadows +begin to lengthen and the light to glow, and found that the attendant +sensations bore repetition remarkably well. There was the same last +intolerable delay at Mestre, just before your first glimpse of the +lagoon confirms the already distinct sea-smell which has added speed to +the precursive flight of your imagination; then the liquid level, +edged afar off by its band of undiscriminated domes and spires, soon +distinguished and proclaimed, however, as excited and contentious heads +multiply at the windows of the train; then your long rumble on the +immense white railway-bridge, which, in spite of the invidious contrast +drawn, and very properly, by Mr. Ruskin between the old and the new +approach, does truly, in a manner, shine across the green lap of the +lagoon like a mighty causeway of marble; then the plunge into the +station, which would be exactly similar to every other plunge save for +one little fact--that the keynote of the great medley of voices borne +back from the exit is not “Cab, sir!” but “Barca, signore!” + +I do not mean, however, to follow the traveller through every phase of +his initiation, at the risk of stamping poor Venice beyond repair as the +supreme bugbear of literature; though for my own part I hold that to +a fine healthy romantic appetite the subject can’t be too diffusely +treated. Meeting in the Piazza on the evening of my arrival a young +American painter who told me that he had been spending the summer just +where I found him, I could have assaulted him for very envy. He was +painting forsooth the interior of St. Mark’s. To be a young American +painter unperplexed by the mocking, elusive soul of things and satisfied +with their wholesome light-bathed surface and shape; keen of eye; fond +of colour, of sea and sky and anything that may chance between them; of +old lace and old brocade and old furniture (even when made to order); of +time-mellowed harmonies on nameless canvases and happy contours in cheap +old engravings; to spend one’s mornings in still, productive analysis +of the clustered shadows of the Basilica, one’s afternoons anywhere, in +church or campo, on canal or lagoon, and one’s evenings in star-light +gossip at Florian’s, feeling the sea-breeze throb languidly between the +two great pillars of the Piazzetta and over the low black domes of the +church--this, I consider, is to be as happy as is consistent with the +preservation of reason. + +The mere use of one’s eyes in Venice is happiness enough, and generous +observers find it hard to keep an account of their profits in this line. +Everything the attention touches holds it, keeps playing with it--thanks +to some inscrutable flattery of the atmosphere. Your brown-skinned, +white-shirted gondolier, twisting himself in the light, seems to you, +as you lie at contemplation beneath your awning, a perpetual symbol of +Venetian “effect.” The light here is in fact a mighty magician and, with +all respect to Titian, Veronese and Tintoret, the greatest artist +of them all. You should see in places the material with which it +deals--slimy brick, marble battered and befouled, rags, dirt, decay. +Sea and sky seem to meet half-way, to blend their tones into a soft +iridescence, a lustrous compound of wave and cloud and a hundred +nameless local reflections, and then to fling the clear tissue against +every object of vision. You may see these elements at work everywhere, +but to see them in their intensity you should choose the finest day +in the month and have yourself rowed far away across the lagoon to +Torcello. Without making this excursion you can hardly pretend to +know Venice or to sympathise with that longing for pure radiance which +animated her great colourists. It is a perfect bath of light, and I +couldn’t get rid of a fancy that we were cleaving the upper atmosphere +on some hurrying cloud-skiff. At Torcello there is nothing but the light +to see--nothing at least but a sort of blooming sand-bar intersected +by a single narrow creek which does duty as a canal and occupied by a +meagre cluster of huts, the dwellings apparently of market-gardeners +and fishermen, and by a ruinous church of the eleventh century. It is +impossible to imagine a more penetrating case of unheeded collapse. +Torcello was the mother-city of Venice, and she lies there now, a mere +mouldering vestige, like a group of weather-bleached parental bones left +impiously unburied. I stopped my gondola at the mouth of the shallow +inlet and walked along the grass beside a hedge to the low-browed, +crumbling cathedral. The charm of certain vacant grassy spaces, in +Italy, overfrowned by masses of brickwork that are honeycombed by the +suns of centuries, is something that I hereby renounce once for all the +attempt to express; but you may be sure that whenever I mention such a +spot enchantment lurks in it. + +A delicious stillness covered the little campo at Torcello; I remember +none so subtly audible save that of the Roman Campagna. There was +no life but the visible tremor of the brilliant air and the cries of +half-a-dozen young children who dogged our steps and clamoured for +coppers. These children, by the way, were the handsomest little brats in +the world, and, each was furnished with a pair of eyes that could only +have signified the protest of nature against the meanness of fortune. +They were very nearly as naked as savages, and their little bellies +protruded like those of infant cannibals in the illustrations of books +of travel; but as they scampered and sprawled in the soft, thick grass, +grinning like suddenly-translated cherubs and showing their hungry +little teeth, they suggested forcibly that the best assurance of +happiness in this world is to be found in the maximum of innocence and +the minimum of wealth. One small urchin--framed, if ever a child was, to +be the joy of an aristocratic mamma--was the most expressively beautiful +creature I had ever looked upon. He had a smile to make Correggio sigh +in his grave; and yet here he was running wild among the sea-stunted +bushes, on the lonely margin of a decaying world, in prelude to how +blank or to how dark a destiny? Verily nature is still at odds with +propriety; though indeed if they ever really pull together I fear nature +will quite lose her distinction. An infant citizen of our own republic, +straight-haired, pale-eyed and freckled, duly darned and catechised, +marching into a New England schoolhouse, is an object often seen and +soon forgotten; but I think I shall always remember with infinite tender +conjecture, as the years roll by, this little unlettered Eros of the +Adriatic strand. Yet all youthful things at Torcello were not cheerful, +for the poor lad who brought us the key of the cathedral was shaking +with an ague, and his melancholy presence seemed to point the moral of +forsaken nave and choir. The church, admirably primitive and curious, +reminded me of the two or three oldest churches of Rome--St. Clement +and St. Agnes. The interior is rich in grimly mystical mosaics of the +twelfth century and the patchwork of precious fragments in the pavement +not inferior to that of St. Mark’s. But the terribly distinct Apostles +are ranged against their dead gold backgrounds as stiffly as grenadiers +presenting arms--intensely personal sentinels of a personal Deity. Their +stony stare seems to wait for ever vainly for some visible revival +of primitive orthodoxy, and one may well wonder whether it finds much +beguilement in idly-gazing troops of Western heretics--passionless even +in their heresy. + +I had been curious to see whether in the galleries and temples of Venice +I should be disposed to transpose my old estimates--to burn what I had +adored and adore what I had burned. It is a sad truth that one can stand +in the Ducal Palace for the first time but once, with the deliciously +ponderous sense of that particular half-hour’s being an era in one’s +mental history; but I had the satisfaction of finding at least--a great +comfort in a short stay--that none of my early memories were likely to +change places and that I could take up my admirations where I had left +them. I still found Carpaccio delightful, Veronese magnificent, Titian +supremely beautiful and Tintoret scarce to be appraised. I repaired +immediately to the little church of San Cassano, which contains the +smaller of Tintoret’s two great Crucifixions; and when I had looked +at it a while I drew a long breath and felt I could now face any other +picture in Venice with proper self-possession. It seemed to me I had +advanced to the uttermost limit of painting; that beyond this another +art--inspired poetry--begins, and that Bellini, Veronese, Giorgione, and +Titian, all joining hands and straining every muscle of their genius, +reach forward not so far but that they leave a visible space in which +Tintoret alone is master. I well remember the exaltations to which +he lifted me when first I learned to know him; but the glow of that +comparatively youthful amazement is dead, and with it, I fear, +that confident vivacity of phrase of which, in trying to utter my +impressions, I felt less the magniloquence than the impotence. In +his power there are many weak spots, mysterious lapses and fitful +intermissions; but when the list of his faults is complete he still +remains to me the most _interesting_ of painters. His reputation rests +chiefly on a more superficial sort of merit--his energy, his unsurpassed +productivity, his being, as Théophile Gautier says, _le roi des +fougueux_. These qualities are immense, but the great source of his +impressiveness is that his indefatigable hand never drew a line that was +not, as one may say, a moral line. No painter ever had such breadth and +such depth; and even Titian, beside him, scarce figures as more than a +great decorative artist. Mr. Ruskin, whose eloquence in dealing with the +great Venetians sometimes outruns his discretion, is fond of speaking +even of Veronese as a painter of deep spiritual intentions. This, it +seems to me, is pushing matters too far, and the author of “The Rape +of Europa” is, pictorially speaking, no greater casuist than any other +genius of supreme good taste. Titian was assuredly a mighty poet, but +Tintoret--well, Tintoret was almost a prophet. Before his greatest works +you are conscious of a sudden evaporation of old doubts and dilemmas, +and the eternal problem of the conflict between idealism and realism +dies the most natural of deaths. In his genius the problem is +practically solved; the alternatives are so harmoniously interfused that +I defy the keenest critic to say where one begins and the other ends. +The homeliest prose melts into the most ethereal poetry--the literal and +the imaginative fairly confound their identity. + +This, however, is vague praise. Tintoret’s great merit, to my mind, was +his unequalled distinctness of vision. When once he had conceived the +germ of a scene it defined itself to his imagination with an intensity, +an amplitude, an individuality of expression, which makes one’s +observation of his pictures seem less an operation of the mind than +a kind of supplementary experience of life. Veronese and Titian are +content with a much looser specification, as their treatment of any +subject that the author of the Crucifixion at San Cassano has also +treated abundantly proves. There are few more suggestive contrasts than +that between the absence of a total character at all commensurate with +its scattered variety and brilliancy in Veronese’s “Marriage of Cana,” + at the Louvre, and the poignant, almost startling, completeness of +Tintoret’s illustration of the theme at the Salute church. To compare +his “Presentation of the Virgin,” at the Madonna dell’ Orto, with +Titian’s at the Academy, or his “Annunciation” with Titian’s close at +hand, is to measure the essential difference between observation and +imagination. One has certainly not said all that there is to say for +Titian when one has called him an observer. _Il y mettait du sien_, +and I use the term to designate roughly the artist whose apprehension, +infinitely deep and strong when applied to the single figure or +to easily balanced groups, spends itself vainly on great dramatic +combinations--or rather leaves them ungauged. It was the whole scene +that Tintoret seemed to have beheld in a flash of inspiration intense +enough to stamp it ineffaceably on his perception; and it was the whole +scene, complete, peculiar, individual, unprecedented, that he committed +to canvas with all the vehemence of his talent. Compare his “Last +Supper,” at San Giorgio--its long, diagonally placed table, its dusky +spaciousness, its scattered lamp-light and halo-light, its startled, +gesticulating figures, its richly realistic foreground--with the +customary formal, almost mathematical rendering of the subject, in which +impressiveness seems to have been sought in elimination rather than +comprehension. You get from Tintoret’s work the impression that he +_felt_, pictorially, the great, beautiful, terrible spectacle of human +life very much as Shakespeare felt it poetically--with a heart that +never ceased to beat a passionate accompaniment to every stroke of +his brush. Thanks to this fact his works are signally grave, and their +almost universal and rapidly increasing decay doesn’t relieve their +gloom. Nothing indeed can well be sadder than the great collection of +Tintorets at San Rocco. Incurable blackness is settling fast upon all of +them, and they frown at you across the sombre splendour of their great +chambers like gaunt twilight phantoms of pictures. To our children’s +children Tintoret, as things are going, can be hardly more than a name; +and such of them as shall miss the tragic beauty, already so dimmed +and stained, of the great “Bearing of the Cross” in that temple of his +spirit will live and die without knowing the largest eloquence of art. +If you wish to add the last touch of solemnity to the place recall +as vividly as possible while you linger at San Rocco the painter’s +singularly interesting portrait of himself, at the Louvre. The old +man looks out of the canvas from beneath a brow as sad as a sunless +twilight, with just such a stoical hopelessness as you might fancy him +to wear if he stood at your side gazing at his rotting canvases. It +isn’t whimsical to read it as the face of a man who felt that he had +given the world more than the world was likely to repay. Indeed before +every picture of Tintoret you may remember this tremendous portrait with +profit. On one side the power, the passion, the illusion of his art; on +the other the mortal fatigue of his spirit. The world’s knowledge of +him is so small that the portrait throws a doubly precious light on his +personality; and when we wonder vainly what manner of man he was, and +what were his purpose, his faith and his method, we may find forcible +assurance there that they were at any rate his life--one of the most +intellectually passionate ever led. + +Verona, which was my last Italian stopping-place, is in any conditions +a delightfully interesting city; but the kindness of my own memory of it +is deepened by a subsequent ten days’ experience of Germany. I rose one +morning at Verona, and went to bed at night at Botzen! The statement +needs no comment, and the two places, though but fifty miles apart, are +as painfully dissimilar as their names. I had prepared myself for your +delectation with a copious tirade on German manners, German scenery, +German art and the German stage--on the lights and shadows of Innsbrück, +Munich, Nüremberg and Heidelberg; but just as I was about to put pen +to paper I glanced into a little volume on these very topics lately +published by that famous novelist and moralist, M. Ernest Feydeau, +the fruit of a summer’s observation at Homburg. This work produced a +reaction; and if I chose to follow M. Feydeau’s own example when he +wishes to qualify his approbation I might call his treatise by any vile +name known to the speech of man. But I content myself with pronouncing +it superficial. I then reflect that my own opportunities for seeing and +judging were extremely limited, and I suppress my tirade, lest some more +enlightened critic should come and hang me with the same rope. Its sum +and substance was to have been that--superficially--Germany is ugly; +that Munich is a nightmare, Heidelberg a disappointment (in spite of its +charming castle) and even Nüremberg not a joy for ever. But comparisons +are odious, and if Munich is ugly Verona is beautiful enough. You may +laugh at my logic, but will probably assent to my meaning. I carried +away from Verona a precious mental picture upon which I cast an +introspective glance whenever between Botzen and Strassburg the +oppression of external circumstance became painful. It was a lovely +August afternoon in the Roman arena--a ruin in which repair and +restoration have been so watchfully and plausibly practised that it +seems all of one harmonious antiquity. The vast stony oval rose high +against the sky in a single clear, continuous line, broken here and +there only by strolling and reclining loungers. The massive tiers +inclined in solid monotony to the central circle, in which a small +open-air theatre was in active operation. A small quarter of the great +slope of masonry facing the stage was roped off into an auditorium, in +which the narrow level space between the foot-lights and the lowest +step figured as the pit. Foot-lights are a figure of speech, for the +performance was going on in the broad glow of the afternoon, with +a delightful and apparently by no means misplaced confidence in the +good-will of the spectators. What the piece was that was deemed so +superbly able to shift for itself I know not--very possibly the same +drama that I remember seeing advertised during my former visit to +Verona; nothing less than _La Tremenda Giustizia di Dio_. If titles +are worth anything this product of the melodramatist’s art might surely +stand upon its own legs. Along the tiers above the little group of +regular spectators was gathered a free-list of unauthorised observers, +who, although beyond ear-shot, must have been enabled by the generous +breadth of Italian gesture to follow the tangled thread of the piece. +It was all deliciously Italian--the mixture of old life and new, the +mountebank’s booth (it was hardly more) grafted on the antique circus, +the dominant presence of a mighty architecture, the loungers and idlers +beneath the kindly sky and upon the sun-warmed stones. I never felt more +keenly the difference between the background to life in very old and +very new civilisations. There are other things in Verona to make it +a liberal education to be born there, though that it is one for +the contemporary Veronese I don’t pretend to say. The Tombs of the +Scaligers, with their soaring pinnacles, their high-poised canopies, +their exquisite refinement and concentration of the Gothic idea, I can’t +profess, even after much worshipful gazing, to have fully comprehended +and enjoyed. They seemed to me full of deep architectural meanings, such +as must drop gently into the mind one by one, after infinite tranquil +contemplation. But even to the hurried and preoccupied traveller the +solemn little chapel-yard in the city’s heart, in which they stand +girdled by their great swaying curtain of linked and twisted iron, is +one of the most impressive spots in Italy. Nowhere else is such a wealth +of artistic achievement crowded into so narrow a space; nowhere else are +the daily comings and goings of men blessed by the presence of _manlier_ +art. Verona is rich furthermore in beautiful churches--several with +beautiful names: San Fermo, Santa Anastasia, San Zenone. This last is a +structure of high antiquity and of the most impressive loveliness. The +nave terminates in a double choir, that is a sub-choir or crypt into +which you descend and where you wander among primitive columns whose +variously grotesque capitals rise hardly higher than your head, and an +upper choral plane reached by broad stairways of the bravest effect. I +shall never forget the impression of majestic chastity that I received +from the great nave of the building on my former visit. I then decided +to my satisfaction that every church is from the devotional point of +view a solecism that has not something of a similar absolute felicity +of proportion; for strictly formal beauty seems best to express our +conception of spiritual beauty. The nobly serious character of San +Zenone is deepened by its single picture--a masterpiece of the most +serious of painters, the severe and exquisite Mantegna. + +{Illustration: THE AMPHITHEATRE, VERONA} + +1872 + + + + + +TWO OLD HOUSES AND THREE YOUNG WOMEN + + +There are times and places that come back yet again, but that, when the +brooding tourist puts out his hand to them, meet it a little slowly, or +even seem to recede a step, as if in slight fear of some liberty he may +take. Surely they should know by this time that he is capable of taking +none. He has his own way--he makes it all right. It now becomes just +a part of the charming solicitation that it presents precisely a +problem--that of giving the particular thing as much as possible without +at the same time giving it, as we say, away. There are considerations, +proprieties, a necessary indirectness--he must use, in short, a little +art. No necessity, however, more than this, makes him warm to his work, +and thus it is that, after all, he hangs his three pictures. + + +I + +The evening that was to give me the first of them was by no means the +first occasion of my asking myself if that inveterate “style” of which +we talk so much be absolutely conditioned--in dear old Venice and +elsewhere--on decrepitude. Is it the style that has brought about the +decrepitude, or the decrepitude that has, as it were, intensified +and consecrated the style? There is an ambiguity about it all that +constantly haunts and beguiles. Dear old Venice has lost her complexion, +her figure, her reputation, her self-respect; and yet, with it all, has +so puzzlingly not lost a shred of her distinction. Perhaps indeed the +case is simpler than it seems, for the poetry of misfortune is familiar +to us all, whereas, in spite of a stroke here and there of some happy +justice that charms, we scarce find ourselves anywhere arrested by the +poetry of a run of luck. The misfortune of Venice being, accordingly, at +every point, what we most touch, feel and see, we end by assuming it to +be of the essence of her dignity; a consequence, we become aware, by the +way, sufficiently discouraging to the general application or pretension +of style, and all the more that, to make the final felicity deep, the +original greatness must have been something tremendous. If it be the +ruins that are noble we have known plenty that were not, and moreover +there are degrees and varieties: certain monuments, solid survivals, +hold up their heads and decline to ask for a grain of your pity. Well, +one knows of course when to keep one’s pity to oneself; yet one clings, +even in the face of the colder stare, to one’s prized Venetian privilege +of making the sense of doom and decay a part of every impression. +Cheerful work, it may be said of course; and it is doubtless only in +Venice that you gain more by such a trick than you lose. What was most +beautiful is gone; what was next most beautiful is, thank goodness, +going--that, I think, is the monstrous description of the better part +of your thought. Is it really your fault if the place makes you want so +desperately to read history into everything? + +You do that wherever you turn and wherever you look, and you do it, +I should say, most of all at night. It comes to you there with longer +knowledge, and with all deference to what flushes and shimmers, that the +night is the real time. It perhaps even wouldn’t take much to make you +award the palm to the nights of winter. This is certainly true for the +form of progression that is most characteristic, for every question +of departure and arrival by gondola. The little closed cabin of +this perfect vehicle, the movement, the darkness and the plash, the +indistinguishable swerves and twists, all the things you don’t see and +all the things you do feel--each dim recognition and obscure arrest is +a possible throb of your sense of being floated to your doom, even when +the truth is simply and sociably that you are going out to tea. Nowhere +else is anything as innocent so mysterious, nor anything as mysterious +so pleasantly deterrent to protest. These are the moments when you are +most daringly Venetian, most content to leave cheap trippers and other +aliens the high light of the mid-lagoon and the pursuit of pink and +gold. The splendid day is good enough for _them_; what is best for you +is to stop at last, as you are now stopping, among clustered _pali_ and +softly-shifting poops and prows, at a great flight of water-steps that +play their admirable part in the general effect of a great entrance. +The high doors stand open from them to the paved chamber of a basement +tremendously tall and not vulgarly lighted, from which, in turn, mounts +the slow stone staircase that draws you further on. The great point is, +that if you are worthy of this impression at all, there isn’t a single +item of it of which the association isn’t noble. Hold to it fast that +there is no other such dignity of arrival as arrival by water. Hold to +it that to float and slacken and gently bump, to creep out of the low, +dark _felze_ and make the few guided movements and find the strong +crooked and offered arm, and then, beneath lighted palace-windows, pass +up the few damp steps on the precautionary carpet--hold to it that these +things constitute a preparation of which the only defect is that it may +sometimes perhaps really prepare too much. It’s so stately that what +can come after?--it’s so good in itself that what, upstairs, as we +comparative vulgarians say, can be better? Hold to it, at any rate, that +if a lady, in especial, scrambles out of a carriage, tumbles out of a +cab, flops out of a tram-car, and hurtles, projectile-like, out of +a “lightning-elevator,” she alights from the Venetian conveyance as +Cleopatra may have stepped from her barge. Upstairs--whatever may be +yet in store for her--her entrance shall still advantageously enjoy +the support most opposed to the “momentum” acquired. The beauty of +the matter has been in the absence of all momentum--elsewhere so +scientifically applied to us, from behind, by the terrible life of our +day--and in the fact that, as the elements of slowness, the felicities +of deliberation, doubtless thus all hang together, the last of +calculable dangers is to enter a great Venetian room with a rush. + +Not the least happy note, therefore, of the picture I am trying to frame +is that there was absolutely no rushing; not only in the sense of a +scramble over marble floors, but, by reason of something dissuasive and +distributive in the very air of the place, a suggestion, under the +fine old ceilings and among types of face and figure abounding in the +unexpected, that here were many things to consider. Perhaps the simplest +rendering of a scene into the depths of which there are good grounds of +discretion for not sinking would be just this emphasis on the value of +the unexpected for such occasions--with due qualification, naturally, of +its degree. Unexpectedness pure and simple, it is needless to say, may +easily endanger any social gathering, and I hasten to add moreover +that the figures and faces I speak of were probably not in the least +unexpected to each other. The stage they occupied was a stage of +variety--Venice has ever been a garden of strange social flowers. It +is only as reflected in the consciousness of the visitor from +afar--brooding tourist even call him, or sharp-eyed bird on the +branch--that I attempt to give you the little drama; beginning with the +felicity that most appealed to him, the visible, unmistakable fact that +he was the only representative of his class. The whole of the rest of +the business was but what he saw and felt and fancied--what he was +to remember and what he was to forget. Through it all, I may say +distinctly, he clung to his great Venetian clue--the explanation of +everything by the historic idea. It was a high historic house, with such +a quantity of recorded past twinkling in the multitudinous candles that +one grasped at the idea of something waning and displaced, and might +even fondly and secretly nurse the conceit that what one was having was +just the very last. Wasn’t it certainly, for instance, no mere illusion +that there is no appreciable future left for such manners--an urbanity +so comprehensive, a form so transmitted, as those of such a hostess and +such a host? The future is for a different conception of the graceful +altogether--so far as it’s for a conception of the graceful at all. Into +that computation I shall not attempt to enter; but these representative +products of an antique culture, at least, and one of which the secret +seems more likely than not to be lost, were not common, nor indeed +was any one else--in the circle to which the picture most insisted on +restricting itself. + +Neither, on the other hand, was anyone either very beautiful or very +fresh: which was again, exactly, a precious “value” on an occasion +that was to shine most, to the imagination, by the complexity of its +references. Such old, old women with such old, old jewels; such ugly, +ugly ones with such handsome, becoming names; such battered, fatigued +gentlemen with such inscrutable decorations; such an absence of youth, +for the most part, in either sex--of the pink and white, the “bud” of +new worlds; such a general personal air, in fine, of being the worse for +a good deal of wear in various old ones. It was not a society--that was +clear--in which little girls and boys set the tune; and there was that +about it all that might well have cast a shadow on the path of even the +most successful little girl. Yet also--let me not be rudely inexact--it +was in honour of youth and freshness that we had all been convened. The +_fiançailles_ of the last--unless it were the last but one--unmarried +daughter of the house had just been brought to a proper climax; the +contract had been signed, the betrothal rounded off--I’m not sure that +the civil marriage hadn’t, that day, taken place. The occasion then had +in fact the most charming of heroines and the most ingenuous of heroes, +a young man, the latter, all happily suffused with a fair Austrian +blush. The young lady had had, besides other more or less shining recent +ancestors, a very famous paternal grandmother, who had played a great +part in the political history of her time and whose portrait, in the +taste and dress of 1830, was conspicuous in one of the rooms. The +grand-daughter of this celebrity, of royal race, was strikingly like her +and, by a fortunate stroke, had been habited, combed, curled in a +manner exactly to reproduce the portrait. These things were charming and +amusing, as indeed were several other things besides. The great Venetian +beauty of our period was there, and nature had equipped the great +Venetian beauty for her part with the properest sense of the suitable, +or in any case with a splendid generosity--since on the ideally suitable +_character_ of so brave a human symbol who shall have the last word? +This responsible agent was at all events the beauty in the world about +whom probably, most, the absence of question (an absence never wholly +propitious) would a little smugly and monotonously flourish: the one +thing wanting to the interest she inspired was thus the possibility +of ever discussing it. There were plenty of suggestive subjects round +about, on the other hand, as to which the exchange of ideas would by no +means necessarily have dropped. You profit to the full at such times by +all the old voices, echoes, images--by that element of the history of +Venice which represents all Europe as having at one time and another +revelled or rested, asked for pleasure or for patience there; which +gives you the place supremely as the refuge of endless strange secrets, +broken fortunes and wounded hearts. + + +II + +There had been, on lines of further or different speculation, a +young Englishman to luncheon, and the young Englishman had proved +“sympathetic”; so that when it was a question afterwards of some of the +more hidden treasures, the browner depths of the old churches, the case +became one for mutual guidance and gratitude--for a small afternoon tour +and the wait of a pair of friends in the warm little _campi_, at locked +doors for which the nearest urchin had scurried off to fetch the keeper +of the key. There are few brown depths to-day into which the light of +the hotels doesn’t shine, and few hidden treasures about which +pages enough, doubtless, haven’t already been printed: my business, +accordingly, let me hasten to say, is not now with the fond renewal of +any discovery--at least in the order of impressions most usual. +Your discovery may be, for that matter, renewed every week; the only +essential is the good luck--which a fair amount of practice has taught +you to count upon-of not finding, for the particular occasion, other +discoverers in the field. Then, in the quiet corner, with the closed +door--then in the presence of the picture and of your companion’s +sensible emotion--not only the original happy moment, but everything +else, is renewed. Yet once again it can all come back. The old custode, +shuffling about in the dimness, jerks away, to make sure of his tip, the +old curtain that isn’t much more modern than the wonderful work itself. +He does his best to create light where light can never be; but you have +your practised groping gaze, and in guiding the young eyes of your less +confident associate, moreover, you feel you possess the treasure. These +are the refined pleasures that Venice has still to give, these odd happy +passages of communication and response. + + +But the point of my reminiscence is that there were other communications +that day, as there were certainly other responses. I have forgotten +exactly what it was we were looking for--without much success--when we +met the three Sisters. Nothing requires more care, as a long knowledge +of Venice works in, than not to lose the useful faculty of getting lost. +I had so successfully done my best to preserve it that I could at that +moment conscientiously profess an absence of any suspicion of where we +might be. It proved enough that, wherever we were, we were where the +three sisters found us. This was on a little bridge near a big campo, +and a part of the charm of the matter was the theory that it was very +much out of the way. They took us promptly in hand--they were +only walking over to San Marco to match some coloured wool for the +manufacture of such belated cushions as still bloom with purple and +green in the long leisures of old palaces; and that mild errand could +easily open a parenthesis. The obscure church we had feebly imagined +we were looking for proved, if I am not mistaken, that of the sisters’ +parish; as to which I have but a confused recollection of a large grey +void and of admiring for the first time a fine work of art of which I +have now quite lost the identity. This was the effect of the charming +beneficence of the three sisters, who presently were to give our +adventure a turn in the emotion of which everything that had preceded +seemed as nothing. It actually strikes me even as a little dim to have +been told by them, as we all fared together, that a certain low, wide +house, in a small square as to which I found myself without particular +association, had been in the far-off time the residence of George Sand. +And yet this was a fact that, though I could then only feel it must +be for another day, would in a different connection have set me richly +reconstructing. + +Madame Sand’s famous Venetian year has been of late immensely in the +air--a tub of soiled linen which the muse of history, rolling her +sleeves well up, has not even yet quite ceased energetically and +publicly to wash. The house in question must have been the house +to which the wonderful lady betook herself when, in 1834, after the +dramatic exit of Alfred de Musset, she enjoyed that remarkable period +of rest and refreshment with the so long silent, the but recently +rediscovered, reported, extinguished, Doctor Pagello. As an old +Sandist--not exactly indeed of the _première heure_, but of the fine +high noon and golden afternoon of the great career--I had been, though I +confess too inactively, curious as to a few points in the topography of +the eminent adventure to which I here allude; but had never got beyond +the little public fact, in itself always a bit of a thrill to the +Sandist, that the present Hotel Danieli had been the scene of its first +remarkable stages. I am not sure indeed that the curiosity I speak +of has not at last, in my breast, yielded to another form of +wonderment--truly to the rather rueful question of why we have so +continued to concern ourselves, and why the fond observer of the +footprints of genius is likely so to continue, with a body of +discussion, neither in itself and in its day, nor in its preserved and +attested records, at all positively edifying. The answer to such an +inquiry would doubtless reward patience, but I fear we can now glance at +its possibilities only long enough to say that interesting persons--so +they be of a sufficiently approved and established interest--render +in some degree interesting whatever happens to them, and give it an +importance even when very little else (as in the case I refer to) may +have operated to give it a dignity. Which is where I leave the issue of +further identifications. + +For the three sisters, in the kindest way in the world, had asked us if +we already knew their sequestered home and whether, in case we didn’t, +we should be at all amused to see it. My own acquaintance with them, +though not of recent origin, had hitherto lacked this enhancement, at +which we both now grasped with the full instinct, indescribable enough, +of what it was likely to give. But how, for that matter, either, can I +find the right expression of what was to remain with us of this episode? +It is the fault of the sad-eyed old witch of Venice that she so easily +puts more into things that can pass under the common names that do for +them elsewhere. Too much for a rough sketch was to be seen and felt +in the home of the three sisters, and in the delightful and slightly +pathetic deviation of their doing us so simply and freely the honours +of it. What was most immediately marked was their resigned cosmopolite +state, the effacement of old conventional lines by foreign contact and +example; by the action, too, of causes full of a special interest, +but not to be emphasised perhaps--granted indeed they be named at +all--without a certain sadness of sympathy. If “style,” in Venice, sits +among ruins, let us always lighten our tread when we pay her a visit. + +Our steps were in fact, I am happy to think, almost soft enough for a +death-chamber as we stood in the big, vague _sala_ of the three sisters, +spectators of their simplified state and their beautiful blighted rooms, +the memories, the portraits, the shrunken relics of nine Doges. If I +wanted a first chapter it was here made to my hand; the painter of life +and manners, as he glanced about, could only sigh--as he so frequently +has to--over the vision of so much more truth than he can use. What on +earth is the need to “invent,” in the midst of tragedy and comedy that +never cease? Why, with the subject itself, all round, so inimitable, +condemn the picture to the silliness of trying not to be aware of it? +The charming lonely girls, carrying so simply their great name and +fallen fortunes, the despoiled _decaduta_ house, the unfailing Italian +grace, the space so out of scale with actual needs, the absence of +books, the presence of ennui, the sense of the length of the hours and +the shortness of everything else--all this was a matter not only for a +second chapter and a third, but for a whole volume, a _dénoûment_ and a +sequel. + +This time, unmistakably, it _was_ the last--Wordsworth’s stately +“shade of that which once was great”; and it was _almost_ as if our +distinguished young friends had consented to pass away slowly in order +to treat us to the vision. Ends are only ends in truth, for the painter +of pictures, when they are more or less conscious and prolonged. One +of the sisters had been to London, whence she had brought back the +impression of having seen at the British Museum a room exclusively +filled with books and documents devoted to the commemoration of her +family. She must also then have encountered at the National Gallery +the exquisite specimen of an early Venetian master in which one of her +ancestors, then head of the State, kneels with so sweet a dignity before +the Virgin and Child. She was perhaps old enough, none the less, to have +seen this precious work taken down from the wall of the room in which +we sat and--on terms so far too easy--carried away for ever; and not +too young, at all events, to have been present, now and then, when her +candid elders, enlightened too late as to what their sacrifice might +really have done for them, looked at each other with the pale hush of +the irreparable. We let ourselves note that these were matters to put a +great deal of old, old history into sweet young Venetian faces. + + +III + +In Italy, if we come to that, this particular appearance is far from +being only in the streets, where we are apt most to observe it--in +countenances caught as we pass and in the objects marked by the +guide-books with their respective stellar allowances. It is behind +the walls of the houses that old, old history is thick and that the +multiplied stars of Baedeker might often best find their application. +The feast of St. John the Baptist is the feast of the year in Florence, +and it seemed to me on that night that I could have scattered about me a +handful of these signs. I had the pleasure of spending a couple of hours +on a signal high terrace that overlooks the Arno, as well as in the +galleries that open out to it, where I met more than ever the pleasant +curious question of the disparity between the old conditions and the new +manners. Make our manners, we moderns, as good as we can, there is still +no getting over it that they are not good enough for many of the great +places. This was one of those scenes, and its greatness came out to the +full into the hot Florentine evening, in which the pink and golden +fires of the pyrotechnics arranged on Ponte Carraja--the occasion of our +assembly--lighted up the large issue. The “good people” beneath were a +huge, hot, gentle, happy family; the fireworks on the bridge, kindling +river as well as sky, were delicate and charming; the terrace connected +the two wings that give bravery to the front of the palace, and the +close-hung pictures in the rooms, open in a long series, offered to a +lover of quiet perambulation an alternative hard to resist. + +Wherever he stood--on the broad loggia, in the cluster of company, among +bland ejaculations and liquefied ices, or in the presence of the mixed +masters that led him from wall to wall--such a seeker for the spirit of +each occasion could only turn it over that in the first place this was +an intenser, finer little Florence than ever, and that in the second +the testimony was again wonderful to former fashions and ideas. What +did they do, in the other time, the time of so much smaller a society, +smaller and fewer fortunes, more taste perhaps as to some particulars, +but fewer tastes, at any rate, and fewer habits and wants--what did they +do with chambers so multitudinous and so vast? Put their “state” at its +highest--and we know of many ways in which it must have broken down--how +did they live in them without the aid of variety? How did they, in +minor communities in which every one knew every one, and every one’s +impression and effect had been long, as we say, discounted, find +representation and emulation sufficiently amusing? Much of the charm of +thinking of it, however, is doubtless that we are not able to say. +This leaves us with the conviction that does them most honour: the old +generations built and arranged greatly for the simple reason that they +liked it, and they could bore themselves--to say nothing of each other, +when it came to that--better in noble conditions than in mean ones. + +It was not, I must add, of the far-away Florentine age that I most +thought, but of periods more recent and of which the sound and beautiful +house more directly spoke. If one had always been homesick for the +Arno-side of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, here was a +chance, and a better one than ever, to taste again of the cup. Many of +the pictures--there was a charming quarter of an hour when I had them +to myself--were bad enough to have passed for good in those delightful +years. Shades of Grand-Dukes encompassed me--Dukes of the pleasant later +sort who weren’t really grand. There was still the sense of having come +too late--yet not too late, after all, for this glimpse and this dream. +My business was to people the place--its own business had never been to +save us the trouble of understanding it. And then the deepest spell of +all was perhaps that just here I was supremely out of the way of the so +terribly actual Florentine question. This, as all the world knows, is +a battle-ground, to-day, in many journals, with all Italy practically +pulling on one side and all England, America and Germany pulling on the +other: I speak of course of the more or less articulate opinion. The +“improvement,” the rectification of Florence is in the air, and the +problem of the particular ways in which, given such desperately delicate +cases, these matters should be understood. The little treasure-city is, +if there ever was one, a delicate case--more delicate perhaps than any +other in the world save that of our taking on ourselves to persuade +the Italians that they mayn’t do as they like with their own. They so +absolutely may that I profess I see no happy issue from the fight. It +will take more tact than our combined tactful genius may at all probably +muster to convince them that their own is, by an ingenious logic, much +rather _ours_. It will take more subtlety still to muster for them that +dazzling show of examples from which they may learn that what in general +is “ours” shall appear to them as a rule a sacrifice to beauty and a +triumph of taste. The situation, to the truly analytic mind, offers in +short, to perfection, all the elements of despair; and I am afraid that +if I hung back, at the Corsini palace, to woo illusions and invoke +the irrelevant, it was because I could think, in the conditions, of no +better way to meet the acute responsibility of the critic than just to +shirk it. + +{1899.} + + + + + +CASA ALVISI + + +Invited to “introduce” certain pages of cordial and faithful +reminiscence from another hand, {1} + +{1} “Browning in Venice,” being Recollections of the late Katharine +De Kay Bronson, with a Prefatory Note by H. J. (_Cornhill Magazine_, +February, 1902).} + +in which a frankly predominant presence seems to live again, I undertook +that office with an interest inevitably somewhat sad--so passed and gone +to-day is so much of the life suggested. Those who fortunately knew Mrs. +Bronson will read into her notes still more of it--more of her subject, +more of herself too, and of many things--than she gives, and some may +well even feel tempted to do for her what she has done here for +her distinguished friend. In Venice, during a long period, for many +pilgrims, Mrs. Arthur Bronson, originally of New York, was, so far as +society, hospitality, a charming personal welcome were concerned, almost +in sole possession; she had become there, with time, quite the prime +representative of those private amenities which the Anglo-Saxon abroad +is apt to miss just in proportion as the place visited is publicly +wonderful, and in which he therefore finds a value twice as great as at +home. Mrs. Bronson really earned in this way the gratitude of mingled +generations and races. She sat for twenty years at the wide mouth, as +it were, of the Grand Canal, holding out her hand, with endless +good-nature, patience, charity, to all decently accredited petitioners, +the incessant troop of those either bewilderedly making or fondly +renewing acquaintance with the dazzling city. + +{Illustration: CASA ALVISI, VENICE} + +Casa Alvisi is directly opposite the high, broad-based florid church +of S. Maria della Salute--so directly that from the balcony over the +water-entrance your eye, crossing the canal, seems to find the key-hole +of the great door right in a line with it; and there was something in +this position that for the time made all Venice-lovers think of the +genial _padrona_ as thus levying in the most convenient way the toll of +curiosity and sympathy. Every one passed, every one was seen to pass, +and few were those not seen to stop and to return. The most generous of +hostesses died a year ago at Florence; her house knows her no more--it +had ceased to do so for some time before her death; and the long, +pleased procession--the charmed arrivals, the happy sojourns at anchor, +the reluctant departures that made Ca’ Alvisi, as was currently said, +a social _porto di mare_--is, for remembrance and regret, already a +possession of ghosts; so that, on the spot, at present, the attention +ruefully averts itself from the dear little old faded but once +familiarly bright façade, overtaken at last by the comparatively vulgar +uses that are doing their best to “paint out” in Venice, right and +left, by staring signs and other vulgarities, the immemorial note of +distinction. The house, in a city of palaces, was small, but the tenant +clung to her perfect, her inclusive position--the one right place that +gave her a better command, as it were, than a better house obtained by +a harder compromise; not being fond, moreover, of spacious halls and +massive treasures, but of compact and familiar rooms, in which her +remarkable accumulation of minute and delicate Venetian objects could +show. She adored--in the way of the Venetian, to which all her taste +addressed itself--the small, the domestic and the exquisite; so that she +would have given a Tintoretto or two, I think, without difficulty, for +a cabinet of tiny gilded glasses or a dinner-service of the right old +silver. + +The general receptacle of these multiplied treasures played at any rate, +through the years, the part of a friendly private-box at the constant +operatic show, a box at the best point of the best tier, with the +cushioned ledge of its front raking the whole scene and with its +withdrawing rooms behind for more detached conversation; for easy--when +not indeed slightly difficult--polyglot talk, artful _bibite_, artful +cigarettes too, straight from the hand of the hostess, who could do all +that belonged to a hostess, place people in relation and keep them so, +take up and put down the topic, cause delicate tobacco and little +gilded glasses to circulate, without ever leaving her sofa-cushions or +intermitting her good-nature. She exercised in these conditions, with +never a block, as we say in London, in the traffic, with never an +admission, an acceptance of the least social complication, her positive +genius for easy interest, easy sympathy, easy friendship. It was as if, +at last, she had taken the human race at large, quite irrespective of +geography, for her neighbours, with neighbourly relations as a matter +of course. These things, on her part, had at all events the greater +appearance of ease from their having found to their purpose--and as if +the very air of Venice produced them--a cluster of forms so light and +immediate, so pre-established by picturesque custom. The old bright +tradition, the wonderful Venetian legend had appealed to her from the +first, closing round her house and her well-plashed water-steps, where +the waiting gondolas were thick, quite as if, actually, the ghost of +the defunct Carnival--since I have spoken of ghosts--still played some +haunting part. + +Let me add, at the same time, that Mrs. Bronson’s social facility, which +was really her great refuge from importunity, a defence with serious +thought and serious feeling quietly cherished behind it, had its +discriminations as well as its inveteracies, and that the most marked +of all these, perhaps, was her attachment to Robert Browning. Nothing in +all her beneficent life had probably made her happier than to have found +herself able to minister, each year, with the returning autumn, to his +pleasure and comfort. Attached to Ca’ Alvisi, on the land side, is a +somewhat melancholy old section of a Giustiniani palace, which she had +annexed to her own premises mainly for the purpose of placing it, in +comfortable guise, at the service of her friends. She liked, as she +professed, when they were the real thing, to have them under her hand; +and here succeeded each other, through the years, the company of the +privileged and the more closely domesticated, who liked, harmlessly, to +distinguish between themselves and outsiders. Among visitors partaking +of this pleasant provision Mr. Browning was of course easily first. But +I must leave her own pen to show him as her best years knew him. +The point was, meanwhile, that if her charity was great even for the +outsider, this was by reason of the inner essence of it--her perfect +tenderness for Venice, which she always recognised as a link. That was +the true principle of fusion, the key to communication. She communicated +in proportion--little or much, measuring it as she felt people more +responsive or less so; and she expressed herself, or in other words her +full affection for the place, only to those who had most of the same +sentiment. The rich and interesting form in which she found it in +Browning may well be imagined--together with the quite independent +quantity of the genial at large that she also found; but I am not sure +that his favour was not primarily based on his paid tribute of such +things as “Two in a Gondola” and “A Toccata of Galuppi.” He had more +ineffaceably than anyone recorded his initiation from of old. + +She was thus, all round, supremely faithful; yet it was perhaps after +all with the very small folk, those to the manner born, that she made +the easiest terms. She loved, she had from the first enthusiastically +adopted, the engaging Venetian people, whose virtues she found touching +and their infirmities but such as appeal mainly to the sense of humour +and the love of anecdote; and she befriended and admired, she studied +and spoiled them. There must have been a multitude of whom it would +scarce be too much to say that her long residence among them was their +settled golden age. When I consider that they have lost her now I fairly +wonder to what shifts they have been put and how long they may not have +to wait for such another messenger of Providence. She cultivated their +dialect, she renewed their boats, she piously relighted--at the top of +the tide-washed _pali_ of traghetto or lagoon--the neglected lamp of the +tutelary Madonnetta; she took cognisance of the wives, the children, the +accidents, the troubles, as to which she became, perceptibly, the most +prompt, the established remedy. On lines where the amusement was happily +less one-sided she put together in dialect many short comedies, dramatic +proverbs, which, with one of her drawing-rooms permanently arranged as +a charming diminutive theatre, she caused to be performed by the +young persons of her circle--often, when the case lent itself, by the +wonderful small offspring of humbler friends, children of the Venetian +lower class, whose aptitude, teachability, drollery, were her constant +delight. It was certainly true that an impression of Venice as humanly +sweet might easily found itself on the frankness and quickness and +amiability of these little people. They were at least so much to +the good; for the philosophy of their patroness was as Venetian as +everything else; helping her to accept experience without bitterness +and to remain fresh, even in the fatigue which finally overtook her, for +pleasant surprises and proved sincerities. She was herself sincere to +the last for the place of her predilection; inasmuch as though she had +arranged herself, in the later time--and largely for the love of “Pippa +Passes”--an alternative refuge at Asolo, she absented herself from +Venice with continuity only under coercion of illness. + +At Asolo, periodically, the link with Browning was more confirmed than +weakened, and there, in old Venetian territory, and with the invasion +of visitors comparatively checked, her preferentially small house became +again a setting for the pleasure of talk and the sense of Italy. It +contained again its own small treasures, all in the pleasant key of the +homelier Venetian spirit. The plain beneath it stretched away like a +purple sea from the lower cliffs of the hills, and the white _campanili_ +of the villages, as one was perpetually saying, showed on the expanse +like scattered sails of ships. The rumbling carriage, the old-time, +rattling, red-velveted carriage of provincial, rural Italy, delightful +and quaint, did the office of the gondola; to Bassano, to Treviso, +to high-walled Castelfranco, all pink and gold, the home of the great +Giorgione. Here also memories cluster; but it is in Venice again that +her vanished presence is most felt, for there, in the real, or certainly +the finer, the more sifted Cosmopolis, it falls into its place among +the others evoked, those of the past seekers of poetry and dispensers +of romance. It is a fact that almost every one interesting, appealing, +melancholy, memorable, odd, seems at one time or another, after many +days and much life, to have gravitated to Venice by a happy instinct, +settling in it and treating it, cherishing it, as a sort of repository +of consolations; all of which to-day, for the conscious mind, is mixed +with its air and constitutes its unwritten history. The deposed, the +defeated, the disenchanted, the wounded, or even only the bored, have +seemed to find there something that no other place could give. But +such people came for themselves, as we seem to see them--only with +the egotism of their grievances and the vanity of their hopes. Mrs. +Bronson’s case was beautifully different--she had come altogether for +others. + + + + + +FROM CHAMBÉRY TO MILAN + + +Your truly sentimental tourist will never take it from any occasion that +there is absolutely nothing for him, and it was at Chambéry--but four +hours from Geneva--that I accepted the situation and decided there +might be mysterious delights in entering Italy by a whizz through an +eight-mile tunnel, even as a bullet through the bore of a gun. I found +my reward in the Savoyard landscape, which greets you betimes with the +smile of anticipation. If it is not so Italian as Italy it is at least +more Italian than anything _but_ Italy--more Italian, too, I should +think, than can seem natural and proper to the swarming red-legged +soldiery who so publicly proclaim it of the empire of M. Thiers. The +light and the complexion of things had to my eyes not a little of that +mollified depth last loved by them rather further on. It was simply +perhaps that the weather was hot and the mountains drowsing in that +iridescent haze that I have seen nearer home than at Chambéry. But the +vegetation, assuredly, had an all but Transalpine twist and curl, and +the classic wayside tangle of corn and vines left nothing to be desired +in the line of careless grace. Chambéry as a town, however, constitutes +no foretaste of the monumental cities. There is shabbiness and +shabbiness, the fond critic of such things will tell you; and that of +the ancient capital of Savoy lacks style. I found a better pastime, +however, than strolling through the dark dull streets in quest of +effects that were not forthcoming. The first urchin you meet will +show you the way to Les Charmettes and the Maison Jean-Jacques. A +very pleasant way it becomes as soon as it leaves the town--a winding, +climbing by-road, bordered with such a tall and sturdy hedge as to +give it the air of an English lane--if you can fancy an English lane +introducing you to the haunts of a Madame de Warens. + +The house that formerly sheltered this lady’s singular ménage stands on +a hillside above the road, which a rapid path connects with the little +grass-grown terrace before it. It is a small shabby, homely dwelling, +with a certain reputable solidity, however, and more of internal +spaciousness than of outside promise. The place is shown by an elderly +competent dame who points out the very few surviving objects which you +may touch with the reflection--complacent in whatsoever degree suits +you--that they have known the familiarity of Rousseau’s hand. It was +presumably a meagrely-appointed house, and I wondered that on such +scanty features so much expression should linger. But the structure has +an ancient ponderosity, and the dust of the eighteenth century seems +to lie on its worm-eaten floors, to cling to the faded old _papiers à +ramages_ on the walls and to lodge in the crevices of the brown wooden +ceilings. Madame de Warens’s bed remains, with the narrow couch of +Jean-Jacques as well, his little warped and cracked yellow spinet, and +a battered, turnip-shaped silver timepiece, engraved with its master’s +name--its primitive tick as extinct as his passionate heart-beats. It +cost me, I confess, a somewhat pitying acceleration of my own to see +this intimately personal relic of the _genius loci_--for it had dwelt; +in his waistcoat-pocket, than which there is hardly a material point +in space nearer to a man’s consciousness--tossed so the dog’s-eared +visitors’ record or _livre de cuisine_ recently denounced by Madame +George Sand. In fact the place generally, in so far as some faint +ghostly presence of its famous inmates seems to linger there, is by no +means exhilarating. Coppet and Ferney tell, if not of pure happiness, at +least of prosperity and, honour, wealth and success. But Les Charmettes +is haunted by ghosts unclean and forlorn. The place tells of poverty, +perversity, distress. A good deal of clever modern talent in France has +been employed in touching up the episode of which it was the scene and +tricking it out in idyllic love-knots. But as I stood on the charming +terrace I have mentioned--a little jewel of a terrace, with grassy flags +and a mossy parapet, and an admirable view of great swelling violet +hills--stood there reminded how much sweeter Nature is than man, the +story looked rather wan and unlovely beneath these literary decorations, +and I could pay it no livelier homage than is implied in perfect pity. +Hero and heroine have become too much creatures of history to take up +attitudes as part of any poetry. But, not to moralise too sternly for +a tourist between trains, I should add that, as an illustration, to be +inserted mentally in the text of the “Confessions,” a glimpse of Les +Charmettes is pleasant enough. It completes the rare charm of good +autobiography to behold with one’s eyes the faded and battered +background of the story; and Rousseau’s narrative is so incomparably +vivid and forcible that the sordid little house at Chambéry seems of +a hardly deeper shade of reality than so many other passages of his +projected truth. + +If I spent an hour at Les Charmettes, fumbling thus helplessly with +the past, I recognised on the morrow how strongly the Mont Cenis Tunnel +smells of the time to come. As I passed along the Saint-Gothard highway +a couple of months since, I perceived, half up the Swiss ascent, a group +of navvies at work in a gorge beneath the road. They had laid bare a +broad surface of granite and had punched in the centre of it a round +black cavity, of about the dimensions, as it seemed to me, of a +soup-plate. This was to attain its perfect development some eight years +hence. The Mont Cenis may therefore be held to have set a fashion which +will be followed till the highest Himalaya is but the ornamental apex or +snow-capped gable-tip of some resounding fuliginous corridor. The tunnel +differs but in length from other tunnels; you spend half an hour in it. +But you whirl out into the blest peninsula, and as you look back seem to +see the mighty mass shrug its shoulders over the line, the mere turn +of a dreaming giant in his sleep. The tunnel is certainly not a poetic +object, out there is no perfection without its beauty; and as you +measure the long rugged outline of the pyramid of which it forms the +base you accept it as the perfection of a short cut. Twenty-four hours +from Paris to Turin is speed for the times--speed which may content us, +at any rate, until expansive Berlin has succeeded in placing itself at +thirty-six from Milan. + +To enter Turin then of a lovely August afternoon was to find a city of +arcades, of pink and yellow stucco, of innumerable cafes, of blue-legged +officers, of ladies draped in the North-Italian mantilla. An old friend +of Italy coming back to her finds an easy waking for dormant memories. +Every object is a reminder and every reminder a thrill. Half an hour +after my arrival, as I stood at my window, which overhung the great +square, I found the scene, within and without, a rough epitome of every +pleasure and every impression I had formerly gathered from Italy: the +balcony and the Venetian-blind, the cool floor of speckled concrete, the +lavish delusions of frescoed wall and ceiling, the broad divan framed +for the noonday siesta, the massive medieval Castello in mid-piazza, +with its shabby rear and its pompous Palladian front, the brick +campaniles beyond, the milder, yellower light, the range of colour, the +suggestion of sound. Later, beneath the arcades, I found many an +old acquaintance: beautiful officers, resplendent, slow-strolling, +contemplative of female beauty; civil and peaceful dandies, hardly less +gorgeous, with that religious faith in moustache and shirt-front which +distinguishes the _belle jeunesse of Italy_; ladies with heads artfully +shawled in Spanish-looking lace, but with too little art--or too much +nature at least--in the region of the bodice; well-conditioned young +_abbati_ with neatly drawn stockings. These indeed are not objects of +first-rate interest, and with such Turin is rather meagrely furnished. +It has no architecture, no churches, no monuments, no romantic +street-scenery. It has the great votive temple of the Superga, which +stands on a high hilltop above the city, gazing across at Monte Rosa and +lifting its own fine dome against the sky with no contemptible art. But +when you have seen the Superga from the quay beside the Po, a skein of a +few yellow threads in August, despite its frequent habit of rising high +and running wild, and said to yourself that in architecture position +is half the battle, you have nothing left to visit but the Museum of +pictures. The Turin Gallery, which is large and well arranged, is the +fortunate owner of three or four masterpieces: a couple of magnificent +Vandycks and a couple of Paul Veroneses; the latter a Queen of Sheba +and a Feast of the House of Levi--the usual splendid combination of +brocades, grandees and marble colonnades dividing those skies _de +turquoise malade_ to which Théophile Gautier is fond of alluding. The +Veroneses are fine, but with Venice in prospect the traveller feels at +liberty to keep his best attention in reserve. If, however, he has the +proper relish for Vandyck, let him linger long and fondly here; for +that admiration will never be more potently stirred than by the adorable +group of the three little royal highnesses, sons and the daughter +of Charles I. All the purity of childhood is here, and all its soft +solidity of structure, rounded tenderly beneath the spangled satin and +contrasted charmingly with the pompous rigidity. Clad respectively in +crimson, white and blue, these small scions stand up in their ruffs and +fardingales in dimpled serenity, squaring their infantine stomachers at +the spectator with an innocence, a dignity, a delightful grotesqueness, +which make the picture a thing of close truth as well as of fine +decorum. You might kiss their hands, but you certainly would think twice +before pinching their cheeks--provocative as they are of this tribute of +admiration--and would altogether lack presumption to lift them off +the ground or the higher level or dais on which they stand so sturdily +planted by right of birth. There is something inimitable in the paternal +gallantry with which the painter has touched off the young lady. She was +a princess, yet she was a baby, and he has contrived, we let ourselves +fancy, to interweave an intimation that she was a creature whom, in her +teens, the lucklessly smitten--even as he was prematurely--must vainly +sigh for. Though the work is a masterpiece of execution its merits under +this head may be emulated, at a distance; the lovely modulations of +colour in the three contrasted and harmonised little satin petticoats, +the solidity of the little heads, in spite of all their prettiness, the +happy, unexaggerated squareness and maturity of _pose_, are, severally, +points to study, to imitate, and to reproduce with profit. But the taste +of such a consummate thing is its great secret as well as its great +merit--a taste which seems one of the lost instincts of mankind. Go and +enjoy this supreme expression of Vandyck’s fine sense, and admit that +never was a politer production. + +Milan speaks to us of a burden of felt life of which Turin is innocent, +but in its general aspect still lingers a northern reserve which makes +the place rather perhaps the last of the prose capitals than the first +of the poetic. The long Austrian occupation perhaps did something +to Germanise its physiognomy; though indeed this is an indifferent +explanation when one remembers how well, temperamentally speaking, Italy +held her own in Venetia. Milan, at any rate, if not bristling with the +æsthetic impulse, opens to us frankly enough the thick volume of her +past. Of that volume the Cathedral is the fairest and fullest page--a +structure not supremely interesting, not logical, not even, to some +minds, commandingly beautiful, but grandly curious and superbly rich. I +hope, for my own part, never to grow too particular to admire it. If +it had no other distinction it would still have that of impressive, +immeasurable achievement. As I strolled beside its vast indented base +one evening, and felt it, above me, rear its grey mysteries into the +starlight while the restless human tide on which I floated rose no +higher than the first few layers of street-soiled marble, I was tempted +to believe that beauty in great architecture is almost a secondary +merit, and that the main point is mass--such mass as may make it a +supreme embodiment of vigorous effort. Viewed in this way a great +building is the greatest conceivable work of art. More than any other +it represents difficulties mastered, resources combined, labour, courage +and patience. And there are people who tell us that art has nothing to +do with morality! Little enough, doubtless, when it is concerned, +even ever so little, in painting the roof of Milan Cathedral within +to represent carved stone-work. Of this famous roof every one has +heard--how good it is, how bad, how perfect a delusion, how transparent +an artifice. It is the first thing your cicerone shows you on entering +the church. The occasionally accommodating art-lover may accept it +philosophically, I think; for the interior, though admirably effective +as a whole, has no great sublimity, nor even purity, of pitch. It +is splendidly vast and dim; the altarlamps twinkle afar through the +incense-thickened air like foglights at sea, and the great columns rise +straight to the roof, which hardly curves to meet them, with the girth +and altitude of oaks of a thousand years; but there is little refinement +of design--few of those felicities of proportion which the eye caresses, +when it finds them, very much as the memory retains and repeats some +happy lines of poetry or some haunting musical phrase. Consistently +brave, none the less, is the result produced, and nothing braver than a +certain exhibition that I privately enjoyed of the relics of St. +Charles Borromeus. This holy man lies at his eternal rest in a small but +gorgeous sepulchral chapel, beneath the boundless pavement and before +the high altar; and for the modest sum of five francs you may have his +shrivelled mortality unveiled and gaze at it with whatever reserves +occur to you. The Catholic Church never renounces a chance of the +sublime for fear of a chance of the ridiculous--especially when the +chance of the sublime may be the very excellent chance of five francs. +The performance in question, of which the good San Carlo paid in the +first instance the cost, was impressive certainly, but as a monstrous +matter or a grim comedy may still be. The little sacristan, having +secured his audience, whipped on a white tunic over his frock, lighted a +couple of extra candles and proceeded to remove from above the altar, +by means of a crank, a sort of sliding shutter, just as you may see +a shop-boy do of a morning at his master’s window. In this case too a +large sheet of plate-glass was uncovered, and to form an idea of the +_étalage_ you must imagine that a jeweller, for reasons of his own, has +struck an unnatural partnership with an undertaker. The black mummified +corpse of the saint is stretched out in a glass coffin, clad in his +mouldering canonicals, mitred, crosiered and gloved, glittering with +votive jewels. It is an extraordinary mixture of death and life; the +desiccated clay, the ashen rags, the hideous little black mask and +skull, and the living, glowing, twinkling splendour of diamonds, +emeralds and sapphires. The collection is really fine, and many great +historic names are attached to the different offerings. Whatever may be +the better opinion as to the future of the Church, I can’t help thinking +she will make a figure in the world so long as she retains this +great fund of precious “properties,” this prodigious capital +decoratively invested and scintillating throughout Christendom at +effectively-scattered points. You see I am forced to agree after all, in +spite of the sliding shutter and the profane swagger of the sacristan, +that a certain pastoral majesty saved the situation, or at least made +irony gape. Yet it was from a natural desire to breathe a sweeter air +that I immediately afterwards undertook the interminable climb to the +roof of the cathedral. This is another world of wonders, and one which +enjoys due renown, every square inch of wall on the winding stairways +being bescribbled with a traveller’s name. There is a great glare from +the far-stretching slopes of marble, a confusion (like the masts of a +navy or the spears of an army) of image-capped pinnacles, biting the +impalpable blue, and, better than either, the goodliest view of level +Lombardy sleeping in its rich transalpine light and resembling, with its +white-walled dwellings and the spires on its horizon, a vast green sea +spotted with ships. After two months of Switzerland the Lombard plain is +a rich rest to the eye, and the yellow, liquid, free-flowing light--as +if on favoured Italy the vessels of heaven were more widely opened--had +for mine a charm which made me think of a great opaque mountain as a +blasphemous invasion of the atmospheric spaces. + +{Illustration: THE SIMPLON GATE, MILAN} + +I have mentioned the cathedral first, but the prime treasure of Milan at +the present hour is the beautiful, tragical Leonardo. The cathedral is +good for another thousand years, but we ask whether our children will +find in the most majestic and most luckless of frescoes much more than +the shadow of a shadow. Its fame has been for a century or two that, as +one may say, of an illustrious invalid whom people visit to see how +he lasts, with leave-taking sighs and almost death-bed or tiptoe +precautions. The picture needs not another scar or stain, now, to be the +saddest work of art in the world; and battered, defaced, ruined as it +is, it remains one of the greatest. We may really compare its anguish +of decay to the slow conscious ebb of life in a human organism. The +production of the prodigy was a breath from the infinite, and the +painter’s conception not immeasurably less complex than the scheme, say, +of his own mortal constitution. There has been much talk lately of the +irony of fate, but I suspect fate was never more ironical than when she +led the most scientific, the most calculating of all painters to spend +fifteen long years in building his goodly house upon the sand. And yet, +after all, may not the playing of that trick represent but a deeper +wisdom, since if the thing enjoyed the immortal health and bloom of a +first-rate Titian we should have lost one of the most pertinent lessons +in the history of art? We know it as hearsay, but here is the plain +proof, that there is no limit to the amount of “stuff” an artist may put +into his work. Every painter ought once in his life to stand before the +Cenacolo and decipher its moral. Mix with your colours and mess on your +palette every particle of the very substance of your soul, and this lest +perchance your “prepared surface” shall play you a trick! Then, and then +only, it will fight to the last--it will resist even in death. Raphael +was a happier genius; you look at his lovely “Marriage of the Virgin” at +the Brera, beautiful as some first deep smile of conscious inspiration, +but to feel that he foresaw no complaint against fate, and that he knew +the world he wanted to know and charmed it into never giving him away. +But I have left no space to speak of the Brera, nor of that paradise +of book-worms with an eye for their background--if such creatures +exist--the Ambrosian Library; nor of that mighty basilica of St. +Ambrose, with its spacious atrium and its crudely solemn mosaics, in +which it is surely your own fault if you don’t forget Dr. Strauss and M. +Renan and worship as grimly as a Christian of the ninth century. + +It is part of the sordid prose of the Mont Cenis road that, unlike those +fine old unimproved passes, the Simplon, the Splügen and--yet awhile +longer--the Saint-Gothard, it denies you a glimpse of that paradise +adorned by the four lakes even as that of uncommented Scripture by +the rivers of Eden. I made, however, an excursion to the Lake of Como, +which, though brief, lasted long enough to suggest to me that I too was +a hero of romance with leisure for a love-affair, and not a hurrying +tourist with a Bradshaw in his pocket. The Lake of Como has figured +largely in novels of “immoral” tendency--being commonly the spot to +which inflamed young gentlemen invite the wives of other gentlemen to +fly with them and ignore the restrictions of public opinion. But even +the Lake of Como has been revised and improved; the fondest prejudices +yield to time; it gives one somehow a sense of an aspiringly high tone. +I should pay a poor compliment at least to the swarming inmates of the +hotels which now alternate attractively by the water-side with villas +old and new were I to read the appearances more cynically. But if it is +lost to florid fiction it still presents its blue bosom to most other +refined uses, and the unsophisticated tourist, the American at least, +may do any amount of private romancing there. The pretty hotel at +Cadenabbia offers him, for instance, in the most elegant and assured +form, the so often precarious adventure of what he calls at home summer +board. It is all so unreal, so fictitious, so elegant and idle, so +framed to undermine a rigid sense of the chief end of man not being to +float for ever in an ornamental boat, beneath an awning tasselled like +a circus-horse, impelled by an affable Giovanni or Antonio from one +stately stretch of lake-laved villa steps to another, that departure +seems as harsh and unnatural as the dream-dispelling note of some +punctual voice at your bedside on a dusky winter morning. Yet I +wondered, for my own part, where I had seen it all before--the +pink-walled villas gleaming through their shrubberies of orange and +oleander, the mountains shimmering in the hazy light like so many +breasts of doves, the constant presence of the melodious Italian voice. +Where indeed but at the Opera when the manager has been more than +usually regardless of expense? Here in the foreground was the palace of +the nefarious barytone, with its banqueting-hall opening as freely on +the stage as a railway buffet on the platform; beyond, the delightful +back scene, with its operatic gamut of colouring; in the middle the +scarlet-sashed _barcaiuoli_, grouped like a chorus, hat in hand, +awaiting the conductor’s signal. It was better even than being in a +novel--this being, this fairly wallowing, in a libretto. + + + + + +THE OLD SAINT-GOTHARD LEAVES FROM A NOTE-BOOK + + +Berne, _September_, 1873.--In Berne again, some eleven weeks after +having left it in July. I have never been in Switzerland so late, and +I came hither innocently supposing the last Cook’s tourist to have paid +out his last coupon and departed. But I was lucky, it seems, to discover +an empty cot in an attic and a very tight place at a table d’hôte. +People are all flocking out of Switzerland, as in July they were +flocking in, and the main channels of egress are terribly choked. I +have been here several days, watching them come and go; it is like +the march-past of an army. It gives one, for an occasional change +from darker thoughts, a lively impression of the numbers of people now +living, and above all now moving, at extreme ease in the world. Here +is little Switzerland disgorging its tens of thousands of honest folk, +chiefly English, and rarely, to judge by their faces and talk, children +of light in any eminent degree; for whom snow-peaks and glaciers +and passes and lakes and chalets and sunsets and a _café complet_, +“including honey,” as the coupon says, have become prime necessities +for six weeks every year. It’s not so long ago that lords and +nabobs monopolised these pleasures; but nowadays in a month’s tour in +Switzerland is no more a _jeu de prince_ than a Sunday excursion. To +watch this huge Anglo-Saxon wave ebbing through Berne suggests, no doubt +most fallaciously, that the common lot of mankind isn’t after all so +very hard and that the masses have reached a high standard of comfort. +The view of the Oberland chain, as you see it from the garden of the +hotel, really butters one’s bread most handsomely; and here are I don’t +know how many hundred Cook’s tourists a day looking at it through the +smoke of their pipes. Is it really the “masses,” however, that I see +every day at the table d’hôte? They have rather too few h’s to the +dozen, but their good-nature is great. Some people complain that they +“vulgarise” Switzerland; but as far as I am concerned I freely give +it up to them and offer them a personal welcome and take a peculiar +satisfaction in seeing them here. Switzerland is a “show country”--I am +more and more struck with the bearings of that truth; and its use in the +world is to reassure persons of a benevolent imagination when they +begin to wish for the drudging millions a greater supply of elevating +amusement. Here is amusement for a thousand years, and as elevating +certainly as mountains three miles high can make it. I expect to live +to see the summit of Monte Rosa heated by steam-tubes and adorned with a +hotel setting three tables d’hôte a day. + +{Illustration: THE CLOCK TOWER, BERNE} + +I have been walking about the arcades, which used to bestow a grateful +shade in July, but which seem rather dusky and chilly in these +shortening autumn days. I am struck with the way the English always +speak of them--with a shudder, as gloomy, as dirty, as evil-smelling, +as suffocating, as freezing, as anything and everything but admirably +picturesque. I take us Americans for the only people who, in travelling, +judge things on the first impulse--when we do judge them at all--not +from the standpoint of simple comfort. Most of us, strolling forth into +these bustling basements, are, I imagine, too much amused, too much +diverted from the sense of an alienable right to public ease, to be +conscious of heat or cold, of thick air, or even of the universal smell +of strong _charcuterie_. If the visible romantic were banished from the +face of the earth I am sure the idea of it would still survive in some +typical American heart.... + +_Lucerne, September_.--Berne, I find, has been filling with tourists at +the expense of Lucerne, which I have been having almost to myself. There +are six people at the table d’hôte; the excellent dinner denotes on the +part of the _chef_ the easy leisure in which true artists love to work. +The waiters have nothing to do but lounge about the hall and chink in +their pockets the fees of the past season. The day has been lovely +in itself, and pervaded, to my sense, by the gentle glow of a natural +satisfaction at my finding myself again on the threshold of Italy. I am +lodged _en prince_, in a room with a balcony hanging over the lake--a +balcony on which I spent a long time this morning at dawn, thanking the +mountain-tops, from the depths of a landscape-lover’s heart, for their +promise of superbly fair weather. There were a great many mountain-tops +to thank, for the crags and peaks and pinnacles tumbled away through the +morning mist in an endless confusion of grandeur. I have been all day +in better humour with Lucerne than ever before--a forecast reflection of +Italian moods. If Switzerland, as I wrote the other day, is so furiously +a show-place, Lucerne is certainly one of the biggest booths at the +fair. The little quay, under the trees, squeezed in between the decks +of the steamboats and the doors of the hotels, is a terrible medley +of Saxon dialects--a jumble of pilgrims in all the phases of devotion, +equipped with book and staff, alpenstock and Baedeker. There are so +many hotels and trinket-shops, so many omnibuses and steamers, so many +Saint-Gothard _vetturini_, so many ragged urchins poking photographs, +minerals and Lucernese English at you, that you feel as if lake and +mountains themselves, in all their loveliness, were but a part of the +“enterprise” of landlords and pedlars, and half expect to see the Righi +and Pilatus and the fine weather figure as items on your hotel-bill +between the _bougie_ and the _siphon_. Nature herself assists you +to this conceit; there is something so operatic and suggestive of +footlights and scene-shifters in the view on which Lucerne looks out. +You are one of five thousand--fifty thousand--“accommodated” spectators; +you have taken your season-ticket and there is a responsible impresario +somewhere behind the scenes. There is such a luxury of beauty in the +prospect--such a redundancy of composition and effect--so many more +peaks and pinnacles than are needed to make one heart happy or regale +the vision of one quiet observer, that you finally accept the little +Babel on the quay and the looming masses in the clouds as equal parts of +a perfect system, and feel as if the mountains had been waiting so many +ages for the hotels to come and balance the colossal group, that +they show a right, after all, to have them big and numerous. +The scene-shifters have been at work all day long, composing and +discomposing the beautiful background of the prospect--massing the +clouds and scattering the light, effacing and reviving, making play +with their wonderful machinery of mist and haze. The mountains rise, one +behind the other, in an enchanting gradation of distances and of melting +blues and greys; you think each successive tone the loveliest and +haziest possible till you see another loom dimly behind it. I couldn’t +enjoy even _The Swiss Times_, over my breakfast, till I had marched +forth to the office of the Saint-Gothard service of coaches and demanded +the banquette for to-morrow. The one place at the disposal of the office +was taken, but I might possibly _m’entendre_ with the conductor for his +own seat--the conductor being generally visible, in the intervals of +business, at the post-office. To the post-office, after breakfast, I +repaired, over the fine new bridge which now spans the green Reuss and +gives such a woeful air of country-cousinship to the crooked old wooden +structure which did sole service when I was here four years ago. The +old bridge is covered with a running hood of shingles and adorned with +a series of very quaint and vivid little paintings of the “Dance of +Death,” quite in the Holbein manner; the new sends up a painful glare +from its white limestone, and is ornamented with candelabra in a +meretricious imitation of platinum. As an almost professional cherisher +of the quaint I ought to have chosen to return at least by the dark and +narrow way; but mark how luxury unmans us. I was already demoralised. +I crossed the threshold of the timbered portal, took a few steps, and +retreated. It _smelt badly!_ So I marched back, counting the lamps in +their fine falsity. But the other, the crooked and covered way, smelt +very badly indeed; and no good American is without a fund of accumulated +sensibility to the odour of stale timber. + +Meanwhile I had spent an hour in the great yard of the postoffice, +waiting for my conductor to turn up and seeing the yellow malles-postes +pushed to and fro. At last, being told my man was at my service, I was +brought to speech of a huge, jovial, bearded, delightful Italian, clad +in the blue coat and waistcoat, with close, round silver buttons, which +are a heritage of the old postilions. No, it was not he; it was a friend +of his; and finally the friend was produced, _en costume de ville_, but +equally jovial, and Italian enough--a brave Lucernese, who had spent half +of his life between Bellinzona and Camerlata. For ten francs this worthy +man’s perch behind the luggage was made mine as far as Bellinzona, and +we separated with reciprocal wishes for good weather on the morrow. +To-morrow is so manifestly determined to be as fine as any other 30th +of September since the weather became on this planet a topic of +conversation that I have had nothing to do but stroll about Lucerne, +staring, loafing and vaguely intent on regarding the fact that, whatever +happens, my place is paid to Milan. I loafed into the immense new Hotel +National and read the _New York Tribune_ on a blue satin divan; after +which I was rather surprised, on coming out, to find myself staring at +a green Swiss lake and not at the Broadway omnibuses. The Hotel +National is adorned with a perfectly appointed Broadway bar--one of the +“prohibited” ones seeking hospitality in foreign lands after the manner +of an old-fashioned French or Italian refugee. + +_Milan, October_.--My journey hither was such a pleasant piece of +traveller’s luck that I feel a delicacy for taking it to pieces to see +what it was made of. Do what we will, however, there remains in all +deeply agreeable impressions a charming something we can’t analyse. I +found it agreeable even, given the rest of my case, to turn out of +bed, at Lucerne, by four o’clock, into the chilly autumn darkness. The +thick-starred sky was cloudless, and there was as yet no flush of dawn; +but the lake was wrapped in a ghostly white mist which crept halfway up +the mountains and made them look as if they too had been lying down +for the night and were casting away the vaporous tissues of their +bedclothes. Into this fantastic fog the little steamer went creaking +away, and I hung about the deck with the two or three travellers who +had known better than to believe it would save them francs or midnight +sighs--over those debts you “pay with your person”--to go and wait for +the diligence at the Poste at Fliielen, or yet at the Guillaume +Tell. The dawn came sailing up over the mountain-tops, flushed but +unperturbed, and blew out the little stars and then the big ones, as a +thrifty matron after a party blows out her candles and lamps; the mist +went melting and wandering away into the duskier hollows and recesses of +the mountains, and the summits defined their profiles against the cool +soft light. + +At Flüelen, before the landing, the big yellow coaches were actively +making themselves bigger, and piling up boxes and bags on their roofs +in a way to turn nervous people’s thoughts to the sharp corners of the +downward twists of the great road. I climbed into my own banquette, and +stood eating peaches--half-a-dozen women were hawking them about under +the horses’ legs--with an air of security that might have been offensive +to the people scrambling and protesting below between coupé and +intérieur. They were all English and all had false alarms about the +claim of somebody else to their place, the place for which they produced +their ticket, with a declaration in three or four different tongues of +the inalienable right to it given them by the expenditure of British +gold. They were all serenely confuted by the stout, purple-faced, +many-buttoned conductors, patted on the backs, assured that their +bath-tubs had every advantage of position on the top, and stowed away +according to their dues. When once one has fairly started on a journey +and has but to go and go by the impetus received, it is surprising what +entertainment one finds in very small things. We surrender to the gaping +traveller’s mood, which surely isn’t the unwisest the heart knows. I +don’t envy people, at any rate, who have outlived or outworn the simple +sweetness of feeling settled to go somewhere with bag and umbrella. If +we are settled on the top of a coach, and the “somewhere” contains an +element of the new and strange, the case is at its best. In this matter +wise people are content to become children again. We don’t turn about on +our knees to look out of the omnibus-window, but we indulge in very much +the same round-eyed contemplation of accessible objects. Responsibility +is left at home or at the worst packed away in the valise, relegated +to quite another part of the diligence with the clean shirts and the +writing-case. I sucked in the gladness of gaping, for this occasion, +with the somewhat acrid juice of my indifferent peaches; it made me +think them very good. This was the first of a series of kindly services +it rendered me. It made me agree next, as we started, that the gentleman +at the booking-office at Lucerne had but played a harmless joke when he +told me the regular seat in the banquette was taken. No one appeared +to claim it; so the conductor and I reversed positions, and I found him +quite as conversible as the usual Anglo-Saxon. + +He was trolling snatches of melody and showing his great yellow teeth in +a jovial grin all the way to Bellinzona--and this in face of the sombre +fact that the Saint-Gothard tunnel is scraping away into the +mountain, all the while, under his nose, and numbering the days of the +many-buttoned brotherhood. But he hopes, for long service’s sake, to be +taken into the employ of the railway; _he_ at least is no cherisher of +quaintness and has no romantic perversity. I found the railway coming +on, however, in a manner very shocking to mine. About an hour short of +Andermatt they have pierced a huge black cavity in the mountain, around +which has grown up a swarming, digging, hammering, smoke-compelling +colony. There are great barracks, with tall chimneys, down in the gorge +that bristled the other day but with natural graces, and a wonderful +increase of wine-shops in the little village of Göschenen above. Along +the breast of the mountain, beside the road, come wandering several +miles of very handsome iron pipes, of a stupendous girth--a conduit for +the water-power with which some of the machinery is worked. It lies at +its mighty length among the rocks like an immense black serpent, +and serves, as a mere detail, to give one the measure of the central +enterprise. When at the end of our long day’s journey, well down in warm +Italy, we came upon the other aperture of the tunnel, I could but uncap +with a grim reverence. Truly Nature is great, but she seems to me to +stand in very much the shoes of my poor friend the conductor. She is +being superseded at her strongest points, successively, and nothing +remains but for her to take humble service with her master. If she can +hear herself think amid that din of blasting and hammering she must be +reckoning up the years to elapse before the cleverest of Ober-Ingénieurs +decides that mountains are mere obstructive matter and has the Jungfrau +melted down and the residuum carried away in balloons and dumped upon +another planet. + +The Devil’s Bridge, with the same failing apparently as the good Homer, +was decidedly nodding. The volume of water in the torrent was shrunken, +and I missed the thunderous uproar and far-leaping spray that have kept +up a miniature tempest in the neighbourhood on my other passages. +It suddenly occurs to me that the fault is not in the good Homer’s +inspiration, but simply in the big black pipes above-mentioned. They +dip into the rushing stream higher up, presumably, and pervert its +fine frenzy to their prosaic uses. There could hardly be a more vivid +reminder of the standing quarrel between use and beauty, and of the +hard time poor beauty is having. I looked wistfully, as we rattled into +dreary Andermatt, at the great white zigzags of the Oberalp road which +climbed away to the left. Even on one’s way to Italy one may spare a +throb of desire for the beautiful vision of the castled Grisons. Dear +to me the memory of my day’s drive last summer through that long blue +avenue of mountains, to queer little mouldering Ilanz, visited before +supper in the ghostly dusk. At Andermatt a sign over a little black +doorway flanked by two dung-hills seemed to me tolerably comical: +_Mineraux_, _Quadrupedes_, _Oiseaux_, _OEufs_, _Tableaux Antiques_. We +bundled in to dinner and the American gentleman in the banquette made +the acquaintance of the Irish lady in the coupé, who talked of the +weather as _foine_ and wore a Persian scarf twisted about her head. At +the other end of the table sat an Englishman, out of the intérieur, who +bore an extraordinary resemblance to the portraits of Edward VI’s and +Mary’s reigns. He walking, a convincing Holbein. The impression was +of value to a cherisher of quaintness, and he must have wondered--not +knowing me for such a character--why I stared at him. It wasn’t him I +was staring at, but some handsome Seymour or Dudley or Digby with a ruff +and a round cap and plume. + +From Andermatt, through its high, cold, sunny valley, we passed into +rugged little Hospenthal, and then up the last stages of the ascent. +From here the road was all new to me. Among the summits of the various +Alpine passes there is little to choose. You wind and double slowly into +keener cold and deeper stillness; you put on your overcoat and turn up +the collar; you count the nestling snow-patches and then you cease to +count them; you pause, as you trudge before the lumbering coach, and +listen to the last-heard cow-bell tinkling away below you in kindlier +herbage. The sky was tremendously blue, and the little stunted bushes +on the snow-streaked slopes were all dyed with autumnal purples and +crimsons. It was a great display of colour. Purple and crimson too, +though not so fine, were the faces thrust out at us from the greasy +little double casements of a barrack beside the road, where the horses +paused before the last pull. There was one little girl in particular, +beginning to _lisser_ her hair, as civilisation approached, in a manner +not to be described, with her poor little blue-black hands. At the +summit are the two usual grim little stone taverns, the steel-blue tarn, +the snow-white peaks, the pause in the cold sunshine. Then we begin to +rattle down with two horses. In five minutes we are swinging along the +famous zigzags. Engineer, driver, horses--it’s very handsomely done by +all of them. The road curves and curls and twists and plunges like the +tail of a kite; sitting perched in the banquette, you see it making +below you and in mid-air certain bold gyrations which bring you as near +as possible, short of the actual experience, to the philosophy of that +immortal Irishman who wished that his fall from the house-top would only +last. But the zigzags last no more than Paddy’s fall, and in due time we +were all coming to our senses over _cafe au lait_ in the little inn +at Faido. After Faido the valley, plunging deeper, began to take thick +afternoon shadows from the hills, and at Airolo we were fairly in the +twilight. But the pink and yellow houses shimmered through the gentle +gloom, and Italy began in broken syllables to whisper that she was at +hand. For the rest of the way to Bellinzona her voice was muffled in the +grey of evening, and I was half vexed to lose the charming sight of the +changing vegetation. But only half vexed, for the moon was climbing all +the while nearer the edge of the crags that overshadowed us, and a thin +magical light came trickling down into the winding, murmuring gorges. It +was a most enchanting business. The chestnut-trees loomed up with double +their daylight stature; the vines began to swing their low festoons like +nets to trip up the fairies. At last the ruined towers of Bellinzona +stood gleaming in the moonshine, and we rattled into the great +post-yard. It was eleven o’clock and I had risen at four; moonshine +apart I wasn’t sorry. + +All that was very well; but the drive next day from Bellinzona to Como +is to my mind what gives its supreme beauty to this great pass. One +can’t describe the beauty of the Italian lakes, nor would one try if +one could; the floweriest rhetoric can recall it only as a picture on +a fireboard recalls a Claude. But it lay spread before me for a whole +perfect day: in the long gleam of the Major, from whose head the +diligence swerves away and begins to climb the bosky hills that divide +it from Lugano; in the shimmering, melting azure of the southern slopes +and masses; in the luxurious tangle of nature and the familiar amenity +of man; in the lawn-like inclinations, where the great grouped chestnuts +make so cool a shadow in so warm a light; in the rusty vineyards, the +littered cornfields and the tawdry wayside shrines. But most of all it’s +the deep yellow light that enchants you and tells you where you are. +See it come filtering down through a vine-covered trellis on the red +handkerchief with which a ragged contadina has bound her hair, and all +the magic of Italy, to the eye, makes an aureole about the poor girl’s +head. Look at a brown-breasted reaper eating his chunk of black bread +under a spreading chestnut; nowhere is shadow so charming, nowhere is +colour so charged, nowhere has accident such grace. The whole drive +to Lugano was one long loveliness, and the town itself is admirably +Italian. There was a great unlading of the coach, during which I +wandered under certain brown old arcades and bought for six sous, from +a young woman in a gold necklace, a hatful of peaches and figs. When +I came back I found the young man holding open the door of the second +diligence, which had lately come up, and beckoning to me with a +despairing smile. The young man, I must note, was the most amiable of +Ticinese; though he wore no buttons he was attached to the diligence +in some amateurish capacity, and had an eye to the mail-bags and other +valuables in the boot. I grumbled at Berne over the want of soft curves +in the Swiss temperament; but the children of the tangled Tessin are +cast in the Italian mould. My friend had as many quips and cranks as a +Neapolitan; we walked together for an hour under the chestnuts, while +the coach was plodding up from Bellinzona, and he never stopped singing +till we reached a little wine-house where he got his mouth full of bread +and cheese. I looked into his open door, a la Sterne, and saw the young +woman sitting rigid and grim, staring over his head and with a great +pile of bread and butter in her lap. He had only informed her most +politely that she was to be transferred to another diligence and must do +him the favour to descend; but she evidently knew of but one way for +a respectable young insulary of her sex to receive the politeness of a +foreign adventurer guilty of an eye betraying latent pleasantry. Heaven +only knew what he was saying! I told her, and she gathered up her +parcels and emerged. A part of the day’s great pleasure perhaps was my +grave sense of being an instrument in the hands of the powers toward the +safe consignment of this young woman and her boxes. When once you have +really bent to the helpless you are caught; there is no such steel trap, +and it holds you fast. My rather grim Abigail was a neophyte in foreign +travel, though doubtless cunning enough at her trade, which I inferred +to be that of making up those prodigious chignons worn mainly by +English ladies. Her mistress had gone on a mule over the mountains to +Cadenabbia, and she herself was coming up with the wardrobe, two +big boxes and a bath-tub. I had played my part, under the powers, +at Bellinzona, and had interposed between the poor girl’s frightened +English and the dreadful Ticinese French of the functionaries in the +post-yard. At the custom-house on the Italian frontier I was of peculiar +service; there was a kind of fateful fascination in it. The wardrobe +was voluminous; I exchanged a paternal glance with my charge as +the _douanier_ plunged his brown fists into it. Who was the lady at +Cadenabbia? What was she to me or I to her? She wouldn’t know, when she +rustled down to dinner next day, that it was I who had guided the frail +skiff of her public basis of vanity to port. So unseen but not unfelt do +we cross each other’s orbits. The skiff however may have foundered that +evening in sight of land. I disengaged the young woman from among her +fellow-travellers and placed her boxes on a hand-cart in the picturesque +streets of Como, within a stone’s throw of that lovely striped and toned +cathedral which has the facade of cameo medallions. I could only make +the _facchino_ swear to take her to the steamboat. He too was a jovial +dog, but I hope he was polite with precautions. + +1873. + + + + + +ITALY REVISITED + + +I + +I waited in Paris until after the elections for the new Chamber (they +took place on the 14th of October); as only after one had learned that +the famous attempt of Marshal MacMahon and his ministers to drive the +French nation to the polls like a flock of huddling sheep, each with the +white ticket of an official candidate round his neck, had not achieved +the success which the energy of the process might have promised--only +then it was possible to draw a long breath and deprive the republican +party of such support as might have been conveyed in one’s sympathetic +presence. Seriously speaking too, the weather had been enchanting--there +were Italian fancies to be gathered without leaving the banks of the +Seine. Day after day the air was filled with golden light, and even +those chalkish vistas of the Parisian _beaux quartiers_ assumed the +iridescent tints of autumn. Autumn weather in Europe is often such +a very sorry affair that a fair-minded American will have it on his +conscience to call attention to a rainless and radiant October. + +The echoes of the electoral strife kept me company for a while after +starting upon that abbreviated journey to Turin which, as you leave +Paris at night, in a train unprovided with encouragements to slumber, is +a singular mixture of the odious and the charming. The charming indeed +I think prevails; for the dark half of the journey is the least +interesting. The morning light ushers you into the romantic gorges +of the Jura, and after a big bowl of _cafe au lait_ at Culoz you may +compose yourself comfortably for the climax of your spectacle. The day +before leaving Paris I met a French friend who had just returned from a +visit to a Tuscan country-seat where he had been watching the vintage. +“Italy,” he said, “is more lovely than words can tell, and France, +steeped in this electoral turmoil, seems no better than a bear-garden.” + The part of the bear-garden through which you travel as you approach the +Mont Cenis seemed to me that day very beautiful. The autumn colouring, +thanks to the absence of rain, had been vivid and crisp, and the +vines that swung their low garlands between the mulberries round about +Chambery looked like long festoons of coral and amber. The frontier +station of Modane, on the further side of the Mont Cenis Tunnel, is +a very ill-regulated place; but even the most irritable of tourists, +meeting it on his way southward, will be disposed to consider it +good-naturedly. There is far too much bustling and scrambling, and the +facilities afforded you for the obligatory process of ripping open +your luggage before the officers of the Italian custom-house are +much scantier than should be; but for myself there is something that +deprecates irritation in the shabby green and grey uniforms of all the +Italian officials who stand loafing about and watching the northern +invaders scramble back into marching order. Wearing an administrative +uniform doesn’t necessarily spoil a man’s temper, as in France one is +sometimes led to believe; for these excellent under-paid Italians carry +theirs as lightly as possible, and their answers to your inquiries don’t +in the least bristle with rapiers, buttons and cockades. After leaving +Modane you slide straight downhill into the Italy of your desire; from +which point the road edges, after the grand manner, along those +It precipices that stand shoulder to shoulder, in a prodigious +perpendicular file, till they finally admit you to a distant glimpse he +ancient capital of Piedmont. + +Turin is no city of a name to conjure with, and I pay an extravagant +tribute to subjective emotion in speaking of it as ancient, if the place +is less bravely peninsular than Florence and Rome, at least it is more +in the scenic tradition than New York Paris; and while I paced the great +arcades and looked at the fourth-rate shop windows I didn’t scruple to +cultivate a shameless optimism. Relatively speaking, Turin touches +a chord; but there is after all no reason in a large collection of +shabbily-stuccoed houses, disposed in a rigidly rectangular manner, for +passing a day of deep, still gaiety. The only reason, I am afraid, is +the old superstition of Italy--that property in the very look of the +written word, the evocation of a myriad images, that makes any lover of +the arts take Italian satisfactions on easier terms than any others. The +written word stands for something that eternally tricks us; we juggle +to our credulity even with such inferior apparatus as is offered to +our hand at Turin. I roamed all the morning under the tall porticoes, +thinking it sufficient joy to take note of the soft, warm air, of that +local colour of things that is at once so broken and so harmonious, and +of the comings and goings, the physiognomy and manners, of the excellent +Turinese. I had opened the old book again; the old charm was in the +style; I was in a more delightful world. I saw nothing surpassingly +beautiful or curious; but your true taster of the most seasoned of +dishes finds well-nigh the whole mixture in any mouthful. Above all on +the threshold of Italy he knows again the solid and perfectly definable +pleasure of finding himself among the traditions of the grand style in +architecture. It must be said that we have still to go there to +recover the sense of the domiciliary mass. In northern cities there are +beautiful houses, picturesque and curious houses; sculptured gables that +hang over the street, charming bay-windows, hooded doorways, elegant +proportions, a profusion of delicate ornament; but a good specimen of +an old Italian palazzo has a nobleness that is all its own. We laugh +at Italian “palaces,” at their peeling paint, their nudity, their +dreariness; but they have the great palatial quality--elevation and +extent. They make of smaller things the apparent abode of pigmies; they +round their great arches and interspace their huge windows with a proud +indifference to the cost of materials. These grand proportions--the +colossal basements, the doorways that seem meant for cathedrals, the far +away cornices--impart by contrast a humble and _bourgeois_ expression +to interiors founded on the sacrifice of the whole to the part, and +in which the air of grandeur depends largely on the help of the +upholsterer. At Turin my first feeling was really one of renewed shame +for our meaner architectural manners. If the Italians at bottom despise +the rest of mankind and regard them as barbarians, disinherited of the +tradition of form, the idea proceeds largely, no doubt, from our +living in comparative mole-hills. They alone were really to build their +civilisation. + +{Illustration: UNDER THE ARCADES, TURIN.} + +An impression which on coming back to Italy I find even stronger than +when it was first received is that of the contrast between the fecundity +of the great artistic period and the vulgarity there of the genius of +to-day. The first few hours spent on Italian soil are sufficient to +renew it, and the question I allude to is, historically speaking, one of +the oddest. That the people who but three hundred years ago had the best +taste in the world should now have the worst; that having produced the +noblest, loveliest, costliest works, they should now be given up to the +manufacture of objects at once ugly and paltry; that the race of which +Michael Angelo and Raphael, Leonardo and Titian were characteristic +should have no other title to distinction than third-rate _genre_ +pictures and catchpenny statues--all this is a frequent perplexity to +the observer of actual Italian life. The flower of “great” art in these +latter years ceased to bloom very powerfully anywhere; but nowhere +does it seem so drooping and withered as in the shadow of the immortal +embodiments of the old Italian genius. You go into a church or a gallery +and feast your fancy upon a splendid picture or an exquisite piece of +sculpture, and on issuing from the door that has admitted you to the +beautiful past are confronted with something that has the effect of a +very bad joke. The aspect of your lodging--the carpets, the curtains, +the upholstery in general, with their crude and violent colouring and +their vulgar material--the trumpery things in the shops, the extreme +bad taste of the dress of the women, the cheapness and baseness of every +attempt at decoration in the cafes and railway-stations, the hopeless +frivolity of everything that pretends to be a work of art--all this +modern crudity runs riot over the relics of the great period. + +We can do a thing for the first time but once; it is but once for all +that we can have a pleasure in its freshness. This is a law not on the +whole, I think, to be regretted, for we sometimes learn to know things +better by not enjoying them too much. It is certain, however, at the +same time, that a visitor who has worked off the immediate ferment for +this inexhaustibly interesting country has by no means entirely drained +the cup. After thinking of Italy as historical and artistic it will +do him no great harm to think of her for a while as panting both for +a future and for a balance at the bank; aspirations supposedly much +at variance with the Byronic, the Ruskinian, the artistic, poetic, +aesthetic manner of considering our eternally attaching peninsula. +He may grant--I don’t say it is absolutely necessary--that its actual +aspects and economics are ugly, prosaic, provokingly out of relation +to the diary and the album; it is nevertheless true that, at the point +things have come to, modern Italy in a manner imposes herself. I hadn’t +been many hours in the country before that truth assailed me; and I may +add that, the first irritation past, I found myself able to accept it. +For, if we think, nothing is more easy to understand than an honest ire +on the part of the young Italy of to-day at being looked at by all the +world as a kind of soluble pigment. Young Italy, preoccupied with its +economical and political future, must be heartily tired of being admired +for its eyelashes and its pose. In one of Thackeray’s novels occurs +a mention of a young artist who sent to the Royal Academy a picture +representing “A Contadino dancing with a Trasteverina at the door of a +Locanda, to the music of a Pifferaro.” It is in this attitude and with +these conventional accessories that the world has hitherto seen fit to +represent young Italy, and one doesn’t wonder that if the youth has +any spirit he should at last begin to resent our insufferable aesthetic +patronage. He has established a line of tram-cars in Rome, from +the Porta del Popolo to the Ponte Molle, and it is on one of these +democratic vehicles that I seem to see him taking his triumphant course +down the vista of the future. I won’t pretend to rejoice with him any +more than I really do; I won’t pretend, as the sentimental tourists say +about it all, as if it were the setting of an intaglio or the border of +a Roman scarf, to “like” it. Like it or not, as we may, it is evidently +destined to be; I see a new Italy in the future which in many important +respects will equal, if not surpass, the most enterprising sections of +our native land. Perhaps by that time Chicago and San Francisco will +have acquired a pose, and their sons and daughters will dance at the +doors of _locande_. + +However this may be, the accomplished schism between the old order and +the new is the promptest moral of a fresh visit to this ever-suggestive +part of the world. The old has become more and more a museum, preserved +and perpetuated in the midst of the new, but without any further +relation to it--it must be admitted indeed that such a relation is +considerable--than that of the stock on his shelves to the shopkeeper, +or of the Siren of the South to the showman who stands before his booth. +More than once, as we move about nowadays in the Italian cities, +there seems to pass before our eyes a vision of the coming years. It +represents to our satisfaction an Italy united and prosperous, +but altogether scientific and commercial. The Italy indeed that we +sentimentalise and romance about was an ardently mercantile country; +though I suppose it loved not its ledgers less, but its frescoes +and altar-pieces more. Scattered through this paradise regained of +trade--this country of a thousand ports--we see a large number of +beautiful buildings in which an endless series of dusky pictures are +darkening, dampening, fading, failing, through the years. By the doors +of the beautiful buildings are little turnstiles at which there sit +a great many uniformed men to whom the visitor pays a tenpenny fee. +Inside, in the vaulted and frescoed chambers, the art of Italy lies +buried as in a thousand mausoleums. It is well taken care of; it is +constantly copied; sometimes it is “restored”--as in the case of that +beautiful boy-figure of Andrea del Sarto at Florence, which may be seen +at the gallery of the Uffizi with its honourable duskiness quite peeled +off and heaven knows what raw, bleeding cuticle laid bare. One evening +lately, near the same Florence, in the soft twilight, I took a stroll +among those encircling hills on which the massive villas are mingled +with the vaporous olives. Presently I arrived where three roads met at a +wayside shrine, in which, before some pious daub of an old-time Madonna, +a little votive lamp glimmered through the evening air. The hour, +the atmosphere, the place, the twinkling taper, the sentiment of the +observer, the thought that some one had been rescued here from an +assassin or from some other peril and had set up a little grateful altar +in consequence, against the yellow-plastered wall of a tangled _podere_; +all this led me to approach the shrine with a reverent, an emotional +step. I drew near it, but after a few steps I paused. I became aware of +an incongruous odour; it seemed to me that the evening air was charged +with a perfume which, although to a certain extent familiar, had not +hitherto associated itself with rustic frescoes and wayside altars. I +wondered, I gently sniffed, and the question so put left me no doubt. +The odour was that of petroleum; the votive taper was nourished with +the essence of Pennsylvania. I confess that I burst out laughing, and a +picturesque contadino, wending his homeward way in the dusk, stared at +me as if I were an iconoclast. He noticed the petroleum only, I imagine, +to snuff it fondly up; but to me the thing served as a symbol of the +Italy of the future. There is a horse-car from the Porta del Popolo to +the Ponte Molle, and the Tuscan shrines are fed with kerosene. + + +II + +If it’s very well meanwhile to come to Turin first it’s better still to +go to Genoa afterwards. Genoa is the tightest topographic tangle in the +world, which even a second visit helps you little to straighten out. In +the wonderful crooked, twisting, climbing, soaring, burrowing Genoese +alleys the traveller is really up to his neck in the old Italian +sketchability. The pride of the place, I believe, is a port of great +capacity, and the bequest of the late Duke of Galliera, who left four +millions of dollars for the purpose of improving and enlarging it, will +doubtless do much toward converting it into one of the great commercial +stations of Europe. But as, after leaving my hotel the afternoon I +arrived, I wandered for a long time at hazard through the tortuous +by-ways of the city, I said to myself, not without an accent of private +triumph, that here at last was something it would be almost impossible +to modernise. I had found my hotel, in the first place, extremely +entertaining--the Croce di Malta, as it is called, established in a +gigantic palace on the edge of the swarming and not over-clean harbour. +It was the biggest house I had ever entered--the basement alone would +have contained a dozen American caravansaries. I met an American +gentleman in the vestibule who (as he had indeed a perfect right to be) +was annoyed by its troublesome dimensions--one was a quarter of an hour +ascending out of the basement--and desired to know if it were a “fair +sample” of the Genoese inns. It appeared an excellent specimen of +Genoese architecture generally; so far as I observed there were few +houses perceptibly smaller than this Titanic tavern. I lunched in a +dusky ballroom whose ceiling was vaulted, frescoed and gilded with the +fatal facility of a couple of centuries ago, and which looked out upon +another ancient housefront, equally huge and equally battered, separated +from it only by a little wedge of dusky space--one of the principal +streets, I believe, of Genoa--whence out of dim abysses the population +sent up to the windows (I had to crane out very far to see it) a +perpetual clattering, shuffling, chaffering sound. Issuing forth +presently into this crevice of a street I found myself up to my neck +in that element of the rich and strange--as to visible and reproducible +“effect,” I mean--for the love of which one revisits Italy. It offered +itself indeed in a variety of colours, some of which were not remarkable +for their freshness or purity. But their combined charm was not to be +resisted, and the picture glowed with the rankly human side of southern +lowlife. + +Genoa, as I have hinted, is the crookedest and most incoherent of +cities; tossed about on the sides and crests of a dozen hills, it is +seamed with gullies and ravines that bristle with those innumerable +palaces for which we have heard from our earliest years that the place +is celebrated. These great structures, with their mottled and faded +complexions, lift their big ornamental cornices to a tremendous height +in the air, where, in a certain indescribably forlorn and desolate +fashion, overtopping each other, they seem to reflect the twinkle and +glitter of the warm Mediterranean. Down about the basements, in the +close crepuscular alleys, the people are for ever moving to and fro or +standing in their cavernous doorways and their dusky, crowded shops, +calling, chattering, laughing, lamenting, living their lives in the +conversational Italian fashion. I had for a long time had no such +vision of possible social pressure. I hadn’t for a long time seen people +elbowing each other so closely or swarming so thickly out of populous +hives. A traveller is often moved to ask himself whether it has been +worth while to leave his home--whatever his home may have been--only to +encounter new forms of human suffering, only to be reminded that toil +and privation, hunger and sorrow and sordid effort, are the portion of +the mass of mankind. To travel is, as it were, to go to the play, to +attend a spectacle; and there is something heartless in stepping forth +into foreign streets to feast on “character” when character consists +simply of the slightly different costume in which labour and want +present themselves. These reflections were forced upon me as I strolled +as through a twilight patched with colour and charged with stale smells; +but after a time they ceased to bear me company. The reason of this, I +think, is because--at least to foreign eyes--the sum of Italian misery +is, on the whole, less than the sum of the Italian knowledge of life. +That people should thank you, with a smile of striking sweetness, for +the gift of twopence, is a proof, certainly, of extreme and constant +destitution; but (keeping in mind the sweetness) it also attests an +enviable ability not to be depressed by circumstances. I know that this +may possibly be great nonsense; that half the time we are acclaiming +the fine quality of the Italian smile the creature so constituted for +physiognomic radiance may be in a sullen frenzy of impatience and pain. +Our observation in any foreign land is extremely superficial, and our +remarks are happily not addressed to the inhabitants themselves, who +would be sure to exclaim upon the impudence of the fancy-picture. + +The other day I visited a very picturesque old city upon a mountain-top, +where, in the course of my wanderings, I arrived at an old disused gate +in the ancient town-wall. The gate hadn’t been absolutely forfeited; +but the recent completion of a modern road down the mountain led most +vehicles away to another egress. The grass-grown pavement, which wound +into the plain by a hundred graceful twists and plunges, was now given +up to ragged contadini and their donkeys, and to such wayfarers as were +not alarmed at the disrepair into which it had fallen. I stood in the +shadow of the tall old gateway admiring the scene, looking to right and +left at the wonderful walls of the little town, perched on the edge of +a shaggy precipice; at the circling mountains over against them; at the +road dipping downward among the chestnuts and olives. There was no one +within sight but a young man who slowly trudged upward with his coat +slung over his shoulder and his hat upon his ear in the manner of a +cavalier in an opera. Like an operatic performer too he sang as he came; +the spectacle, generally, was operatic, and as his vocal flourishes +reached my ear I said to myself that in Italy accident was always +romantic and that such a figure had been exactly what was wanted to set +off the landscape. It suggested in a high degree that knowledge of life +for which I just now commended the Italians. I was turning back under +the old gateway when the young man overtook me and, suspending his song, +asked me if I could favour him with a match to light the hoarded remnant +of a cigar. This request led, as I took my way again to the inn, to my +falling into talk with him. He was a native of the ancient city, and +answered freely all my inquiries as to its manners and customs and +its note of public opinion. But the point of my anecdote is that he +presently acknowledged himself a brooding young radical and communist, +filled with hatred of the present Italian government, raging with +discontent and crude political passion, professing a ridiculous hope +that Italy would soon have, as France had had, her “‘89,” and declaring +that he for his part would willingly lend a hand to chop off the +heads of the king and the royal family. He was an unhappy, underfed, +unemployed young man, who took a hard, grim view of everything and was +operatic only quite in spite of himself. This made it very absurd of me +to have looked at him simply as a graceful ornament to the prospect, +an harmonious little figure in the middle distance. “Damn the prospect, +damn the middle distance!” would have been all _his_ philosophy. Yet but +for the accident of my having gossipped with him I should have made him +do service, in memory, as an example of sensuous optimism! + +I am bound to say however that I believe a great deal of the sensuous +optimism observable in the Genoese alleys and beneath the low, crowded +arcades along the port was very real. Here every one was magnificently +sunburnt, and there were plenty of those queer types, mahogany-coloured, +bare-chested mariners with earrings and crimson girdles, that seem to +people a southern seaport with the chorus of “Masaniello.” But it is not +fair to speak as if at Genoa there were nothing but low-life to be seen, +for the place is the residence of some of the grandest people in the +world. Nor are all the palaces ranged upon dusky alleys; the handsomest +and most impressive form a splendid series on each side of a couple +of very proper streets, in which there is plenty of room for a +coach-and-four to approach the big doorways. Many of these doorways +are open, revealing great marble staircases with couchant lions for +balustrades and ceremonious courts surrounded by walls of sun-softened +yellow. One of the great piles in the array is coloured a goodly red and +contains in particular the grand people I just now spoke of. They +live indeed on the third floor; but here they have suites of wonderful +painted and gilded chambers, in which foreshortened frescoes also cover +the vaulted ceilings and florid mouldings emboss the ample walls. These +distinguished tenants bear the name of Vandyck, though they are members +of the noble family of Brignole-Sale, one of whose children--the Duchess +of Galliera--has lately given proof of nobleness in presenting the +gallery of the red palace to the city of Genoa. + + +III + +On leaving Genoa I repaired to Spezia, chiefly with a view of +accomplishing a sentimental pilgrimage, which I in fact achieved in the +most agreeable conditions. The Gulf of Spezia is now the headquarters +of the Italian fleet, and there were several big iron-plated frigates +riding at anchor in front of the town. The streets were filled with lads +in blue flannel, who were receiving instruction at a schoolship in the +harbour, and in the evening--there was a brilliant moon--the little +breakwater which stretched out into the Mediterranean offered a scene of +recreation to innumerable such persons. But this fact is from the point +of view of the cherisher of quaintness of little account, for since it +has become prosperous Spezia has grown ugly. The place is filled with +long, dull stretches of dead wall and great raw expanses of artificial +land. It wears that look of monstrous, of more than far-western newness +which distinguishes all the creations of the young Italian State. Nor +did I find any great compensation in an immense inn of recent birth, +an establishment seated on the edge of the sea in anticipation of a +_passeggiata_ which is to come that way some five years hence, the +region being in the meantime of the most primitive formation. The inn +was filled with grave English people who looked respectable and +bored, and there was of course a Church of England service in the +gaudily-frescoed parlour. Neither was it the drive to Porto Venere that +chiefly pleased me--a drive among vines and olives, over the hills +and beside the Mediterranean, to a queer little crumbling village on a +headland, as sweetly desolate and superannuated as the name it bears. +There is a ruined church near the village, which occupies the site +(according to tradition) of an ancient temple of Venus; and if Venus ever +revisits her desecrated shrines she must sometimes pause a moment in +that sunny stillness and listen to the murmur of the tideless sea at +the base of the narrow promontory. If Venus sometimes comes there Apollo +surely does as much; for close to the temple is a gateway surmounted by +an inscription in Italian and English, which admits you to a curious, +and it must be confessed rather cockneyfied, cave among the rocks. It +was here, says the inscription, that the great Byron, swimmer and poet, +“defied the waves of the Ligurian sea.” The fact is interesting, though +not supremely so; for Byron was always defying something, and if a slab +had been put up wherever this performance came off these commemorative +tablets would be in many parts of Europe as thick as milestones. + +No; the great merit of Spezia, to my eye, is that I engaged a boat there +of a lovely October afternoon and had myself rowed across the gulf--it +took about an hour and a half--to the little bay of Lerici, which opens +out of it. This bay of Lerici is charming; the bosky grey-green hills +close it in, and on either side of the entrance, perched on a bold +headland, a wonderful old crumbling castle keeps ineffectual guard. The +place is classic to all English travellers, for in the middle of the +curving shore is the now desolate little villa in which Shelley spent +the last months of his short life. He was living at Lerici when he +started on that short southern cruise from which he never returned. The +house he occupied is strangely shabby and as sad as you may choose to +find it. It stands directly upon the beach, with scarred and battered +walls and a loggia of several arches opening to a little terrace with +a rugged parapet, which, when the wind blows, must be drenched with +the salt spray. The place is very lonely--all overwearied with sun and +breeze and brine--very close to nature, as it was Shelley’s passion +to be. I can fancy a great lyric poet sitting on the terrace of a warm +evening and feeling very far from England in the early years of the +century. In that place, and with his genius, he would as a matter of +course have heard in the voice of nature a sweetness which only the +lyric movement could translate. It is a place where an English-speaking +pilgrim himself may very honestly think thoughts and feel moved to lyric +utterance. But I must content myself with saying in halting prose that +I remember few episodes of Italian travel more sympathetic, as they have +it here, than that perfect autumn afternoon; the half-hour’s station on +the little battered terrace of the villa; the climb to the singularly +felicitous old castle that hangs above Lerici; the meditative lounge, in +the fading light, on the vine-decked platform that looked out toward the +sunset and the darkening mountains and, far below, upon the quiet sea, +beyond which the pale-faced tragic villa stared up at the brightening +moon. + + +IV + +I had never known Florence more herself, or in other words more +attaching, than I found her for a week in that brilliant October. +She sat in the sunshine beside her yellow river like the little +treasure-city she has always seemed, without commerce, without other +industry than the manufacture of mosaic paper-weights and alabaster +Cupids, without actuality or energy or earnestness or any of those +rugged virtues which in most cases are deemed indispensable for civic +cohesion; with nothing but the little unaugmented stock of her mediaeval +memories, her tender-coloured mountains, her churches and palaces, +pictures and statues. There were very few strangers; one’s detested +fellow-pilgrim was infrequent; the native population itself seemed +scanty; the sound of wheels in the streets was but occasional; by eight +o’clock at night, apparently, every one had gone to bed, and the +musing wanderer, still wandering and still musing, had the place to +himself--had the thick shadow-masses of the great palaces, and the +shafts of moonlight striking the polygonal paving-stones, and the empty +bridges, and the silvered yellow of the Arno, and the stillness broken +only by a homeward step, a step accompanied by a snatch of song from a +warm Italian voice. My room at the inn looked out on the river and was +flooded all day with sunshine. There was an absurd orange-coloured +paper on the walls; the Arno, of a hue not altogether different, flowed +beneath; and on the other side of it rose a line of sallow houses, of +extreme antiquity, crumbling and mouldering, bulging and protruding over +the stream. (I seem to speak of their fronts; but what I saw was their +shabby backs, which were exposed to the cheerful flicker of the river, +while the fronts stood for ever in the deep damp shadow of a narrow +mediaeval street.) All this brightness and yellowness was a perpetual +delight; it was a part of that indefinably charming colour which +Florence always seems to wear as you look up and down at it from +the river, and from the bridges and quays. This is a kind of grave +radiance--a harmony of high tints--which I scarce know how to describe. +There are yellow walls and green blinds and red roofs, there are +intervals of brilliant brown and natural-looking blue; but the picture +is not spotty nor gaudy, thanks to the distribution of the colours in +large and comfortable masses, and to the washing-over of the scene by +some happy softness of sunshine. The river-front of Florence is in short +a delightful composition. Part of its charm comes of course from the +generous aspect of those high-based Tuscan palaces which a renewal of +acquaintance with them has again commended to me as the most dignified +dwellings in the world. Nothing can be finer than that look of giving +up the whole immense ground-floor to simple purposes of vestibule and +staircase, of court and high-arched entrance; as if this were all but +a massive pedestal for the real habitation and people weren’t properly +housed unless, to begin with, they should be lifted fifty feet above +the pavement. The great blocks of the basement; the great intervals, +horizontally and vertically, from window to window (telling of the +height and breadth of the rooms within); the armorial shield hung +forward at one of the angles; the wide-brimmed roof, overshadowing +the narrow street; the rich old browns and yellows of the walls: these +definite elements put themselves together with admirable art. + +{Illustration: ROMAN GATEWAY, RIMINI.} + +Take a Tuscan pile of this type out of its oblique situation in the +town; call it no longer a palace, but a villa; set it down by a terrace +on one of the hills that encircle Florence, place a row of high-waisted +cypresses beside it, give it a grassy court-yard and a view of the +Florentine towers and the valley of the Arno, and you will think it +perhaps even more worthy of your esteem. It was a Sunday noon, and +brilliantly warm, when I again arrived; and after I had looked from my +windows a while at that quietly-basking river-front I have spoken of +I took my way across one of the bridges and then out of one of the +gates--that immensely tall Roman Gate in which the space from the top of +the arch to the cornice (except that there is scarcely a cornice, it is +all a plain massive piece of wall) is as great, or seems to be, as that +from the ground to the former point. Then I climbed a steep and winding +way--much of it a little dull if one likes, being bounded by mottled, +mossy garden-walls--to a villa on a hill-top, where I found various +things that touched me with almost too fine a point. Seeing them again, +often, for a week, both by sunlight and moonshine, I never quite learned +not to covet them; not to feel that not being a part of them was somehow +to miss an exquisite chance. What a tranquil, contented life it seemed, +with romantic beauty as a part of its daily texture!--the sunny terrace, +with its tangled _podere_ beneath it; the bright grey olives against +the bright blue sky; the long, serene, horizontal lines of other villas, +flanked by their upward cypresses, disposed upon the neighbouring hills; +the richest little city in the world in a softly-scooped hollow at one’s +feet, and beyond it the most appealing of views, the most majestic, +yet the most familiar. Within the villa was a great love of art and +a painting-room full of felicitous work, so that if human life there +confessed to quietness, the quietness was mostly but that of the intent +act. A beautiful occupation in that beautiful position, what could +possibly be better? That is what I spoke just now of envying--a way +of life that doesn’t wince at such refinements of peace and ease. When +labour self-charmed presents itself in a dull or an ugly place we esteem +it, we admire it, but we scarce feel it to be the ideal of good fortune. +When, however, its votaries move as figures in an ancient, noble +landscape, and their walks and contemplations are like a turning of the +leaves of history, we seem to have before us an admirable case of virtue +made easy; meaning here by virtue contentment and concentration, a real +appreciation of the rare, the exquisite though composite, medium of +life. You needn’t want a rush or a crush when the scene itself, the mere +scene, shares with you such a wealth of consciousness. + +It is true indeed that I might after a certain time grow weary of a +regular afternoon stroll among the Florentine lanes; of sitting on low +parapets, in intervals of flower-topped wall, and looking across at +Fiesole or down the rich-hued valley of the Arno; of pausing at the open +gates of villas and wondering at the height of cypresses and the depth +of loggias; of walking home in the fading light and noting on a dozen +westward-looking surfaces the glow of the opposite sunset. But for a +week or so all this was delightful. The villas are innumerable, and if +you’re an aching alien half the talk is about villas. This one has a +story; that one has another; they all look as if they had stories--none +in truth predominantly gay. Most of them are offered to rent (many of +them for sale) at prices unnaturally low; you may have a tower and a +garden, a chapel and an expanse of thirty windows, for five hundred +dollars a year. In imagination you hire three or four; you take +possession and settle and stay. Your sense of the fineness of the finest +is of something very grave and stately; your sense of the bravery of two +or three of the best something quite tragic and sinister. From what does +this latter impression come? You gather it as you stand there in the +early dusk, with your eyes on the long, pale-brown facade, the enormous +windows, the iron cages fastened to the lower ones. Part of the brooding +expression of these great houses comes, even when they have not fallen +into decay, from their look of having outlived their original use. Their +extraordinary largeness and massiveness are a satire on their present +fate. They weren’t built with such a thickness of wall and depth of +embrasure, such a solidity of staircase and superfluity of stone, +simply to afford an economical winter residence to English and American +families. I don’t know whether it was the appearance of these stony old +villas, which seemed so dumbly conscious of a change of manners, that +threw a tinge of melancholy over the general prospect; certain it is +that, having always found this note as of a myriad old sadnesses in +solution in the view of Florence, it seemed to me now particularly +strong. “Lovely, lovely, but it makes me ‘blue,’” the sensitive stranger +couldn’t but murmur to himself as, in the late afternoon, he looked +at the landscape from over one of the low parapets, and then, with his +hands in his pockets, turned away indoors to candles and dinner. + + +V + +Below, in the city, through all frequentation of streets and churches +and museums, it was impossible not to have a good deal of the same +feeling; but here the impression was more easy to analyse. It came from +a sense of the perfect separateness of all the great productions of +the Renaissance from the present and the future of the place, from the +actual life and manners, the native ideal. I have already spoken of +the way in which the vast aggregation of beautiful works of art in the +Italian cities strikes the visitor nowadays--so far as present Italy +is concerned--as the mere stock-in-trade of an impecunious but thrifty +people. It is this spiritual solitude, this conscious disconnection of +the great works of architecture and sculpture that deposits a certain +weight upon the heart; when we see a great tradition broken we feel +something of the pain with which we hear a stifled cry. But regret +is one thing and resentment is another. Seeing one morning, in a +shop-window, the series of _Mornings in Florence_ published a few years +since by Mr. Ruskin, I made haste to enter and purchase these amusing +little books, some passages of which I remembered formerly to have +read. I couldn’t turn over many pages without observing that the +“separateness” of the new and old which I just mentioned had produced +in their author the liveliest irritation. With the more acute phases of +this condition it was difficult to sympathise, for the simple reason, it +seems to me, that it savours of arrogance to demand of any people, as +a right of one’s own, that they shall be artistic. “Be artistic +yourselves!” is the very natural reply that young Italy has at hand for +English critics and censors. When a people produces beautiful statues +and pictures it gives us something more than is set down in the bond, +and we must thank it for its generosity; and when it stops producing +them or caring for them we may cease thanking, but we hardly have a +right to begin and rail. The wreck of Florence, says Mr. Ruskin, “is now +too ghastly and heart-breaking to any human soul that remembers the days +of old”; and these desperate words are an allusion to the fact that the +little square in front of the cathedral, at the foot of Giotto’s Tower, +with the grand Baptistery on the other side, is now the resort of +a number of hackney-coaches and omnibuses. This fact is doubtless +lamentable, and it would be a hundred times more agreeable to see among +people who have been made the heirs of so priceless a work of art as the +sublime campanile some such feeling about it as would keep it free even +from the danger of defilement. A cab-stand is a very ugly and dirty +thing, and Giotto’s Tower should have nothing in common with such +conveniences. But there is more than one way of taking such things, and +the sensitive stranger who has been walking about for a week with his +mind full of the sweetness and suggestiveness of a hundred Florentine +places may feel at last in looking into Mr. Ruskin’s little tracts that, +discord for discord, there isn’t much to choose between the importunity +of the author’s personal ill-humour and the incongruity of horse-pails +and bundles of hay. And one may say this without being at all a partisan +of the doctrine of the inevitableness of new desecrations. For my own +part, I believe there are few things in this line that the new Italian +spirit isn’t capable of, and not many indeed that we aren’t destined to +see. Pictures and buildings won’t be completely destroyed, because in +that case the _forestieri_, scatterers of cash, would cease to arrive +and the turn-stiles at the doors of the old palaces and convents, with +the little patented slit for absorbing your half-franc, would grow quite +rusty, would stiffen with disuse. But it’s safe to say that the +new Italy growing into an old Italy again will continue to take her +elbow-room wherever she may find it. + +{Illustration: SANTA MARIA NOVELLA, FLORENCE} + +I am almost ashamed to say what I did with Mr. Ruskin’s little books. I +put them into my pocket and betook myself to Santa Maria Novella. There +I sat down and, after I had looked about for a while at the beautiful +church, drew them forth one by one and read the greater part of them. +Occupying one’s self with light literature in a great religious edifice +is perhaps as bad a piece of profanation as any of those rude dealings +which Mr. Ruskin justly deplores; but a traveller has to make the most +of odd moments, and I was waiting for a friend in whose company I was +to go and look at Giotto’s beautiful frescoes in the cloister of the +church. My friend was a long time coming, so that I had an hour with Mr. +Ruskin, whom I called just now a light _littérateur_ because in these +little Mornings in Florence he is for ever making his readers laugh. +I remembered of course where I was, and in spite of my latent hilarity +felt I had rarely got such a snubbing. I had really been enjoying the +good old city of Florence, but I now learned from Mr. Ruskin that this +was a scandalous waste of charity. I should have gone about with an +imprecation on my lips, I should have worn a face three yards long. I +had taken great pleasure in certain frescoes by Ghirlandaio in the choir +of that very church; but it appeared from one of the little books that +these frescoes were as naught. I had much admired Santa Croce and had +thought the Duomo a very noble affair; but I had now the most positive +assurance I knew nothing about them. After a while, if it was only +ill-humour that was needed for doing honour to the city of the Medici, +I felt that I had risen to a proper level; only now it was Mr. Ruskin +himself I had lost patience with, not the stupid Brunelleschi, not the +vulgar Ghirlandaio. Indeed I lost patience altogether, and asked myself +by what right this informal votary of form pretended to run riot through +a poor charmed _flaneur’s_ quiet contemplations, his attachment to the +noblest of pleasures, his enjoyment of the loveliest of cities. The +little books seemed invidious and insane, and it was only when I +remembered that I had been under no obligation to buy them that I +checked myself in repenting of having done so. + +Then at last my friend arrived and we passed together out of the church, +and, through the first cloister beside it, into a smaller enclosure +where we stood a while to look at the tomb of the Marchesa +Strozzi-Ridolfi, upon which the great Giotto has painted four superb +little pictures. It was easy to see the pictures were superb; but I drew +forth one of my little books again, for I had observed that Mr. Ruskin +spoke of them. Hereupon I recovered my tolerance; for what could be +better in this case, I asked myself, than Mr. Ruskin’s remarks? They +are in fact excellent and charming--full of appreciation of the deep +and simple beauty of the great painter’s work. I read them aloud to my +companion; but my companion was rather, as the phrase is, “put off” + by them. One of the frescoes--it is a picture of the birth of the +Virgin--contains a figure coming through a door. “Of ornament,” I quote, +“there is only the entirely simple outline of the vase which the servant +carries; of colour two or three masses of sober red and pure white, +with brown and grey. That is all,” Mr. Ruskin continues. “And if you are +pleased with this you can see Florence. But if not, by all means amuse +yourself there, if you find it amusing, as long as you like; you +can never see it.” _You can never see it._ This seemed to my friend +insufferable, and I had to shuffle away the book again, so that we might +look at the fresco with the unruffled geniality it deserves. We agreed +afterwards, when in a more convenient place I read aloud a good many +more passages from the precious tracts, that there are a great many +ways of seeing Florence, as there are of seeing most beautiful and +interesting things, and that it is very dry and pedantic to say that +the happy vision depends upon our squaring our toes with a certain +particular chalk-mark. We see Florence wherever and whenever we enjoy +it, and for enjoying it we find a great many more pretexts than Mr. +Ruskin seems inclined to allow. My friend and I convinced ourselves +also, however, that the little books were an excellent purchase, on +account of the great charm and felicity of much of their incidental +criticism; to say nothing, as I hinted just now, of their being +extremely amusing. Nothing in fact is more comical than the familiar +asperity of the author’s style and the pedagogic fashion in which he +pushes and pulls his unhappy pupils about, jerking their heads toward +this, rapping their knuckles for that, sending them to stand in +corners and giving them Scripture texts to copy. But it is neither the +felicities nor the aberrations of detail, in Mr. Ruskin’s writings, that +are the main affair for most readers; it is the general tone that, as +I have said, puts them off or draws them on. For many persons he will +never bear the test of being read in this rich old Italy, where art, so +long as it really lived at all, was spontaneous, joyous, irresponsible. +If the reader is in daily contact with those beautiful Florentine +works which do still, in away, force themselves into notice through the +vulgarity and cruelty of modern profanation, it will seem to him that +this commentator’s comment is pitched in the strangest falsetto key. +“One may read a hundred pages of this sort of thing,” said my friend, +“without ever dreaming that he is talking about _art_. You can say +nothing worse about him than that.” Which is perfectly true. Art is the +one corner of human life in which we may take our ease. To justify our +presence there the only thing demanded of us is that we shall have felt +the representational impulse. In other connections our impulses are +conditioned and embarrassed; we are allowed to have only so many as +are consistent with those of our neighbours; with their convenience +and well-being, with their convictions and prejudices, their rules and +regulations. Art means an escape from all this. Wherever her shining +standard floats the need for apology and compromise is over; there it +is enough simply that we please or are pleased. There the tree is judged +only by its fruits. If these are sweet the tree is justified--and not +less so the consumer. + +One may read a great many pages of Mr. Ruskin without getting a hint of +this delightful truth; a hint of the not unimportant fact that art after +all is made for us and not we for art. This idea that the value of +a work is in the amount of illusion it yields is conspicuous by its +absence. And as for Mr. Ruskin’s world’s being a place--his world of +art--where we may take life easily, woe to the luckless mortal who +enters it with any such disposition. Instead of a garden of delight, he +finds a sort of assize court in perpetual session. Instead of a place +in which human responsibilities are lightened and suspended, he finds a +region governed by a kind of Draconic legislation. His responsibilities +indeed are tenfold increased; the gulf between truth and error is for +ever yawning at his feet; the pains and penalties of this same error are +advertised, in apocalyptic terminology, upon a thousand sign-posts; and +the rash intruder soon begins to look back with infinite longing to the +lost paradise of the artless. There can be no greater want of tact in +dealing with those things with which men attempt to ornament life than +to be perpetually talking about “error.” A truce to all rigidities is +the law of the place; the only thing absolute there is that some force +and some charm have worked. The grim old bearer of the scales excuses +herself; she feels this not to be her province. Differences here are not +iniquity and righteousness; they are simply variations of temperament, +kinds of curiosity. We are not under theological government. + + +VI + +It was very charming, in the bright, warm days, to wander from one +corner of Florence to another, paying one’s respects again to remembered +masterpieces. It was pleasant also to find that memory had played no +tricks and that the rarest things of an earlier year were as rare as +ever. To enumerate these felicities would take a great deal of space; +for I never had been more struck with the mere quantity of brilliant +Florentine work. Even giving up the Duomo and Santa Croce to Mr. Ruskin +as very ill-arranged edifices, the list of the Florentine treasures is +almost inexhaustible. Those long outer galleries of the Uffizi had +never beguiled me more; sometimes there were not more than two or +three figures standing there, Baedeker in hand, to break the charming +perspective. One side of this upstairs portico, it will be remembered, +is entirely composed of glass; a continuity of old-fashioned windows, +draped with white curtains of rather primitive fashion, which hang there +till they acquire a perceptible tone. The light, passing through +them, is softly filtered and diffused; it rests mildly upon the +old marbles--chiefly antique Roman busts--which stand in the narrow +intervals of the casements. It is projected upon the numerous pictures +that cover the opposite wall and that are not by any means, as a general +thing, the gems of the great collection; it imparts a faded brightness +to the old ornamental arabesques upon the painted wooden ceiling, and it +makes a great soft shining upon the marble floor, in which, as you look +up and down, you see the strolling tourists and the motionless copyists +almost reflected. I don’t know why I should find all this very pleasant, +but in fact, I have seldom gone into the Uffizi without walking the +length of this third-story cloister, between the (for the most part) +third-rate canvases and panels and the faded cotton curtains. Why is +it that in Italy we see a charm in things in regard to which in other +countries we always take vulgarity for granted? If in the city of +New York a great museum of the arts were to be provided, by way of +decoration, with a species of verandah enclosed on one side by a series +of small-paned windows draped in dirty linen, and furnished on the other +with an array of pictorial feebleness, the place being surmounted by +a thinly-painted wooden roof, strongly suggestive of summer heat, +of winter cold, of frequent leakage, those amateurs who had had the +advantage of foreign travel would be at small pains to conceal their +contempt. Contemptible or respectable, to the judicial mind, this quaint +old loggia of the Uffizi admitted me into twenty chambers where I found +as great a number of ancient favourites. I don’t know that I had a +warmer greeting for any old friend than for Andrea del Sarto, that most +touching of painters who is not one of the first. But it was on the +other side of the Arno that I found him in force, in those dusky +drawing-rooms of the Pitti Palace to which you take your way along +the tortuous tunnel that wanders through the houses of Florence and is +supported by the little goldsmiths’ booths on the Ponte Vecchio. In the +rich insufficient light of these beautiful rooms, where, to look at the +pictures, you sit in damask chairs and rest your elbows on tables of +malachite, the elegant Andrea becomes deeply effective. Before long he +has drawn you close. But the great pleasure, after all, was to revisit +the earlier masters, in those specimens of them chiefly that bloom +so unfadingly on the big plain walls of the Academy. Fra Angelico and +Filippo Lippi, Botticelli and Lorenzo di Credi are the clearest, +the sweetest and best of all painters; as I sat for an hour in +their company, in the cold great hall of the institution I have +mentioned--there are shabby rafters above and an immense expanse of +brick tiles below, and many bad pictures as well as good--it seemed +to me more than ever that if one really had to choose one couldn’t do +better than choose here. You may rest at your ease at the Academy, in +this big first room--at the upper end especially, on the left--because +more than many other places it savours of old Florence. More for +instance, in reality, than the Bargello, though the Bargello makes great +pretensions. Beautiful and masterful though the Bargello is, it smells +too strongly of restoration, and, much of old Italy as still lurks in +its furbished and renovated chambers, it speaks even more distinctly +of the ill-mannered young kingdom that has--as “unavoidably” as you +please--lifted down a hundred delicate works of sculpture from the +convent-walls where their pious authors placed them. If the early Tuscan +painters are exquisite I can think of no praise pure enough for the +sculptors of the same period, Donatello and Luca della Robbia, Matteo +Civitale and Mina da Fiesole, who, as I refreshed my memory of them, +seemed to me to leave absolutely nothing to be desired in the way of +straightness of inspiration and grace of invention. The Bargello is full +of early Tuscan sculpture, most of the pieces of which have come from +suppressed religious houses; and even if the visitor be an ardent +liberal he is uncomfortably conscious of the rather brutal process by +which it has been collected. One can hardly envy young Italy the number +of odious things she has had to do. + +The railway journey from Florence to Rome has been altered both for the +better and for the worse; for the better in that it has been shortened +by a couple of hours; for the worse inasmuch as when about half the +distance has been traversed the train deflects to the west and leaves +the beautiful old cities of Assisi, Perugia, Terni, Narni, unvisited. +Of old it was possible to call at these places, in a manner, from the +window of the train; even if you didn’t stop, as you probably couldn’t, +every time you passed, the immensely interesting way in which, like a +loosened belt on an aged and shrunken person, their ample walls held +them easily together was something well worth noting. Now, however, +for compensation, the express train to Rome stops at Orvieto, and in +consequence... In consequence what? What is the result of the stop of +an express train at Orvieto? As I glibly wrote that sentence I suddenly +paused, aware of the queer stuff I was uttering. That an express train +would graze the base of the horrid purple mountain from the apex of +which this dark old Catholic city uplifts the glittering front of +its cathedral--that might have been foretold by a keen observer of +contemporary manners. But that it would really have the grossness to +hang about is a fact over which, as he records it, an inveterate, a +perverse cherisher of the sense of the past order, the order still +largely prevailing at the time of his first visit to Italy, may well +make what is vulgarly called an ado. The train does stop at Orvieto, +not very long, it is true, but long enough to let you out. The same +phenomenon takes place on the following day, when, having visited the +city, you get in again. I availed myself without scruple of both of +these occasions, having formerly neglected to drive to the place in a +post-chaise. But frankly, the railway-station being in the plain and the +town on the summit of an extraordinary hill, you have time to forget +the puffing indiscretion while you wind upwards to the city-gate. The +position of Orvieto is superb--worthy of the “middle distance” of an +eighteenth-century landscape. But, as every one knows, the splendid +Cathedral is the proper attraction of the spot, which, indeed, save +for this fine monument and for its craggy and crumbling ramparts, is a +meanly arranged and, as Italian cities go, not particularly impressive +little town. I spent a beautiful Sunday there and took in the charming +church. I gave it my best attention, though on the whole I fear I found +it inferior to its fame. A high concert of colour, however, is the +densely carved front, richly covered with radiant mosaics. The old white +marble of the sculptured portions is as softly yellow as ancient ivory; +the large exceedingly bright pictures above them flashed and twinkled +in the glorious weather. Very striking and interesting the theological +frescoes of Luca Signorelli, though I have seen compositions of this +general order that appealed to me more. Characteristically fresh, +finally, the clear-faced saints and seraphs, in robes of pink and azure, +whom Fra Angelico has painted upon the ceiling of the great chapel, +along with a noble sitting figure--more expressive of movement than most +of the creations of this pictorial peace-maker--of Christ in judgment. +Yet the interest of the cathedral of Orvieto is mainly not the visible +result, but the historical process that lies behind it; those three +hundred years of the applied devotion of a people of which an American +scholar has written an admirable account.{1} + +1877. + +{1} Charles Eliot Norton, _Notes of Travel and Study in Italy_. + + + + + +A ROMAN HOLIDAY + + +It is certainly sweet to be merry at the right moment; but the right +moment hardly seems to me the ten days of the Roman Carnival. It was +my rather cynical suspicion perhaps that they wouldn’t keep to my +imagination the brilliant promise of legend; but I have been justified +by the event and have been decidedly less conscious of the festal +influences of the season than of the inalienable gravity of the place. +There was a time when the Carnival was a serious matter--that is a +heartily joyous one; but, thanks to the seven-league boots the kingdom +of Italy has lately donned for the march of progress in quite other +directions, the fashion of public revelry has fallen woefully out of +step. The state of mind and manners under which the Carnival was kept in +generous good faith I doubt if an American can exactly conceive: he can +only say to himself that for a month in the year there must have been +things--things considerably of humiliation--it was comfortable to +forget. But now that Italy is made the Carnival is unmade; and we are +not especially tempted to envy the attitude of a population who have +lost their relish for play and not yet acquired to any striking extent +an enthusiasm for work. The spectacle on the Corso has seemed to me, on +the whole, an illustration of that great breach with the past of which +Catholic Christendom felt the somewhat muffled shock in September, 1870. +A traveller acquainted with the fully papal Rome, coming back any time +during the past winter, must have immediately noticed that something +momentous had happened--something hostile to the elements of picture +and colour and “style.” My first warning was that ten minutes after +my arrival I found myself face to face with a newspaper stand. The +impossibility in the other days of having anything in the journalistic +line but the _Osservatore Romano_ and the _Voce della Verità_ used to +seem to me much connected with the extraordinary leisure of thought and +stillness of mind to which the place admitted you. But now the slender +piping of the Voice of Truth is stifled by the raucous note of eventide +vendors of the _Capitale_, the _Libertà_ and the _Fanfulla_; and Rome +reading unexpurgated news is another Rome indeed. For every subscriber +to the _Libertà_ there may well be an antique masker and reveller less. +As striking a sign of the new régime is the extraordinary increase of +population. The Corso was always a well-filled street, but now it’s +a perpetual crush. I never cease to wonder where the new-comers are +lodged, and how such spotless flowers of fashion as the gentlemen who +stare at the carriages can bloom in the atmosphere of those _camere +mobiliate_ of which I have had glimpses. This, however, is their own +question, and bravely enough they meet it. They proclaimed somehow, to +the first freshness of my wonder, as I say, that by force of numbers +Rome had been secularised. An Italian dandy is a figure visually +to reckon with, but these goodly throngs of them scarce offered +compensation for the absent monsignori, treading the streets in their +purple stockings and followed by the solemn servants who returned on +their behalf the bows of the meaner sort; for the mourning gear of the +cardinals’ coaches that formerly glittered with scarlet and swung with +the weight of the footmen clinging behind; for the certainty that you’ll +not, by the best of traveller’s luck, meet the Pope sitting deep in the +shadow of his great chariot with uplifted fingers like some inaccessible +idol in his shrine. You may meet the King indeed, who is as ugly, as +imposingly ugly, as some idols, though not so inaccessible. The other +day as I passed the Quirinal he drove up in a low carriage with a single +attendant; and a group of men and women who had been waiting near +the gate rushed at him with a number of folded papers. The carriage +slackened pace and he pocketed their offerings with a business-like +air--hat of a good-natured man accepting handbills at a street-corner. +Here was a monarch at his palace gate receiving petitions from his +subjects--being adjured to right their wrongs. The scene ought to have +thrilled me, but somehow it had no more intensity than a woodcut in an +illustrated newspaper. Homely I should call it at most; admirably so, +certainly, for there were lately few sovereigns standing, I believe, +with whom their people enjoyed these filial hand-to-hand relations. The +King this year, however, has had as little to do with the Carnival as +the Pope, and the innkeepers and Americans have marked it for their own. + +It was advertised to begin at half-past two o’clock of a certain +Saturday, and punctually at the stroke of the hour, from my room across +a wide court, I heard a sudden multiplication of sounds and confusion +of tongues in the Corso. I was writing to a friend for whom I cared +more than for any mere romp; but as the minutes elapsed and the hubbub +deepened curiosity got the better of affection, and I remembered that I +was really within eye-shot of an affair the fame of which had ministered +to the daydreams of my infancy. I used to have a scrap-book with a +coloured print of the starting of the bedizened wild horses, and the use +of a library rich in keepsakes and annuals with a frontispiece commonly +of a masked lady in a balcony, the heroine of a delightful tale further +on. Agitated by these tender memories I descended into the street; but +I confess I looked in vain for a masked lady who might serve as a +frontispiece, in vain for any object whatever that might adorn a tale. +Masked and muffled ladies there were in abundance; but their masks were +of ugly wire, perfectly resembling the little covers placed upon strong +cheese in German hotels, and their drapery was a shabby water-proof +with the hood pulled over their chignons. They were armed with great tin +scoops or funnels, with which they solemnly shovelled lime and flour +out of bushel-baskets and down on the heads of the people in the street. +They were packed into balconies all the way along the straight vista of +the Corso, in which their calcareous shower maintained a dense, gritty, +unpalatable fog. The crowd was compact in the street, and the Americans +in it were tossing back confetti out of great satchels hung round their +necks. It was quite the “you’re another” sort of repartee, and less +seasoned than I had hoped with the airy mockery tradition hangs about +this festival. The scene was striking, in a word; but somehow not as +I had dreamed of its being. I stood regardful, I suppose, but with a +peculiarly tempting blankness of visage, for in a moment I received +half a bushel of flour on my too-philosophic head. Decidedly it was an +ignoble form of humour. I shook my ears like an emergent diver, and had +a sudden vision of how still and sunny and solemn, how peculiarly and +undisturbedly themselves, how secure from any intrusion less sympathetic +than one’s own, certain outlying parts of Rome must just then be. The +Carnival had received its deathblow in my imagination; and it has been +ever since but a thin and dusky ghost of pleasure that has flitted at +intervals in and out of my consciousness. + +I turned my back accordingly on the Corso and wandered away to the +grass-grown quarters delightfully free even from the possibility of +a fellow-countryman. And so having set myself an example I have been +keeping Carnival by strolling perversely along the silent circumference +of Rome. I have doubtless lost a great deal. The Princess Margaret has +occupied a balcony opposite the open space which leads into Via Condotti +and, I believe, like the discreet princess she is, has dealt in no +missiles but bonbons, bouquets and white doves. I would have waited +half an hour any day to see the Princess Margaret hold a dove on her +forefinger; but I never chanced to notice any preparation for that +effect. And yet do what you will you can’t really elude the Carnival. As +the days elapse it filters down into the manners of the common people, +and before the week is over the very beggars at the church-doors seem to +have gone to the expense of a domino. When you meet these specimens of +dingy drollery capering about in dusky back-streets at all hours of +the day and night, meet them flitting out of black doorways between the +greasy groups that cluster about Roman thresholds, you feel that a love +of “pranks,” the more vivid the better, must from far back have +been implanted in the Roman temperament with a strong hand. An +unsophisticated American is wonderstruck at the number of persons, of +every age and various conditions, whom it costs nothing in the nature of +an ingenuous blush to walk up and down the streets in the costume of a +theatrical supernumerary. Fathers of families do it at the head of an +admiring progeniture; aunts and uncles and grandmothers do it; all +the family does it, with varying splendour but with the same good +conscience. “A pack of babies!” the doubtless too self-conscious alien +pronounces it for its pains, and tries to imagine himself strutting +along Broadway in a battered tin helmet and a pair of yellow tights. Our +vices are certainly different; it takes those of the innocent sort to be +so ridiculous. A self-consciousness lapsing so easily, in fine, strikes +me as so near a relation to amenity, urbanity and general gracefulness +that, for myself, I should be sorry to lay a tax on it, lest these other +commodities should also cease to come to market. + +I was rewarded, when I had turned away with my ears full of flour, by +a glimpse of an intenser life than the dingy foolery of the Corso. +I walked down by the back streets to the steps mounting to the +Capitol--that long inclined plane, rather, broken at every two paces, +which is the unfailing disappointment, I believe, of tourists primed for +retrospective raptures. Certainly the Capitol seen from this side isn’t +commanding. The hill is so low, the ascent so narrow, Michael Angelo’s +architecture in the quadrangle at the top so meagre, the whole place +somehow so much more of a mole-hill than a mountain, that for the first +ten minutes of your standing there Roman history seems suddenly to have +sunk through a trap-door. It emerges however on the other side, in the +Forum; and here meanwhile, if you get no sense of the sublime, you get +gradually a sense of exquisite composition. Nowhere in Rome is more +colour, more charm, more sport for the eye. The mild incline, during +the winter months, is always covered with lounging sun-seekers, and +especially with those more constantly obvious members of the Roman +population--beggars, soldiers, monks and tourists. The beggars and +peasants lie kicking their heels along that grandest of loafing-places +the great steps of the Ara Coeli. The dwarfish look of the Capitol is +intensified, I think, by the neighbourhood of this huge blank staircase, +mouldering away in disuse, the weeds thick in its crevices, and climbing +to the rudely solemn facade of the church. The sunshine glares on this +great unfinished wall only to light up its featureless despair, its +expression of conscious, irremediable incompleteness. Sometimes, massing +its rusty screen against the deep blue sky, with the little cross and +the sculptured porch casting a clear-cut shadow on the bricks, it seems +to have even more than a Roman desolation, it confusedly suggests Spain +and Africa--lands with no latent _risorgimenti_, with absolutely +nothing but a fatal past. The legendary wolf of Rome has lately been +accommodated with a little artificial grotto, among the cacti and the +palms, in the fantastic triangular garden squeezed between the steps of +the church and the ascent to the Capitol, where she holds a perpetual +levee and “draws” apparently as powerfully as the Pope himself. Above, +in the piazzetta before the stuccoed palace which rises so jauntily on a +basement of thrice its magnitude, are more loungers and knitters in the +sun, seated round the massively inscribed base of the statue of Marcus +Aurelius. Hawthorne has perfectly expressed the attitude of this +admirable figure in saying that it extends its arm with “a command which +is in itself a benediction.” I doubt if any statue of king or captain +in the public places of the world has more to commend it to the general +heart. Irrecoverable simplicity--residing so in irrecoverable Style--has +no sturdier representative. Here is an impression that the sculptors of +the last three hundred years have been laboriously trying to reproduce; +but contrasted with this mild old monarch their prancing horsemen +suggest a succession of riding-masters taking out young ladies’ +schools. The admirably human character of the figure survives the rusty +decomposition of the bronze and the slight “debasement” of the art; and +one may call it singular that in the capital of Christendom the portrait +most suggestive of a Christian conscience is that of a pagan emperor. + +You recover in some degree your stifled hopes of sublimity as you +pass beyond the palace and take your choice of either curving slope to +descend into the Forum. Then you see that the little stuccoed edifice +is but a modern excrescence on the mighty cliff of a primitive +construction, whose great squares of porous tufa, as they underlie each +other, seem to resolve themselves back into the colossal cohesion of +unhewn rock. There are prodigious strangenesses in the union of +this airy and comparatively fresh-faced superstructure and these +deep-plunging, hoary foundations; and few things in Rome are more +entertaining to the eye than to measure the long plumb-line which drops +from the inhabited windows of the palace, with their little over-peeping +balconies, their muslin curtains and their bird-cages, down to the +rugged constructional work of the Republic. In the Forum proper the +sublime is eclipsed again, though the late extension of the excavations +gives a chance for it. + +Nothing in Rome helps your fancy to a more vigorous backward flight than +to lounge on a sunny day over the railing which guards the great central +researches. It “says” more things to you than you can repeat to see the +past, the ancient world, as you stand there, bodily turned up with the +spade and transformed from an immaterial, inaccessible fact of time into +a matter of soils and surfaces. The pleasure is the same--in kind--as +what you enjoy of Pompeii, and the pain the same. It wasn’t here, +however, that I found my compensation for forfeiting the spectacle on +the Corso, but in a little church at the end of the narrow byway which +diverges up the Palatine from just beside the Arch of Titus. This byway +leads you between high walls, then takes a bend and introduces you to a +long row of rusty, dusty little pictures of the stations of the cross. +Beyond these stands a small church with a front so modest that you +hardly recognise it till you see the leather curtain. I never see a +leather curtain without lifting it; it is sure to cover a constituted +_scene_ of some sort--good, bad or indifferent. The scene this time was +meagre--whitewash and tarnished candlesticks and mouldy muslin flowers +being its principal features. I shouldn’t have remained if I hadn’t +been struck with the attitude of the single worshipper--a young priest +kneeling before one of the sidealtars, who, as I entered, lifted his +head and gave me a sidelong look so charged with the languor of devotion +that he immediately became an object of interest. He was visiting each +of the altars in turn and kissing the balustrade beneath them. He was +alone in the church, and indeed in the whole region. There were no +beggars even at the door; they were plying their trade on the skirts +of the Carnival. In the entirely deserted place he alone knelt for +religion, and as I sat respectfully by it seemed to me I could hear in +the perfect silence the far-away uproar of the maskers. It was my +late impression of these frivolous people, I suppose, joined with the +extraordinary gravity of the young priest’s face--his pious fatigue, +his droning prayer and his isolation--that gave me just then and there a +supreme vision of the religious passion, its privations and resignations +and exhaustions and its terribly small share of amusement. He was +young and strong and evidently of not too refined a fibre to enjoy the +Carnival; but, planted there with his face pale with fasting and his +knees stiff with praying, he seemed so stern a satire on it and on +the crazy thousands who were preferring it to _his_ way, that I half +expected to see some heavenly portent out of a monastic legend come down +and confirm his choice. Yet I confess that though I wasn’t enamoured of +the Carnival myself, his seemed a grim preference and this forswearing +of the world a terrible game--a gaining one only if your zeal never +falters; a hard fight when it does. In such an hour, to a stout young +fellow like the hero of my anecdote, the smell of incense must seem +horribly stale and the muslin flowers and gilt candlesticks to figure no +great bribe. And it wouldn’t have helped him much to think that not so +very far away, just beyond the Forum, in the Corso, there was sport for +the million, and for nothing. I doubt on the other hand whether my young +priest had thought of this. He had made himself a temple out of the very +elements of his innocence, and his prayers followed each other too +fast for the tempter to slip in a whisper. And so, as I say, I found a +solider fact of human nature than the love of _coriandoli_. + +One of course never passes the Colosseum without paying it one’s +respects--without going in under one of the hundred portals and crossing +the long oval and sitting down a while, generally at the foot of the +cross in the centre. I always feel, as I do so, as if I were seated in +the depths of some Alpine valley. The upper portions of the side toward +the Esquiline look as remote and lonely as an Alpine ridge, and you +raise your eyes to their rugged sky-line, drinking in the sun and +silvered by the blue air, with much the same feeling with which you +would take in a grey cliff on which an eagle might lodge. This roughly +mountainous quality of the great ruin is its chief interest; beauty +of detail has pretty well vanished, especially since the high-growing +wild-flowers have been plucked away by the new government, whose +functionaries, surely, at certain points of their task, must have felt +as if they shared the dreadful trade of those who gather samphire. +Even if you are on your way to the Lateran you won’t grudge the twenty +minutes it will take you, on leaving the Colosseum, to turn away under +the Arch of Constantine, whose noble battered bas-reliefs, with the +chain of tragic statues--fettered, drooping barbarians--round its +summit, I assume you to have profoundly admired, toward the piazzetta of +the church of San Giovanni e Paolo, on the slope of Caelian. No spot in +Rome can show a cluster of more charming accidents. The ancient brick +apse of the church peeps down into the trees of the little wooded walk +before the neighbouring church of San Gregorio, intensely venerable +beneath its excessive modernisation; and a series of heavy brick +buttresses, flying across to an opposite wall, overarches the short, +steep, paved passage which leads into the small square. This is flanked +on one side by the long mediaeval portico of the church of the two +saints, sustained by eight time-blackened columns of granite and marble. +On another rise the great scarce-windowed walls of a Passionist convent, +and on the third the portals of a grand villa, whose tall porter, +with his cockade and silver-topped staff, standing sublime behind his +grating, seems a kind of mundane St. Peter, I suppose, to the beggars +who sit at the church door or lie in the sun along the farther slope +which leads to the gate of the convent. The place always seems to me the +perfection of an out-of-the-way corner--a place you would think twice +before telling people about, lest you should find them there the next +time you were to go. It is such a group of objects, singly and in their +happy combination, as one must come to Rome to find at one’s house +door; but what makes it peculiarly a picture is the beautiful dark +red campanile of the church, which stands embedded in the mass of +the convent. It begins, as so many things in Rome begin, with a stout +foundation of antique travertine, and rises high, in delicately quaint +mediaeval brickwork--little tiers and apertures sustained on miniature +columns and adorned with small cracked slabs of green and yellow marble, +inserted almost at random. When there are three or four brown-breasted +contadini sleeping in the sun before the convent doors, and a departing +monk leading his shadow down over them, I think you will not find +anything in Rome more _sketchable_. + +If you stop, however, to observe everything worthy of your water-colours +you will never reach St. John Lateran. My business was much less with +the interior of that vast and empty, that cold clean temple, which I +have never found peculiarly interesting, than with certain charming +features of its surrounding precinct--the crooked old court beside it, +which admits you to the Baptistery and to a delightful rear-view of +the queer architectural odds and ends that may in Rome compose a florid +ecclesiastical façade. There are more of these, a stranger jumble +of chance detail, of lurking recesses and wanton projections and +inexplicable windows, than I have memory or phrase for; but the gem +of the collection is the oddly perched peaked turret, with its yellow +travertine welded upon the rusty brickwork, which was not meant to be +suspected, and the brickwork retreating beneath and leaving it in the +odd position of a tower _under_ which you may see the sky. As to the +great front of the church overlooking the Porta San Giovanni, you are +not admitted behind the scenes; the term is quite in keeping, for the +architecture has a vastly theatrical air. It is extremely imposing--that +of St. Peter’s alone is more so; and when from far off on the Campagna +you see the colossal images of the mitred saints along the top standing +distinct against the sky, you forget their coarse construction and their +inflated draperies. The view from the great space which stretches from +the church steps to the city wall is the very prince of views. Just +beside you, beyond the great alcove of mosaic, is the Scala Santa, the +marble staircase which (says the legend) Christ descended under the +weight of Pilate’s judgment, and which all Christians must for ever +ascend on their knees; before you is the city gate which opens upon the +Via Appia Nuova, the long gaunt file of arches of the Claudian aqueduct, +their jagged ridge stretching away like the vertebral column of some +monstrous mouldering skeleton, and upon the blooming brown and purple +flats and dells of the Campagna and the glowing blue of the Alban +Mountains, spotted with their white, high-nestling towns; while to your +left is the great grassy space, lined with dwarfish mulberry-trees, +which stretches across to the damp little sister-basilica of Santa Croce +in Gerusalemme. During a former visit to Rome I lost my heart to this +idle tract,{1} + +{1} Utterly overbuilt and gone--1909. + +and wasted much time in sitting on the steps of the church and watching +certain white-cowled friars who were sure to be passing there for the +delight of my eyes. There are fewer friars now, and there are a great +many of the king’s recruits, who inhabit the ex-conventual barracks +adjoining Santa Croce and are led forward to practise their goose-step +on the sunny turf. Here too the poor old cardinals who are no longer +to be seen on the Pincio descend from their mourning-coaches and +relax their venerable knees. These members alone still testify to the +traditional splendour of the princes of the Church; for as they advance +the lifted black petticoat reveals a flash of scarlet stockings and +makes you groan at the victory of civilisation over colour. + +{Illustration: THE FAÇADE OF ST. JOHN LATERAN, ROME.} + +If St. John Lateran disappoints you internally, you have an easy +compensation in pacing the long lane which connects it with Santa +Maria Maggiore and entering the singularly perfect nave of that most +delightful of churches. The first day of my stay in Rome under the +old dispensation I spent in wandering at random through the city, +with accident for my _valet-de-place_. It served me to perfection and +introduced me to the best things; among others to an immediate happy +relation with Santa Maria Maggiore. First impressions, memorable +impressions, are generally irrecoverable; they often leave one the +wiser, but they rarely return in the same form. I remember, of my coming +uninformed and unprepared into the place of worship and of curiosity +that I have named, only that I sat for half an hour on the edge of the +base of one of the marble columns of the beautiful nave and enjoyed a +perfect revel of--what shall I call it?--taste, intelligence, fancy, +perceptive emotion? The place proved so endlessly suggestive that +perception became a throbbing confusion of images, and I departed with +a sense of knowing a good deal that is not set down in Murray. I have +seated myself more than once again at the base of the same column; +but you live your life only once, the parts as well as the whole. The +obvious charm of the church is the elegant grandeur of the nave--its +perfect shapeliness and its rich simplicity, its long double row of +white marble columns and its high flat roof, embossed with intricate +gildings and mouldings. It opens into a choir of an extraordinary +splendour of effect, which I recommend you to look out for of a fine +afternoon. At such a time the glowing western light, entering the high +windows of the tribune, kindles the scattered masses of colour into +sombre bright-ness, scintillates on the great solemn mosaic of the +vault, touches the porphyry columns of the superb baldachino with ruby +lights, and buries its shining shafts in the deep-toned shadows that +hang about frescoes and sculptures and mouldings. The deeper charm even +than in such things, however, is the social or historic note or tone or +atmosphere of the church--I fumble, you see, for my right expression; +the sense it gives you, in common with most of the Roman churches, and +more than any of them, of having been prayed in for several centuries by +an endlessly curious and complex society. It takes no great attention to +let it come to you that the authority of Italian Catholicism has lapsed +not a little in these days; not less also perhaps than to feel that, as +they stand, these deserted temples were the fruit of a society leavened +through and through by ecclesiastical manners, and that they formed for +ages the constant background of the human drama. They are, as one +may say, the _churchiest_ churches in Europe--the fullest of gathered +memories, of the experience of their office. There’s not a figure one +has read of in old-world annals that isn’t to be imagined on proper +occasion kneeling before the lamp-decked Confession beneath the altar of +Santa Maria Maggiore. One sees after all, however, even among the +most palpable realities, very much what the play of one’s imagination +projects there; and I present my remarks simply as a reminder that one’s +constant excursions into these places are not the least interesting +episodes of one’s walks in Rome. + +I had meant to give a simple illustration of the church-habit, so to +speak, but I have given it at such a length as leaves scant space to +touch on the innumerable topics brushed by the pen that begins to take +Roman notes. It is by the aimless _flânerie_ which leaves you free to +follow capriciously every hint of entertainment that you get to know +Rome. The greater part of the life about you goes on in the streets; +and for an observer fresh from a country in which town scenery is at the +least monotonous incident and character and picture seem to abound. I +become conscious with compunction, let me hasten to add, that I have +launched myself thus on the subject of Roman churches and Roman walks +without so much as a preliminary allusion to St. Peter’s. One is apt to +proceed thither on rainy days with intentions of exercise--to put the +case only at that--and to carry these out body and mind. Taken as a walk +not less than as a church, St. Peter’s of course reigns alone. Even +for the profane “constitutional” it serves where the Boulevards, where +Piccadilly and Broadway, fall short, and if it didn’t offer to our use +the grandest area in the world it would still offer the most diverting. +Few great works of art last longer to the curiosity, to the perpetually +transcended attention. You think you have taken the whole thing in, but +it expands, it rises sublime again, and leaves your measure itself poor. +You never let the ponderous leather curtain bang down behind you--your +weak lift of a scant edge of whose padded vastness resembles the +liberty taken in folding back the parchment corner of some mighty folio +page--without feeling all former visits to have been but missed attempts +at apprehension and the actual to achieve your first real possession. +The conventional question is ever as to whether one hasn’t been +“disappointed in the size,” but a few honest folk here and there, I +hope, will never cease to say no. The place struck me from the first as +the hugest thing conceivable--a real exaltation of one’s idea of space; +so that one’s entrance, even from the great empty square which either +glares beneath the deep blue sky or makes of the cool far-cast shadow of +the immense front something that resembles a big slate-coloured country +on a map, seems not so much a going in somewhere as a going out. The +mere man of pleasure in quest of new sensations might well not know +where to better his encounter there of the sublime shock that brings +him, within the threshold, to an immediate gasping pause. There are +days when the vast nave looks mysteriously vaster than on others and +the gorgeous baldachino a longer journey beyond the far-spreading +tessellated plain of the pavement, and when the light has yet a quality +which lets things loom their largest, while the scattered figures--I +mean the human, for there are plenty of others--mark happily the scale +of items and parts. Then you have only to stroll and stroll and gaze and +gaze; to watch the glorious altar-canopy lift its bronze architecture, +its colossal embroidered contortions, like a temple within a temple, and +feel yourself, at the bottom of the abysmal shaft of the dome, dwindle +to a crawling dot. + +Much of the constituted beauty resides in the fact that it is all +general beauty, that you are appealed to by no specific details, or that +these at least, practically never importunate, are as taken for granted +as the lieutenants and captains are taken for granted in a great +standing army--among whom indeed individual aspects may figure here +the rather shifting range of decorative dignity in which details, when +observed, often prove poor (though never not massive and substantially +precious) and sometimes prove ridiculous. The sculptures, with the sole +exception of Michael Angelo’s ineffable “Pieta,” which lurks obscurely +in a side-chapel--this indeed to my sense the rarest artistic +_combination_ of the greatest things the hand of man has produced--are +either bad or indifferent; and the universal incrustation of marble, +though sumptuous enough, has a less brilliant effect than much later +work of the same sort, that for instance of St. Paul’s without the +Walls. The supreme beauty is the splendidly sustained simplicity of the +whole. The thing represents a prodigious imagination extraordinarily +strained, yet strained, at its happiest pitch, without breaking. Its +happiest pitch I say, because this is the only creation of its strenuous +author in presence of which you are in presence of serenity. You +may invoke the idea of ease at St. Peter’s without a sense of +sacrilege--which you can hardly do, if you are at all spiritually +nervous, in Westminster Abbey or Notre Dame. The vast enclosed clearness +has much to do with the idea. There are no shadows to speak of, no +marked effects of shade; only effects of light innumerably--points at +which this element seems to mass itself in airy density and scatter +itself in enchanting gradations and cadences. It performs the office of +gloom or of mystery in Gothic churches; hangs like a rolling mist along +the gilded vault of the nave, melts into bright interfusion the mosaic +scintillations of the dome, clings and clusters and lingers, animates +the whole huge and otherwise empty shell. A good Catholic, I suppose, is +the same Catholic anywhere, before the grandest as well as the humblest +altars; but to a visitor not formally enrolled St. Peter’s speaks less +of aspiration than of full and convenient assurance. The soul infinitely +expands there, if one will, but all on its quite human level. It marvels +at the reach of our dreams and the immensity of our resources. To be so +impressed and put in our place, we say, is to be sufficiently “saved”; +we can’t be more than the heaven itself; and what specifically celestial +beauty such a show or such a substitute may lack it makes up for in +certainty and tangibility. And yet if one’s hours on the scene are not +actually spent in praying, the spirit seeks it again as for the finer +comfort, for the blessing, exactly, of its example, its protection and +its exclusion. When you are weary of the swarming democracy of your +fellow-tourists, of the unremunerative aspects of human nature on Corso +and Pincio, of the oppressively frequent combination of coronets on +carriage panels and stupid faces in carriages, of addled brains and +lacquered boots, of ruin and dirt and decay, of priests and beggars and +takers of advantage, of the myriad tokens of a halting civilisation, the +image of the great temple depresses the balance of your doubts, seems to +rise above even the highest tide of vulgarity and make you still believe +in the heroic will and the heroic act. It’s a relief, in other words, to +feel that there’s nothing but a cab-fare between your pessimism and one +of the greatest of human achievements. + +{Illustration: THE COLONNADE OF ST. PETER, ROME.} + +This might serve as a Lenten peroration to these remarks of mine which +have strayed so woefully from their jovial text, save that I ought +fairly to confess that my last impression of the Carnival was altogether +Carnivalesque.. The merry-making of Shrove Tuesday had life and +felicity; the dead letter of tradition broke out into nature and grace. +I pocketed my scepticism and spent a long afternoon on the Corso. Almost +every one was a masker, but you had no need to conform; the pelting rain +of confetti effectually disguised you. I can’t say I found it all +very exhilarating; but here and there I noticed a brighter episode--a +capering clown inflamed with contagious jollity, some finer humourist +forming a circle every thirty yards to crow at his indefatigable +sallies. One clever performer so especially pleased me that I should +have been glad to catch a glimpse of the natural man. You imagined for +him that he was taking a prodigious intellectual holiday and that +his gaiety was in inverse ratio to his daily mood. Dressed as a needy +scholar, in an ancient evening-coat and with a rusty black hat and +gloves fantastically patched, he carried a little volume carefully +under his arm. His humours were in excellent taste, his whole manner the +perfection of genteel comedy. The crowd seemed to relish him vastly, +and he at once commanded a glee-fully attentive audience. Many of his +sallies I lost; those I caught were excellent. His trick was often +to begin by taking some one urbanely and caressingly by the chin and +complimenting him on the _intelligenza della sua fisionomia_. I kept +near him as long as I could; for he struck me as a real ironic artist, +cherishing a disinterested, and yet at the same time a motived and +a moral, passion for the grotesque. I should have liked, however--if +indeed I shouldn’t have feared--to see him the next morning, or when he +unmasked that night over his hard-earned supper in a smoky _trattoria_. +As the evening went on the crowd thickened and became a motley press of +shouting, pushing, scrambling, everything but squabbling, revellers. The +rain of missiles ceased at dusk, but the universal deposit of chalk and +flour was trampled into a cloud made lurid by flaring pyramids of the +gas-lamps that replaced for the occasion the stingy Roman luminaries. +Early in the evening came off the classic exhibition of the +_moccoletti_, which I but half saw, like a languid reporter resigned +beforehand to be cashiered for want of enterprise. From the mouth of +a side-street, over a thousand heads, I caught a huge slow-moving +illuminated car, from which blue-lights and rockets and Roman candles +were in course of discharge, meeting all in a dim fuliginous glare +far above the house-tops. It was like a glimpse of some public orgy in +ancient Babylon. In the small hours of the morning, walking homeward +from a private entertainment, I found Ash Wednesday still kept at bay. +The Corso, flaring with light, smelt like a circus. Every one was taking +friendly liberties with every one else and using up the dregs of his +festive energy in convulsive hootings and gymnastics. Here and there +certain indefatigable spirits, clad all in red after the manner of +devils and leaping furiously about with torches, were supposed to +affright you. But they shared the universal geniality and bequeathed +me no midnight fears as a pretext for keeping Lent, the _carnevale dei +preti_, as I read in that profanely radical sheet the _Capitale_. Of +this too I have been having glimpses. Going lately into Santa Francesca +Romana, the picturesque church near the Temple of Peace, I found a feast +for the eyes--a dim crimson-toned light through curtained windows, +a great festoon of tapers round the altar, a bulging girdle of lamps +before the sunken shrine beneath, and a dozen white-robed Dominicans +scattered in the happiest composition on the pavement. It was better +than the _moccoletti_. + +1873. + + + + + +ROMAN RIDES + + +I shall always remember the first I took: out of the Porta del Popolo, +to where the Ponte Molle, whose single arch sustains a weight of +historic tradition, compels the sallow Tiber to flow between its four +great-mannered ecclesiastical statues, over the crest of the hill and +along the old posting-road to Florence. It was mild midwinter, the +season peculiarly of colour on the Roman Campagna; and the light was +full of that mellow purple glow, that tempered intensity, which haunts +the after-visions of those who have known Rome like the memory of some +supremely irresponsible pleasure. An hour away I pulled up and at the +edge of a meadow gazed away for some time into remoter distances. Then +and there, it seemed to me, I measured the deep delight of knowing +the Campagna. But I saw more things in it than I can easily tell. The +country rolled away around me into slopes and dells of long-drawn +grace, chequered with purple and blue and blooming brown. The lights and +shadows were at play on the Sabine Mountains--an alternation of tones +so exquisite as to be conveyed only by some fantastic comparison to +sapphire and amber. In the foreground a contadino in his cloak and +peaked hat jogged solitary on his ass; and here and there in the +distance, among blue undulations, some white village, some grey tower, +helped deliciously to make the picture the typical “Italian landscape” + of old-fashioned art. It was so bright and yet so sad, so still and yet +so charged, to the supersensuous ear, with the murmur of an extinguished +life, that you could only say it was intensely and adorably strange, +could only impute to the whole overarched scene an unsurpassed +secret for bringing tears of appreciation to no matter how +ignorant--archaeologically ignorant--eyes. To ride once, in these +conditions, is of course to ride again and to allot to the Campagna a +generous share of the time one spends in Rome. + +It is a pleasure that doubles one’s horizon, and one can scarcely say +whether it enlarges or limits one’s impression of the city proper. It +certainly makes St. Peter’s seem a trifle smaller and blunts the edge of +one’s curiosity in the Forum. It must be the effect of the experience, +at all extended, that when you think of Rome afterwards you will think +still respectfully and regretfully enough of the Vatican and the Pincio, +the streets and the picture-making street life; but will even more +wonder, with an irrepressible contraction of the heart, when again you +shall feel yourself bounding over the flower-smothered turf, or pass +from one framed picture to another beside the open arches of the +crumbling aqueducts. You look back at the City so often from some grassy +hill-top--hugely compact within its walls, with St. Peter’s overtopping +all things and yet seeming small, and the vast girdle of marsh and +meadow receding on all sides to the mountains and the sea--that you come +to remember it at last as hardly more than a respectable parenthesis in +a great sweep of generalisation. Within the walls, on the other hand, +you think of your intended ride as the most romantic of all your +possibilities; of the Campagna generally as an illimitable experience. +One’s rides certainly give Rome an inordinate scope for the +reflective--by which I suppose I mean after all the aesthetic and the +“esoteric”--life. To dwell in a city which, much as you grumble at +it, is after all very fairly a modern city; with crowds and shops and +theatres and cafes and balls and receptions and dinner-parties, and all +the modern confusion of social pleasures and pains; to have at your +door the good and evil of it all; and yet to be able in half an hour to +gallop away and leave it a hundred miles, a hundred years, behind, and +to look at the tufted broom glowing on a lonely tower-top in the still +blue air, and the pale pink asphodels trembling none the less for the +stillness, and the shaggy-legged shepherds leaning on their sticks in +motionless brotherhood with the heaps of ruin, and the scrambling goats +and staggering little kids treading out wild desert smells from the +top of hollow-sounding mounds; and then to come back through one of the +great gates and a couple of hours later find yourself in the “world,” + dressed, introduced, entertained, inquiring, talking about “Middlemarch” + to a young English lady or listening to Neapolitan songs from a +gentleman in a very low-cut shirt--all this is to lead in a manner a +double life and to gather from the hurrying hours more impressions than +a mind of modest capacity quite knows how to dispose of. + +I touched lately upon this theme with a friend who, I fancied, would +understand me, and who immediately assured me that he had just spent a +day that this mingled diversity of sensation made to the days one spends +elsewhere what an uncommonly good novel may be to the daily paper. +“There was an air of idleness about it, if you will,” he said, “and it +was certainly pleasant enough to have been wrong. Perhaps, being after +all unused to long stretches of dissipation, this was why I had a +half-feeling that I was reading an odd chapter in the history of a +person very much more of a _héros de roman_ than myself.” Then he +proceeded to relate how he had taken a long ride with a lady whom he +extremely admired. “We turned off from the Tor di Quinto Road to that +castellated farm-house you know of--once a Ghibelline fortress--whither +Claude Lorraine used to come to paint pictures of which the surrounding +landscape is still so artistically, so compositionally, suggestive. We +went into the inner court, a cloister almost, with the carven capitals +of its loggia columns, and looked at a handsome child swinging shyly +against the half-opened door of a room whose impenetrable shadow, behind +her, made her, as it were, a sketch in bituminous water-colours. We +talked with the farmer, a handsome, pale, fever-tainted fellow with a +well-to-do air that didn’t in the least deter his affability from a turn +compatible with the acceptance of small coin; and then we galloped away +and away over the meadows which stretch with hardly a break to Veii. The +day was strangely delicious, with a cool grey sky and just a touch of +moisture in the air stirred by our rapid motion. The Campagna, in the +colourless even light, was more solemn and romantic than ever; and a +ragged shepherd, driving a meagre straggling flock, whom we stopped to +ask our way of, was a perfect type of pastoral, weather-beaten misery. +He was precisely the shepherd for the foreground of a scratchy etching. +There were faint odours of spring in the air, and the grass here and +there was streaked with great patches of daisies; but it was spring +with a foreknowledge of autumn, a day to be enjoyed with a substrain of +sadness, the foreboding of regret, a day somehow to make one feel as if +one had seen and felt a great deal--quite, as I say, like a _heros +de roman_. Touching such characters, it was the illustrious Pelham, +I think, who, on being asked if he rode, replied that he left those +violent exercises to the ladies. But under such a sky, in such an +air, over acres of daisied turf, a long, long gallop is certainly +a supersubtle joy. The elastic bound of your horse is the poetry +of motion; and if you are so happy as to add to it not the prose of +companionship riding comes almost to affect you as a spiritual exercise. +My gallop, at any rate,” said my friend, “threw me into a mood which +gave an extraordinary zest to the rest of the day.” He was to go to a +dinner-party at a villa on the edge of Rome, and Madam X--, who was also +going, called for him in her carriage. “It was a long drive,” he went +on, “through the Forum, past the Colosseum. She told me a long story +about a most interesting person. Toward the end my eyes caught through +the carriage window a slab of rugged sculptures. We were passing under +the Arch of Constantine. In the hall pavement of the villa is a rare +antique mosaic--one of the largest and most perfect; the ladies on their +way to the drawing-room trail over it the flounces of Worth. We drove +home late, and there’s my day.” + +On your exit from most of the gates of Rome you have generally +half-an-hour’s progress through winding lanes, many of which are hardly +less charming than the open meadows. On foot the walls and high hedges +would vex you and spoil your walk; but in the saddle you generally +overtop them, to an endless peopling of the minor vision. Yet a Roman +wall in the springtime is for that matter almost as interesting as +anything it conceals. Crumbling grain by grain, coloured and mottled +to a hundred tones by sun and storm, with its rugged structure of brick +extruding through its coarse complexion of peeling stucco, its creeping +lacework of wandering ivy starred with miniature violets, and its wild +fringe of stouter flowers against the sky--it is as little as possible a +blank partition; it is practically a luxury of landscape. At the moment +at which I write, in mid-April, all the ledges and cornices are wreathed +with flaming poppies, nodding there as if they knew so well what faded +greys and yellows are an offset to their scarlet. But the best point in +a dilapidated enclosing surface of vineyard or villa is of course the +gateway, lifting its great arch of cheap rococo scroll-work, its balls +and shields and mossy dish-covers--as they always perversely figure +to me--and flanked with its dusky cypresses. I never pass one without +taking out my mental sketch-book and jotting it down as a vignette in +the insubstantial record of my ride. They are as sad and dreary as if +they led to the moated grange where Mariana waited in desperation for +something to happen; and it’s easy to take the usual inscription over +the porch as a recommendation to those who enter to renounce all hope of +anything but a glass of more or less agreeably acrid _vino romano_. For +what you chiefly see over the walls and at the end of the straight short +avenue of rusty cypresses are the appurtenances of a _vigna_--a couple +of acres of little upright sticks blackening in the sun, and a vast +sallow-faced, scantily windowed mansion, whose expression denotes +little of the life of the mind beyond what goes to the driving of a hard +bargain over the tasted hogsheads. If Mariana is there she certainly has +no pile of old magazines to beguile her leisure. The life of the mind, +if the term be in any application here not ridiculous, appears to any +asker of curious questions, as he wanders about Rome, the very thinnest +deposit of the past. Within the rococo gateway, which itself has a +vaguely esthetic self-consciousness, at the end of the cypress walk, +you will probably see a mythological group in rusty marble--a Cupid and +Psyche, a Venus and Paris, an Apollo and Daphne--the relic of an age +when a Roman proprietor thought it fine to patronise the arts. But I +imagine you are safe in supposing it to constitute the only allusion +savouring of culture that has been made on the premises for three or +four generations. + +There is a franker cheerfulness--though certainly a proper amount of +that forlornness which lurks about every object to which the Campagna +forms a background--in the primitive little taverns where, on the +homeward stretch, in the waning light, you are often glad to rein up and +demand a bottle of their best. Their best and their worst are indeed +the same, though with a shifting price, and plain _vino bianco_ or _vino +rosso_ (rarely both) is the sole article of refreshment in which they +deal. There is a ragged bush over the door, and within, under a dusky +vault, on crooked cobble-stones, sit half-a-dozen contadini in their +indigo jackets and goatskin breeches and with their elbows on the table. +There is generally a rabble of infantile beggars at the door, pretty +enough in their dusty rags, with their fine eyes and intense Italian +smile, to make you forget your private vow of doing your individual best +I to make these people, whom you like so much, unlearn their old vices. +Was Porta Pia bombarded three years ago that Peppino should still grow +up to whine for a copper? But the Italian shells had no direct message +for Peppino’s stomach--and you are going to a dinner-party at a villa. +So Peppino “points” an instant for the copper in the dust and grows up a +Roman beggar. The whole little place represents the most primitive form +of hostelry; but along any of the roads leading out of the city you may +find establishments of a higher type, with Garibaldi, superbly mounted +and foreshortened, painted on the wall, or a lady in a low-necked dress +opening a fictive lattice with irresistible hospitality, and a yard with +the classic vine-wreathed arbour casting thin shadows upon benches and +tables draped and cushioned with the white dust from which the highways +from the gates borrow most of their local colour. None the less, I +say, you avoid the highroads, and, if you are a person of taste, don’t +grumble at the occasional need of following the walls of the city. City +walls, to a properly constituted American, can never be an object of +indifference; and it is emphatically “no end of a sensation” to pace in +the shadow of this massive cincture of Rome. I have found myself, as I +skirted its base, talking of trivial things, but never without a sudden +reflection on the deplorable impermanence of first impressions. A +twelvemonth ago the raw plank fences of a Boston suburb, inscribed with +the virtues of healing drugs, bristled along my horizon: now I glance +with idle eyes at a compacted antiquity in which a more learned sense +may read portentous dates and signs--Servius, Aurelius, Honorius. But +even to idle eyes the prodigious, the continuous thing bristles with +eloquent passages. In some places, where the huge brickwork is black +with time and certain strange square towers look down at you with still +blue eyes, the Roman sky peering through lidless loopholes, and there is +nothing but white dust in the road and solitude in the air, I might take +myself for a wandering Tartar touching on the confines of the Celestial +Empire. The wall of China must have very much such a gaunt robustness. +The colour of the Roman ramparts is everywhere fine, and their rugged +patchwork has been subdued by time and weather into a mellow harmony +that the brush only asks to catch up. On the northern side of the city, +behind the Vatican, St. Peter’s and the Trastevere, I have seen them +glowing in the late afternoon with the tones of ancient bronze and rusty +gold. Here at various points they are embossed with the Papal insignia, +the tiara with its flying bands and crossed keys; to the high style +of which the grace that attaches to almost any lost cause--even if not +quite the “tender” grace of a day that is dead--considerably adds a +style. With the dome of St. Peter’s resting on their cornice and the +hugely clustered architecture of the Vatican rising from them as from a +terrace, they seem indeed the valid bulwark of an ecclesiastical city. +Vain bulwark, alas! sighs the sentimental tourist, fresh from the meagre +entertainment of this latter Holy Week. But he may find monumental +consolation in this neighbourhood at a source where, as I pass, I never +fail to apply for it. At half-an-hour’s walk beyond Porta San Pancrazio, +beneath the wall of the Villa Doria, is a delightfully pompous +ecclesiastical gateway of the seventeenth century, erected by Paul V to +commemorate his restoration of the aqueducts through which the stream +bearing his name flows towards the fine florid portico protecting its +clear-sheeted outgush on the crest of the Janiculan. It arches across +the road in the most ornamental manner of the period, and one can hardly +pause before it without seeming to assist at a ten minutes’ revival of +old Italy--without feeling as if one were in a cocked hat and sword and +were coming up to Rome, in another mood than Luther’s, with a letter of +recommendation to the mistress of a cardinal. + +The Campagna differs greatly on the two sides of the Tiber; and it is +hard to say which, for the rider, has the greater charm. The half-dozen +rides you may take from Porta San Giovanni possess the perfection of +traditional Roman interest and lead you through a far-strewn wilderness +of ruins--a scattered maze of tombs and towers and nameless fragments of +antique masonry. The landscape here has two great features; close before +you on one side is the long, gentle swell of the Alban Hills, deeply, +fantastically blue in most weathers, and marbled with the vague white +masses of their scattered towns and villas. It would be difficult to +draw the hard figure to a softer curve than that with which the heights +sweep from Albano to the plain; this a perfect example of the classic +beauty of line in the Italian landscape--that beauty which, when it +fills the background of a picture, makes us look in the foreground for +a broken column couched upon flowers and a shepherd piping to dancing +nymphs. At your side, constantly, you have the broken line of the +Claudian Aqueduct, carrying its broad arches far away into the plain. +The meadows along which it lies are not the smoothest in the world for +a gallop, but there is no pleasure greater than to wander near it. It +stands knee-deep in the flower-strewn grass, and its rugged piers are +hung with ivy as the columns of a church are draped for a festa. Every +archway is a picture, massively framed, of the distance beyond--of the +snow-tipped Sabines and lonely Soracte. As the spring advances the whole +Campagna smiles and waves with flowers; but I think they are nowhere +more rank and lovely than in the shifting shadow of the aqueducts, where +they muffle the feet of the columns and smother the half-dozen brooks +which wander in and out like silver meshes between the legs of a file +of giants. They make a niche for themselves too in every crevice and +tremble on the vault of the empty conduits. The ivy hereabouts in the +springtime is peculiarly brilliant and delicate; and though it cloaks +and muffles these Roman fragments far less closely than the castles +and abbeys of England it hangs with the light elegance of all Italian +vegetation. It is partly doubtless because their mighty outlines are +still unsoftened that the aqueducts are so impressive. They seem +the very source of the solitude in which they stand; they look like +architectural spectres and loom through the light mists of their grassy +desert, as you recede along the line, with the same insubstantial +vastness as if they rose out of Egyptian sands. It is a great +neighbourhood of ruins, many of which, it must be confessed, you have +applauded in many an album. But station a peasant with sheepskin +coat and bandaged legs in the shadow of a tomb or tower best known to +drawing-room art, and scatter a dozen goats on the mound above him, and +the picture has a charm which has not yet been sketched away. + +The other quarter of the Campagna has wider fields and smoother turf and +perhaps a greater number of delightful rides; the earth is sounder, and +there are fewer pitfalls and ditches. The land for the most part lies +higher and catches more wind, and the grass is here and there for great +stretches as smooth and level as a carpet. You have no Alban Mountains +before you, but you have in the distance the waving ridge of the nearer +Apennines, and west of them, along the course of the Tiber, the long +seaward level of deep-coloured fields, deepening as they recede to the +blue and purple of the sea itself. Beyond them, of a very clear day, +you may see the glitter of the Mediterranean. These are the occasions +perhaps to remember most fondly, for they lead you to enchanting nooks, +and the landscape has details of the highest refinement. Indeed when my +sense reverts to the lingering impressions of so blest a time, it seems +a fool’s errand to have attempted to express them, and a waste of words +to do more than recommend the reader to go citywards at twilight of the +end of March, making for Porta Cavalleggieri, and note what he sees. At +this hour the Campagna is to the last point its melancholy self, and +I remember roadside “effects” of a strange and intense suggestiveness. +Certain mean, mouldering villas behind grass-grown courts have an +indefinably sinister look; there was one in especial of which it was +impossible not to argue that a despairing creature must have once +committed suicide there, behind bolted door and barred window, and that +no one has since had the pluck to go in and see why he never came out. +Every wayside mark of manners, of history, every stamp of the past in +the country about Rome, touches my sense to a thrill, and I may thus +exaggerate the appeal of very common things. This is the more likely +because the appeal seems ever to rise out of heaven knows what depths +of ancient trouble. To delight in the aspects of _sentient_ ruin might +appear a heartless pastime, and the pleasure, I confess, shows the note +of perversity. The sombre and the hard are as common an influence from +southern things as the soft and the bright, I think; sadness rarely +fails to assault a northern observer when he misses what he takes for +comfort. Beauty is no compensation for the loss, only making it more +poignant. Enough beauty of climate hangs over these Roman cottages and +farm-houses--beauty of light, of atmosphere and of vegetation; but their +charm for the maker-out of the stories in things is the way the golden +air shows off their desolation. Man lives more with Nature in Italy than +in New or than in Old England; she does more work for him and gives +him more holidays than in our short-summered climes, and his home is +therefore much more bare of devices for helping him to do without her, +forget her and forgive her. These reflections are perhaps the source of +the character you find in a moss-coated stone stairway climbing outside +of a wall; in a queer inner court, befouled with rubbish and drearily +bare of convenience; in an ancient quaintly carven well, worked with +infinite labour from an overhanging window; in an arbour of time-twisted +vines under which you may sit with your feet in the dirt and remember +as a dim fable that there are races for which the type of domestic +allurement is the parlour hearth-rug. For reasons apparent or otherwise +these things amuse me beyond expression, and I am never weary of staring +into gateways, of lingering by dreary, shabby, half-barbaric farm-yards, +of feasting a foolish gaze on sun-cracked plaster and unctuous indoor +shadows. I mustn’t forget, however, that it’s not for wayside effects +that one rides away behind St. Peter’s, but for the strong sense +of wandering over boundless space, of seeing great classic lines of +landscape, of watching them dispose themselves into pictures so full of +“style” that you can think of no painter who deserves to have you admit +that they suggest him--hardly knowing whether it is better pleasure +to gallop far and drink deep of air and grassy distance and the whole +delicious opportunity, or to walk and pause and linger, and try and +grasp some ineffaceable memory of sky and colour and outline. Your +pace can hardly help falling into a contemplative measure at the time, +everywhere so wonderful, but in Rome so persuasively divine, when the +winter begins palpably to soften and quicken. Far out on the Campagna, +early in February, you feel the first vague earthly emanations, which +in a few weeks come wandering into the heart of the city and throbbing +through the close, dark streets. Springtime in Rome is an immensely +poetic affair; but you must stand often far out in the ancient waste, +between grass and sky, to measure its deep, full, steadily accelerated +rhythm. The winter has an incontestable beauty, and is pre-eminently the +time of colour--the time when it is no affectation, but homely verity, +to talk about the “purple” tone of the atmosphere. As February comes and +goes your purple is streaked with green and the rich, dark bloom of the +distance begins to lose its intensity. But your loss is made up by other +gains; none more precious than that inestimable gain to the ear--the +disembodied voice of the lark. It comes with the early flowers, the +white narcissus and the cyclamen, the half-buried violets and the pale +anemones, and makes the whole atmosphere ring like a vault of tinkling +glass. You never see the source of the sound, and are utterly unable to +localise his note, which seems to come from everywhere at once, to be +some hundred-throated voice of the air. Sometimes you fancy you just +catch him, a mere vague spot against the blue, an intenser throb in the +universal pulsation of light. As the weeks go on the flowers multiply +and the deep blues and purples of the hills, turning to azure and +violet, creep higher toward the narrowing snow-line of the Sabines. The +temperature rises, the first hour of your ride you feel the heat, but +you beguile it with brushing the hawthorn-blossoms as you pass along the +hedges, and catching at the wild rose and honeysuckle; and when you get +into the meadows there is stir enough in the air to lighten the dead +weight of the sun. The Roman air, however, is not a tonic medicine, and +it seldom suffers exercise to be all exhilarating. It has always +seemed to me indeed part of the charm of the latter that your keenest +consciousness is haunted with a vague languor. Occasionally when the +sirocco blows that sensation becomes strange and exquisite. Then, under +the grey sky, before the dim distances which the south-wind mostly +brings with it, you seem to ride forth into a world from which all +hope has departed and in which, in spite of the flowers that make your +horse’s footfalls soundless, nothing is left save some queer probability +that your imagination is unable to measure, but from which it hardly +shrinks. This quality in the Roman element may now and then “relax” + you almost to ecstasy; but a season of sirocco would be an overdose of +morbid pleasure. You may at any rate best feel the peculiar beauty of +the Campagna on those mild days of winter when the mere quality and +temper of the sunshine suffice to move the landscape to joy, and you +pause on the brown grass in the sunny stillness and, by listening long +enough, almost fancy you hear the shrill of the midsummer cricket. It +is detail and ornament that vary from month to month, from week to +week even, and make your returns to the same places a constant feast +of unexpectedness; but the great essential features of the prospect +preserve throughout the year the same impressive serenity. Soracte, be +it January or May, rises from its blue horizon like an island from the +sea and with an elegance of contour which no mood of the year can deepen +or diminish. You know it well; you have seen it often in the mellow +backgrounds of Claude; and it has such an irresistibly classic, academic +air that while you look at it you begin to take your saddle for a +faded old arm-chair in a palace gallery. A month’s rides in different +directions will show you a dozen prime Claudes. After I had seen them +all I went piously to the Doria gallery to refresh my memory of its +two famous specimens and to enjoy to the utmost their delightful air of +reference to something that had become a part of my personal experience. +Delightful it certainly is to feel the common element in one’s own +sensibility and those of a genius whom that element has helped to do +great things. Claude must have haunted the very places of one’s personal +preference and adjusted their divine undulations to his splendid scheme +of romance, his view of the poetry of life. He was familiar with aspects +in which there wasn’t a single uncompromising line. I saw a few days ago +a small finished sketch from his hand, in the possession of an American +artist, which was almost startling in its clear reflection of forms +unaltered by the two centuries that have dimmed and cracked the paint +and canvas. + +This unbroken continuity of the impressions I have tried to indicate is +an excellent example of the intellectual background of all enjoyment in +Rome. It effectually prevents pleasure from becoming vulgar, for your +sensation rarely begins and ends with itself; it reverberates--it +recalls, commemorates, resuscitates something else. At least half the +merit of everything you enjoy must be that it suits you absolutely; but +the larger half here is generally that it has suited some one else and +that you can never flatter yourself you have discovered it. It has been +addressed to some use a million miles out of your range, and has had +great adventures before ever condescending to please you. It was in +admission of this truth that my discriminating friend who showed me the +Claudes found it impossible to designate a certain delightful region +which you enter at the end of an hour’s riding from Porta Cavalleggieri +as anything but Arcadia. The exquisite correspondence of the term in +this case altogether revived its faded bloom; here veritably the oaten +pipe must have stirred the windless air and the satyrs have laughed +among the brookside reeds. Three or four long grassy dells stretch away +in a chain between low hills over which delicate trees are so discreetly +scattered that each one is a resting place for a shepherd. The elements +of the scene are simple enough, but the composition has extraordinary +refinement. By one of those happy chances which keep observation in +Italy always in her best humour a shepherd had thrown himself down under +one of the trees in the very attitude of Meliboeus. He had been washing +his feet, I suppose, in the neighbouring brook, and had found it +pleasant afterwards to roll his short breeches well up on his thighs. +Lying thus in the shade, on his elbow, with his naked legs stretched out +on the turf and his soft peaked hat over his long hair crushed back +like the veritable bonnet of Arcady, he was exactly the figure of the +background of this happy valley. The poor fellow, lying there in +rustic weariness and ignorance, little fancied that he was a symbol of +old-world meanings to new-world eyes. + +Such eyes may find as great a store of picturesque meanings in the +cork-woods of Monte Mario, tenderly loved of all equestrians. These are +less severely pastoral than our Arcadia, and you might more properly +lodge there a damosel of Ariosto than a nymph of Theocritus. Among them +is strewn a lovely wilderness of flowers and shrubs, and the whole place +has such a charming woodland air, that, casting about me the other day +for a compliment, I declared that it reminded me of New Hampshire. My +compliment had a double edge, and I had no sooner uttered it than I +smiled--or sighed--to perceive in all the undiscriminated botany about +me the wealth of detail, the idle elegance and grace of Italy alone, the +natural stamp of the land which has the singular privilege of making one +love her unsanctified beauty all but as well as those features of one’s +own country toward which nature’s small allowance doubles that of one’s +own affection. For this effect of casting a spell no rides have more +value than those you take in Villa Doria or Villa Borghese; or don’t +take, possibly, if you prefer to reserve these particular regions--the +latter in especial--for your walking hours. People do ride, however, +in both villas, which deserve honourable mention in this regard. Villa +Doria, with its noble site, its splendid views, its great groups of +stone-pines, so clustered and yet so individual, its lawns and flowers +and fountains, its altogether princely disposition, is a place where one +may pace, well mounted, of a brilliant day, with an agreeable sense of +its being rather a more elegant pastime to balance in one’s stirrups +than to trudge on even the smoothest gravel. But at Villa Borghese +the walkers have the best of it; for they are free of those adorable +outlying corners and bosky byways which the rumble of barouches never +reaches. In March the place becomes a perfect epitome of the spring. +You cease to care much for the melancholy greenness of the disfeatured +statues which has been your chief winter’s intimation of verdure; and +before you are quite conscious of the tender streaks and patches in the +great quaint grassy arena round which the Propaganda students, in their +long skirts, wander slowly, like dusky seraphs revolving the gossip of +Paradise, you spy the brave little violets uncapping their azure brows +beneath the high-stemmed pines. One’s walks here would take us too far, +and one’s pauses detain us too long, when in the quiet parts under +the wall one comes across a group of charming small school-boys in +full-dress suits and white cravats, shouting over their play in clear +Italian, while a grave young priest, beneath a tree, watches them over +the top of his book. It sounds like nothing, but the force behind it and +the frame round it, the setting, the air, the chord struck, make it a +hundred wonderful things. + +1873. + + + + + +ROMAN NEIGHBOURHOODS + + +I made a note after my first stroll at Albano to the effect that I had +been talking of the “picturesque” all my life, but that now for a change +I beheld it. I had been looking all winter across the Campagna at the +free-flowing outline of the Alban Mount, with its half-dozen towns +shining on its purple side even as vague sun-spots in the shadow of +a cloud, and thinking it simply an agreeable incident in the varied +background of Rome. But now that during the last few days I have been +treating it as a foreground, have been suffering St. Peter’s to play +the part of a small mountain on the horizon, with the Campagna swimming +mistily through the ambiguous lights and shadows of the interval, I find +the interest as great as in the best of the by-play of Rome. The walk +I speak of was just out of the village, to the south, toward the +neighbouring town of L’Ariccia, neighbouring these twenty years, since +the Pope (the late Pope, I was on the point of calling him) threw his +superb viaduct across the deep ravine which divides it from Albano. At +the risk of seeming to fantasticate I confess that the Pope’s having +built the viaduct--in this very recent antiquity--made me linger there +in a pensive posture and marvel at the march of history and at Pius the +Ninth’s beginning already to profit by the sentimental allowances we +make to vanished powers. An ardent _nero_ then would have had his own +way with me and obtained a frank admission that the Pope was indeed a +father to his people. Far down into the charming valley which slopes out +of the ancestral woods of the Chigis into the level Campagna winds the +steep stone-paved road at the bottom of which, in the good old days, +tourists in no great hurry saw the mules and oxen tackled to their +carriage for the opposite ascent. And indeed even an impatient tourist +might have been content to lounge back in his jolting chaise and look +out at the mouldy foundations of the little city plunging into the +verdurous flank of the gorge. Questioned, as a cherisher of quaintness, +as to the best “bit” hereabouts, I should certainly name the way in +which the crumbling black houses of these ponderous villages plant their +weary feet on the flowery edges of all the steepest chasms. Before you +enter one of them you invariably find yourself lingering outside its +pretentious old gateway to see it clutched and stitched to the stony +hillside by this rank embroidery of the wildest and bravest things that +grow. Just at this moment nothing is prettier than the contrast between +their dusky ruggedness and the tender, the yellow and pink and violet +fringe of that mantle. All this you may observe from the viaduct at +the Ariccia; but you must wander below to feel the full force of the +eloquence of our imaginary _papalino_. The pillars and arches of +pale grey peperino arise in huge tiers with a magnificent spring and +solidity. The older Romans built no better; and the work has a deceptive +air of being one of their sturdy bequests which help one to drop +another sigh over the antecedents the Italians of to-day are so eager to +repudiate. Will those _they_ give their descendants be as good? + +At the Ariccia, in any case, I found a little square with a couple of +mossy fountains, occupied on one side by a vast dusky-faced Palazzo +Chigi and on the other by a goodly church with an imposing dome. +The dome, within, covers the whole edifice and is adorned with some +extremely elegant stucco-work of the seventeenth century. It gave a +great value to this fine old decoration that preparations were going +forward for a local festival and that the village carpenter was hanging +certain mouldy strips of crimson damask against the piers of the vaults. +The damask might have been of the seventeenth century too, and a group +of peasant-women were seeing it unfurled with evident awe. I regarded +it myself with interest--it seemed so the tattered remnant of a fashion +that had gone out for ever. I thought again of the poor disinherited +Pope, wondering whether, when such venerable frippery will no longer +bear the carpenter’s nails, any more will be provided. It was hard to +fancy anything but shreds and patches in that musty tabernacle. Wherever +you go in Italy you receive some such intimation as this of the shrunken +proportions of Catholicism, and every church I have glanced into on my +walks hereabouts has given me an almost pitying sense of it. One finds +one’s self at last--without fatuity, I hope--feeling sorry for the +solitude of the remaining faithful. It’s as if the churches had been +made so for the world, in its social sense, and the world had so +irrevocably moved away. They are in size out of all modern proportion to +the local needs, and the only thing at all alive in the melancholy waste +they collectively form is the smell of stale incense. There are pictures +on all the altars by respectable third-rate painters; pictures which I +suppose once were ordered and paid for and criticised by worshippers who +united taste with piety. At Genzano, beyond the Ariccia, rises on the +grey village street a pompous Renaissance temple whose imposing nave +and aisles would contain the population of a capital. But where is the +_taste_ of the Ariccia and Genzano? Where are the choice spirits for +whom Antonio Raggi modelled the garlands of his dome and a hundred +clever craftsmen imitated Guido and Caravaggio? Here and there, from the +pavement, as you pass, a dusky crone interlards her devotions with more +profane importunities, or a grizzled peasant on rusty-jointed knees, +tilted forward with his elbows on a bench, reveals the dimensions of +the patch in his blue breeches. But where is the connecting link between +Guido and Caravaggio and those poor souls for whom an undoubted original +is only a something behind a row of candlesticks, of no very clear +meaning save that you must bow to it? You find a vague memory of it at +best in the useless grandeurs about you, and you seem to be looking at a +structure of which the stubborn earth-scented foundations alone remain, +with the carved and painted shell that bends above them, while the +central substance has utterly crumbled away. + +I shall seem to have adopted a more meditative pace than befits a brisk +constitutional if I say that I also fell a-thinking before the shabby +façade of the old Chigi Palace. But it seemed somehow in its grey +forlornness to respond to the sadly superannuated expression of the +opposite church; and indeed in any condition what self-respecting +cherisher of quaintness can forbear to do a little romancing in the +shadow of a provincial palazzo? On the face of the matter, I know, +there is often no very salient peg to hang a romance on. A sort of dusky +blankness invests the establishment, which has often a rather imbecile +old age. But a hundred brooding secrets lurk in this inexpressive mask, +and the Chigi Palace did duty for me in the suggestive twilight as +the most haunted of houses. Its basement walls sloped outward like the +beginning of a pyramid, and its lower windows were covered with massive +iron cages. Within the doorway, across the court, I saw the pale glimmer +of flowers on a terrace, and I made much, for the effect of the roof, of +a great covered loggia or belvedere with a dozen window-panes missing +or mended with paper. Nothing gives one a stronger impression of old +manners than an ancestral palace towering in this haughty fashion over +a shabby little town; you hardly stretch a point when you call it an +impression of feudalism. The scene may pass for feudal to American eyes, +for which a hundred windows on a facade mean nothing more exclusive than +a hotel kept (at the most invidious) on the European plan. The mouldy +grey houses on the steep crooked street, with their black cavernous +archways pervaded by bad smells, by the braying of asses and by human +intonations hardly more musical, the haggard and tattered peasantry +staring at you with hungry-heavy eyes, the brutish-looking monks +(there are still enough to point a moral), the soldiers, the mounted +constables, the dirt, the dreariness, the misery, and the dark +over-grown palace frowning over it all from barred window and guarded +gateway--what more than all this do we dimly descry in a mental image of +the dark ages? For all his desire to keep the peace with the vivid image +of things if it be only vivid enough, the votary of this ideal may well +occasionally turn over such values with the wonder of what one takes +them as paying for. They pay sometimes for such sorry “facts of life.” + At Genzano, out of the very midst of the village squalor, rises the +Palazzo Cesarini, separated from its gardens by a dirty lane. Between +peasant and prince, the contact is unbroken, and one would suppose +Italian good-nature sorely taxed by their mutual allowances; that the +prince in especial must cultivate a firm impervious shell. There are +no comfortable townsfolk about him to remind him of the blessings of a +happy mediocrity of fortune. When he looks out of his window he sees a +battered old peasant against a sunny wall sawing off his dinner from a +hunch of black bread. + +I must confess, however, that “feudal” as it amused me to find the +little piazza of the Ariccia, it appeared to threaten in no manner an +exasperated rising. On the contrary, the afternoon being cool, many of +the villagers were contentedly muffled in those ancient cloaks, lined +with green baize, which, when tossed over the shoulder and surmounted +with a peaked hat, form one of the few lingering remnants of “costume” + in Italy; others were tossing wooden balls light-heartedly enough on the +grass outside the town. The egress on this side is under a great stone +archway thrown out from the palace and surmounted with the family arms. +Nothing could better confirm your theory that the townsfolk are groaning +serfs. The road leads away through the woods, like many of the roads +hereabouts, among trees less remarkable for their size than for their +picturesque contortions and posturings. The woods, at the moment at +which I write, are full of the raw green light of early spring, a _jour_ +vastly becoming to the various complexions of the wild flowers that +cover the waysides. I have never seen these untended parterres in such +lovely exuberance; the sturdiest pedestrian becomes a lingering idler if +he allows them to catch his eye. The pale purple cyclamen, with its hood +thrown back, stands up in masses as dense as tulip-beds; and here and +there in the duskier places great sheets of forget-me-not seem to exhale +a faint blue mist. These are the commonest plants; there are dozens +more I know no name for--a rich profusion in especial of a beautiful +five-petalled flower whose white texture is pencilled with hair-strokes +certain fair copyists I know of would have to hold their breath to +imitate. An Italian oak has neither the girth nor the height of its +English brothers, but it contrives in proportion to be perhaps even +more effective. It crooks its back and twists its arms and clinches its +hundred fists with the queerest extravagance, and wrinkles its bark +into strange rugosities from which its first scattered sprouts of yellow +green seem to break out like a morbid fungus. But the tree which has the +greatest charm to northern eyes is the cold grey-green ilex, whose clear +crepuscular shade drops against a Roman sun a veil impenetrable, yet not +oppressive. The ilex has even less colour than the cypress, but it is +much less funereal, and a landscape in which it is frequent may still +be said to smile faintly, though by no means to laugh. It abounds in +old Italian gardens, where the boughs are trimmed and interlocked into +vaulted corridors in which, from point to point, as in the niches of +some dimly frescoed hall, you see mildewed busts stare at you with a +solemnity which the even grey light makes strangely intense. A +humbler relative of the ilex, though it does better things than help +broken-nosed emperors to look dignified, is the olive, which covers many +of the neighbouring hillsides with its little smoky puffs of foliage. A +stroke of composition I never weary of is that long blue stretch of the +Campagna which makes a high horizon and rests on this vaporous base of +olive-tops. A reporter intent upon a simile might liken it to the ocean +seen above the smoke of watch-fires kindled on the strand. + +To do perfect justice to the wood-walk away from the Ariccia I ought +to touch upon the birds that were singing vespers as I passed. But the +reader would find my rhapsody as poor entertainment as the programme of +a concert he had been unable to attend. I have no more learning about +bird-music than would help me to guess that a dull dissyllabic refrain +in the heart of the wood came from the cuckoo; and when at moments I +heard a twitter of fuller tone, with a more suggestive modulation, +I could only _hope_ it was the nightingale. I have listened for the +nightingale more than once in places so charming that his song would +have seemed but the articulate expression of their beauty, and have +never heard much beyond a provoking snatch or two--a prelude that came +to nothing. In spite of a natural grudge, however, I generously believe +him a great artist or at least a great genius--a creature who despises +any prompting short of absolute inspiration. For the rich, the +multitudinous melody around me seemed but the offering to my ear of the +prodigal spirit of tradition. The wood was ringing with sound because it +was twilight, spring and Italy. It was also because of these good things +and various others besides that I relished so keenly my visit to the +Capuchin convent upon which I emerged after half-an-hour in the wood. +It stands above the town on the slope of the Alban Mount, and its wild +garden climbs away behind it and extends its melancholy influence. +Before it is a small stiff avenue of trimmed live-oaks which conducts +you to a grotesque little shrine beneath the staircase ascending to the +church. Just here, if you are apt to grow timorous at twilight, you may +take a very pretty fright; for as you draw near you catch behind the +grating of the shrine the startling semblance of a gaunt and livid monk. +A sickly lamplight plays down upon his face, and he stares at you from +cavernous eyes with a dreadful air of death in life. Horror of horrors, +you murmur, is this a Capuchin penance? You discover of course in a +moment that it is only a Capuchin joke, that the monk is a pious dummy +and his spectral visage a matter of the paint-brush. You resent his +intrusion on the surrounding loveliness; and as you proceed to demand +entertainment at their convent you pronounce the Capuchins very foolish +fellows. This declaration, as I made it, was supported by the conduct of +the simple brother who opened the door of the cloister in obedience to +my knock and, on learning my errand, demurred about admitting me at +so late an hour. If I would return on the morrow morning he’d be most +happy. He broke into a blank grin when I assured him that this was the +very hour of my desire and that the garish morning light would do no +justice to the view. These were mysteries beyond his ken, and it was +only his good-nature (of which he had plenty) and not his imagination +that was moved. So that when, passing through the narrow cloister and +out upon the grassy terrace, I saw another cowled brother standing with +folded hands profiled against the sky, in admirable harmony with the +scene, I questioned his knowing the uses for which he is still most +precious. This, however, was surely too much to ask of him, and it was +cause enough for gratitude that, though he was there before me, he was +not a fellow-tourist with an opera-glass slung over his shoulder. There +was support to my idea of the convent in the expiring light, for the +scene was in its way unsurpassable. Directly below the terrace lay the +deep-set circle of the Alban Lake, shining softly through the light +mists of evening. This beautiful pool--it is hardly more--occupies the +crater of a prehistoric volcano, a perfect cup, shaped and smelted by +furnace-fires. The rim of the cup, rising high and densely wooded round +the placid stone-blue water, has a sort of natural artificiality. The +sweep and contour of the long circle are admirable; never was a lake so +charmingly lodged. It is said to be of extraordinary depth; and though +stone-blue water seems at first a very innocent substitute for boiling +lava, it has a sinister look which betrays its dangerous antecedents. +The winds never reach it and its surface is never ruffled; but its +deep-bosomed placidity seems to cover guilty secrets, and you fancy it +in communication with the capricious and treacherous forces of nature. +Its very colour is of a joyless beauty, a blue as cold and opaque as a +solidified sheet of lava. Streaked and wrinkled by a mysterious motion +of its own, it affects the very type of a legendary pool, and I could +easily have believed that I had only to sit long enough into the evening +to see the ghosts of classic nymphs and naiads cleave its sullen flood +and beckon me with irresistible arms. Is it because its shores are +haunted with these vague Pagan influences that two convents have risen +there to purge the atmosphere? From the Capuchin terrace you look +across at the grey Franciscan monastery of Palazzuola, which is not less +romantic certainly than the most obstinate myth it may have exorcised. +The Capuchin garden is a wild tangle of great trees and shrubs and +clinging, trembling vines which in these hard days are left to take care +of themselves; a weedy garden, if there ever was one, but none the less +charming for that, in the deepening dusk, with its steep grassy vistas +struggling away into impenetrable shadow. I braved the shadow for the +sake of climbing upon certain little flat-roofed crumbling pavilions +that rise from the corners of the further wall and give you a wider and +lovelier view of lake and hills and sky. + +I have perhaps justified to the reader the mild proposition with which I +started--convinced him, that is, that Albano is worth a walk. It may be +a different walk each day, moreover, and not resemble its predecessors +save by its keeping in the shade. “Galleries” the roads are prettily +called, and with the justice that they are vaulted and draped overhead +and hung with an immense succession of pictures. As you follow the few +miles from Genzano to Frascati you have perpetual views of the Campagna +framed by clusters of trees; the vast iridescent expanse of which +completes the charm and comfort of your verdurous dusk. I compared it +just now to the sea, and with a good deal of truth, for it has the same +incalculable lights and shades, the same confusion of glitter and gloom. +But I have seen it at moments--chiefly in the misty twilight--when it +resembled less the waste of waters than something more portentous, the +land itself in fatal dissolution. I could believe the fields to be dimly +surging and tossing and melting away into quicksands, and that one’s +very last chance of an impression was taking place. A view, however, +which has the merit of being really as interesting as it seems, is that +of the Lake of Nemi; which the enterprising traveller hastens to compare +with its sister sheet of Albano. Comparison in this case is particularly +odious, for in order to prefer one lake to the other you have to +discover faults where there are none. Nemi is a smaller circle, but lies +in a deeper cup, and if with no grey Franciscan pile to guard its woody +shores, at least, in the same position, the little high-perched black +town to which it gives its name and which looks across at Genzano on the +opposite shore as Palazzuola regards Castel Gandolfo. The walk from the +Ariccia to Genzano is charming, most of all when it reaches a certain +grassy piazza from which three public avenues stretch away under a +double row of stunted and twisted elms. The Duke Cesarini has a villa at +Genzano--I mentioned it just now--whose gardens overhang the lake; but +he has also a porter in a faded rakish-looking livery who shakes his +head at your proffered franc unless you can reinforce it with a permit +countersigned at Rome. For this annoying complication of dignities he is +justly to be denounced; but I forgive him for the sake of that ancestor +who in the seventeenth century planted this shady walk. Never was a +prettier approach to a town than by these low-roofed light-chequered +corridors. Their only defect is that they prepare you for a town of +rather more rustic coquetry than Genzano exhibits. It has quite the +usual allowance, the common cynicism, of accepted decay, and looks +dismally as if its best families had all fallen into penury together and +lost the means of keeping anything better than donkeys in their great +dark, vaulted basements and mending their broken window-panes with +anything better than paper. It was on the occasion of this drear Genzano +that I had a difference of opinion with a friend who maintained that +there was nothing in the same line so pretty in Europe as a pretty New +England village. The proposition seemed to a cherisher of quaintness on +the face of it inacceptable; but calmly considered it has a measure of +truth. I am not fond of chalk-white painted planks, certainly; I vastly +prefer the dusky tones of ancient stucco and peperino; but I succumb +on occasion to the charms of a vine-shaded porch, of tulips and dahlias +glowing in the shade of high-arching elms, of heavy-scented lilacs +bending over a white paling to brush your cheek. + +“I prefer Siena to Lowell,” said my friend; “but I prefer Farmington to +such a thing as this.” In fact an Italian village is simply a miniature +Italian city, and its various parts imply a town of fifty times the +size. At Genzano are neither dahlias nor lilacs, and no odours but +foul ones. Flowers and other graces are all confined to the high-walled +precincts of Duke Cesarini, to which you must obtain admission twenty +miles away. The houses on the other hand would generally lodge a New +England cottage, porch and garden and high-arching elms included, in +one of their cavernous basements. These vast grey dwellings are all of +a fashion denoting more generous social needs than any they serve +nowadays. They speak of better days and of a fabulous time when Italy +was either not shabby or could at least “carry off” her shabbiness. For +what follies are they doing penance? Through what melancholy stages have +their fortunes ebbed? You ask these questions as you choose the shady +side of the long blank street and watch the hot sun glare upon the +dust-coloured walls and pause before the fetid gloom of open doors. + +I should like to spare a word for mouldy little Nemi, perched upon a +cliff high above the lake, at the opposite side; but after all, when I +had climbed up into it from the water-side, passing beneath a great arch +which I suppose once topped a gateway, and counted its twenty or thirty +apparent inhabitants peeping at me from black doorways, and looked at +the old round tower at whose base the village clusters, and declared +that it was all queer, queer, desperately queer, I had said all that is +worth saying about it. Nemi has a much better appreciation of its +lovely position than Genzano, where your only view of the lake is from a +dunghill behind one of the houses. At the foot of the round tower is +an overhanging terrace, from which you may feast your eyes on the only +freshness they find in these dusky human hives--the blooming seam, as +one may call it, of strong wild flowers which binds the crumbling walls +to the face of the cliff. Of Rocca di Papa I must say as little, It +consorted generally with the bravery of its name; but the only object +I made a note of as I passed through it on my way to Monte Cavo, which +rises directly above it, was a little black house with a tablet in its +face setting forth that Massimo d’ Azeglio had dwelt there. The story +of his sojourn is not the least attaching episode in his delightful +_Ricordi_. From the summit of Monte Cavo is a prodigious view, which you +may enjoy with whatever good-nature is left you by the reflection that +the modern Passionist convent occupying this admirable site was erected +by the Cardinal of York (grandson of James II) on the demolished ruins +of an immemorial temple of Jupiter: the last foolish act of a foolish +race. For me I confess this folly spoiled the convent, and the convent +all but spoiled the view; for I kept thinking how fine it would have +been to emerge upon the old pillars and sculptures from the lava +pavement of the Via Triumphalis, which wanders grass-grown and untrodden +through the woods. A convent, however, which nothing spoils is that of +Palazzuola, to which I paid my respects on this same occasion. It rises +on a lower spur of Monte Cavo, on the edge, as we have seen, of the +Alban Lake, and though it occupies a classic site, that of early Alba +Longa, it displaced nothing more precious than memories and legends so +dim that the antiquarians are still quarrelling about them. It has a +meagre little church and the usual sham Perugino with a couple of tinsel +crowns for the Madonna and the Infant inserted into the canvas; and it +has also a musty old room hung about with faded portraits and charts and +queer ecclesiastical knick-knacks, which borrowed a mysterious +interest from the sudden assurance of the simple Franciscan brother who +accompanied me that it was the room of the Son of the King of Portugal. +But my peculiar pleasure was the little thick-shaded garden which +adjoins the convent and commands from its massive artificial foundations +an enchanting view of the lake. Part of it is laid out in cabbages and +lettuce, over which a rubicund brother, with his frock tucked up, was +bending with a solicitude which he interrupted to remove his skullcap +and greet me with the unsophisticated sweet-humoured smile that every +now and then in Italy does so much to make you forget the ambiguities of +monachism. The rest is occupied by cypresses and other funereal +umbrage, making a dank circle round an old cracked fountain black with +water-moss. The parapet of the terrace is furnished with good stone +seats where you may lean on your elbows to gaze away a sunny half-hour +and, feeling the general charm of the scene, declare that the best +mission of such a country in the world has been simply to produce, in +the way of prospect and picture, these masterpieces of mildness. Mild +here as a dream the whole attained effect, mild as resignation, mild +as one’s thoughts of another life. Such a session wasn’t surely an +experience of the irritable flesh; it was the deep degustation, on a +summer’s day, of something immortally expressed by a man of genius. + +{Illustration: CASTEL GANDOLFO.} + +From Albano you may take your way through several ancient little cities +to Frascati, a rival centre of _villeggiatura_, the road following the +hillside for a long morning’s walk and passing through alternations +of denser and clearer shade--the dark vaulted alleys of ilex and the +brilliant corridors of fresh-sprouting oak. The Campagna is beneath you +continually, with the sea beyond Ostia receiving the silver arrows of +the sun upon its chased and burnished shield, and mighty Rome, to the +north, lying at no great length in the idle immensity around it. +The highway passes below Castel Gandolfo, which stands perched on an +eminence behind a couple of gateways surmounted with the Papal tiara and +twisted cordon; and I have more than once chosen the roundabout road for +the sake of passing beneath these pompous insignia. Castel Gandolfo is +indeed an ecclesiastical village and under the peculiar protection of +the Popes, whose huge summer-palace rises in the midst of it like a +rural Vatican. In speaking of the road to Frascati I necessarily revert +to my first impressions, gathered on the occasion of the feast of the +Annunziata, which falls on the 25th of March and is celebrated by +a peasants’ fair. As Murray strongly recommends you to visit this +spectacle, at which you are promised a brilliant exhibition of all +the costumes of modern Latium, I took an early train to Frascati and +measured, in company with a prodigious stream of humble pedestrians, the +half-hour’s interval to Grotta Ferrata, where the fair is held. The road +winds along the hillside, among the silver-sprinkled olives and through +a charming wood where the ivy seemed tacked upon the oaks by women’s +fingers and the birds were singing to the late anemones. It was +covered with a very jolly crowd of vulgar pleasure-takers, and the only +creatures not in a state of manifest hilarity were the pitiful +little overladen, overbeaten donkeys (who surely deserve a chapter to +themselves in any description of these neighbourhoods) and the horrible +beggars who were thrusting their sores and stumps at you from under +every tree. Every one was shouting, singing, scrambling, making light of +dust and distance and filling the air with that childlike jollity which +the blessed Italian temperament never goes roundabout to conceal. There +is no crowd surely at once so jovial and so gentle as an Italian crowd, +and I doubt if in any other country the tightly packed third-class +car in which I went out from Rome would have introduced me to so much +smiling and so little swearing. Grotta Ferrata is a very dirty little +village, with a number of raw new houses baking on the hot hillside and +nothing to charm the fond gazer but its situation and its old fortified +abbey. After pushing about among the shabby little booths and declining +a number of fabulous bargains in tinware, shoes and pork, I was glad +to retire to a comparatively uninvaded corner of the abbey and +divert myself with the view. This grey ecclesiastical stronghold is +a thoroughly scenic affair, hanging over the hillside on plunging +foundations which bury themselves among the dense olives. It has massive +round towers at the corners and a grass-grown moat, enclosing a church +and a monastery. The fore-court, within the abbatial gateway, now serves +as the public square of the village and in fair-time of course witnesses +the best of the fun. The best of the fun was to be found in certain +great vaults and cellars of the abbey, where wine was in free flow +from gigantic hogsheads. At the exit of these trickling grottos shady +trellises of bamboo and gathered twigs had been improvised, and under +them a grand guzzling proceeded. All of which was so in the fine old +style that I was roughly reminded of the wedding-feast of Gamacho. The +banquet was far less substantial of course, but it had a note as of +immemorial manners that couldn’t fail to suggest romantic analogies to a +pilgrim from the land of no cooks. There was a feast of reason close +at hand, however, and I was careful to visit the famous frescoes of +Domenichino in the adjoining church. It sounds rather brutal perhaps to +say that, when I came back into the clamorous little piazza, the sight +of the peasants swilling down their sour wine appealed to me more than +the masterpieces--Murray calls them so--of the famous Bolognese. It +amounts after all to saying that I prefer Teniers to Domenichino; which +I am willing to let pass for the truth. The scene under the rickety +trellises was the more suggestive of Teniers that there were no costumes +to make it too Italian. Murray’s attractive statement on this point was, +like many of his statements, much truer twenty years ago than to-day. +Costume is gone or fast going; I saw among the women not a single +crimson bodice and not a couple of classic head-cloths. The poorer sort, +dressed in vulgar rags of no fashion and colour, and the smarter ones +in calico gowns and printed shawls of the vilest modern fabric, had +honoured their dusky tresses but with rich applications of grease. The +men are still in jackets and breeches, and, with their slouched and +pointed hats and open-breasted shirts and rattling leather leggings, +may remind one sufficiently of the Italian peasant as he figured in the +woodcuts familiar to our infancy. After coming out of the church I found +a delightful nook--a queer little terrace before a more retired and +tranquil drinking-shop--where I called for a bottle of wine to help me +to guess why I “drew the line” at Domenichino. + +This little terrace was a capricious excrescence at the end of +the piazza, itself simply a greater terrace; and one reached it, +picturesquely, by ascending a short inclined plane of grass-grown +cobble-stones and passing across a little dusky kitchen through whose +narrow windows the light of the mighty landscape beyond touched up old +earthen pots. The terrace was oblong and so narrow that it held but a +single small table, placed lengthwise; yet nothing could be pleasanter +than to place one’s bottle on the polished parapet. Here you seemed +by the time you had emptied it to be swinging forward into +immensity--hanging poised above the Campagna. A beautiful gorge with +a twinkling stream wandered down the hill far below you, beyond which +Marino and Castel Gandolfo peeped above the trees. In front you could +count the towers of Rome and the tombs of the Appian Way. I don’t know +that I came to any very distinct conclusion about Domenichino; but it +was perhaps because the view was perfection that he struck me as more +than ever mediocrity. And yet I don’t think it was one’s bottle of wine, +either, that made one after all maudlin about him; it was the sense of +the foolishly usurped in his tenure of fame, of the derisive in his ever +having been put forward. To say so indeed savours of flogging a dead +horse, but it is surely an unkind stroke of fate for him that Murray +assures ten thousand Britons every winter in the most emphatic manner +that his Communion of St. Jerome is the second finest picture in the +world. If this were so one would certainly here in Rome, where such +institutions are convenient, retire into the very nearest convent; with +such a world one would have a standing quarrel. And yet this sport +of destiny is an interesting case, in default of being an interesting +painter, and I would take a moderate walk, in most moods, to see one of +his pictures. He is so supremely good an example of effort detached from +inspiration and school-merit divorced from spontaneity, that one of his +fine frigid performances ought to hang in a conspicuous place in every +academy of design. Few things of the sort contain more urgent lessons +or point a more precious moral; and I would have the head-master in the +drawing-school take each ingenuous pupil by the hand and lead him up +to the Triumph of David or the Chase of Diana or the red-nosed Persian +Sibyl and make him some such little speech as the following: “This great +picture, my son, was hung here to show you how you must _never_ paint; +to give you a perfect specimen of what in its boundless generosity the +providence of nature created for our fuller knowledge--an artist whose +development was a negation. The great thing in art is charm, and the +great thing in charm is spontaneity. Domenichino, having talent, is here +and there an excellent model--he was devoted, conscientious, observant, +industrious; but now that we’ve seen pretty well what can simply be +learned do its best, these things help him little with us, because his +imagination was cold. It loved nothing, it lost itself in nothing, its +efforts never gave it the heartache. It went about trying this and +that, concocting cold pictures after cold receipts, dealing in the +second-hand, in the ready-made, and putting into its performances +a little of everything but itself. When you see so many things in a +composition you might suppose that among them all some charm might be +born; yet they’re really but the hundred mouths through which you may +hear the unhappy thing murmur ‘I’m dead!’ It’s by the simplest thing it +has that a picture lives--by its temper. Look at all the great talents, +Domenichino as well as at Titian; but think less of dogma than of plain +nature, and I can almost promise you that yours will remain true.” This +is very little to what the aesthetic sage I have imagined _might_ say; +and we are after all unwilling to let our last verdict be an unkind one +on any great bequest of human effort. The faded frescoes in the chapel +at Grotta Ferrata leave us a memory the more of man’s effort to dream +beautifully; and they thus mingle harmoniously enough with our multifold +impressions of Italy, where dreams and realities have both kept such +pace and so strangely diverged. It was absurd--that was the truth--to +be critical at all among the appealing old Italianisms round me and to +treat the poor exploded Bolognese more harshly than, when I walked +back to Frascati, I treated the charming old water-works of the Villa +Aldobrandini. I confound these various products of antiquated art in a +genial absolution, and should like especially to tell how fine it was to +watch this prodigious fountain come tumbling down its channel of mouldy +rock-work, through its magnificent vista of ilex, to the fantastic old +hemicycle where a dozen tritons and naiads sit posturing to receive it. +The sky above the ilexes was incredibly blue and the ilexes themselves +incredibly black; and to see the young white moon peeping above the +trees you could easily have fancied it was midnight. I should like +furthermore to expatiate on Villa Mondragone, the most grandly +impressive hereabouts, of all such domestic monuments. The Casino in the +midst is as big as the Vatican, which it strikingly resembles, and +it stands perched on a terrace as vast as the parvise of St. Peter’s, +looking straight away over black cypress-tops into the shining vastness +of the Campagna. Everything somehow seemed immense and solemn; there +was nothing small but certain little nestling blue shadows on the Sabine +Mountains, to which the terrace seems to carry you wonderfully near. +The place been for some time lost to private uses, since it figures +fantastically in a novel of George Sand--_La Daniella_--and now, in +quite another way, as a Jesuit college for boys. The afternoon was +perfect, and as it waned it filled the dark alleys with a wonderful +golden haze. Into this came leaping and shouting a herd of little +collegians with a couple of long-skirted Jesuits striding at their +heels. We all know--I make the point for my antithesis--the monstrous +practices of these people; yet as I watched the group I verily believe +I declared that if I had a little son he should go to Mondragone and +receive their crooked teachings for the sake of the other memories, the +avenues of cypress and ilex, the view of the Campagna, the atmosphere +of antiquity. But doubtless when a sense of “mere character,” shameless +incomparable character, has brought one to this it is time one should +pause. + + + + + +THE AFTER-SEASON IN ROME + + +One may at the blest end of May say without injustice to anybody that +the state of mind of many a _forestiero_ in Rome is one of intense +impatience for the moment when all other _forestieri_ shall have +taken themselves off. One may confess to this state of mind and be no +misanthrope. The place has passed so completely for the winter months +into the hands of the barbarians that that estimable character the +passionate pilgrim finds it constantly harder to keep his passion clear. +He has a rueful sense of impressions perverted and adulterated; the +all-venerable visage disconcerts us by a vain eagerness to see itself +mirrored in English, American, German eyes. It isn’t simply that you are +never first or never alone at the classic or historic spots where +you have dreamt of persuading the shy _genius loci_ into confidential +utterance; it isn’t simply that St. Peter’s, the Vatican, the Palatine, +are for ever ringing with the false note of the languages without style: +it is the general oppressive feeling that the city of the soul +has become for the time a monstrous mixture of watering-place and +curiosity-shop and that its most ardent life is that of the tourists who +haggle over false intaglios and yawn through palaces and temples. But +you are told of a happy time when these abuses begin to pass away, when +Rome becomes Rome again and you may have her all to yourself. “You may +like her more or less now,” I was assured at the height of the season; +“but you must wait till the month of May, when she’ll give you _all_ she +has, to love her. Then the foreigners, or the excess of them, are gone; +the galleries and ruins are empty, and the place,” said my informant, +who was a happy Frenchman of the Académie de France, _“renait a +ellememe.”_ Indeed I was haunted all winter by an irresistible prevision +of what Rome _must_ be in declared spring. Certain charming places +seemed to murmur: “Ah, this is nothing! Come back at the right weeks and +see the sky above us almost black with its excess of blue, and the +new grass already deep, but still vivid, and the white roses tumble in +odorous spray and the warm radiant air distil gold for the smelting-pot +that the _genius loci_ then dips his brush into before making play with +it, in his inimitable way, for the general effect of complexion.” + +A month ago I spent a week in the country, and on my return, the first +time I approached the Corso, became conscious of a change. Something +delightful had happened, to which at first I couldn’t give a name, but +which presently shone out as the fact that there were but half as +many people present and that these were chiefly the natural or the +naturalised. We had been docked of half our irrelevance, our motley +excess, and now physically, morally, æesthetically there was elbow-room. +In the afternoon I went to the Pincio, and the Pincio was almost dull. +The band was playing to a dozen ladies who lay in landaus poising their +lace-fringed parasols; but they had scarce more than a light-gloved +dandy apiece hanging over their carriage doors. By the parapet to the +great terrace that sweeps the city stood but three or four interlopers +looking at the sunset and with their Baedekers only just showing in +their pockets--the sunsets not being down among the tariffed articles +in these precious volumes. I went so far as to hope for them that, +like myself, they were, under every precaution, taking some amorous +intellectual liberty with the scene. + +Practically I violate thus the instinct of monopoly, since it’s a +shame not to publish that Rome in May is indeed exquisitely worth your +patience. I have just been so gratified at finding myself in undisturbed +possession for a couple of hours of the Museum of the Lateran that I can +afford to be magnanimous. It’s almost as if the old all-papal paradise +had come back. The weather for a month has been perfect, the sky an +extravagance of blue, the air lively enough, the nights cool, nippingly +cool, and the whole ancient greyness lighted with an irresistible smile. +Rome, which in some moods, especially to new-comers, seems a place of +almost sinister gloom, has an occasional art, as one knows her better, +of brushing away care by the grand gesture with which some splendid +impatient mourning matron--just the Niobe of Nations, surviving, +emerging and looking about her again--might pull off and cast aside an +oppression of muffling crape. This admirable power still temperamentally +to react and take notice lurks in all her darkness and dirt and decay--a +something more careless and hopeless than our thrifty northern cheer, +and yet more genial and urbane than the Parisian spirit of _blague_. +The collective Roman nature is a healthy and hearty one, and you feel it +abroad in the streets even when the sirocco blows and the medium of life +seems to proceed more or less from the mouth of a furnace. But who shall +analyse even the simplest Roman impression? It is compounded of so +many things, it says so much, it involves so much, it so quickens the +intelligence and so flatters the heart, that before we fairly grasp +the case the imagination has marked it for her own and exposed us to a +perilous likelihood of talking nonsense about it. + +The smile of Rome, as I have called it, and its insidious message to +those who incline to ramble irresponsibly and take things as they come, +is ushered in with the first breath of spring, and then grows and grows +with the advancing season till it wraps the whole place in its tenfold +charm. As the process develops you can do few better things than +go often to Villa Borghese and sit on the grass--on a stout bit of +drapery--and watch its exquisite stages. It has a frankness and a +sweetness beyond any relenting of _our_ clumsy climates even when ours +leave off their damnable faces and begin. Nature departs from every +reserve with a confidence that leaves one at a loss where, as it were, +to look--leaves one, as I say, nothing to do but to lay one’s head among +the anemones at the base of a high-stemmed pine and gaze up crestward +and sky-ward along its slanting silvery column. You may watch the whole +business from a dozen of these choice standpoints and have a different +villa for it every day in the week. The Doria, the Ludovisi, the Medici, +the Albani, the Wolkonski, the Chigi, the Mellini, the Massimo--there +are more of them, with all their sights and sounds and odours and +memories, than you have senses for. But I prefer none of them to the +Borghese, which is free to all the world at all times and yet never +crowded; for when the whirl of carriages is great in the middle regions +you may find a hundred untrodden spots and silent corners, tenanted at +the worst by a group of those long-skirted young Propagandists who +stalk about with solemn angularity, each with a book under his arm, like +silhouettes from a medieval missal, and “compose” so extremely well +with the still more processional cypresses and with stretches of +golden-russet wall overtopped by ultramarine. And yet if the Borghese is +good the Medici is strangely charming, and you may stand in the little +belvedere which rises with such surpassing oddity out of the dusky heart +of the Boschetto at the latter establishment--a miniature presentation +of the wood of the Sleeping Beauty--and look across at the Ludovisi +pines lifting their crooked parasols into a sky of what a painter would +call the most morbid blue, and declare that the place where _they_ grow +is the most delightful in the world. Villa Ludovisi has been all winter +the residence of the lady familiarly known in Roman society as “Rosina,” + Victor Emmanuel’s morganatic wife, the only familiarity it would +seem, that she allows, for the grounds were rigidly closed, to the +inconsolable regret of old Roman sojourners. Just as the nightingales +began to sing, however, the quasi-august _padrona_ departed, and the +public, with certain restrictions, have been admitted to hear them. +The place takes, where it lies, a princely ease, and there could be no +better example of the expansive tendencies of ancient privilege than the +fact that its whole vast extent is contained by the city walls. It has +in this respect very much the same enviable air of having got up early +that marks the great intramural demesne of Magdalen College at Oxford. +The stern old ramparts of Rome form the outer enclosure of the villa, +and hence a series of “striking scenic effects” which it would be +unscrupulous flattery to say you can imagine. The grounds are laid out +in the formal last-century manner; but nowhere do the straight black +cypresses lead off the gaze into vistas of a melancholy more charged +with associations--poetic, romantic, historic; nowhere are there +grander, smoother walls of laurel and myrtle. + +I recently spent an afternoon hour at the little Protestant cemetery +close to St. Paul’s Gate, where the ancient and the modern world are +insidiously contrasted. They make between them one of the solemn places +of Rome--although indeed when funereal things are so interfused it seems +ungrateful to call them sad. Here is a mixture of tears and smiles, of +stones and flowers, of mourning cypresses and radiant sky, which gives +us the impression of our looking back at death from the brighter side +of the grave. The cemetery nestles in an angle of the city wall, and the +older graves are sheltered by a mass of ancient brickwork, through whose +narrow loopholes you peep at the wide purple of the Campagna. Shelley’s +grave is here, buried in roses--a happy grave every way for the very +type and figure of the Poet. Nothing could be more impenetrably tranquil +than this little corner in the bend of the protecting rampart, where a +cluster of modern ashes is held tenderly in the rugged hand of the Past. +The past is tremendously embodied in the hoary pyramid of Caius Cestius, +which rises hard by, half within the wall and half without, cutting +solidly into the solid blue of the sky and casting its pagan shadow upon +the grass of English graves--that of Keats, among them--with an effect +of poetic justice. It is a wonderful confusion of mortality and a grim +enough admonition of our helpless promiscuity in the crucible of time. +But the most touching element of all is the appeal of the pious English +inscriptions among all these Roman memories; touching because of their +universal expression of that trouble within trouble, misfortune in +a foreign land. Something special stirs the heart through the fine +Scriptural language in which everything is recorded. The echoes of +massive Latinity with which the atmosphere is charged suggest nothing +more majestic and monumental. I may seem unduly to refine, but the +injunction to the reader in the monument to Miss Bathurst, drowned in +the Tiber in 1824, “If thou art young and lovely, build not thereon, +for she who lies beneath thy feet in death was the loveliest flower ever +cropt in its bloom,” affects us irresistibly as a case for tears on the +spot. The whole elaborate inscription indeed says something over and +beyond all it does say. The English have the reputation of being the +most reticent people in the world, and as there is no smoke without fire +I suppose they have done something to deserve it; yet who can say that +one doesn’t constantly meet the most startling examples of the insular +faculty to “gush”? In this instance the mother of the deceased takes +the public into her confidence with surprising frankness and omits +no detail, seizing the opportunity to mention by the way that she had +already lost her husband by a most mysterious visitation. The appeal +to one’s attention and the confidence in it are withal most moving. The +whole record has an old-fashioned gentility that makes its frankness +tragic. You seem to hear the garrulity of passionate grief. + +To be choosing these positive commonplaces of the Roman tone for a theme +when there are matters of modern moment going on may seem none the +less to require an apology. But I make no claim to your special +correspondent’s faculty for getting an “inside” view of things, and I +have hardly more than a pictorial impression of the Pope’s illness and +of the discussion of the Law of the Convents. Indeed I am afraid +to speak of the Pope’s illness at all, lest I should say something +egregiously heartless about it, recalling too forcibly that unnatural +husband who was heard to wish that his wife would “either” get well--! +He had his reasons, and Roman tourists have theirs in the shape of a +vague longing for something spectacular at St. Peter’s. If it takes the +sacrifice of somebody to produce it let somebody then be sacrificed. +Meanwhile we have been having a glimpse of the spectacular side of the +Religious Corporations Bill. Hearing one morning a great hubbub in the +Corso I stepped forth upon my balcony. A couple of hundred men were +strolling slowly down the street with their hands in their pockets, +shouting in unison “Abbasso il ministero!” and huzzaing in chorus. Just +beneath my window they stopped and began to murmur “Al Quirinale, al +Quirinale!” The crowd surged a moment gently and then drifted to the +Quirinal, where it scuffled harmlessly with half-a-dozen of the king’s +soldiers. It ought to have been impressive, for what was it, strictly, +unless the seeds of revolution? But its carriage was too gentle and +its cries too musical to send the most timorous tourist to packing +his trunk. As I began with saying: in Rome, in May, everything has an +amiable side, even popular uprisings. + + + + + +FROM A ROMAN NOTE-BOOK + + +December 28, 1872.--In Rome again for the last three days--that second +visit which, when the first isn’t followed by a fatal illness in +Florence, the story goes that one is doomed to pay. I didn’t drink of +the Fountain of Trevi on the eve of departure the other time; but I feel +as if I had drunk of the Tiber itself. Nevertheless as I drove from +the station in the evening I wondered what I should think of it at this +first glimpse hadn’t I already known it. All manner of evil perhaps. +Paris, as I passed along the Boulevards three evenings before to take +the train, was swarming and glittering as befits a great capital. Here, +in the black, narrow, crooked, empty streets, I saw nothing I would +fain regard as eternal. But there were new gas-lamps round the spouting +Triton in Piazza Barberini and a newspaper stall on the corner of the +Condotti and the Corso--salient signs of the emancipated state. An hour +later I walked up to Via Gregoriana by Piazza di Spagna. It was all +silent and deserted, and the great flight of steps looked surprisingly +small. Everything seemed meagre, dusky, provincial. Could Rome after all +really _be_ a world-city? That queer old rococo garden gateway at +the top of the Gregoriana stirred a dormant memory; it awoke into a +consciousness of the delicious mildness of the air, and very soon, in +a little crimson drawing-room, I was reconciled and re-initiated.... +Everything is dear (in the way of lodgings), but it hardly matters, as +everything is taken and some one else paying for it. I must make up my +mind to a bare perch. But it seems poorly perverse here to aspire to +an “interior” or to be conscious of the economic side of life. The +æesthetic is so intense that you feel you should live on the taste +of it, should extract the nutritive essence of the atmosphere. For +positively it’s _such_ an atmosphere! The weather is perfect, the sky as +blue as the most exploded tradition fames it, the whole air glowing +and throbbing with lovely colour.... The glitter of Paris is now all +gaslight. And oh the monotonous miles of rain-washed asphalte! + +_December 30th_.--I have had nothing to do with the “ceremonies.” In +fact I believe there have hardly been any--no midnight mass at the +Sistine chapel, no silver trumpets at St. Peter’s. Everything is +remorselessly clipped and curtailed--the Vatican in deepest mourning. +But I saw it in its superbest scarlet in ‘69.... I went yesterday with +L. to the Colonna gardens--an adventure that would have reconverted me +to Rome if the thing weren’t already done. It’s a rare old place--rising +in mouldy bosky terraces and mossy stairways and winding walks from the +back of the palace to the top of the Quirinal. It’s the grand style +of gardening, and resembles the present natural manner as a chapter of +Johnsonian rhetoric resembles a piece of clever contemporary journalism. +But it’s a better style in horticulture than in literature; I prefer +one of the long-drawn blue-green Colonna vistas, with a maimed and +mossy-coated garden goddess at the end, to the finest possible quotation +from a last-century classic. Perhaps the best thing there is the +old orangery with its trees in fantastic terra-cotta tubs. The late +afternoon light was gilding the monstrous jars and suspending golden +chequers among the golden-fruited leaves. Or perhaps the best thing is +the broad terrace with its mossy balustrade and its benches; also its +view of the great naked Torre di Nerone (I think), which might look +stupid if the rosy brickwork didn’t take such a colour in the blue +air. Delightful, at any rate, to stroll and talk there in the afternoon +sunshine. + +_January 2nd,_ 1873.--Two or three drives with A.--one to St. Paul’s +without the Walls and back by a couple of old churches on the Aventine. +I was freshly struck with the rare distinction of the little Protestant +cemetery at the Gate, lying in the shadow of the black sepulchral +Pyramid and the thick-growing black cypresses. Bathed in the clear Roman +light the place is heartbreaking for what it asks you--in such a world +as _this_--to renounce. If it should “make one in love with death to lie +there,” that’s only if death should be conscious. As the case stands, +the weight of a tremendous past presses upon the flowery sod, and the +sleeper’s mortality feels the contact of all the mortality with which +the brilliant air is tainted.... The restored Basilica is incredibly +splendid. It seems a last pompous effort of formal Catholicism, and +there are few more striking emblems of later Rome--the Rome foredoomed +to see Victor Emmanuel in the Quirinal, the Rome of abortive councils +and unheeded anathemas. It rises there, gorgeous and useless, on its +miasmatic site, with an air of conscious bravado--a florid advertisement +of the superabundance of faith. Within it’s magnificent, and its +magnificence has no shabby spots--a rare thing in Rome. Marble and +mosaic, alabaster and malachite, lapis and porphyry, incrust it from +pavement to cornice and flash back their polished lights at each other +with such a splendour of effect that you seem to stand at the heart of +some immense prismatic crystal. One has to come to Italy to know marbles +and love them. I remember the fascination of the first great show of +them I met in Venice--at the Scalzi and Gesuiti. Colour has in no other +form so cool and unfading a purity and lustre. Softness of tone and +hardness of substance--isn’t that the sum of the artist’s desire? G., +with his beautiful caressing, open-lipped Roman utterance, so easy to +understand and, to my ear, so finely suggestive of genuine Latin, not +our horrible Anglo-Saxon and Protestant kind, urged upon us the charms +of a return by the Aventine and the sight of a couple of old churches. +The best is Santa Sabina, a very fine old structure of the fifth +century, mouldering in its dusky solitude and consuming its own +antiquity. What a massive heritage Christianity and Catholicism are +leaving here! What a substantial fact, in all its decay, this memorial +Christian temple outliving its uses among the sunny gardens and +vineyards! It has a noble nave, filled with a stale smell which +(like that of the onion) brought tears to my eyes, and bordered with +twenty-four fluted marble columns of Pagan origin. The crudely primitive +little mosaics along the entablature are extremely curious. A Dominican +monk, still young, who showed us the church, seemed a creature generated +from its musty shadows I odours. His physiognomy was wonderfully _de +l’emploi_, and his voice, most agreeable, had the strangest jaded +humility. His lugubrious salute and sanctimonious impersonal +appropriation of my departing franc would have been a master-touch on +the stage. While we were still in the church a bell rang that he had to +go and answer, and as he came back and approached us along the nave he +made with his white gown and hood and his cadaverous face, against the +dark church background, one of those pictures which, thank the Muses, +have not yet been reformed out of Italy. It was the exact illustration, +for insertion in a text, of heaven knows how many old romantic and +conventional literary Italianisms--plays, poems, mysteries of Udolpho. +We got back into the carriage and talked of profane things and went home +to dinner--drifting recklessly, it seemed to me, from aesthetic luxury +to social. + +On the 31st we went to the musical vesper-service at the Gesu--hitherto +done so splendidly before the Pope and the cardinals. The manner of it +was eloquent of change--no Pope, no cardinals, and indifferent music; +but a great _mise-en-scène_ nevertheless. The church is gorgeous; late +Renaissance, of great proportions, and full, like so many others, but in +a pre-eminent degree, of seventeenth and eighteenth century Romanism. +It doesn’t impress the imagination, but richly feeds the curiosity, +by which I mean one’s sense of the curious; suggests no legends, but +innumerable anecdotes à la Stendhal. There is a vast dome, filled with a +florid concave fresco of tumbling foreshortened angels, and all over +the ceilings and cornices a wonderful outlay of dusky gildings +and mouldings. There are various Bernini saints and seraphs in +stucco-sculpture, astride of the tablets and door-tops, backing against +their rusty machinery of coppery _nimbi_ and egg-shaped cloudlets. +Marble, damask and tapers in gorgeous profusion. The high altar a great +screen of twinkling chandeliers. The choir perched in a little loft high +up in the right transept, like a balcony in a side-scene at the opera, +and indulging in surprising roulades and flourishes.... Near me sat a +handsome, opulent-looking nun--possibly an abbess or prioress of noble +lineage. Can a holy woman of such a complexion listen to a fine operatic +barytone in a sumptuous temple and receive none but ascetic impressions? +What a cross-fire of influences does Catholicism provide! + +_January 4th._--A drive with A. out of Porta San Giovanni and along Via +Appia Nuova. More and more beautiful as you get well away from the walls +and the great view opens out before you--the rolling green-brown dells +and flats of the Campagna, the long, disjointed arcade of the aqueducts, +the deep-shadowed blue of the Alban Hills, touched into pale lights by +their scattered towns. We stopped at the ruined basilica of San Stefano, +an affair of the fifth century, rather meaningless without a learned +companion. But the perfect little sepulchral chambers of the Pancratii, +disinterred beneath the church, tell their own tale--in their hardly +dimmed frescoes, their beautiful sculptured coffin and great sepulchral +slab. Better still the tomb of the Valerii adjoining it--a single +chamber with an arched roof, covered with stucco mouldings perfectly +intact, exquisite figures and arabesques as sharp and delicate as if the +plasterer’s scaffold had just been taken from under them. Strange enough +to think of these things--so many of them as there are--surviving their +immemorial eclipse in this perfect shape and coming up like long-lost +divers on the sea of time. + +_January 16th._--A delightful walk last Sunday with F. to Monte Mario. +We drove to Porta Angelica, the little gate hidden behind the right wing +of Bernini’s colonnade, and strolled thence up the winding road to the +Villa Mellini, where one of the greasy peasants huddled under the wall +in the sun admits you for half franc into the finest old ilex-walk in +Italy. It is all vaulted grey-green shade with blue Campagna stretches +in the interstices. The day was perfect; the still sunshine, as we sat +at the twisted base of the old trees, seemed to have the drowsy hum of +mid-summer--with that charm of Italian vegetation that comes to us as +its confession of having scenically served, to weariness at last, for +some pastoral these many centuries a classic. In a certain cheapness +and thinness of substance--as compared with the English stoutness, never +left athirst--it reminds me of our own, and it is relatively dry enough +and pale enough to explain the contempt of many unimaginative Britons. +But it has an idle abundance and wantonness, a romantic shabbiness +and dishevelment. At the Villa Mellini is the famous lonely pine which +“tells” so in the landscape from other points, bought off from the axe +by (I believe) Sir George Beaumont, commemorated in a like connection in +Wordsworth’s great sonnet. He at least was not an unimaginative Briton. +As you stand under it, its far-away shallow dome, supported on a single +column almost white enough to be marble, seems to dwell in the dizziest +depths of the blue. Its pale grey-blue boughs and its silvery stem make +a wonderful harmony with the ambient air. The Villa Mellini is full +of the elder Italy of one’s imagination--the Italy of Boccaccio and +Ariosto. There are twenty places where the Florentine story-tellers +might have sat round on the grass. Outside the villa walls, beneath the +over-crowding orange-boughs, straggled old Italy as well--but not in +Boccaccio’s velvet: a row of ragged and livid contadini, some simply +stupid in their squalor, but some downright brigands of romance, or of +reality, with matted locks and terribly sullen eyes. + +A couple of days later I walked for old acquaintance’ sake over to San +Onofrio on the Janiculan. The approach is one of the dirtiest adventures +in Rome, and though the view is fine from the little terrace, the church +and convent are of a meagre and musty pattern. Yet here--almost like +pearls in a dunghill--are hidden mementos of two of the most exquisite +of Italian minds. Torquato Tasso spent the last months of his life here, +and you may visit his room and various warped and faded relics. The most +interesting is a cast of his face taken after death--looking, like all +such casts, almost more than mortally gallant and distinguished. But +who should look all ideally so if not he? In a little shabby, chilly +corridor adjoining is a fresco of Leonardo, a Virgin and Child with +the _donatorio_. It is very small, simple and faded, but it has all the +artist’s magic, that mocking, illusive refinement and hint of a vague +_arriere-pensee_ which mark every stroke of Leonardo’s brush. Is it the +perfection of irony or the perfection of tenderness? What does he mean, +what does he affirm, what does he deny? Magic wouldn’t be magic, nor the +author of such things stand so absolutely alone, if we were ready with +an explanation. As I glanced from the picture to the poor stupid little +red-faced brother at my side I wondered if the thing mightn’t pass for +an elegant epigram on monasticism. Certainly, at any rate, there is more +intellect in it than under all the monkish tonsures it has seen coming +and going these three hundred years. + +_January 21st._--The last three or four days I have regularly spent a +couple of hours from noon baking myself in the sun of the Pincio to get +rid of a cold. The weather perfect and the crowd (especially to-day) +amazing. Such a staring, lounging, dandified, amiable crowd! Who does +the vulgar stay-at-home work of Rome? All the grandees and half the +foreigners are there in their carriages, the _bourgeoisie_ on foot +staring at them and the beggars lining all the approaches. The great +difference between public places in America and Europe is in the number +of unoccupied people of every age and condition sitting about early and +late on benches and gazing at you, from your hat to your boots, as you +pass. Europe is certainly the continent of the practised stare. The +ladies on the Pincio have to run the gauntlet; but they seem to do so +complacently enough. The European woman is brought up to the sense +of having a definite part in the way of manners or manner to play in +public. To lie back in a barouche alone, balancing a parasol and seeming +to ignore the extremely immediate gaze of two serried ranks of male +creatures on each side of her path, save here and there to recognise +one of them with an imperceptible nod, is one of her daily duties. +The number of young men here who, like the coenobites of old, lead the +purely contemplative life is enormous. They muster in especial force +on the Pincio, but the Corso all day is thronged with them. They are +well-dressed, good-humoured, good-looking, polite; but they seem never +to do a harder stroke of work than to stroll from the Piazza Colonna to +the Hotel de Rome or _vice versa_. Some of them don’t even stroll, but +stand leaning by the hour against the doorways, sucking the knobs of +their canes, feeling their back hair and settling their shirt-cuffs. At +my cafe in the morning several stroll in already (at nine o’clock) in +light, in “evening” gloves. But they order nothing, turn on their heels, +glance at the mirrors and stroll out again. When it rains they herd +under the _portes-cochères_ and in the smaller cafes.... Yesterday +Prince Humbert’s little _primogenito_ was on the Pincio in an open +landau with his governess. He’s a sturdy blond little man and the image +of the King. They had stopped to listen to the music, and the crowd was +planted about the carriage-wheels, staring and criticising under the +child’s snub little nose. It appeared bold cynical curiosity, without +the slightest manifestation of “loyalty,” and it gave me a singular +sense of the vulgarisation of Rome under the new regime. When the Pope +drove abroad it was a solemn spectacle; even if you neither kneeled nor +uncovered you were irresistibly impressed. But the Pope never stopped to +listen to opera tunes, and he had no little popelings, under the charge +of superior nurse-maids, whom you might take liberties with. The family +at the Quirinal make something of a merit, I believe, of their +modest and inexpensive way of life. The merit is great; yet, +representationally, what a change for the worse from an order which +proclaimed stateliness a part of its essence! The divinity that doth +hedge a king must be pretty well on the wane. But how many more fine old +traditions will the extremely sentimental traveller miss in the Italians +over whom that little jostled prince in the landau will have come +into his kinghood? ... The Pincio continues to beguile; it’s a great +resource. I am for ever being reminded of the “aesthetic luxury,” as I +called it above, of living in Rome. To be able to choose of an afternoon +for a lounge (respectfully speaking) between St. Peter’s and the high +precinct you approach by the gate just beyond Villa Medici--counting +nothing else--is a proof that if in Rome you may suffer from ennui, at +least your ennui has a throbbing soul in it. It is something to say for +the Pincio that you don’t always choose St. Peter’s. Sometimes I lose +patience with its parade of eternal idleness, but at others this very +idleness is balm to one’s conscience. Life on just these terms seems so +easy, so monotonously sweet, that you feel it would be unwise, would be +really unsafe, to change. The Roman air is charged with an elixir, the +Roman cup seasoned with some insidious drop, of which the action is +fatally, yet none the less agreeably, “lowering.” + +_January 26th._--With S. to the Villa Medici--perhaps on the whole +the most enchanting place in Rome. The part of the garden called the +Boschetto has an incredible, impossible charm; an upper terrace, behind +locked gates, covered with a little dusky forest of evergreen oaks. +Such a dim light as of a fabled, haunted place, such a soft suffusion +of tender grey-green tones, such a company of gnarled and twisted little +miniature trunks--dwarfs playing with each other at being giants--and +such a shower of golden sparkles drifting in from the vivid west! At +the end of the wood is a steep, circular mound, up which the short trees +scramble amain, with a long mossy staircase climbing up to a belvedere. +This staircase, rising suddenly out of the leafy dusk to you don’t see +where, is delightfully fantastic. You expect to see an old woman in a +crimson petticoat and with a distaff come hobbling down and turn into +a fairy and offer you three wishes. I should name for my own first wish +that one didn’t have to be a Frenchman to come and live and dream and +work at the Académie de France. Can there be for a while a happier +destiny than that of a young artist conscious of talent and of no errand +but to educate, polish and perfect it, transplanted to these sacred +shades? One has fancied Plato’s Academy--his gleaming colonnades, his +blooming gardens and Athenian sky; but was it as good as this one, where +Monsieur Hebert does the Platonic? The blessing in Rome is not that this +or that or the other isolated object is so very unsurpassable; but that +the general air so contributes to interest, to impressions that are not +as any other impressions anywhere in the world. And from this general +air the Villa Medici has distilled an essence of its own--walled it in +and made it delightfully private. The great façade on the gardens +is like an enormous rococo clock-face all incrusted with images and +arabesques and tablets. What mornings and afternoons one might +spend there, brush in hand, unpreoccupied, untormented, pensioned, +satisfied--either persuading one’s self that one would be “doing +something” in consequence or not caring if one shouldn’t be. + +_At a later date--middle of March_.--A ride with S. W. out of the Porta +Pia to the meadows beyond the Ponte Nomentana--close to the site of +Phaon’s villa where Nero in hiding had himself stabbed. It all spoke as +things here only speak, touching more chords than one can _now_ really +know or say. For these are predestined memories and the stuff that +regrets are made of; the mild divine efflorescence of spring, the +wonderful landscape, the talk suspended for another gallop.... +Returning, we dismounted at the gate of the Villa Medici and walked +through the twilight of the vaguely perfumed, bird-haunted alleys to +H.’s studio, hidden in the wood like a cottage in a fairy tale. I spent +there a charming half-hour in the fading light, looking at the pictures +while my companion discoursed of her errand. The studio is small and +more like a little salon; the painting refined, imaginative, somewhat +morbid, full of consummate French ability. A portrait, idealised and +etherealised, but a likeness of Mme. de---(from last year’s Salon) +in white satin, quantities of lace, a coronet, diamonds and pearls; a +striking combination of brilliant silvery tones. A “Femme Sauvage,” + a naked dusky girl in a wood, with a wonderfully clever pair of shy, +passionate eyes. The author is different enough from any of the numerous +American artists. They may be producers, but he’s a product as well--a +product of influences of a sort of which we have as yet no +general command. One of them is his charmed lapse of life in that +unprofessional-looking little studio, with his enchanted wood on one +side and the plunging wall of Rome on the other. + +_January 30th._--A drive the other day with a friend to Villa Madama, +on the side of Monte Mario; a place like a page out of one of Browning’s +richest evocations of this clime and civilisation. Wondrous in its +haunting melancholy, it might have inspired half “The Ring and the Book” + at a stroke. What a grim commentary on history such a scene--what an +irony of the past! The road up to it through the outer enclosure is +almost impassable with mud and stones. At the end, on a terrace, rises +the once elegant Casino, with hardly a whole pane of glass in its +façade, reduced to its sallow stucco and degraded ornaments. The front +away from Rome has in the basement a great loggia, now walled in from +the weather, preceded by a grassy be littered platform with an immense +sweeping view of the Campagna; the sad-looking, more than sad-looking, +evil-looking, Tiber beneath (the colour of gold, the sentimentalists +say, the colour of mustard, the realists); a great vague stretch beyond, +of various complexions and uses; and on the horizon the ever-iridescent +mountains. The place has become the shabbiest farm-house, with muddy +water in the old _pièces d’eau_ and dunghills on the old parterres. +The “feature” is the contents of the loggia: a vaulted roof and walls +decorated by Giulio Romano; exquisite stucco-work and still brilliant +frescoes; arabesques and figurini, nymphs and fauns, animals and +flowers--gracefully lavish designs of every sort. Much of the +colour--especially the blues--still almost vivid, and all the work +wonderfully ingenious, elegant and charming. Apartments so decorated can +have been meant only for the recreation of people greater than any +we know, people for whom life was impudent ease and success. Margaret +Farnese was the lady of the house, but where she trailed her cloth of +gold the chickens now scamper between your legs over rotten straw. It is +all inexpressibly dreary. A stupid peasant scratching his head, a +couple of critical Americans picking their steps, the walls tattered and +befouled breast-high, dampness and decay striking in on your heart, and +the scene overbowed by these heavenly frescoes, moulering there in their +airy artistry! It’s poignant; it provokes tears; it tells so of the +waste of effort. Something human seems to pant beneath the grey pall +of time and to implore you to rescue it, to pity it, to stand by it +somehow. But you leave it to its lingering death without compunction, +almost with pleasure; for the place seems vaguely crime-haunted--paying +at least the penalty of some hard immorality. The end of a Renaissance +pleasure-house. Endless for the didactic observer the moral, abysmal for +the storyseeker the tale. + +_February 12th_.--Yesterday to the Villa Albani. Over-formal and (as my +companion says) too much like a tea-garden; but with beautiful stairs +and splendid geometrical lines of immense box-hedge, intersected +with high pedestals supporting little antique busts. The light to-day +magnificent; the Alban Hills of an intenser broken purple than I had +yet seen them--their white towns blooming upon it like vague projected +lights. It was like a piece of very modern painting, and a good example +of how Nature has at times a sort of mannerism which ought to make +us careful how we condemn out of hand the more refined and affected +artists. The collection of marbles in the Casino (Winckelmann’s) +admirable and to be seen again. The famous Antinous crowned with lotus +a strangely beautiful and impressive thing. The “Greek manner,” on the +showing of something now and again encountered here, moves one to feel +that even for purely romantic and imaginative effects it surpasses any +since invented. If there be not imagination, even in our comparatively +modern sense of the word, in the baleful beauty of that perfect young +profile there is none in “Hamlet” or in “Lycidas.” There is five hundred +times as much as in “The Transfiguration.” With this at any rate to +point to it’s not for sculpture not professedly to produce any emotion +producible by painting. There are numbers of small and delicate +fragments of bas-reliefs of exquisite grace, and a huge piece (two +combatants--one, on horseback, beating down another--murder made eternal +and beautiful) attributed to the Parthenon and certainly as grandly +impressive as anything in the Elgin marbles. S. W. suggested again the +Roman villas as a “subject.” Excellent if one could find a feast of +facts à la Stendhal. A lot of vague ecstatic descriptions and anecdotes +wouldn’t at all pay. There have been too many already. Enough facts are +recorded, I suppose; one should discover them and soak in them for +a twelvemonth. And yet a Roman villa, in spite of statues, ideas and +atmosphere, affects me as of a scanter human and social _portee_, a +shorter, thinner reverberation, than an old English country-house, +round which experience seems piled so thick. But this perhaps is either +hair-splitting or “racial” prejudice. + +{Illustration: ENTRANCE TO THE VATICAN, ROME} + +_March 9th._--The Vatican is still deadly cold; a couple of hours there +yesterday with R. W. E. Yet he, illustrious and enviable man, fresh from +the East, had no overcoat and wanted none. Perfect bliss, I think, would +be to live in Rome without thinking of overcoats. The Vatican seems +very familiar, but strangely smaller than of old. I never lost the sense +before of confusing vastness. _Sancta simplicitas!_ All my old friends +however stand there in undimmed radiance, keeping most of them their +old pledges. I am perhaps more struck now with the enormous amount of +padding--the number of third-rate, fourth-rate things that weary the eye +desirous to approach freshly the twenty and thirty best. In spite of the +padding there are dozens of treasures that one passes regretfully; but +the impression of the whole place is the great thing--the feeling that +through these solemn vistas flows the source of an incalculable part of +our present conception of Beauty. + +_April 10th._--Last night, in the rain, to the Teatro Valle to see a +comedy of Goldoni in Venetian dialect--“I Quattro Rustighi.” I could but +half follow it; enough, however, to be sure that, for all its humanity +of irony, it wasn’t so good as Molière. The acting was capital--broad, +free and natural; the play of talk easier even than life itself; but, +like all the Italian acting I have seen, it was wanting in _finesse_, +that shade of the shade by which, and by which alone, one really knows +art. I contrasted the affair with the evening in December last that I +walked over (also in the rain) to the Odeon and saw the “Plaideurs” and +the “Malade lmaginaire.” There, too, was hardly more than a handful of +spectators; but what rich, ripe, fully representational and above +all intellectual comedy, and what polished, educated playing! These +Venetians in particular, however, have a marvellous _entrain_ of their +own; they seem even less than the French to recite. In some of the +women--ugly, with red hands and shabby dresses--an extraordinary gift of +natural utterance, of seeming to invent joyously as they go. + +_Later_.--Last evening in H.’s box at the Apollo to hear Ernesto Rossi +in “Othello.” He shares supremacy with Salvini in Italian tragedy. +Beautiful great theatre with boxes you can walk about in; brilliant +audience. The Princess Margaret was there--I have never been to +the theatre that she was not--and a number of other princesses in +neighbouring boxes. G. G. came in and instructed us that they were the +M., the L., the P., &c. Rossi is both very bad and very fine; bad where +anything like taste and discretion is required, but “all there,” and +more than there, in violent passion. The last act reduced too much, +however, to mere exhibitional sensibility. The interesting thing to me +was to observe the Italian conception of the part--to see how crude +it was, how little it expressed the hero’s moral side, his depth, +his dignity--anything more than his being a creature terrible in mere +tantrums. The great point was his seizing Iago’s head and whacking it +half-a-dozen times on the floor, and then flinging him twenty yards +away. It was wonderfully done, but in the doing of it and in the evident +relish for it in the house there was I scarce knew what force of easy +and thereby rather cheap expression. + +_April 27th_.--A morning with L. B. at Villa Ludovisi, which we agreed +that we shouldn’t soon forget. The villa now belongs to the King, who +has lodged his morganatic wife there. There is nothing so blissfully +_right_ in Rome, nothing more consummately consecrated to style. The +grounds and gardens are immense, and the great rusty-red city wall +stretches away behind them and makes the burden of the seven hills +seem vast without making _them_ seem small. There is everything--dusky +avenues trimmed by the clippings of centuries, groves and dells and +glades and glowing pastures and reedy fountains and great flowering +meadows studded with enormous slanting pines. The day was delicious, +the trees all one melody, the whole place a revelation of what Italy +and hereditary pomp can do together. Nothing could be more in the +grand manner than this garden view of the city ramparts, lifting +their fantastic battlements above the trees and flowers. They are all +tapestried with vines and made to serve as sunny fruit-walls--grim old +defence as they once were; now giving nothing but a splendid buttressed +privacy. The sculptures in the little Casino are few, but there are two +great ones--the beautiful sitting Mars and the head of the great Juno, +the latter thrust into a corner behind a shutter. These things it’s +almost impossible to praise; we can only mark them well and keep them +clear, as we insist on silence to hear great music.... If I don’t praise +Guercino’s Aurora in the greater Casino, it’s for another reason; this +is certainly a very muddy masterpiece. It figures on the ceiling of +a small low hall; the painting is coarse and the ceiling too near. +Besides, it’s unfair to pass straight from the Greek mythology to the +Bolognese. We were left to roam at will through the house; the custode +shut us in and went to walk in the park. The apartments were all open, +and I had an opportunity to reconstruct, from its _milieu_ at least, the +character of a morganatic queen. I saw nothing to indicate that it +was not amiable; but I should have thought more highly of the lady’s +discrimination if she had had the Juno removed from behind her shutter. +In such a house, girdled about with such a park, me thinks I could be +amiable--and perhaps discriminating too. The Ludovisi Casino is small, +but the perfection of the life of ease might surely be led there. There +are English houses enough in wondrous parks, but they expose you to too +many small needs and observances--to say nothing of a red-faced butler +dropping his h’s. You are oppressed with the detail of accommodation. +Here the billiard-table is old-fashioned, perhaps a trifle crooked; but +you have Guercino above your head, and Guercino, after all, is almost +as good as Guido. The rooms, I noticed, all pleased by their shape, by +a lovely proportion, by a mass of delicate ornamentation on the high +concave ceilings. One might live over again in them some deliciously +benighted life of a forgotten type--with graceful old _sale_, and +immensely thick walls, and a winding stone staircase, and a view from +the loggia at the top; a view of twisted parasol-pines balanced, high +above a wooden horizon, against a sky of faded sapphire. + +_May 17th._--It was wonderful yesterday at St. John Lateran. The spring +now has turned to perfect summer; there are cascades of verdure over +all the walls; the early flowers are a fading memory, and the new grass +knee-deep in the Villa Borghese. The winter aspect of the region about +the Lateran is one of the best things in Rome; the sunshine is nowhere +so golden and the lean shadows nowhere so purple as on the long grassy +walk to Santa Croce. But yesterday I seemed to see nothing but green +and blue. The expanse before Santa Croce was vivid green; the Campagna +rolled away in great green billows, which seemed to break high about the +gaunt aqueducts; and the Alban Hills, which in January and February +keep shifting and melting along the whole scale of azure, were almost +monotonously fresh, and had lost some of their finer modelling. But the +sky was ultramarine and everything radiant with light and warmth--warmth +which a soft steady breeze kept from excess. I strolled some time about +the church, which has a grand air enough, though I don’t seize the point +of view of Miss----, who told me the other day how vastly finer she +thought it than St. Peter’s. But on Miss----‘s lips this seemed a very +pretty paradox. The choir and transepts have a sombre splendour, and +I like the old vaulted passage with its slabs and monuments behind +the choir. The charm of charms at St. John Lateran is the admirable +twelfth-century cloister, which was never more charming than yesterday. +The shrubs and flowers about the ancient well were blooming away in the +intense light, and the twisted pillars and chiselled capitals of the +perfect little colonnade seemed to enclose them like the sculptured rim +of a precious vase. Standing out among the flowers you may look up and +see a section of the summit of the great façade of the church. The robed +and mitred apostles, bleached and rain-washed by the ages, rose into the +blue air like huge snow figures. I spent at the incorporated museum a +subsequent hour of fond vague attention, having it quite to myself. +It is rather scantily stocked, but the great cool halls open out +impressively one after the other, and the wide spaces between the +statues seem to suggest at first that each is a masterpiece. I was in +the loving mood of one’s last days in Rome, and when I had nothing else +to admire I admired the magnificent thickness of the embrasures of the +doors and windows. If there were no objects of interest at all in the +Lateran the palace would be worth walking through every now and then, +to keep up one’s idea of solid architecture. I went over to the +Scala Santa, where was no one but a very shabby priest sitting like a +ticket-taker at the door. But he let me pass, and I ascended one of the +profane lateral stairways and treated myself to a glimpse of the Sanctum +Sanctorum. Its threshold is crossed but once or twice a year, I believe, +by three or four of the most exalted divines, but you may look into it +freely enough through a couple of gilded lattices. It is very sombre +and splendid, and conveys the impression of a very holy place. And yet +somehow it suggested irreverent thoughts; it had to my fancy--perhaps on +account of the lattice--an Oriental, a Mahometan note. I expected every +moment to see a sultana appear in a silver veil and silken trousers and +sit down on the crimson carpet. + +Farewell, packing, the sharp pang of going. One would like to be able +after five months in Rome to sum up for tribute and homage, one’s +experience, one’s gains, the whole adventure of one’s sensibility. But +one has really vibrated too much--the addition of so many items isn’t +easy. What is simply clear is the sense of an acquired passion for the +place and of an incalculable number of gathered impressions. Many +of these have been intense and momentous, but one has trodden on the +other--there are always the big fish that swallow up the little--and +one can hardly say what has become of them. They store themselves +noiselessly away, I suppose, in the dim but safe places of memory and +“taste,” and we live in a quiet faith that they will emerge into vivid +relief if life or art should demand them. As for the passion we needn’t +perhaps trouble ourselves about that. Fifty swallowed palmfuls of the +Fountain of Trevi couldn’t make us more ardently sure that we shall at +any cost come back. + +1873. + + + + + +A FEW OTHER ROMAN NEIGHBOURHOODS + + +If I find my old notes, in all these Roman connections, inevitably +bristle with the spirit of the postscript, so I give way to this +prompting to the extent of my scant space and with the sense of +other occasions awaiting me on which I shall have to do no less. The +impression of Rome was repeatedly to renew itself for the author of +these now rather antique and artless accents; was to overlay itself +again and again with almost heavy thicknesses of experience, the last of +which is, as I write, quite fresh to memory; and he has thus felt almost +ashamed to drop his subject (though it be one that tends so easily to +turn to the infinite) as if the law of change had in all the years had +nothing to say to his case. It’s of course but of his case alone that he +speaks--wondering little what he may make of it for the profit of others +by an attempt, however brief, to point the moral of the matter, or in +other words compare the musing _mature_ visitor’s “feeling about Rome” + with that of the extremely agitated, even if though extremely inexpert, +consciousness reflected in the previous pages. The actual, the current +Rome affects him as a world governed by new conditions altogether and +ruefully pleading that sorry fact in the ear of the antique wanderer +wherever he may yet mournfully turn for some re-capture of what he +misses. The city of his first unpremeditated rapture shines to memory, +on the other hand, in the manner of a lost paradise the rustle of whose +gardens is still just audible enough in the air to make him wonder if +some sudden turn, some recovered vista, mayn’t lead him back to the +thing itself. My genial, my helpful tag, at this point, would doubtless +properly resolve itself, for the reader, into a clue toward some such +successful ingenuity of quest; a remark I make, I may add, even while +reflecting that the Paradise isn’t apparently at all “lost” to visitors +not of my generation. It is the seekers of _that_ remote and romantic +tradition who have seen it, from one period of ten, or even of five, +years to another, systematically and remorselessly built out from their +view. Their helpless plaint, their sense of the generally irrecoverable +and unspeakable, is not, however, what I desire here most to express; +I should like, on the contrary, with ampler opportunity, positively to +enumerate the cases, the cases of contact, impression, experience, +in which the cold ashes of a long-chilled passion may fairly feel +themselves made to glow again. No one who has ever loved Rome as Rome +could be loved in youth and before her poised basketful of the finer +appeals to fond fancy was actually upset, wants to stop loving her; +so that our bleeding and wounded, though perhaps not wholly moribund, +loyalty attends us as a hovering admonitory, anticipatory ghost, one +of those magnanimous life-companions who before complete extinction +designate to the other member of the union their approved successor. So +it is at any rate that I conceive the pilgrim old enough to have become +aware in all these later years of what he misses to be counselled and +pacified in the interest of recognitions that shall a little make up for +it. + +It was this wisdom I was putting into practice, no doubt, for instance, +when I lately resigned myself to motoring of a splendid June day “out +to” Subiaco; as a substitute for a resignation that had anciently taken, +alas, but the form of my never getting there at all. Everything that +day, moreover, seemed right, surely; everything on certain other days +that were like it through their large indebtedness, at this, that and +the other point, to the last new thing, seemed so right that they come +back to me now, after a moderate interval, in the full light of +that unchallenged felicity. I couldn’t at all gloriously recall, for +instance, as I floated to Subiaco on vast brave wings, how on the +occasion of my first visit to Rome, thirty-eight years before, I had +devoted certain evenings, evenings of artless “preparation” in my room +at the inn, to the perusal of Alphonse Dantier’s admirable _Monastères +Bénédictins d’ltalie_, taking piously for granted that I should get +myself somehow conveyed to Monte Cassino and to Subiaco at least: such +an affront to the passion of curiosity, the generally infatuated +state then kindled, would any suspicion of my foredoomed, my all +but interminable, privation during visits to come have seemed to me. +Fortune, in the event, had never favoured my going, but I was to give +myself up at last to the sense of her quite taking me by the hand, and +that is how I now think of our splendid June day at Subiaco. The note +of the wondrous place itself is conventional “wild” Italy raised to the +highest intensity, the ideally, the sublimely conventional and wild, +complete and supreme in itself, without a disparity or a flaw; which +character of perfect picturesque orthodoxy seemed more particularly +to begin for me, I remember, as we passed, on our way, through that +indescribable and indestructible Tivoli, where the jumble of the +elements of the familiarly and exploitedly, the all too notoriously +fair and queer, was more violent and vociferous than ever--so the whole +spectacle there seemed at once to rejoice in cockneyfication and to +resist it. There at least I had old memories to renew--including that +in especial, from a few years back, of one of the longest, hottest, +dustiest return-drives to Rome that the Campagna on a sirocco day was +ever to have treated me to. + +{Illustration: VILLA D’ESTE, TIVOLI} + +That was to be more than made up on this later occasion by an hour of +early evening, snatched on the run back to Rome, that remains with me as +one of those felicities we are wise to leave for ever, just as they are, +just, that is, where they fell, never attempting to renew or improve +them. So happy a chance was it that ensured me at the afternoon’s end +a solitary stroll through the Villa d’ Este, where the day’s invasion, +whatever it might have been, had left no traces and where I met nobody +in the great rococo passages and chambers, and in the prodigious alleys +and on the repeated flights of tortuous steps, but the haunting Genius +of Style, into whose noble battered old face, as if it had come out +clearer in the golden twilight and on recognition of response so deeply +moved, I seemed to exhale my sympathy. This was truly, amid a conception +and order of things all mossed over from disuse, but still without +a form abandoned or a principle disowned, one of the hours that one +doesn’t forget. The ruined fountains seemed strangely to _wait_, in the +stillness and under cover of the approaching dusk, not to begin ever +again to play, also, but just only to be tenderly imagined to do so; +quite as everything held its breath, at the mystic moment, for the drop +of the cruel and garish exposure, for the Spirit of the place to steal +forth and go his round. The vistas of the innumerable mighty cypresses +ranged themselves, in their files and companies, like beaten heroes +for their captain’s, review; the great artificial “works” of every +description, cascades, hemicycles, all graded and grassed and +stone-seated as for floral games, mazes and bowers and alcoves and +grottos, brave indissoluble unions of the planted and the builded +symmetry, with the terraces and staircases that overhang and the arcades +and cloisters that underspread, made common cause together as for one’s +taking up a little, in kindly lingering wonder, the “feeling” out of +which they have sprung. One didn’t see it, under the actual influence, +one wouldn’t for the world have seen it, as that they longed to be +justified, during a few minutes in the twenty-four hours, of their +absurdity of pomp and circumstance--but only that they asked for +company, once in a way, as they were so splendidly formed to give it, +and that the best company, in a changed world, at the end of time, +what could they hope it to be but just the lone, the dawdling person of +taste, the visitor with a flicker of fancy, not to speak of a pang of +pity, to spare for them? It was in the flicker of fancy, no doubt, that +as I hung about the great top-most terrace in especial, and then again +took my way through the high gaunt corridors and the square and bare +alcoved and recessed saloons, all overscored with such a dim waste +of those painted, those delicate and capricious decorations which the +loggie of the Vatican promptly borrowed from the ruins of the Palatine, +or from whatever other revealed and inspiring ancientries, and which +make ghostly confession here of that descent, I gave the rein to my +sense of the sinister too, of that vague after-taste as of evil things +that lurks so often, for a suspicious sensibility, wherever the terrible +game of the life of the Renaissance was played as the Italians played +it; wherever the huge tessellated chessboard seems to stretch about us; +swept bare, almost always violently swept bare, of its chiselled and +shifting figures, of every value and degree, but with this echoing +desolation itself representing the long gasp, as it were, of +overstrained time, the great after-hush that follows on things too +wonderful or dreadful. + +I am putting here, however, my cart before my horse, for the hour just +glanced at was but a final tag to a day of much brighter curiosity, +and which seemed to take its baptism, as we passed through prodigious +perched and huddled, adorably scattered and animated and even crowded +Tivoli, from the universal happy spray of the drumming Anio waterfalls, +all set in their permanent rainbows and Sibylline temples and classic +allusions and Byronic quotations; a wondrous romantic jumble of such +things and quite others--heterogeneous inns and clamorous _guingettes_ +and factories grabbing at the torrent, to say nothing of innumerable +guides and donkeys and white-tied, swallow-tailed waiters dashing out +of grottos and from under cataracts, and of the air, on the part of +the whole population, of standing about, in the most characteristic +_contadino_ manner, to pounce on you and take you somewhere, snatch you +from somebody else, shout something at you, the aqueous and other uproar +permitting, and then charge you for it, your innocence aiding. I’m +afraid our run the rest of the way to Subiaco remains with me but as +an after-sense of that exhilaration, in spite of our rising admirably +higher, all the while, and plunging constantly deeper into splendid +solitary gravities, supreme romantic solemnities and sublimities, of +landscape. The Benedictine convent, which clings to certain more or less +vertiginous ledges and slopes of a vast precipitous gorge, constitutes, +with the whole perfection of its setting, the very ideal of the +tradition of that _extraordinary in the romantic_ handed down to us, as +the most attaching and inviting spell of Italy, by all the old academic +literature of travel and art of the Salvator Rosas and Claudes. This is +the main tribute I may pay in a few words to an impression of which a +sort of divine rightness of oddity, a pictorial felicity that was almost +not of this world, but of a higher degree of distinction altogether, +affected me as the leading note; yet about the whole exquisite +complexity of which I can’t pretend to be informing. + +All the elements of the scene melted for me together; even from the +pause for luncheon on a grassy wayside knoll, over heaven knows what +admirable preparatory headlong slopes and ravines and iridescent +distances, under spreading chestnuts and in the high air that was cool +and sweet, to the final pedestrian climb of sinuous mountain-paths that +the shining limestone and the strong green of shrub and herbage made as +white as silver. There the miraculous home of St. Benedict awaited us +in the form of a builded and pictured-over maze of chapels and shrines, +cells and corridors, stupefying rock-chambers and caves, places all +at an extraordinary variety of different levels and with labyrinthine +intercommunications; there the spirit of the centuries sat like some +invisible icy presence that only permits you to stare and wonder. I +stared, I wondered, I went up and down and in and out and lost myself +in the fantastic fable of the innumerable hard facts themselves; and +whenever I could, above all, I peeped out of small windows and hung over +chance terraces for the love of the general outer picture, the splendid +fashion in which the fretted mountains of marble, as they might have +been, round about, seemed to inlay themselves, for the effect of the +“distinction” I speak of, with vegetations of dark emerald. There above +all--or at least in what such aspects did further for the prodigy of the +Convent, whatever that prodigy might for do _them_--was, to a life-long +victim of Italy, almost verily as never before, the operation of the +old love-philtre; there were the inexhaustible sources of interest and +charm. + +{Illustration: SUBIACO} + +These mystic fountains broke out for me elsewhere, again and again, I +rejoice to say--and perhaps more particularly, to be frank about it, +where the ground about them was pressed with due emphasis of appeal by +the firm wheels of the great winged car. I motored, under invitation +and protection, repeatedly back into the sense of the other years, +that sense of the “old” and comparatively idle Rome of my particular +infatuated prime which I was living to see superseded, and this even +when the fond vista bristled with innumerable “signs of the times,” + unmistakable features of the new era, that, by I scarce know what +perverse law, succeeded in ministering to a happy effect. Some of these +false notes proceed simply from the immense growth of every sort of +facilitation--so that people are much more free than of old to come and +go and do, to inquire and explore, to pervade and generally “infest”; +with a consequent loss, for the fastidious individual, of his +blest earlier sense, not infrequent, of having the occasion and the +impression, as he used complacently to say, all to himself. We none of +us had anything quite all to ourselves during an afternoon at Ostia, +on a beautiful June Sunday; it was a different affair, rather, from the +long, the comparatively slow and quite unpeopled drive that I was to +remember having last taken early in the autumn thirty years before, and +which occupied the day--with the aid of a hamper from once supreme old +Spillman, the provider for picnics to a vanished world (since I suspect +the antique ideal of “a picnic in the Campagna,” the fondest conception +of a happy day, has lost generally much of its glamour). Our idyllic +afternoon, at any rate, left no chord of sensibility that could possibly +have been in question untouched--not even that of tea on the shore at +Fiumincino, after we had spent an hour among the ruins of Ostia and +seen our car ferried across the Tiber, almost saffron-coloured here and +swirling towards its mouth, on a boat that was little more than a big +rustic raft and that yet bravely resisted the prodigious weight. What +shall I say, in the way of the particular, of the general felicity +before me, for the sweetness of the hour to which the incident just +named, with its strange and amusing juxtapositions of the patriarchally +primitive and the insolently supersubtle, the earliest and the latest +efforts of restless science, were almost immediately to succeed? + +We had but skirted the old gold-and-brown walls of Castel Fusano, where +the massive Chigi tower and the immemorial stone-pines and the afternoon +sky and the desolate sweetness and concentrated rarity of the picture +all kept their appointment, to fond memory, with that especial form of +Roman faith, the fine aesthetic conscience in things, that is never, +never broken. We had wound through tangled lanes and met handsome sallow +country-folk lounging at leisure, as became the Sunday, and ever so +pleasantly and garishly clothed, if not quite consistently costumed, as +just on purpose to feed our wanton optimism; and then we had addressed +ourselves with a soft superficiality to the open, the exquisite little +Ostian reliquary, an exhibition of stony vaguenesses half straightened +out. The ruins of the ancient port of Rome, the still recoverable +identity of streets and habitations and other forms of civil life, are +a not inconsiderable handful, though making of the place at best a very +small sister to Pompeii; but a soft superficiality is ever the refuge of +my shy sense before any ghost of informed reconstitution, and I plead my +surrender to it with the less shame that I believe I “enjoy” such scenes +even on such futile pretexts as much as it can be appointed them by the +invidious spirit of History to _be_ enjoyed. It may be said, of course, +that enjoyment, question-begging term at best, isn’t in these austere +connections designated--but rather some principle of appreciation that +can at least give a coherent account of itself. On that basis then--as +I could, I profess, _but_ revel in the looseness of my apprehension, +so wide it seemed to fling the gates of vision and divination--I won’t +pretend to dot, as it were, too many of the i’s of my incompetence. +I was competent only to have been abjectly interested. On reflection, +moreover, I see that no impression of over-much company invaded +the picture till the point was exactly reached for its contributing +thoroughly to character and amusement; across at Fiumincino, which the +age of the bicycle has made, in a small way, the handy Gravesend or +Coney Island of Rome, the cafés and _birrerie_ were at high pressure, +and the bustle all motley and friendly beside the melancholy river, +where the water-side life itself had twenty quaint and vivid notes and +where a few upstanding objects, ancient or modern, looked eminent and +interesting against the delicate Roman sky that dropped down and down +to the far-spreading marshes of malaria. Besides which “company” is ever +intensely gregarious, hanging heavily together and easily outwitted; +so that we had but to proceed a scant distance further and meet the +tideless Mediterranean, where it tumbled in a trifle breezily on the +sands, to be all to ourselves with our tea-basket, quite as in the good +old fashion--only in truth with the advantage that the contemporary +tea-basket is so much improved. + +I jumble my memories as a tribute to the whole idyll--I give the golden +light in which they come back to me for what it is worth; worth, I mean, +as allowing that the possibilities of charm of the Witch of the Seven +Hills, as we used to call her in magazines, haven’t all been vulgarised +away. It was precisely there, on such an occasion and in such a place, +that this might seem signally to have happened; whereas in fact the mild +suburban riot, in which the so gay but so light potations before the +array of little houses of entertainment were what struck one as really +making most for mildness, was brushed over with a fabled grace, was +harmonious, felicitous, distinguished, quite after the fashion of some +thoroughly trained chorus or phalanx of opera or ballet. Bicycles were +stacked up by the hundred; the youth of Rome are ardent cyclists, with +a great taste for flashing about in more or less denuded or costumed +athletic and romantic bands and guilds, and on our return cityward, +toward evening, along the right bank of the river, the road swarmed with +the patient wheels and bent backs of these budding _cives Romani_ quite +to the effect of its finer interest. Such at least, I felt, could only +be one’s acceptance of almost any feature of a scene bathed in that +extraordinarily august air that the waning Roman day is so insidiously +capable of taking on when any other element of style happens at all to +contribute. Weren’t they present, these other elements, in the great +classic lines and folds, the fine academic or historic attitudes of +the darkening land itself as it hung about the old highway, varying +its vague accidents, but achieving always perfect “composition”? I +shamelessly add that cockneyfied impression, at all events, to what I +have called my jumble; Rome, to which we all swept on together in the +wondrous glowing medium, _saved_ everything, spreading afar her wide +wing and applying after all but her supposed grand gift of the secret +of salvation. We kept on and on into the great dim rather sordidly papal +streets that approach the quarter of St. Peter’s; to the accompaniment, +finally, of that markedly felt provocation of fond wonder which had +never failed to lie in wait for me under any question of a renewed +glimpse of the huge unvisited rear of the basilica. There was no renewed +glimpse just then, in the gloaming; but the region I speak of had been +for me, in fact, during the previous weeks, less unvisited than ever +before, so that I had come to count an occasional walk round and about +it as quite of the essence of the convenient small change with which the +heterogeneous City may still keep paying you. These frequentations in +the company of a sculptor friend had been incidental to our reaching +a small artistic foundry of fine metal, an odd and interesting little +establishment placed, as who should say in the case of such a mere +left-over scrap of a large loose margin, nowhere: it lurked so +unsuspectedly, that is, among the various queer things that Rome +comprehensively refers to as “behind St. Peter’s.” + +We had passed then, on the occasion of our several pilgrimages, in +beneath the great flying, or at least straddling buttresses to the left +of the mighty façade, where you enter that great idle precinct of fine +dense pavement and averted and sacrificed grandeur, the reverse of the +monstrous medal of the front. Here the architectural monster rears its +back and shoulders on an equal scale and this whole unregarded world +of colossal consistent symmetry and hidden high finish gives you the +measure of the vast total treasure of items and features. The outward +face of all sorts of inward majesties of utility and ornament here +above all correspondingly reproduces itself; the expanses of golden +travertine--the freshness of tone, the cleanness of surface, in the +sunny air, being extraordinary--climb and soar and spread under the +crushing weight of a scheme carried out in every ponderous particular. +Never was such a show of _wasted_ art, of pomp for pomp’s sake, as +where all the chapels bulge and all the windows, each one a separate +constructional masterpiece, tower above almost grassgrown vacancy; with +the full and immediate effect, of course, of reading us a lesson on +the value of lawful pride. The pride is the pride of indifference as to +whether a greatness so founded be gaped at in all its features or not. +My friend and I were alone to gape at them most often while, for the +unfailing impression of them, on our way to watch the casting of our +figure, we extended our circuit of the place. To which I may add, as +another example of that tentative, that appealing twitch of the garment +of Roman association of which one kept renewing one’s consciousness, the +half-hour at the little foundry itself was all charming--with its quite +shabby and belittered and ramshackle recall of the old Roman “art-life” + of one’s early dreams. Everything was somehow in the picture, the +rickety sheds, the loose paraphernalia, the sunny, grassy yard where a +goat was browsing; then the queer interior gloom of the pits, frilled +with little overlooking scaffoldings and bridges, for the sinking +fireward of the image that was to take on hardness; and all the +pleasantness and quickness, the beguiling refinement, of the three or +four light fine “hands” of whom the staff consisted and into whose type +and tone one liked to read, with whatever harmless extravagance, so many +signs that a lively sense of stiff processes, even in humble life, could +still leave untouched the traditional rare feeling for the artistic. +How delightful such an occupation in such a general setting--those of +my friend, I at such moments irrepressibly moralised; and how one might +after such a fashion endlessly go and come and ask nothing better; or if +better, only so to the extent of another impression I was to owe to him: +that of an evening meal spread, in the warm still darkness that made no +candle flicker, on the wide high space of an old loggia that overhung, +in one quarter, the great obelisked Square preceding one of the Gates, +and in the other the Tiber and the far Trastevere and more things than +I can say--above all, as it were, the whole backward past, the mild +confused romance of the Rome one had loved and of which one was exactly +taking leave under protection of the friendly lanterned and garlanded +feast and the commanding, all-embracing roof-garden. It was indeed a +reconciling, it was an altogether penetrating, last hour. + +1909. + + + + + +A CHAIN OF CITIES + +One day in midwinter, some years since, during a journey from Rome +to Florence perforce too rapid to allow much wayside sacrifice to +curiosity, I waited for the train at Narni. There was time to stroll +far enough from the station to have a look at the famous old bridge +of Augustus, broken short off in mid-Tiber. While I stood admiring the +measure of impression was made to overflow by the gratuitous grace of a +white-cowled monk who came trudging up the road that wound to the gate +of the town. Narni stood, in its own presented felicity, on a hill a +good space away, boxed in behind its perfect grey wall, and the monk, +to oblige me, crept slowly along and disappeared within the aperture. +Everything was distinct in the clear air, and the view exactly as like +the bit of background by an Umbrian master as it ideally should have +been. The winter is bare and brown enough in southern Italy and the +earth reduced to more of a mere anatomy than among ourselves, for whom +the very _crânerie_ of its exposed state, naked and unashamed, gives it +much of the robust serenity, not of a fleshless skeleton, but of a fine +nude statue. In these regions at any rate, the tone of the air, for +the eye, during the brief desolation, has often an extraordinary charm: +nature still smiles as with the deputed and provisional charity of +colour and light, the duty of not ceasing to cheer man’s heart. Her +whole behaviour, at the time, cast such a spell on the broken bridge, +the little walled town and the trudging friar, that I turned away with +the impatient vow and the fond vision of how I would take the journey +again and pause to my heart’s content at Narni, at Spoleto, at Assisi, +at Perugia, at Cortona, at Arezzo. But we have generally to clip our +vows a little when we come to fulfil them; and so it befell that when my +blest springtime arrived I had to begin as resignedly as possible, yet +with comparative meagreness, at Assisi. + +{Illustration: ASSISI.} + +I suppose enjoyment would have a simple zest which it often lacks if +we always did things at the moment we want to, for it’s mostly when +we can’t that we’re thoroughly sure we _would_, and we can answer too +little for moods in the future conditional. Winter at least seemed to me +to have put something into these seats of antiquity that the May sun +had more or less melted away--a desirable strength of tone, a depth +upon depth of queerness and quaintness. Assisi had been in the January +twilight, after my mere snatch at Narni, a vignette out of some brown +old missal. But you’ll have to be a fearless explorer now to find of a +fine spring day any such cluster of curious objects as doesn’t seem made +to match before anything else Mr. Baedeker’s polyglot estimate of its +chief recommendations. This great man was at Assisi in force, and a +brand-new inn for his accommodation has just been opened cheek by +jowl with the church of St. Francis. I don’t know that even the dire +discomfort of this harbourage makes it seem less impertinent; but I +confess I sought its protection, and the great view seemed hardly less +beautiful from my window than from the gallery of the convent. This +view embraces the whole wide reach of Umbria, which becomes as twilight +deepens a purple counterfeit of the misty sea. The visitor’s first +errand is with the church; and it’s fair furthermore to admit that when +he has crossed that threshold the position and quality of his hotel +cease for the time to be matters of moment. This two-fold temple of St. +Francis is one of the very sacred places of Italy, and it would be +hard to breathe anywhere an air more heavy with holiness. Such seems +especially the case if you happen thus to have come from Rome, where +everything ecclesiastical is, in aspect, so very much of this world--so +florid, so elegant, so full of accommodations and excrescences. The mere +site here makes for authority, and they were brave builders who laid the +foundation-stones. The thing rises straight from a steep mountain-side +and plunges forward on its great substructure of arches even as a +crowned headland may frown over the main. Before it stretches a long, +grassy piazza, at the end of which you look up a small grey street, to +see it first climb a little way the rest of the hill and then pause +and leave a broad green slope, crested, high in the air, with a ruined +castle. When I say before it I mean before the upper church; for by +way of doing something supremely handsome and impressive the sturdy +architects of the thirteenth century piled temple upon temple and +bequeathed a double version of their idea. One may imagine them to have +intended perhaps an architectural image of the relation between heart +and head. Entering the lower church at the bottom of the great flight +of steps which leads from the upper door, you seem to push at least into +the very heart of Catholicism. + +For the first minutes after leaving the clearer gloom you catch nothing +but a vista of low black columns closed by the great fantastic cage +surrounding the altar, which is thus placed, by your impression, in +a sort of gorgeous cavern. Gradually you distinguish details, become +accustomed to the penetrating chill, and even manage to make out a +few frescoes; but the general effect remains splendidly sombre and +subterranean. The vaulted roof is very low and the pillars dwarfish, +though immense in girth, as befits pillars supporting substantially a +cathedral. The tone of the place is a triumph of mystery, the richest +harmony of lurking shadows and dusky corners, all relieved by scattered +images and scintillations. There was little light but what came through +the windows of the choir over which the red curtains had been dropped +and were beginning to glow with the downward sun. The choir was guarded +by a screen behind which a dozen venerable voices droned vespers; but +over the top of the screen came the heavy radiance and played among the +ornaments of the high fence round the shrine, casting the shadow of the +whole elaborate mass forward into the obscured nave. The darkness of +vaults and side-chapels is overwrought with vague frescoes, most of them +by Giotto and his school, out of which confused richness the terribly +distinct little faces characteristic of these artists stare at you with +a solemn formalism. Some are faded and injured, and many so ill-lighted +and ill-placed that you can only glance at them with decent conjecture; +the great group, however--four paintings by Giotto on the ceiling above +the altar--may be examined with some success. Like everything of that +grim and beautiful master they deserve examination; but with the effect +ever of carrying one’s appreciation in and in, as it were, rather than +of carrying it out and out, off and off, as happens for us with those +artists who have been helped by the process of “evolution” to grow +wings. This one, “going in” for emphasis at any price, stamps hard, as +who should say, on the very spot of his idea--thanks to which fact +he has a concentration that has never been surpassed. He was in other +words, in proportion to his means, a genius supremely expressive; he +makes the very shade of an intended meaning or a represented attitude so +unmistakable that his figures affect us at moments as creatures all +too suddenly, too alarmingly, too menacingly met. Meagre, primitive, +undeveloped, he yet is immeasurably strong; he even suggests that if he +had lived the due span of years later Michael Angelo might have found +a rival. Not that he is given, however, to complicated postures or +superhuman flights. The something strange that troubles and haunts us in +his work springs rather from a kind of fierce familiarity. + +It is part of the wealth of the lower church that it contains an +admirable primitive fresco by an artist of genius rarely encountered, +Pietro Cavallini, pupil of Giotto. This represents the Crucifixion; the +three crosses rising into a sky spotted with the winged heads of angels +while a dense crowd presses below. You will nowhere see anything more +direfully lugubrious, or more approaching for direct force, though not +of course for amplitude of style, Tintoretto’s great renderings of the +scene in Venice. The abject anguish of the crucified and the straddling +authority and brutality of the mounted guards in the foreground are +contrasted in a fashion worthy of a great dramatist. But the most +poignant touch is the tragic grimaces of the little angelic heads that +fall like hailstones through the dark air. It is genuine realistic +weeping, the act of irrepressible “crying,” that the painter has +depicted, and the effect is pitiful at the same time as grotesque. There +are many more frescoes besides; all the chapels on one side are +lined with them, but these are chiefly interesting in their general +impressiveness--as they people the dim recesses with startling +presences, with apparitions out of scale. Before leaving the place I +lingered long near the door, for I was sure I shouldn’t soon again enjoy +such a feast of scenic composition. The opposite end glowed with subdued +colour; the middle portion was vague and thick and brown, with two or +three scattered worshippers looming through the obscurity; while, all +the way down, the polished pavement, its uneven slabs glittering dimly +in the obstructed light, was of the very essence of expensive picture. +It is certainly desirable, if one takes the lower church of St. Francis +to represent the human heart, that one should find a few bright places +there. But if the general effect is of brightness terrorised and +smothered, is the symbol less valid? For the contracted, prejudiced, +passionate heart let it stand. + +One thing at all events we can say, that we should rejoice to boast as +capacious, symmetrical and well-ordered a head as the upper sanctuary. +Thanks to these merits, in spite of a brave array of Giottesque work +which has the advantage of being easily seen, it lacks the great +character of its counterpart. The frescoes, which are admirable, +represent certain leading events in the life of St. Francis, and +suddenly remind you, by one of those anomalies that are half the secret +of the consummate _mise-en-scene_ of Catholicism, that the apostle of +beggary, the saint whose only tenement in life was the ragged robe which +barely covered him, is the hero of this massive structure. Church upon +church, nothing less will adequately shroud his consecrated clay. The +great reality of Giotto’s designs adds to the helpless wonderment with +which we feel the passionate pluck of the Hero, the sense of being +separated from it by an impassable gulf, the reflection on all that has +come and gone to make morality at that vertiginous pitch impossible. +There are no such high places of humility left to climb to. An observant +friend who has lived long in Italy lately declared to me, however, that +she detested the name of this moralist, deeming him chief propagator of +the Italian vice most trying to the would-be lover of the people, the +want of personal self-respect. There is a solidarity in the use of soap, +and every cringing beggar, idler, liar and pilferer flourished for her +under the shadow of the great Francisan indifference to it. She was +possibly right; at Rome, at Naples, I might have admitted she was right; +but at Assisi, face to face with Giotto’s vivid chronicle, we admire too +much in its main subject the exquisite play of that subject’s genius--we +don’t remit to him, and this for very envy, a single throb of his +consciousness. It took in, that human, that divine embrace, everything +_but_ soap. + +I should find it hard to give an orderly account of my next adventures +or impressions at Assisi, which could n’t well be anything more than +mere romantic _flanerie_. One may easily plead as the final result of +a meditation at the shrine of St. Francis a great and even an amused +charity. This state of mind led me slowly up and down for a couple of +hours through the steep little streets, and at last stretched itself +on the grass with me in the shadow of the great ruined castle that +decorates so grandly the eminence above the town. I remember edging +along the sunless side of the small mouldy houses and pausing very often +to look at nothing in particular. It was all very hot, very hushed, very +resignedly but very persistently old. A wheeled vehicle in such a place +is an event, and the _forestiero’s_ interrogative tread in the blank +sonorous lanes has the privilege of bringing the inhabitants to their +doorways. Some of the better houses, however, achieve a sombre stillness +that protests against the least curiosity as to what may happen in any +such century as this. You wonder, as you pass, what lingering old-world +social types vegetate there, but you won’t find out; albeit that in one +very silent little street I had a glimpse of an open door which I have +not forgotten. A long-haired peddler who must have been a Jew, and who +yet carried without prejudice a burden of mass-books and rosaries, was +offering his wares to a stout old priest. The priest had opened the +door rather stingily and appeared half-heartedly to dismiss him. But +the peddler held up something I couldn’t see; the priest wavered with a +timorous concession to profane curiosity and then furtively pulled the +agent of sophistication, or whatever it might be, into the house. I +should have liked to enter with that worthy. + +I saw later some gentlemen of Assisi who also seemed bored enough to +have found entertainment in his tray. They were at the door of the cafe +on the Piazza, and were so thankful to me for asking them the way to the +cathedral that, answering all in chorus, they lighted up with smiles as +sympathetic as if I had done them a favour. Of that type were my mild, +my delicate adventures. The Piazza has a fine old portico of an ancient +Temple of Minerva--six fluted columns and a pediment, of beautiful +proportions, but sadly battered and decayed. Goethe, I believe, found it +much more interesting than the mighty mediaeval church, and Goethe, as a +cicerone, doubtless could have persuaded one that it was so; but in the +humble society of Murray we shall most of us find a richer sense in the +later monument. I found quaint old meanings enough in the dark yellow +facade of the small cathedral as I sat on a stone bench by the oblong +green stretched before it. This is a pleasing piece of Italian Gothic +and, like several of its companions at Assisi, has an elegant wheel +window and a number of grotesque little carvings of creatures human +and bestial. If with Goethe I were to balance anything against the +attractions of the double church I should choose the ruined castle +on the hill above the town. I had been having glimpses of it all the +afternoon at the end of steep street-vistas, and promising myself +half-an-hour beside its grey walls at sunset. The sun was very late +setting, and my half-hour became a long lounge in the lee of an abutment +which arrested the gentle uproar of the wind. The castle is a splendid +piece of ruin, perched on the summit of the mountain to whose slope +Assisi clings and dropping a pair of stony arms to enclose the little +town in its embrace. The city wall, in other words, straggles up the +steep green hill and meets the crumbling skeleton of the fortress. On +the side off from the town the mountain plunges into a deep ravine, the +opposite face of which is formed by the powerful undraped shoulder of +Monte Subasio, a fierce reflector of the sun. Gorge and mountain are +wild enough, but their frown expires in the teeming softness of the +great vale of Umbria. To lie aloft there on the grass, with silver-grey +ramparts at one’s back and the warm rushing wind in one’s ears, and +watch the beautiful plain mellow into the tones of twilight, was as +exquisite a form of repose as ever fell to a tired tourist’s lot. + +{Illustration: PERUGIA.} + +Perugia too has an ancient stronghold, which one must speak of in +earnest as that unconscious humorist the classic American traveller +is supposed invariably to speak of the Colosseum: it will be a very +handsome building when it’s finished. Even Perugia is going the way of +all Italy--straightening out her streets, preparing her ruins, laying +her venerable ghosts. The castle is being completely _remis a neuf_--a +Massachusetts schoolhouse could n’t cultivate a “smarter” ideal. There +are shops in the basement and fresh putty on all the windows; so +that the only thing proper to a castle it has kept is its magnificent +position and range, which you may enjoy from the broad platform where +the Perugini assemble at eventide. Perugia is chiefly known to fame as +the city of Raphael’s master; but it has a still higher claim to renown +and ought to figure in the gazetteer of fond memory as the little City +of the infinite View. The small dusky, crooked place tries by a hundred +prompt pretensions, immediate contortions, rich mantling flushes and +other ingenuities, to waylay your attention and keep it at home; but +your consciousness, alert and uneasy from the first moment, is all +abroad even when your back is turned to the vast alternative or when +fifty house-walls conceal it, and you are for ever rushing up by-streets +and peeping round corners in the hope of another glimpse or reach of it. +As it stretches away before you in that eminent indifference to limits +which is at the same time at every step an eminent homage to style, it +is altogether too free and fair for compasses and terms. You can only +say, and rest upon it, that you prefer it to any other visible fruit of +position or claimed empire of the eye that you are anywhere likely to +enjoy. + +For it is such a wondrous mixture of blooming plain and gleaming river +and wavily-multitudinous mountain vaguely dotted with pale grey cities, +that, placed as you are, roughly speaking, in the centre of Italy, you +all but span the divine peninsula from sea to sea. Up the long vista +of the Tiber you look--almost to Rome; past Assisi, Spello, Foligno, +Spoleto, all perched on their respective heights and shining through the +violet haze. To the north, to the east, to the west, you see a hundred +variations of the prospect, of which I have kept no record. Two +notes only I have made: one--though who hasn’t made it over and over +again?--on the exquisite elegance of mountain forms in this endless play +of the excrescence, it being exactly as if there were variation of sex +in the upheaved mass, with the effect here mainly of contour and curve +and complexion determined in the feminine sense. It further came home to +me that the command of such an outlook on the world goes far, surely, to +give authority and centrality and experience, those of the great seats +of dominion, even to so scant a cluster of attesting objects as here. It +must deepen the civic consciousness and take off the edge of ennui. +It performs this kindly office, at any rate, for the traveller who +may overstay his curiosity as to Perugino and the Etruscan relics. It +continually solicits his wonder and praise--it reinforces the historic +page. I spent a week in the place, and when it was gone I had had enough +of Perugino, but had n’t had enough of the View. + +I should perhaps do the reader a service by telling him just how a week +at Perugia may be spent. His first care must be to ignore the very dream +of haste, walking everywhere very slowly and very much at random, and +to impute an esoteric sense to almost anything his eye may happen to +encounter. Almost everything in fact lends itself to the historic, +the romantic, the æsthetic fallacy--almost everything has an antique +queerness and richness that ekes out the reduced state; that of a grim +and battered old adventuress, the heroine of many shames and scandals, +surviving to an extraordinary age and a considerable penury, but with +ancient gifts of princes and other forms of the wages of sin to show, +and the most beautiful garden of all the world to sit and doze and count +her beads in and remember. He must hang a great deal about the huge +Palazzo Pubblico, which indeed is very well worth any acquaintance you +may scrape with it. It masses itself gloomily above the narrow street to +an immense elevation, and leads up the eye along a cliff-like surface +of rugged wall, mottled with old scars and new repairs, to the loggia +dizzily perched on its cornice. He must repeat his visit to the Etruscan +Gate, by whose immemorial composition he must indeed linger long to +resolve it back into the elements originally attending it. He must uncap +to the irrecoverable, the inimitable style of the statue of Pope Julius +III before the cathedral, remembering that Hawthorne fabled his Miriam, +in an air of romance from which we are well-nigh as far to-day as from +the building of Etruscan gates, to have given rendezvous to Kenyon at +its base. Its material is a vivid green bronze, and the mantle and tiara +are covered with a delicate embroidery worthy of a silver-smith. + +Then our leisurely friend must bestow on Perugino’s frescoes in +the Exchange, and on his pictures in the University, all the placid +contemplation they deserve. He must go to the theatre every evening, +in an orchestra-chair at twenty-two soldi, and enjoy the curious +didacticism of “Amore senza Stima,” “Severita e Debolezza,” “La Societa +Equivoca,” and other popular specimens of contemporaneous Italian +comedy--unless indeed the last-named be not the edifying title applied, +for peninsular use, to “Le Demi-Monde” of the younger Dumas. I shall +be very much surprised if, at the end of a week of this varied +entertainment, he hasn’t learnt how to live, not exactly in, but with, +Perugia. His strolls will abound in small accidents and mercies of +vision, but of which a dozen pencil-strokes would be a better memento +than this poor word-sketching. From the hill on which the town is +planted radiate a dozen ravines, down whose sides the houses slide and +scramble with an alarming indifference to the cohesion of their little +rugged blocks of flinty red stone. You ramble really nowhither without +emerging on some small court or terrace that throws your view across a +gulf of tangled gardens or vineyards and over to a cluster of serried +black dwellings which have to hollow in their backs to keep their +balance on the opposite ledge. On archways and street-staircases and +dark alleys that bore through a density of massive basements, and curve +and climb and plunge as they go, all to the truest mediaeval tune, +you may feast your fill. These are the local, the architectural, +the compositional commonplaces.. Some of the little streets in +out-of-the-way corners are so rugged and brown and silent that you may +imagine them passages long since hewn by the pick-axe in a deserted +stone-quarry. The battered black houses, of the colour of buried +things--things buried, that is, in accumulations of time, closer packed, +even as such are, than spadefuls of earth--resemble exposed sections of +natural rock; none the less so when, beyond some narrow gap, you catch +the blue and silver of the sublime circle of landscape. + +{Illustration: ETRUSCAN GATEWAY, PERUGIA.} + +But I ought n’t to talk of mouldy alleys, or yet of azure distances, +as if they formed the main appeal to taste in this accomplished little +city. In the Sala del Cambio, where in ancient days the money-changers +rattled their embossed coin and figured up their profits, you may enjoy +one of the serenest aesthetic pleasures that the golden age of art +anywhere offers us. Bank parlours, I believe, are always handsomely +appointed, but are even those of Messrs. Rothschild such models of mural +bravery as this little counting-house of a bygone fashion? The bravery +is Perugino’s own; for, invited clearly to do his best, he left it as +a lesson to the ages, covering the four low walls and the vault with +scriptural and mythological figures of extraordinary beauty. They +are ranged in artless attitudes round the upper half of the +room--the sibyls, the prophets, the philosophers, the Greek and Roman +heroes--looking down with broad serene faces, with small mild eyes and +sweet mouths that commit them to nothing in particular unless to being +comfortably and charmingly alive, at the incongruous proceedings of a +Board of Brokers. Had finance a very high tone in those days, or were +genius and faith then simply as frequent as capital and enterprise are +among ourselves? The great distinction of the Sala del Cambio is that +it has a friendly Yes for both these questions. There was a rigid +transactional probity, it seems to say; there was also a high tide of +inspiration. About the artist himself many things come up for us--more +than I can attempt in their order; for he was not, I think, to an +attentive observer, the mere smooth and entire and devout spirit we at +first are inclined to take him for. He has that about him which leads +us to wonder if he may not, after all, play a proper part enough here +as the patron of the money-changers. He is the delight of a million of +young ladies; but who knows whether we should n’t find in his works, +might we “go into” them a little, a trifle more of manner than of +conviction, and of system than of deep sincerity? + +This, I allow, would put no great affront on them, and one speculates +thus partly but because it’s a pleasure to hang about him on any +pretext, and partly because his immediate effect is to make us quite +inordinately embrace the pretext of his lovely soul. His portrait, +painted on the wall of the Sala (you may see it also in Rome +and Florence) might at any rate serve for the likeness of Mr. +Worldly-Wiseman in Bunyan’s allegory. He was fond of his glass, I +believe, and he made his art lucrative. This tradition is not refuted +by his preserved face, and after some experience--or rather after a good +deal, since you can’t have a _little_ of Perugino, who abounds wherever +old masters congregate, so that one has constantly the sense of being +“in” for all there is--you may find an echo of it in the uniform type of +his creatures, their monotonous grace, their prodigious invariability. +He may very well have wanted to produce figures of a substantial, yet at +the same time of an impeccable innocence; but we feel that he had taught +himself _how_ even beyond his own belief in them, and had arrived at +a process that acted at last mechanically. I confess at the same time +that, so interpreted, the painter affects me as hardly less interesting, +and one can’t but become conscious of one’s style when one’s style +has become, as it were, so conscious of one’s, or at least of its own, +fortune. If he was the inventor of a remarkably calculable _facture_, a +calculation that never fails is in its way a grace of the first order, +and there are things in this special appearance of perfection of +practice that make him the forerunner of a mighty and more modern race. +More than any of the early painters who strongly charm, you may take all +his measure from a single specimen. The other samples infallibly match, +reproduce unerringly the one type he had mastered, but which had the +good fortune to be adorably fair, to seem to have dawned on a vision +unsullied by the shadows of earth. Which truth, moreover, leaves +Perugino all delightful as composer and draughtsman; he has in each of +these characters a sort of spacious neatness which suggests that the +whole conception has been washed clean by some spiritual chemistry the +last thing before reaching the canvas; after which it has been applied +to that surface with a rare economy of time and means. Giotto and Fra +Angelico, beside him, are full of interesting waste and irrelevant +passion. In the sacristy of the charming church of San Pietro--a museum +of pictures and carvings--is a row of small heads of saints formerly +covering the frame of the artist’s Ascension, carried off by the French. +It is almost miniature work, and here at least Perugino triumphs in +sincerity, in apparent candour, as well as in touch. Two of the holy +men are reading their breviaries, but with an air of infantine innocence +quite consistent with their holding the book upside down. + +Between Perugia and Cortona lies the large weedy water of Lake +Thrasymene, turned into a witching word for ever by Hannibal’s recorded +victory over Rome. Dim as such records have become to us and remote such +realities, he is yet a passionless pilgrim who does n’t, as he passes, +of a heavy summer’s day, feel the air and the light and the very +faintness of the breeze all charged and haunted with them, all +interfused as with the wasted ache of experience and with the vague +historic gaze. Processions of indistinguishable ghosts bore me company +to Cortona itself, most sturdily ancient of Italian towns. It must have +been a seat of ancient knowledge even when Hannibal and Flaminius came +to the shock of battle, and have looked down afar from its grey ramparts +on the contending swarm with something of the philosophic composure +suitable to a survivor of Pelasgic and Etruscan revolutions. These grey +ramparts are in great part still visible, and form the chief attraction +of Cortona. It is perched on the very pinnacle of a mountain, and I +wound and doubled interminably over the face of the great hill, while +the jumbled roofs and towers of the arrogant little city still seemed +nearer to the sky than to the railway-station. “Rather rough,” Murray +pronounces the local inn; and rough indeed it was; there was scarce a +square foot of it that you would have cared to stroke with your hand. +The landlord himself, however, was all smoothness and the best fellow in +the world; he took me up into a rickety old loggia on the tip-top of his +establishment and played showman as to half the kingdoms of the earth. +I was free to decide at the same time whether my loss or my gain was the +greater for my seeing Cortona through the medium of a festa. On the +one hand the museum was closed (and in a certain sense the smaller +and obscurer the town the more I like the museum); the churches--an +interesting note of manners and morals--were impenetrably crowded, +though, for that matter, so was the cafe, where I found neither an empty +stool nor the edge of a table. I missed a sight of the famous painted +Muse, the art-treasure of Cortona and supposedly the most precious, as +it falls little short of being the only, sample of the Greek painted +picture that has come down to us. On the other hand, I saw--but this is +what I saw. + +{Illustration: A STREET, CORTONA.} + +A part of the mountain-top is occupied by the church of St. Margaret, +and this was St. Margaret’s day. The houses pause roundabout it and +leave a grassy slope, planted here and there with lean black cypresses. +The contadini from near and far had congregated in force and were +crowding into the church or winding up the slope. When I arrived they +were all kneeling or uncovered; a bedizened procession, with banners +and censers, bearing abroad, I believe, the relics of the saint, was +re-entering the church. The scene made one of those pictures that +Italy still brushes in for you with an incomparable hand and from +an inexhaustible palette when you find her in the mood. The day was +superb--the sky blazed overhead like a vault of deepest sapphire. The +grave brown peasantry, with no great accent of costume, but with +sundry small ones--decked, that is, in cheap fineries of scarlet and +yellow--made a mass of motley colour in the high wind-stirred light. +The procession halted in the pious hush, and the lovely land around and +beneath us melted away, almost to either sea, in tones of azure scarcely +less intense than the sky. Behind the church was an empty crumbling +citadel, with half-a-dozen old women keeping the gate for coppers. +Here were views and breezes and sun and shade and grassy corners to the +heart’s content, together with one could n’t say what huge seated mystic +melancholy presence, the after-taste of everything the still open maw +of time had consumed. I chose a spot that fairly combined all these +advantages, a spot from which I seemed to look, as who should say, +straight down the throat of the monster, no dark passage now, but with +all the glorious day playing into it, and spent a good part of my stay +at Cortona lying there at my length and observing the situation over +the top of a volume that I must have brought in my pocket just for that +especial wanton luxury of the resource provided and slighted. In the +afternoon I came down and hustled a while through the crowded little +streets, and then strolled forth under the scorching sun and made the +outer circuit of the wall. There I found tremendous uncemented blocks; +they glared and twinkled in the powerful light, and I had to put on a +blue eye-glass in order to throw into its proper perspective the vague +Etruscan past, obtruded and magnified in such masses quite as with the +effect of inadequately-withdrawn hands and feet in photographs. + +I spent the next day at Arezzo, but I confess in very much the same +uninvestigating fashion--taking in the “general impression,” I dare say, +at every pore, but rather systematically leaving the dust of the ages +unfingered on the stored records: I should doubtless, in the poor time +at my command, have fingered it to so little purpose. The seeker for +the story of things has moreover, if he be worth his salt, a hundred +insidious arts; and in that case indeed--by which I mean when his +sensibility has come duly to adjust itself--the story assaults him but +from too many sides. He even feels at moments that he must sneak along +on tiptoe in order not to have too much of it. Besides which the case +all depends on the kind of use, the range of application, his tangled +consciousness, or his intelligible genius, say, may come to recognize +for it. At Arezzo, however this might be, one was far from Rome, one +was well within genial Tuscany, and the historic, the romantic decoction +seemed to reach one’s lips in less stiff doses. There at once was the +“general impression”--the exquisite sense of the scarce expressible +Tuscan quality, which makes immediately, for the whole pitch of one’s +perception, a grateful, a not at all strenuous difference, attaches to +almost any coherent group of objects, to any happy aspect of the scene, +for a main note, some mild recall, through pleasant friendly colour, +through settled ample form, through something homely and economic too at +the very heart of “style,” of an identity of temperament and habit with +those of the divine little Florence that one originally knew. Adorable +Italy in which, for the constant renewal of interest, of attention, of +affection, these refinements of variety, these so harmoniously-grouped +and individually-seasoned fruits of the great garden of history, keep +presenting themselves! It seemed to fall in with the cheerful Tuscan +mildness for instance--sticking as I do to that ineffectual expression +of the Tuscan charm, of the yellow-brown Tuscan dignity at large--that +the ruined castle on the hill (with which agreeable feature Arezzo is no +less furnished than Assisi and Cortona) had been converted into a great +blooming, and I hope all profitable, podere or market-garden. I lounged +away the half-hours there under a spell as potent as the “wildest” + forecast of propriety--propriety to all the particular conditions--could +have figured it. I had seen Santa Maria della Pieve and its campanile +of quaint colonnades, the stately, dusky cathedral--grass-plotted and +residenced about almost after the fashion of an English “close”--and +John of Pisa’s elaborate marble shrine; I had seen the museum and its +Etruscan vases and majolica platters. These were very well, but the old +pacified citadel somehow, through a day of soft saturation, placed me +most in relation. Beautiful hills surrounded it, cypresses cast straight +shadows at its corners, while in the middle grew a wondrous Italian +tangle of wheat and corn, vines and figs, peaches and cabbages, memories +and images, anything and everything. + +1873. + + + + + +SIENA EARLY AND LATE + + +I + + +Florence being oppressively hot and delivered over to the mosquitoes, +the occasion seemed to favour that visit to Siena which I had more than +once planned and missed. I arrived late in the evening, by the light +of a magnificent moon, and while a couple of benignantly-mumbling old +crones were making up my bed at the inn strolled forth in quest of a +first impression. Five minutes brought me to where I might gather it +unhindered as it bloomed in the white moonshine. The great Piazza of +Siena is famous, and though in this day of multiplied photographs and +blunted surprises and profaned revelations none of the world’s wonders +can pretend, like Wordsworth’s phantom of delight, really to “startle +and waylay,” yet as I stepped upon the waiting scene from under a dark +archway I was conscious of no loss of the edge of a precious presented +sensibility. The waiting scene, as I have called it, was in the shape of +a shallow horse-shoe--as the untravelled reader who has turned over his +travelled friends’ portfolios will respectfully remember; or, better, of +a bow in which the high wide face of the Palazzo Pubblico forms the +cord and everything else the arc. It was void of any human presence that +could figure to me the current year; so that, the moonshine assisting, +I had half-an-hour’s infinite vision of mediæval Italy. The Piazza being +built on the side of a hill--or rather, as I believe science affirms, in +the cup of a volcanic crater--the vast pavement converges downwards in +slanting radiations of stone, the spokes of a great wheel, to a point +directly before the Palazzo, which may mark the hub, though it is +nothing more ornamental than the mouth of a drain. The great monument +stands on the lower side and might seem, in spite of its goodly mass and +its embattled cornice, to be rather defiantly out-countenanced by vast +private constructions occupying the opposite eminence. This might be, +without the extraordinary dignity of the architectural gesture with +which the huge high-shouldered pile asserts itself. + +On the firm edge of the palace, from bracketed base to grey-capped +summit against the sky, where grows a tall slim tower which soars and +soars till it has given notice of the city’s greatness over the blue +mountains that mark the horizon. It rises as slender and straight as a +pennoned lance planted on the steel-shod toe of a mounted knight, and +keeps all to itself in the blue air, far above the changing fashions of +the market, the proud consciousness or rare arrogance once built into +it. This beautiful tower, the finest thing in Siena and, in its rigid +fashion, as permanently fine thus as a really handsome nose on a face of +no matter what accumulated age, figures there still as a Declaration +of Independence beside which such an affair as ours, thrown off at +Philadelphia, appears to have scarce done more than helplessly give way +to time. Our Independence has become a dependence on a thousand such +dreadful things as the incorrupt declaration of Siena strikes us as +looking for ever straight over the level of. As it stood silvered by +the moonlight, while my greeting lasted, it seemed to speak, all as from +soul to soul, very much indeed as some ancient worthy of a lower order, +buttonholing one on the coveted chance and at the quiet hour, might +have done, of a state of things long and vulgarly superseded, but to the +pride and power, the once prodigious vitality, of which who could expect +any one effect to testify more incomparably, more indestructibly, quite, +as it were, more immortally? The gigantic houses enclosing the rest of +the Piazza took up the tale and mingled with it their burden. “We are +very old and a trifle weary, but we were built strong and piled high, +and we shall last for many an age. The present is cold and heedless, but +we keep ourselves in heart by brooding over our store of memories and +traditions. We are haunted houses in every creaking timber and aching +stone.” Such were the gossiping connections I established with Siena +before I went to bed. + +Since that night I have had a week’s daylight knowledge of the surface +of the subject at least, and don’t know how I can better present it than +simply as another and a vivider page of the lesson that the ever-hungry +artist has only to _trust_ old Italy for her to feed him at every single +step from her hand--and if not with one sort of sweetly-stale grain from +that wondrous mill of history which during so many ages ground finer +than any other on earth, why then always with something else. Siena has +at any rate “preserved appearances”--kept the greatest number of them, +that is, unaltered for the eye--about as consistently as one can imagine +the thing done. Other places perhaps may treat you to as drowsy an odour +of antiquity, but few exhale it from so large an area. Lying massed +within her walls on a dozen clustered hill-tops, she shows you at every +turn in how much greater a way she once lived; and if so much of the +grand manner is extinct, the receptacle of the ashes still solidly +rounds itself. This heavy general stress of all her emphasis on the past +is what she constantly keeps in your eyes and your ears, and if you be +but a casual observer and admirer the generalised response is mainly +what you give her. The casual observer, however beguiled, is mostly +not very learned, not over-equipped in advance with data; he hasn’t +specialised, his notions are necessarily vague, the chords of his +imagination, for all his good-will, are inevitably muffled and weak. But +such as it is, his received, his welcome impression serves his turn so +far as the life of sensibility goes, and reminds him from time to time +that even the lore of German doctors is but the shadow of satisfied +curiosity. I have been living at the inn, walking about the streets, +sitting in the Piazza; these are the simple terms of my experience. But +streets and inns in Italy are the vehicles of half one’s knowledge; +if one has no fancy for their lessons one may burn one’s note-book. +In Siena everything is Sienese. The inn has an English sign over the +door--a little battered plate with a rusty representation of the lion +and the unicorn; but advance hopefully into the mouldy stone alley which +serves as vestibule and you will find local colour enough. The landlord, +I was told, had been servant in an English family, and I was curious to +see how he met the probable argument of the casual Anglo-Saxon after the +latter’s first twelve hours in his establishment. As he failed to appear +I asked the waiter if he, weren’t at home. “Oh,” said the latter, “he’s +a _piccolo grasso vecchiotto_ who doesn’t like to move.” I’m afraid this +little fat old man has simply a bad conscience. It’s no small burden for +one who likes the Italians--as who doesn’t, under this restriction?--to +have so much indifference even to rudimentary purifying processes to +dispose of. What is the real philosophy of dirty habits, and are foul +surfaces merely superficial? If unclean manners have in truth the +moral meaning which I suspect in them we must love Italy better than +consistency. This a number of us are prepared to do, but while we are +making the sacrifice it is as well we should be aware. + +We may plead moreover for these impecunious heirs of the past that even +if it were easy to be clean in the midst of their mouldering heritage +it would be difficult to appear so. At the risk of seeming to flaunt the +silly superstition of restless renovation for the sake of renovation, +which is but the challenge of the infinitely precious principle of +duration, one is still moved to say that the prime result of one’s +contemplative strolls in the dusky alleys of such a place is an +ineffable sense of disrepair. Everything is cracking, peeling, fading, +crumbling, rotting. No young Sienese eyes rest upon anything youthful; +they open into a world battered and befouled with long use. Everything +has passed its meridian except the brilliant façade of the cathedral, +which is being diligently retouched and restored, and a few private +palaces whose broad fronts seem to have been lately furbished and +polished. Siena was long ago mellowed to the pictorial tone; the +operation of time is now to deposit shabbiness upon shabbiness. But +it’s for the most part a patient, sturdy, sympathetic shabbiness, +which soothes rather than irritates the nerves, and has in many cases +doubtless as long a career to run as most of our pert and shallow +freshnesses. It projects at all events a deeper shadow into the constant +twilight of the narrow streets--that vague historic dusk, as I may call +it, in which one walks and wonders. These streets are hardly more than +sinuous flagged alleys, into which the huge black houses, between their +almost meeting cornices, suffer a meagre light to filter down over +rough-hewn stone, past windows often of graceful Gothic form, and great +pendent iron rings and twisted sockets for torches. Scattered over +their many-headed hill, they suffer the roadway often to incline to the +perpendicular, becoming so impracticable for vehicles that the sound of +wheels is only a trifle less anomalous than it would be in Venice. But +all day long there comes up to my window an incessant shuffling of feet +and clangour of voices. The weather is very warm for the season, all the +world is out of doors, and the Tuscan tongue (which in Siena is reputed +to have a classic purity) wags in every imaginable key. It doesn’t +rest even at night, and I am often an uninvited guest at concerts +and _conversazioni_ at two o’clock in the morning. The concerts are +sometimes charming. I not only don’t curse my wakefulness, but go to my +window to listen. Three men come carolling by, trolling and quavering +with voices of delightful sweetness, or a lonely troubadour in his +shirt-sleeves draws such artful love-notes from his clear, fresh +tenor, that I seem for the moment to be behind the scenes at the opera, +watching some Rubini or Mario go “on” and waiting for the round of +applause. In the intervals a couple of friends or enemies stop--Italians +always make their points in conversation by pulling up, letting you walk +on a few paces, to turn and find them standing with finger on nose +and engaging your interrogative eye--they pause, by a happy instinct, +directly under my window, and dispute their point or tell their story +or make their confidence. One scarce is sure which it may be; everything +has such an explosive promptness, such a redundancy of inflection and +action. But everything for that matter takes on such dramatic life +as our lame colloquies never know--so that almost any uttered +communications here become an acted play, improvised, mimicked, +proportioned and rounded, carried bravely to its _dénoûment_. The +speaker seems actually to establish his stage and face his foot-lights, +to create by a gesture a little scenic circumscription about him; he +rushes to and fro and shouts and stamps and postures, he ranges through +every phase of his inspiration. I noted the other evening a striking +instance of the spontaneity of the Italian gesture, in the person of a +small Sienese of I hardly know what exact age--the age of inarticulate +sounds and the experimental use of a spoon. It was a Sunday evening, and +this little man had accompanied his parents to the café. The Caffè +Greco at Siena is a most delightful institution; you get a capital +_demi-tasse_ for three sous, and an excellent ice for eight, and while +you consume these easy luxuries you may buy from a little hunchback the +local weekly periodical, the _Vita Nuova_, for three centimes (the two +centimes left from your sou, if you are under the spell of this magical +frugality, will do to give the waiter). My young friend was sitting on +his father’s knee and helping himself to the half of a strawberry-ice +with which his mamma had presented him. He had so many misadventures +with his spoon that this lady at length confiscated it, there being +nothing left of the ice but a little crimson liquid which he might +dispose of by the common instinct of childhood. But he was no friend, +it appeared, to such freedoms; he was a perfect little gentleman and he +resented it being expected of him that he should drink down his remnant. +He protested therefore, and it was the manner of his protest that struck +me. He didn’t cry audibly, though he made a very wry face. It was no +stupid squall, and yet he was too young to speak. It was a penetrating +concord of inarticulately pleading, accusing sounds, accompanied by +gestures of the most exquisite propriety. These were perfectly mature; +he did everything that a man of forty would have done if he had been +pouring out a flood of sonorous eloquence. He shrugged his shoulders +and wrinkled his eyebrows, tossed out his hands and folded his arms, +obtruded his chin and bobbed about his head--and at last, I am happy to +say, recovered his spoon. If I had had a solid little silver one I would +have presented it to him as a testimonial to a perfect, though as yet +unconscious, artist. + +My actual tribute to him, however, has diverted me from what I had in +mind--a much weightier matter--the great private palaces which are the +massive majestic syllables, sentences, periods, of the strange message +the place addresses to us. They are extraordinarily spacious and +numerous, and one wonders what part they can play in the meagre economy +of the actual city. The Siena of to-day is a mere shrunken semblance +of the rabid little republic which in the thirteenth century waged +triumphant war with Florence, cultivated the arts with splendour, +planned a cathedral (though it had ultimately to curtail the design) of +proportions almost unequalled, and contained a population of two hundred +thousand souls. Many of these dusky piles still bear the names of the +old mediaeval magnates the vague mild occupancy of whose descendants has +the effect of armour of proof worn over “pot” hats and tweed jackets and +trousers. Half-a-dozen of them are as high as the Strozzi and Riccardi +palaces in Florence; they couldn’t well be higher. The very essence of +the romantic and the scenic is in the way these colossal dwellings are +packed together in their steep streets, in the depths of their little +enclosed, agglomerated city. When we, in our day and country, raise a +structure of half the mass and dignity, we leave a great space about +it in the manner of a pause after a showy speech. But when a Sienese +countess, as things are here, is doing her hair near the window, she +is a wonderfully near neighbour to the cavalier opposite, who is being +shaved by his valet. Possibly the countess doesn’t object to a certain +chosen publicity at her toilet; what does an Italian gentleman assure +me but that the aristocracy make very free with each other? Some of the +palaces are shown, but only when the occupants are at home, and now they +are in _villeggiatura_. Their villeggiatura lasts eight months of the +year, the waiter at the inn informs me, and they spend little more than +the carnival in the city. The gossip of an inn-waiter ought perhaps to +be beneath the dignity of even such thin history as this; but I confess +that when, as a story-seeker always and ever, I have come in from my +strolls with an irritated sense of the dumbness of stones and mortar, +it has been to listen with avidity, over my dinner, to the proffered +confidences of the worthy man who stands by with a napkin. His talk is +really very fine, and he prides himself greatly on his cultivated tone, +to which he calls my attention. He has very little good to say about the +Sienese nobility. They are “proprio d’origine egoista”--whatever that +may be--and there are many who can’t write their names. This may be +calumny; but I doubt whether the most blameless of them all could have +spoken more delicately of a lady of peculiar personal appearance who had +been dining near me. “She’s too fat,” I grossly said on her leaving +the room. The waiter shook his head with a little sniff: “È troppo +materiale.” This lady and her companion were the party whom, thinking +I might relish a little company--I had been dining alone for a week--he +gleefully announced to me as newly arrived Americans. They were +Americans, I found, who wore, pinned to their heads in permanence, the +black lace veil or mantilla, conveyed their beans to their mouth with +a knife, and spoke a strange raucous Spanish. They were in fine +compatriots from Montevideo. + +{Illustration: THE RED PALACE, SIENA.} + +The genius of old Siena, however, would make little of any stress of +such distinctions; one representative of a far-off social platitude +being about as much in order as another as he stands before the great +loggia of the Casino di Nobili, the club of the best society. The +nobility, which is very numerous and very rich, is still, says the +apparently competent native I began by quoting, perfectly feudal and +uplifted and separate. Morally and intellectually, behind the walls of +its palaces, the fourteenth century, it’s thrilling to think, hasn’t +ceased to hang on. There is no bourgeoisie to speak of; immediately +after the aristocracy come the poor people, who are very poor indeed. +My friend’s account of these matters made me wish more than ever, as +a lover of the preserved social specimen, of type at almost any price, +that one weren’t, a helpless victim of the historic sense, reduced +simply to staring at black stones and peeping up stately staircases; +and that when one had examined the street-face of the palace, Murray in +hand, one might walk up to the great drawing-room, make one’s bow to the +master and mistress, the old abbe and the young count, and invite +them to favour one with a sketch of their social philosophy or a few +first-hand family anecdotes. + +The dusky labyrinth of the streets, we must in default of such +initiations content ourselves with noting, is interrupted by two great +candid spaces: the fan-shaped piazza, of which I just now said a word, +and the smaller square in which the cathedral erects its walls of +many-coloured marble. Of course since paying the great piazza my +compliments by moonlight I have strolled through it often at sunnier and +shadier hours. The market is held there, and wherever Italians buy and +sell, wherever they count and chaffer--as indeed you hear them do right +and left, at almost any moment, as you take your way among them--the +pulse of life beats fast. It has been doing so on the spot just named, I +suppose, for the last five hundred years, and during that time the cost +of eggs and earthen pots has been gradually but inexorably increasing. +The buyers nevertheless wrestle over their purchases as lustily as so +many fourteenth-century burghers suddenly waking up in horror to current +prices. You have but to walk aside, however, into the Palazzo Pubblico +really to feel yourself a thrifty old medievalist. The state affairs of +the Republic were formerly transacted here, but it now gives shelter +to modern law-courts and other prosy business. I was marched through +a number of vaulted halls and chambers, which, in the intervals of the +administrative sessions held in them, are peopled only by the great +mouldering archaic frescoes--anything but inanimate these even in their +present ruin--that cover the walls and ceiling. The chief painters of +the Sienese school lent a hand in producing the works I name, and you +may complete there the connoisseurship in which, possibly, you will have +embarked at the Academy. I say “possibly” to be very judicial, my own +observation having led me no great length. I have rather than otherwise +cherished the thought that the Sienese school suffers one’s eagerness +peacefully to slumber--benignantly abstains in fact from whipping up +a languid curiosity and a tepid faith. “A formidable rival to the +Florentine,” says some book--I forget which--into which I recently +glanced. Not a bit of it thereupon boldly say I; the Florentines may +rest on their laurels and the lounger on his lounge. The early painters +of the two groups have indeed much in common; but the Florentines had +the good fortune to see their efforts gathered up and applied by a few +pre-eminent spirits, such as never came to the rescue of the groping +Sienese. Fra Angelico and Ghirlandaio said all their feebler _confrères_ +dreamt of and a great deal more beside, but the inspiration of Simone +Memmi and Ambrogio Lorenzetti and Sano di Pietro has a painful air of +never efflorescing into a maximum. Sodoma and Beccafumi are to my taste +a rather abortive maximum. But one should speak of them all gently--and +I do, from my soul; for their labour, by their lights, has wrought a +precious heritage of still-living colour and rich figure-peopled shadow +for the echoing chambers of their old civic fortress. The faded frescoes +cover the walls like quaintly-storied tapestries; in one way or another +they cast their spell. If one owes a large debt of pleasure to pictorial +art one comes to think tenderly and easily of its whole evolution, as +of the conscious experience of a single mysterious, striving spirit, and +one shrinks from saying rude things about any particular phase of it, +just as one would from referring without precautions to some error or +lapse in the life of a person one esteemed. You don’t care to remind a +grizzled veteran of his defeats, and why should we linger in Siena to +talk about Beccafumi? I by no means go so far as to say, with an amateur +with whom I have just been discussing the matter, that “Sodoma is a +precious poor painter and Beccafumi no painter at all”; but, opportunity +being limited, I am willing to let the remark about Beccafumi pass for +true. With regard to Sodoma, I remember seeing four years ago in the +choir of the Cathedral of Pisa a certain small dusky specimen of the +painter--an Abraham and Isaac, if I am not mistaken--which was charged +with a gloomy grace. One rarely meets him in general collections, and I +had never done so till the other day. He was not prolific, apparently; +he had however his own elegance, and his rarity is a part of it. + +Here in Siena are a couple of dozen scattered frescoes and three or four +canvases; his masterpiece, among others, an harmonious Descent from the +Cross. I wouldn’t give a fig for the equilibrium of the figures or +the ladders; but while it lasts the scene is all intensely solemn and +graceful and sweet--too sweet for so bitter a subject. Sodoma’s +women are strangely sweet; an imaginative sense of morbid appealing +attitude--as notably in the sentimental, the pathetic, but the none the +less pleasant, “Swooning of St. Catherine,” the great Sienese heroine, +at San Domenico--seems to me the author’s finest accomplishment. His +frescoes have all the same almost appealing evasion of difficulty, and a +kind of mild melancholy which I am inclined to think the sincerest +part of them, for it strikes me as practically the artist’s depressed +suspicion of his own want of force. Once he determined, however, that if +he couldn’t be strong he would make capital of his weakness, and painted +the Christ bound to the Column, of the Academy. Here he got much nearer +and I have no doubt mixed his colours with his tears; but the result +can’t be better described than by saying that it is, pictorially, the +first of the modern Christs. Unfortunately it hasn’t been the last. + +{Illustration: SAN DOMINICO, SIENA} + +The main strength of Sienese art went possibly into the erection of the +Cathedral, and yet even here the strength is not of the greatest strain. +If, however, there are more interesting temples in Italy, there are +few more richly and variously scenic and splendid, the comparative +meagreness of the architectural idea being overlaid by a marvellous +wealth of ingenious detail. Opposite the church--with the dull old +archbishop’s palace on one side and a dismantled residence of the late +Grand Duke of Tuscany on the other--is an ancient hospital with a big +stone bench running all along its front. Here I have sat a while every +morning for a week, like a philosophic convalescent, watching the florid +façade of the cathedral glitter against the deep blue sky. It has been +lavishly restored of late years, and the fresh white marble of the +densely clustered pinnacles and statues and beasts and flowers +flashes in the sunshine like a mosaic of jewels. There is more of this +goldsmith’s work in stone than I can remember or describe; it is piled +up over three great doors with immense margins of exquisite decorative +sculpture--still in the ancient cream-coloured marble--and beneath three +sharp pediments embossed with images relieved against red marble and +tipped with golden mosaics. It is in the highest degree fantastic and +luxuriant--it is on the whole very lovely. As a triumph of the many-hued +it prepares you for the interior, where the same parti-coloured +splendour is endlessly at play--a confident complication of harmonies +and contrasts and of the minor structural refinements and braveries. +The internal surface is mainly wrought in alternate courses of black and +white marble; but as the latter has been dimmed by the centuries to a +fine mild brown the place is all a concert of relieved and dispersed +glooms. Save for Pinturicchio’s brilliant frescoes in the Sacristy +there are no pictures to speak of; but the pavement is covered with many +elaborate designs in black and white mosaic after cartoons by Beccafumi. +The patient skill of these compositions makes them a rare piece of +decoration; yet even here the friend whom I lately quoted rejects this +over-ripe fruit of the Sienese school. The designs are nonsensical, he +declares, and all his admiration is for the cunning artisans who have +imitated the hatchings and shadings and hair-strokes of the pencil +by the finest curves of inserted black stone. But the true romance of +handiwork at Siena is to be seen in the wondrous stalls of the choir, +under the coloured light of the great wheel-window. Wood-carving has +ever been a cherished craft of the place, and the best masters of the +art during the fifteenth century lavished themselves on this prodigious +task. It is the frost-work on one’s window-panes interpreted in polished +oak. It would be hard to find, doubtless, a more moving illustration of +the peculiar patience, the sacred candour, of the great time. Into such +artistry as this the author seems to put more of his personal substance +than into any other; he has to wrestle not only with his subject, +but with his material. He is richly fortunate when his subject is +charming--when his devices, inventions and fantasies spring lightly to +his hand; for in the material itself, after age and use have ripened +and polished and darkened it to the richness of ebony and to a greater +warmth there is something surpassingly delectable and venerable. Wander +behind the altar at Siena when the chanting is over and the incense has +faded, and look well at the stalls of the Barili. + +1873. + + +II + + +I leave the impression noted in the foregoing pages to tell its own +small story, but have it on my conscience to wonder, in this connection, +quite candidly and publicly and by way of due penance, at the scantness +of such first-fruits of my sensibility. I was to see Siena repeatedly +in the years to follow, I was to know her better, and I would say that +I was to do her an ampler justice didn’t that remark seem to reflect a +little on my earlier poor judgment. This judgment strikes me to-day as +having fallen short--true as it may be that I find ever a value, or +at least an interest, even in the moods and humours and lapses of any +brooding, musing or fantasticating observer to whom the finer sense +of things is _on the whole_ not closed. If he has on a given occasion +nodded or stumbled or strayed, this fact by itself speaks to me of +him--speaks to me, that is, of his faculty and his idiosyncrasies, and +I care nothing for the application of his faculty unless it be, first of +all, in itself interesting. Which may serve as my reply to any objection +here breaking out--on the ground that if a spectator’s languors are +evidence, of a sort, about that personage, they are scarce evident about +the case before him, at least if the case be important. I let my perhaps +rather weak expression of the sense of Siena stand, at any rate--for the +sake of what I myself read into it; but I should like to amplify it by +other memories, and would do so eagerly if I might here enjoy the space. +The difficulty for these rectifications is that if the early vision has +failed of competence or of full felicity, if initiation has thus been +slow, so, with renewals and extensions, so, with the larger experience, +one hindrance is exchanged for another. There is quite such a +possibility as having lived into a relation too much to be able to make +a statement of it. + +I remember on one occasion arriving very late of a summer night, after +an almost unbroken run from London, and the note of that approach--I +was the only person alighting at the station below the great hill of +the little fortress city, under whose at once frowning and gaping gate I +must have passed, in the warm darkness and the absolute stillness, +very much after the felt fashion of a person of importance about to be +enormously incarcerated--gives me, for preservation thus belated, the +pitch, as I may call it, at various times, though always at one season, +of an almost systematised esthetic use of the place. It wasn’t to be +denied that the immensely better “accommodations” instituted by the +multiplying, though alas more bustling, years had to be recognised as +supplying a basis, comparatively prosaic if one would, to that luxury. +No sooner have I written which words, however, than I find myself adding +that one “wouldn’t,” that one doesn’t--doesn’t, that is, consent now to +regard the then “new” hotel (pretty old indeed by this time) as anything +but an aid to a free play of perception. The strong and rank old Arme +d’Inghilterra, in the darker street, has passed away; but its ancient +rival the Aquila Nera put forth claims to modernisation, and the Grand +Hotel, the still fresher flower of modernity near the gate by which you +enter from the station, takes on to my present remembrance a mellowness +as of all sorts of comfort, cleanliness and kindness. The particular +facts, those of the visit I began here by alluding to and those of still +others, at all events, inveterately made in June or early in July, enter +together in a fusion as of hot golden-brown objects seen through the +practicable crevices of shutters drawn upon high, cool, darkened rooms +where the scheme of the scene involved longish days of quiet work, with +late afternoon emergence and contemplation waiting on the better or the +worse conscience. I thus associate the compact world of the admirable +hill-top, the world of a predominant golden-brown, with a general +invocation of sensibility and fancy, and think of myself as going forth +into the lingering light of summer evenings all attuned to intensity of +the idea of compositional beauty, or in other words, freely speaking, +to the question of colour, to intensity of picture. To communicate with +Siena in this charming way was thus, I admit, to have no great margin +for the prosecution of inquiries, but I am not sure that it wasn’t, +little by little, to feel the whole combination of elements better than +by a more exemplary method, and this from beginning to end of the scale. + +More of the elements indeed, for memory, hang about the days that were +ushered in by that straight flight from the north than about any other +series--if partly, doubtless, but because of my having then stayed +longest. I specify it at all events for fond reminiscence as the year, +the only year, at which I was present at the Palio, the earlier one, +the series of furious horse-races between elected representatives of +different quarters of the town taking place toward the end of June, as +the second and still more characteristic exhibition of the same sort +is appointed to the month of August; a spectacle that I am far from +speaking of as the finest flower of my old and perhaps even a little +faded cluster of impressions, but which smudges that special sojourn as +with the big thumb--mark of a slightly soiled and decidedly ensanguined +hand. For really, after all, the great loud gaudy romp or heated frolic, +simulating ferocity if not achieving it, that is the annual pride of the +town, was not intrinsically, to my-view, extraordinarily impressive--in +spite of its bristling with all due testimony to the passionate Italian +clutch of any pretext for costume and attitude and utterance, for +mumming and masquerading and raucously representing; the vast cheap +vividness rather somehow refines itself, and the swarm and hubbub of the +immense square melt, to the uplifted sense of a very high-placed balcony +of the overhanging Chigi palace, where everything was superseded but the +intenser passage, across the ages, of the great Renaissance tradition +of architecture and the infinite sweetness of the waning golden day. +The Palio, indubitably, was _criard_--and the more so for quite +monopolising, at Siena, the note of crudity; and much of it demanded +doubtless of one’s patience a due respect for the long local continuity +of such things; it drops into its humoured position, however, in any +retrospective command of the many brave aspects of the prodigious place. +Not that I am pretending here, even for rectification, to take these at +all in turn; I only go on a little with my rueful glance at the marked +gaps left in my original report of sympathies entertained. + +I bow my head for instance to the mystery of my not having mentioned +that the coolest and freshest flower of the day was ever that of one’s +constant renewal of a charmed homage to Pinturicchio, coolest and +freshest and signally youngest and most matutinal (as distinguished from +merely primitive or crepuscular) of painters, in the library or +sacristy of the Cathedral. Did I _always_ find time before work to spend +half-an-hour of immersion, under that splendid roof, in the clearest +and tenderest, the very cleanest and “straightest,” as it masters +our envious credulity, of all storied fresco-worlds? This wondrous +apartment, a monument in itself to the ancient pride and power of +the Church, and which contains an unsurpassed treasure of gloriously +illuminated missals, psalters and other vast parchment folios, almost +each of whose successive leaves gives the impression of rubies, +sapphires and emeralds set in gold and practically embedded in the page, +offers thus to view, after a fashion splendidly sustained, a pictorial +record of the career of Pope Pius II, Aeneas Sylvius of the Siena +Piccolomini (who gave him for an immediate successor a second of +their name), most profanely literary of Pontiffs and last of would-be +Crusaders, whose adventures and achievements under Pinturicchio’s brush +smooth themselves out for us very much to the tune of the “stories” told +by some fine old man of the world, at the restful end of his life, to +the cluster of his grandchildren. The end of AEneas Sylvius was not +restful; he died at Ancona in troublous times, preaching war, and +attempting to make it, against the then terrific Turk; but over no great +worldly personal legend, among those of men of arduous affairs, arches a +fairer, lighter or more pacific memorial vault than the shining Libreria +of Siena. I seem to remember having it and its unfrequented enclosing +precinct so often all to myself that I must indeed mostly have resorted +to it for a prompt benediction on the day. Like no other strong +solicitation, among artistic appeals to which one may compare it up and +down the whole wonderful country, is the felt neighbouring presence of +the overwrought Cathedral in its little proud possessive town: you may +so often feel by the week at a time that it stands there really for your +own personal enjoyment, your romantic convenience, your small wanton +aesthetic use. In such a light shines for me, at all events, under such +an accumulation and complication of tone flushes and darkens and richly +recedes for me, across the years, the treasure-house of many-coloured +marbles in the untrodden, the drowsy, empty Sienese square. One +could positively do, in the free exercise of any responsible fancy or +luxurious taste, what one would with it. + +But that proposition holds true, after all, for almost any mild pastime +of the incurable student of loose meanings and stray relics and odd +references and dim analogies in an Italian hill-city bronzed and +seasoned by the ages. I ought perhaps, for justification of the right to +talk, to have plunged into the Siena archives of which, on one occasion, +a kindly custodian gave me, in rather dusty and stuffy conditions, +as the incident vaguely comes back to me, a glimpse that was like a +moment’s stand at the mouth of a deep, dark mine. I didn’t descend into +the pit; I did, instead of this, a much idler and easier thing: I simply +went every afternoon, my stint of work over, I like to recall, for a +musing stroll upon the Lizza--the Lizza which had its own unpretentious +but quite insidious art of meeting the lover of old stories halfway. The +great and subtle thing, if you are not a strenuous specialist, in places +of a heavily charged historic consciousness, is to profit by the sense +of that consciousness--or in other words to cultivate a relation with +the oracle--after the fashion that suits yourself; so that if the +general after-taste of experience, experience at large, the fine +distilled essence of the matter, seems to breathe, in such a case, from +the very stones and to make a thick strong liquor of the very air, you +may thus gather as you pass what is most to your purpose; which is +more the indestructible mixture of lived things, with its concentrated +lingering odour, than any interminable list of numbered chapters and +verses. Chapters and verses, literally scanned, refuse coincidence, +mostly, with the divisional proprieties of your own pile of +manuscript--which is but another way of saying, in short, that if the +Lizza is a mere fortified promontory of the great Sienese hill, serving +at once as a stronghold for the present military garrison and as a +planted and benched and band-standed walk and recreation-ground for the +citizens, so I could never, toward close of day, either have enough of +it or yet feel the vaguest saunterings there to be vain. They were vague +with the qualification always of that finer massing, as one wandered +off, of the bronzed and seasoned element, the huge rock pedestal, the +bravery of walls and gates and towers and palaces and loudly asserted +dominion; and then of that pervaded or mildly infested air in which +one feels the experience of the ages, of which I just spoke, to be +exquisitely in solution; and lastly of the wide, strange, sad, beautiful +horizon, a rim of far mountains that always pictured, for the leaner +on old rubbed and smoothed parapets at the sunset hour, a country not +exactly blighted or deserted, but that had had its life, on an immense +scale, and had gone, with all its memories and relics, into rather +austere, in fact into almost grim and misanthropic, retirement. This was +a manner and a mood, at any rate, in all the land, that favoured in the +late afternoons the divinest landscape blues and purples--not to speak +of its favouring still more my practical contention that the whole +guarded headland in question, with the immense ramparts of golden brown +and red that dropped into vineyards and orchards and cornfields and all +the rustic elegance of the Tuscan _podere_, was knitting for me a +chain of unforgettable hours; to the justice of which claim let these +divagations testify. + +It wasn’t, however, that one mightn’t without disloyalty to that scheme +of profit seek impressions further afield--though indeed I may best say +of such a matter as the long pilgrimage to the pictured convent of Monte +Oliveto that it but played on the same fine chords as the overhanging, +the far-gazing Lizza. What it came to was that one simply put to the +friendly test, as it were, the mood and manner of the country. This +remembrance is precious, but the demonstration of that sense as of +a great heaving region stilled by some final shock and returning +thoughtfully, in fact tragically, on itself, couldn’t have been more +pointed. The long-drawn rural road I refer to, stretching over hill and +dale and to which I devoted the whole of the longest day of the year--I +was in a small single-horse conveyance, of which I had already made +appreciative use, and with a driver as disposed as myself ever to +sacrifice speed to contemplation--is doubtless familiar now with the +rush of the motor-car; the thought of whose free dealings with the +solitude of Monte Oliveto makes me a little ruefully reconsider, I +confess, the spirit in which I have elsewhere in these pages, on behalf +of the lust, the landscape lust, of the eyes, acknowledged our general +increasing debt to that vehicle. For that we met nothing whatever, as +I seem at this distance of time to recall, while we gently trotted and +trotted through the splendid summer hours and a dry desolation that yet +somehow smiled and smiled, was part of the charm and the intimacy of +the whole impression--the impression that culminated at last, before +the great cloistered square, lonely, bleak and stricken, in the almost +aching vision, more frequent in the Italy of to-day than anywhere in the +world, of the uncalculated waste of a myriad forms of piety, forces of +labour, beautiful fruits of genius. However, one gaped above all things +for the impression, and what one mainly asked was that it should be +strong of its kind. That was the case, I think I couldn’t but feel, at +every moment of the couple of hours I spent in the vast, cold, empty +shell, out of which the Benedictine brotherhood sheltered there for ages +had lately been turned by the strong arm of a secular State. There was +but one good brother left, a very lean and tough survivor, a dusky, +elderly, friendly Abbate, of an indescribable type and a perfect manner, +of whom I think I felt immediately thereafter that I should have +liked to say much, but as to whom I must have yielded to the fact +that ingenious and vivid commemoration was even then in store for him. +Literary portraiture had marked him for its own, and in the short +story of _Un Saint_, one of the most finished of contemporary French +_nouvelles_, the art and the sympathy of Monsieur Paul Bourget preserve +his interesting image. He figures in the beautiful tale, the Abbate +of the desolate cloister and of those comparatively quiet years, as a +clean, clear type of sainthood; a circumstance this in itself to cause a +fond analyst of other than “Latin” race (model and painter in this +case having their Latinism so strongly in common) almost endlessly to +meditate. Oh, the unutterable differences in any scheme or estimate +of physiognomic values, in any range of sensibility to expressional +association, among observers of different, of inevitably more or +less opposed, traditional and “racial” points of view! One had heard +convinced Latins--or at least I had!--speak of situations of trust and +intimacy in which they couldn’t have endured near them a Protestant or, +as who should say for instance, an Anglo-Saxon; but I was to remember +my own private attempt to measure such a change of sensibility as +might have permitted the prolonged close approach of the dear dingy, +half-starved, very possibly all heroic, and quite ideally urbane Abbate. +The depth upon depth of things, the cloud upon cloud of associations, on +one side and the other, that would have had to change first! + +To which I may add nevertheless that since one ever supremely invoked +intensity of impression and abundance of character, I feasted my fill +of it at Monte Oliveto, and that for that matter this would have +constituted my sole refreshment in the vast icy void of the blighted +refectory if I hadn’t bethought myself of bringing with me a scrap of +food, too scantly apportioned, I recollect--very scantly indeed, since +my _cocchiere_ was to share with me--by my purveyor at Siena. Our +tragic--even if so tenderly tragic--entertainer had nothing to give us; +but the immemorial cold of the enormous monastic interior in which we +smilingly fasted would doubtless not have had for me without that such +a wealth of reference. I was to have “liked” the whole adventure, so +I must somehow have liked that; by which remark I am recalled to the +special treasure of the desecrated temple, those extraordinarily +strong and brave frescoes of Luca Signorelli and Sodoma that adorn, in +admirable condition, several stretches of cloister wall. These creations +in a manner took care of themselves; aided by the blue of the sky above +the cloister-court they glowed, they insistently lived; I remember the +frigid prowl through all the rest of the bareness, including that of the +big dishonoured church and that even of the Abbate’s abysmally resigned +testimony to his mere human and personal situation; and then, with such +a force of contrast and effect of relief, the great sheltered sun-flares +and colour-patches of scenic composition and design where a couple of +hands centuries ago turned to dust had so wrought the defiant miracle +of life and beauty that the effect is of a garden blooming among ruins. +Discredited somehow, since they all would, the destroyers themselves, +the ancient piety, the general spirit and intention, but still bright +and assured and sublime--practically, enviably immortal--the other, the +still subtler, the all aesthetic good faith. + +1909. + + + + + +THE AUTUMN IN FLORENCE + + +Florence too has its “season,” not less than Rome, and I have been +rejoicing for the past six weeks in the fact that this comparatively +crowded parenthesis hasn’t yet been opened. Coming here in the first +days of October I found the summer still in almost unmenaced possession, +and ever since, till within a day or two, the weight of its hand has +been sensible. Properly enough, as the city of flowers, Florence mingles +the elements most artfully in the spring--during the divine crescendo of +March and April, the weeks when six months of steady shiver have still +not shaken New York and Boston free of the long Polar reach. But the +very quality of the decline of the year as we at present here feel it +suits peculiarly the mood in which an undiscourageable gatherer of the +sense of things, or taster at least of “charm,” moves through these +many-memoried streets and galleries and churches. Old things, old +places, old people, or at least old races, ever strike us as giving out +their secrets most freely in such moist, grey, melancholy days as have +formed the complexion of the past fortnight. With Christmas arrives the +opera, the only opera worth speaking of--which indeed often means in +Florence the only opera worth talking through; the gaiety, the gossip, +the reminders in fine of the cosmopolite and watering-place character to +which the city of the Medici long ago began to bend her antique temper. +Meanwhile it is pleasant enough for the tasters of charm, as I say, and +for the makers of invidious distinctions, that the Americans haven’t all +arrived, however many may be on their way, and that the weather has a +monotonous overcast softness in which, apparently, aimless contemplation +grows less and less ashamed. There is no crush along the Cascine, as +on the sunny days of winter, and the Arno, wandering away toward the +mountains in the haze, seems as shy of being looked at as a good picture +in a bad light. No light, to my eyes, nevertheless, could be better +than this, which reaches us, all strained and filtered and refined, +exquisitely coloured and even a bit conspicuously sophisticated, through +the heavy air of the past that hangs about the place for ever. + +I first knew Florence early enough, I am happy to say, to have heard the +change for the worse, the taint of the modern order, bitterly lamented +by old haunters, admirers, lovers--those qualified to present a picture +of the conditions prevailing under the good old Grand-Dukes, the two +last of their line in especial, that, for its blest reflection of +sweetness and mildness and cheapness and ease, of every immediate boon +in life to be enjoyed quite for nothing, could but draw tears from +belated listeners. Some of these survivors from the golden age--just the +beauty of which indeed was in the gold, of sorts, that it poured into +your lap, and not in the least in its own importunity on that head--have +needfully lingered on, have seen the ancient walls pulled down and +the compact and belted mass of which the Piazza della Signoria was the +immemorial centre expand, under the treatment of enterprising syndics, +into an ungirdled organism of the type, as they viciously say, of +Chicago; one of those places of which, as their grace of a circumference +is nowhere, the dignity of a centre can no longer be predicated. +Florence loses itself to-day in dusty boulevards and smart _beaux +quartiers_, such as Napoleon III and Baron Haussmann were to set the +fashion of to a too mediæval Europe--with the effect of some precious +page of antique text swallowed up in a marginal commentary that smacks +of the style of the newspaper. So much for what has happened on this +side of that line of demarcation which, by an odd law, makes us, with +our preference for what we are pleased to call the picturesque, object +to such occurrences even _as_ occurrences. The real truth is that +objections are too vain, and that he would be too rude a critic here, +just now, who shouldn’t be in the humour to take the thick with the +thin and to try at least to read something of the old soul into the new +forms. + +There is something to be said moreover for your liking a city (once it’s +a question of your actively circulating) to pretend to comfort you more +by its extent than by its limits; in addition to which Florence was +anciently, was in her palmy days peculiarly, a daughter of change and +movement and variety, of shifting moods, policies and régimes--just +as the Florentine character, as we have it to-day, is a character that +takes all things easily for having seen so many come and go. It saw the +national capital, a few years since, arrive and sit down by the Arno, +and took no further thought than sufficed for the day; then it saw, the +odd visitor depart and whistled her cheerfully on her way to Rome. The +new boulevards of the Sindaco Peruzzi come, it may be said, but they +don’t go; which, after all, it isn’t from the æsthetic point of view +strictly necessary they should. A part of the essential amiability of +Florence, of her genius for making you take to your favour on easy terms +everything that in any way belongs to her, is that she has already flung +an element of her grace over all their undried mortar and plaster. Such +modern arrangements as the Piazza d’ Azeglio and the _viale_ or Avenue +of the Princess Margaret please not a little, I think--for what they +are!--and do so even in a degree, by some fine local privilege just +because they are Florentine. The afternoon lights rest on them as if to +thank them for not being worse, and their vistas are liberal where +they look toward the hills. They carry you close to these admirable +elevations, which hang over Florence on all sides, and if in the +foreground your sense is a trifle perplexed by the white pavements +dotted here and there with a policeman or a nursemaid, you have only to +reach beyond and see Fiesole turn to violet, on its ample eminence, from +the effect of the opposite sunset. + +Facing again then to Florence proper you have local colour enough and +to spare--which you enjoy the more, doubtless, from standing off to get +your light and your point of view. The elder streets abutting on all +this newness bore away into the heart of the city in narrow, dusky +perspectives that quite refine, in certain places, by an art of their +own, on the romantic appeal. There are temporal and other accidents +thanks to which, as you pause to look down them and to penetrate the +deepening shadows that accompany their retreat, they resemble little +corridors leading out from the past, mystical like the ladder in Jacob’s +dream; so that when you see a single figure advance and draw nearer +you are half afraid to wait till it arrives--it must be too much of the +nature of a ghost, a messenger from an underworld. However this may be, +a place paved with such great mosaics of slabs and lined with palaces of +so massive a tradition, structures which, in their large dependence +on pure proportion for interest and beauty, reproduce more than other +modern styles the simple nobleness of Greek architecture, must ever have +placed dignity first in the scale of invoked effect and laid up no great +treasure of that ragged picturesqueness--the picturesqueness of large +poverty--on which we feast our idle eyes at Rome and Naples. Except in +the unfinished fronts of the churches, which, however, unfortunately, +are mere ugly blankness, one finds less of the poetry of ancient +over-use, or in other words less romantic southern shabbiness, than +in most Italian cities. At two or three points, none the less, this +sinister grace exists in perfection--just such perfection as so often +proves that what is literally hideous may be constructively delightful +and what is intrinsically tragic play on the finest chords of +appreciation. On the north side of the Arno, between Ponte Vecchio and +Ponte Santa Trinita, is a row of immemorial houses that back on the +river, in whose yellow flood they bathe their sore old feet. Anything +more battered and befouled, more cracked and disjointed, dirtier, +drearier, poorer, it would be impossible to conceive. They look as if +fifty years ago the liquid mud had risen over their chimneys and then +subsided again and left them coated for ever with its unsightly slime. +And yet forsooth, because the river is yellow, and the light is yellow, +and here and there, elsewhere, some mellow mouldering surface, some hint +of colour, some accident of atmosphere, takes up the foolish tale and +repeats the note--because, in short, it is Florence, it is Italy, and +the fond appraiser, the infatuated alien, may have had in his eyes, at +birth and afterwards, the micaceous sparkle of brown-stone fronts no +more interesting than so much sand-paper, these miserable dwellings, +instead of suggesting mental invocations to an enterprising board of +health, simply create their own standard of felicity and shamelessly +live in it. Lately, during the misty autumn nights, the moon has +shone on them faintly and refined their shabbiness away into something +ineffably strange and spectral. The turbid stream sweeps along without +a sound, and the pale tenements hang above it like a vague miasmatic +exhalation. The dimmest back-scene at the opera, when the tenor is +singing his sweetest, seems hardly to belong to a world more detached +from responsibility. + +{Illustration: ON THE ARNO, FLORENCE.} + +What it is that infuses so rich an interest into the general charm is +difficult to say in a few words; yet as we wander hither and thither in +quest of sacred canvas and immortal bronze and stone we still feel the +genius of the place hang about. Two industrious English ladies, the +Misses Horner, have lately published a couple of volumes of “Walks” by +the Arno-side, and their work is a long enumeration of great artistic +deeds. These things remain for the most part in sound preservation, and, +as the weeks go by and you spend a constant portion of your days among +them the sense of one of the happiest periods of human Taste--to put it +only at that--settles upon your spirit. It was not long; it lasted, in +its splendour, for less than a century; but it has stored away in the +palaces and churches of Florence a heritage of beauty that these three +enjoying centuries since haven’t yet exhausted. This forms a clear +intellectual atmosphere into which you may turn aside from the modern +world and fill your lungs as with the breath of a forgotten creed. The +memorials of the past here address us moreover with a friendliness, win +us by we scarcely know what sociability, what equal amenity, that we +scarce find matched in other great esthetically endowed communities and +periods. Venice, with her old palaces cracking under the weight of their +treasures, is, in her influence, insupportably sad; Athens, with her +maimed marbles and dishonoured memories, transmutes the consciousness of +sensitive observers, I am told, into a chronic heartache; but in one’s +impression of old Florence the abiding felicity, the sense of saving +sanity, of something sound and human, predominates, offering you a +medium still conceivable for life. The reason of this is partly, no +doubt, the “sympathetic” nature, the temperate joy, of Florentine art +in general--putting the sole Dante, greatest of literary artists, aside; +partly the tenderness of time, in its lapse, which, save in a few cases, +has been as sparing of injury as if it knew that when it should have +dimmed and corroded these charming things it would have nothing so sweet +again for its tooth to feed on. If the beautiful Ghirlandaios and Lippis +are fading, this generation will never know it. The large Fra Angelico +in the Academy is as clear and keen as if the good old monk stood +there wiping his brushes; the colours seem to _sing_, as it were, like +new-fledged birds in June. Nothing is more characteristic of early +Tuscan art than the high-reliefs of Luca della Robbia; yet there isn’t +one of them that, except for the unique mixture of freshness with its +wisdom, of candour with its expertness, mightn’t have been modelled +yesterday. + +But perhaps the best image of the absence of stale melancholy or wasted +splendour, of the positive presence of what I have called temperate joy, +in the Florentine impression and genius, is the bell-tower of Giotto, +which rises beside the cathedral. No beholder of it will have forgotten +how straight and slender it stands there, how strangely rich in the +common street, plated with coloured marble patterns, and yet so far from +simple or severe in design that we easily wonder how its author, the +painter of exclusively and portentously grave little pictures, should +have fashioned a building which in the way of elaborate elegance, of the +true play of taste, leaves a jealous modern criticism nothing to +miss. Nothing can be imagined at once more lightly and more pointedly +fanciful; it might have been handed over to the city, as it stands, +by some Oriental genie tired of too much detail. Yet for all that +suggestion it seems of no particular time--not grey and hoary like +a Gothic steeple, not cracked and despoiled like a Greek temple; +its marbles shining so little less freshly than when they were laid +together, and the sunset lighting up its cornice with such a friendly +radiance, that you come at last to regard it simply as the graceful, +indestructible soul of the place made visible. The Cathedral, +externally, for all its solemn hugeness, strikes the same note of +would-be reasoned elegance and cheer; it has conventional grandeur, of +course, but a grandeur so frank and ingenuous even in its _parti-pris_. +It has seen so much, and outlived so much, and served so many sad +purposes, and yet remains in aspect so full of the fine Tuscan +geniality, the feeling for life, one may almost say the feeling for +amusement, that inspired it. Its vast many-coloured marble walls become +at any rate, with this, the friendliest note of all Florence; there +is an unfailing charm in walking past them while they lift their great +acres of geometrical mosaic higher in the air than you have time or +other occasion to look. You greet them from the deep street as you greet +the side of a mountain when you move in the gorge--not twisting back +your head to keep looking at the top, but content with the minor +accidents, the nestling hollows and soft cloud-shadows, the general +protection of the valley. + +Florence is richer in pictures than we really know till we have begun to +look for them in outlying corners. Then, here and there, one comes upon +lurking values and hidden gems that it quite seems one might as a good +New Yorker quietly “bag” for the so aspiring Museum of that city without +their being missed. The Pitti Palace is of course a collection of +masterpieces; they jostle each other in their splendour, they perhaps +even, in their merciless multitude, rather fatigue our admiration. The +Uffizi is almost as fine a show, and together with that long serpentine +artery which crosses the Arno and connects them, making you ask +yourself, whichever way you take it, what goal can be grand enough to +crown such a journey, they form the great central treasure-chamber +of the town. But I have been neglecting them of late for love of the +Academy, where there are fewer copyists and tourists, above all fewer +pictorial lions, those whose roar is heard from afar and who strike +us as expecting overmuch to have it their own way in the jungle. The +pictures at the Academy are all, rather, doves--the whole impression is +less pompously tropical. Selection still leaves one too much to say, but +I noted here, on my last occasion, an enchanting Botticelli so obscurely +hung, in one of the smaller rooms, that I scarce knew whether most to +enjoy or to resent its relegation. Placed, in a mean black frame, where +you wouldn’t have looked for a masterpiece, it yet gave out to a good +glass every characteristic of one. Representing as it does the walk of +Tobias with the angel, there are really parts of it that an angel might +have painted; but I doubt whether it is observed by half-a-dozen persons +a year. That was my excuse for my wanting to know, on the spot, though +doubtless all sophistically, what dishonour, could the transfer be +artfully accomplished, a strong American light and a brave gilded frame +would, comparatively speaking, do it. There and then it would, shine +with the intense authority that we claim for the fairest things--would +exhale its wondrous beauty as a sovereign example. What it comes to +is that this master is the most interesting of a great band--the only +Florentine save Leonardo and Michael in whom the impulse was original +and the invention rare. His imagination is of things strange, subtle and +complicated--things it at first strikes us that we moderns have reason +to know, and that it has taken us all the ages to learn; so that we +permit ourselves to wonder how a “primitive” could come by them. We soon +enough reflect, however, that we ourselves have come by them almost only +_through_ him, exquisite spirit that he was, and that when we enjoy, or +at least when we encounter, in our William Morrises, in our +Rossettis and Burne-Joneses, the note of the haunted or over-charged +consciousness, we are but treated, with other matters, to repeated doses +of diluted Botticelli. He practically set with his own hand almost all +the copies to almost all our so-called pre-Raphaelites, earlier and +later, near and remote. + +Let us at the same time, none the less, never fail of response to +the great Florentine geniality at large. Fra Angelico, Filippo Lippi, +Ghirlandaio, were not “subtly” imaginative, were not even riotously so; +but what other three were ever more gladly observant, more vividly and +richly true? If there should some time be a weeding out of the world’s +possessions the best works of the early Florentines will certainly +be counted among the flowers. With the ripest performances of the +Venetians--by which I don’t mean the over-ripe--we can but take them for +the most valuable things in the history of art. Heaven forbid we should +be narrowed down to a cruel choice; but if it came to a question of +keeping or losing between half-a-dozen Raphaels and half-a-dozen things +it would be a joy to pick out at the Academy, I fear that, for myself, +the memory of the Transfiguration, or indeed of the other Roman relics +of the painter, wouldn’t save the Raphaels. And yet this was so far from +the opinion of a patient artist whom I saw the other day copying the +finest of Ghirlandaios--a beautiful Adoration of the Kings at the +Hospital of the Innocenti. Here was another sample of the buried +art-wealth of Florence. It hangs in an obscure chapel, far aloft, behind +an altar, and though now and then a stray tourist wanders in and puzzles +a while over the vaguely-glowing forms, the picture is never really +seen and enjoyed. I found an aged Frenchman of modest mien perched on a +little platform beneath it, behind a great hedge of altar-candlesticks, +with an admirable copy all completed. The difficulties of his task had +been well-nigh insuperable, and his performance seemed to me a real feat +of magic. He could scarcely move or turn, and could find room for his +canvas but by rolling it together and painting a small piece at a time, +so that he never enjoyed a view of his _ensemble_. The original is +gorgeous with colour and bewildering with decorative detail, but not +a gleam of the painter’s crimson was wanting, not a curl in his gold +arabesques. It seemed to me that if I had copied a Ghirlandaio in such +conditions I would at least maintain for my own credit that he was the +first painter in the world. “Very good of its kind,” said the weary old +man with a shrug of reply for my raptures; “but oh, how far short of +Raphael!” However that may be, if the reader chances to observe this +consummate copy in the so commendable Museum devoted in Paris to such +works, let him stop before it with a due reverence; it is one of the +patient things of art. Seeing it wrought there, in its dusky nook, under +such scant convenience, I found no bar in the painter’s foreignness to +a thrilled sense that the old art-life of Florence isn’t yet extinct. It +still at least works spells and almost miracles. + +1873. + + + + + +FLORENTINE NOTES + + +I + + +Yesterday that languid organism known as the Florentine Carnival put on +a momentary semblance of vigour, and decreed a general _corso_ through +the town. The spectacle was not brilliant, but it suggested some natural +reflections. I encountered the line of carriages in the square before +Santa Croce, of which they were making the circuit. They rolled solemnly +by, with their inmates frowning forth at each other in apparent wrath +at not finding each other more worth while. There were no masks, no +costumes, no decorations, no throwing of flowers or sweetmeats. It was +as if each carriageful had privately and not very heroically resolved +not to be at costs, and was rather discomfited at finding that it was +getting no better entertainment than it gave. The middle of the piazza +was filled with little tables, with shouting mountebanks, mostly +disguised in battered bonnets and crinolines, offering chances in +raffles for plucked fowls and kerosene lamps. I have never thought the +huge marble statue of Dante, which overlooks the scene, a work of the +last refinement; but, as it stood there on its high pedestal, chin in +hand, frowning down on all this cheap foolery, it seemed to have a great +moral intention. The carriages followed a prescribed course--through Via +Ghibellina, Via del Proconsolo, past the Badia and the Bargello, beneath +the great tessellated cliffs of the Cathedral, through Via Tornabuoni +and out into ten minutes’ sunshine beside the Arno. Much of all this +is the gravest and stateliest part of Florence, a quarter of supreme +dignity, and there was an almost ludicrous incongruity in seeing +Pleasure leading her train through these dusky historic streets. It was +most uncomfortably cold, and in the absence of masks many a fair +nose was fantastically tipped with purple. But as the carriages crept +solemnly along they seemed to keep a funeral march--to follow an antique +custom, an exploded faith, to its tomb. The Carnival is dead, and these +good people who had come abroad to make merry were funeral mutes and +grave-diggers. Last winter in Rome it showed but a galvanised life, yet +compared with this humble exhibition it was operatic. At Rome indeed +it was too operatic. The knights on horseback there were a bevy of +circus-riders, and I’m sure half the mad revellers repaired every night +to the Capitol for their twelve sous a day. + +I have just been reading over the Letters of the President de Brosses. +A hundred years ago, in Venice, the Carnival lasted six months; and at +Rome for many weeks each year one was free, under cover of a mask, +to perpetrate the most fantastic follies and cultivate the most +remunerative vices. It’s very well to read the President’s notes, which +have indeed a singular interest; but they make us ask ourselves why we +should expect the Italians to persist in manners and practices which +we ourselves, if we had responsibilities in the matter, should find +intolerable. The Florentines at any rate spend no more money nor faith +on the carnivalesque. And yet this truth has a qualification; for +what struck me in the whole spectacle yesterday, and prompted these +observations, was not at all the more or less of costume of the +occupants of the carriages, but the obstinate survival of the +merrymaking instinct in the people at large. There could be no better +example of it than that so dim a shadow of entertainment should keep all +Florence standing and strolling, densely packed for hours, in the cold +streets. There was nothing to see that mightn’t be seen on the Cascine +any fine day in the year--nothing but a name, a tradition, a pretext for +sweet staring idleness. The faculty of making much of common things +and converting small occasions into great pleasures is, to a son +of communities strenuous as ours are strenuous, the most salient +characteristic of the so-called Latin civilisations. It charms him and +vexes him, according to his mood; and for the most part it represents a +moral gulf between his own temperamental and indeed spiritual sense +of race, and that of Frenchmen and Italians, far wider than the watery +leagues that a steamer may annihilate. But I think his mood is wisest +when he accepts the “foreign” easy surrender to _all_ the senses as the +sign of an unconscious philosophy of life, instilled by the experience +of centuries--the philosophy of people who have lived long and much, +who have discovered no short cuts to happiness and no effective +circumvention of effort, and so have come to regard the average lot as a +ponderous fact that absolutely calls for a certain amount of sitting on +the lighter tray of the scales. Florence yesterday then took its holiday +in a natural, placid fashion that seemed to make its own temper an +affair quite independent of the splendour of the compensation decreed on +a higher line to the weariness of its legs. That the _corso_ was stupid +or lively was the shame or the glory of the powers “above”--the fates, +the gods, the _forestieri_, the town-councilmen, the rich or the stingy. +Common Florence, on the narrow footways, pressed against the houses, +obeyed a natural need in looking about complacently, patiently, gently, +and never pushing, nor trampling, nor swearing, nor staggering. This +liberal margin for festivals in Italy gives the masses a more than +man-of-the-world urbanity in taking their pleasure. + +Meanwhile it occurs to me that by a remote New England fireside an +unsophisticated young person of either sex is reading in an old volume +of travels or an old romantic tale some account of these anniversaries +and appointed revels as old Catholic lands offer them to view. Across +the page swims a vision of sculptured palace-fronts draped in crimson +and gold and shining in a southern sun; of a motley train of maskers +sweeping on in voluptuous confusion and pelting each other with nosegays +and love-letters. Into the quiet room, quenching the rhythm of the +Connecticut clock, floats an uproar of delighted voices, a medley of +stirring foreign sounds, an echo of far-heard music of a strangely alien +cadence. But the dusk is falling, and the unsophisticated young person +closes the book wearily and wanders to the window. The dusk is falling +on the beaten snow. Down the road is a white wooden meeting-house, +looking grey among the drifts. The young person surveys the prospect +a while, and then wanders back and stares at the fire. The Carnival of +Venice, of Florence, of Rome; colour and costume, romance and rapture! +The young person gazes in the firelight at the flickering chiaroscuro +of the future, discerns at last the glowing phantasm of opportunity, +and determines with a wild heart-beat to go and see it all--twenty years +hence! + + +II + + +A couple of days since, driving to Fiesole, we came back by the castle +of Vincigliata. The afternoon was lovely; and, though there is as yet +(February 10th) no visible revival of vegetation, the air was full of a +vague vernal perfume, and the warm colours of the hills and the yellow +western sunlight flooding the plain seemed to contain the promise of +Nature’s return to grace. It’s true that above the distant pale blue +gorge of Vallombrosa the mountain-line was tipped with snow; but the +liberated soul of Spring was nevertheless at large. The view from +Fiesole seems vaster and richer with each visit. The hollow in which +Florence lies, and which from below seems deep and contracted, opens +out into an immense and generous valley and leads away the eye into +a hundred gradations of distance. The place itself showed, amid its +chequered fields and gardens, with as many towers and spires as a +chess-board half cleared. The domes and towers were washed over with +a faint blue mist. The scattered columns of smoke, interfused with the +sinking sunlight, hung over them like streamers and pennons of silver +gauze; and the Arno, twisting and curling and glittering here and there, +was a serpent cross-striped with silver. + +Vincigliata is a product of the millions, the leisure and the +eccentricity, I suppose people say, of an English gentleman--Mr. Temple +Leader, whose name should be commemorated. You reach the castle from +Fiesole by a narrow road, returning toward Florence by a romantic twist +through the hills and passing nothing on its way save thin plantations +of cypress and cedar. Upward of twenty years ago, I believe, this +gentleman took a fancy to the crumbling shell of a mediæval fortress on +a breezy hill-top overlooking the Val d’ Arno and forthwith bought it +and began to “restore” it. I know nothing of what the original ruin may +have cost; but in the dusky courts and chambers of the present elaborate +structure this impassioned archæologist must have buried a fortune. He +has, however, the compensation of feeling that he has erected a monument +which, if it is never to stand a feudal siege, may encounter at least +some critical over-hauling. It is a disinterested work of art and really +a triumph of æsthetic culture. The author has reproduced with minute +accuracy a sturdy home-fortress of the fourteenth century, and has kept +throughout such rigid terms with his model that the result is literally +uninhabitable to degenerate moderns. It is simply a massive facsimile, +an elegant museum of archaic images, mainly but most amusingly +counterfeit, perched on a spur of the Apennines. The place is most +politely shown. There is a charming cloister, painted with extremely +clever “quaint” frescoes, celebrating the deeds of the founders of the +castle--a cloister that is everything delightful a cloister should +be except truly venerable and employable. There is a beautiful castle +court, with the embattled tower climbing into the blue far above it, +and a spacious loggia with rugged medallions and mild-hued Luca della +Robbias fastened unevenly into the walls. But the apartments are the +great success, and each of them as good a “reconstruction” as a tale +of Walter Scott; or, to speak frankly, a much better one. They are all +low-beamed and vaulted, stone-paved, decorated in grave colours +and lighted, from narrow, deeply recessed windows, through small +leaden-ringed plates of opaque glass. + +The details are infinitely ingenious and elaborately grim, and the +indoor atmosphere of mediaevalism most forcibly revived. No compromising +fact of domiciliary darkness and cold is spared us, no producing +condition of mediaeval manners not glanced at. There are oaken benches +round the room, of about six inches in depth, and gaunt fauteuils of +wrought leather, illustrating the suppressed transitions which, as +George Eliot says, unite all contrasts--offering a visible link between +the modern conceptions of torture and of luxury. There are fireplaces +nowhere but in the kitchen, where a couple of sentry-boxes are inserted +on either side of the great hooded chimney-piece, into which people +might creep and take their turn at being toasted and smoked. One may +doubt whether this dearth of the hearthstone could have raged on such +a scale, but it’s a happy stroke in the representation of an Italian +dwelling of any period. It shows how the graceful fiction that Italy +is all “meridional” flourished for some time before being refuted +by grumbling tourists. And yet amid this cold comfort you feel the +incongruous presence of a constant intuitive regard for beauty. The +shapely spring of the vaulted ceilings; the richly figured walls, coarse +and hard in substance as they are; the charming shapes of the great +platters and flagons in the deep recesses of the quaintly carved black +dressers; the wandering hand of ornament, as it were, playing here and +there for its own diversion in unlighted corners--such things redress, +to our fond credulity, with all sorts of grace, the balance of the +picture. + +And yet, somehow, with what dim, unillumined vision one fancies even +such inmates as those conscious of finer needs than the mere supply of +blows and beef and beer would meet passing their heavy eyes over +such slender household beguilements! These crepuscular chambers +at Vincigliata are a mystery and a challenge; they seem the mere +propounding of an answerless riddle. You long, as you wander through +them, turning up your coat-collar and wondering whether ghosts can catch +bronchitis, to answer it with some positive notion of what people so +encaged and situated “did,” how they looked and talked and carried +themselves, how they took their pains and pleasures, how they counted +off the hours. Deadly ennui seems to ooze out of the stones and hang in +clouds in the brown corners. No wonder men relished a fight and panted +for a fray. “Skull-smashers” were sweet, ears ringing with pain and +ribs cracking in a tussle were soothing music, compared with the cruel +quietude of the dim-windowed castle. When they came back they could only +have slept a good deal and eased their dislocated bones on those meagre +oaken ledges. Then they woke up and turned about to the table and ate +their portion of roasted sheep. They shouted at each other across the +board and flung the wooden plates at the servingmen. They jostled and +hustled and hooted and bragged; and then, after gorging and boozing +and easing their doublets, they squared their elbows one by one on the +greasy table and buried their scarred foreheads and dreamed of a good +gallop after flying foes. And the women? They must have been strangely +simple--simpler far than any moral archraeologist can show us in a +learned restoration. Of course, their simplicity had its graces and +devices; but one thinks with a sigh that, as the poor things turned away +with patient looks from the viewless windows to the same, same looming +figures on the dusky walls, they hadn’t even the consolation of knowing +that just this attitude and movement, set off by their peaked coifs, +their falling sleeves and heavily-twisted trains, would sow the seed of +yearning envy--of sorts--on the part of later generations. + +There are moods in which one feels the impulse to enter a tacit protest +against too gross an appetite for pure aesthetics in this starving and +sinning world. One turns half away, musingly, from certain beautiful +useless things. But the healthier state of mind surely is to lay no tax +on any really intelligent manifestation of the curious, and exquisite. +Intelligence hangs together essentially, all along the line; it only +needs time to make, as we say, its connections. The massive _pastiche_ +of Vincigliata has no superficial use; but, even if it were less +complete, less successful, less brilliant, I should feel a reflective +kindness for it. So disinterested and expensive a toy is its own +justification; it belongs to the heroics of dilettantism. + + +III + + +One grows to feel the collection of pictures at the Pitti Palace +splendid rather than interesting. After walking through it once or twice +you catch the key in which it is pitched--you know what you are +likely not to find on closer examination; none of the works of the +uncompromising period, nothing from the half-groping geniuses of the +early time, those whose colouring was sometimes harsh and their outlines +sometimes angular. Vague to me the principle on which the pictures +were originally gathered and of the aesthetic creed of the princes who +chiefly selected them. A princely creed I should roughly call it--the +creed of people who believed in things presenting a fine face to +society; who esteemed showy results rather than curious processes, and +would have hardly cared more to admit into their collection a work by +one of the laborious precursors of the full efflorescence than to see a +bucket and broom left standing in a state saloon. The gallery contains +in literal fact some eight or ten paintings of the early Tuscan +School--notably two admirable specimens of Filippo Lippi and one of the +frequent circular pictures of the great Botticelli--a Madonna, chilled +with tragic prescience, laying a pale cheek against that of a blighted +Infant. Such a melancholy mother as this of Botticelli would have +strangled her baby in its cradle to rescue it from the future. But of +Botticelli there is much to say. One of the Filippo Lippis is perhaps +his masterpiece--a Madonna in a small rose-garden (such a “flowery +close” as Mr. William Morris loves to haunt), leaning over an Infant who +kicks his little human heels on the grass while half-a-dozen curly-pated +angels gather about him, looking back over their shoulders with the +candour of children in _tableaux vivants_, and one of them drops an +armful of gathered roses one by one upon the baby. The delightful +earthly innocence of these winged youngsters is quite inexpressible. +Their heads are twisted about toward the spectator as if they were +playing at leap-frog and were expecting a companion to come and take +a jump. Never did “young” art, never did subjective freshness, attempt +with greater success to represent those phases. But these three fine +works are hung over the tops of doors in a dark back room--the bucket +and broom are thrust behind a curtain. It seems to me, nevertheless, +that a fine Filippo Lippi is good enough company for an Allori or a +Cigoli, and that that too deeply sentient Virgin of Botticelli might +happily balance the flower-like irresponsibility of Raphael’s “Madonna +of the Chair.” + +Taking the Pitti collection, however, simply for what it pretends to +be, it gives us the very flower of the sumptuous, the courtly, the +grand-ducal. It is chiefly official art, as one may say, but it presents +the fine side of the type--the brilliancy, the facility, the amplitude, +the sovereignty of good taste. I agree on the whole with a nameless +companion and with what he lately remarked about his own humour on +these matters; that, having been on his first acquaintance with +pictures nothing if not critical, and held the lesson incomplete and +the opportunity slighted if he left a gallery without a headache, he +had come, as he grew older, to regard them more as the grandest of +all pleasantries and less as the most strenuous of all lessons, and to +remind himself that, after all, it is the privilege of art to make us +friendly to the human mind and not to make us suspicious of it. We do +in fact as we grow older unstring the critical bow a little and strike +a truce with invidious comparisons. We work off the juvenile impulse +to heated partisanship and discover that one spontaneous producer isn’t +different enough from another to keep the all-knowing Fates from smiling +over our loves and our aversions. We perceive a certain human solidarity +in all cultivated effort, and are conscious of a growing accommodation +of judgment--an easier disposition, the fruit of experience, to take +the joke for what it is worth as it passes. We have in short less of a +quarrel with the masters we don’t delight in, and less of an impulse +to pin all our faith on those in whom, in more zealous days, we fancied +that we made our peculiar meanings. The meanings no longer seem quite so +peculiar. Since then we have arrived at a few in the depths of our own +genius that are not sensibly less striking. + +And yet it must be added that all this depends vastly on one’s mood--as +a traveller’s impressions do, generally, to a degree which those who +give them to the world would do well more explicitly to declare. We have +our hours of expansion and those of contraction, and yet while we follow +the traveller’s trade we go about gazing and judging with unadjusted +confidence. We can’t suspend judgment; we must take our notes, and the +notes are florid or crabbed, as the case may be. A short time ago I +spent a week in an ancient city on a hill-top, in the humour, for which +I was not to blame, which produces crabbed notes. I knew it at the +time, but couldn’t help it. I went through all the motions of liberal +appreciation; I uncapped in all the churches and on the massive ramparts +stared all the views fairly out of countenance; but my imagination, +which I suppose at bottom had very good reasons of its own and knew +perfectly what it was about, refused to project into the dark old town +and upon the yellow hills that sympathetic glow which forms half the +substance of our genial impressions. So it is that in museums and +palaces we are alternate radicals and conservatives. On some days we ask +but to be somewhat sensibly affected; on others, Ruskin-haunted, to be +spiritually steadied. After a long absence from the Pitti Palace I went +back there the other morning and transferred myself from chair to +chair in the great golden-roofed saloons--the chairs are all gilded and +covered with faded silk--in the humour to be diverted at any price. I +needn’t mention the things that diverted me; I yawn now when I think of +some of them. But an artist, for instance, to whom my kindlier judgment +has made permanent concessions is that charming Andrea del Sarto. When +I first knew him, in my cold youth, I used to say without mincing that +I didn’t like him. _Cet âge est sans pitié_. The fine sympathetic, +melancholy, pleasing painter! He has a dozen faults, and if you insist +pedantically on your rights the conclusive word you use about him will +be the word weak. But if you are a generous soul you will utter it +low--low as the mild grave tone of his own sought harmonies. He is +monotonous, narrow, incomplete; he has but a dozen different figures and +but two or three ways of distributing them; he seems able to utter but +half his thought, and his canvases lack apparently some final return on +the whole matter--some process which his impulse failed him before he +could bestow. And yet in spite of these limitations his genius is both +itself of the great pattern and lighted by the air of a great period. +Three gifts he had largely: an instinctive, unaffected, unerring grace; +a large and rich, and yet a sort of withdrawn and indifferent sobriety; +and best of all, as well as rarest of all, an indescribable property +of relatedness as to the moral world. Whether he was aware of the +connection or not, or in what measure, I cannot say; but he gives, so to +speak, the taste of it. Before his handsome vague-browed Madonnas; the +mild, robust young saints who kneel in his foregrounds and look round +at you with a conscious anxiety which seems to say that, though in the +picture, they are not of it, but of your own sentient life of commingled +love and weariness; the stately apostles, with comely heads and +harmonious draperies, who gaze up at the high-seated Virgin like early +astronomers at a newly seen star--there comes to you the brush of the +dark wing of an inward life. A shadow falls for the moment, and in it +you feel the chill of moral suffering. Did the Lippis suffer, father +or son? Did Raphael suffer? Did Titian? Did Rubens suffer? Perish +the thought--it wouldn’t be fair to _us_ that they should have had +everything. And I note in our poor second-rate Andrea an element of +interest lacking to a number of stronger talents. + +Interspersed with him at the Pitti hang the stronger and the weaker +in splendid abundance. Raphael is there, strong in portraiture--easy, +various, bountiful genius that he was--and (strong here isn’t the word, +but) happy beyond the common dream in his beautiful “Madonna of the +Chair.” The general instinct of posterity seems to have been to +treat this lovely picture as a semi-sacred, an almost miraculous, +manifestation. People stand in a worshipful silence before it, as they +would before a taper-studded shrine. If we suspend in imagination on the +right of it the solid, realistic, unidealised portrait of Leo the Tenth +(which hangs in another room) and transport to the left the fresco of +the School of Athens from the Vatican, and then reflect that these were +three separate fancies of a single youthful, amiable genius we recognise +that such a producing consciousness must have been a “treat.” My +companion already quoted has a phrase that he “doesn’t care for +Raphael,” but confesses, when pressed, that he was a most remarkable +young man. Titian has a dozen portraits of unequal interest. I never +particularly noticed till lately--it is very ill hung--that portentous +image of the Emperor Charles the Fifth. He was a burlier, more imposing +personage than his usual legend figures, and in his great puffed sleeves +and gold chains and full-skirted over-dress he seems to tell of a +tread that might sometimes have been inconveniently resonant. But the +_purpose_ to have his way and work his will is there--the great stomach +for divine right, the old monarchical temperament. The great Titian, in +portraiture, however, remains that formidable young man in black, with +the small compact head, the delicate nose and the irascible blue eye. +Who was he? What was he? “_Ritratto virile_” is all the catalogue is +able to call the picture. “Virile!” Rather! you vulgarly exclaim. You +may weave what romance you please about it, but a romance your dream +must be. Handsome, clever, defiant, passionate, dangerous, it was not +his own fault if he hadn’t adventures and to spare. He was a gentleman +and a warrior, and his adventures balanced between camp and court. +I imagine him the young orphan of a noble house, about to come into +mortgaged estates. One wouldn’t have cared to be his guardian, bound to +paternal admonitions once a month over his precocious transactions with +the Jews or his scandalous abduction from her convent of such and such a +noble maiden. + +The Pitti Gallery contains none of Titian’s golden-toned groups; but +it boasts a lovely composition by Paul Veronese, the dealer in silver +hues--a Baptism of Christ. W---- named it to me the other day as the +picture he most enjoyed, and surely painting seems here to have proposed +to itself to discredit and annihilate--and even on the occasion of such +a subject--everything but the loveliness of life. The picture bedims and +enfeebles its neighbours. We ask ourselves whether painting as such can +go further. It is simply that here at last the art stands complete. +The early Tuscans, as well as Leonardo, as Raphael, as Michael, saw the +great spectacle that surrounded them in beautiful sharp-edged elements +and parts. The great Venetians felt its indissoluble unity and +recognised that form and colour and earth and air were equal members +of every possible subject; and beneath their magical touch the hard +outlines melted together and the blank intervals bloomed with meaning. +In this beautiful Paul Veronese of the Pitti everything is part of +the charm--the atmosphere as well as the figures, the look of radiant +morning in the white-streaked sky as well as the living human limbs, the +cloth of Venetian purple about the loins of the Christ as well as the +noble humility of his attitude. The relation to Nature of the other +Italian schools differs from that of the Venetian as courtship--even +ardent courtship--differs from marriage. + + +IV + + +I went the other day to the secularised Convent of San Marco, paid my +franc at the profane little wicket which creaks away at the door--no +less than six custodians, apparently, are needed to turn it, as if it +may have a recusant conscience--passed along the bright, still cloister +and paid my respects to Fra Angelico’s Crucifixion, in that dusky +chamber in the basement. I looked long; one can hardly do otherwise. The +fresco deals with the pathetic on the grand scale, and after taking +in its beauty you feel as little at liberty to go away abruptly as +you would to leave church during the sermon. You may be as little of +a formal Christian as Fra Angelico was much of one; you yet feel +admonished by spiritual decency to let so yearning a view of the +Christian story work its utmost will on you. The three crosses rise high +against a strange completely crimson sky, which deepens mysteriously +the tragic expression of the scene, though I remain perforce vague as to +whether this lurid background be a fine intended piece of symbolism or +an effective accident of time. In the first case the extravagance quite +triumphs. Between the crosses, under no great rigour of composition, +are scattered the most exemplary saints--kneeling, praying, weeping, +pitying, worshipping. The swoon of the Madonna is depicted at the left, +and this gives the holy presences, in respect to the case, the strangest +historical or actual air. Everything is so real that you feel a vague +impatience and almost ask yourself how it was that amid the army of his +consecrated servants our Lord was permitted to suffer. On reflection you +see that the painter’s design, so far as coherent, has been simply to +offer an immense representation of Pity, and all with such concentrated +truth that his colours here seem dissolved in tears that drop and drop, +however softly, through all time. Of this single yearning consciousness +the figures are admirably expressive. No later painter learned to render +with deeper force than Fra Angelico the one state of the spirit he could +conceive--a passionate pious tenderness. Immured in his quiet convent, +he apparently never received an intelligible impression of evil; and his +conception of human life was a perpetual sense of sacredly loving +and being loved. But how, immured in his quiet convent, away from the +streets and the studios, did he become that genuine, finished, perfectly +professional painter? No one is less of a mere mawkish amateur. His +range was broad, from this really heroic fresco to the little trumpeting +seraphs, in their opaline robes, enamelled, as it were, on the gold +margins of his pictures. + +I sat out the sermon and departed, I hope, with the gentle preacher’s +blessing. I went into the smaller refectory, near by, to refresh my +memory of the beautiful Last Supper of Domenico Ghirlandaio. It would be +putting things coarsely to say that I adjourned thus from a sernlon to +a comedy, though Ghirlandaio’s theme, as contrasted with the blessed +Angelico’s, was the dramatic spectacular side of human life. How keenly +he observed it and how richly he rendered it, the world about him of +colour and costume, of handsome heads and pictorial groupings! In his +admirable school there is no painter one enjoys--_pace_ Ruskin--more +sociably and irresponsibly. Lippo Lippi is simpler, quainter, +more frankly expressive; but we retain before him a remnant of the +sympathetic discomfort provoked by the masters whose conceptions were +still a trifle too large for their means. The pictorial vision in their +minds seems to stretch and strain their undeveloped skill almost to a +sense of pain. In Ghirlandaio the skill and the imagination are equal, +and he gives us a delightful impression of enjoying his own resources. +Of all the painters of his time he affects us least as positively not +of ours. He enjoyed a crimson mantle spreading and tumbling in curious +folds and embroidered with needlework of gold, just as he enjoyed a +handsome well-rounded head, with vigorous dusky locks, profiled in +courteous adoration. He enjoyed in short the various reality of things, +and had the good fortune to live in an age when reality flowered into a +thousand amusing graces--to speak only of those. He was not especially +addicted to giving spiritual hints; and yet how hard and meagre they +seem, the professed and finished realists of our own day, with the +spiritual _bonhomie_ or candour that makes half Ghirlandaio’s richness +left out! The Last Supper at San Marco is an excellent example of the +natural reverence of an artist of that time with whom reverence was +not, as one may say, a specialty. The main idea with him has been the +variety, the material bravery and positively social charm of the +scene, which finds expression, with irrepressible generosity, in the +accessories of the background. Instinctively he imagines an opulent +garden--imagines it with a good faith which quite tides him over the +reflection that Christ and his disciples were poor men and unused to sit +at meat in palaces. Great full-fruited orange-trees peep over the wall +before which the table is spread, strange birds fly through the air, +while a peacock perches on the edge of the partition and looks down +on the sacred repast. It is striking that, without any at all intense +religious purpose, the figures, in their varied naturalness, have a +dignity and sweetness of attitude that admits of numberless reverential +constructions. I should call all this the happy tact of a robust faith. + +On the staircase leading up to the little painted cells of the Beato +Angelico, however, I suddenly faltered and paused. Somehow I had grown +averse to the intenser zeal of the Monk of Fiesole. I wanted no more of +him that day. I wanted no more macerated friars and spear-gashed sides. +Ghirlandaio’s elegant way of telling his story had put me in the humour +for something more largely intelligent, more profanely pleasing. +I departed, walked across the square, and found it in the Academy, +standing in a particular spot and looking up at a particular high-hung +picture. It is difficult to speak adequately, perhaps even intelligibly, +of Sandro Botticelli. An accomplished critic--Mr. Pater, in his _Studies +on the History of the Renaissance_--has lately paid him the tribute +of an exquisite, a supreme, curiosity. He was rarity and distinction +incarnate, and of all the multitudinous masters of his group +incomparably the most interesting, the one who detains and perplexes +and fascinates us most. Exquisitely fine his imagination--infinitely +audacious and adventurous his fancy. Alone among the painters of his +time he strikes us as having invention. The glow and thrill of expanding +observation--this was the feeling that sent his comrades to their +easels; but Botticelli’s moved him to reactions and emotions of which +they knew nothing, caused his faculty to sport and wander and explore +on its own account. These impulses have fruits often so ingenious and so +lovely that it would be easy to talk nonsense about them. I hope it is +not nonsense, however, to say that the picture to which I just alluded +(the “Coronation of the Virgin,” with a group of life-sized saints +below and a garland of miniature angels above) is one of the supremely +beautiful productions of the human mind. It is hung so high that +you need a good glass to see it; to say nothing of the unprecedented +delicacy of the work. The lower half is of moderate interest; but the +dance of hand-clasped angels round the heavenly couple above has a +beauty newly exhaled from the deepest sources of inspiration. Their +perfect little hands are locked with ineffable elegance; their blowing +robes are tossed into folds of which each line is a study; their +charming feet have the relief of the most delicate sculpture. But, as +I have already noted, of Botticelli there is much, too much to +say--besides which Mr. Pater has said all. Only add thus to his +inimitable grace of design that the exquisite pictorial force driving +him goes a-Maying not on wanton errands of its own, but on those of some +mystic superstition which trembles for ever in his heart. + +{Illustration: THE GREAT EAVES, FLORENCE} + + +V + + +The more I look at the old Florentine domestic architecture the more I +like it--that of the great examples at least; and if I ever am able to +build myself a lordly pleasure-house I don’t see how in conscience I can +build it different from these. They are sombre and frowning, and look +a trifle more as if they were meant to keep people out than to let +them in; but what equally “important” type--if there be an equally +important--is more expressive of domiciliary dignity and security and +yet attests them with a finer æesthetic economy? They are impressively +“handsome,” and yet contrive to be so by the simplest means. I don’t say +at the smallest pecuniary cost--that’s another matter. There is money +buried in the thick walls and diffused through the echoing excess of +space. The merchant nobles of the fifteenth century had deep and full +pockets, I suppose, though the present bearers of their names are glad +to let out their palaces in suites of apartments which are occupied by +the commercial aristocracy of another republic. One is told of fine old +mouldering chambers of which possession is to be enjoyed for a sum not +worth mentioning. I am afraid that behind these so gravely harmonious +fronts there is a good deal of dusky discomfort, and I speak now simply +of the large serious faces themselves as you can see them from the +street; see them ranged cheek to cheek, in the grey historic light of +Via dei Bardi, Via Maggio, Via degli Albizzi. The force of character, +the familiar severity and majesty, depend on a few simple features: on +the great iron-caged windows of the rough-hewn basement; on the noble +stretch of space between the summit of one high, round-topped window +and the bottom of that above; on the high-hung sculptured shield at the +angle of the house; on the flat far-projecting roof; and, finally, on +the magnificent tallness of the whole building, which so dwarfs our +modern attempts at size. The finest of these Florentine palaces are, I +imagine, the tallest habitations in Europe that are frankly and +amply habitations--not mere shafts for machinery of the American +grain-elevator pattern. Some of the creations of M. Haussmann in Paris +may climb very nearly as high; but there is all the difference in the +world between the impressiveness of a building which takes breath, as +it were, some six or seven times, from storey to storey, and of one that +erects itself to an equal height in three long-drawn pulsations. When +a house is ten windows wide and the drawing-room floor is as high as a +chapel it can afford but three floors. The spaciousness of some of those +ancient drawing-rooms is that of a Russian steppe. The “family circle,” + gathered anywhere within speaking distance, must resemble a group of +pilgrims encamped in the desert on a little oasis of carpet. Madame +Gryzanowska, living at the top of a house in that dusky, tortuous old +Borgo Pinti, initiated me the other evening most good-naturedly, lamp in +hand, into the far-spreading mysteries of her apartment. Such quarters +seem a translation into space of the old-fashioned idea of leisure. +Leisure and “room” have been passing out of our manners together, but +here and there, being of stouter structure, the latter lingers and +survives. + +Here and there, indeed, in this blessed Italy, reluctantly modern in +spite alike of boasts and lamentations, it seems to have been preserved +for curiosity’s and fancy’s sake, with a vague, sweet odour of the +embalmer’s spices about it. I went the other morning to the Corsini +Palace. The proprietors obviously are great people. One of the ornaments +of Rome is their great white-faced palace in the dark Trastevere and +its voluminous gallery, none the less delectable for the poorness of +the pictures. Here they have a palace on the Arno, with another large, +handsome, respectable and mainly uninteresting collection. It contains +indeed three or four fine examples of early Florentines. It was not +especially for the pictures that I went, however; and certainly not for +the pictures that I stayed. I was under the same spell as the inveterate +companion with whom I walked the other day through the beautiful private +apartments of the Pitti Palace and who said: “I suppose I care for +nature, and I know there have been times when I have thought it the +greatest pleasure in life to lie under a tree and gaze away at blue +hills. But just now I had rather lie on that faded sea-green satin sofa +and gaze down through the open door at that retreating vista of gilded, +deserted, haunted chambers. In other words I prefer a good ‘interior’ +to a good landscape. The impression has a greater intensity--the thing +itself a more complex animation. I like fine old rooms that have been +occupied in a fine old way. I like the musty upholstery, the antiquated +knick-knacks, the view out of the tall deep-embrasured windows at garden +cypresses rocking against a grey sky. If you don’t know why, I’m afraid +I can’t tell you.” It seemed to me at the Palazzo Corsini that I did +know why. In places that have been lived in so long and so much and in +such a fine old way, as my friend said--that is under social conditions +so multifold and to a comparatively starved and democratic sense so +curious--the past seems to have left a sensible deposit, an aroma, an +atmosphere. This ghostly presence tells you no secrets, but it prompts +you to try and guess a few. What has been done and said here through so +many years, what has been ventured or suffered, what has been dreamed or +despaired of? Guess the riddle if you can, or if you think it worth +your ingenuity. The rooms at Palazzo Corsini suggest indeed, and seem +to recall, but a monotony of peace and plenty. One of them imaged such +a noble perfection of a home-scene that I dawdled there until the old +custodian came shuffling back to see whether possibly I was trying +to conceal a Caravaggio about my person: a great crimson-draped +drawing-room of the amplest and yet most charming proportions; walls +hung with large dark pictures, a great concave ceiling frescoed and +moulded with dusky richness, and half-a-dozen south windows looking out +on the Arno, whose swift yellow tide sends up the light in a cheerful +flicker. I fear that in my appreciation of the particular effect so +achieved I uttered a monstrous folly--some momentary willingness to be +maimed or crippled all my days if I might pass them in such a place. In +fact half the pleasure of inhabiting this spacious saloon would be that +of using one’s legs, of strolling up and down past the windows, one by +one, and making desultory journeys from station to station and corner +to corner. Near by is a colossal ball-room, domed and pilastered like +a Renaissance cathedral, and super-abundantly decorated with marble +effigies, all yellow and grey with the years. + + +VI + + +In the Carthusian Monastery outside the Roman Gate, mutilated and +profaned though it is, one may still snuff up a strong if stale +redolence of old Catholicism and old Italy. The road to it is ugly, +being encumbered with vulgar waggons and fringed with tenements +suggestive of an Irish-American suburb. Your interest begins as you +come in sight of the convent perched on its little mountain and lifting +against the sky, around the bell-tower of its gorgeous chapel, a coronet +of clustered cells. You make your way into the lower gate, through a +clamouring press of deformed beggars who thrust at you their stumps +of limbs, and you climb the steep hillside through a shabby plantation +which it is proper to fancy was better tended in the monkish time. The +monks are not totally abolished, the government having the grace to +await the natural extinction of the half-dozen old brothers who remain, +and who shuffle doggedly about the cloisters, looking, with their white +robes and their pale blank old faces, quite anticipatory ghosts of their +future selves. A prosaic, profane old man in a coat and trousers serves +you, however, as custodian. The melancholy friars have not even the +privilege of doing you the honours of their dishonour. One must imagine +the pathetic effect of their former silent pointings to this and that +conventual treasure under stress of the feeling that such pointings were +narrowly numbered. The convent is vast and irregular--it bristles with +those picture-making arts and accidents which one notes as one lingers +and passes, but which in Italy the overburdened memory learns to resolve +into broadly general images. I rather deplore its position at the gates +of a bustling city--it ought rather to be lodged in some lonely fold of +the Apennines. And yet to look out from the shady porch of one of the +quiet cells upon the teeming vale of the Arno and the clustered towers +of Florence must have deepened the sense of monastic quietude. + +The chapel, or rather the church, which is of great proportions and +designed by Andrea Orcagna, the primitive painter, refines upon the +consecrated type or even quite glorifies it. The massive cincture +of black sculptured stalls, the dusky Gothic roof, the high-hung, +deep-toned pictures and the superb pavement of verd-antique and dark red +marble, polished into glassy lights, must throw the white-robed figures +of the gathered friars into the highest romantic relief. All this luxury +of worship has nowhere such value as in the chapels of monasteries, +where we find it contrasted with the otherwise so ascetic economy of the +worshippers. The paintings and gildings of their church, the gem-bright +marbles and fantastic carvings, are really but the monastic tribute to +sensuous delight--an imperious need for which the fond imagination of +Rome has officiously opened the door. One smiles when one thinks how +largely a fine starved sense for the forbidden things of earth, if it +makes the most of its opportunities, may gratify this need under +cover of devotion. Nothing is too base, too hard, too sordid for real +humility, but nothing too elegant, too amiable, too caressing, caressed, +caressable, for the exaltation of faith. The meaner the convent cell the +richer the convent chapel. Out of poverty and solitude, inanition and +cold, your honest friar may rise at his will into a Mahomet’s Paradise +of luxurious analogies. + +There are further various dusky subterranean oratories where a number +of bad pictures contend faintly with the friendly gloom. Two or three of +these funereal vaults, however, deserve mention. In one of them, side +by side, sculptured by Donatello in low relief, lie the white marble +effigies of the three members of the Accaiuoli family who founded the +convent in the thirteenth century. In another, on his back, on the +pavement, rests a grim old bishop of the same stout race by the same +honest craftsman. Terribly grim he is, and scowling as if in his stony +sleep he still dreamed of his hates and his hard ambitions. Last and +best, in another low chapel, with the trodden pavement for its bed, +shines dimly a grand image of a later bishop--Leonardo Buonafede, who, +dying in 1545, owes his monument to Francesco di San Gallo. I have seen +little from this artist’s hand, but it was clearly of the cunningest. +His model here was a very sturdy old prelate, though I should say a very +genial old man. The sculptor has respected his monumental ugliness, +but has suffused it with a singular homely charm--a look of confessed +physical comfort in the privilege of paradise. All these figures have +an inimitable reality, and their lifelike marble seems such an +incorruptible incarnation of the genius of the place that you begin to +think of it as even more reckless than cruel on the part of the present +public powers to have begun to pull the establishment down, morally +speaking, about their ears. They are lying quiet yet a while; but when +the last old friar dies and the convent formally lapses, won’t they rise +on their stiff old legs and hobble out to the gates and thunder forth +anathemas before which even a future and more enterprising régime may be +disposed to pause? + +Out of the great central cloister open the snug little detached +dwellings of the absent fathers. When I said just now that the Certosa +in Val d’Ema gives you a glimpse of old Italy I was thinking of this +great pillared quadrangle, lying half in sun and half in shade, of its +tangled garden-growth in the centre, surrounding the ancient customary +well, and of the intense blue sky bending above it, to say nothing of +the indispensable old white-robed monk who pokes about among the lettuce +and parsley. We have seen such places before; we have visited them in +that divinatory glance which strays away into space for a moment over +the top of a suggestive book. I don’t quite know whether it’s more or +less as one’s fancy would have it that the monkish cells are no cells +at all, but very tidy little _appartements complets_, consisting of a +couple of chambers, a sitting-room and a spacious loggia, projecting out +into space from the cliff-like wall of the monastery and sweeping from +pole to pole the loveliest view in the world. It’s poor work, however, +taking notes on views, and I will let this one pass. The little chambers +are terribly cold and musty now. Their odour and atmosphere are such +as one used, as a child, to imagine those of the school-room during +Saturday and Sunday. + + +VII + + +In the Roman streets, wherever you turn, the facade of a church in more +or less degenerate flamboyance is the principal feature of the scene; +and if, in the absence of purer motives, you are weary of aesthetic +trudging over the corrugated surface of the Seven Hills, a system of +pavement in which small cobble-stones anomalously endowed with angles +and edges are alone employed, you may turn aside at your pleasure and +take a reviving sniff at the pungency of incense. In Florence, one soon +observes, the churches are relatively few and the dusky house-fronts +more rarely interrupted by specimens of that extraordinary architecture +which in Rome passes for sacred. In Florence, in other words, +ecclesiasticism is less cheap a commodity and not dispensed in the same +abundance at the street-corners. Heaven forbid, at the same time, that +I should undervalue the Roman churches, which are for the most +part treasure-houses of history, of curiosity, of promiscuous and +associational interest. It is a fact, nevertheless, that, after St. +Peter’s, I know but one really beautiful church by the Tiber, the +enchanting basilica of St. Mary Major. Many have structural character, +some a great _allure_, but as a rule they all lack the dignity of +the best of the Florentine temples. Here, the list being immeasurably +shorter and the seed less scattered, the principal churches are all +beautiful. And yet I went into the Annunziata the other day and sat +there for half-an-hour because, forsooth, the gildings and the marbles +and the frescoed dome and the great rococo shrine near the door, with +its little black jewelled fetish, reminded me so poignantly of Rome. +Such is the city properly styled eternal--since it is eternal, at least, +as regards the consciousness of the individual. One loves it in its +sophistications--though for that matter isn’t it all rich and precious +sophistication?--better than other places in their purity. + +Coming out of the Annunziata you look past the bronze statue of the +Grand Duke Ferdinand I (whom Mr. Browning’s heroine used to watch +for--in the poem of “The Statue and the Bust”--from the red palace near +by), and down a street vista of enchanting picturesqueness. The street +is narrow and dusky and filled with misty shadows, and at its opposite +end rises the vast bright-coloured side of the Cathedral. It stands up +in very much the same mountainous fashion as the far-shining mass of the +bigger prodigy at Milan, of which your first glimpse as you leave your +hotel is generally through another such dark avenue; only that, if we +talk of mountains, the white walls of Milan must be likened to snow and +ice from their base, while those of the Duomo of Florence may be the +image of some mighty hillside enamelled with blooming flowers. The big +bleak interior here has a naked majesty which, though it may fail of +its effect at first, becomes after a while extraordinarily touching. +Originally disconcerting, it soon inspired me with a passion. +Externally, at any rate, it is one of the loveliest works of man’s +hands, and an overwhelming proof into the bargain that when elegance +belittles grandeur you have simply had a bungling artist. + +Santa Croce within not only triumphs here, but would triumph anywhere. +“A trifle naked if you like,” said my irrepressible companion, “but +that’s what I call architecture, just as I don’t call bronze or marble +clothes (save under urgent stress of portraiture) statuary.” And indeed +we are far enough away from the clustering odds and ends borrowed from +every art and every province without which the ritually builded thing +doesn’t trust its spell to work in Rome. The vastness, the lightness, +the open spring of the arches at Santa Croce, the beautiful shape of the +high and narrow choir, the impression made as of mass without weight and +the gravity yet reigning without gloom--these are my frequent delight, +and the interest grows with acquaintance. The place is the great +Florentine Valhalla, the final home or memorial harbour of the native +illustrious dead, but that consideration of it would take me far. It +must be confessed moreover that, between his coarsely-imagined statue +out in front and his horrible monument in one of the aisles, the author +of _The Divine Comedy_, for instance, is just hereabouts rather an +extravagant figure. “Ungrateful Florence,” declaims Byron. Ungrateful +indeed--would she were more so! the susceptible spirit of the great +exile may be still aware enough to exclaim; in common, that is, with +most of the other immortals sacrificed on so very large a scale to +current Florentine “plastic” facility. In explanation of which remark, +however, I must confine myself to noting that, as almost all the old +monuments at Santa Croce are small, comparatively small, and interesting +and exquisite, so the modern, well nigh without exception, are +disproportionately vast and pompous, or in other words distressingly +vague and vain. The aptitude of hand, the compositional assurance, with +which such things are nevertheless turned out, constitutes an anomaly +replete with suggestion for an observer of the present state of the arts +on the soil and in the air that once befriended them, taking them all +together, as even the soil and the air of Greece scarce availed to do. +But on this head, I repeat, there would be too much to say; and I find +myself checked by the same warning at the threshold of the church in +Florence really interesting beyond Santa Croce, beyond all others. Such, +of course, easily, is Santa Maria Novella, where the chapels are lined +and plated with wonderful figured and peopled fresco-work even as most +of those in Rome with precious inanimate substances. These overscored +retreats of devotion, as dusky, some of them, as eremitic caves swarming +with importunate visions, have kept me divided all winter between the +love of Ghirlandaio and the fear of those seeds of catarrh to which +their mortal chill seems propitious till far on into the spring. So +I pause here just on the praise of that delightful painter--as to +the spirit of whose work the reflections I have already made are but +confirmed by these examples. In the choir at Santa Maria Novella, where +the incense swings and the great chants resound, between the gorgeous +coloured window and the florid grand altar, he still “goes in,” with +all his might, for the wicked, the amusing world, the world of faces and +forms and characters, of every sort of curious human and rare material +thing. + +{Illustration: BOBOLI GARDEN, FLORENCE.} + + +VIII + + +I had always felt the Boboli Gardens charming enough for me to “haunt” + them; and yet such is the interest of Florence in every quarter that it +took another _corso_ of the same cheap pattern as the last to cause me +yesterday to flee the crowded streets, passing under that archway of the +Pitti Palace which might almost be the gate of an Etruscan city, so that +I might spend the afternoon among the mouldy statues that compose with +their screens of cypress, looking down at our clustered towers and our +background of pale blue hills vaguely freckled with white villas. These +pleasure-grounds of the austere Pitti pile, with its inconsequent charm +of being so rough-hewn and yet somehow so elegantly balanced, plead with +a voice all their own the general cause of the ample enclosed, planted, +cultivated private preserve--preserve of tranquillity and beauty and +immunity--in the heart of a city; a cause, I allow, for that matter, +easy to plead anywhere, once the pretext is found, the large, quiet, +distributed town-garden, with the vague hum of big grudging boundaries +all about it, but with everything worse excluded, being of course the +most insolently-pleasant thing in the world. In addition to which, when +the garden is in the Italian manner, with flowers rather remarkably +omitted, as too flimsy and easy and cheap, and without lawns that +are too smart, paths that are too often swept and shrubs that are too +closely trimmed, though with a fanciful formalism giving style to its +shabbiness, and here and there a dusky ilex-walk, and here and there a +dried-up fountain, and everywhere a piece of mildewed sculpture staring +at you from a green alcove, and just in the right place, above all, a +grassy amphitheatre curtained behind with black cypresses and sloping +downward in mossy marble steps--when, I say, the place possesses these +attractions, and you lounge there of a soft Sunday afternoon, the racier +spectacle of the streets having made your fellow-loungers few and left +you to the deep stillness and the shady vistas that lead you wonder +where, left you to the insidious irresistible mixture of nature and art, +nothing too much of either, only a supreme happy resultant, a divine +_tertium quid_: under these conditions, it need scarce be said the +revelation invoked descends upon you. + +The Boboli Gardens are not large--you wonder how compact little Florence +finds room for them within her walls. But they are scattered, to their +extreme, their all-romantic advantage and felicity, over a group +of steep undulations between the rugged and terraced palace and a +still-surviving stretch of city wall, where the unevenness of the ground +much adds to their apparent size. You may cultivate in them the fancy of +their solemn and haunted character, of something faint and dim and even, +if you like, tragic, in their prescribed, their functional smile; as if +they borrowed from the huge monument that overhangs them certain of its +ponderous memories and regrets. This course is open to you, I mention, +but it isn’t enjoined, and will doubtless indeed not come up for you +at all if it isn’t your habit, cherished beyond any other, to spin your +impressions to the last tenuity of fineness. Now that I bethink myself I +must always have happened to wander here on grey and melancholy days. It +remains none the less true that the place contains, thank goodness--or +at least thank the grave, the infinitely-distinguished traditional +_taste_ of Florence--no cheerful, trivial object, neither parterres, nor +pagodas, nor peacocks, nor swans. They have their famous amphitheatre +already referred to, with its degrees or stone benches of a thoroughly +aged and mottled complexion and its circular wall of evergreens behind, +in which small cracked images and vases, things that, according to +association, and with the law of the same quite indefinable, may make as +much on one occasion for exquisite dignity as they may make on another +for (to express it kindly) nothing at all. Something was once done in +this charmed and forsaken circle--done or meant to be done; what was it, +dumb statues, who saw it with your blank eyes? Opposite stands the +huge flat-roofed palace, putting forward two great rectangular arms and +looking, with its closed windows and its foundations of almost unreduced +rock, like some ghost of a sample of a ruder Babylon. In the wide +court-like space between the wings is a fine old white marble fountain +that never plays. Its dusty idleness completes the general air of +abandonment. Chancing on such a cluster of objects in Italy--glancing at +them in a certain light and a certain mood--I get (perhaps on too easy +terms, you may think) a sense of _history_ that takes away my breath. +Generations of Medici have stood at these closed windows, embroidered +and brocaded according to their period, and held _fetes champetres_ and +floral games on the greensward, beneath the mouldering hemicycle. And +the Medici were great people! But what remains of it all now is a mere +tone in the air, a faint sigh in the breeze, a vague expression in +things, a passive--or call it rather, perhaps, to be fair, a shyly, +pathetically responsive--accessibility to the yearning guess. Call +it much or call it little, the ineffaceability of this deep stain +of experience, it is the interest of old places and the bribe to the +brooding analyst. Time has devoured the doers and their doings, but +there still hangs about some effect of their passage. We can “layout” + parks on virgin soil, and cause them to bristle with the most expensive +importations, but we unfortunately can’t scatter abroad again this seed +of the eventual human soul of a place--that comes but in its time and +takes too long to grow. There is nothing like it when it _has_ come. + + + + + +TUSCAN CITIES + + +The cities I refer to are Leghorn, Pisa, Lucca and Pistoia, among which +I have been spending the last few days. The most striking fact as to +Leghorn, it must be conceded at the outset, is that, being in Tuscany, +it should be so scantily Tuscan. The traveller curious in local colour +must content himself with the deep blue expanse of the Mediterranean. +The streets, away from the docks, are modern, genteel and rectangular; +Liverpool might acknowledge them if it weren’t for their clean-coloured, +sun-bleached stucco. They are the offspring of the new industry which is +death to the old idleness. Of interesting architecture, fruit of the +old idleness or at least of the old leisure, Leghorn is singularly +destitute. It has neither a church worth one’s attention, nor a +municipal palace, nor a museum, and it may claim the distinction, unique +in Italy, of being the city of no pictures. In a shabby corner near +the docks stands a statue of one of the elder Grand Dukes of Tuscany, +appealing to posterity on grounds now vague--chiefly that of having +placed certain Moors under tribute. Four colossal negroes, in very bad +bronze, are chained to the base of the monument, which forms with their +assistance a sufficiently fantastic group; but to patronise the arts is +not the line of the Livornese, and for want of the slender annuity +which would keep its precinct sacred this curious memorial is buried +in dockyard rubbish. I must add that on the other hand there is a very +well-conditioned and, in attitude and gesture, extremely natural and +familiar statue of Cavour in one of the city squares, and in another a +couple of effigies of recent Grand Dukes, represented, that is dressed, +or rather undressed, in the character of heroes of Plutarch. Leghorn +is a city of magnificent spaces, and it was so long a journey from the +sidewalk to the pedestal of these images that I never took the time +to go and read the inscriptions. And in truth, vaguely, I bore the +originals a grudge, and wished to know as little about them as possible; +for it seemed to me that as _patres patrae_, in their degree, they might +have decreed that the great blank, ochre-faced piazza should be a trifle +less ugly. There is a distinct amenity, however, in any experience of +Italy almost anywhere, and I shall probably in the future not be above +sparing a light regret to several of the hours of which the one I speak +of was composed. I shall remember a large cool bourgeois villa in the +garden of a noiseless suburb--a middle-aged Villa Franco (I owe it as a +genial pleasant _pension_ the tribute of recognition), roomy and stony, +as an Italian villa should be. I shall remember that, as I sat in the +garden, and, looking up from my book, saw through a gap in the shrubbery +the red house-tiles against the deep blue sky and the grey underside of +the ilex-leaves turned up by the Mediterranean breeze, it was all still +quite Tuscany, if Tuscany in the minor key. + +If you should naturally desire, in such conditions, a higher intensity, +you have but to proceed, by a very short journey, to Pisa--where, for +that matter, you will seem to yourself to have hung about a good deal +already, and from an early age. Few of us can have had a childhood +so unblessed by contact with the arts as that one of its occasional +diversions shan’t have been a puzzled scrutiny of some alabaster model +of the Leaning Tower under a glass cover in a back-parlour. Pisa and its +monuments have, in other words, been industriously vulgarised, but it +is astonishing how well they have survived the process. The charm of the +place is in fact of a high order and but partially foreshadowed by the +famous crookedness of its campanile. I felt it irresistibly and yet +almost inexpressibly the other afternoon, as I made my way to the +classic corner of the city through the warm drowsy air which nervous +people come to inhale as a sedative. I was with an invalid companion who +had had no sleep to speak of for a fortnight. “Ah! stop the carriage,” + she sighed, or yawned, as I could feel, deliciously, “in the shadow of +this old slumbering palazzo, and let me sit here and close my eyes, and +taste for an hour of oblivion.” Once strolling over the grass, however, +out of which the quartette of marble monuments rises, we awaked +responsively enough to the present hour. Most people remember the happy +remark of tasteful, old-fashioned Forsyth (who touched a hundred other +points in his “Italy” scarce less happily) as to the fact that the +four famous objects are “fortunate alike in their society and their +solitude.” It must be admitted that they are more fortunate in their +society than we felt ourselves to be in ours; for the scene presented +the animated appearance for which, on any fine spring day, all the +choicest haunts of ancient quietude in Italy are becoming yearly more +remarkable. There were clamorous beggars at all the sculptured portals, +and bait for beggars, in abundance, trailing in and out of them under +convoy of loquacious ciceroni. I forget just how I apportioned the +responsibility, of intrusion, for it was not long before fellow-tourists +and fellow-countrymen became a vague, deadened, muffled presence, that +of the dentist’s last words when he is giving you ether. They suffered +mystic disintegration in the dense, bright, tranquil air, so charged +with its own messages. The Cathedral and its companions are fortunate +indeed in everything--fortunate in the spacious angle of the grey old +city-wall which folds about them in their sculptured elegance like a +strong protecting arm; fortunate in the broad greensward which stretches +from the marble base of Cathedral and cemetery to the rugged foot of the +rampart; fortunate in the little vagabonds who dot the grass, plucking +daisies and exchanging Italian cries; fortunate in the pale-gold tone to +which time and the soft sea-damp have mellowed and darkened their marble +plates; fortunate, above all, in an indescribable grace of grouping, +half hazard, half design, which insures them, in one’s memory of things +admired, very much the same isolated corner that they occupy in the +charming city. + +Of the smaller cathedrals of Italy I know none I prefer to that of Pisa; +none that, on a moderate scale, produces more the impression of a great +church. It has without so modest a measurability, represents so clean +and compact a mass, that you are startled when you cross the threshold +at the apparent space it encloses. An architect of genius, for all that +he works with colossal blocks and cumbrous pillars, is certainly the +most cunning of conjurors. The front of the Duomo is a small pyramidal +screen, covered with delicate carvings and chasings, distributed over +a series of short columns upholding narrow arches. It might be a +sought imitation of goldsmith’s work in stone, and the area covered is +apparently so small that extreme fineness has been prescribed. How it is +therefore that on the inner side of this façade the wall should appear +to rise to a splendid height and to support one end of a ceiling as +remote in its gilded grandeur, one could almost fancy, as that of St. +Peter’s; how it is that the nave should stretch away in such solemn +vastness, the shallow transepts emphasise the grand impression and the +apse of the choir hollow itself out like a dusky cavern fretted +with golden stalactites, is all matter for exposition by a keener +architectural analyst than I. To sit somewhere against a pillar where +the vista is large and the incidents cluster richly, and vaguely revolve +these mysteries without answering them, is the best of one’s usual +enjoyment of a great church. It takes no deep sounding to conclude +indeed that a gigantic Byzantine Christ in mosaic, on the concave roof +of the choir, contributes largely to the particular impression here as +of very old and choice and original and individual things. It has even +more of stiff solemnity than is common to works of its school, and +prompts to more wonder than ever on the nature of the human mind at a +time when such unlovely shapes could satisfy its conception of holiness. +Truly pathetic is the fate of these huge mosaic idols, thanks to the +change that has overtaken our manner of acceptance of them. Strong the +contrast between the original sublimity of their pretensions and the way +in which they flatter that free sense of the grotesque which the modern +imagination has smuggled even into the appreciation of religious forms. +They were meant to yield scarcely to the Deity itself in grandeur, but +the only part they play now is to stare helplessly at our critical, our +aesthetic patronage of them. The spiritual refinement marking the hither +end of a progress had n’t, however, to wait for us to signalise it; it +found expression three centuries ago in the beautiful specimen of the +painter Sodoma on the wall of the choir. This latter, a small Sacrifice +of Isaac, is one of the best examples of its exquisite author, and +perhaps, as chance has it, the most perfect opposition that could +be found in the way of the range of taste to the effect of the great +mosaic. There are many painters more powerful than Sodoma--painters who, +like the author of the mosaic, attempted and compassed grandeur; but +none has a more persuasive grace, none more than he was to sift and +chasten a conception till it should affect one with the sweetness of a +perfectly distilled perfume. + +Of the patient successive efforts of painting to arrive at the supreme +refinement of such a work as the Sodoma the Campo Santo hard by offers a +most interesting memorial. It presents a long, blank marble wall to the +relative profaneness of the Cathedral close, but within it is a perfect +treasure-house of art. This quadrangular defence surrounds an open court +where weeds and wild roses are tangled together and a sunny stillness +seems to rest consentingly, as if Nature had been won to consciousness +of the precious relics committed to her. Something in the quality of the +place recalls the collegiate cloisters of Oxford, but it must be added +that this is the handsomest compliment to that seat of learning. The +open arches of the quadrangles of Magdalen and Christ Church are not +of mellow Carrara marble, nor do they offer to sight columns, slim and +elegant, that seem to frame the unglazed windows of a cathedral. To be +buried in the Campo Santo of Pisa, I may however further qualify, you +need only be, or to have more or less anciently been, illustrious, and +there is a liberal allowance both as to the character and degree of +your fame. The most obtrusive object in one of the long vistas is a most +complicated monument to Madame Catalani, the singer, recently erected +by her possibly too-appreciative heirs. The wide pavement is a mosaic of +sepulchral slabs, and the walls, below the base of the paling frescoes, +are incrusted with inscriptions and encumbered with urns and antique +sarcophagi. The place is at once a cemetery and a museum, and its +especial charm is its strange mixture of the active and the passive, +of art and rest, of life and death. Originally its walls were one vast +continuity of closely pressed frescoes; but now the great capricious +scars and stains have come to outnumber the pictures, and the cemetery +has grown to be a burial-place of pulverised masterpieces as well as of +finished lives. The fragments of painting that remain are fortunately +the best; for one is safe in believing that a host of undimmed +neighbours would distract but little from the two great works of +Orcagna. Most people know the “Triumph of Death” and the “Last Judgment” + from descriptions and engravings; but to measure the possible good faith +of imitative art one must stand there and see the painter’s howling +potentates dragged into hell in all the vividness of his bright hard +colouring; see his feudal courtiers, on their palfreys, hold their noses +at what they are so fast coming to; see his great Christ, in judgment, +refuse forgiveness with a gesture commanding enough, really inhuman +enough, to make virtue merciless for ever. The charge that Michael +Angelo borrowed his cursing Saviour from this great figure of Orcagna is +more valid than most accusations of plagiarism; but of the two figures +one at least could be spared. For direct, triumphant expressiveness +these two superb frescoes have probably never been surpassed. The +painter aims at no very delicate meanings, but he drives certain gross +ones home so effectively that for a parallel to his process one must +look to the art of the actor, the emphasising “point”--making mime. +Some of his female figures are superb--they represent creatures of a +formidable temperament. + +There are charming women, however, on the other side of the cloister--in +the beautiful frescoes of Benozzo Gozzoli. If Orcagna’s work was +appointed to survive the ravage of time it is a happy chance that +it should be balanced by a group of performances of such a different +temper. The contrast is the more striking that in subject the +inspiration of both painters is strictly, even though superficially, +theological. But Benozzo cares, in his theology, for nothing but the +story, the scene and the drama--the chance to pile up palaces and spires +in his backgrounds against pale blue skies cross-barred with pearly, +fleecy clouds, and to scatter sculptured arches and shady trellises over +the front, with every incident of human life going forward lightly and +gracefully beneath them. Lightness and grace are the painter’s great +qualities, marking the hithermost limit of unconscious elegance, after +which “style” and science and the wisdom of the serpent set in. +His charm is natural fineness; a little more and we should have +refinement--which is a very different thing. Like all _les délicats_ of +this world, as M. Renan calls them, Benozzo has suffered greatly. The +space on the walls he originally covered with his Old Testament stories +is immense; but his exquisite handiwork has peeled off by the acre, +as one may almost say, and the latter compartments of the series are +swallowed up in huge white scars, out of which a helpless head or hand +peeps forth like those of creatures sinking into a quicksand. As +for Pisa at large, although it is not exactly what one would call +a mouldering city--for it has a certain well-aired cleanness and +brightness, even in its supreme tranquillity--it affects the imagination +very much in the same way as the Campo Santo. And, in truth, a city +so ancient and deeply historic as Pisa is at every step but the +burial-ground of a larger life than its present one. The wide empty +streets, the goodly Tuscan palaces--which look as if about all of them +there were a genteel private understanding, independent of placards, +that they are to be let extremely cheap--the delicious relaxing air, +the full-flowing yellow river, the lounging Pisani, smelling, +metaphorically, their poppy-flowers, seemed to me all so many +admonitions to resignation and oblivion. And this is what I mean by +saying that the charm of Pisa (apart from its cluster of monuments) is +a charm of a high order. The architecture has but a modest dignity; the +lions are few; there are no fixed points for stopping and gaping. And +yet the impression is profound; the charm is a moral charm. If I were +ever to be incurably disappointed in life, if I had lost my health, +my money, or my friends, if I were resigned forevermore to pitching my +expectations in a minor key, I should go and invoke the Pisan peace. Its +quietude would seem something more than a stillness--a hush. Pisa may be +a dull place to live in, but it’s an ideal place to wait for death. + +Nothing could be more charming than the country between Pisa and +Lucca--unless possibly the country between Lucca and Pistoia. If Pisa is +dead Tuscany, Lucca is Tuscany still living and enjoying, desiring and +intending. The town is a charming mixture of antique “character” and +modern inconsequence; and! not only the town, but the country--the +blooming romantic country which you admire from the famous promenade +on the city-wall. The wall is of superbly solid and intensely “toned” + brickwork and of extraordinary breadth, and its summit, planted with +goodly trees and swelling here and there into bastions and outworks and +little open gardens, surrounds the city with a circular lounging-place +of a splendid dignity. This well-kept, shady, ivy-grown rampart reminded +me of certain mossy corners of England; but it looks away to a prospect +of more than English loveliness--a broad green plain where the summer +yields a double crop of grain, and a circle of bright blue mountains +speckled with high-hung convents and profiled castles and nestling +villas, and traversed by valleys of a deeper and duskier blue. In one of +the deepest and shadiest of these recesses one of the most “sympathetic” + of small watering-places is hidden away yet a while longer from +easy invasion--the Baths to which Lucca has lent its name. Lucca is +pre-eminently a city of churches; ecclesiastical architecture being +indeed the only one of the arts to which it seems to have given +attention. There are curious bits of domestic architecture, but no +great palaces, and no importunate frequency of pictures. The Cathedral, +however, sums up the merits of its companions and is a singularly noble +and interesting church. Its peculiar boast is a wonderful inlaid front, +on which horses and hounds and hunted beasts are lavishly figured in +black marble over a white ground. What I chiefly appreciated in the grey +solemnity of the nave and transepts was the superb effect of certain +second-storey Gothic arches--those which rest on the pavement being +Lombard. These arches are delicate and slender, like those of the +cloister at Pisa, and they play their part in the dusky upper air with +real sublimity. + +At Pistoia there is of course a Cathedral, and there is nothing +unexpected in its being, externally at least, highly impressive; in its +having a grand campanile at its door, a gaudy baptistery, in alternate +layers of black and white marble, across the way, and a stately civic +palace on either side. But even had I the space to do otherwise I should +prefer to speak less of the particular objects of interest in the place +than of the pleasure I found it to lounge away in the empty streets the +quiet hours of a warm afternoon. To say where I lingered longest would +be to tell of a little square before the hospital, out of which you +look up at the beautiful frieze in coloured earthernware by the brothers +Della Robbia, which runs across the front of the building. It represents +the seven orthodox offices of charity and, with its brilliant blues and +yellows and its tender expressiveness, brightens up amazingly, to the +sense and soul, this little grey corner of the mediaeval city. Pi stoia +is still mediaeval. How grass-grown it seemed, how drowsy, how full of +idle vistas and melancholy nooks! If nothing was supremely wonderful, +everything was delicious. + +{Illustration: THE HOSPITAL, PISTOIA.} + +1874. + + + + + +OTHER TUSCAN CITIES + + +I + + +I had scanted charming Pisa even as I had scanted great Siena in my +original small report of it, my scarce more than stammering notes of +years before; but even if there had been meagreness of mere gaping +vision--which there in fact hadn’t been--as well as insufficiency of +public tribute, the indignity would soon have ceased to weigh on my +conscience. For to this affection I was to return again still oftener +than to the strong call of Siena my eventual frequentations of Pisa, all +merely impressionistic and amateurish as they might be--and I pretended, +up and down the length of the land, to none other--leave me at the +hither end of time with little more than a confused consciousness of +exquisite _quality_ on the part of the small sweet scrap of a place of +ancient glory; a consciousness so pleadingly content to be general and +vague that I shrink from pulling it to pieces. The Republic of Pisa +fought with the Republic of Florence, through the ages so ferociously +and all but invincibly that what is so pale and languid in her to-day +may well be the aspect of any civil or, still more, military creature +bled and bled and bled at the “critical” time of its life. She has +verily a just languor and is touchingly anæmic; the past history, or +at any rate the present perfect acceptedness, of which condition hangs +about her with the last grace of weakness, making her state in this +particular the very secret of her irresistible appeal. I was to find the +appeal, again and again, one of the sweetest, tenderest, even if not +one of the fullest and richest impressions possible; and if I went back +whenever I could it was very much as one doesn’t indecently neglect a +gentle invalid friend. The couch of the invalid friend, beautifully, +appealingly resigned, has been wheeled, say, for the case, into the warm +still garden, and your visit but consists of your sitting beside it with +kind, discreet, testifying silences. Such is the figurative form under +which the once rugged enemy of Florence, stretched at her length by the +rarely troubled Arno, to-day presents herself; and I find my analogy +complete even to my sense of the mere mild _séance_, the inevitably +tacit communion or rather blank interchange, between motionless cripple +and hardly more incurable admirer. + +The terms of my enjoyment of Pisa scarce departed from that ideal--slow +contemplative perambulations, rather late in the day and after work done +mostly in the particular decent inn-room that was repeatedly my portion; +where the sunny flicker of the river played up from below to the very +ceiling, which, by the same sign, anciently and curiously raftered and +hanging over my table at a great height, had been colour-pencilled into +ornament as fine (for all practical purposes) as the page of a missal. +I add to this, for remembrance, an inveteracy of evening idleness and of +reiterated ices in front of one of the quiet cafés--quiet as everything +at Pisa is quiet, or will certainly but in these latest days have ceased +to be; one in especial so beautifully, so mysteriously void of bustle +that almost always the neighbouring presence and admirable chatter of +some group of the local University students would fall upon my ear, by +the half-hour at a time, not less as a privilege, frankly, than as a +clear-cut image of the young Italian mind and life, by which I lost +nothing. I use such terms as “admirable” and “privilege,” in this last +most casual of connections--which was moreover no connection at all but +what my attention made it--simply as an acknowledgment of the interest +that might play there through some inevitable thoughts. These were, for +that matter, intensely in keeping with the ancient scene and air: +they dealt with the exquisite difference between that tone and type of +ingenuous adolescence--in the mere relation of charmed _audition_--and +other forms of juvenility of whose mental and material accent one had +elsewhere met the assault. Civilised, charmingly civilised, were my +loquacious neighbours--as how had n’t they to be, one asked one’s self, +through the use of a medium of speech that is in itself a sovereign +saturation? _There_ was the beautiful congruity of the happily-caught +impression; the fact of my young men’s general Tuscanism of tongue, +which related them so on the spot to the whole historic consensus +of things. It wasn’t dialect--as it of course easily might have been +elsewhere, at Milan, at Turin, at Bologna, at Naples; it was the clear +Italian in which all the rest of the surrounding story was told, all +the rest of the result of time recorded; and it made them delightful, +prattling, unconscious men of the particular little constituted and +bequeathed world which everything else that was charged with old +meanings and old beauty referred to--all the more that their talk was +never by any chance of romping games or deeds of violence, but kept +flowering, charmingly and incredibly, into eager ideas and literary +opinions and philosophic discussions and, upon my honour, vital +questions. + +They have taken me too far, for so light a reminiscence; but I claim +for the loose web of my impressions at no point a heavier texture. Which +comes back to what I was a moment ago saying--that just in proportion +as you “feel” the morbid charm of Pisa you press on it gently, and this +somehow even under stress of whatever respectful attention. I found +this last impulse, at all events, so far as I was concerned, quite +contentedly spend itself in a renewed sense of the simple large pacified +felicity of such an afternoon aspect as that of the Lung’ Arno, taken up +or down its course; whether to within sight of small Santa Maria della +Spina, the tiny, the delicate, the exquisite Gothic chapel perched where +the quay drops straight, or, in the other direction, toward the melting +perspective of the narrow local pleasure-ground, the rather thin and +careless bosky grace of which recedes, beside the stream whose very +turbidity pleases, to a middle distance of hot and tangled and exuberant +rural industry and a proper blue horizon of Carrara mountains. The Pisan +Lung’ Arno is shorter and less featured and framed than the Florentine, +but it has the fine accent of a marked curve and is quite as bravely +Tuscan; witness the type of river-fronting palace which, in half-a-dozen +massive specimens, the last word of the anciently “handsome,” are of +the essence of the physiognomy of the place. In the glow of which +retrospective admission I ask myself how I came, under my first flush, +reflected in other pages, to fail of justice to so much proud domestic +architecture--in the very teeth moreover of the fact that I was for ever +paying my compliments, in a wistful, wondering way, to the fine Palazzo +Lanfranchi, occupied in 1822 by the migratory Byron, and whither Leigh +Hunt, as commemorated in the latter’s Autobiography, came out to join +him in an odd journalistic scheme. + +Of course, however, I need scarcely add, the centre of my daily +revolution--quite thereby on the circumference--was the great Company of +Four in their sequestered corner; objects of regularly recurrent pious +pilgrimage, if for no other purpose than to see whether each would +each time again so inimitably carry itself as one of a group of +wonderfully-worked old ivories. Their charm of relation to each other +and to everything else that concerns them, that of the quartette of +monuments, is more or less inexpressible all round; but not the least of +it, ever, is in their beautiful secret for taking at different hours +and seasons, in different states of the light, the sky, the wind, the +weather--in different states, even, it used verily to seem to me, of +an admirer’s imagination or temper or nerves--different complexional +appearances, different shades and pallors, different glows and chills. +I have seen them look almost viciously black, and I have seen them as +clear and fair as pale gold. And these things, for the most part, off on +the large grassy carpet spread for them, and with the elbow of the old +city-wall, not elsewhere erect, respectfully but protectingly crooked +about, to the tune of a usual unanimity save perhaps in the case of +the Leaning Tower--so abnormal a member of any respectable family this +structure at best that I always somehow fancied its three companions, +the Cathedral, the Baptistery and the Campo Santo, capable of quiet +common understandings, for the major or the minor effect, into which +their odd fellow, no hint thrown out to him, was left to enter as he +might. If one haunted the place, one ended by yielding to the conceit +that, beautifully though the others of the group may be said to behave +about him, one sometimes caught them in the act of tacitly combining to +ignore him--as if he had, after so long, begun to give on their nerves. +Or is that absurdity but my shamefaced form of admission that, for all +the wonder of him, he finally gave on mine? Frankly--I would put it at +such moments--he becomes at last an optical bore or _betise_. + +{Illustration: THE LOGGIA, LUCCA.} + + +II + + +To Lucca I was not to return often--I was to return only once; when that +compact and admirable little city, the very model of a small _pays de +Cocagne_, overflowing with everything that makes for ease, for plenty, +for beauty, for interest and good example, renewed for me, in the +highest degree, its genial and robust appearance. The perfection of +this renewal must indeed have been, at bottom, the ground of my rather +hanging back from possible excess of acquaintance--with the instinct +that so right and rich and rounded a little impression had better be +left than endangered. I remember positively saying to myself the second +time that no brown-and-gold Tuscan city, even, could _be_ as happy as +Lucca looked--save always, exactly, Lucca; so that, on the chance of any +shade of human illusion in the case, I wouldn’t, as a brooding analyst, +go within fifty miles of it again. Just so, I fear I must confess, it +was this mere face-value of the place that, when I went back, formed my +sufficiency; I spent all my scant time--or the greater part, for I took +a day to drive over to the Bagni--just gaping at its visible attitude. +This may be described as that of simply sitting there, through the +centuries, at the receipt of perfect felicity; on its splendid solid +seat of russet masonry, that is--for its great republican ramparts of +long ago still lock it tight--with its wide garden-land, its ancient +appanage or hereditary domain, teeming and blooming with everything that +is good and pleasant for man, all about, and with a ring of graceful and +noble, yet comparatively unbeneficed uplands and mountains watching +it, for very envy, across the plain, as a circle of bigger boys, in +the playground, may watch a privileged or pampered smaller one munch a +particularly fine apple. Half smothered thus in oil and wine and +corn and all the fruits of the earth, Lucca seems fairly to laugh for +good-humour, and it’s as if one can’t say more for her than that, thanks +to her putting forward for you a temperament somehow still richer than +her heritage, you forgive her at every turn her fortune. She smiles up +at you her greeting as you dip into her wide lap, out of which you may +select almost any rare morsel whatever. Looking back at my own choice +indeed I see it must have suffered a certain embarrassment--that of the +sense of too many things; for I scarce remember choosing at all, any +more than I recall having had to go hungry. I turned into all the +churches--taking care, however, to pause before one of them, though +before which I now irrecoverably forget, for verification of Ruskin’s so +characteristically magnified rapture over the high and rather narrow +and obscure hunting-frieze on its front--and in the Cathedral paid my +respects at every turn to the greatest of Lucchesi, Matteo Civitale, +wisest, sanest, homeliest, kindest of _quattro-cento_ sculptors, to +whose works the Duomo serves almost as a museum. But my nearest approach +to anything so invidious as a discrimination or a preference, under the +spell of so felt an equilibrium, must have been the act of engaging a +carriage for the Baths. + +That inconsequence once perpetrated, let me add, the impression was as +right as any other--the impression of the drive through the huge general +tangled and fruited _podere_ of the countryside; that of the pair of +jogging hours that bring the visitor to where the wideish gate of the +valley of the Serchio opens. The question after this became quite other; +the narrowing, though always more or less smiling gorge that draws you +on and on is a different, a distinct proposition altogether, with its +own individual grace of appeal and association. It is the association, +exactly, that would even now, on this page, beckon me forward, or +perhaps I should rather say backward--weren’t more than a glance at it +out of the question--to a view of that easier and not so inordinately +remote past when “people spent the summer” in these perhaps slightly +stuffy shades. I speak of that age, I think of it at least, as easier +than ours, in spite of the fact that even as I made my pilgrimage the +mark of modern change, the railway in construction, had begun to be +distinct, though the automobile was still pretty far in the future. The +relations and proportions of everything are of course now altered--I +indeed, I confess, wince at the vision of the cloud of motor-dust that +must in the fine season hang over the whole connection. That represents +greater promptness of approach to the bosky depths of Ponte-a-Serraglio +and the Bagni Caldi, but it throws back the other time, that of the +old jogging relation, of the Tuscan grand-ducal “season” and the small +cosmopolite sociability, into quite Arcadian air and the comparatively +primitive scale. The “easier” Italy of our infatuated precursors +there wears its glamour of facility not through any question of “the +development of communications,” but through the very absence of the +dream of that boon, thanks to which every one (among the infatuated) +lived on terms of so much closer intercourse with the general object of +their passion. After we had crossed the Serchio that beautiful day we +passed into the charming, the amiably tortuous, the thickly umbrageous, +valley of the Lima, and then it was that I seemed fairly to remount the +stream of time; figuring to myself wistfully, at the small scattered +centres of entertainment--modest inns, pensions and other places of +convenience clustered where the friendly torrent is bridged or the +forested slopes adjust themselves--what the summer days and the summer +rambles and the summer dreams must have been, in the blest place, when +“people” (by which I mean the contingent of beguiled barbarians) didn’t +know better, as we say, than to content themselves with such a mild +substitute, such a soft, sweet and essentially elegant apology, for +adventure. One wanted not simply to hang about a little, but really to +live back, as surely one might, have done by staying on, into the so +romantically strong, if mechanically weak, Italy of the associations of +one’s youth. It was a pang to have to revert to the present even in the +form of Lucca--which says everything. + + +III + + +If undeveloped communications were to become enough for me at those +retrospective moments, I might have felt myself supplied to my taste, +let me go on to say, at the hour of my making, with great resolution, +an attempt on high-seated and quite grandly out-of-the-way Volterra: +a reminiscence associated with quite a different year and, I should +perhaps sooner have bethought myself, with my fond experience of +Pisa--inasmuch as it was during a pause under that bland and motionless +wing that I seem to have had to organise in the darkness of a summer +dawn my approach to the old Etruscan stronghold. The railway then +existed, but I rose in the dim small hours to take my train; moreover, +so far as that might too much savour of an incongruous facility, +the fault was in due course quite adequately repaired by an apparent +repudiation of any awareness of such false notes on the part of the +town. I may not invite the reader to penetrate with me by so much as a +step the boundless backward reach of history to which the more massive +of the Etruscan gates of Volterra, the Porta all’ Arco, forms the +solidest of thresholds; since I perforce take no step myself, and am +even exceptionally condemned here to impressionism unashamed. My errand +was to spend a Sunday with an Italian friend, a native in fact of the +place, master of a house there in which he offered me hospitality; who, +also arriving from Florence the night before, had obligingly come on +with me from Pisa, and whose consciousness of a due urbanity, already +rather overstrained, and still well before noon, by the accumulation +of our matutinal vicissitudes and other grounds for patience, met +all ruefully at the station the supreme shock of an apparently great +desolate world of volcanic hills, of blank, though “engineered,” + undulations, as the emergence of a road testified, unmitigated by the +smallest sign of a wheeled vehicle. The station, in other words, looked +out at that time (and I daresay the case hasn’t strikingly altered) on a +mere bare huge hill-country, by some remote mighty shoulder of which +the goal of our pilgrimage, so questionably “served” by the railway, was +hidden from view. Served as well by a belated omnibus, a four-in-hand of +lame and lamentable quality, the place, I hasten to add, eventually +put forth some show of being; after a complete practical recognition of +which, let me at once further mention, all the other, the positive and +sublime, connections of Volterra established themselves for me without +my lifting a finger. + +The small shrunken, but still lordly prehistoric city is perched, when +once you have rather painfully zigzagged to within sight of it, very +much as an eagle’s eyrie, oversweeping the land and the sea; and to +that type of position, the ideal of the airy peak of vantage, with all +accessories and minor features a drop, a slide and a giddiness, its +individual items and elements strike you at first as instinctively +conforming. This impression was doubtless after a little modified for +me; there were levels, there were small stony practicable streets, there +were walks and strolls, outside the gates and roundabout the cyclopean +wall, to the far end of downward-tending protrusions and promontories, +natural buttresses and pleasant terrene headlands, friendly suburban +spots (one would call them if the word had less detestable references) +where games of bowls and overtrellised wine-tables could put in their +note; in spite of which however my friend’s little house of hospitality, +clean and charming and oh, so immemorially Tuscan, was as perpendicular +and ladder-like as so compact a residence could be; it kept up for me +beautifully--as regards posture and air, though humanly and socially +it rather cooed like a dovecote--the illusion of the vertiginously +“balanced” eagle’s nest. The air, in truth, all the rest of that +splendid day, must have been the key to the promptly-produced intensity +of one’s relation to every aspect of the charming episode; the light, +cool, keen air of those delightful high places, in Italy, that tonically +correct the ardours of July, and which at our actual altitude could but +affect me as the very breath of the grand local legend. I might have +“had” the little house, our particular eagle’s nest, for the summer, +and even on such touching terms; and I well remember the force of the +temptation to take it, if only other complications had permitted; to +spend the series of weeks with that admirable _interesting_ freshness +in my lungs: interesting, I especially note, as the strong appropriate +medium in which a continuity with the irrecoverable but still effective +past had been so robustly preserved. I couldn’t yield, alas, to the +conceived felicity, which had half-a-dozen appealing aspects; I could +only, while thus feeling how the atmospheric medium itself made for a +positively initiative exhilaration, enjoy my illusion till the morrow. +The exhilaration therefore supplies to memory the whole light in which, +for the too brief time, I went about “seeing” Volterra; so that my +glance at the seated splendour reduces itself, as I have said, to +the merest impressionism; nothing more was to be looked for, on the +stretched surface of consciousness, from one breezy wash of the brush. +I find there the clean strong image simplified to the three or four +unforgettable particulars of the vast rake of the view; with the +Maremma, of evil fame, more or less immediately below, but with those +islands of the sea, Corsica and Elba, the names of which are sharply +associational beyond any others, dressing the far horizon in the grand +manner, and the Ligurian coast-line melting northward into beauty and +history galore; with colossal uncemented blocks of Etruscan gates and +walls plunging you--and by their very interest--into a sweet surrender +of any privilege of appreciation more crushing than your general +synthetic stare; and with the rich and perfectly arranged museum, an +unsurpassed exhibition of monumental treasure from Etruscan tombs, +funereal urns mainly, reliquaries of an infinite power to move and charm +us still, contributing to this same so designed, but somehow at the same +time so inspired, collapse of the historic imagination under too heavy a +pressure, or abeyance of “private judgment” in too unequal a relation. + + +IV + + +I remember recovering private judgment indeed in the course of two or +three days following the excursion I have just noted; which must have +shaped themselves in some sort of consonance with the idea that as we +were hereabouts in the very middle of dim Etruria a common self-respect +prescribed our somehow profiting by the fact. This kindled in us the +spirit of exploration, but with results of which I here attempt to +record, so utterly does the whole impression swoon away, for present +memory, into vagueness, confusion and intolerable heat, Our self-respect +was of the common order, but the blaze of the July sun was, even for +Tuscany, of the uncommon; so that the project of a trudging quest for +Etruscan tombs in shadeless wastes yielded to its own temerity. +There comes back to me nevertheless at the same time, from the mild +misadventure, and quite as through this positive humility of failure, +the sense of a supremely intimate revelation of Italy in undress, so +to speak (the state, it seemed, in which one would most fondly, most +ideally, enjoy her); Italy no longer in winter starch and sobriety, with +winter manners and winter prices and winter excuses, all addressed to +the _forestieri_ and the philistines; but lolling at her length, with +her graces all relaxed, and thereby only the more natural; the brilliant +performer, in short, _en famille_, the curtain down and her salary +stopped for the season--thanks to which she is by so much more the easy +genius and the good creature as she is by so much less the advertised +_prima donna_. She received us nowhere more sympathetically, that is +with less ceremony or self-consciousness, I seem to recall, than at +Montepulciano, for instance--where it was indeed that the recovery of +private judgment I just referred to couldn’t help taking place. What we +were doing, or what we expected to do, at Montepulciano I keep no other +trace of than is bound up in a present quite tender consciousness that I +wouldn’t for the world not have been there. I think my reason must have +been largely just in the beauty of the name (for could any beauty be +greater?), reinforced no doubt by the fame of the local vintage and the +sense of how we should quaff it on the spot. Perhaps we quaffed it too +constantly; since the romantic picture reduces itself for me but to two +definite appearances; that of the more priggish discrimination so far +reasserting itself as to advise me that Montepulciano was dirty, even +remarkably dirty; and that of her being not much else besides but +perched and brown and queer and crooked, and noble withal (which is what +almost any Tuscan city more easily than not acquits herself of; all the +while she may on such occasions figure, when one looks off from her to +the end of dark street-vistas or catches glimpses through high arcades, +some big battered, blistered, overladen, overmasted ship, swimming in a +violet sea). + +If I have lost the sense of what we were doing, that could at all suffer +commemoration, at Montepulciano, so I sit helpless before the memory +of small stewing Torrita, which we must somehow have expected to yield, +under our confidence, a view of shy charms, but which did n’t yield, to +my recollection, even anything that could fairly be called a breakfast +or a dinner. There may have been in the neighbourhood a rumour +of Etruscan tombs; the neighbourhood, however, was vast, and that +possibility not to be verified, in the conditions, save after due +refreshment. Then it was, doubtless, that the question of refreshment so +beckoned us, by a direct appeal, straight across country, from Perugia, +that, casting consistency, if not to the winds, since alas there were +none, but to the lifeless air, we made the sweltering best of our way +(and it took, for the distance, a terrible time) to the Grand Hotel of +that city. This course shines for me, in the retrospect, with a light +even more shameless than that in which my rueful conscience then saw it; +since we thus exchanged again, at a stroke, the tousled _bonne fille_ of +our vacational Tuscany for the formal and figged-out presence of Italy +on her good behaviour. We had never seen her conform more to all the +proprieties, we felt, than under this aspect of lavish hospitality to +that now apparently quite inveterate swarm of pampered _forestieri_, +English and Americans in especial, who, having had Roman palaces and +villas deliciously to linger in, break the northward journey, when once +they decide to take it, in the Umbrian paradise. They were, goodness +knows, within their rights, and we profited, as anyone may easily and +cannily profit at that time, by the sophistications paraded for them; +only I feel, as I pleasantly recover it all, that though we had arrived +perhaps at the most poetical of watering-places we had lost our finer +clue. (The difference from other days was immense, all the span of +evolution from the ancient malodorous inn which somehow did n’t matter, +to that new type of polyglot caravanserai which everywhere insists on +mattering--mattering, even in places where other interests abound, so +much more than anything else.) That clue, the finer as I say, I would +fain at any rate to-day pick up for its close attachment to another +Tuscan city or two--for a felt pull from strange little San Gimignano +delle belle Torre in especial; by which I mean from the memory of a +summer Sunday spent there during a stay at Siena. But I have already +superabounded, for mere love of my general present rubric--the real +thickness of experience having a good deal evaporated, so that the Tiny +Town of the Many Towers hangs before me, not to say, rather, far +behind me, after the manner of an object directly meeting the wrong or +diminishing lens of one’s telescope. + +It did everything, on the occasion of that pilgrimage, that it was +expected to do, presenting itself more or less in the guise of some rare +silvery shell, washed up by the sea of time, cracked and battered and +dishonoured, with its mutilated marks of adjustment to the extinct +type of creature it once harboured figuring against the sky as maimed +gesticulating arms flourished in protest against fate. If the centuries, +however, had pretty well cleaned out, vulgarly speaking, this amazing +little fortress-town, it wasn’t that a mere aching void was bequeathed +us, I recognise as I consult a somewhat faded impression; the whole +scene and occasion come back to me as the exhibition, on the contrary, +of a stage rather crowded and agitated, of no small quantity of sound +and fury, of concussions, discussions, vociferations, hurryings to and +fro, that could scarce have reached a higher pitch in the old days of +the siege and the sortie. San Gimignano affected me, to a certainty, +as not dead, I mean, but as inspired with that strange and slightly +sinister new life that is now, in case after case, up and down the +peninsula, and even in presence of the dryest and most scattered bones, +producing the miracle of resurrection. The effect is often--and I find +it strikingly involved in this particular reminiscence--that of the +buried hero himself positively waking up to show you his bones for a +fee, and almost capering about in his appeal to your attention. What +has become of the soul of San Gimignano who shall say?--but, of a genial +modern Sunday, it is as if the heroic skeleton, risen from the dust, +were in high activity, officious for your entertainment and your +detention, clattering and changing plates at the informal friendly inn, +personally conducting you to a sight of the admirable Santa Fina of +Ghirlandaio, as I believe is supposed, in a dim chapel of the Collegiata +church; the poor young saint, on her low bed, in a state of ecstatic +vision (the angelic apparition is given), acconpanied by a few figures +and accessories of the most beautiful and touching truth. This image +is what has most vividly remained with me, of the day I thus so +ineffectually recover; the precious ill-set gem or domestic treasure of +Santa Fina, and then the wonderful drive, at eventide, back to Siena: +the progress through the darkening land that was like a dense fragrant +garden, all fireflies and warm emanations and dimly-seen motionless +festoons, extravagant vines and elegant branches intertwisted for miles, +with couples and companies of young countryfolk almost as fondly united +and raising their voices to the night as if superfluously to sing out at +you that they were happy, and above all were Tuscan. On reflection, and +to be just, I connect the slightly incongruous loudness that hung about +me under the Beautiful Towers with the really too coarse competition for +my favour among the young vetturini who lay in wait for my approach, +and with an eye to my subsequent departure, on my quitting, at some +unremembered spot, the morning train from Siena, from which point there +was then still a drive. That onset was of a fine mediaeval violence, but +the subsiding echoes of it alone must have afterwards borne me company; +mingled, at the worst, with certain reverberations of the animated +rather than concentrated presence of sundry young sketchers and copyists +of my own nationality, which element in the picture conveyed beyond +anything else how thoroughly it was all to sit again henceforth in the +eye of day. My final vision perhaps was of a sacred reliquary not so +much rudely as familiarly and “humorously” torn open. The note had, with +all its references, its own interest; but I never went again. + +{Illustration: TOWERS OF SAN GIMIGNANO.} + + + + + +RAVENNA + + +I write these lines on a cold Swiss mountain-top, shut in by an intense +white mist from any glimpse of the underworld of lovely Italy; but as +I jotted down the other day in the ancient capital of Honorius and +Theodoric the few notes of which they are composed, I let the original +date stand for local colour’s sake. Its mere look, as I transcribe it, +emits a grateful glow in the midst of the Alpine rawness, and gives a +depressed imagination something tangible to grasp while awaiting the +return of fine weather. For Ravenna was glowing, less than a week since, +as I edged along the narrow strip of shadow binding one side of the +empty, white streets. After a long, chill spring the summer this year +descended upon Italy with a sudden jump and an ominous hot breath. I +stole away from Florence in the night, and even on top of the Apennines, +under the dull starlight and in the rushing train, one could but sit and +pant perspiringly. + +At Bologna I found a festa, or rather two festas, a civil and a +religious, going on in mutual mistrust and disparagement. The civil, +that of the Statuto, was the one fully national Italian holiday as by +law established--the day that signalises everywhere over the land at +once its achieved and hard-won unification; the religious was a jubilee +of certain local churches. The latter is observed by the Bolognese +parishes in couples, and comes round for each couple but once in ten +years--an arrangement by which the faithful at large insure themselves +a liberal recurrence of expensive processions. It was n’t my business +to distinguish the sheep from the goats, the pious from the profane, the +prayers from the scoffers; it was enough that, melting together under +the scorching sun, they filled the admirably solid city with a flood +of spectacular life. The combination at one point was really dramatic. +While a long procession of priests and young virgins in white veils, +bearing tapers, marshalled itself in one of the streets, a review of +the King’s troops went forward outside the town. On its return a large +detachment of cavalry passed across the space where the incense was +burning, the pictured banners swaying and the litany being droned, and +checked the advance of the little ecclesiastical troop. The long vista +of the street, between the porticoes, was festooned with garlands and +scarlet and tinsel; the robes and crosses and canopies of the priests, +the clouds of perfumed smoke and the white veils of the maidens, were +resolved by the hot bright air into a gorgeous medley of colour, across +which the mounted soldiers rattled and flashed as if it had been a +conquering army trampling on an embassy of propitiation. It was, to tell +the truth, the first time an’ Italian festa had really exhibited to my +eyes the genial glow and the romantic particulars promised by song and +story; and I confess that those eyes found more pleasure in it than they +were to find an hour later in the picturesque on canvas as one observes +it in the Pinacoteca. I found myself scowling most unmercifully at Guido +and Domenichino. + +For Ravenna, however, I had nothing but smiles--grave, reflective, +philosophic smiles, I hasten to add, such as accord with the historic +dignity, not to say the mortal sunny sadness, of the place. I arrived +there in the evening, before, even at drowsy Ravenna, the festa of the +Statuto had altogether put itself to bed. I immediately strolled forth +from the inn, and found it sitting up a while longer on the piazza, +chiefly at the cafe door, listening to the band of the garrison by the +light of a dozen or so of feeble tapers, fastened along the front of +the palace of the Government. Before long, however, it had dispersed and +departed, and I was left alone with the grey illumination and with an +affable citizen whose testimony as to the manners and customs of +Ravenna I had aspired to obtain. I had, borrowing confidence from prompt +observation, suggested deferentially that it was n’t the liveliest place +in the world, and my friend admitted that it was in fact not a seat of +ardent life. But had I seen the Corso? Without seeing the Corso one did +n’t exhaust the possibilities. The Corso of Ravenna, of a hot summer +night, had an air of surprising seclusion and repose. Here and there in +an upper closed window glimmered a light; my companion’s footsteps +and my own were the only sounds; not a creature was within sight. The +suffocating air helped me to believe for a moment that I walked in the +Italy of Boccaccio, hand-in-hand with the plague, through a city which +had lost half its population by pestilence and the other half by flight. +I turned back into my inn profoundly satisfied. This at last was the +old-world dulness of a prime distillation; this at last was antiquity, +history, repose. + +The impression was largely confirmed and enriched on the following day; +but it was obliged at an early stage of my visit to give precedence to +another--the lively perception, namely, of the thinness of my saturation +with Gibbon and the other sources of legend. At Ravenna the waiter at +the café and the coachman who drives you to the Pine-Forest allude to +Galla Placidia and Justinian as to any attractive topic of the hour; +wherever you turn you encounter some fond appeal to your historic +presence of mind. For myself I could only attune my spirit vaguely to +so ponderous a challenge, could only feel I was breathing an air of +prodigious records and relics. I conned my guide-book and looked up +at the great mosaics, and then fumbled at poor Murray again for some +intenser light on the court of Justinian; but I can imagine that to +a visitor more intimate with the originals of the various great +almond-eyed mosaic portraits in the vaults of the churches these +extremely curious works of art may have a really formidable interest. I +found in the place at large, by daylight, the look of a vast straggling +depopulated village. The streets with hardly an exception are +grass-grown, and though I walked about all day I failed to encounter a +single wheeled vehicle. I remember no shop but the little establishment +of an urbane photographer, whose views of the Pineta, the great +legendary pine-forest just without the town, gave me an irresistible +desire to seek that refuge. There was no architecture to speak of; and +though there are a great many large domiciles with aristocratic names +they stand cracking and baking in the sun in no very comfortable +fashion. The houses have for the most part an all but rustic rudeness; +they are low and featureless and shabby, as well as interspersed +with high garden walls over which the long arms of tangled vines +hang motionless into the stagnant streets. Here and there in all this +dreariness, in some particularly silent and grassy corner, rises an old +brick church with a front more or less spoiled, by cheap modernisation, +and a strange cylindrical campanile pierced with small arched windows +and extremely suggestive of the fifth century. These churches constitute +the palpable interest of Ravenna, and their own principal interest, +after thirteen centuries of well-intentioned spoliation, resides +in their unequalled collection of early Christian mosaics. It is an +interest simple, as who should say, almost to harshness, and leads one’s +attention along a straight and narrow way. There are older churches in +Rome, and churches which, looked at as museums, are more variously and +richly informing; but in Rome you stumble at every step on some curious +pagan memorial, often beautiful enough to make your thoughts wander far +from the strange stiff primitive Christian forms. + +Ravenna, on the other hand, began with the Church, and all her monuments +and relics are harmoniously rigid. By the middle of the first century +she possessed an exemplary saint, Apollinaris, a disciple of Peter, to +whom her two finest places of worship are dedicated. It was to one of +these, jocosely entitled the “new,” that I first directed my steps. +I lingered outside a while and looked at the great red, barrel-shaped +bell-towers, so rusty, so crumbling, so archaic, and yet so resolute to +ring in another century or two, and then went in to the coolness, the +shining marble columns, the queer old sculptured slabs and sarcophagi +and the long mosaics that scintillated, under the roof, along the wall +of the nave. San Apollinare Nuovo, like most of its companions, is a +magazine of early Christian odds and ends; fragments of yellow marble +incrusted with quaint sculptured emblems of primitive dogma; great rough +troughs, containing the bones of old bishops; episcopal chairs with the +marble worn narrow by centuries of pressure from the solid episcopal +person; slabs from the fronts of old pulpits, covered with carven +hierogylphics of an almost Egyptian abstruseness--lambs and stags and +fishes and beasts of theological affinities even less apparent. Upon all +these strange things the strange figures in the great mosaic panorama +look down, with coloured cheeks and staring eyes, lifelike enough to +speak to you and answer your wonderment and tell you in bad Latin of +the decadence that it was in such and such a fashion they believed and +worshipped. First, on each side, near the door, are houses and ships and +various old landmarks of Ravenna; then begins a long procession, on +one side, of twenty-two white-robed virgins and three obsequious magi, +terminating in a throne bearing the Madonna and Child, surrounded +by four angels; on the other side, of an equal number of male saints +(twenty-five, that is) holding crowns in their hands and leading to a +Saviour enthroned between angels of singular expressiveness. What it +is these long slim seraphs express I cannot quite say, but they have an +odd, knowing, sidelong look out of the narrow ovals of their eyes which, +though not without sweetness, would certainly make me murmur a defensive +prayer or so were I to find myself alone in the church towards dusk. +All this work is of the latter part of the sixth century and brilliantly +preserved. The gold backgrounds twinkle as if they had been inserted +yesterday, and here and there a figure is executed almost too much in +the modern manner to be interesting; for the charm of mosaic work is, +to my sense, confined altogether to the infancy of the art. The great +Christ, in the series of which I speak, is quite an elaborate picture, +and yet he retains enough of the orthodox stiffness to make him +impressive in the simpler, elder sense. He is clad in a purple robe, +even as an emperor, his hair and beard are artfully curled, his eyebrows +arched, his complexion brilliant, his whole aspect such a one as the +popular mind may have attributed to Honorius or Valentinian. It is all +very Byzantine, and yet I found in it much of that interest which is +inseparable, to a facile imagination, from all early representations of +our Lord. Practically they are no more authentic than the more or less +plausible inventions of Ary Scheffer and Holman Hunt; in spite of which +they borrow a certain value, factitious perhaps but irresistible, from +the mere fact that they are twelve or thirteen centuries less distant +from the original. It is something that this was the way the people in +the sixth century imagined Jesus to have looked; the image has suffered +by so many the fewer accretions. The great purple-robed monarch on the +wall of Ravenna is at least a very potent and positive Christ, and the +only objection I have to make to him is that though in this character he +must have had a full apportionment of divine foreknowledge he betrays no +apprehension of Dr. Channing and M. Renan. If one’s preference lies, for +distinctness’ sake, between the old plainness and the modern fantasy, +one must admit that the plainness has here a very grand outline. + +{Illustration: SANT APOLLINAR NUOVO, RAVENNA.} + +I spent the rest of the morning in charmed transition between the hot +yellow streets and the cool grey interiors of the churches. The +greyness everywhere was lighted up by the scintillation, on vault and +entablature, of mosaics more or less archaic, but always brilliant and +elaborate, and everywhere too by the same deep amaze of the fact that, +while centuries had worn themselves away and empires risen and fallen, +these little cubes of coloured glass had stuck in their allotted places +and kept their freshness. I have no space for a list of the various +shrines so distinguished, and, to tell the truth, my memory of them has +already become a very generalised and undiscriminated record. The total +aspect of the place, its sepulchral stillness, its absorbing perfume +of evanescence and decay and mortality, confounds the distinctions +and blurs the details. The Cathedral, which is vast and high, has +been excessively modernised, and was being still more so by a lavish +application of tinsel and cotton-velvet in preparation for the centenary +feast of St. Apollinaris, which befalls next month. Things on this +occasion are to be done handsomely, and a fair Ravennese informed me +that a single family had contributed three thousand francs towards a +month’s vesper-music. It seemed to me hereupon that I should like in +the August twilight to wander into the quiet nave of San Apollinare, +and look up at the great mosaics through the resonance of some fine +chanting. I remember distinctly enough, however, the tall +basilica of San Vitale, of octagonal shape, like an exchange or +custom-house--modelled, I believe, upon St. Sophia at Constantinople. +It has a great span of height and a great solemnity, as well as a choir +densely pictured over on arch and apse with mosaics of the time of +Justinian. These are regular pictures, full of movement, gesture and +perspective, and just enough sobered in hue by time to bring home their +remoteness. In the middle of the church, under the great dome, sat an +artist whom I envied, making at an effective angle a study of the choir +and its broken lights, its decorated altar and its incrusted twinkling +walls. The picture, when finished, will hang, I suppose, on the library +wall of some person of taste; but even if it is much better than is +probable--I did n’t look at it--all his taste won’t tell the owner, +unless he has been there, in just what a soundless, mouldering, +out-of-the-way corner of old Italy it was painted. An even better place +for an artist fond of dusky architectural nooks, except that here the +dusk is excessive and he would hardly be able to tell his green from +his red, is the extraordinary little church of the Santi Nazaro e Celso, +otherwise known as the mausoleum of Galla Placidia. This is perhaps on +the whole the spot in Ravenna where the impression is of most sovereign +authority and most thrilling force. It consists of a narrow low-browed +cave, shaped like a Latin cross, every inch of which except the floor +is covered with dense symbolic mosaics. Before you and on each side, +through the thick brown light, loom three enormous barbaric sarcophagi, +containing the remains of potentates of the Lower Empire. It is as if +history had burrowed under ground to escape from research and you +had fairly run it to earth. On the right lie the ashes of the Emperor +Honorius, and in the middle those of his sister, Galla Placidia, a lady +who, I believe, had great adventures. On the other side rest the bones +of Constantius III. The place might be a small natural grotto lined with +glimmering mineral substances, and there is something quite tremendous +in being shut up so closely with these three imperial ghosts. The shadow +of the great Roman name broods upon the huge sepulchres and abides for +ever within the narrow walls. + +But still other memories hang about than those of primitive bishops and +degenerate emperors. Byron lived here and Dante died here, and the tomb +of the one poet and the dwelling of the other are among the advertised +appeals. The grave of Dante, it must be said, is anything but Dantesque, +and the whole precinct is disposed with that odd vulgarity of taste +which distinguishes most modern Italian tributes to greatness. The +author of _The Divine Comedy_ commemorated in stucco, even in a +slumbering corner of Ravenna, is not “sympathetic.” Fortunately of all +poets he least needs a monument, as he was pre-eminently an architect in +diction and built himself his temple of fame in verses more solid +than Cyclopean blocks. If Dante’s tomb is not Dantesque, so neither is +Byron’s house Byronic, being a homely, shabby, two-storied dwelling, +directly on the street, with as little as possible of isolation and +mystery. In Byron’s time it was an inn, and it is rather a curious +reflection that “Cain” and the “Vision of Judgment” should have been +written at an hotel. The fact supplies a commanding precedent for +self-abstraction to tourists at once sentimental and literary. I must +declare indeed that my acquaintance with Ravenna considerably increased +my esteem for Byron and helped to renew my faith in the sincerity of +his inspiration. A man so much _de son temps_ as the author of the +above-named and other pieces can have spent two long years in this +stagnant city only by the help of taking a great deal of disinterested +pleasure in his own genius. He had indeed a notable pastime--the various +churches are adorned with monuments of ancestral Guicciolis--but it is +none the less obvious that Ravenna, fifty years ago, would have been an +intolerably dull residence to a foreigner of distinction unequipped with +intellectual resources. The hour one spends with Byron’s memory then +is almost compassionate. After all, one says to one’s self as one turns +away from the grandiloquent little slab in front of his house and looks +down the deadly provincial vista of the empty, sunny street, the author +of so many superb stanzas asked less from the world than he gave it. One +of his diversions was to ride in the Pineta, which, beginning a couple +of miles from the city, extends some twenty-five miles along the sands +of the Adriatic. I drove out to it for Byron’s sake, and Dante’s, and +Boccaccio’s, all of whom have interwoven it with their fictions, and for +that of a possible whiff of coolness from the sea. Between the city and +the forest, in the midst of malarious rice-swamps, stands the finest of +the Ravennese churches, the stately temple of San Apollinare in Classe. +The Emperor Augustus constructed hereabouts a harbour for fleets, which +the ages have choked up, and which survives only in the title of this +ancient church. Its extreme loneliness makes it doubly impressive. They +opened the great doors for me, and let a shaft of heated air go wander +up the beautiful nave between the twenty-four lustrous, pearly columns +of cipollino marble, and mount the wide staircase of the choir and spend +itself beneath the mosaics of the vault. I passed a memorable half-hour +sitting in this wave of tempered light, looking down the cool grey +avenue of the nave, out of the open door, at the vivid green swamps, and +listening to the melancholy stillness. I rambled for an hour in the Wood +of Associations, between the tall smooth, silvery stems of the pines, +and beside a creek which led me to the outer edge of the wood and a +view of white sails, gleaming and gliding behind the sand-hills. It +was infinitely, it was nobly “quaint,” but, as the trees stand at wide +intervals and bear far aloft in the blue air but a little parasol of +foliage, I suppose that, of a glaring summer day, the forest itself +was only the more characteristic of its clime and country for being +perfectly shadeless. + +{Illustration: RAVENNA PINETA.} + +1873. + + + + + +THE SAINT’S AFTERNOON AND OTHERS + + +Before and above all was the sense that, with the narrow limits of past +adventure, I had never yet had such an impression of what the summer +could be in the south or the south in the summer; but I promptly found +it, for the occasion, a good fortune that my terms of comparison were +restricted. It was really something, at a time when the stride of the +traveller had become as long as it was easy, when the seven-league boots +positively hung, for frequent use, in the closet of the most sedentary, +to have kept one’s self so innocent of strange horizons that the Bay of +Naples in June might still seem quite final. That picture struck me--a +particular corner of it at least, and for many reasons--as the last +word; and it is this last word that comes back to me, after a short +interval, in a green, grey northern nook, and offers me again its warm, +bright golden meaning before it also inevitably catches the chill. Too +precious, surely, for us not to suffer it to help us as it may is the +faculty of putting together again in an order the sharp minutes and +hours that the wave of time has been as ready to pass over as the salt +sea to wipe out the letters and words your stick has traced in the sand. +Let me, at any rate, recover a sufficient number of such signs to make a +sort of sense. + + +I + + +Far aloft on the great rock was pitched, as the first note, and indeed +the highest, of the wondrous concert, the amazing creation of the friend +who had offered me hospitality, and whom, more almost than I had ever +envied anyone anything, I envied the privilege of being able to reward +a heated, artless pilgrim with a revelation of effects so incalculable. +There was none but the loosest prefigurement as the creaking and puffing +little boat, which had conveyed me only from Sorrento, drew closer +beneath the prodigious island--beautiful, horrible and haunted--that +does most, of all the happy elements and accidents, towards making +the Bay of Naples, for the study of composition, a lesson in the grand +style. There was only, above and below, through the blue of the air and +sea, a great confused shining of hot cliffs and crags and buttresses, +a loss, from nearness, of the splendid couchant outline and the more +comprehensive mass, and an opportunity--oh, not lost, I assure you--to +sit and meditate, even moralise, on the empty deck, while a happy +brotherhood of American and German tourists, including, of course, many +sisters, scrambled down into little waiting, rocking tubs and, after a +few strokes, popped systematically into the small orifice of the Blue +Grotto. There was an appreciable moment when they were all lost to view +in that receptacle, the daily “psychological” moment during which it +must so often befall the recalcitrant observer on the deserted deck to +find himself aware of how delightful it might be if none of them +should come out again. The charm, the fascination of the idea is not a +little--though also not wholly--in the fact that, as the wave rises +over the aperture, there is the most encouraging appearance that they +perfectly may not. There it is. There is no more of them. It is a case +to which nature has, by the neatest stroke and with the best taste in +the world, just quietly attended. + +Beautiful, horrible, haunted: that is the essence of what, about itself, +Capri says to you--dip again into your Tacitus and see why; and yet, +while you roast a little under the awning and in the vaster shadow, it +is not because the trail of Tiberius is ineffaceable that you are most +uneasy. The trail of Germanicus in Italy to-day ramifies further and +bites perhaps even deeper; a proof of which is, precisely, that his +eclipse in the Blue Grotto is inexorably brief, that here he is popping +out again, bobbing enthusiastically back and scrambling triumphantly +back. The spirit, in truth, of his effective appropriation of Capri has +a broad-faced candour against which there is no standing up, supremely +expressive as it is of the well-known “love that kills,” of Germanicus’s +fatal susceptibility. If I were to let myself, however, incline to +_that_ aspect of the serious case of Capri I should embark on strange +depths. The straightness and simplicity, the classic, synthetic +directness of the German passion for Italy, make this passion probably +the sentiment in the world that is in the act of supplying enjoyment in +the largest, sweetest mouthfuls; and there is something unsurpassably +marked in the way that on this irresistible shore it has seated itself +to ruminate and digest. It keeps the record in its own loud accents; it +breaks out in the folds of the hills and on the crests of the crags into +every manner of symptom and warning. Huge advertisements and portents +stare across the bay; the acclivities bristle with breweries and +“restorations” and with great ugly Gothic names. I hasten, of course, to +add that some such general consciousness as this may well oppress, under +any sky, at the century’s end, the brooding tourist who makes himself a +prey by staying anywhere, when the gong sounds, “behind.” It is behind, +in the track and the reaction, that he least makes out the end of it +all, perceives that to visit anyone’s country for anyone’s sake is more +and more to find some one quite other in possession. No one, least of +all the brooder himself, is in his own. + + +II + + +I certainly, at any rate, felt the force of this truth when, on scaling +the general rock with the eye of apprehension, I made out at a point +much nearer its summit than its base the gleam of a dizzily-perched +white sea-gazing front which I knew for my particular landmark and which +promised so much that it would have been welcome to keep even no +more than half. Let me instantly say that it kept still more than it +promised, and by no means least in the way of leaving far below it the +worst of the outbreak of restorations and breweries. There is a road at +present to the upper village, with which till recently communication was +all by rude steps cut in the rock and diminutive donkeys scrambling on +the flints; one of those fine flights of construction which the +great road-making “Latin races” take, wherever they prevail, without +advertisement or bombast; and even while I followed along the face of +the cliff its climbing consolidated ledge, I asked myself how I could +think so well of it without consistently thinking better still of +the temples of beer so obviously destined to enrich its terminus. The +perfect answer to that was of course that the brooding tourist is never +bound to be consistent. What happier law for him than this very one, +precisely, when on at last alighting, high up in the blue air, to +stare and gasp and almost disbelieve, he embraced little by little the +beautiful truth particularly, on this occasion, reserved for himself, +and took in the stupendous picture? For here above all had the thought +and the hand come from far away--even from _ultima Thule_, and yet were +in possession triumphant and acclaimed. Well, all one could say was that +the way they had felt their opportunity, the divine conditions of the +place, spoke of the advantage of some such intellectual perspective as a +remote original standpoint alone perhaps can give. If what had finally, +with infinite patience, passion, labour, taste, got itself done there, +was like some supreme reward of an old dream of Italy, something perfect +after long delays, was it not verily in _ultima Thule_ that the vow +would have been piously enough made and the germ tenderly enough +nursed? For a certain art of asking of Italy all she can give, you must +doubtless either be a rare _raffine_ or a rare genius, a sophisticated +Norseman or just a Gabriele d’ Annunzio. + +All she can give appeared to me, assuredly, for that day and the +following, gathered up and enrolled there: in the wondrous cluster and +dispersal of chambers, corners, courts, galleries, arbours, arcades, +long white ambulatories and vertiginous points of view. The greatest +charm of all perhaps was that, thanks to the particular conditions, she +seemed to abound, to overflow, in directions in which I had never yet +enjoyed the chance to find her so free. The indispensable thing was +therefore, in observation, in reflection, to press the opportunity hard, +to recognise that as the abundance was splendid, so, by the same stroke, +it was immensely suggestive. It dropped into one’s lap, naturally, at +the end of an hour or two, the little white flower of its formula: the +brooding tourist, in other words, could only continue to brood till he +had made out in a measure, as I may say, what was so wonderfully the +matter with him. He was simply then in the presence, more than ever yet, +of the possible poetry of the personal and social life of the south, and +the fun would depend much--as occasions are fleeting--on his arriving +in time, in the interest of that imagination which is his only field +of sport, at adequate new notations of it. The sense of all this, his +obscure and special fun in the general bravery, mixed, on the morrow, +with the long, human hum of the bright, hot day and filled up the golden +cup with questions and answers. The feast of St. Antony, the patron of +the upper town, was the one thing in the air, and of the private beauty +of the place, there on the narrow shelf, in the shining, shaded loggias +and above the blue gulfs, all comers were to be made free. + + +III + + +The church-feast of its saint is of course for Anacapri, as for any +self-respecting Italian town, the great day of the year, and the +smaller the small “country,” in native parlance, as well as the simpler, +accordingly, the life, the less the chance for leakage, on other +pretexts, of the stored wine of loyalty. This pure fluid, it was easy +to feel overnight, had not sensibly lowered its level; so that nothing +indeed, when the hour came, could well exceed the outpouring. All up and +down the Sorrentine promontory the early summer happens to be the time +of the saints, and I had just been witness there of a week on every day +of which one might have travelled, through kicked-up clouds and other +demonstrations, to a different hot holiday. There had been no bland +evening that, somewhere or other, in the hills or by the sea, the white +dust and the red glow didn’t rise to the dim stars. Dust, perspiration, +illumination, conversation--these were the regular elements. “They’re +very civilised,” a friend who knows them as well as they can be known +had said to me of the people in general; “plenty of fireworks and plenty +of talk--that’s all they ever want.” That they were “civilised”--on the +side on which they were most to show--was therefore to be the word of +the whole business, and nothing could have, in fact, had more interest +than the meaning that for the thirty-six hours I read into it. + +Seen from below and diminished by distance, Anacapri makes scarce a +sign, and the road that leads to it is not traceable over the rock; but +it sits at its ease on its high, wide table, of which it covers--and +with picturesque southern culture as well--as much as it finds +convenient. As much of it as possible was squeezed all the morning, for +St. Antony, into the piazzetta before the church, and as much more into +that edifice as the robust odour mainly prevailing there allowed room +for. It was the odour that was in prime occupation, and one could only +wonder how so many men, women and children could cram themselves into so +much smell. It was surely the smell, thick and resisting, that was least +successfully to be elbowed. Meanwhile the good saint, before he could +move into the air, had, among the tapers and the tinsel, the opera-music +and the pulpit poundings, bravely to snuff it up. The shade outside was +hot, and the sun was hot; but we waited as densely for him to come out, +or rather to come “on,” as the pit at the opera waits for the great +tenor. There were people from below and people from the mainland and +people from Pomerania and a brass band from Naples. There were other +figures at the end of longer strings--strings that, some of them indeed, +had pretty well given way and were now but little snippets trailing in +the dust. Oh, the queer sense of the good old Capri of artistic legend, +of which the name itself was, in the more benighted years--years of the +contadina and the pifferaro--a bright evocation! Oh, the echo, on the +spot, of each romantic tale! Oh, the loafing painters, so bad and so +happy, the conscious models, the vague personalities! The “beautiful +Capri girl” was of course not missed, though not perhaps so beautiful +as in her ancient glamour, which none the less didn’t at all exclude +the probable presence--with _his_ legendary light quite undimmed--of +the English lord in disguise who will at no distant date marry her. The +whole thing was there; one held it in one’s hand. + +The saint comes out at last, borne aloft in long procession and under a +high canopy: a rejoicing, staring, smiling saint, openly delighted +with the one happy hour in the year on which he may take his own walk. +Frocked and tonsured, but not at all macerated, he holds in his hand a +small wax puppet of an infant Jesus and shows him to all their friends, +to whom he nods and bows: to whom, in the dazzle of the sun he literally +seems to grin and wink, while his litter sways and his banners flap and +every one gaily greets him. The ribbons and draperies flutter, and the +white veils of the marching maidens, the music blares and the guns go +off and the chants resound, and it is all as holy and merry and noisy +as possible. The procession--down to the delightful little tinselled and +bare-bodied babies, miniature St. Antonys irrespective of sex, led or +carried by proud papas or brown grandsires--includes so much of the +population that you marvel there is such a muster to look on--like the +charades given in a family in which every one wants to act. But it +is all indeed in a manner one house, the little high-niched island +community, and nobody therefore, even in the presence of the head of it, +puts on an air of solemnity. Singular and suggestive before everything +else is the absence of any approach to our notion of the posture of +respect, and this among people whose manners in general struck one as so +good and, in particular, as so cultivated. The office of the saint--of +which the festa is but the annual reaffirmation--involves not the +faintest attribute of remoteness or mystery. + +While, with my friend, I waited for him, we went for coolness into the +second church of the place, a considerable and bedizened structure, +with the rare curiosity of a wondrous pictured pavement of majolica, +the garden of Eden done in large coloured tiles or squares, with every +beast, bird and river, and a brave _diminuendo_, in especial, from +portal to altar, of perspective, so that the animals and objects of the +foreground are big and those of the successive distances differ with +much propriety. Here in the sacred shade the old women were knitting, +gossipping, yawning, shuffling about; here the children were romping and +“larking”; here, in a manner, were the open parlour, the nursery, the +kindergarten and the _conversazione_ of the poor. This is everywhere the +case by the southern sea. I remember near Sorrento a wayside chapel that +seemed the scene of every function of domestic life, including cookery +and others. The odd thing is that it all appears to interfere so little +with that special civilised note--the note of manners--which is so +constantly touched. It is barbarous to expectorate in the temple of your +faith, but that doubtless is an extreme case. Is civilisation really +measured by the number of things people do respect? There would seem to +be much evidence against it. The oldest societies, the societies +with most traditions, are naturally not the least ironic, the least +_blasees_, and the African tribes who take so many things into account +that they fear to quit their huts at night are not the fine flower. + + +IV + + +Where, on the other hand, it was impossible not to feel to the full +all the charming _riguardi_--to use their own good word--in which our +friends _could_ abound, was, that afternoon, in the extraordinary temple +of art and hospitality that had been benignantly opened to me. Hither, +from three o’clock to seven, all the world, from the small in particular +to the smaller and the smallest, might freely flock, and here, from the +first hour to the last, the huge straw-bellied flasks of purple wine +were tilted for all the thirsty. They were many, the thirsty, they were +three hundred, they were unending; but the draughts they drank were +neither countable nor counted. This boon was dispensed in a long, +pillared portico, where everything was white and light save the blue +of the great bay as it played up from far below or as you took it in, +between shining columns, with your elbows on the parapet. Sorrento and +Vesuvius were over against you; Naples furthest off, melted, in the +middle of the picture, into shimmering vagueness and innocence; and the +long arm of Posilippo and the presence of the other islands, Procida, +the stricken Ischia, made themselves felt to the left. The grand air of +it all was in one’s very nostrils and seemed to come from sources too +numerous and too complex to name. It was antiquity in solution, with +every brown, mild figure, every note of the old speech, every tilt of +the great flask, every shadow cast by every classic fragment, adding +its touch to the impression. What was the secret of the surprising +amenity?--to the essence of which one got no nearer than simply by +feeling afresh the old story of the deep interfusion of the present with +the past. You had felt that often before, and all that could, at the +most, help you now was that, more than ever yet, the present appeared +to become again really classic, to sigh with strange elusive sounds of +Virgil and Theocritus. Heaven only knows how little they would in truth +have had to say to it, but we yield to these visions as we must, and +when the imagination fairly turns in its pain almost any soft name is +good enough to soothe it. + +It threw such difficulties but a step back to say that the secret of +the amenity was “style”; for what in the world was the secret of style, +which you might have followed up and down the abysmal old Italy for so +many a year only to be still vainly calling for it? Everything, at any +rate, that happy afternoon, in that place of poetry, was bathed and +blessed with it. The castle of Barbarossa had been on the height behind; +the villa of black Tiberius had overhung the immensity from the right; +the white arcades and the cool chambers offered to every step some sweet +old “piece” of the past, some rounded porphyry pillar supporting a bust, +some shaft of pale alabaster upholding a trellis, some mutilated marble +image, some bronze that had roughly resisted. Our host, if we came to +that, had the secret; but he could only express it in grand practical +ways. One of them was precisely this wonderful “afternoon tea,” in which +tea only--_that_, good as it is, has never the note of style--was not to +be found. The beauty and the poetry, at all events, were clear enough, +and the extraordinary uplifted distinction; but where, in all this, +it may be asked, was the element of “horror” that I have spoken of as +sensible?--what obsession that was not charming could find a place in +that splendid light, out of which the long summer squeezes every secret +and shadow? I’m afraid I’m driven to plead that these evils were exactly +in one’s imagination, a predestined victim always of the cruel, the +fatal historic sense. To make so much distinction, how much history had +been needed!--so that the whole air still throbbed and ached with it, +as with an accumulation of ghosts to whom the very climate was pitiless, +condemning them to blanch for ever in the general glare and grandeur, +offering them no dusky northern nook, no place at the friendly fireside, +no shelter of legend or song. + + +V + + +My friend had, among many original relics, in one of his white +galleries--and how he understood the effect and the “value” of +whiteness!--two or three reproductions of the finest bronzes of the +Naples museum, the work of a small band of brothers whom he had found +himself justified in trusting to deal with their problem honourably +and to bring forth something as different as possible from the usual +compromise of commerce. They had brought forth, in especial, for him, a +copy of the young resting, slightly-panting Mercury which it was a pure +delight to live with, and they had come over from Naples on St. Antony’s +eve, as they had done the year before, to report themselves to their +patron, to keep up good relations, to drink Capri wine and to join +in the tarantella. They arrived late, while we were at supper; they +received their welcome and their billet, and I am not sure it was not +the conversation and the beautiful manners of these obscure young men +that most fixed in my mind for the time the sense of the side of life +that, all around, was to come out strongest. It would be artless, +no doubt, to represent them as high types of innocence or even of +energy--at the same time that, weighing them against _some_ ruder folk +of our own race, we might perhaps have made bold to place their share +even of these qualities in the scale. It was an impression indeed never +infrequent in Italy, of which I might, in these days, first have felt +the force during a stay, just earlier, with a friend at Sorrento--a +friend who had good-naturedly “had in,” on his wondrous terrace, after +dinner, for the pleasure of the gaping alien, the usual local quartette, +violins, guitar and flute, the musical barber, the musical tailor, +sadler, joiner, humblest sons of the people and exponents of Neapolitan +song. Neapolitan song, as we know, has been blown well about the world, +and it is late in the day to arrive with a ravished ear for it. That, +however, was scarcely at all, for me, the question: the question, on the +Sorrento terrace, so high up in the cool Capri night, was of the present +outlook, in the world, for the races with whom it has been a tradition, +in intercourse, positively to please. + +The personal civilisation, for intercourse, of the musical barber and +tailor, of the pleasant young craftsmen of my other friend’s company, +was something that could be trusted to make the brooding tourist brood +afresh--to say more to him in fact, all the rest of the second occasion, +than everything else put together. The happy address, the charming +expression, the indistinctive discretion, the complete eclipse, in +short, of vulgarity and brutality--these things easily became among +these people the supremely suggestive note, begetting a hundred hopes +and fears as to the place that, with the present general turn of affairs +about the globe, is being kept for them. They are perhaps what the races +politically feeble have still most to contribute--but what appears to +be the happy prospect for the races politically feeble? And so the +afternoon waned, among the mellow marbles and the pleasant folk---the +purple wine flowed, the golden light faded, song and dance grew free and +circulation slightly embarrassed. But the great impression remained and +finally was exquisite. It was all purple wine, all art and song, and +nobody a grain the worse. It was fireworks and conversation--the former, +in the piazzetta, were to come later; it was civilisation and amenity. I +took in the greater picture, but I lost nothing else; and I talked with +the contadini about antique sculpture. No, nobody was a grain the worse; +and I had plenty to think of. So it was I was quickened to remember +that we others, we of my own country, as a race politically _not_ +weak, had--by what I had somewhere just heard--opened “three hundred +‘saloons’” at Manila. + + +VI + + +The “other” afternoons I here pass on to--and I may include in them, +for that matter, various mornings scarce less charmingly sacred to +memory--were occasions of another and a later year; a brief but all +felicitous impression of Naples itself, and of the approach to it from +Rome, as well as of the return to Rome by a different wonderful way, +which I feel I shall be wise never to attempt to “improve on.” Let +me muster assurance to confess that this comparatively recent and +superlatively rich reminiscence gives me for its first train of +ineffable images those of a motor-run that, beginning betimes of a +splendid June day, and seeing me, with my genial companions, blissfully +out of Porta San Paolo, hung over us thus its benediction till the +splendour had faded in the lamplit rest of the Chiaja. “We’ll go by the +mountains,” my friend, of the chariot of fire, had said, “and we’ll come +back, after three days, by the sea”; which handsome promise flowered +into such flawless performance that I could but feel it to have closed +and rounded for me, beyond any further rehandling, the long-drawn rather +indeed than thick-studded chaplet of my visitations of Naples--from the +first, seasoned with the highest sensibility of youth, forty years ago, +to this last the other day. I find myself noting with interest--and just +to be able to emphasise it is what inspires me with these remarks--that, +in spite of the milder and smoother and perhaps, pictorially speaking, +considerably emptier, Neapolitan face of things, things in general, +of our later time, I recognised in my final impression a grateful, +a beguiling serenity. The place is at the best wild and weird and +sinister, and yet seemed on this occasion to be seated more at her ease +in her immense natural dignity. My disposition to feel that, I hasten to +add, was doubtless my own secret; my three beautiful days, at any rate, +filled themselves with the splendid harmony, several of the minor notes +of which ask for a place, such as it may be, just here. + +Wondrously, it was a clean and cool and, as who should say, quiet +and amply interspaced Naples--in tune with itself, no harsh jangle of +_forestieri_ vulgarising the concert. I seemed in fact, under the blaze +of summer, the only stranger--though the blaze of summer itself was, +for that matter, everywhere but a higher pitch of light and colour and +tradition, and a lower pitch of everything else; even, it struck me, +of sound and fury. The appeal in short was genial, and, faring out to +Pompeii of a Sunday afternoon, I enjoyed there, for the only time I +can recall, the sweet chance of a late hour or two, the hour of +the lengthening shadows, absolutely alone. The impression remains +ineffaceable--it was to supersede half-a-dozen other mixed memories, the +sense that had remained with me, from far back, of a pilgrimage always +here beset with traps and shocks and vulgar importunities, achieved +under fatal discouragements. Even Pompeii, in fine, haunt of _all_ the +cockneys of creation, burned itself, in the warm still eventide, as +clear as glass, or as the glow of a pale topaz, and the particular +cockney who roamed without a plan and at his ease, but with his feet on +Roman slabs, his hands on Roman stones, his eyes on the Roman void, his +consciousness really at last of some good to him, could open himself +as never before to the fond luxurious fallacy of a close communion, a +direct revelation. With which there were other moments for him not less +the fruit of the slow unfolding of time; the clearest of these again +being those enjoyed on the terrace of a small island-villa--the island +a rock and the villa a wondrous little rock-garden, unless a better term +would be perhaps rock-salon, just off the extreme point of Posilippo +and where, thanks to a friendliest hospitality, he was to hang ecstatic, +through another sublime afternoon, on the wave of a magical wand. Here, +as happened, were charming wise, original people even down to delightful +amphibious American children, enamelled by the sun of the Bay as for +figures of miniature Tritons and Nereids on a Renaissance plaque; and +above all, on the part of the general prospect, a demonstration of the +grand style of composition and effect that one was never to wish to see +bettered. The way in which the Italian scene on such occasions as +this seems to purify itself to the transcendent and perfect _idea_ +alone--idea of beauty, of dignity, of comprehensive grace, with all +accidents merged, all defects disowned, all experience outlived, and +to gather itself up into the mere mute eloquence of what has just +incalculably _been_, remains for ever the secret and the lesson of the +subtlest daughter of History. All one could do, at the heart of +the overarching crystal, and in presence of the relegated City, +the far-trailing Mount, the grand Sorrentine headland, the islands +incomparably stationed and related, was to wonder what may well become +of the so many other elements of any poor human and social complexus, +what might become of any successfully working or only struggling and +floundering civilisation at all, when high Natural Elegance proceeds to +take such exclusive charge and recklessly assume, as it were, _all_ the +responsibilities. + + +VII + + +This indeed had been quite the thing I was asking myself all the +wondrous way down from Rome, and was to ask myself afresh, on the +return, largely within sight of the sea, as our earlier course had +kept to the ineffably romantic inland valleys, the great decorated blue +vistas in which the breasts of the mountains shine vaguely with strange +high-lying city and castle and church and convent, even as shoulders of +no diviner line might be hung about with dim old jewels. It was odd, +at the end of time, long after those initiations, of comparative youth, +that had then struck one as extending the very field itself of felt +charm, as exhausting the possibilities of fond surrender, it was odd +to have positively a new basis of enjoyment, a new gate of triumphant +passage, thrust into one’s consciousness and opening to one’s use; just +as I confess I have to brace myself a little to call by such fine names +our latest, our ugliest and most monstrous aid to motion. It is true of +the monster, as we have known him up to now, that one can neither quite +praise him nor quite blame him without a blush--he reflects so the +nature of the company he’s condemned to keep. His splendid easy power +addressed to noble aims makes him assuredly on occasion a purely +beneficent creature. I parenthesise at any rate that I know him in no +other light--counting out of course the acquaintance that consists of a +dismayed arrest in the road, with back flattened against wall or hedge, +for the dusty, smoky, stenchy shock of his passage. To no end is his +easy power more blest than to that of ministering to the ramifications, +as it were, of curiosity, or to that, in other words, of achieving for +us, among the kingdoms of the earth, the grander and more genial, the +comprehensive and _complete_ introduction. Much as was ever to be said +for our old forms of pilgrimage--and I am convinced that they are far +from wholly superseded--they left, they had to leave, dreadful gaps in +our yearning, dreadful lapses in our knowledge, dreadful failures in our +energy; there were always things off and beyond, goals of delight +and dreams of desire, that dropped as a matter of course into the +unattainable, and over to which our wonder-working agent now flings the +firm straight bridge. Curiosity has lost, under this amazing extension, +its salutary renouncements perhaps; contemplation has become one with +action and satisfaction one with desire--speaking always in the spirit +of the inordinate lover of an enlightened use of our eyes. That may +represent, for all I know, an insolence of advantage on which there will +be eventual heavy charges, as yet obscure and incalculable, to pay, and +I glance at the possibility only to avoid all thought of the lesson +of the long run, and to insist that I utter this dithyramb but in the +immediate flush and fever of the short. For such a beat of time as +our fine courteous and contemplative advance upon Naples, and for such +another as our retreat northward under the same fine law of observation +and homage, the bribed consciousness could only decline to question its +security. The sword of Damocles suspended over that presumption, the +skeleton at the banquet of extravagant ease, would have been that even +at our actual inordinate rate--leaving quite apart “improvements” to +come--such savings of trouble begin to use up the world; some hard +grain of difficulty being always a necessary part of the composition of +pleasure. The hard grain in our old comparatively pedestrian mixture, +before this business of our learning not so much even to fly (which +might indeed involve trouble) as to be mechanically and prodigiously +flown, quite another matter, was the element of uncertainty, effort +and patience; the handful of silver nails which, I admit, drove many an +impression home. The seated motorist misses the silver nails, I fully +acknowledge, save in so far as his aesthetic (let alone his moral) +conscience may supply him with some artful subjective substitute; in +which case the thing becomes a precious secret of his own. + +However, I wander wild--by which I mean I look too far ahead; my +intention having been only to let my sense of the merciless June beauty +of Naples Bay at the sunset hour and on the island terrace associate +itself with the whole inexpressible taste of our two motor-days’ feast +of scenery. That queer question of the exquisite grand manner as the +most emphasised _all_ of things--of what it may, seated so predominant +in nature, insidiously, through the centuries, let generations and +populations “in for,” hadn’t in the least waited for the special +emphasis I speak of to hang about me. I must have found myself more or +less consciously entertaining it by the way--since how couldn’t it be of +the very essence of the truth, constantly and intensely before us, that +Italy is really so much the most beautiful country in the world, taking +all things together, that others must stand off and be hushed while she +speaks? Seen thus in great comprehensive iridescent stretches, it is +the incomparable wrought _fusion_, fusion of human history and mortal +passion with the elements of earth and air, of colour, composition and +form, that constitutes her appeal and gives it the supreme heroic grace. +The chariot of fire favours fusion rather than promotes analysis, +and leaves much of that first June picture for me, doubtless, a great +accepted blur of violet and silver. The various hours and successive +aspects, the different strong passages of our reverse process, on +the other hand, still figure for me even as some series of sublime +landscape-frescoes--if the great Claude, say, had ever used that +medium--in the immense gallery of a palace; the homeward run by Capua, +Terracina, Gaeta and its storied headland fortress, across the deep, +strong, indescribable Pontine Marshes, white-cattled, strangely +pastoral, sleeping in the afternoon glow, yet stirred by the near +sea-breath. Thick somehow to the imagination as some full-bodied +sweetness of syrup is thick to the palate the atmosphere of that +region--thick with the sense of history and the very taste of time; as +if the haunt and home (which indeed it is) of some great fair bovine +aristocracy attended and guarded by halberdiers in the form of the +mounted and long-lanced herdsmen, admirably congruous with the whole +picture at every point, and never more so than in their manner of gaily +taking up, as with bell-voices of golden bronze, the offered wayside +greeting. + +{Illustration: TERRACINA} + +There had been this morning among the impressions of our first hour an +unforgettable specimen of that general type--the image of one of those +human figures on which our perception of the romantic so often pounces +in Italy as on the genius of the scene personified; with this advantage, +that as the scene there has, at its best, an unsurpassable distinction, +so the physiognomic representative, standing for it all, and with +an animation, a complexion, an expression, a fineness and fulness of +humanity that appear to have gathered it in and to sum it up, becomes +beautiful by the same simple process, very much, that makes the heir to +a great capitalist rich. Our early start, our roundabout descent from +Posilippo by shining Baire for avoidance of the city, had been an hour +of enchantment beyond any notation I can here recover; all lustre and +azure, yet all composition and classicism, the prospect developed and +spread, till after extraordinary upper reaches of radiance and horizons +of pearl we came at the turn of a descent upon a stalwart young +gamekeeper, or perhaps substantial young farmer, who, well-appointed and +blooming, had unslung his gun and, resting on it beside a hedge, just +lived for us, in the rare felicity of his whole look, during that +moment and while, in recognition, or almost, as we felt, in homage, we +instinctively checked our speed. He pointed, as it were, the lesson, +giving the supreme right accent or final exquisite turn to the immense +magnificent phrase; which from those moments on, and on and on, +resembled doubtless nothing so much as a page written, by a consummate +verbal economist and master of style, in the noblest of all tongues. Our +splendid human plant by the wayside had flowered thus into style--and +there wasn’t to be, all day, a lapse of eloquence, a wasted word or a +cadence missed. + +These things are personal memories, however, with the logic of certain +insistences of that sort often difficult to seize. Why should I have +kept so sacredly uneffaced, for instance, our small afternoon wait at +tea-time or, as we made it, coffee-time, in the little brown piazzetta +of Velletri, just short of the final push on through the flushed +Castelli Romani and the drop and home-stretch across the darkening +Campagna? We had been dropped into the very lap of the ancient civic +family, after the inveterate fashion of one’s sense of such stations in +small Italian towns. There was a narrow raised terrace, with steps, +in front of the best of the two or three local cafes, and in the soft +enclosed, the warm waning light of June various benign contemplative +worthies sat at disburdened tables and, while they smoked long black +weeds, enjoyed us under those probable workings of subtlety with +which we invest so many quite unimaginably blank (I dare say) Italian +simplicities. The charm was, as always in Italy, in the tone and the air +and the happy hazard of things, which made any positive pretension or +claimed importance a comparatively trifling question. We slid, in the +steep little place, more or less down hill; we wished, stomachically, we +had rather addressed ourselves to a tea-basket; we suffered importunity +from unchidden infants who swarmed about our chairs and romped about +our feet; we stayed no long time, and “went to see” nothing; yet we +communicated to intensity, we lay at our ease in the bosom of the past, +we practised intimacy, in short, an intimacy so much greater than +the mere accidental and ostensible: the difficulty for the right and +grateful expression of which makes the old, the familiar tax on the +luxury of loving Italy. + + +1900-1909. + + + + + + + +End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Italian Hours, by Henry James + +*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ITALIAN HOURS *** + +***** This file should be named 6354-0.txt or 6354-0.zip ***** +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: + http://www.gutenberg.org/6/3/5/6354/ + +Produced by Richard Farris and the online team at +Distributed Proofreaders + + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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Hart was the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm +concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared +with anyone. For forty years, he produced and distributed Project +Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support. + +Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed +editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S. +unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not necessarily +keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition. + +Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility: + + www.gutenberg.org + +This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm, +including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary +Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to +subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks. + diff --git a/6354-0.zip b/6354-0.zip Binary files differnew file mode 100644 index 0000000..964ef8d --- /dev/null +++ b/6354-0.zip diff --git a/6354-8.txt b/6354-8.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..3d0392c --- /dev/null +++ b/6354-8.txt @@ -0,0 +1,11640 @@ +The Project Gutenberg EBook of Italian Hours, by Henry James + +This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with +almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + +Title: Italian Hours + +Author: Henry James + + +Release Date: August, 2004 [EBook #6354] +This file was first posted on November 29, 2002] +Last Updated: April 10, 2013 + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 + +*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ITALIAN HOURS *** + + + + +Produced by Richard Farris and the online team at +Distributed Proofreaders + + + + + + + + +ITALIAN HOURS + +By Henry James + + +Published November 1909 + + + + +PREFACE + +The chapters of which this volume is composed have with few exceptions +already been collected, and were then associated with others +commemorative of other impressions of (no very extensive) excursions and +wanderings. The notes on various visits to Italy are here for the first +time exclusively placed together, and as they largely refer to quite +other days than these--the date affixed to each paper sufficiently +indicating this--I have introduced a few passages that speak for a later +and in some cases a frequently repeated vision of the places and scenes +in question. I have not hesitated to amend my text, expressively, +wherever it seemed urgently to ask for this, though I have not pretended +to add the element of information or the weight of curious and critical +insistence to a brief record of light inquiries and conclusions. +The fond appeal of the observer concerned is all to aspects and +appearances--above all to the interesting face of things as it mainly +_used_ to be. + +H. J. + + + + + +CONTENTS + + VENICE + THE GRAND CANAL + VENICE: AN EARLY IMPRESSION + TWO OLD HOUSES AND THREE YOUNG WOMEN + CASA AL VISI + FROM CHAMBRY TO MILAN + THE OLD SAINT-GOTHARD + ITALY REVISITED + A ROMAN HOLIDAY + ROMAN RIDES + ROMAN NEIGHBOURHOODS + THE AFTER-SEASON IN ROME + FROM A ROMAN NOTE-BOOK + A FEW OTHER ROMAN NEIGHBOURHOODS + A CHAIN OF CITIES + SIENA EARLY AND LATE + THE AUTUMN IN FLORENCE + FLORENTINE NOTES + TUSCAN CITIES + OTHER TUSCAN CITIES + RAVENNA + THE SAINT'S AFTERNOON AND OTHERS + + + + + + ILLUSTRATIONS + + THE HARBOUR, GENOA (Frontispiece) + FLAGS AT ST. MARK'S, VENICE + A NARROW CANAL, VENICE + PALAZZO MOCENIGO, VENICE + THE AMPHITHEATRE, VERONA + CASA ALVISI, VENICE + THE SIMPLON GATE, MILAN + THE CLOCK TOWER, BERNE + UNDER THE ARCADES, TURIN + ROMAN GATEWAY, RIMINI + SANTA MARIA NOVELLA, FLORENCE + THE FAADE OF ST. JOHN LATERAN, ROME + THE COLONNADE OF ST. PETER'S, ROME + CASTEL GANDOLFO + ENTRANCE TO THE VATICAN, ROME + VILLA D' ESTE, TIVOLI + SUBIACO + ASSISI + PERUGIA + ETRUSCAN GATEWAY, PERUGIA + A STREET, CORTONA + THE RED PALACE, SIENA + SAN DOMENICO, SIENA + ON THE ARNO, FLORENCE + THE GREAT EAVES, FLORENCE + BOBOLI GARDENS, FLORENCE + THE HOSPITAL, PISTOIA + THE LOGGIA, LUCCA + TOWERS OF SAN GIMIGNANO + SAN APOLLINARE NUOVO, RAVENNA + RAVENNA PINETA + TERRACINA + + + + + +VENICE + + +It is a great pleasure to write the word; but I am not sure there is not +a certain impudence in pretending to add anything to it. Venice has been +painted and described many thousands of times, and of all the cities of +the world is the easiest to visit without going there. Open the +first book and you will find a rhapsody about it; step into the first +picture-dealer's and you will find three or four high-coloured "views" +of it. There is notoriously nothing more to be said on the subject. +Every one has been there, and every one has brought back a collection of +photographs. There is as little mystery about the Grand Canal as about +our local thoroughfare, and the name of St. Mark is as familiar as +the postman's ring. It is not forbidden, however, to speak of familiar +things, and I hold that for the true Venice-lover Venice is always in +order. There is nothing new to be said about her certainly, but the +old is better than any novelty. It would be a sad day indeed when +there should be something new to say. I write these lines with the +full consciousness of having no information whatever to offer. I do not +pretend to enlighten the reader; I pretend only to give a fillip to his +memory; and I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in +love with his theme. + + +I + +Mr. Ruskin has given it up, that is very true; but only after extracting +half a lifetime of pleasure and an immeasurable quantity of fame from +it. We all may do the same, after it has served our turn, which it +probably will not cease to do for many a year to come. Meantime it is +Mr. Ruskin who beyond anyone helps us to enjoy. He has indeed lately +produced several aids to depression in the shape of certain little +humorous--ill-humorous--pamphlets (the series of _St. Mark's Rest_) +which embody his latest reflections on the subject of our city and +describe the latest atrocities perpetrated there. These latter are +numerous and deeply to be deplored; but to admit that they have spoiled +Venice would be to admit that Venice may be spoiled--an admission +pregnant, as it seems to us, with disloyalty. Fortunately one reacts +against the Ruskinian contagion, and one hour of the lagoon is worth a +hundred pages of demoralised prose. This queer late-coming prose of +Mr. Ruskin (including the revised and condensed issue of the _Stones of +Venice_, only one little volume of which has been published, or perhaps +ever will be) is all to be read, though much of it appears addressed to +children of tender age. It is pitched in the nursery-key, and might +be supposed to emanate from an angry governess. It is, however, +all suggestive, and much of it is delightfully just. There is an +inconceivable want of form in it, though the author has spent his life +in laying down the principles of form and scolding people for departing +from them; but it throbs and flashes with the love of his subject--a +love disconcerted and abjured, but which has still much of the force of +inspiration. Among the many strange things that have befallen Venice, +she has had the good fortune to become the object of a passion to a man +of splendid genius, who has made her his own and in doing so has made +her the world's. There is no better reading at Venice therefore, as I +say, than Ruskin, for every true Venice-lover can separate the wheat +from the chaff. The narrow theological spirit, the moralism _ tout +propos_, the queer provincialities and pruderies, are mere wild weeds in +a mountain of flowers. One may doubtless be very happy in Venice without +reading at all--without criticising or analysing or thinking a strenuous +thought. It is a city in which, I suspect, there is very little +strenuous thinking, and yet it is a city in which there must be almost +as much happiness as misery. The misery of Venice stands there for all +the world to see; it is part of the spectacle--a thoroughgoing devotee +of local colour might consistently say it is part of the pleasure. The +Venetian people have little to call their own--little more than the bare +privilege of leading their lives in the most beautiful of towns. Their +habitations are decayed; their taxes heavy; their pockets light; their +opportunities few. One receives an impression, however, that life +presents itself to them with attractions not accounted for in this +meagre train of advantages, and that they are on better terms with +it than many people who have made a better bargain. They lie in the +sunshine; they dabble in the sea; they wear bright rags; they fall into +attitudes and harmonies; they assist at an eternal _conversazione_. It +is not easy to say that one would have them other than they are, and it +certainly would make an immense difference should they be better fed. +The number of persons in Venice who evidently never have enough to eat +is painfully large; but it would be more painful if we did not equally +perceive that the rich Venetian temperament may bloom upon a dog's +allowance. Nature has been kind to it, and sunshine and leisure +and conversation and beautiful views form the greater part of its +sustenance. It takes a great deal to make a successful American, but +to make a happy Venetian takes only a handful of quick sensibility. +The Italian people have at once the good and the evil fortune to be +conscious of few wants; so that if the civilisation of a society is +measured by the number of its needs, as seems to be the common opinion +to-day, it is to be feared that the children of the lagoon would make +but a poor figure in a set of comparative tables. Not their misery, +doubtless, but the way they elude their misery, is what pleases the +sentimental tourist, who is gratified by the sight of a beautiful race +that lives by the aid of its imagination. The way to enjoy Venice is +to follow the example of these people and make the most of simple +pleasures. Almost all the pleasures of the place are simple; this may be +maintained even under the imputation of ingenious paradox. There is no +simpler pleasure than looking at a fine Titian, unless it be looking at +a fine Tintoret or strolling into St. Mark's,--abominable the way one +falls into the habit,--and resting one's light-wearied eyes upon the +windowless gloom; or than floating in a gondola or than hanging over +a balcony or than taking one's coffee at Florian's. It is of such +superficial pastimes that a Venetian day is composed, and the pleasure +of the matter is in the emotions to which they minister. These are +fortunately of the finest--otherwise Venice would be insufferably dull. +Reading Ruskin is good; reading the old records is perhaps better; but +the best thing of all is simply staying on. The only way to care for +Venice as she deserves it is to give her a chance to touch you often--to +linger and remain and return. + + +II + +The danger is that you will not linger enough--a danger of which the +author of these lines had known something. It is possible to dislike +Venice, and to entertain the sentiment in a responsible and intelligent +manner. There are travellers who think the place odious, and those who +are not of this opinion often find themselves wishing that the others +were only more numerous. The sentimental tourist's sole quarrel with his +Venice is that he has too many competitors there. He likes to be +alone; to be original; to have (to himself, at least) the air of making +discoveries. The Venice of to-day is a vast museum where the little +wicket that admits you is perpetually turning and creaking, and you +march through the institution with a herd of fellow-gazers. There is +nothing left to discover or describe, and originality of attitude is +completely impossible. This is often very annoying; you can only turn +your back on your impertinent playfellow and curse his want of delicacy. +But this is not the fault of Venice; it is the fault of the rest of the +world. The fault of Venice is that, though she is easy to admire, she is +not so easy to live with as you count living in other places. After you +have stayed a week and the bloom of novelty has rubbed off you wonder if +you can accommodate yourself to the peculiar conditions. Your old habits +become impracticable and you find yourself obliged to form new ones of +an undesirable and unprofitable character. You are tired of your gondola +(or you think you are) and you have seen all the principal pictures +and heard the names of the palaces announced a dozen times by your +gondolier, who brings them out almost as impressively as if he were +an English butler bawling titles into a drawing-room. You have walked +several hundred times round the Piazza and bought several bushels of +photographs. You have visited the antiquity mongers whose horrible +sign-boards dishonour some of the grandest vistas in the Grand Canal; +you have tried the opera and found it very bad; you have bathed at +the Lido and found the water flat. You have begun to have a +shipboard-feeling--to regard the Piazza as an enormous saloon and +the Riva degli Schiavoni as a promenade-deck. You are obstructed and +encaged; your desire for space is unsatisfied; you miss your usual +exercise. You try to take a walk and you fail, and meantime, as I say, +you have come to regard your gondola as a sort of magnified baby's +cradle. You have no desire to be rocked to sleep, though you are +sufficiently kept awake by the irritation produced, as you gaze across +the shallow lagoon, by the attitude of the perpetual gondolier, with his +turned-out toes, his protruded chin, his absurdly unscientific stroke. +The canals have a horrible smell, and the everlasting Piazza, where you +have looked repeatedly at every article in every shop-window and found +them all rubbish, where the young Venetians who sell bead bracelets and +"panoramas" are perpetually thrusting their wares at you, where the same +tightly-buttoned officers are for ever sucking the same black weeds, at +the same empty tables, in front of the same cafs--the Piazza, as I say, +has resolved itself into a magnificent tread-mill. This is the state +of mind of those shallow inquirers who find Venice all very well for +a week; and if in such a state of mind you take your departure you act +with fatal rashness. The loss is your own, moreover; it is not--with +all deference to your personal attractions--that of your companions who +remain behind; for though there are some disagreeable things in Venice +there is nothing so disagreeable as the visitors. The conditions are +peculiar, but your intolerance of them evaporates before it has had time +to become a prejudice. When you have called for the bill to go, pay it +and remain, and you will find on the morrow that you are deeply attached +to Venice. It is by living there from day to day that you feel the +fulness of her charm; that you invite her exquisite influence to sink +into your spirit. The creature varies like a nervous woman, whom you +know only when you know all the aspects of her beauty. She has high +spirits or low, she is pale or red, grey or pink, cold or warm, fresh or +wan, according to the weather or the hour. She is always interesting +and almost always sad; but she has a thousand occasional graces and is +always liable to happy accidents. You become extraordinarily fond of +these things; you count upon them; they make part of your life. Tenderly +fond you become; there is something indefinable in those depths of +personal acquaintance that gradually establish themselves. The place +seems to personify itself, to become human and sentient and conscious of +your affection. You desire to embrace it, to caress it, to possess it; +and finally a soft sense of possession grows up and your visit becomes a +perpetual love-affair. It is very true that if you go, as the author +of these lines on a certain occasion went, about the middle of March, a +certain amount of disappointment is possible. He had paid no visit for +several years, and in the interval the beautiful and helpless city had +suffered an increase of injury. The barbarians are in full possession +and you tremble for what they may do. You are reminded from the moment +of your arrival that Venice scarcely exists any more as a city at all; +that she exists only as a battered peep-show and bazaar. There was a +horde of savage Germans encamped in the Piazza, and they filled +the Ducal Palace and the Academy with their uproar. The English and +Americans came a little later. They came in good time, with a great many +French, who were discreet enough to make very long repasts at the Caff +Quadri, during which they were out of the way. The months of April and +May of the year 1881 were not, as a general thing, a favourable season +for visiting the Ducal Palace and the Academy. The _valet-de-place_ +had marked them for his own and held triumphant possession of them. He +celebrates his triumphs in a terrible brassy voice, which resounds all +over the place, and has, whatever language he be speaking, the accent +of some other idiom. During all the spring months in Venice these gentry +abound in the great resorts, and they lead their helpless captives +through churches and galleries in dense irresponsible groups. They +infest the Piazza; they pursue you along the Riva; they hang about +the bridges and the doors of the cafs. In saying just now that I was +disappointed at first, I had chiefly in mind the impression that assails +me to-day in the whole precinct of St. Mark's. The condition of +this ancient sanctuary is surely a great scandal. The pedlars and +commissioners ply their trade--often a very unclean one--at the very +door of the temple; they follow you across the threshold, into the +sacred dusk, and pull your sleeve, and hiss into your ear, scuffling +with each other for customers. There is a great deal of dishonour about +St. Mark's altogether, and if Venice, as I say, has become a great +bazaar, this exquisite edifice is now the biggest booth. + + +III + +It is treated as a booth in all ways, and if it had not somehow a great +spirit of solemnity within it the traveller would soon have little +warrant for regarding it as a religious affair. The restoration of the +outer walls, which has lately been so much attacked and defended, is +certainly a great shock. Of the necessity of the work only an expert +is, I suppose, in a position to judge; but there is no doubt that, if +a necessity it be, it is one that is deeply to be regretted. To no +more distressing necessity have people of taste lately had to resign +themselves. Wherever the hand of the restorer has been laid all +semblance of beauty has vanished; which is a sad fact, considering that +the external loveliness of St. Mark's has been for ages less impressive +only than that of the still comparatively uninjured interior. I know not +what is the measure of necessity in such a case, and it appears indeed +to be a very delicate question. To-day, at any rate, that admirable +harmony of faded mosaic and marble which, to the eye of the traveller +emerging from the narrow streets that lead to the Piazza, filled all the +further end of it with a sort of dazzling silver presence--to-day this +lovely vision is in a way to be completely reformed and indeed well-nigh +abolished. The old softness and mellowness of colour--the work of the +quiet centuries and of the breath of the salt sea--is giving way to +large crude patches of new material which have the effect of a monstrous +malady rather than of a restoration to health. They look like blotches +of red and white paint and dishonourable smears of chalk on the cheeks +of a noble matron. The face toward the Piazzetta is in especial the +newest-looking thing conceivable--as new as a new pair of boots or +as the morning's paper. We do not profess, however, to undertake a +scientific quarrel with these changes; we admit that our complaint is +a purely sentimental one. The march of industry in united Italy must +doubtless be looked at as a whole, and one must endeavour to believe +that it is through innumerable lapses of taste that this deeply +interesting country is groping her way to her place among the nations. +For the present, it is not to be denied, certain odd phases of the +process are more visible than the result, to arrive at which it seems +necessary that, as she was of old a passionate votary of the beautiful, +she should to-day burn everything that she has adored. It is doubtless +too soon to judge her, and there are moments when one is willing to +forgive her even the restoration of St. Mark's. Inside as well there has +been a considerable attempt to make the place more tidy; but the general +effect, as yet, has not seriously suffered. What I chiefly remember is +the straightening out of that dark and rugged old pavement--those deep +undulations of primitive mosaic in which the fond spectator was thought +to perceive an intended resemblance to the waves of the ocean. Whether +intended or not the analogy was an image the more in a treasure-house +of images; but from a considerable portion of the church it has now +disappeared. Throughout the greater part indeed the pavement remains as +recent generations have known it--dark, rich, cracked, uneven, spotted +with porphyry and time-blackened malachite, polished by the knees of +innumerable worshippers; but in other large stretches the idea imitated +by the restorers is that of the ocean in a dead calm, and the model they +have taken the floor of a London club-house or of a New York hotel. +I think no Venetian and scarcely any Italian cares much for such +differences; and when, a year ago, people in England were writing to the +_Times_ about the whole business and holding meetings to protest against +it the dear children of the lagoon--so far as they heard or heeded the +rumour--thought them partly busy-bodies and partly asses. Busy-bodies +they doubtless were, but they took a good deal of disinterested trouble. +It never occurs to the Venetian mind of to-day that such trouble may be +worth taking; the Venetian mind vainly endeavours to conceive a state of +existence in which personal questions are so insipid that people have +to look for grievances in the wrongs of brick and marble. I must not, +however, speak of St. Mark's as if I had the pretension of giving a +description of it or as if the reader desired one. The reader has been +too well served already. It is surely the best-described building in the +world. Open the _Stones of Venice_, open Thophile Gautier's _Italia_, +and you will see. These writers take it very seriously, and it is only +because there is another way of taking it that I venture to speak of +it; the way that offers itself after you have been in Venice a couple of +months, and the light is hot in the great Square, and you pass in under +the pictured porticoes with a feeling of habit and friendliness and a +desire for something cool and dark. There are moments, after all, when +the church is comparatively quiet and empty, and when you may sit there +with an easy consciousness of its beauty. From the moment, of course, +that you go into any Italian church for any purpose but to say your +prayers or look at the ladies, you rank yourself among the trooping +barbarians I just spoke of; you treat the place as an orifice in the +peep-show. Still, it is almost a spiritual function--or, at the worst, +an amorous one--to feed one's eyes on the molten colour that drops from +the hollow vaults and thickens the air with its richness. It is all so +quiet and sad and faded and yet all so brilliant and living. The strange +figures in the mosaic pictures, bending with the curve of niche and +vault, stare down through the glowing dimness; the burnished gold that +stands behind them catches the light on its little uneven cubes. St. +Mark's owes nothing of its character to the beauty of proportion or +perspective; there is nothing grandly balanced or far-arching; there +are no long lines nor triumphs of the perpendicular. The church arches +indeed, but arches like a dusky cavern. Beauty of surface, of tone, +of detail, of things near enough to touch and kneel upon and lean +against--it is from this the effect proceeds. In this sort of beauty the +place is incredibly rich, and you may go there every day and find afresh +some lurking pictorial nook. It is a treasury of bits, as the painters +say; and there are usually three or four of the fraternity with their +easels set up in uncertain equilibrium on the undulating floor. It is +not easy to catch the real complexion of St. Mark's, and these laudable +attempts at portraiture are apt to look either lurid or livid. But if +you cannot paint the old loose-looking marble slabs, the great panels +of basalt and jasper, the crucifixes of which the lonely anguish looks +deeper in the vertical light, the tabernacles whose open doors disclose +a dark Byzantine image spotted with dull, crooked gems--if you cannot +paint these things you can at least grow fond of them. You grow fond +even of the old benches of red marble, partly worn away by the breeches +of many generations and attached to the base of those wide pilasters of +which the precious plating, delightful in its faded brownness, with a +faint grey bloom upon it, bulges and yawns a little with honourable age. + +{Illustration: FLAGS AT ST. MARK'S VENICE} + + +IV + +Even at first, when the vexatious sense of the city of the Doges reduced +to earning its living as a curiosity-shop was in its keenness, there was +a great deal of entertainment to be got from lodging on Riva Schiavoni +and looking out at the far-shimmering lagoon. There was entertainment +indeed in simply getting into the place and observing the queer +incidents of a Venetian installation. A great many persons contribute +indirectly to this undertaking, and it is surprising how they spring +out at you during your novitiate to remind you that they are bound up +in some mysterious manner with the constitution of your little +establishment. It was an interesting problem for instance to trace the +subtle connection existing between the niece of the landlady and the +occupancy of the fourth floor. Superficially it was none too visible, as +the young lady in question was a dancer at the Fenice theatre--or when +that was closed at the Rossini--and might have been supposed absorbed by +her professional duties. It proved necessary, however, that she should +hover about the premises in a velvet jacket and a pair of black kid +gloves with one little white button; as also, that she should apply a +thick coating of powder to her face, which had a charming oval and a +sweet weak expression, like that of most of the Venetian maidens, +who, as a general thing--it was not a peculiarity of the land-lady's +niece--are fond of besmearing themselves with flour. You soon recognise +that it is not only the many-twinkling lagoon you behold from a +habitation on the Riva; you see a little of everything Venetian. +Straight across, before my windows, rose the great pink mass of San +Giorgio Maggiore, which has for an ugly Palladian church a success +beyond all reason. It is a success of position, of colour, of the +immense detached Campanile, tipped with a tall gold angel. I know not +whether it is because San Giorgio is so grandly conspicuous, with a +great deal of worn, faded-looking brickwork; but for many persons the +whole place has a kind of suffusion of rosiness. Asked what may be the +leading colour in the Venetian concert, we should inveterately say Pink, +and yet without remembering after all that this elegant hue occurs +very often. It is a faint, shimmering, airy, watery pink; the bright +sea-light seems to flush with it and the pale whiteish-green of lagoon +and canal to drink it in. There is indeed a great deal of very evident +brickwork, which is never fresh or loud in colour, but always burnt out, +as it were, always exquisitely mild. + +Certain little mental pictures rise before the collector of memories at +the simple mention, written or spoken, of the places he has loved. When +I hear, when I see, the magical name I have written above these pages, +it is not of the great Square that I think, with its strange basilica +and its high arcades, nor of the wide mouth of the Grand Canal, with the +stately steps and the well-poised dome of the Salute; it is not of +the low lagoon, nor the sweet Piazzetta, nor the dark chambers of St. +Mark's. I simply see a narrow canal in the heart of the city--a patch +of green water and a surface of pink wall. The gondola moves slowly; it +gives a great smooth swerve, passes under a bridge, and the gondolier's +cry, carried over the quiet water, makes a kind of splash in the +stillness. A girl crosses the little bridge, which has an arch like +a camel's back, with an old shawl on her head, which makes her +characteristic and charming; you see her against the sky as you float +beneath. The pink of the old wall seems to fill the whole place; it +sinks even into the opaque water. Behind the wall is a garden, out +of which the long arm of a white June rose--the roses of Venice are +splendid--has flung itself by way of spontaneous ornament. On the other +side of this small water-way is a great shabby facade of Gothic windows +and balconies--balconies on which dirty clothes are hung and under +which a cavernous-looking doorway opens from a low flight of slimy +water-steps. It is very hot and still, the canal has a queer smell, and +the whole place is enchanting. + +{Illustration: A NARROW CANAL, VENICE} + +It is poor work, however, talking about the colour of things in Venice. +The fond spectator is perpetually looking at it from his window, when he +is not floating about with that delightful sense of being for the moment +a part of it, which any gentleman in a gondola is free to entertain. +Venetian windows and balconies are a dreadful lure, and while you rest +your elbows on these cushioned ledges the precious hours fly away. But +in truth Venice isn't in fair weather a place for concentration of mind. +The effort required for sitting down to a writing-table is heroic, +and the brightest page of MS. looks dull beside the brilliancy of your +_milieu_. All nature beckons you forth and murmurs to you sophistically +that such hours should be devoted to collecting impressions. Afterwards, +in ugly places, at unprivileged times, you can convert your impressions +into prose. Fortunately for the present proser the weather wasn't always +fine; the first month was wet and windy, and it was better to judge +of the matter from an open casement than to respond to the advances +of persuasive gondoliers. Even then however there was a constant +entertainment in the view. It was all cold colour, and the steel-grey +floor of the lagoon was stroked the wrong way by the wind. Then there +were charming cool intervals, when the churches, the houses, the +anchored fishing-boats, the whole gently-curving line of the Riva, +seemed to be washed with a pearly white. Later it all turned warm--warm +to the eye as well as to other senses. After the middle of May the whole +place was in a glow. The sea took on a thousand shades, but they were +only infinite variations of blue, and those rosy walls I just spoke of +began to flush in the thick sunshine. Every patch of colour, every yard +of weather-stained stucco, every glimpse of nestling garden or daub of +sky above a _calle_, began to shine and sparkle--began, as the painters +say, to "compose." The lagoon was streaked with odd currents, which +played across it like huge smooth finger-marks. The gondolas multiplied +and spotted it allover; every gondola and gondolier looking, at a +distance, precisely like every other. + +There is something strange and fascinating in this mysterious +impersonality of the gondola. It has an identity when you are in it, +but, thanks to their all being of the same size, shape and colour, and +of the same deportment and gait, it has none, or as little as possible, +as you see it pass before you. From my windows on the Riva there was +always the same silhouette--the long, black, slender skiff, lifting its +head and throwing it back a little, moving yet seeming not to move, with +the grotesquely-graceful figure on the poop. This figure inclines, +as may be, more to the graceful or to the grotesque--standing in the +"second position" of the dancing-master, but indulging from the waist +upward in a freedom of movement which that functionary would deprecate. +One may say as a general thing that there is something rather awkward in +the movement even of the most graceful gondolier, and something graceful +in the movement of the most awkward. In the graceful men of course the +grace predominates, and nothing can be finer than the large, firm way +in which, from their point of vantage, they throw themselves over +their tremendous oar. It has the boldness of a plunging bird and +the regularity of a pendulum. Sometimes, as you see this movement in +profile, in a gondola that passes you--see, as you recline on your own +low cushions, the arching body of the gondolier lifted up against the +sky--it has a kind of nobleness which suggests an image on a Greek +frieze. The gondolier at Venice is your very good friend--if you choose +him happily--and on the quality of the personage depends a good deal +that of your impressions. He is a part of your daily life, your double, +your shadow, your complement. Most people, I think, either like their +gondolier or hate him; and if they like him, like him very much. In this +case they take an interest in him after his departure; wish him to be +sure of employment, speak of him as the gem of gondoliers and tell their +friends to be certain to "secure" him. There is usually no difficulty in +securing him; there is nothing elusive or reluctant about a gondolier. +Nothing would induce me not to believe them for the most part excellent +fellows, and the sentimental tourist must always have a kindness for +them. More than the rest of the population, of course, they are the +children of Venice; they are associated with its idiosyncrasy, with its +essence, with its silence, with its melancholy. + +When I say they are associated with its silence I should immediately add +that they are associated also with its sound. Among themselves they are +an extraordinarily talkative company. They chatter at the _traghetti_, +where they always have some sharp point under discussion; they bawl +across the canals; they bespeak your commands as you approach; they defy +each other from afar. If you happen to have a _traghetto_ under your +window, you are well aware that they are a vocal race. I should go even +further than I went just now, and say that the voice of the gondolier is +in fact for audibility the dominant or rather the only note of Venice. +There is scarcely another heard sound, and that indeed is part of the +interest of the place. There is no noise there save distinctly human +noise; no rumbling, no vague uproar, nor rattle of wheels and hoofs. It +is all articulate and vocal and personal. One may say indeed that Venice +is emphatically the city of conversation; people talk all over the place +because there is nothing to interfere with its being caught by the ear. +Among the populace it is a general family party. The still water carries +the voice, and good Venetians exchange confidences at a distance of half +a mile. It saves a world of trouble, and they don't like trouble. Their +delightful garrulous language helps them to make Venetian life a +long _conversazione_. This language, with its soft elisions, its +odd transpositions, its kindly contempt for consonants and other +disagreeables, has in it something peculiarly human and accommodating. +If your gondolier had no other merit he would have the merit that he +speaks Venetian. This may rank as a merit even--some people perhaps +would say especially--when you don't understand what he says. But he +adds to it other graces which make him an agreeable feature in your +life. The price he sets on his services is touchingly small, and he +has a happy art of being obsequious without being, or at least without +seeming, abject. For occasional liberalities he evinces an almost +lyrical gratitude. In short he has delightfully good manners, a merit +which he shares for the most part with the Venetians at large. One +grows very fond of these people, and the reason of one's fondness is the +frankness and sweetness of their address. That of the Italian family +at large has much to recommend it; but in the Venetian manner there is +something peculiarly ingratiating. One feels that the race is old, that +it has a long and rich civilisation in its blood, and that if it hasn't +been blessed by fortune it has at least been polished by time. It hasn't +a genius for stiff morality, and indeed makes few pretensions in that +direction. It scruples but scantly to represent the false as the +true, and has been accused of cultivating the occasion to grasp and +to overreach, and of steering a crooked course--not to your and my +advantage--amid the sanctities of property. It has been accused further +of loving if not too well at least too often, of being in fine as little +austere as possible. I am not sure it is very brave, nor struck with its +being very industrious. But it has an unfailing sense of the amenities +of life; the poorest Venetian is a natural man of the world. He is +better company than persons of his class are apt to be among the nations +of industry and virtue--where people are also sometimes perceived to lie +and steal and otherwise misconduct themselves. He has a great desire to +please and to be pleased. + + +V + +In that matter at least the cold-blooded stranger begins at last to +imitate him; begins to lead a life that shall be before all things easy; +unless indeed he allow himself, like Mr. Ruskin, to be put out of humour +by Titian and Tiepolo. The hours he spends among the pictures are his +best hours in Venice, and I am ashamed to have written so much of +common things when I might have been making festoons of the names of +the masters. Only, when we have covered our page with such festoons +what more is left to say? When one has said Carpaccio and Bellini, the +Tintoret and the Veronese, one has struck a note that must be left to +resound at will. Everything has been said about the mighty painters, and +it is of little importance that a pilgrim the more has found them to +his taste. "Went this morning to the Academy; was very much pleased with +Titian's 'Assumption.'" That honest phrase has doubtless been written +in many a traveller's diary, and was not indiscreet on the part of +its author. But it appeals little to the general reader, and we must +moreover notoriously not expose our deepest feelings. Since I have +mentioned Titian's "Assumption" I must say that there are some people +who have been less pleased with it than the observer we have just +imagined. It is one of the possible disappointments of Venice, and you +may if you like take advantage of your privilege of not caring for it. +It imparts a look of great richness to the side of the beautiful room of +the Academy on which it hangs; but the same room contains two or three +works less known to fame which are equally capable of inspiring a +passion. "The 'Annunciation' struck me as coarse and superficial": that +note was once made in a simple-minded tourist's book. At Venice, strange +to say, Titian is altogether a disappointment; the city of his adoption +is far from containing the best of him. Madrid, Paris, London, Florence, +Dresden, Munich--these are the homes of his greatness. + +There are other painters who have but a single home, and the greatest of +these is the Tintoret. Close beside him sit Carpaccio and Bellini, who +make with him the dazzling Venetian trio. The Veronese may be seen and +measured in other places; he is most splendid in Venice, but he shines +in Paris and in Dresden. You may walk out of the noon-day dusk of +Trafalgar Square in November, and in one of the chambers of the National +Gallery see the family of Darius rustling and pleading and weeping +at the feet of Alexander. Alexander is a beautiful young Venetian in +crimson pantaloons, and the picture sends a glow into the cold London +twilight. You may sit before it for an hour and dream you are floating +to the water-gate of the Ducal Palace, where a certain old beggar who +has one of the handsomest heads in the world--he has sat to a hundred +painters for Doges and for personages more sacred--has a prescriptive +right to pretend to pull your gondola to the steps and to hold out a +greasy immemorial cap. But you must go to Venice in very fact to see +the other masters, who form part of your life while you are there, who +illuminate your view of the universe. It is difficult to express one's +relation to them; the whole Venetian art-world is so near, so familiar, +so much an extension and adjunct of the spreading actual, that it seems +almost invidious to say one owes more to one of them than to the other. +Nowhere, not even in Holland, where the correspondence between the +real aspects and the little polished canvases is so constant and so +exquisite, do art and life seem so interfused and, as it were, so +consanguineous. All the splendour of light and colour, all the Venetian +air and the Venetian history are on the walls and ceilings of the +palaces; and all the genius of the masters, all the images and visions +they have left upon canvas, seem to tremble in the sunbeams and dance +upon the waves. That is the perpetual interest of the place--that you +live in a certain sort of knowledge as in a rosy cloud. You don't go +into the churches and galleries by way of a change from the streets; +you go into them because they offer you an exquisite reproduction of +the things that surround you. All Venice was both model and painter, +and life was so pictorial that art couldn't help becoming so. With +all diminutions life is pictorial still, and this fact gives an +extraordinary freshness to one's perception of the great Venetian works. +You judge of them not as a connoisseur, but as a man of the world, and +you enjoy them because they are so social and so true. Perhaps of all +works of art that are equally great they demand least reflection on the +part of the spectator--they make least of a mystery of being enjoyed. +Reflection only confirms your admiration, yet is almost ashamed to show +its head. These things speak so frankly and benignantly to the sense +that even when they arrive at the highest style--as in the Tintoret's +"Presentation of the little Virgin at the Temple"--they are still more +familiar. + +But it is hard, as I say, to express all this, and it is painful as well +to attempt it--painful because in the memory of vanished hours so filled +with beauty the consciousness of present loss oppresses. Exquisite +hours, enveloped in light and silence, to have known them once is to +have always a terrible standard of enjoyment. Certain lovely mornings +of May and June come back with an ineffaceable fairness. Venice isn't +smothered in flowers at this season, in the manner of Florence and Rome; +but the sea and sky themselves seem to blossom and rustle. The gondola +waits at the wave-washed steps, and if you are wise you will take your +place beside a discriminating companion. Such a companion in Venice +should of course be of the sex that discriminates most finely. An +intelligent woman who knows her Venice seems doubly intelligent, and it +makes no woman's perceptions less keen to be aware that she can't help +looking graceful as she is borne over the waves. The handsome Pasquale, +with uplifted oar, awaits your command, knowing, in a general way, +from observation of your habits, that your intention is to go to see +a picture or two. It perhaps doesn't immensely matter what picture +you choose: the whole affair is so charming. It is charming to wander +through the light and shade of intricate canals, with perpetual +architecture above you and perpetual fluidity beneath. It is charming +to disembark at the polished steps of a little empty _campo_--a sunny +shabby square with an old well in the middle, an old church on one +side and tall Venetian windows looking down. Sometimes the windows are +tenantless; sometimes a lady in a faded dressing-gown leans vaguely on +the sill. There is always an old man holding out his hat for +coppers; there are always three or four small boys dodging possible +umbrella-pokes while they precede you, in the manner of custodians, to +the door of the church. + + +VI + +The churches of Venice are rich in pictures, and many a masterpiece +lurks in the unaccommodating gloom of side-chapels and sacristies. Many +a noble work is perched behind the dusty candles and muslin roses of a +scantily-visited altar; some of them indeed, hidden behind the altar, +suffer in a darkness that can never be explored. The facilities offered +you for approaching the picture in such cases are a mockery of your +irritated wish. You stand at tip-toe on a three-legged stool, you climb +a rickety ladder, you almost mount upon the shoulders of the _custode_. +You do everything but see the picture. You see just enough to be sure +it's beautiful. You catch a glimpse of a divine head, of a fig tree +against a mellow sky, but the rest is impenetrable mystery. You +renounce all hope, for instance, of approaching the magnificent Cima da +Conegliano in San Giovanni in Bragora; and bethinking yourself of the +immaculate purity that shines in the spirit of this master, you renounce +it with chagrin and pain. Behind the high altar in that church hangs +a Baptism of Christ by Cima which I believe has been more or less +repainted. You make the thing out in spots, you see it has a fullness +of perfection. But you turn away from it with a stiff neck and promise +yourself consolation in the Academy and at the Madonna dell' Orto, +where two noble works by the same hand--pictures as clear as a summer +twilight--present themselves in better circumstances. It may be said +as a general thing that you never see the Tintoret. You admire him, +you adore him, you think him the greatest of painters, but in the great +majority of cases your eyes fail to deal with him. This is partly +his own fault; so many of his works have turned to blackness and are +positively rotting in their frames. At the Scuola di San Rocco, where +there are acres of him, there is scarcely anything at all adequately +visible save the immense "Crucifixion" in the upper story. It is true +that in looking at this huge composition you look at many pictures; it +has not only a multitude of figures but a wealth of episodes; and you +pass from one of these to the other as if you were "doing" a gallery. +Surely no single picture in the world contains more of human life; there +is everything in it, including the most exquisite beauty. It is one of +the greatest things of art; it is always interesting. There are works of +the artist which contain touches more exquisite, revelations of beauty +more radiant, but there is no other vision of so intense a reality, an +execution so splendid. The interest, the impressiveness, of that whole +corner of Venice, however melancholy the effect of its gorgeous and +ill-lighted chambers, gives a strange importance to a visit to the +Scuola. Nothing that all travellers go to see appears to suffer less +from the incursions of travellers. It is one of the loneliest booths +of the bazaar, and the author of these lines has always had the good +fortune, which he wishes to every other traveller, of having it to +himself. I think most visitors find the place rather alarming and +wicked-looking. They walk about a while among the fitful figures that +gleam here and there out of the great tapestry (as it were) with which +the painter has hung all the walls, and then, depressed and bewildered +by the portentous solemnity of these objects, by strange glimpses of +unnatural scenes, by the echo of their lonely footsteps on the vast +stone floors, they take a hasty departure, finding themselves again, +with a sense of release from danger, a sense that the _genius loci_ was +a sort of mad white-washer who worked with a bad mixture, in the bright +light of the _campo_, among the beggars, the orange-vendors and the +passing gondolas. Solemn indeed is the place, solemn and strangely +suggestive, for the simple reason that we shall scarcely find four walls +elsewhere that inclose within a like area an equal quantity of genius. +The air is thick with it and dense and difficult to breathe; for it was +genius that was not happy, inasmuch as it, lacked the art to fix itself +for ever. It is not immortality that we breathe at the Scuola di San +Rocco, but conscious, reluctant mortality. + +Fortunately, however, we can turn to the Ducal Palace, where everything +is so brilliant and splendid that the poor dusky Tintoret is lifted in +spite of himself into the concert. This deeply original building is of +course the loveliest thing in Venice, and a morning's stroll there is a +wonderful illumination. Cunningly select your hour--half the enjoyment +of Venice is a question of dodging--and enter at about one o'clock, when +the tourists have flocked off to lunch and the echoes of the charming +chambers have gone to sleep among the sunbeams. There is no brighter +place in Venice--by which I mean that on the whole there is none half so +bright. The reflected sunshine plays up through the great windows from +the glittering lagoon and shimmers and twinkles over gilded walls and +ceilings. All the history of Venice, all its splendid stately past, +glows around you in a strong sealight. Everyone here is magnificent, but +the great Veronese is the most magnificent of all. He swims before you +in a silver cloud; he thrones in an eternal morning. The deep blue sky +burns behind him, streaked across with milky bars; the white colonnades +sustain the richest canopies, under which the first gentlemen and ladies +in the world both render homage and receive it. Their glorious garments +rustle in the air of the sea and their sun-lighted faces are the very +complexion of Venice. The mixture of pride and piety, of politics and +religion, of art and patriotism, gives a splendid dignity to every +scene. Never was a painter more nobly joyous, never did an artist take a +greater delight in life, seeing it all as a kind of breezy festival and +feeling it through the medium of perpetual success. He revels in the +gold-framed ovals of the ceilings, multiplies himself there with the +fluttering movement of an embroidered banner that tosses itself into the +blue. He was the happiest of painters and produced the happiest picture +in the world. "The Rape of Europa" surely deserves this title; it is +impossible to look at it without aching with envy. Nowhere else in art +is such a temperament revealed; never did inclination and opportunity +combine to express such enjoyment. The mixture of flowers and gems and +brocade, of blooming flesh and shining sea and waving groves, of youth, +health, movement, desire--all this is the brightest vision that ever +descended upon the soul of a painter. Happy the artist who could +entertain such a vision; happy the artist who could paint it as the +masterpiece I here recall is painted. + +The Tintoret's visions were not so bright as that; but he had several +that were radiant enough. In the room that contains the work just cited +are several smaller canvases by the greatly more complex genius of the +Scuola di San Rocco, which are almost simple in their loveliness, almost +happy in their simplicity. They have kept their brightness through the +centuries, and they shine with their neighbours in those golden rooms. +There is a piece of painting in one of them which is one of the sweetest +things in Venice and which reminds one afresh of those wild flowers of +execution that bloom so profusely and so unheeded in the dark corners +of all of the Tintoret's work. "Pallas chasing away Mars" is, I believe, +the name that is given to the picture; and it represents in fact a young +woman of noble appearance administering a gentle push to a fine young +man in armour, as if to tell him to keep his distance. It is of the +gentleness of this push that I speak, the charming way in which she puts +out her arm, with a single bracelet on it, and rests her young hand, its +rosy fingers parted, on his dark breastplate. She bends her enchanting +head with the effort--a head which has all the strange fairness that the +Tintoret always sees in women--and the soft, living, flesh-like glow +of all these members, over which the brush has scarcely paused in its +course, is as pretty an example of genius as all Venice can show. +But why speak of the Tintoret when I can say nothing of the great +"Paradise," which unfolds its somewhat smoky splendour and the wonder of +its multitudinous circles in one of the other chambers? If it were not +one of the first pictures in the world it would be about the biggest, +and we must confess that the spectator gets from it at first chiefly +an impression of quantity. Then he sees that this quantity is really +wealth; that the dim confusion of faces is a magnificent composition, +and that some of the details of this composition are extremely +beautiful. It is impossible however in a retrospect of Venice to specify +one's happiest hours, though as one looks backward certain ineffaceable +moments start here and there into vividness. How is it possible to +forget one's visits to the sacristy of the Frari, however frequent +they may have been, and the great work of John Bellini which forms the +treasure of that apartment? + + +VII + +Nothing in Venice is more perfect than this, and we know of no work of +art more complete. The picture is in three compartments; the Virgin sits +in the central division with her child; two venerable saints, standing +close together, occupy each of the others. It is impossible to imagine +anything more finished or more ripe. It is one of those things that sum +up the genius of a painter, the experience of a life, the teaching of +a school. It seems painted with molten gems, which have only been +clarified by time, and is as solemn as it is gorgeous and as simple as +it is deep. Giovanni Bellini is more or less everywhere in Venice, and, +wherever he is, almost certain to be first--first, I mean, in his own +line: paints little else than the Madonna and the saints; he has not +Carpaccio's care for human life at large, nor the Tintoret's nor the +of the Veronese. Some of his greater pictures, however, where several +figures are clustered together, have a richness of sanctity that is +almost profane. There is one of them on the dark side of the room at the +Academy that contains Titian's "Assumption," which if we could only see +it--its position is an inconceivable scandal--would evidently be one of +the mightiest of so-called sacred pictures. So too is the Madonna of San +Zaccaria, hung in a cold, dim, dreary place, ever so much too high, but +so mild and serene, and so grandly disposed and accompanied, that the +proper attitude for even the most critical amateur, as he looks at it, +strikes one as the bended knee. There is another noble John Bellini, +one of the very few in which there is no Virgin, at San Giovanni +Crisostomo--a St. Jerome, in a red dress, sitting aloft upon the rocks +and with a landscape of extraordinary purity behind him. The absence of +the peculiarly erect Madonna makes it an interesting surprise among the +works of the painter and gives it a somewhat less strenuous air. But it +has brilliant beauty and the St. Jerome is a delightful old personage. + +The same church contains another great picture for which the haunter +of these places must find a shrine apart in his memory; one of the most +interesting things he will have seen, if not the most brilliant. Nothing +appeals more to him than three figures of Venetian ladies which occupy +the foreground of a smallish canvas of Sebastian del Piombo, placed +above the high altar of San Giovanni Crisostomo. Sebastian was a +Venetian by birth, but few of his productions are to be seen in his +native place; few indeed are to be seen anywhere. The picture represents +the patron-saint of the church, accompanied by other saints and by the +worldly votaries I have mentioned. These ladies stand together on the +left, holding in their hands little white caskets; two of them are in +profile, but the foremost turns her face to the spectator. This face and +figure are almost unique among the beautiful things of Venice, and they +leave the susceptible observer with the impression of having made, +or rather having missed, a strange, a dangerous, but a most valuable, +acquaintance. The lady, who is superbly handsome, is the typical +Venetian of the sixteenth century, and she remains for the mind the +perfect flower of that society. Never was there a greater air of +breeding, a deeper expression of tranquil superiority. She walks a +goddess--as if she trod without sinking the waves of the Adriatic. It +is impossible to conceive a more perfect expression of the aristocratic +spirit either in its pride or in its benignity. This magnificent +creature is so strong and secure that she is gentle, and so quiet that +in comparison all minor assumptions of calmness suggest only a vulgar +alarm. But for all this there are depths of possible disorder in her +light-coloured eye. + +I had meant however to say nothing about her, for it's not right to +speak of Sebastian when one hasn't found room for Carpaccio. These +visions come to one, and one can neither hold them nor brush them aside. +Memories of Carpaccio, the magnificent, the delightful--it's not for +want of such visitations, but only for want of space, that I haven't +said of him what I would. There is little enough need of it for +Carpaccio's sake, his fame being brighter to-day--thanks to the generous +lamp Mr. Ruskin has held up to it--than it has ever been. Yet there is +something ridiculous in talking of Venice without making him almost the +refrain. He and the Tintoret are the two great realists, and it is hard +to say which is the more human, the more various. The Tintoret had +the mightier temperament, but Carpaccio, who had the advantage of more +newness and more responsibility, sailed nearer to perfection. Here and +there he quite touches it, as in the enchanting picture, at the Academy, +of St. Ursula asleep in her little white bed, in her high clean room, +where the angel visits her at dawn; or in the noble St. Jerome in his +study at S. Giorgio Schiavoni. This latter work is a pearl of sentiment, +and I may add without being fantastic a ruby of colour. It unites the +most masterly finish with a kind of universal largeness of feeling, and +he who has it well in his memory will never hear the name of Carpaccio +without a throb of almost personal affection. Such indeed is the feeling +that descends upon you in that wonderful little chapel of St. George +of the Slaves, where this most personal and sociable of artists has +expressed all the sweetness of his imagination. The place is small +and incommodious, the pictures are out of sight and ill-lighted, the +custodian is rapacious, the visitors are mutually intolerable, but +the shabby little chapel is a palace of art. Mr. Ruskin has written a +pamphlet about it which is a real aid to enjoyment, though I can't but +think the generous artist, with his keen senses and his just feeling, +would have suffered to hear his eulogist declare that one of his +other productions--in the Museo Civico of Palazzo Correr, a delightful +portrait of two Venetian ladies with pet animals--is the "finest picture +in the world." It has no need of that to be thought admirable; and what +more can a painter desire? + + +VIII + +May in Venice is better than April, but June is best of all. Then the +days are hot, but not too hot, and the nights are more beautiful than +the days. Then Venice is rosier than ever in the morning and more golden +than ever as the day descends. She seems to expand and evaporate, to +multiply all her reflections and iridescences. Then the life of her +people and the strangeness of her constitution become a perpetual +comedy, or at least a perpetual drama. Then the gondola is your sole +habitation, and you spend days between sea and sky. You go to the Lido, +though the Lido has been spoiled. When I first saw it, in 1869, it was +a very natural place, and there was but a rough lane across the little +island from the landing-place to the beach. There was a bathing-place in +those days, and a restaurant, which was very bad, but where in the warm +evenings your dinner didn't much matter as you sat letting it cool on +the wooden terrace that stretched out into the sea. To-day the Lido is +a part of united Italy and has been made the victim of villainous +improvements. A little cockney village has sprung up on its rural bosom +and a third-rate boulevard leads from Santa Elisabetta to the Adriatic. +There are bitumen walks and gas-lamps, lodging-houses, shops and a +_teatro diurno_. The bathing-establishment is bigger than before, +and the restaurant as well; but it is a compensation perhaps that +the cuisine is no better. Such as it is, however, you won't scorn +occasionally to partake of it on the breezy platform under which bathers +dart and splash, and which looks out to where the fishing-boats, with +sails of orange and crimson, wander along the darkening horizon. The +beach at the Lido is still lonely and beautiful, and you can easily walk +away from the cockney village. The return to Venice in the sunset is +classical and indispensable, and those who at that glowing hour have +floated toward the towers that rise out of the lagoon will not easily +part with the impression. But you indulge in larger excursions--you go +to Burano and Torcello, to Malamocco and Chioggia. Torcello, like the +Lido, has been improved; the deeply interesting little cathedral of the +eighth century, which stood there on the edge of the sea, as touching +in its ruin, with its grassy threshold and its primitive mosaics, as the +bleached bones of a human skeleton washed ashore by the tide, has now +been restored and made cheerful, and the charm of the place, its strange +and suggestive desolation, has well-nigh departed. + +It will still serve you as a pretext, however, for a day on the lagoon, +especially as you will disembark at Burano and admire the wonderful +fisher-folk, whose good looks--and bad manners, I am sorry to say--can +scarcely be exaggerated. Burano is celebrated for the beauty of its +women and the rapacity of its children, and it is a fact that though +some of the ladies are rather bold about it every one of them shows +you a handsome face. The children assail you for coppers, and in their +desire to be satisfied pursue your gondola into the sea. Chioggia is +a larger Burano, and you carry away from either place a half-sad, +half-cynical, but altogether pictorial impression; the impression of +bright-coloured hovels, of bathing in stagnant canals, of young girls +with faces of a delicate shape and a susceptible expression, with +splendid heads of hair and complexions smeared with powder, faded yellow +shawls that hang like old Greek draperies, and little wooden shoes +that click as they go up and down the steps of the convex bridges; of +brown-cheeked matrons with lustrous tresses and high tempers, massive +throats encased with gold beads, and eyes that meet your own with a +certain traditional defiance. The men throughout the islands of +Venice are almost as handsome as the women; I have never seen so many +good-looking rascals. At Burano and Chioggia they sit mending their +nets, or lounge at the street corners, where conversation is always +high-pitched, or clamour to you to take a boat; and everywhere they +decorate the scene with their splendid colour--cheeks and throats as +richly brown as the sails of their fishing-smacks--their sea-faded +tatters which are always a "costume," their soft Venetian jargon, and +the gallantry with which they wear their hats, an article that nowhere +sits so well as on a mass of dense Venetian curls. If you are happy you +will find yourself, after a June day in Venice (about ten o'clock), on +a balcony that overhangs the Grand Canal, with your elbows on the broad +ledge, a cigarette in your teeth and a little good company beside you. +The gondolas pass beneath, the watery surface gleams here and there from +their lamps, some of which are coloured lanterns that move mysteriously +in the darkness. There are some evenings in June when there are too many +gondolas, too many lanterns, too many serenades in front of the hotels. +The serenading in particular is overdone; but on such a balcony as I +speak of you needn't suffer from it, for in the apartment behind +you--an accessible refuge--there is more good company, there are more +cigarettes. If you are wise you will step back there presently. + +1882. + + + + + +THE GRAND CANAL + + +The honour of representing the plan and the place at their best might +perhaps appear, in the City of St. Mark, properly to belong to the +splendid square which bears the patron's name and which is the centre +of Venetian life so far (this is pretty well all the way indeed) as +Venetian life is a matter of strolling and chaffering, of gossiping and +gaping, of circulating without a purpose, and of staring--too often with +a foolish one--through the shop-windows of dealers whose hospitality +makes their doorsteps dramatic, at the very vulgarest rubbish in all the +modern market. If the Grand Canal, however, is not quite technically a +"street," the perverted Piazza is perhaps even less normal; and I hasten +to add that I am glad not to find myself studying my subject under the +international arcades, or yet (I will go the length of saying) in the +solemn presence of the church. For indeed in that case I foresee I +should become still more confoundingly conscious of the stumbling-block +that inevitably, even with his first few words, crops up in the path +of the lover of Venice who rashly addresses himself to expression. +"Venetian life" is a mere literary convention, though it be an +indispensable figure. The words have played an effective part in the +literature of sensibility; they constituted thirty years ago the title +of Mr. Howells's delightful volume of impressions; but in using +them to-day one owes some frank amends to one's own lucidity. Let me +carefully premise therefore that so often as they shall again drop +from my pen, so often shall I beg to be regarded as systematically +superficial. + +Venetian life, in the large old sense, has long since come to an end, +and the essential present character of the most melancholy of cities +resides simply in its being the most beautiful of tombs. Nowhere else +has the past been laid to rest with such tenderness, such a sadness of +resignation and remembrance. Nowhere else is the present so alien, so +discontinuous, so like a crowd in a cemetery without garlands for +the graves. It has no flowers in its hands, but, as a compensation +perhaps--and the thing is doubtless more to the point--it has money +and little red books. The everlasting shuffle of these irresponsible +visitors in the Piazza is contemporary Venetian life. Everything else is +only a reverberation of that. The vast mausoleum has a turnstile at the +door, and a functionary in a shabby uniform lets you in, as per tariff, +to see how dead it is. From this _constatation_, this cold curiosity, +proceed all the industry, the prosperity, the vitality of the place. The +shopkeepers and gondoliers, the beggars and the models, depend upon +it for a living; they are the custodians and the ushers of the great +museum--they are even themselves to a certain extent the objects of +exhibition. It is in the wide vestibule of the square that the polygot +pilgrims gather most densely; Piazza San Marco is the lobby of the opera +in the intervals of the performance. The present fortune of Venice, the +lamentable difference, is most easily measured there, and that is why, +in the effort to resist our pessimism, we must turn away both from the +purchasers and from the vendors of _ricordi_. The _ricordi_ that we +prefer are gathered best where the gondola glides--best of all on the +noble waterway that begins in its glory at the Salute and ends in +its abasement at the railway station. It is, however, the cockneyfied +Piazzetta (forgive me, shade of St. Theodore--has not a brand new caf +begun to glare there, electrically, this very year?) that introduces us +most directly to the great picture by which the Grand Canal works its +first spell, and to which a thousand artists, not always with a talent +apiece, have paid their tribute. We pass into the Piazzetta to look down +the great throat, as it were, of Venice, and the vision must console us +for turning our back on St. Mark's. + +We have been treated to it again and again, of course, even if we have +never stirred from home; but that is only a reason the more for catching +at any freshness that may be left in the world of photography. It is in +Venice above all that we hear the small buzz of this vulgarising voice +of the familiar; yet perhaps it is in Venice too that the picturesque +fact has best mastered the pious secret of how to wait for us. Even +the classic Salute waits like some great lady on the threshold of her +saloon. She is more ample and serene, more seated at her door, than all +the copyists have told us, with her domes and scrolls, her scolloped +buttresses and statues forming a pompous crown, and her wide steps +disposed on the ground like the train of a robe. This fine air of the +woman of the world is carried out by the well-bred assurance with which +she looks in the direction of her old-fashioned Byzantine neighbour; +and the juxtaposition of two churches so distinguished and so different, +each splendid in its sort, is a sufficient mark of the scale and range +of Venice. However, we ourselves are looking away from St. Mark's--we +must blind our eyes to that dazzle; without it indeed there are +brightnesses and fascinations enough. We see them in abundance even +while we look away from the shady steps of the Salute. These steps are +cool in the morning, yet I don't know that I can justify my excessive +fondness for them any better than I can explain a hundred of the other +vague infatuations with which Venice sophisticates the spirit. Under +such an influence fortunately one need n't explain--it keeps account +of nothing but perceptions and affections. It is from the Salute steps +perhaps, of a summer morning, that this view of the open mouth of +the city is most brilliantly amusing. The whole thing composes as if +composition were the chief end of human institutions. The charming +architectural promontory of the Dogana stretches out the most graceful +of arms, balancing in its hand the gilded globe on which revolves the +delightful satirical figure of a little weathercock of a woman. This +Fortune, this Navigation, or whatever she is called--she surely needs no +name--catches the wind in the bit of drapery of which she has divested +her rotary bronze loveliness. On the other side of the Canal twinkles +and glitters the long row of the happy palaces which are mainly +expensive hotels. There is a little of everything everywhere, in +the bright Venetian air, but to these houses belongs especially the +appearance of sitting, across the water, at the receipt of custom, +of watching in their hypocritical loveliness for the stranger and the +victim. I call them happy, because even their sordid uses and their +vulgar signs melt somehow, with their vague sea-stained pinks and drabs, +into that strange gaiety of light and colour which is made up of the +reflection of superannuated things. The atmosphere plays over them like +a laugh, they are of the essence of the sad old joke. They are almost +as charming from other places as they are from their own balconies, +and share fully in that universal privilege of Venetian objects which +consists of being both the picture and the point of view. + +This double character, which is particularly strong in the Grand Canal, +adds a difficulty to any control of one's notes. The Grand Canal may +be practically, as in impression, the cushioned balcony of a high and +well-loved palace--the memory of irresistible evenings, of the +sociable elbow, of endless lingering and looking; or it may evoke the +restlessness of a fresh curiosity, of methodical inquiry, in a gondola +piled with references. There are no references, I ought to mention, in +the present remarks, which sacrifice to accident, not to completeness. +A rhapsody of Venice is always in order, but I think the catalogues +are finished. I should not attempt to write here the names of all the +palaces, even if the number of those I find myself able to remember in +the immense array were less insignificant. There are many I delight in +that I don't know, or at least don't keep, apart. Then there are the bad +reasons for preference that are better than the good, and all the sweet +bribery of association and recollection. These things, as one stands on +the Salute steps, are so many delicate fingers to pick straight out +of the row a dear little featureless house which, with its pale green +shutters, looks straight across at the great door and through the +very keyhole, as it were, of the church, and which I needn't call by +a name--a pleasant American name--that every one in Venice, these many +years, has had on grateful lips. It is the very friendliest house in all +the wide world, and it has, as it deserves to have, the most beautiful +position. It is a real _porto di mare_, as the gondoliers say--a port +within a port; it sees everything that comes and goes, and takes it all +in with practised eyes. Not a tint or a hint of the immense iridescence +is lost upon it, and there are days of exquisite colour on which it may +fancy itself the heart of the wonderful prism. We wave to it from the +Salute steps, which we must decidedly leave if we wish to get on, a +grateful hand across the water, and turn into the big white church of +Longhena--an empty shaft beneath a perfunctory dome--where an American +family and a German party, huddled in a corner upon a pair of benches, +are gazing, with a conscientiousness worthy of a better cause, at +nothing in particular. + +For there is nothing particular in this cold and conventional temple to +gaze at save the great Tintoretto of the sacristy, to which we quickly +pay our respects, and which we are glad to have for ten minutes to +ourselves. The picture, though full of beauty, is not the finest of the +master's; but it serves again as well as another to transport--there +is no other word--those of his lovers for whom, in far-away days when +Venice was an early rapture, this strange and mystifying painter was +almost the supreme revelation. The plastic arts may have less to say +to us than in the hungry years of youth, and the celebrated picture in +general be more of a blank; but more than the others any fine Tintoret +still carries us back, calling up not only the rich particular vision +but the freshness of the old wonder. Many things come and go, but this +great artist remains for us in Venice a part of the company of the mind. +The others are there in their obvious glory, but he is the only one for +whom the imagination, in our expressive modern phrase, sits up. "The +Marriage in Cana," at the Salute, has all his characteristic and +fascinating unexpectedness--the sacrifice of the figure of our Lord, +who is reduced to the mere final point of a clever perspective, and the +free, joyous presentation of all the other elements of the feast. +Why, in spite of this queer one-sidedness, does the picture give us no +impression of a lack of what the critics call reverence? For no other +reason that I can think of than because it happens to be the work of its +author, in whose very mistakes there is a singular wisdom. Mr. Ruskin +has spoken with sufficient eloquence of the serious loveliness of the +row of heads of the women on the right, who talk to each other as they +sit at the foreshortened banquet. There could be no better example +of the roving independence of the painter's vision, a real spirit of +adventure for which his subject was always a cluster of accidents; not +an obvious order, but a sort of peopled and agitated chapter of life, +in which the figures are submissive pictorial notes. These notes are all +there in their beauty and heterogeneity, and if the abundance is of a +kind to make the principle of selection seem in comparison timid, +yet the sense of "composition" in the spectator--if it happen to +exist--reaches out to the painter in peculiar sympathy. Dull must be the +spirit of the worker tormented in any field of art with that particular +question who is not moved to recognise in the eternal problem the high +fellowship of Tintoretto. + +If the long reach from this point to the deplorable iron bridge which +discharges the pedestrian at the Academy--or, more comprehensively, to +the painted and gilded Gothic of the noble Palazzo Foscari--is too much +of a curve to be seen at any one point as a whole, it represents the +better the arched neck, as it were, of the undulating serpent of which +the Canalazzo has the likeness. We pass a dozen historic houses, we note +in our passage a hundred component "bits," with the baffled sketcher's +sense, and with what would doubtless be, save for our intensely Venetian +fatalism, the baffled sketcher's temper. It is the early palaces, of +course, and also, to be fair, some of the late, if we could take them +one by one, that give the Canal the best of its grand air. The fairest +are often cheek-by-jowl with the foulest, and there are few, alas, so +fair as to have been completely protected by their beauty. The ages and +the generations have worked their will on them, and the wind and the +weather have had much to say; but disfigured and dishonoured as they +are, with the bruises of their marbles and the patience of their ruin, +there is nothing like them in the world, and the long succession of +their faded, conscious faces makes of the quiet waterway they overhang +a _promenade historique_ of which the lesson, however often we read it, +gives, in the depth of its interest, an incomparable dignity to Venice. +We read it in the Romanesque arches, crooked to-day in their very +curves, of the early middle-age, in the exquisite individual Gothic of +the splendid time, and in the cornices and columns of a decadence almost +as proud. These things at present are almost equally touching in their +good faith; they have each in their degree so effectually parted with +their pride. They have lived on as they could and lasted as they might, +and we hold them to no account of their infirmities, for even those of +them whose blank eyes to-day meet criticism with most submission are far +less vulgar than the uses we have mainly managed to put them to. We have +botched them and patched them and covered them with sordid signs; we +have restored and improved them with a merciless taste, and the best of +them we have made over to the pedlars. Some of the most striking objects +in the finest vistas at present are the huge advertisements of the +curiosity-shops. + +The antiquity-mongers in Venice have all the courage of their opinion, +and it is easy to see how well they know they can confound you with an +unanswerable question. What is the whole place but a curiosity-shop, and +what are you here for yourself but to pick up odds and ends? "We pick +them up _for_ you," say these honest Jews, whose prices are marked +in dollars, "and who shall blame us if, the flowers being pretty well +plucked, we add an artificial rose or two to the composition of the +bouquet?" They take care, in a word, that there be plenty of relics, and +their establishments are huge and active. They administer the antidote +to pedantry, and you can complain of them only if you never cross their +thresholds. If you take this step you are lost, for you have parted with +the correctness of your attitude. Venice becomes frankly from such a +moment the big depressing dazzling joke in which after all our sense +of her contradictions sinks to rest--the grimace of an over-strained +philosophy. It's rather a comfort, for the curiosity-shops are amusing. +You have bad moments indeed as you stand in their halls of humbug and, +in the intervals of haggling, hear through the high windows the soft +splash of the sea on the old water-steps, for you think with anger of +the noble homes that are laid waste in such scenes, of the delicate +lives that must have been, that might still be, led there. You +reconstruct the admirable house according to your own needs; leaning on +a back balcony, you drop your eyes into one of the little green gardens +with which, for the most part, such establishments are exasperatingly +blessed, and end by feeling it a shame that you yourself are not in +possession. (I take for granted, of course, that as you go and come you +are, in imagination, perpetually lodging yourself and setting up your +gods; for if this innocent pastime, this borrowing of the mind, be not +your favourite sport there is a flaw in the appeal that Venice makes +to you.) There may be happy cases in which your envy is tempered, or +perhaps I should rather say intensified, by real participation. If you +have had the good fortune to enjoy the hospitality of an old Venetian +home and to lead your life a little in the painted chambers that still +echo with one of the historic names, you have entered by the shortest +step into the inner spirit of the place. If it did n't savour of +treachery to private kindness I should like to speak frankly of one of +these delightful, even though alienated, structures, to refer to it as +a splendid example of the old palatial type. But I can only do so in +passing, with a hundred precautions, and, lifting the curtain at the +edge, drop a commemorative word on the success with which, in this +particularly happy instance, the cosmopolite habit, the modern sympathy, +the intelligent, flexible attitude, the latest fruit of time, adjust +themselves to the great gilded, relinquished shell and try to fill it +out. A Venetian palace that has not too grossly suffered and that is not +overwhelming by its mass makes almost any life graceful that may be +led in it. With cultivated and generous contemporary ways it reveals a +pre-established harmony. As you live in it day after day its beauty and +its interest sink more deeply into your spirit; it has its moods and +its hours and its mystic voices and its shifting expressions. If in +the absence of its masters you have happened to have it to yourself +for twenty-four hours you will never forget the charm of its haunted +stillness, late on the summer afternoon for instance, when the call of +playing children comes in behind from the campo, nor the way the old +ghosts seemed to pass on tip-toe on the marble floors. It gives you +practically the essence of the matter that we are considering, for +beneath the high balconies Venice comes and goes, and the particular +stretch you command contains all the characteristics. Everything has its +turn, from the heavy barges of merchandise, pushed by long poles and the +patient shoulder, to the floating pavilions of the great serenades, and +you may study at your leisure the admirable Venetian arts of managing a +boat and organising a spectacle. Of the beautiful free stroke with which +the gondola, especially when there are two oars, is impelled, you never, +in the Venetian scene, grow weary; it is always in the picture, and the +large profiled action that lets the standing rowers throw themselves +forward to a constant recovery has the double value of being, at the +fag-end of greatness, the only energetic note. The people from the +hotels are always afloat, and, at the hotel pace, the solitary gondolier +(like the solitary horseman of the old-fashioned novel) is, I confess, +a somewhat melancholy figure. Perched on his poop without a mate, he +re-enacts perpetually, in high relief, with his toes turned out, the +comedy of his odd and charming movement. He always has a little the +look of an absent-minded nursery-maid pushing her small charges in a +perambulator. + +But why should I risk too free a comparison, where this picturesque and +amiable class are concerned? I delight in their sun-burnt complexions +and their childish dialect; I know them only by their merits, and I am +grossly prejudiced in their favour. They are interesting and touching, +and alike in their virtues and their defects human nature is simplified +as with a big effective brush. Affecting above all is their dependence +on the stranger, the whimsical stranger who swims out of their ken, yet +whom Providence sometimes restores. The best of them at any rate are +in their line great artists. On the swarming feast-days, on the strange +feast-night of the Redentore, their steering is a miracle of ease. The +master-hands, the celebrities and winners of prizes--you may see them +on the private gondolas in spotless white, with brilliant sashes and +ribbons, and often with very handsome persons--take the right of way +with a pardonable insolence. They penetrate the crush of boats with +an authority of their own. The crush of boats, the universal sociable +bumping and squeezing, is great when, on the summer nights, the ladies +shriek with alarm, the city pays the fiddlers, and the illuminated +barges, scattering music and song, lead a long train down the Canal. The +barges used to be rowed in rhythmic strokes, but now they are towed by +the steamer. The coloured lamps, the vocalists before the hotels, are +not to my sense the greatest seduction of Venice; but it would be +an uncandid sketch of the Canalazzo that shouldn't touch them with +indulgence. Taking one nuisance with another, they are probably the +prettiest in the world, and if they have in general more magic for the +new arrival than for the old Venice-lover, they in any case, at their +best, keep up the immemorial tradition. The Venetians have had from the +beginning of time the pride of their processions and spectacles, and +it's a wonder how with empty pockets they still make a clever show. The +Carnival is dead, but these are the scraps of its inheritance. Vauxhall +on the water is of course more Vauxhall than ever, with the good fortune +of home-made music and of a mirror that reduplicates and multiplies. +The feast of the Redeemer--the great popular feast of the year--is a +wonderful Venetian Vauxhall. All Venice on this occasion takes to the +boats for the night and loads them with lamps and provisions. Wedged +together in a mass it sups and sings; every boat is a floating arbour, +a private _caf-concert_. Of all Christian commemorations it is the most +ingenuously and harmlessly pagan. Toward morning the passengers repair +to the Lido, where, as the sun rises, they plunge, still sociably, into +the sea. The night of the Redentore has been described, but it would be +interesting to have an account, from the domestic point of view, of its +usual morrow. It is mainly an affair of the Giudecca, however, which is +bridged over from the Zattere to the great church. The pontoons are laid +together during the day--it is all done with extraordinary celerity and +art--and the bridge is prolonged across the Canalazzo (to Santa Maria +Zobenigo), which is my only warrant for glancing at the occasion. We +glance at it from our palace windows; lengthening our necks a little, as +we look up toward the Salute, we see all Venice, on the July afternoon, +so serried as to move slowly, pour across the temporary footway. It is +a flock of very good children, and the bridged Canal is their toy. All +Venice on such occasions is gentle and friendly; not even all Venice +pushes anyone into the water. + +But from the same high windows we catch without any stretching of the +neck a still more indispensable note in the picture, a famous pretender +eating the bread of bitterness. This repast is served in the open air, +on a neat little terrace, by attendants in livery, and there is no +indiscretion in our seeing that the pretender dines. Ever since the +table d'hte in "Candide" Venice has been the refuge of monarchs in want +of thrones--she would n't know herself without her _rois en exil._ The +exile is agreeable and soothing, the gondola lets them down gently. Its +movement is an anodyne, its silence a philtre, and little by little it +rocks all ambitions to sleep. The proscript has plenty of leisure to +write his proclamations and even his memoirs, and I believe he has +organs in which they are published; but the only noise he makes in the +world is the harmless splash of his oars. He comes and goes along the +Canalazzo, and he might be much worse employed. He is but one of the +interesting objects it presents, however, and I am by no means sure +that he is the most striking. He has a rival, if not in the iron +bridge, which, alas, is within our range, at least--to take an immediate +example--in the Montecuculi Palace. Far-descended and weary, but +beautiful in its crooked old age, with its lovely proportions, its +delicate round arches, its carvings and its disks of marble, is the +haunted Montecuculi. Those who have a kindness for Venetian gossip like +to remember that it was once for a few months the property of Robert +Browning, who, however, never lived in it, and who died in the splendid +Rezzonico, the residence of his son and a wonderful cosmopolite +"document," which, as it presents itself, in an admirable position, but +a short way farther down the Canal, we can almost see, in spite of the +curve, from the window at which we stand. This great seventeenth century +pile, throwing itself upon the water with a peculiar florid assurance, +a certain upward toss of its cornice which gives it the air of a rearing +sea-horse, decorates immensely--and within, as well as without--the wide +angle that it commands. + +There is a more formal greatness in the high square Gothic Foscari, +just below it, one of the noblest creations of the fifteenth century, +a masterpiece of symmetry and majesty. Dedicated to-day to official +uses--it is the property of the State--it looks conscious of the +consideration it enjoys, and is one of the few great houses within our +range whose old age strikes us as robust and painless. It is visibly +"kept up"; perhaps it is kept up too much; perhaps I am wrong in +thinking so well of it. These doubts and fears course rapidly through my +mind--I am easily their victim when it is a question of architecture--as +they are apt to do to-day, in Italy, almost anywhere, in the presence +of the beautiful, of the desecrated or the neglected. We feel at such +moments as if the eye of Mr. Ruskin were upon us; we grow nervous and +lose our confidence. This makes me inevitably, in talking of Venice, +seek a pusillanimous safety in the trivial and the obvious. I am on +firm ground in rejoicing in the little garden directly opposite our +windows--it is another proof that they really show us everything--and in +feeling that the gardens of Venice would deserve a page to themselves. +They are infinitely more numerous than the arriving stranger can +suppose; they nestle with a charm all their own in the complications of +most back-views. Some of them are exquisite, many are large, and even +the scrappiest have an artful understanding, in the interest of colour, +with the waterways that edge their foundations. On the small canals, +in the hunt for amusement, they are the prettiest surprises of all. +The tangle of plants and flowers crowds over the battered walls, the +greenness makes an arrangement with the rosy sordid brick. Of all the +reflected and liquefied things in Venice, and the number of these is +countless, I think the lapping water loves them most. They are numerous +on the Canalazzo, but wherever they occur they give a brush to the +picture and in particular, it is easy to guess, give a sweetness to the +house. Then the elements are complete--the trio of air and water and of +things that grow. Venice without them would be too much a matter of the +tides and the stones. Even the little trellises of the _traghetti_ count +charmingly as reminders, amid so much artifice, of the woodland nature +of man. The vine-leaves, trained on horizontal poles, make a roof +of chequered shade for the gondoliers and ferrymen, who doze there +according to opportunity, or chatter or hail the approaching "fare." +There is no "hum" in Venice, so that their voices travel far; they +enter your windows and mingle even with your dreams. I beg the reader +to believe that if I had time to go into everything, I would go into the +_traghetti_, which have their manners and their morals, and which +used to have their piety. This piety was always a _madonnina_, the +protectress of the passage--a quaint figure of the Virgin with the red +spark of a lamp at her feet. The lamps appear for the most part to have +gone out, and the images doubtless have been sold for _bric-a-brac_. +The ferrymen, for aught I know, are converted to Nihilism--a faith +consistent happily with a good stroke of business. One of the figures +has been left, however--the Madonnetta which gives its name to a +_traghetto_ near the Rialto. But this sweet survivor is a carven stone +inserted ages ago in the corner of an old palace and doubtless difficult +of removal. _Pazienza_, the day will come when so marketable a relic +will also be extracted from its socket and purchased by the devouring +American. I leave that expression, on second thought, standing; but I +repent of it when I remember that it is a devouring American--a lady +long resident in Venice and whose kindnesses all Venetians, as well as +her country-people, know, who has rekindled some of the extinguished +tapers, setting up especially the big brave Gothic shrine, of painted +and gilded wood, which, on the top of its stout _palo_, sheds its +influence on the place of passage opposite the Salute. + +If I may not go into those of the palaces this devious discourse has +left behind, much less may I enter the great galleries of the Academy, +which rears its blank wall, surmounted by the lion of St. Mark, well +within sight of the windows at which we are still lingering. This +wondrous temple of Venetian art--for all it promises little from +without--overhangs, in a manner, the Grand Canal, but if we were so much +as to cross its threshold we should wander beyond recall. It contains, +in some of the most magnificent halls--where the ceilings have all +the glory with which the imagination of Venice alone could over-arch a +room--some of the noblest pictures in the world; and whether or not +we go back to them on any particular occasion for another look, it is +always a comfort to know that they are there, as the sense of them on +the spot is a part of the furniture of the mind--the sense of them close +at hand, behind every wall and under every cover, like the inevitable +reverse of a medal, of the side exposed to the air that reflects, +intensifies, completes the scene. In other words, as it was the +inevitable destiny of Venice to be painted, and painted with passion, so +the wide world of picture becomes, as we live there, and however much we +go about our affairs, the constant habitation of our thoughts. The truth +is, we are in it so uninterruptedly, at home and abroad, that there +is scarcely a pressure upon us to seek it in one place more than in +another. Choose your standpoint at random and trust the picture to come +to you. This is manifestly why I have not, I find myself conscious, said +more about the features of the Canalazzo which occupy the reach between +the Salute and the position we have so obstinately taken up. It is +still there before us, however, and the delightful little Palazzo Dario, +intimately familiar to English and American travellers, picks itself out +in the foreshortened brightness. The Dario is covered with the loveliest +little marble plates and sculptured circles; it is made up of exquisite +pieces--as if there had been only enough to make it small--so that it +looks, in its extreme antiquity, a good deal like a house of cards that +hold together by a tenure it would be fatal to touch. An old Venetian +house dies hard indeed, and I should add that this delicate thing, +with submission in every feature, continues to resist the contact of +generations of lodgers. It is let out in floors (it used to be let as +a whole) and in how many eager hands--for it is in great +requisition--under how many fleeting dispensations have we not known and +loved it? People are always writing in advance to secure it, as they +are to secure the Jenkins's gondolier, and as the gondola passes we +see strange faces at the windows--though it's ten to one we recognise +them--and the millionth artist coming forth with his traps at the +water-gate. The poor little patient Dario is one of the most flourishing +booths at the fair. + +The faces in the window look out at the great Sansovino--the splendid +pile that is now occupied by the Prefect. I feel decidedly that I +don't object as I ought to the palaces of the sixteenth and seventeenth +centuries. Their pretensions impose upon me, and the imagination peoples +them more freely than it can people the interiors of the prime. Was not +moreover this masterpiece of Sansovino once occupied by the Venetian +post-office, and thereby intimately connected with an ineffaceable first +impression of the author of these remarks? He had arrived, wondering, +palpitating, twenty-three years ago, after nightfall, and, the first +thing on the morrow, had repaired to the post-office for his letters. +They had been waiting a long time and were full of delayed interest, and +he returned with them to the gondola and floated slowly down the Canal. +The mixture, the rapture, the wonderful temple of the _poste restante_, +the beautiful strangeness, all humanised by good news--the memory of +this abides with him still, so that there always proceeds from the +splendid waterfront I speak of a certain secret appeal, something that +seems to have been uttered first in the sonorous chambers of youth. Of +course this association falls to the ground--or rather splashes into the +water--if I am the victim of a confusion. _Was_ the edifice in question +twenty-three years ago the post-office, which has occupied since, for +many a day, very much humbler quarters? I am afraid to take the proper +steps for finding out, lest I should learn that during these years I +have misdirected my emotion. A better reason for the sentiment, at any +rate, is that such a great house has surely, in the high beauty of its +tiers, a refinement of its own. They make one think of colosseums and +aqueducts and bridges, and they constitute doubtless, in Venice, the +most pardonable specimen of the imitative. I have even a timid kindness +for the huge Pesaro, far down the Canal, whose main reproach, more even +than the coarseness of its forms, is its swaggering size, its want +of consideration for the general picture, which the early examples so +reverently respect. The Pesaro is as far out of the frame as a modern +hotel, and the Cornaro, close to it, oversteps almost equally the +modesty of art. One more thing they and their kindred do, I must add, +for which, unfortunately, we can patronise them less. They make even the +most elaborate material civilisation of the present day seem woefully +shrunken and _bourgeois_, for they simply--I allude to the biggest +palaces--can't be lived in as they were intended to be. The modern +tenant may take in all the magazines, but he bends not the bow of +Achilles. He occupies the place, but he doesn't fill it, and he has +guests from the neighbouring inns with ulsters and Baedekers. We are +far at the Pesaro, by the way, from our attaching window, and we take +advantage of it to go in rather a melancholy mood to the end. The long +straight vista from the Foscari to the Rialto, the great middle stretch +of the Canal, contains, as the phrase is, a hundred objects of interest, +but it contains most the bright oddity of its general Deluge air. In all +these centuries it has never got over its resemblance to a flooded city; +for some reason or other it is the only part of Venice in which the +houses look as if the waters had overtaken them. Everywhere else they +reckon with them--have chosen them; here alone the lapping seaway seems +to confess itself an accident. + +{Illustration: PALAZZO MONCENIGO, VENICE} + +There are persons who hold this long, gay, shabby, spotty perspective, +in which, with its immense field of confused reflection, the houses have +infinite variety, the dullest expanse in Venice. It was not dull, we +imagine, for Lord Byron, who lived in the midmost of the three Mocenigo +palaces, where the writing-table is still shown at which he gave the +rein to his passions. For other observers it is sufficiently enlivened +by so delightful a creation as the Palazzo Loredan, once a masterpiece +and at present the Municipio, not to speak of a variety of other +immemorial bits whose beauty still has a degree of freshness. Some of +the most touching relics of early Venice are here--for it was here she +precariously clustered--peeping out of a submersion more pitiless than +the sea. As we approach the Rialto indeed the picture falls off and a +comparative commonness suffuses it. There is a wide paved walk on either +side of the Canal, on which the waterman--and who in Venice is not a +waterman?--is prone to seek repose. I speak of the summer days--it is +the summer Venice that is the visible Venice. The big tarry barges are +drawn up at the _fondamenta_, and the bare-legged boatmen, in faded blue +cotton, lie asleep on the hot stones. If there were no colour anywhere +else there would be enough in their tanned personalities. Half the low +doorways open into the warm interior of waterside drinking-shops, and +here and there, on the quay, beneath the bush that overhangs the door, +there are rickety tables and chairs. Where in Venice is there not the +amusement of character and of detail? The tone in this part is very +vivid, and is largely that of the brown plebeian faces looking out of +the patchy miscellaneous houses--the faces of fat undressed women and of +other simple folk who are not aware that they enjoy, from balconies once +doubtless patrician, a view the knowing ones of the earth come thousands +of miles to envy them. The effect is enhanced by the tattered clothes +hung to dry in the windows, by the sun-faded rags that flutter from the +polished balustrades--these are ivory-smooth with time; and the whole +scene profits by the general law that renders decadence and ruin +in Venice more brilliant than any prosperity. Decay is in this +extraordinary place golden in tint and misery _couleur de rose_. The +gondolas of the correct people are unmitigated sable, but the poor +market-boats from the islands are kaleidoscopic. + +The Bridge of the Rialto is a name to conjure with, but, honestly +speaking, it is scarcely the gem of the composition. There are of course +two ways of taking it--from the water or from the upper passage, where +its small shops and booths abound in Venetian character; but it mainly +counts as a feature of the Canal when seen from the gondola or even from +the awful _vaporetto_. The great curve of its single arch is much to +be commended, especially when, coming from the direction of the +railway-station, you see it frame with its sharp compass-line the +perfect picture, the reach of the Canal on the other side. But the backs +of the little shops make from the water a graceless collective hump, and +the inside view is the diverting one. The big arch of the bridge--like +the arches of all the bridges--is the waterman's friend in wet weather. +The gondolas, when it rains, huddle beside the peopled barges, and +the young ladies from the hotels, vaguely fidgeting, complain of the +communication of insect life. Here indeed is a little of everything, and +the jewellers of this celebrated precinct--they have their immemorial +row--make almost as fine a show as the fruiterers. It is a universal +market, and a fine place to study Venetian types. The produce of +the islands is discharged there, and the fishmongers announce their +presence. All one's senses indeed are vigorously attacked; the whole +place is violently hot and bright, all odorous and noisy. The churning +of the screw of the _vaporetto_ mingles with the other sounds--not +indeed that this offensive note is confined to one part of the Canal. +But Just here the little piers of the resented steamer are particularly +near together, and it seems somehow to be always kicking up the water. +As we go further down we see it stopping exactly beneath the glorious +windows of the Ca'd'Oro. It has chosen its position well, and who +shall gainsay it for having put itself under the protection of the +most romantic facade in Europe? The companionship of these objects is +a symbol; it expresses supremely the present and the future of Venice. +Perfect, in its prime, was the marble Ca'd'Oro, with the noble recesses +of its _loggie_, but even then it probably never "met a want," like the +successful _vaporetto_. If, however, we are not to go into the Museo +Civico--the old Museo Correr, which rears a staring renovated front +far down on the left, near the station, so also we must keep out of the +great vexed question of steam on the Canalazzo, just as a while since we +prudently kept out of the Accademia. These are expensive and complicated +excursions. It is obvious that if the _vaporetti_ have contributed to +the ruin of the gondoliers, already hard pressed by fate, and to that of +the palaces, whose foundations their waves undermine, and that if +they have robbed the Grand Canal of the supreme distinction of its +tranquillity, so on the other hand they have placed "rapid transit," in +the New York phrase, in everybody's reach, and enabled everybody--save +indeed those who wouldn't for the world--to rush about Venice as +furiously as people rush about New York. The suitability of this +consummation needn't be pointed out. + +Even we ourselves, in the irresistible contagion, are going so fast now +that we have only time to note in how clever and costly a fashion the +Museo Civico, the old Fondaco dei Turchi, has been reconstructed and +restored. It is a glare of white marble without, and a series of showy +majestic halls within, where a thousand curious mementos and relics of +old Venice are gathered and classified. Of its miscellaneous treasures +I fear I may perhaps frivolously prefer the series of its remarkable +living Longhis, an illustration of manners more copious than the +celebrated Carpaccio, the two ladies with their little animals and their +long sticks. Wonderful indeed today are the museums of Italy, where +the renovations and the _belle ordonnance_ speak of funds apparently +unlimited, in spite of the fact that the numerous custodians +frankly look starved. What is the pecuniary source of all this civic +magnificence--it is shown in a hundred other ways--and how do the +Italian cities manage to acquit themselves of expenses that would be +formidable to communities richer and doubtless less aesthetic? Who pays +the bills for the expressive statues alone, the general exuberance +of sculpture, with which every _piazzetta_ of almost every village +is patriotically decorated? Let us not seek an answer to the puzzling +question, but observe instead that we are passing the mouth of the +populous Canareggio, next widest of the waterways, where the race of +Shylock abides, and at the corner of which the big colourless church of +San Geremia stands gracefully enough on guard. The Canareggio, with its +wide lateral footways and humpbacked bridges, makes on the feast of St. +John an admirable noisy, tawdry theatre for one of the prettiest and the +most infantile of the Venetian processions. + +The rest of the course is a reduced magnificence, in spite of +interesting bits, of the battered pomp of the Pesaro and the Cornaro, +of the recurrent memories of royalty in exile which cluster about the +Palazzo Vendramin Calergi, once the residence of the Comte de Chambord +and still that of his half-brother, in spite too of the big Papadopoli +gardens, opposite the station, the largest private grounds in Venice, +but of which Venice in general mainly gets the benefit in the usual form +of irrepressible greenery climbing over walls and nodding at water. The +rococo church of the Scalzi is here, all marble and malachite, all a +cold, hard glitter and a costly, curly ugliness, and here too, opposite, +on the top of its high steps, is San Simeone Profeta, I won't say +immortalised, but unblushingly misrepresented, by the perfidious +Canaletto. I shall not stay to unravel the mystery of this prosaic +painter's malpractices; he falsified without fancy, and as he apparently +transposed at will the objects he reproduced, one is never sure of the +particular view that may have constituted his subject. It would look +exactly like such and such a place if almost everything were not +different. San Simeone Profeta appears to hang there upon the wall; but +it is on the wrong side of the Canal and the other elements quite fail +to correspond. One's confusion is the greater because one doesn't +know that everything may not really have changed, even beyond all +probability--though it's only in America that churches cross the street +or the river--and the mixture of the recognisable and the different +makes the ambiguity maddening, all the more that the painter is almost +as attaching as he is bad. Thanks at any rate to the white church, domed +and porticoed, on the top of its steps, the traveller emerging for +the first time upon the terrace of the railway-station seems to have a +Canaletto before him. He speedily discovers indeed even in the presence +of this scene of the final accents of the Canalazzo--there is a charm in +the old pink warehouses on the hot _fondamenta_--that he has something +much better. He looks up and down at the gathered gondolas; he has his +surprise after all, his little first Venetian thrill; and as the terrace +of the station ushers in these things we shall say no harm of it, though +it is not lovely. It is the beginning of his experience, but it is the +end of the Grand Canal. + +1892. + + + + + +VENICE: AN EARLY IMPRESSION + + +There would be much to say about that golden chain of historic cities +which stretches from Milan to Venice, in which the very names--Brescia, +Verona, Mantua, Padua--are an ornament to one's phrase; but I should +have to draw upon recollections now three years old and to make my short +story a long one. Of Verona and Venice only have I recent impressions, +and even to these must I do hasty justice. I came into Venice, just as +I had done before, toward the end of a summer's day, when the shadows +begin to lengthen and the light to glow, and found that the attendant +sensations bore repetition remarkably well. There was the same last +intolerable delay at Mestre, just before your first glimpse of the +lagoon confirms the already distinct sea-smell which has added speed to +the precursive flight of your imagination; then the liquid level, +edged afar off by its band of undiscriminated domes and spires, soon +distinguished and proclaimed, however, as excited and contentious heads +multiply at the windows of the train; then your long rumble on the +immense white railway-bridge, which, in spite of the invidious contrast +drawn, and very properly, by Mr. Ruskin between the old and the new +approach, does truly, in a manner, shine across the green lap of the +lagoon like a mighty causeway of marble; then the plunge into the +station, which would be exactly similar to every other plunge save for +one little fact--that the keynote of the great medley of voices borne +back from the exit is not "Cab, sir!" but "Barca, signore!" + +I do not mean, however, to follow the traveller through every phase of +his initiation, at the risk of stamping poor Venice beyond repair as the +supreme bugbear of literature; though for my own part I hold that to +a fine healthy romantic appetite the subject can't be too diffusely +treated. Meeting in the Piazza on the evening of my arrival a young +American painter who told me that he had been spending the summer just +where I found him, I could have assaulted him for very envy. He was +painting forsooth the interior of St. Mark's. To be a young American +painter unperplexed by the mocking, elusive soul of things and satisfied +with their wholesome light-bathed surface and shape; keen of eye; fond +of colour, of sea and sky and anything that may chance between them; of +old lace and old brocade and old furniture (even when made to order); of +time-mellowed harmonies on nameless canvases and happy contours in cheap +old engravings; to spend one's mornings in still, productive analysis +of the clustered shadows of the Basilica, one's afternoons anywhere, in +church or campo, on canal or lagoon, and one's evenings in star-light +gossip at Florian's, feeling the sea-breeze throb languidly between the +two great pillars of the Piazzetta and over the low black domes of the +church--this, I consider, is to be as happy as is consistent with the +preservation of reason. + +The mere use of one's eyes in Venice is happiness enough, and generous +observers find it hard to keep an account of their profits in this line. +Everything the attention touches holds it, keeps playing with it--thanks +to some inscrutable flattery of the atmosphere. Your brown-skinned, +white-shirted gondolier, twisting himself in the light, seems to you, +as you lie at contemplation beneath your awning, a perpetual symbol of +Venetian "effect." The light here is in fact a mighty magician and, with +all respect to Titian, Veronese and Tintoret, the greatest artist +of them all. You should see in places the material with which it +deals--slimy brick, marble battered and befouled, rags, dirt, decay. +Sea and sky seem to meet half-way, to blend their tones into a soft +iridescence, a lustrous compound of wave and cloud and a hundred +nameless local reflections, and then to fling the clear tissue against +every object of vision. You may see these elements at work everywhere, +but to see them in their intensity you should choose the finest day +in the month and have yourself rowed far away across the lagoon to +Torcello. Without making this excursion you can hardly pretend to +know Venice or to sympathise with that longing for pure radiance which +animated her great colourists. It is a perfect bath of light, and I +couldn't get rid of a fancy that we were cleaving the upper atmosphere +on some hurrying cloud-skiff. At Torcello there is nothing but the light +to see--nothing at least but a sort of blooming sand-bar intersected +by a single narrow creek which does duty as a canal and occupied by a +meagre cluster of huts, the dwellings apparently of market-gardeners +and fishermen, and by a ruinous church of the eleventh century. It is +impossible to imagine a more penetrating case of unheeded collapse. +Torcello was the mother-city of Venice, and she lies there now, a mere +mouldering vestige, like a group of weather-bleached parental bones left +impiously unburied. I stopped my gondola at the mouth of the shallow +inlet and walked along the grass beside a hedge to the low-browed, +crumbling cathedral. The charm of certain vacant grassy spaces, in +Italy, overfrowned by masses of brickwork that are honeycombed by the +suns of centuries, is something that I hereby renounce once for all the +attempt to express; but you may be sure that whenever I mention such a +spot enchantment lurks in it. + +A delicious stillness covered the little campo at Torcello; I remember +none so subtly audible save that of the Roman Campagna. There was +no life but the visible tremor of the brilliant air and the cries of +half-a-dozen young children who dogged our steps and clamoured for +coppers. These children, by the way, were the handsomest little brats in +the world, and, each was furnished with a pair of eyes that could only +have signified the protest of nature against the meanness of fortune. +They were very nearly as naked as savages, and their little bellies +protruded like those of infant cannibals in the illustrations of books +of travel; but as they scampered and sprawled in the soft, thick grass, +grinning like suddenly-translated cherubs and showing their hungry +little teeth, they suggested forcibly that the best assurance of +happiness in this world is to be found in the maximum of innocence and +the minimum of wealth. One small urchin--framed, if ever a child was, to +be the joy of an aristocratic mamma--was the most expressively beautiful +creature I had ever looked upon. He had a smile to make Correggio sigh +in his grave; and yet here he was running wild among the sea-stunted +bushes, on the lonely margin of a decaying world, in prelude to how +blank or to how dark a destiny? Verily nature is still at odds with +propriety; though indeed if they ever really pull together I fear nature +will quite lose her distinction. An infant citizen of our own republic, +straight-haired, pale-eyed and freckled, duly darned and catechised, +marching into a New England schoolhouse, is an object often seen and +soon forgotten; but I think I shall always remember with infinite tender +conjecture, as the years roll by, this little unlettered Eros of the +Adriatic strand. Yet all youthful things at Torcello were not cheerful, +for the poor lad who brought us the key of the cathedral was shaking +with an ague, and his melancholy presence seemed to point the moral of +forsaken nave and choir. The church, admirably primitive and curious, +reminded me of the two or three oldest churches of Rome--St. Clement +and St. Agnes. The interior is rich in grimly mystical mosaics of the +twelfth century and the patchwork of precious fragments in the pavement +not inferior to that of St. Mark's. But the terribly distinct Apostles +are ranged against their dead gold backgrounds as stiffly as grenadiers +presenting arms--intensely personal sentinels of a personal Deity. Their +stony stare seems to wait for ever vainly for some visible revival +of primitive orthodoxy, and one may well wonder whether it finds much +beguilement in idly-gazing troops of Western heretics--passionless even +in their heresy. + +I had been curious to see whether in the galleries and temples of Venice +I should be disposed to transpose my old estimates--to burn what I had +adored and adore what I had burned. It is a sad truth that one can stand +in the Ducal Palace for the first time but once, with the deliciously +ponderous sense of that particular half-hour's being an era in one's +mental history; but I had the satisfaction of finding at least--a great +comfort in a short stay--that none of my early memories were likely to +change places and that I could take up my admirations where I had left +them. I still found Carpaccio delightful, Veronese magnificent, Titian +supremely beautiful and Tintoret scarce to be appraised. I repaired +immediately to the little church of San Cassano, which contains the +smaller of Tintoret's two great Crucifixions; and when I had looked +at it a while I drew a long breath and felt I could now face any other +picture in Venice with proper self-possession. It seemed to me I had +advanced to the uttermost limit of painting; that beyond this another +art--inspired poetry--begins, and that Bellini, Veronese, Giorgione, and +Titian, all joining hands and straining every muscle of their genius, +reach forward not so far but that they leave a visible space in which +Tintoret alone is master. I well remember the exaltations to which +he lifted me when first I learned to know him; but the glow of that +comparatively youthful amazement is dead, and with it, I fear, +that confident vivacity of phrase of which, in trying to utter my +impressions, I felt less the magniloquence than the impotence. In +his power there are many weak spots, mysterious lapses and fitful +intermissions; but when the list of his faults is complete he still +remains to me the most _interesting_ of painters. His reputation rests +chiefly on a more superficial sort of merit--his energy, his unsurpassed +productivity, his being, as Thophile Gautier says, _le roi des +fougueux_. These qualities are immense, but the great source of his +impressiveness is that his indefatigable hand never drew a line that was +not, as one may say, a moral line. No painter ever had such breadth and +such depth; and even Titian, beside him, scarce figures as more than a +great decorative artist. Mr. Ruskin, whose eloquence in dealing with the +great Venetians sometimes outruns his discretion, is fond of speaking +even of Veronese as a painter of deep spiritual intentions. This, it +seems to me, is pushing matters too far, and the author of "The Rape +of Europa" is, pictorially speaking, no greater casuist than any other +genius of supreme good taste. Titian was assuredly a mighty poet, but +Tintoret--well, Tintoret was almost a prophet. Before his greatest works +you are conscious of a sudden evaporation of old doubts and dilemmas, +and the eternal problem of the conflict between idealism and realism +dies the most natural of deaths. In his genius the problem is +practically solved; the alternatives are so harmoniously interfused that +I defy the keenest critic to say where one begins and the other ends. +The homeliest prose melts into the most ethereal poetry--the literal and +the imaginative fairly confound their identity. + +This, however, is vague praise. Tintoret's great merit, to my mind, was +his unequalled distinctness of vision. When once he had conceived the +germ of a scene it defined itself to his imagination with an intensity, +an amplitude, an individuality of expression, which makes one's +observation of his pictures seem less an operation of the mind than +a kind of supplementary experience of life. Veronese and Titian are +content with a much looser specification, as their treatment of any +subject that the author of the Crucifixion at San Cassano has also +treated abundantly proves. There are few more suggestive contrasts than +that between the absence of a total character at all commensurate with +its scattered variety and brilliancy in Veronese's "Marriage of Cana," +at the Louvre, and the poignant, almost startling, completeness of +Tintoret's illustration of the theme at the Salute church. To compare +his "Presentation of the Virgin," at the Madonna dell' Orto, with +Titian's at the Academy, or his "Annunciation" with Titian's close at +hand, is to measure the essential difference between observation and +imagination. One has certainly not said all that there is to say for +Titian when one has called him an observer. _Il y mettait du sien_, +and I use the term to designate roughly the artist whose apprehension, +infinitely deep and strong when applied to the single figure or +to easily balanced groups, spends itself vainly on great dramatic +combinations--or rather leaves them ungauged. It was the whole scene +that Tintoret seemed to have beheld in a flash of inspiration intense +enough to stamp it ineffaceably on his perception; and it was the whole +scene, complete, peculiar, individual, unprecedented, that he committed +to canvas with all the vehemence of his talent. Compare his "Last +Supper," at San Giorgio--its long, diagonally placed table, its dusky +spaciousness, its scattered lamp-light and halo-light, its startled, +gesticulating figures, its richly realistic foreground--with the +customary formal, almost mathematical rendering of the subject, in which +impressiveness seems to have been sought in elimination rather than +comprehension. You get from Tintoret's work the impression that he +_felt_, pictorially, the great, beautiful, terrible spectacle of human +life very much as Shakespeare felt it poetically--with a heart that +never ceased to beat a passionate accompaniment to every stroke of +his brush. Thanks to this fact his works are signally grave, and their +almost universal and rapidly increasing decay doesn't relieve their +gloom. Nothing indeed can well be sadder than the great collection of +Tintorets at San Rocco. Incurable blackness is settling fast upon all of +them, and they frown at you across the sombre splendour of their great +chambers like gaunt twilight phantoms of pictures. To our children's +children Tintoret, as things are going, can be hardly more than a name; +and such of them as shall miss the tragic beauty, already so dimmed +and stained, of the great "Bearing of the Cross" in that temple of his +spirit will live and die without knowing the largest eloquence of art. +If you wish to add the last touch of solemnity to the place recall +as vividly as possible while you linger at San Rocco the painter's +singularly interesting portrait of himself, at the Louvre. The old +man looks out of the canvas from beneath a brow as sad as a sunless +twilight, with just such a stoical hopelessness as you might fancy him +to wear if he stood at your side gazing at his rotting canvases. It +isn't whimsical to read it as the face of a man who felt that he had +given the world more than the world was likely to repay. Indeed before +every picture of Tintoret you may remember this tremendous portrait with +profit. On one side the power, the passion, the illusion of his art; on +the other the mortal fatigue of his spirit. The world's knowledge of +him is so small that the portrait throws a doubly precious light on his +personality; and when we wonder vainly what manner of man he was, and +what were his purpose, his faith and his method, we may find forcible +assurance there that they were at any rate his life--one of the most +intellectually passionate ever led. + +Verona, which was my last Italian stopping-place, is in any conditions +a delightfully interesting city; but the kindness of my own memory of it +is deepened by a subsequent ten days' experience of Germany. I rose one +morning at Verona, and went to bed at night at Botzen! The statement +needs no comment, and the two places, though but fifty miles apart, are +as painfully dissimilar as their names. I had prepared myself for your +delectation with a copious tirade on German manners, German scenery, +German art and the German stage--on the lights and shadows of Innsbrck, +Munich, Nremberg and Heidelberg; but just as I was about to put pen +to paper I glanced into a little volume on these very topics lately +published by that famous novelist and moralist, M. Ernest Feydeau, +the fruit of a summer's observation at Homburg. This work produced a +reaction; and if I chose to follow M. Feydeau's own example when he +wishes to qualify his approbation I might call his treatise by any vile +name known to the speech of man. But I content myself with pronouncing +it superficial. I then reflect that my own opportunities for seeing and +judging were extremely limited, and I suppress my tirade, lest some more +enlightened critic should come and hang me with the same rope. Its sum +and substance was to have been that--superficially--Germany is ugly; +that Munich is a nightmare, Heidelberg a disappointment (in spite of its +charming castle) and even Nremberg not a joy for ever. But comparisons +are odious, and if Munich is ugly Verona is beautiful enough. You may +laugh at my logic, but will probably assent to my meaning. I carried +away from Verona a precious mental picture upon which I cast an +introspective glance whenever between Botzen and Strassburg the +oppression of external circumstance became painful. It was a lovely +August afternoon in the Roman arena--a ruin in which repair and +restoration have been so watchfully and plausibly practised that it +seems all of one harmonious antiquity. The vast stony oval rose high +against the sky in a single clear, continuous line, broken here and +there only by strolling and reclining loungers. The massive tiers +inclined in solid monotony to the central circle, in which a small +open-air theatre was in active operation. A small quarter of the great +slope of masonry facing the stage was roped off into an auditorium, in +which the narrow level space between the foot-lights and the lowest +step figured as the pit. Foot-lights are a figure of speech, for the +performance was going on in the broad glow of the afternoon, with +a delightful and apparently by no means misplaced confidence in the +good-will of the spectators. What the piece was that was deemed so +superbly able to shift for itself I know not--very possibly the same +drama that I remember seeing advertised during my former visit to +Verona; nothing less than _La Tremenda Giustizia di Dio_. If titles +are worth anything this product of the melodramatist's art might surely +stand upon its own legs. Along the tiers above the little group of +regular spectators was gathered a free-list of unauthorised observers, +who, although beyond ear-shot, must have been enabled by the generous +breadth of Italian gesture to follow the tangled thread of the piece. +It was all deliciously Italian--the mixture of old life and new, the +mountebank's booth (it was hardly more) grafted on the antique circus, +the dominant presence of a mighty architecture, the loungers and idlers +beneath the kindly sky and upon the sun-warmed stones. I never felt more +keenly the difference between the background to life in very old and +very new civilisations. There are other things in Verona to make it +a liberal education to be born there, though that it is one for +the contemporary Veronese I don't pretend to say. The Tombs of the +Scaligers, with their soaring pinnacles, their high-poised canopies, +their exquisite refinement and concentration of the Gothic idea, I can't +profess, even after much worshipful gazing, to have fully comprehended +and enjoyed. They seemed to me full of deep architectural meanings, such +as must drop gently into the mind one by one, after infinite tranquil +contemplation. But even to the hurried and preoccupied traveller the +solemn little chapel-yard in the city's heart, in which they stand +girdled by their great swaying curtain of linked and twisted iron, is +one of the most impressive spots in Italy. Nowhere else is such a wealth +of artistic achievement crowded into so narrow a space; nowhere else are +the daily comings and goings of men blessed by the presence of _manlier_ +art. Verona is rich furthermore in beautiful churches--several with +beautiful names: San Fermo, Santa Anastasia, San Zenone. This last is a +structure of high antiquity and of the most impressive loveliness. The +nave terminates in a double choir, that is a sub-choir or crypt into +which you descend and where you wander among primitive columns whose +variously grotesque capitals rise hardly higher than your head, and an +upper choral plane reached by broad stairways of the bravest effect. I +shall never forget the impression of majestic chastity that I received +from the great nave of the building on my former visit. I then decided +to my satisfaction that every church is from the devotional point of +view a solecism that has not something of a similar absolute felicity +of proportion; for strictly formal beauty seems best to express our +conception of spiritual beauty. The nobly serious character of San +Zenone is deepened by its single picture--a masterpiece of the most +serious of painters, the severe and exquisite Mantegna. + +{Illustration: THE AMPHITHEATRE, VERONA} + +1872 + + + + + +TWO OLD HOUSES AND THREE YOUNG WOMEN + + +There are times and places that come back yet again, but that, when the +brooding tourist puts out his hand to them, meet it a little slowly, or +even seem to recede a step, as if in slight fear of some liberty he may +take. Surely they should know by this time that he is capable of taking +none. He has his own way--he makes it all right. It now becomes just +a part of the charming solicitation that it presents precisely a +problem--that of giving the particular thing as much as possible without +at the same time giving it, as we say, away. There are considerations, +proprieties, a necessary indirectness--he must use, in short, a little +art. No necessity, however, more than this, makes him warm to his work, +and thus it is that, after all, he hangs his three pictures. + + +I + +The evening that was to give me the first of them was by no means the +first occasion of my asking myself if that inveterate "style" of which +we talk so much be absolutely conditioned--in dear old Venice and +elsewhere--on decrepitude. Is it the style that has brought about the +decrepitude, or the decrepitude that has, as it were, intensified +and consecrated the style? There is an ambiguity about it all that +constantly haunts and beguiles. Dear old Venice has lost her complexion, +her figure, her reputation, her self-respect; and yet, with it all, has +so puzzlingly not lost a shred of her distinction. Perhaps indeed the +case is simpler than it seems, for the poetry of misfortune is familiar +to us all, whereas, in spite of a stroke here and there of some happy +justice that charms, we scarce find ourselves anywhere arrested by the +poetry of a run of luck. The misfortune of Venice being, accordingly, at +every point, what we most touch, feel and see, we end by assuming it to +be of the essence of her dignity; a consequence, we become aware, by the +way, sufficiently discouraging to the general application or pretension +of style, and all the more that, to make the final felicity deep, the +original greatness must have been something tremendous. If it be the +ruins that are noble we have known plenty that were not, and moreover +there are degrees and varieties: certain monuments, solid survivals, +hold up their heads and decline to ask for a grain of your pity. Well, +one knows of course when to keep one's pity to oneself; yet one clings, +even in the face of the colder stare, to one's prized Venetian privilege +of making the sense of doom and decay a part of every impression. +Cheerful work, it may be said of course; and it is doubtless only in +Venice that you gain more by such a trick than you lose. What was most +beautiful is gone; what was next most beautiful is, thank goodness, +going--that, I think, is the monstrous description of the better part +of your thought. Is it really your fault if the place makes you want so +desperately to read history into everything? + +You do that wherever you turn and wherever you look, and you do it, +I should say, most of all at night. It comes to you there with longer +knowledge, and with all deference to what flushes and shimmers, that the +night is the real time. It perhaps even wouldn't take much to make you +award the palm to the nights of winter. This is certainly true for the +form of progression that is most characteristic, for every question +of departure and arrival by gondola. The little closed cabin of +this perfect vehicle, the movement, the darkness and the plash, the +indistinguishable swerves and twists, all the things you don't see and +all the things you do feel--each dim recognition and obscure arrest is +a possible throb of your sense of being floated to your doom, even when +the truth is simply and sociably that you are going out to tea. Nowhere +else is anything as innocent so mysterious, nor anything as mysterious +so pleasantly deterrent to protest. These are the moments when you are +most daringly Venetian, most content to leave cheap trippers and other +aliens the high light of the mid-lagoon and the pursuit of pink and +gold. The splendid day is good enough for _them_; what is best for you +is to stop at last, as you are now stopping, among clustered _pali_ and +softly-shifting poops and prows, at a great flight of water-steps that +play their admirable part in the general effect of a great entrance. +The high doors stand open from them to the paved chamber of a basement +tremendously tall and not vulgarly lighted, from which, in turn, mounts +the slow stone staircase that draws you further on. The great point is, +that if you are worthy of this impression at all, there isn't a single +item of it of which the association isn't noble. Hold to it fast that +there is no other such dignity of arrival as arrival by water. Hold to +it that to float and slacken and gently bump, to creep out of the low, +dark _felze_ and make the few guided movements and find the strong +crooked and offered arm, and then, beneath lighted palace-windows, pass +up the few damp steps on the precautionary carpet--hold to it that these +things constitute a preparation of which the only defect is that it may +sometimes perhaps really prepare too much. It's so stately that what +can come after?--it's so good in itself that what, upstairs, as we +comparative vulgarians say, can be better? Hold to it, at any rate, that +if a lady, in especial, scrambles out of a carriage, tumbles out of a +cab, flops out of a tram-car, and hurtles, projectile-like, out of +a "lightning-elevator," she alights from the Venetian conveyance as +Cleopatra may have stepped from her barge. Upstairs--whatever may be +yet in store for her--her entrance shall still advantageously enjoy +the support most opposed to the "momentum" acquired. The beauty of +the matter has been in the absence of all momentum--elsewhere so +scientifically applied to us, from behind, by the terrible life of our +day--and in the fact that, as the elements of slowness, the felicities +of deliberation, doubtless thus all hang together, the last of +calculable dangers is to enter a great Venetian room with a rush. + +Not the least happy note, therefore, of the picture I am trying to frame +is that there was absolutely no rushing; not only in the sense of a +scramble over marble floors, but, by reason of something dissuasive and +distributive in the very air of the place, a suggestion, under the +fine old ceilings and among types of face and figure abounding in the +unexpected, that here were many things to consider. Perhaps the simplest +rendering of a scene into the depths of which there are good grounds of +discretion for not sinking would be just this emphasis on the value of +the unexpected for such occasions--with due qualification, naturally, of +its degree. Unexpectedness pure and simple, it is needless to say, may +easily endanger any social gathering, and I hasten to add moreover +that the figures and faces I speak of were probably not in the least +unexpected to each other. The stage they occupied was a stage of +variety--Venice has ever been a garden of strange social flowers. It +is only as reflected in the consciousness of the visitor from +afar--brooding tourist even call him, or sharp-eyed bird on the +branch--that I attempt to give you the little drama; beginning with the +felicity that most appealed to him, the visible, unmistakable fact that +he was the only representative of his class. The whole of the rest of +the business was but what he saw and felt and fancied--what he was +to remember and what he was to forget. Through it all, I may say +distinctly, he clung to his great Venetian clue--the explanation of +everything by the historic idea. It was a high historic house, with such +a quantity of recorded past twinkling in the multitudinous candles that +one grasped at the idea of something waning and displaced, and might +even fondly and secretly nurse the conceit that what one was having was +just the very last. Wasn't it certainly, for instance, no mere illusion +that there is no appreciable future left for such manners--an urbanity +so comprehensive, a form so transmitted, as those of such a hostess and +such a host? The future is for a different conception of the graceful +altogether--so far as it's for a conception of the graceful at all. Into +that computation I shall not attempt to enter; but these representative +products of an antique culture, at least, and one of which the secret +seems more likely than not to be lost, were not common, nor indeed +was any one else--in the circle to which the picture most insisted on +restricting itself. + +Neither, on the other hand, was anyone either very beautiful or very +fresh: which was again, exactly, a precious "value" on an occasion +that was to shine most, to the imagination, by the complexity of its +references. Such old, old women with such old, old jewels; such ugly, +ugly ones with such handsome, becoming names; such battered, fatigued +gentlemen with such inscrutable decorations; such an absence of youth, +for the most part, in either sex--of the pink and white, the "bud" of +new worlds; such a general personal air, in fine, of being the worse for +a good deal of wear in various old ones. It was not a society--that was +clear--in which little girls and boys set the tune; and there was that +about it all that might well have cast a shadow on the path of even the +most successful little girl. Yet also--let me not be rudely inexact--it +was in honour of youth and freshness that we had all been convened. The +_fianailles_ of the last--unless it were the last but one--unmarried +daughter of the house had just been brought to a proper climax; the +contract had been signed, the betrothal rounded off--I'm not sure that +the civil marriage hadn't, that day, taken place. The occasion then had +in fact the most charming of heroines and the most ingenuous of heroes, +a young man, the latter, all happily suffused with a fair Austrian +blush. The young lady had had, besides other more or less shining recent +ancestors, a very famous paternal grandmother, who had played a great +part in the political history of her time and whose portrait, in the +taste and dress of 1830, was conspicuous in one of the rooms. The +grand-daughter of this celebrity, of royal race, was strikingly like her +and, by a fortunate stroke, had been habited, combed, curled in a +manner exactly to reproduce the portrait. These things were charming and +amusing, as indeed were several other things besides. The great Venetian +beauty of our period was there, and nature had equipped the great +Venetian beauty for her part with the properest sense of the suitable, +or in any case with a splendid generosity--since on the ideally suitable +_character_ of so brave a human symbol who shall have the last word? +This responsible agent was at all events the beauty in the world about +whom probably, most, the absence of question (an absence never wholly +propitious) would a little smugly and monotonously flourish: the one +thing wanting to the interest she inspired was thus the possibility +of ever discussing it. There were plenty of suggestive subjects round +about, on the other hand, as to which the exchange of ideas would by no +means necessarily have dropped. You profit to the full at such times by +all the old voices, echoes, images--by that element of the history of +Venice which represents all Europe as having at one time and another +revelled or rested, asked for pleasure or for patience there; which +gives you the place supremely as the refuge of endless strange secrets, +broken fortunes and wounded hearts. + + +II + +There had been, on lines of further or different speculation, a +young Englishman to luncheon, and the young Englishman had proved +"sympathetic"; so that when it was a question afterwards of some of the +more hidden treasures, the browner depths of the old churches, the case +became one for mutual guidance and gratitude--for a small afternoon tour +and the wait of a pair of friends in the warm little _campi_, at locked +doors for which the nearest urchin had scurried off to fetch the keeper +of the key. There are few brown depths to-day into which the light of +the hotels doesn't shine, and few hidden treasures about which +pages enough, doubtless, haven't already been printed: my business, +accordingly, let me hasten to say, is not now with the fond renewal of +any discovery--at least in the order of impressions most usual. +Your discovery may be, for that matter, renewed every week; the only +essential is the good luck--which a fair amount of practice has taught +you to count upon-of not finding, for the particular occasion, other +discoverers in the field. Then, in the quiet corner, with the closed +door--then in the presence of the picture and of your companion's +sensible emotion--not only the original happy moment, but everything +else, is renewed. Yet once again it can all come back. The old custode, +shuffling about in the dimness, jerks away, to make sure of his tip, the +old curtain that isn't much more modern than the wonderful work itself. +He does his best to create light where light can never be; but you have +your practised groping gaze, and in guiding the young eyes of your less +confident associate, moreover, you feel you possess the treasure. These +are the refined pleasures that Venice has still to give, these odd happy +passages of communication and response. + + +But the point of my reminiscence is that there were other communications +that day, as there were certainly other responses. I have forgotten +exactly what it was we were looking for--without much success--when we +met the three Sisters. Nothing requires more care, as a long knowledge +of Venice works in, than not to lose the useful faculty of getting lost. +I had so successfully done my best to preserve it that I could at that +moment conscientiously profess an absence of any suspicion of where we +might be. It proved enough that, wherever we were, we were where the +three sisters found us. This was on a little bridge near a big campo, +and a part of the charm of the matter was the theory that it was very +much out of the way. They took us promptly in hand--they were +only walking over to San Marco to match some coloured wool for the +manufacture of such belated cushions as still bloom with purple and +green in the long leisures of old palaces; and that mild errand could +easily open a parenthesis. The obscure church we had feebly imagined +we were looking for proved, if I am not mistaken, that of the sisters' +parish; as to which I have but a confused recollection of a large grey +void and of admiring for the first time a fine work of art of which I +have now quite lost the identity. This was the effect of the charming +beneficence of the three sisters, who presently were to give our +adventure a turn in the emotion of which everything that had preceded +seemed as nothing. It actually strikes me even as a little dim to have +been told by them, as we all fared together, that a certain low, wide +house, in a small square as to which I found myself without particular +association, had been in the far-off time the residence of George Sand. +And yet this was a fact that, though I could then only feel it must +be for another day, would in a different connection have set me richly +reconstructing. + +Madame Sand's famous Venetian year has been of late immensely in the +air--a tub of soiled linen which the muse of history, rolling her +sleeves well up, has not even yet quite ceased energetically and +publicly to wash. The house in question must have been the house +to which the wonderful lady betook herself when, in 1834, after the +dramatic exit of Alfred de Musset, she enjoyed that remarkable period +of rest and refreshment with the so long silent, the but recently +rediscovered, reported, extinguished, Doctor Pagello. As an old +Sandist--not exactly indeed of the _premire heure_, but of the fine +high noon and golden afternoon of the great career--I had been, though I +confess too inactively, curious as to a few points in the topography of +the eminent adventure to which I here allude; but had never got beyond +the little public fact, in itself always a bit of a thrill to the +Sandist, that the present Hotel Danieli had been the scene of its first +remarkable stages. I am not sure indeed that the curiosity I speak +of has not at last, in my breast, yielded to another form of +wonderment--truly to the rather rueful question of why we have so +continued to concern ourselves, and why the fond observer of the +footprints of genius is likely so to continue, with a body of +discussion, neither in itself and in its day, nor in its preserved and +attested records, at all positively edifying. The answer to such an +inquiry would doubtless reward patience, but I fear we can now glance at +its possibilities only long enough to say that interesting persons--so +they be of a sufficiently approved and established interest--render +in some degree interesting whatever happens to them, and give it an +importance even when very little else (as in the case I refer to) may +have operated to give it a dignity. Which is where I leave the issue of +further identifications. + +For the three sisters, in the kindest way in the world, had asked us if +we already knew their sequestered home and whether, in case we didn't, +we should be at all amused to see it. My own acquaintance with them, +though not of recent origin, had hitherto lacked this enhancement, at +which we both now grasped with the full instinct, indescribable enough, +of what it was likely to give. But how, for that matter, either, can I +find the right expression of what was to remain with us of this episode? +It is the fault of the sad-eyed old witch of Venice that she so easily +puts more into things that can pass under the common names that do for +them elsewhere. Too much for a rough sketch was to be seen and felt +in the home of the three sisters, and in the delightful and slightly +pathetic deviation of their doing us so simply and freely the honours +of it. What was most immediately marked was their resigned cosmopolite +state, the effacement of old conventional lines by foreign contact and +example; by the action, too, of causes full of a special interest, +but not to be emphasised perhaps--granted indeed they be named at +all--without a certain sadness of sympathy. If "style," in Venice, sits +among ruins, let us always lighten our tread when we pay her a visit. + +Our steps were in fact, I am happy to think, almost soft enough for a +death-chamber as we stood in the big, vague _sala_ of the three sisters, +spectators of their simplified state and their beautiful blighted rooms, +the memories, the portraits, the shrunken relics of nine Doges. If I +wanted a first chapter it was here made to my hand; the painter of life +and manners, as he glanced about, could only sigh--as he so frequently +has to--over the vision of so much more truth than he can use. What on +earth is the need to "invent," in the midst of tragedy and comedy that +never cease? Why, with the subject itself, all round, so inimitable, +condemn the picture to the silliness of trying not to be aware of it? +The charming lonely girls, carrying so simply their great name and +fallen fortunes, the despoiled _decaduta_ house, the unfailing Italian +grace, the space so out of scale with actual needs, the absence of +books, the presence of ennui, the sense of the length of the hours and +the shortness of everything else--all this was a matter not only for a +second chapter and a third, but for a whole volume, a _dnoment_ and a +sequel. + +This time, unmistakably, it _was_ the last--Wordsworth's stately +"shade of that which once was great"; and it was _almost_ as if our +distinguished young friends had consented to pass away slowly in order +to treat us to the vision. Ends are only ends in truth, for the painter +of pictures, when they are more or less conscious and prolonged. One +of the sisters had been to London, whence she had brought back the +impression of having seen at the British Museum a room exclusively +filled with books and documents devoted to the commemoration of her +family. She must also then have encountered at the National Gallery +the exquisite specimen of an early Venetian master in which one of her +ancestors, then head of the State, kneels with so sweet a dignity before +the Virgin and Child. She was perhaps old enough, none the less, to have +seen this precious work taken down from the wall of the room in which +we sat and--on terms so far too easy--carried away for ever; and not +too young, at all events, to have been present, now and then, when her +candid elders, enlightened too late as to what their sacrifice might +really have done for them, looked at each other with the pale hush of +the irreparable. We let ourselves note that these were matters to put a +great deal of old, old history into sweet young Venetian faces. + + +III + +In Italy, if we come to that, this particular appearance is far from +being only in the streets, where we are apt most to observe it--in +countenances caught as we pass and in the objects marked by the +guide-books with their respective stellar allowances. It is behind +the walls of the houses that old, old history is thick and that the +multiplied stars of Baedeker might often best find their application. +The feast of St. John the Baptist is the feast of the year in Florence, +and it seemed to me on that night that I could have scattered about me a +handful of these signs. I had the pleasure of spending a couple of hours +on a signal high terrace that overlooks the Arno, as well as in the +galleries that open out to it, where I met more than ever the pleasant +curious question of the disparity between the old conditions and the new +manners. Make our manners, we moderns, as good as we can, there is still +no getting over it that they are not good enough for many of the great +places. This was one of those scenes, and its greatness came out to the +full into the hot Florentine evening, in which the pink and golden +fires of the pyrotechnics arranged on Ponte Carraja--the occasion of our +assembly--lighted up the large issue. The "good people" beneath were a +huge, hot, gentle, happy family; the fireworks on the bridge, kindling +river as well as sky, were delicate and charming; the terrace connected +the two wings that give bravery to the front of the palace, and the +close-hung pictures in the rooms, open in a long series, offered to a +lover of quiet perambulation an alternative hard to resist. + +Wherever he stood--on the broad loggia, in the cluster of company, among +bland ejaculations and liquefied ices, or in the presence of the mixed +masters that led him from wall to wall--such a seeker for the spirit of +each occasion could only turn it over that in the first place this was +an intenser, finer little Florence than ever, and that in the second +the testimony was again wonderful to former fashions and ideas. What +did they do, in the other time, the time of so much smaller a society, +smaller and fewer fortunes, more taste perhaps as to some particulars, +but fewer tastes, at any rate, and fewer habits and wants--what did they +do with chambers so multitudinous and so vast? Put their "state" at its +highest--and we know of many ways in which it must have broken down--how +did they live in them without the aid of variety? How did they, in +minor communities in which every one knew every one, and every one's +impression and effect had been long, as we say, discounted, find +representation and emulation sufficiently amusing? Much of the charm of +thinking of it, however, is doubtless that we are not able to say. +This leaves us with the conviction that does them most honour: the old +generations built and arranged greatly for the simple reason that they +liked it, and they could bore themselves--to say nothing of each other, +when it came to that--better in noble conditions than in mean ones. + +It was not, I must add, of the far-away Florentine age that I most +thought, but of periods more recent and of which the sound and beautiful +house more directly spoke. If one had always been homesick for the +Arno-side of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, here was a +chance, and a better one than ever, to taste again of the cup. Many of +the pictures--there was a charming quarter of an hour when I had them +to myself--were bad enough to have passed for good in those delightful +years. Shades of Grand-Dukes encompassed me--Dukes of the pleasant later +sort who weren't really grand. There was still the sense of having come +too late--yet not too late, after all, for this glimpse and this dream. +My business was to people the place--its own business had never been to +save us the trouble of understanding it. And then the deepest spell of +all was perhaps that just here I was supremely out of the way of the so +terribly actual Florentine question. This, as all the world knows, is +a battle-ground, to-day, in many journals, with all Italy practically +pulling on one side and all England, America and Germany pulling on the +other: I speak of course of the more or less articulate opinion. The +"improvement," the rectification of Florence is in the air, and the +problem of the particular ways in which, given such desperately delicate +cases, these matters should be understood. The little treasure-city is, +if there ever was one, a delicate case--more delicate perhaps than any +other in the world save that of our taking on ourselves to persuade +the Italians that they mayn't do as they like with their own. They so +absolutely may that I profess I see no happy issue from the fight. It +will take more tact than our combined tactful genius may at all probably +muster to convince them that their own is, by an ingenious logic, much +rather _ours_. It will take more subtlety still to muster for them that +dazzling show of examples from which they may learn that what in general +is "ours" shall appear to them as a rule a sacrifice to beauty and a +triumph of taste. The situation, to the truly analytic mind, offers in +short, to perfection, all the elements of despair; and I am afraid that +if I hung back, at the Corsini palace, to woo illusions and invoke +the irrelevant, it was because I could think, in the conditions, of no +better way to meet the acute responsibility of the critic than just to +shirk it. + +{1899.} + + + + + +CASA ALVISI + + +Invited to "introduce" certain pages of cordial and faithful +reminiscence from another hand, {1} + +{1} "Browning in Venice," being Recollections of the late Katharine +De Kay Bronson, with a Prefatory Note by H. J. (_Cornhill Magazine_, +February, 1902).} + +in which a frankly predominant presence seems to live again, I undertook +that office with an interest inevitably somewhat sad--so passed and gone +to-day is so much of the life suggested. Those who fortunately knew Mrs. +Bronson will read into her notes still more of it--more of her subject, +more of herself too, and of many things--than she gives, and some may +well even feel tempted to do for her what she has done here for +her distinguished friend. In Venice, during a long period, for many +pilgrims, Mrs. Arthur Bronson, originally of New York, was, so far as +society, hospitality, a charming personal welcome were concerned, almost +in sole possession; she had become there, with time, quite the prime +representative of those private amenities which the Anglo-Saxon abroad +is apt to miss just in proportion as the place visited is publicly +wonderful, and in which he therefore finds a value twice as great as at +home. Mrs. Bronson really earned in this way the gratitude of mingled +generations and races. She sat for twenty years at the wide mouth, as +it were, of the Grand Canal, holding out her hand, with endless +good-nature, patience, charity, to all decently accredited petitioners, +the incessant troop of those either bewilderedly making or fondly +renewing acquaintance with the dazzling city. + +{Illustration: CASA ALVISI, VENICE} + +Casa Alvisi is directly opposite the high, broad-based florid church +of S. Maria della Salute--so directly that from the balcony over the +water-entrance your eye, crossing the canal, seems to find the key-hole +of the great door right in a line with it; and there was something in +this position that for the time made all Venice-lovers think of the +genial _padrona_ as thus levying in the most convenient way the toll of +curiosity and sympathy. Every one passed, every one was seen to pass, +and few were those not seen to stop and to return. The most generous of +hostesses died a year ago at Florence; her house knows her no more--it +had ceased to do so for some time before her death; and the long, +pleased procession--the charmed arrivals, the happy sojourns at anchor, +the reluctant departures that made Ca' Alvisi, as was currently said, +a social _porto di mare_--is, for remembrance and regret, already a +possession of ghosts; so that, on the spot, at present, the attention +ruefully averts itself from the dear little old faded but once +familiarly bright faade, overtaken at last by the comparatively vulgar +uses that are doing their best to "paint out" in Venice, right and +left, by staring signs and other vulgarities, the immemorial note of +distinction. The house, in a city of palaces, was small, but the tenant +clung to her perfect, her inclusive position--the one right place that +gave her a better command, as it were, than a better house obtained by +a harder compromise; not being fond, moreover, of spacious halls and +massive treasures, but of compact and familiar rooms, in which her +remarkable accumulation of minute and delicate Venetian objects could +show. She adored--in the way of the Venetian, to which all her taste +addressed itself--the small, the domestic and the exquisite; so that she +would have given a Tintoretto or two, I think, without difficulty, for +a cabinet of tiny gilded glasses or a dinner-service of the right old +silver. + +The general receptacle of these multiplied treasures played at any rate, +through the years, the part of a friendly private-box at the constant +operatic show, a box at the best point of the best tier, with the +cushioned ledge of its front raking the whole scene and with its +withdrawing rooms behind for more detached conversation; for easy--when +not indeed slightly difficult--polyglot talk, artful _bibite_, artful +cigarettes too, straight from the hand of the hostess, who could do all +that belonged to a hostess, place people in relation and keep them so, +take up and put down the topic, cause delicate tobacco and little +gilded glasses to circulate, without ever leaving her sofa-cushions or +intermitting her good-nature. She exercised in these conditions, with +never a block, as we say in London, in the traffic, with never an +admission, an acceptance of the least social complication, her positive +genius for easy interest, easy sympathy, easy friendship. It was as if, +at last, she had taken the human race at large, quite irrespective of +geography, for her neighbours, with neighbourly relations as a matter +of course. These things, on her part, had at all events the greater +appearance of ease from their having found to their purpose--and as if +the very air of Venice produced them--a cluster of forms so light and +immediate, so pre-established by picturesque custom. The old bright +tradition, the wonderful Venetian legend had appealed to her from the +first, closing round her house and her well-plashed water-steps, where +the waiting gondolas were thick, quite as if, actually, the ghost of +the defunct Carnival--since I have spoken of ghosts--still played some +haunting part. + +Let me add, at the same time, that Mrs. Bronson's social facility, which +was really her great refuge from importunity, a defence with serious +thought and serious feeling quietly cherished behind it, had its +discriminations as well as its inveteracies, and that the most marked +of all these, perhaps, was her attachment to Robert Browning. Nothing in +all her beneficent life had probably made her happier than to have found +herself able to minister, each year, with the returning autumn, to his +pleasure and comfort. Attached to Ca' Alvisi, on the land side, is a +somewhat melancholy old section of a Giustiniani palace, which she had +annexed to her own premises mainly for the purpose of placing it, in +comfortable guise, at the service of her friends. She liked, as she +professed, when they were the real thing, to have them under her hand; +and here succeeded each other, through the years, the company of the +privileged and the more closely domesticated, who liked, harmlessly, to +distinguish between themselves and outsiders. Among visitors partaking +of this pleasant provision Mr. Browning was of course easily first. But +I must leave her own pen to show him as her best years knew him. +The point was, meanwhile, that if her charity was great even for the +outsider, this was by reason of the inner essence of it--her perfect +tenderness for Venice, which she always recognised as a link. That was +the true principle of fusion, the key to communication. She communicated +in proportion--little or much, measuring it as she felt people more +responsive or less so; and she expressed herself, or in other words her +full affection for the place, only to those who had most of the same +sentiment. The rich and interesting form in which she found it in +Browning may well be imagined--together with the quite independent +quantity of the genial at large that she also found; but I am not sure +that his favour was not primarily based on his paid tribute of such +things as "Two in a Gondola" and "A Toccata of Galuppi." He had more +ineffaceably than anyone recorded his initiation from of old. + +She was thus, all round, supremely faithful; yet it was perhaps after +all with the very small folk, those to the manner born, that she made +the easiest terms. She loved, she had from the first enthusiastically +adopted, the engaging Venetian people, whose virtues she found touching +and their infirmities but such as appeal mainly to the sense of humour +and the love of anecdote; and she befriended and admired, she studied +and spoiled them. There must have been a multitude of whom it would +scarce be too much to say that her long residence among them was their +settled golden age. When I consider that they have lost her now I fairly +wonder to what shifts they have been put and how long they may not have +to wait for such another messenger of Providence. She cultivated their +dialect, she renewed their boats, she piously relighted--at the top of +the tide-washed _pali_ of traghetto or lagoon--the neglected lamp of the +tutelary Madonnetta; she took cognisance of the wives, the children, the +accidents, the troubles, as to which she became, perceptibly, the most +prompt, the established remedy. On lines where the amusement was happily +less one-sided she put together in dialect many short comedies, dramatic +proverbs, which, with one of her drawing-rooms permanently arranged as +a charming diminutive theatre, she caused to be performed by the +young persons of her circle--often, when the case lent itself, by the +wonderful small offspring of humbler friends, children of the Venetian +lower class, whose aptitude, teachability, drollery, were her constant +delight. It was certainly true that an impression of Venice as humanly +sweet might easily found itself on the frankness and quickness and +amiability of these little people. They were at least so much to +the good; for the philosophy of their patroness was as Venetian as +everything else; helping her to accept experience without bitterness +and to remain fresh, even in the fatigue which finally overtook her, for +pleasant surprises and proved sincerities. She was herself sincere to +the last for the place of her predilection; inasmuch as though she had +arranged herself, in the later time--and largely for the love of "Pippa +Passes"--an alternative refuge at Asolo, she absented herself from +Venice with continuity only under coercion of illness. + +At Asolo, periodically, the link with Browning was more confirmed than +weakened, and there, in old Venetian territory, and with the invasion +of visitors comparatively checked, her preferentially small house became +again a setting for the pleasure of talk and the sense of Italy. It +contained again its own small treasures, all in the pleasant key of the +homelier Venetian spirit. The plain beneath it stretched away like a +purple sea from the lower cliffs of the hills, and the white _campanili_ +of the villages, as one was perpetually saying, showed on the expanse +like scattered sails of ships. The rumbling carriage, the old-time, +rattling, red-velveted carriage of provincial, rural Italy, delightful +and quaint, did the office of the gondola; to Bassano, to Treviso, +to high-walled Castelfranco, all pink and gold, the home of the great +Giorgione. Here also memories cluster; but it is in Venice again that +her vanished presence is most felt, for there, in the real, or certainly +the finer, the more sifted Cosmopolis, it falls into its place among +the others evoked, those of the past seekers of poetry and dispensers +of romance. It is a fact that almost every one interesting, appealing, +melancholy, memorable, odd, seems at one time or another, after many +days and much life, to have gravitated to Venice by a happy instinct, +settling in it and treating it, cherishing it, as a sort of repository +of consolations; all of which to-day, for the conscious mind, is mixed +with its air and constitutes its unwritten history. The deposed, the +defeated, the disenchanted, the wounded, or even only the bored, have +seemed to find there something that no other place could give. But +such people came for themselves, as we seem to see them--only with +the egotism of their grievances and the vanity of their hopes. Mrs. +Bronson's case was beautifully different--she had come altogether for +others. + + + + + +FROM CHAMBRY TO MILAN + + +Your truly sentimental tourist will never take it from any occasion that +there is absolutely nothing for him, and it was at Chambry--but four +hours from Geneva--that I accepted the situation and decided there +might be mysterious delights in entering Italy by a whizz through an +eight-mile tunnel, even as a bullet through the bore of a gun. I found +my reward in the Savoyard landscape, which greets you betimes with the +smile of anticipation. If it is not so Italian as Italy it is at least +more Italian than anything _but_ Italy--more Italian, too, I should +think, than can seem natural and proper to the swarming red-legged +soldiery who so publicly proclaim it of the empire of M. Thiers. The +light and the complexion of things had to my eyes not a little of that +mollified depth last loved by them rather further on. It was simply +perhaps that the weather was hot and the mountains drowsing in that +iridescent haze that I have seen nearer home than at Chambry. But the +vegetation, assuredly, had an all but Transalpine twist and curl, and +the classic wayside tangle of corn and vines left nothing to be desired +in the line of careless grace. Chambry as a town, however, constitutes +no foretaste of the monumental cities. There is shabbiness and +shabbiness, the fond critic of such things will tell you; and that of +the ancient capital of Savoy lacks style. I found a better pastime, +however, than strolling through the dark dull streets in quest of +effects that were not forthcoming. The first urchin you meet will +show you the way to Les Charmettes and the Maison Jean-Jacques. A +very pleasant way it becomes as soon as it leaves the town--a winding, +climbing by-road, bordered with such a tall and sturdy hedge as to +give it the air of an English lane--if you can fancy an English lane +introducing you to the haunts of a Madame de Warens. + +The house that formerly sheltered this lady's singular mnage stands on +a hillside above the road, which a rapid path connects with the little +grass-grown terrace before it. It is a small shabby, homely dwelling, +with a certain reputable solidity, however, and more of internal +spaciousness than of outside promise. The place is shown by an elderly +competent dame who points out the very few surviving objects which you +may touch with the reflection--complacent in whatsoever degree suits +you--that they have known the familiarity of Rousseau's hand. It was +presumably a meagrely-appointed house, and I wondered that on such +scanty features so much expression should linger. But the structure has +an ancient ponderosity, and the dust of the eighteenth century seems +to lie on its worm-eaten floors, to cling to the faded old _papiers +ramages_ on the walls and to lodge in the crevices of the brown wooden +ceilings. Madame de Warens's bed remains, with the narrow couch of +Jean-Jacques as well, his little warped and cracked yellow spinet, and +a battered, turnip-shaped silver timepiece, engraved with its master's +name--its primitive tick as extinct as his passionate heart-beats. It +cost me, I confess, a somewhat pitying acceleration of my own to see +this intimately personal relic of the _genius loci_--for it had dwelt; +in his waistcoat-pocket, than which there is hardly a material point +in space nearer to a man's consciousness--tossed so the dog's-eared +visitors' record or _livre de cuisine_ recently denounced by Madame +George Sand. In fact the place generally, in so far as some faint +ghostly presence of its famous inmates seems to linger there, is by no +means exhilarating. Coppet and Ferney tell, if not of pure happiness, at +least of prosperity and, honour, wealth and success. But Les Charmettes +is haunted by ghosts unclean and forlorn. The place tells of poverty, +perversity, distress. A good deal of clever modern talent in France has +been employed in touching up the episode of which it was the scene and +tricking it out in idyllic love-knots. But as I stood on the charming +terrace I have mentioned--a little jewel of a terrace, with grassy flags +and a mossy parapet, and an admirable view of great swelling violet +hills--stood there reminded how much sweeter Nature is than man, the +story looked rather wan and unlovely beneath these literary decorations, +and I could pay it no livelier homage than is implied in perfect pity. +Hero and heroine have become too much creatures of history to take up +attitudes as part of any poetry. But, not to moralise too sternly for +a tourist between trains, I should add that, as an illustration, to be +inserted mentally in the text of the "Confessions," a glimpse of Les +Charmettes is pleasant enough. It completes the rare charm of good +autobiography to behold with one's eyes the faded and battered +background of the story; and Rousseau's narrative is so incomparably +vivid and forcible that the sordid little house at Chambry seems of +a hardly deeper shade of reality than so many other passages of his +projected truth. + +If I spent an hour at Les Charmettes, fumbling thus helplessly with +the past, I recognised on the morrow how strongly the Mont Cenis Tunnel +smells of the time to come. As I passed along the Saint-Gothard highway +a couple of months since, I perceived, half up the Swiss ascent, a group +of navvies at work in a gorge beneath the road. They had laid bare a +broad surface of granite and had punched in the centre of it a round +black cavity, of about the dimensions, as it seemed to me, of a +soup-plate. This was to attain its perfect development some eight years +hence. The Mont Cenis may therefore be held to have set a fashion which +will be followed till the highest Himalaya is but the ornamental apex or +snow-capped gable-tip of some resounding fuliginous corridor. The tunnel +differs but in length from other tunnels; you spend half an hour in it. +But you whirl out into the blest peninsula, and as you look back seem to +see the mighty mass shrug its shoulders over the line, the mere turn +of a dreaming giant in his sleep. The tunnel is certainly not a poetic +object, out there is no perfection without its beauty; and as you +measure the long rugged outline of the pyramid of which it forms the +base you accept it as the perfection of a short cut. Twenty-four hours +from Paris to Turin is speed for the times--speed which may content us, +at any rate, until expansive Berlin has succeeded in placing itself at +thirty-six from Milan. + +To enter Turin then of a lovely August afternoon was to find a city of +arcades, of pink and yellow stucco, of innumerable cafes, of blue-legged +officers, of ladies draped in the North-Italian mantilla. An old friend +of Italy coming back to her finds an easy waking for dormant memories. +Every object is a reminder and every reminder a thrill. Half an hour +after my arrival, as I stood at my window, which overhung the great +square, I found the scene, within and without, a rough epitome of every +pleasure and every impression I had formerly gathered from Italy: the +balcony and the Venetian-blind, the cool floor of speckled concrete, the +lavish delusions of frescoed wall and ceiling, the broad divan framed +for the noonday siesta, the massive medieval Castello in mid-piazza, +with its shabby rear and its pompous Palladian front, the brick +campaniles beyond, the milder, yellower light, the range of colour, the +suggestion of sound. Later, beneath the arcades, I found many an +old acquaintance: beautiful officers, resplendent, slow-strolling, +contemplative of female beauty; civil and peaceful dandies, hardly less +gorgeous, with that religious faith in moustache and shirt-front which +distinguishes the _belle jeunesse of Italy_; ladies with heads artfully +shawled in Spanish-looking lace, but with too little art--or too much +nature at least--in the region of the bodice; well-conditioned young +_abbati_ with neatly drawn stockings. These indeed are not objects of +first-rate interest, and with such Turin is rather meagrely furnished. +It has no architecture, no churches, no monuments, no romantic +street-scenery. It has the great votive temple of the Superga, which +stands on a high hilltop above the city, gazing across at Monte Rosa and +lifting its own fine dome against the sky with no contemptible art. But +when you have seen the Superga from the quay beside the Po, a skein of a +few yellow threads in August, despite its frequent habit of rising high +and running wild, and said to yourself that in architecture position +is half the battle, you have nothing left to visit but the Museum of +pictures. The Turin Gallery, which is large and well arranged, is the +fortunate owner of three or four masterpieces: a couple of magnificent +Vandycks and a couple of Paul Veroneses; the latter a Queen of Sheba +and a Feast of the House of Levi--the usual splendid combination of +brocades, grandees and marble colonnades dividing those skies _de +turquoise malade_ to which Thophile Gautier is fond of alluding. The +Veroneses are fine, but with Venice in prospect the traveller feels at +liberty to keep his best attention in reserve. If, however, he has the +proper relish for Vandyck, let him linger long and fondly here; for +that admiration will never be more potently stirred than by the adorable +group of the three little royal highnesses, sons and the daughter +of Charles I. All the purity of childhood is here, and all its soft +solidity of structure, rounded tenderly beneath the spangled satin and +contrasted charmingly with the pompous rigidity. Clad respectively in +crimson, white and blue, these small scions stand up in their ruffs and +fardingales in dimpled serenity, squaring their infantine stomachers at +the spectator with an innocence, a dignity, a delightful grotesqueness, +which make the picture a thing of close truth as well as of fine +decorum. You might kiss their hands, but you certainly would think twice +before pinching their cheeks--provocative as they are of this tribute of +admiration--and would altogether lack presumption to lift them off +the ground or the higher level or dais on which they stand so sturdily +planted by right of birth. There is something inimitable in the paternal +gallantry with which the painter has touched off the young lady. She was +a princess, yet she was a baby, and he has contrived, we let ourselves +fancy, to interweave an intimation that she was a creature whom, in her +teens, the lucklessly smitten--even as he was prematurely--must vainly +sigh for. Though the work is a masterpiece of execution its merits under +this head may be emulated, at a distance; the lovely modulations of +colour in the three contrasted and harmonised little satin petticoats, +the solidity of the little heads, in spite of all their prettiness, the +happy, unexaggerated squareness and maturity of _pose_, are, severally, +points to study, to imitate, and to reproduce with profit. But the taste +of such a consummate thing is its great secret as well as its great +merit--a taste which seems one of the lost instincts of mankind. Go and +enjoy this supreme expression of Vandyck's fine sense, and admit that +never was a politer production. + +Milan speaks to us of a burden of felt life of which Turin is innocent, +but in its general aspect still lingers a northern reserve which makes +the place rather perhaps the last of the prose capitals than the first +of the poetic. The long Austrian occupation perhaps did something +to Germanise its physiognomy; though indeed this is an indifferent +explanation when one remembers how well, temperamentally speaking, Italy +held her own in Venetia. Milan, at any rate, if not bristling with the +sthetic impulse, opens to us frankly enough the thick volume of her +past. Of that volume the Cathedral is the fairest and fullest page--a +structure not supremely interesting, not logical, not even, to some +minds, commandingly beautiful, but grandly curious and superbly rich. I +hope, for my own part, never to grow too particular to admire it. If +it had no other distinction it would still have that of impressive, +immeasurable achievement. As I strolled beside its vast indented base +one evening, and felt it, above me, rear its grey mysteries into the +starlight while the restless human tide on which I floated rose no +higher than the first few layers of street-soiled marble, I was tempted +to believe that beauty in great architecture is almost a secondary +merit, and that the main point is mass--such mass as may make it a +supreme embodiment of vigorous effort. Viewed in this way a great +building is the greatest conceivable work of art. More than any other +it represents difficulties mastered, resources combined, labour, courage +and patience. And there are people who tell us that art has nothing to +do with morality! Little enough, doubtless, when it is concerned, +even ever so little, in painting the roof of Milan Cathedral within +to represent carved stone-work. Of this famous roof every one has +heard--how good it is, how bad, how perfect a delusion, how transparent +an artifice. It is the first thing your cicerone shows you on entering +the church. The occasionally accommodating art-lover may accept it +philosophically, I think; for the interior, though admirably effective +as a whole, has no great sublimity, nor even purity, of pitch. It +is splendidly vast and dim; the altarlamps twinkle afar through the +incense-thickened air like foglights at sea, and the great columns rise +straight to the roof, which hardly curves to meet them, with the girth +and altitude of oaks of a thousand years; but there is little refinement +of design--few of those felicities of proportion which the eye caresses, +when it finds them, very much as the memory retains and repeats some +happy lines of poetry or some haunting musical phrase. Consistently +brave, none the less, is the result produced, and nothing braver than a +certain exhibition that I privately enjoyed of the relics of St. +Charles Borromeus. This holy man lies at his eternal rest in a small but +gorgeous sepulchral chapel, beneath the boundless pavement and before +the high altar; and for the modest sum of five francs you may have his +shrivelled mortality unveiled and gaze at it with whatever reserves +occur to you. The Catholic Church never renounces a chance of the +sublime for fear of a chance of the ridiculous--especially when the +chance of the sublime may be the very excellent chance of five francs. +The performance in question, of which the good San Carlo paid in the +first instance the cost, was impressive certainly, but as a monstrous +matter or a grim comedy may still be. The little sacristan, having +secured his audience, whipped on a white tunic over his frock, lighted a +couple of extra candles and proceeded to remove from above the altar, +by means of a crank, a sort of sliding shutter, just as you may see +a shop-boy do of a morning at his master's window. In this case too a +large sheet of plate-glass was uncovered, and to form an idea of the +_talage_ you must imagine that a jeweller, for reasons of his own, has +struck an unnatural partnership with an undertaker. The black mummified +corpse of the saint is stretched out in a glass coffin, clad in his +mouldering canonicals, mitred, crosiered and gloved, glittering with +votive jewels. It is an extraordinary mixture of death and life; the +desiccated clay, the ashen rags, the hideous little black mask and +skull, and the living, glowing, twinkling splendour of diamonds, +emeralds and sapphires. The collection is really fine, and many great +historic names are attached to the different offerings. Whatever may be +the better opinion as to the future of the Church, I can't help thinking +she will make a figure in the world so long as she retains this +great fund of precious "properties," this prodigious capital +decoratively invested and scintillating throughout Christendom at +effectively-scattered points. You see I am forced to agree after all, in +spite of the sliding shutter and the profane swagger of the sacristan, +that a certain pastoral majesty saved the situation, or at least made +irony gape. Yet it was from a natural desire to breathe a sweeter air +that I immediately afterwards undertook the interminable climb to the +roof of the cathedral. This is another world of wonders, and one which +enjoys due renown, every square inch of wall on the winding stairways +being bescribbled with a traveller's name. There is a great glare from +the far-stretching slopes of marble, a confusion (like the masts of a +navy or the spears of an army) of image-capped pinnacles, biting the +impalpable blue, and, better than either, the goodliest view of level +Lombardy sleeping in its rich transalpine light and resembling, with its +white-walled dwellings and the spires on its horizon, a vast green sea +spotted with ships. After two months of Switzerland the Lombard plain is +a rich rest to the eye, and the yellow, liquid, free-flowing light--as +if on favoured Italy the vessels of heaven were more widely opened--had +for mine a charm which made me think of a great opaque mountain as a +blasphemous invasion of the atmospheric spaces. + +{Illustration: THE SIMPLON GATE, MILAN} + +I have mentioned the cathedral first, but the prime treasure of Milan at +the present hour is the beautiful, tragical Leonardo. The cathedral is +good for another thousand years, but we ask whether our children will +find in the most majestic and most luckless of frescoes much more than +the shadow of a shadow. Its fame has been for a century or two that, as +one may say, of an illustrious invalid whom people visit to see how +he lasts, with leave-taking sighs and almost death-bed or tiptoe +precautions. The picture needs not another scar or stain, now, to be the +saddest work of art in the world; and battered, defaced, ruined as it +is, it remains one of the greatest. We may really compare its anguish +of decay to the slow conscious ebb of life in a human organism. The +production of the prodigy was a breath from the infinite, and the +painter's conception not immeasurably less complex than the scheme, say, +of his own mortal constitution. There has been much talk lately of the +irony of fate, but I suspect fate was never more ironical than when she +led the most scientific, the most calculating of all painters to spend +fifteen long years in building his goodly house upon the sand. And yet, +after all, may not the playing of that trick represent but a deeper +wisdom, since if the thing enjoyed the immortal health and bloom of a +first-rate Titian we should have lost one of the most pertinent lessons +in the history of art? We know it as hearsay, but here is the plain +proof, that there is no limit to the amount of "stuff" an artist may put +into his work. Every painter ought once in his life to stand before the +Cenacolo and decipher its moral. Mix with your colours and mess on your +palette every particle of the very substance of your soul, and this lest +perchance your "prepared surface" shall play you a trick! Then, and then +only, it will fight to the last--it will resist even in death. Raphael +was a happier genius; you look at his lovely "Marriage of the Virgin" at +the Brera, beautiful as some first deep smile of conscious inspiration, +but to feel that he foresaw no complaint against fate, and that he knew +the world he wanted to know and charmed it into never giving him away. +But I have left no space to speak of the Brera, nor of that paradise +of book-worms with an eye for their background--if such creatures +exist--the Ambrosian Library; nor of that mighty basilica of St. +Ambrose, with its spacious atrium and its crudely solemn mosaics, in +which it is surely your own fault if you don't forget Dr. Strauss and M. +Renan and worship as grimly as a Christian of the ninth century. + +It is part of the sordid prose of the Mont Cenis road that, unlike those +fine old unimproved passes, the Simplon, the Splgen and--yet awhile +longer--the Saint-Gothard, it denies you a glimpse of that paradise +adorned by the four lakes even as that of uncommented Scripture by +the rivers of Eden. I made, however, an excursion to the Lake of Como, +which, though brief, lasted long enough to suggest to me that I too was +a hero of romance with leisure for a love-affair, and not a hurrying +tourist with a Bradshaw in his pocket. The Lake of Como has figured +largely in novels of "immoral" tendency--being commonly the spot to +which inflamed young gentlemen invite the wives of other gentlemen to +fly with them and ignore the restrictions of public opinion. But even +the Lake of Como has been revised and improved; the fondest prejudices +yield to time; it gives one somehow a sense of an aspiringly high tone. +I should pay a poor compliment at least to the swarming inmates of the +hotels which now alternate attractively by the water-side with villas +old and new were I to read the appearances more cynically. But if it is +lost to florid fiction it still presents its blue bosom to most other +refined uses, and the unsophisticated tourist, the American at least, +may do any amount of private romancing there. The pretty hotel at +Cadenabbia offers him, for instance, in the most elegant and assured +form, the so often precarious adventure of what he calls at home summer +board. It is all so unreal, so fictitious, so elegant and idle, so +framed to undermine a rigid sense of the chief end of man not being to +float for ever in an ornamental boat, beneath an awning tasselled like +a circus-horse, impelled by an affable Giovanni or Antonio from one +stately stretch of lake-laved villa steps to another, that departure +seems as harsh and unnatural as the dream-dispelling note of some +punctual voice at your bedside on a dusky winter morning. Yet I +wondered, for my own part, where I had seen it all before--the +pink-walled villas gleaming through their shrubberies of orange and +oleander, the mountains shimmering in the hazy light like so many +breasts of doves, the constant presence of the melodious Italian voice. +Where indeed but at the Opera when the manager has been more than +usually regardless of expense? Here in the foreground was the palace of +the nefarious barytone, with its banqueting-hall opening as freely on +the stage as a railway buffet on the platform; beyond, the delightful +back scene, with its operatic gamut of colouring; in the middle the +scarlet-sashed _barcaiuoli_, grouped like a chorus, hat in hand, +awaiting the conductor's signal. It was better even than being in a +novel--this being, this fairly wallowing, in a libretto. + + + + + +THE OLD SAINT-GOTHARD LEAVES FROM A NOTE-BOOK + + +Berne, _September_, 1873.--In Berne again, some eleven weeks after +having left it in July. I have never been in Switzerland so late, and +I came hither innocently supposing the last Cook's tourist to have paid +out his last coupon and departed. But I was lucky, it seems, to discover +an empty cot in an attic and a very tight place at a table d'hte. +People are all flocking out of Switzerland, as in July they were +flocking in, and the main channels of egress are terribly choked. I +have been here several days, watching them come and go; it is like +the march-past of an army. It gives one, for an occasional change +from darker thoughts, a lively impression of the numbers of people now +living, and above all now moving, at extreme ease in the world. Here +is little Switzerland disgorging its tens of thousands of honest folk, +chiefly English, and rarely, to judge by their faces and talk, children +of light in any eminent degree; for whom snow-peaks and glaciers +and passes and lakes and chalets and sunsets and a _caf complet_, +"including honey," as the coupon says, have become prime necessities +for six weeks every year. It's not so long ago that lords and +nabobs monopolised these pleasures; but nowadays in a month's tour in +Switzerland is no more a _jeu de prince_ than a Sunday excursion. To +watch this huge Anglo-Saxon wave ebbing through Berne suggests, no doubt +most fallaciously, that the common lot of mankind isn't after all so +very hard and that the masses have reached a high standard of comfort. +The view of the Oberland chain, as you see it from the garden of the +hotel, really butters one's bread most handsomely; and here are I don't +know how many hundred Cook's tourists a day looking at it through the +smoke of their pipes. Is it really the "masses," however, that I see +every day at the table d'hte? They have rather too few h's to the +dozen, but their good-nature is great. Some people complain that they +"vulgarise" Switzerland; but as far as I am concerned I freely give +it up to them and offer them a personal welcome and take a peculiar +satisfaction in seeing them here. Switzerland is a "show country"--I am +more and more struck with the bearings of that truth; and its use in the +world is to reassure persons of a benevolent imagination when they +begin to wish for the drudging millions a greater supply of elevating +amusement. Here is amusement for a thousand years, and as elevating +certainly as mountains three miles high can make it. I expect to live +to see the summit of Monte Rosa heated by steam-tubes and adorned with a +hotel setting three tables d'hte a day. + +{Illustration: THE CLOCK TOWER, BERNE} + +I have been walking about the arcades, which used to bestow a grateful +shade in July, but which seem rather dusky and chilly in these +shortening autumn days. I am struck with the way the English always +speak of them--with a shudder, as gloomy, as dirty, as evil-smelling, +as suffocating, as freezing, as anything and everything but admirably +picturesque. I take us Americans for the only people who, in travelling, +judge things on the first impulse--when we do judge them at all--not +from the standpoint of simple comfort. Most of us, strolling forth into +these bustling basements, are, I imagine, too much amused, too much +diverted from the sense of an alienable right to public ease, to be +conscious of heat or cold, of thick air, or even of the universal smell +of strong _charcuterie_. If the visible romantic were banished from the +face of the earth I am sure the idea of it would still survive in some +typical American heart.... + +_Lucerne, September_.--Berne, I find, has been filling with tourists at +the expense of Lucerne, which I have been having almost to myself. There +are six people at the table d'hte; the excellent dinner denotes on the +part of the _chef_ the easy leisure in which true artists love to work. +The waiters have nothing to do but lounge about the hall and chink in +their pockets the fees of the past season. The day has been lovely +in itself, and pervaded, to my sense, by the gentle glow of a natural +satisfaction at my finding myself again on the threshold of Italy. I am +lodged _en prince_, in a room with a balcony hanging over the lake--a +balcony on which I spent a long time this morning at dawn, thanking the +mountain-tops, from the depths of a landscape-lover's heart, for their +promise of superbly fair weather. There were a great many mountain-tops +to thank, for the crags and peaks and pinnacles tumbled away through the +morning mist in an endless confusion of grandeur. I have been all day +in better humour with Lucerne than ever before--a forecast reflection of +Italian moods. If Switzerland, as I wrote the other day, is so furiously +a show-place, Lucerne is certainly one of the biggest booths at the +fair. The little quay, under the trees, squeezed in between the decks +of the steamboats and the doors of the hotels, is a terrible medley +of Saxon dialects--a jumble of pilgrims in all the phases of devotion, +equipped with book and staff, alpenstock and Baedeker. There are so +many hotels and trinket-shops, so many omnibuses and steamers, so many +Saint-Gothard _vetturini_, so many ragged urchins poking photographs, +minerals and Lucernese English at you, that you feel as if lake and +mountains themselves, in all their loveliness, were but a part of the +"enterprise" of landlords and pedlars, and half expect to see the Righi +and Pilatus and the fine weather figure as items on your hotel-bill +between the _bougie_ and the _siphon_. Nature herself assists you +to this conceit; there is something so operatic and suggestive of +footlights and scene-shifters in the view on which Lucerne looks out. +You are one of five thousand--fifty thousand--"accommodated" spectators; +you have taken your season-ticket and there is a responsible impresario +somewhere behind the scenes. There is such a luxury of beauty in the +prospect--such a redundancy of composition and effect--so many more +peaks and pinnacles than are needed to make one heart happy or regale +the vision of one quiet observer, that you finally accept the little +Babel on the quay and the looming masses in the clouds as equal parts of +a perfect system, and feel as if the mountains had been waiting so many +ages for the hotels to come and balance the colossal group, that +they show a right, after all, to have them big and numerous. +The scene-shifters have been at work all day long, composing and +discomposing the beautiful background of the prospect--massing the +clouds and scattering the light, effacing and reviving, making play +with their wonderful machinery of mist and haze. The mountains rise, one +behind the other, in an enchanting gradation of distances and of melting +blues and greys; you think each successive tone the loveliest and +haziest possible till you see another loom dimly behind it. I couldn't +enjoy even _The Swiss Times_, over my breakfast, till I had marched +forth to the office of the Saint-Gothard service of coaches and demanded +the banquette for to-morrow. The one place at the disposal of the office +was taken, but I might possibly _m'entendre_ with the conductor for his +own seat--the conductor being generally visible, in the intervals of +business, at the post-office. To the post-office, after breakfast, I +repaired, over the fine new bridge which now spans the green Reuss and +gives such a woeful air of country-cousinship to the crooked old wooden +structure which did sole service when I was here four years ago. The +old bridge is covered with a running hood of shingles and adorned with +a series of very quaint and vivid little paintings of the "Dance of +Death," quite in the Holbein manner; the new sends up a painful glare +from its white limestone, and is ornamented with candelabra in a +meretricious imitation of platinum. As an almost professional cherisher +of the quaint I ought to have chosen to return at least by the dark and +narrow way; but mark how luxury unmans us. I was already demoralised. +I crossed the threshold of the timbered portal, took a few steps, and +retreated. It _smelt badly!_ So I marched back, counting the lamps in +their fine falsity. But the other, the crooked and covered way, smelt +very badly indeed; and no good American is without a fund of accumulated +sensibility to the odour of stale timber. + +Meanwhile I had spent an hour in the great yard of the postoffice, +waiting for my conductor to turn up and seeing the yellow malles-postes +pushed to and fro. At last, being told my man was at my service, I was +brought to speech of a huge, jovial, bearded, delightful Italian, clad +in the blue coat and waistcoat, with close, round silver buttons, which +are a heritage of the old postilions. No, it was not he; it was a friend +of his; and finally the friend was produced, _en costume de ville_, but +equally jovial, and Italian enough--a brave Lucernese, who had spent half +of his life between Bellinzona and Camerlata. For ten francs this worthy +man's perch behind the luggage was made mine as far as Bellinzona, and +we separated with reciprocal wishes for good weather on the morrow. +To-morrow is so manifestly determined to be as fine as any other 30th +of September since the weather became on this planet a topic of +conversation that I have had nothing to do but stroll about Lucerne, +staring, loafing and vaguely intent on regarding the fact that, whatever +happens, my place is paid to Milan. I loafed into the immense new Hotel +National and read the _New York Tribune_ on a blue satin divan; after +which I was rather surprised, on coming out, to find myself staring at +a green Swiss lake and not at the Broadway omnibuses. The Hotel +National is adorned with a perfectly appointed Broadway bar--one of the +"prohibited" ones seeking hospitality in foreign lands after the manner +of an old-fashioned French or Italian refugee. + +_Milan, October_.--My journey hither was such a pleasant piece of +traveller's luck that I feel a delicacy for taking it to pieces to see +what it was made of. Do what we will, however, there remains in all +deeply agreeable impressions a charming something we can't analyse. I +found it agreeable even, given the rest of my case, to turn out of +bed, at Lucerne, by four o'clock, into the chilly autumn darkness. The +thick-starred sky was cloudless, and there was as yet no flush of dawn; +but the lake was wrapped in a ghostly white mist which crept halfway up +the mountains and made them look as if they too had been lying down +for the night and were casting away the vaporous tissues of their +bedclothes. Into this fantastic fog the little steamer went creaking +away, and I hung about the deck with the two or three travellers who +had known better than to believe it would save them francs or midnight +sighs--over those debts you "pay with your person"--to go and wait for +the diligence at the Poste at Fliielen, or yet at the Guillaume +Tell. The dawn came sailing up over the mountain-tops, flushed but +unperturbed, and blew out the little stars and then the big ones, as a +thrifty matron after a party blows out her candles and lamps; the mist +went melting and wandering away into the duskier hollows and recesses of +the mountains, and the summits defined their profiles against the cool +soft light. + +At Flelen, before the landing, the big yellow coaches were actively +making themselves bigger, and piling up boxes and bags on their roofs +in a way to turn nervous people's thoughts to the sharp corners of the +downward twists of the great road. I climbed into my own banquette, and +stood eating peaches--half-a-dozen women were hawking them about under +the horses' legs--with an air of security that might have been offensive +to the people scrambling and protesting below between coup and +intrieur. They were all English and all had false alarms about the +claim of somebody else to their place, the place for which they produced +their ticket, with a declaration in three or four different tongues of +the inalienable right to it given them by the expenditure of British +gold. They were all serenely confuted by the stout, purple-faced, +many-buttoned conductors, patted on the backs, assured that their +bath-tubs had every advantage of position on the top, and stowed away +according to their dues. When once one has fairly started on a journey +and has but to go and go by the impetus received, it is surprising what +entertainment one finds in very small things. We surrender to the gaping +traveller's mood, which surely isn't the unwisest the heart knows. I +don't envy people, at any rate, who have outlived or outworn the simple +sweetness of feeling settled to go somewhere with bag and umbrella. If +we are settled on the top of a coach, and the "somewhere" contains an +element of the new and strange, the case is at its best. In this matter +wise people are content to become children again. We don't turn about on +our knees to look out of the omnibus-window, but we indulge in very much +the same round-eyed contemplation of accessible objects. Responsibility +is left at home or at the worst packed away in the valise, relegated +to quite another part of the diligence with the clean shirts and the +writing-case. I sucked in the gladness of gaping, for this occasion, +with the somewhat acrid juice of my indifferent peaches; it made me +think them very good. This was the first of a series of kindly services +it rendered me. It made me agree next, as we started, that the gentleman +at the booking-office at Lucerne had but played a harmless joke when he +told me the regular seat in the banquette was taken. No one appeared +to claim it; so the conductor and I reversed positions, and I found him +quite as conversible as the usual Anglo-Saxon. + +He was trolling snatches of melody and showing his great yellow teeth in +a jovial grin all the way to Bellinzona--and this in face of the sombre +fact that the Saint-Gothard tunnel is scraping away into the +mountain, all the while, under his nose, and numbering the days of the +many-buttoned brotherhood. But he hopes, for long service's sake, to be +taken into the employ of the railway; _he_ at least is no cherisher of +quaintness and has no romantic perversity. I found the railway coming +on, however, in a manner very shocking to mine. About an hour short of +Andermatt they have pierced a huge black cavity in the mountain, around +which has grown up a swarming, digging, hammering, smoke-compelling +colony. There are great barracks, with tall chimneys, down in the gorge +that bristled the other day but with natural graces, and a wonderful +increase of wine-shops in the little village of Gschenen above. Along +the breast of the mountain, beside the road, come wandering several +miles of very handsome iron pipes, of a stupendous girth--a conduit for +the water-power with which some of the machinery is worked. It lies at +its mighty length among the rocks like an immense black serpent, +and serves, as a mere detail, to give one the measure of the central +enterprise. When at the end of our long day's journey, well down in warm +Italy, we came upon the other aperture of the tunnel, I could but uncap +with a grim reverence. Truly Nature is great, but she seems to me to +stand in very much the shoes of my poor friend the conductor. She is +being superseded at her strongest points, successively, and nothing +remains but for her to take humble service with her master. If she can +hear herself think amid that din of blasting and hammering she must be +reckoning up the years to elapse before the cleverest of Ober-Ingnieurs +decides that mountains are mere obstructive matter and has the Jungfrau +melted down and the residuum carried away in balloons and dumped upon +another planet. + +The Devil's Bridge, with the same failing apparently as the good Homer, +was decidedly nodding. The volume of water in the torrent was shrunken, +and I missed the thunderous uproar and far-leaping spray that have kept +up a miniature tempest in the neighbourhood on my other passages. +It suddenly occurs to me that the fault is not in the good Homer's +inspiration, but simply in the big black pipes above-mentioned. They +dip into the rushing stream higher up, presumably, and pervert its +fine frenzy to their prosaic uses. There could hardly be a more vivid +reminder of the standing quarrel between use and beauty, and of the +hard time poor beauty is having. I looked wistfully, as we rattled into +dreary Andermatt, at the great white zigzags of the Oberalp road which +climbed away to the left. Even on one's way to Italy one may spare a +throb of desire for the beautiful vision of the castled Grisons. Dear +to me the memory of my day's drive last summer through that long blue +avenue of mountains, to queer little mouldering Ilanz, visited before +supper in the ghostly dusk. At Andermatt a sign over a little black +doorway flanked by two dung-hills seemed to me tolerably comical: +_Mineraux_, _Quadrupedes_, _Oiseaux_, _OEufs_, _Tableaux Antiques_. We +bundled in to dinner and the American gentleman in the banquette made +the acquaintance of the Irish lady in the coup, who talked of the +weather as _foine_ and wore a Persian scarf twisted about her head. At +the other end of the table sat an Englishman, out of the intrieur, who +bore an extraordinary resemblance to the portraits of Edward VI's and +Mary's reigns. He walking, a convincing Holbein. The impression was +of value to a cherisher of quaintness, and he must have wondered--not +knowing me for such a character--why I stared at him. It wasn't him I +was staring at, but some handsome Seymour or Dudley or Digby with a ruff +and a round cap and plume. + +From Andermatt, through its high, cold, sunny valley, we passed into +rugged little Hospenthal, and then up the last stages of the ascent. +From here the road was all new to me. Among the summits of the various +Alpine passes there is little to choose. You wind and double slowly into +keener cold and deeper stillness; you put on your overcoat and turn up +the collar; you count the nestling snow-patches and then you cease to +count them; you pause, as you trudge before the lumbering coach, and +listen to the last-heard cow-bell tinkling away below you in kindlier +herbage. The sky was tremendously blue, and the little stunted bushes +on the snow-streaked slopes were all dyed with autumnal purples and +crimsons. It was a great display of colour. Purple and crimson too, +though not so fine, were the faces thrust out at us from the greasy +little double casements of a barrack beside the road, where the horses +paused before the last pull. There was one little girl in particular, +beginning to _lisser_ her hair, as civilisation approached, in a manner +not to be described, with her poor little blue-black hands. At the +summit are the two usual grim little stone taverns, the steel-blue tarn, +the snow-white peaks, the pause in the cold sunshine. Then we begin to +rattle down with two horses. In five minutes we are swinging along the +famous zigzags. Engineer, driver, horses--it's very handsomely done by +all of them. The road curves and curls and twists and plunges like the +tail of a kite; sitting perched in the banquette, you see it making +below you and in mid-air certain bold gyrations which bring you as near +as possible, short of the actual experience, to the philosophy of that +immortal Irishman who wished that his fall from the house-top would only +last. But the zigzags last no more than Paddy's fall, and in due time we +were all coming to our senses over _cafe au lait_ in the little inn +at Faido. After Faido the valley, plunging deeper, began to take thick +afternoon shadows from the hills, and at Airolo we were fairly in the +twilight. But the pink and yellow houses shimmered through the gentle +gloom, and Italy began in broken syllables to whisper that she was at +hand. For the rest of the way to Bellinzona her voice was muffled in the +grey of evening, and I was half vexed to lose the charming sight of the +changing vegetation. But only half vexed, for the moon was climbing all +the while nearer the edge of the crags that overshadowed us, and a thin +magical light came trickling down into the winding, murmuring gorges. It +was a most enchanting business. The chestnut-trees loomed up with double +their daylight stature; the vines began to swing their low festoons like +nets to trip up the fairies. At last the ruined towers of Bellinzona +stood gleaming in the moonshine, and we rattled into the great +post-yard. It was eleven o'clock and I had risen at four; moonshine +apart I wasn't sorry. + +All that was very well; but the drive next day from Bellinzona to Como +is to my mind what gives its supreme beauty to this great pass. One +can't describe the beauty of the Italian lakes, nor would one try if +one could; the floweriest rhetoric can recall it only as a picture on +a fireboard recalls a Claude. But it lay spread before me for a whole +perfect day: in the long gleam of the Major, from whose head the +diligence swerves away and begins to climb the bosky hills that divide +it from Lugano; in the shimmering, melting azure of the southern slopes +and masses; in the luxurious tangle of nature and the familiar amenity +of man; in the lawn-like inclinations, where the great grouped chestnuts +make so cool a shadow in so warm a light; in the rusty vineyards, the +littered cornfields and the tawdry wayside shrines. But most of all it's +the deep yellow light that enchants you and tells you where you are. +See it come filtering down through a vine-covered trellis on the red +handkerchief with which a ragged contadina has bound her hair, and all +the magic of Italy, to the eye, makes an aureole about the poor girl's +head. Look at a brown-breasted reaper eating his chunk of black bread +under a spreading chestnut; nowhere is shadow so charming, nowhere is +colour so charged, nowhere has accident such grace. The whole drive +to Lugano was one long loveliness, and the town itself is admirably +Italian. There was a great unlading of the coach, during which I +wandered under certain brown old arcades and bought for six sous, from +a young woman in a gold necklace, a hatful of peaches and figs. When +I came back I found the young man holding open the door of the second +diligence, which had lately come up, and beckoning to me with a +despairing smile. The young man, I must note, was the most amiable of +Ticinese; though he wore no buttons he was attached to the diligence +in some amateurish capacity, and had an eye to the mail-bags and other +valuables in the boot. I grumbled at Berne over the want of soft curves +in the Swiss temperament; but the children of the tangled Tessin are +cast in the Italian mould. My friend had as many quips and cranks as a +Neapolitan; we walked together for an hour under the chestnuts, while +the coach was plodding up from Bellinzona, and he never stopped singing +till we reached a little wine-house where he got his mouth full of bread +and cheese. I looked into his open door, a la Sterne, and saw the young +woman sitting rigid and grim, staring over his head and with a great +pile of bread and butter in her lap. He had only informed her most +politely that she was to be transferred to another diligence and must do +him the favour to descend; but she evidently knew of but one way for +a respectable young insulary of her sex to receive the politeness of a +foreign adventurer guilty of an eye betraying latent pleasantry. Heaven +only knew what he was saying! I told her, and she gathered up her +parcels and emerged. A part of the day's great pleasure perhaps was my +grave sense of being an instrument in the hands of the powers toward the +safe consignment of this young woman and her boxes. When once you have +really bent to the helpless you are caught; there is no such steel trap, +and it holds you fast. My rather grim Abigail was a neophyte in foreign +travel, though doubtless cunning enough at her trade, which I inferred +to be that of making up those prodigious chignons worn mainly by +English ladies. Her mistress had gone on a mule over the mountains to +Cadenabbia, and she herself was coming up with the wardrobe, two +big boxes and a bath-tub. I had played my part, under the powers, +at Bellinzona, and had interposed between the poor girl's frightened +English and the dreadful Ticinese French of the functionaries in the +post-yard. At the custom-house on the Italian frontier I was of peculiar +service; there was a kind of fateful fascination in it. The wardrobe +was voluminous; I exchanged a paternal glance with my charge as +the _douanier_ plunged his brown fists into it. Who was the lady at +Cadenabbia? What was she to me or I to her? She wouldn't know, when she +rustled down to dinner next day, that it was I who had guided the frail +skiff of her public basis of vanity to port. So unseen but not unfelt do +we cross each other's orbits. The skiff however may have foundered that +evening in sight of land. I disengaged the young woman from among her +fellow-travellers and placed her boxes on a hand-cart in the picturesque +streets of Como, within a stone's throw of that lovely striped and toned +cathedral which has the facade of cameo medallions. I could only make +the _facchino_ swear to take her to the steamboat. He too was a jovial +dog, but I hope he was polite with precautions. + +1873. + + + + + +ITALY REVISITED + + +I + +I waited in Paris until after the elections for the new Chamber (they +took place on the 14th of October); as only after one had learned that +the famous attempt of Marshal MacMahon and his ministers to drive the +French nation to the polls like a flock of huddling sheep, each with the +white ticket of an official candidate round his neck, had not achieved +the success which the energy of the process might have promised--only +then it was possible to draw a long breath and deprive the republican +party of such support as might have been conveyed in one's sympathetic +presence. Seriously speaking too, the weather had been enchanting--there +were Italian fancies to be gathered without leaving the banks of the +Seine. Day after day the air was filled with golden light, and even +those chalkish vistas of the Parisian _beaux quartiers_ assumed the +iridescent tints of autumn. Autumn weather in Europe is often such +a very sorry affair that a fair-minded American will have it on his +conscience to call attention to a rainless and radiant October. + +The echoes of the electoral strife kept me company for a while after +starting upon that abbreviated journey to Turin which, as you leave +Paris at night, in a train unprovided with encouragements to slumber, is +a singular mixture of the odious and the charming. The charming indeed +I think prevails; for the dark half of the journey is the least +interesting. The morning light ushers you into the romantic gorges +of the Jura, and after a big bowl of _cafe au lait_ at Culoz you may +compose yourself comfortably for the climax of your spectacle. The day +before leaving Paris I met a French friend who had just returned from a +visit to a Tuscan country-seat where he had been watching the vintage. +"Italy," he said, "is more lovely than words can tell, and France, +steeped in this electoral turmoil, seems no better than a bear-garden." +The part of the bear-garden through which you travel as you approach the +Mont Cenis seemed to me that day very beautiful. The autumn colouring, +thanks to the absence of rain, had been vivid and crisp, and the +vines that swung their low garlands between the mulberries round about +Chambery looked like long festoons of coral and amber. The frontier +station of Modane, on the further side of the Mont Cenis Tunnel, is +a very ill-regulated place; but even the most irritable of tourists, +meeting it on his way southward, will be disposed to consider it +good-naturedly. There is far too much bustling and scrambling, and the +facilities afforded you for the obligatory process of ripping open +your luggage before the officers of the Italian custom-house are +much scantier than should be; but for myself there is something that +deprecates irritation in the shabby green and grey uniforms of all the +Italian officials who stand loafing about and watching the northern +invaders scramble back into marching order. Wearing an administrative +uniform doesn't necessarily spoil a man's temper, as in France one is +sometimes led to believe; for these excellent under-paid Italians carry +theirs as lightly as possible, and their answers to your inquiries don't +in the least bristle with rapiers, buttons and cockades. After leaving +Modane you slide straight downhill into the Italy of your desire; from +which point the road edges, after the grand manner, along those +It precipices that stand shoulder to shoulder, in a prodigious +perpendicular file, till they finally admit you to a distant glimpse he +ancient capital of Piedmont. + +Turin is no city of a name to conjure with, and I pay an extravagant +tribute to subjective emotion in speaking of it as ancient, if the place +is less bravely peninsular than Florence and Rome, at least it is more +in the scenic tradition than New York Paris; and while I paced the great +arcades and looked at the fourth-rate shop windows I didn't scruple to +cultivate a shameless optimism. Relatively speaking, Turin touches +a chord; but there is after all no reason in a large collection of +shabbily-stuccoed houses, disposed in a rigidly rectangular manner, for +passing a day of deep, still gaiety. The only reason, I am afraid, is +the old superstition of Italy--that property in the very look of the +written word, the evocation of a myriad images, that makes any lover of +the arts take Italian satisfactions on easier terms than any others. The +written word stands for something that eternally tricks us; we juggle +to our credulity even with such inferior apparatus as is offered to +our hand at Turin. I roamed all the morning under the tall porticoes, +thinking it sufficient joy to take note of the soft, warm air, of that +local colour of things that is at once so broken and so harmonious, and +of the comings and goings, the physiognomy and manners, of the excellent +Turinese. I had opened the old book again; the old charm was in the +style; I was in a more delightful world. I saw nothing surpassingly +beautiful or curious; but your true taster of the most seasoned of +dishes finds well-nigh the whole mixture in any mouthful. Above all on +the threshold of Italy he knows again the solid and perfectly definable +pleasure of finding himself among the traditions of the grand style in +architecture. It must be said that we have still to go there to +recover the sense of the domiciliary mass. In northern cities there are +beautiful houses, picturesque and curious houses; sculptured gables that +hang over the street, charming bay-windows, hooded doorways, elegant +proportions, a profusion of delicate ornament; but a good specimen of +an old Italian palazzo has a nobleness that is all its own. We laugh +at Italian "palaces," at their peeling paint, their nudity, their +dreariness; but they have the great palatial quality--elevation and +extent. They make of smaller things the apparent abode of pigmies; they +round their great arches and interspace their huge windows with a proud +indifference to the cost of materials. These grand proportions--the +colossal basements, the doorways that seem meant for cathedrals, the far +away cornices--impart by contrast a humble and _bourgeois_ expression +to interiors founded on the sacrifice of the whole to the part, and +in which the air of grandeur depends largely on the help of the +upholsterer. At Turin my first feeling was really one of renewed shame +for our meaner architectural manners. If the Italians at bottom despise +the rest of mankind and regard them as barbarians, disinherited of the +tradition of form, the idea proceeds largely, no doubt, from our +living in comparative mole-hills. They alone were really to build their +civilisation. + +{Illustration: UNDER THE ARCADES, TURIN.} + +An impression which on coming back to Italy I find even stronger than +when it was first received is that of the contrast between the fecundity +of the great artistic period and the vulgarity there of the genius of +to-day. The first few hours spent on Italian soil are sufficient to +renew it, and the question I allude to is, historically speaking, one of +the oddest. That the people who but three hundred years ago had the best +taste in the world should now have the worst; that having produced the +noblest, loveliest, costliest works, they should now be given up to the +manufacture of objects at once ugly and paltry; that the race of which +Michael Angelo and Raphael, Leonardo and Titian were characteristic +should have no other title to distinction than third-rate _genre_ +pictures and catchpenny statues--all this is a frequent perplexity to +the observer of actual Italian life. The flower of "great" art in these +latter years ceased to bloom very powerfully anywhere; but nowhere +does it seem so drooping and withered as in the shadow of the immortal +embodiments of the old Italian genius. You go into a church or a gallery +and feast your fancy upon a splendid picture or an exquisite piece of +sculpture, and on issuing from the door that has admitted you to the +beautiful past are confronted with something that has the effect of a +very bad joke. The aspect of your lodging--the carpets, the curtains, +the upholstery in general, with their crude and violent colouring and +their vulgar material--the trumpery things in the shops, the extreme +bad taste of the dress of the women, the cheapness and baseness of every +attempt at decoration in the cafes and railway-stations, the hopeless +frivolity of everything that pretends to be a work of art--all this +modern crudity runs riot over the relics of the great period. + +We can do a thing for the first time but once; it is but once for all +that we can have a pleasure in its freshness. This is a law not on the +whole, I think, to be regretted, for we sometimes learn to know things +better by not enjoying them too much. It is certain, however, at the +same time, that a visitor who has worked off the immediate ferment for +this inexhaustibly interesting country has by no means entirely drained +the cup. After thinking of Italy as historical and artistic it will +do him no great harm to think of her for a while as panting both for +a future and for a balance at the bank; aspirations supposedly much +at variance with the Byronic, the Ruskinian, the artistic, poetic, +aesthetic manner of considering our eternally attaching peninsula. +He may grant--I don't say it is absolutely necessary--that its actual +aspects and economics are ugly, prosaic, provokingly out of relation +to the diary and the album; it is nevertheless true that, at the point +things have come to, modern Italy in a manner imposes herself. I hadn't +been many hours in the country before that truth assailed me; and I may +add that, the first irritation past, I found myself able to accept it. +For, if we think, nothing is more easy to understand than an honest ire +on the part of the young Italy of to-day at being looked at by all the +world as a kind of soluble pigment. Young Italy, preoccupied with its +economical and political future, must be heartily tired of being admired +for its eyelashes and its pose. In one of Thackeray's novels occurs +a mention of a young artist who sent to the Royal Academy a picture +representing "A Contadino dancing with a Trasteverina at the door of a +Locanda, to the music of a Pifferaro." It is in this attitude and with +these conventional accessories that the world has hitherto seen fit to +represent young Italy, and one doesn't wonder that if the youth has +any spirit he should at last begin to resent our insufferable aesthetic +patronage. He has established a line of tram-cars in Rome, from +the Porta del Popolo to the Ponte Molle, and it is on one of these +democratic vehicles that I seem to see him taking his triumphant course +down the vista of the future. I won't pretend to rejoice with him any +more than I really do; I won't pretend, as the sentimental tourists say +about it all, as if it were the setting of an intaglio or the border of +a Roman scarf, to "like" it. Like it or not, as we may, it is evidently +destined to be; I see a new Italy in the future which in many important +respects will equal, if not surpass, the most enterprising sections of +our native land. Perhaps by that time Chicago and San Francisco will +have acquired a pose, and their sons and daughters will dance at the +doors of _locande_. + +However this may be, the accomplished schism between the old order and +the new is the promptest moral of a fresh visit to this ever-suggestive +part of the world. The old has become more and more a museum, preserved +and perpetuated in the midst of the new, but without any further +relation to it--it must be admitted indeed that such a relation is +considerable--than that of the stock on his shelves to the shopkeeper, +or of the Siren of the South to the showman who stands before his booth. +More than once, as we move about nowadays in the Italian cities, +there seems to pass before our eyes a vision of the coming years. It +represents to our satisfaction an Italy united and prosperous, +but altogether scientific and commercial. The Italy indeed that we +sentimentalise and romance about was an ardently mercantile country; +though I suppose it loved not its ledgers less, but its frescoes +and altar-pieces more. Scattered through this paradise regained of +trade--this country of a thousand ports--we see a large number of +beautiful buildings in which an endless series of dusky pictures are +darkening, dampening, fading, failing, through the years. By the doors +of the beautiful buildings are little turnstiles at which there sit +a great many uniformed men to whom the visitor pays a tenpenny fee. +Inside, in the vaulted and frescoed chambers, the art of Italy lies +buried as in a thousand mausoleums. It is well taken care of; it is +constantly copied; sometimes it is "restored"--as in the case of that +beautiful boy-figure of Andrea del Sarto at Florence, which may be seen +at the gallery of the Uffizi with its honourable duskiness quite peeled +off and heaven knows what raw, bleeding cuticle laid bare. One evening +lately, near the same Florence, in the soft twilight, I took a stroll +among those encircling hills on which the massive villas are mingled +with the vaporous olives. Presently I arrived where three roads met at a +wayside shrine, in which, before some pious daub of an old-time Madonna, +a little votive lamp glimmered through the evening air. The hour, +the atmosphere, the place, the twinkling taper, the sentiment of the +observer, the thought that some one had been rescued here from an +assassin or from some other peril and had set up a little grateful altar +in consequence, against the yellow-plastered wall of a tangled _podere_; +all this led me to approach the shrine with a reverent, an emotional +step. I drew near it, but after a few steps I paused. I became aware of +an incongruous odour; it seemed to me that the evening air was charged +with a perfume which, although to a certain extent familiar, had not +hitherto associated itself with rustic frescoes and wayside altars. I +wondered, I gently sniffed, and the question so put left me no doubt. +The odour was that of petroleum; the votive taper was nourished with +the essence of Pennsylvania. I confess that I burst out laughing, and a +picturesque contadino, wending his homeward way in the dusk, stared at +me as if I were an iconoclast. He noticed the petroleum only, I imagine, +to snuff it fondly up; but to me the thing served as a symbol of the +Italy of the future. There is a horse-car from the Porta del Popolo to +the Ponte Molle, and the Tuscan shrines are fed with kerosene. + + +II + +If it's very well meanwhile to come to Turin first it's better still to +go to Genoa afterwards. Genoa is the tightest topographic tangle in the +world, which even a second visit helps you little to straighten out. In +the wonderful crooked, twisting, climbing, soaring, burrowing Genoese +alleys the traveller is really up to his neck in the old Italian +sketchability. The pride of the place, I believe, is a port of great +capacity, and the bequest of the late Duke of Galliera, who left four +millions of dollars for the purpose of improving and enlarging it, will +doubtless do much toward converting it into one of the great commercial +stations of Europe. But as, after leaving my hotel the afternoon I +arrived, I wandered for a long time at hazard through the tortuous +by-ways of the city, I said to myself, not without an accent of private +triumph, that here at last was something it would be almost impossible +to modernise. I had found my hotel, in the first place, extremely +entertaining--the Croce di Malta, as it is called, established in a +gigantic palace on the edge of the swarming and not over-clean harbour. +It was the biggest house I had ever entered--the basement alone would +have contained a dozen American caravansaries. I met an American +gentleman in the vestibule who (as he had indeed a perfect right to be) +was annoyed by its troublesome dimensions--one was a quarter of an hour +ascending out of the basement--and desired to know if it were a "fair +sample" of the Genoese inns. It appeared an excellent specimen of +Genoese architecture generally; so far as I observed there were few +houses perceptibly smaller than this Titanic tavern. I lunched in a +dusky ballroom whose ceiling was vaulted, frescoed and gilded with the +fatal facility of a couple of centuries ago, and which looked out upon +another ancient housefront, equally huge and equally battered, separated +from it only by a little wedge of dusky space--one of the principal +streets, I believe, of Genoa--whence out of dim abysses the population +sent up to the windows (I had to crane out very far to see it) a +perpetual clattering, shuffling, chaffering sound. Issuing forth +presently into this crevice of a street I found myself up to my neck +in that element of the rich and strange--as to visible and reproducible +"effect," I mean--for the love of which one revisits Italy. It offered +itself indeed in a variety of colours, some of which were not remarkable +for their freshness or purity. But their combined charm was not to be +resisted, and the picture glowed with the rankly human side of southern +lowlife. + +Genoa, as I have hinted, is the crookedest and most incoherent of +cities; tossed about on the sides and crests of a dozen hills, it is +seamed with gullies and ravines that bristle with those innumerable +palaces for which we have heard from our earliest years that the place +is celebrated. These great structures, with their mottled and faded +complexions, lift their big ornamental cornices to a tremendous height +in the air, where, in a certain indescribably forlorn and desolate +fashion, overtopping each other, they seem to reflect the twinkle and +glitter of the warm Mediterranean. Down about the basements, in the +close crepuscular alleys, the people are for ever moving to and fro or +standing in their cavernous doorways and their dusky, crowded shops, +calling, chattering, laughing, lamenting, living their lives in the +conversational Italian fashion. I had for a long time had no such +vision of possible social pressure. I hadn't for a long time seen people +elbowing each other so closely or swarming so thickly out of populous +hives. A traveller is often moved to ask himself whether it has been +worth while to leave his home--whatever his home may have been--only to +encounter new forms of human suffering, only to be reminded that toil +and privation, hunger and sorrow and sordid effort, are the portion of +the mass of mankind. To travel is, as it were, to go to the play, to +attend a spectacle; and there is something heartless in stepping forth +into foreign streets to feast on "character" when character consists +simply of the slightly different costume in which labour and want +present themselves. These reflections were forced upon me as I strolled +as through a twilight patched with colour and charged with stale smells; +but after a time they ceased to bear me company. The reason of this, I +think, is because--at least to foreign eyes--the sum of Italian misery +is, on the whole, less than the sum of the Italian knowledge of life. +That people should thank you, with a smile of striking sweetness, for +the gift of twopence, is a proof, certainly, of extreme and constant +destitution; but (keeping in mind the sweetness) it also attests an +enviable ability not to be depressed by circumstances. I know that this +may possibly be great nonsense; that half the time we are acclaiming +the fine quality of the Italian smile the creature so constituted for +physiognomic radiance may be in a sullen frenzy of impatience and pain. +Our observation in any foreign land is extremely superficial, and our +remarks are happily not addressed to the inhabitants themselves, who +would be sure to exclaim upon the impudence of the fancy-picture. + +The other day I visited a very picturesque old city upon a mountain-top, +where, in the course of my wanderings, I arrived at an old disused gate +in the ancient town-wall. The gate hadn't been absolutely forfeited; +but the recent completion of a modern road down the mountain led most +vehicles away to another egress. The grass-grown pavement, which wound +into the plain by a hundred graceful twists and plunges, was now given +up to ragged contadini and their donkeys, and to such wayfarers as were +not alarmed at the disrepair into which it had fallen. I stood in the +shadow of the tall old gateway admiring the scene, looking to right and +left at the wonderful walls of the little town, perched on the edge of +a shaggy precipice; at the circling mountains over against them; at the +road dipping downward among the chestnuts and olives. There was no one +within sight but a young man who slowly trudged upward with his coat +slung over his shoulder and his hat upon his ear in the manner of a +cavalier in an opera. Like an operatic performer too he sang as he came; +the spectacle, generally, was operatic, and as his vocal flourishes +reached my ear I said to myself that in Italy accident was always +romantic and that such a figure had been exactly what was wanted to set +off the landscape. It suggested in a high degree that knowledge of life +for which I just now commended the Italians. I was turning back under +the old gateway when the young man overtook me and, suspending his song, +asked me if I could favour him with a match to light the hoarded remnant +of a cigar. This request led, as I took my way again to the inn, to my +falling into talk with him. He was a native of the ancient city, and +answered freely all my inquiries as to its manners and customs and +its note of public opinion. But the point of my anecdote is that he +presently acknowledged himself a brooding young radical and communist, +filled with hatred of the present Italian government, raging with +discontent and crude political passion, professing a ridiculous hope +that Italy would soon have, as France had had, her "'89," and declaring +that he for his part would willingly lend a hand to chop off the +heads of the king and the royal family. He was an unhappy, underfed, +unemployed young man, who took a hard, grim view of everything and was +operatic only quite in spite of himself. This made it very absurd of me +to have looked at him simply as a graceful ornament to the prospect, +an harmonious little figure in the middle distance. "Damn the prospect, +damn the middle distance!" would have been all _his_ philosophy. Yet but +for the accident of my having gossipped with him I should have made him +do service, in memory, as an example of sensuous optimism! + +I am bound to say however that I believe a great deal of the sensuous +optimism observable in the Genoese alleys and beneath the low, crowded +arcades along the port was very real. Here every one was magnificently +sunburnt, and there were plenty of those queer types, mahogany-coloured, +bare-chested mariners with earrings and crimson girdles, that seem to +people a southern seaport with the chorus of "Masaniello." But it is not +fair to speak as if at Genoa there were nothing but low-life to be seen, +for the place is the residence of some of the grandest people in the +world. Nor are all the palaces ranged upon dusky alleys; the handsomest +and most impressive form a splendid series on each side of a couple +of very proper streets, in which there is plenty of room for a +coach-and-four to approach the big doorways. Many of these doorways +are open, revealing great marble staircases with couchant lions for +balustrades and ceremonious courts surrounded by walls of sun-softened +yellow. One of the great piles in the array is coloured a goodly red and +contains in particular the grand people I just now spoke of. They +live indeed on the third floor; but here they have suites of wonderful +painted and gilded chambers, in which foreshortened frescoes also cover +the vaulted ceilings and florid mouldings emboss the ample walls. These +distinguished tenants bear the name of Vandyck, though they are members +of the noble family of Brignole-Sale, one of whose children--the Duchess +of Galliera--has lately given proof of nobleness in presenting the +gallery of the red palace to the city of Genoa. + + +III + +On leaving Genoa I repaired to Spezia, chiefly with a view of +accomplishing a sentimental pilgrimage, which I in fact achieved in the +most agreeable conditions. The Gulf of Spezia is now the headquarters +of the Italian fleet, and there were several big iron-plated frigates +riding at anchor in front of the town. The streets were filled with lads +in blue flannel, who were receiving instruction at a schoolship in the +harbour, and in the evening--there was a brilliant moon--the little +breakwater which stretched out into the Mediterranean offered a scene of +recreation to innumerable such persons. But this fact is from the point +of view of the cherisher of quaintness of little account, for since it +has become prosperous Spezia has grown ugly. The place is filled with +long, dull stretches of dead wall and great raw expanses of artificial +land. It wears that look of monstrous, of more than far-western newness +which distinguishes all the creations of the young Italian State. Nor +did I find any great compensation in an immense inn of recent birth, +an establishment seated on the edge of the sea in anticipation of a +_passeggiata_ which is to come that way some five years hence, the +region being in the meantime of the most primitive formation. The inn +was filled with grave English people who looked respectable and +bored, and there was of course a Church of England service in the +gaudily-frescoed parlour. Neither was it the drive to Porto Venere that +chiefly pleased me--a drive among vines and olives, over the hills +and beside the Mediterranean, to a queer little crumbling village on a +headland, as sweetly desolate and superannuated as the name it bears. +There is a ruined church near the village, which occupies the site +(according to tradition) of an ancient temple of Venus; and if Venus ever +revisits her desecrated shrines she must sometimes pause a moment in +that sunny stillness and listen to the murmur of the tideless sea at +the base of the narrow promontory. If Venus sometimes comes there Apollo +surely does as much; for close to the temple is a gateway surmounted by +an inscription in Italian and English, which admits you to a curious, +and it must be confessed rather cockneyfied, cave among the rocks. It +was here, says the inscription, that the great Byron, swimmer and poet, +"defied the waves of the Ligurian sea." The fact is interesting, though +not supremely so; for Byron was always defying something, and if a slab +had been put up wherever this performance came off these commemorative +tablets would be in many parts of Europe as thick as milestones. + +No; the great merit of Spezia, to my eye, is that I engaged a boat there +of a lovely October afternoon and had myself rowed across the gulf--it +took about an hour and a half--to the little bay of Lerici, which opens +out of it. This bay of Lerici is charming; the bosky grey-green hills +close it in, and on either side of the entrance, perched on a bold +headland, a wonderful old crumbling castle keeps ineffectual guard. The +place is classic to all English travellers, for in the middle of the +curving shore is the now desolate little villa in which Shelley spent +the last months of his short life. He was living at Lerici when he +started on that short southern cruise from which he never returned. The +house he occupied is strangely shabby and as sad as you may choose to +find it. It stands directly upon the beach, with scarred and battered +walls and a loggia of several arches opening to a little terrace with +a rugged parapet, which, when the wind blows, must be drenched with +the salt spray. The place is very lonely--all overwearied with sun and +breeze and brine--very close to nature, as it was Shelley's passion +to be. I can fancy a great lyric poet sitting on the terrace of a warm +evening and feeling very far from England in the early years of the +century. In that place, and with his genius, he would as a matter of +course have heard in the voice of nature a sweetness which only the +lyric movement could translate. It is a place where an English-speaking +pilgrim himself may very honestly think thoughts and feel moved to lyric +utterance. But I must content myself with saying in halting prose that +I remember few episodes of Italian travel more sympathetic, as they have +it here, than that perfect autumn afternoon; the half-hour's station on +the little battered terrace of the villa; the climb to the singularly +felicitous old castle that hangs above Lerici; the meditative lounge, in +the fading light, on the vine-decked platform that looked out toward the +sunset and the darkening mountains and, far below, upon the quiet sea, +beyond which the pale-faced tragic villa stared up at the brightening +moon. + + +IV + +I had never known Florence more herself, or in other words more +attaching, than I found her for a week in that brilliant October. +She sat in the sunshine beside her yellow river like the little +treasure-city she has always seemed, without commerce, without other +industry than the manufacture of mosaic paper-weights and alabaster +Cupids, without actuality or energy or earnestness or any of those +rugged virtues which in most cases are deemed indispensable for civic +cohesion; with nothing but the little unaugmented stock of her mediaeval +memories, her tender-coloured mountains, her churches and palaces, +pictures and statues. There were very few strangers; one's detested +fellow-pilgrim was infrequent; the native population itself seemed +scanty; the sound of wheels in the streets was but occasional; by eight +o'clock at night, apparently, every one had gone to bed, and the +musing wanderer, still wandering and still musing, had the place to +himself--had the thick shadow-masses of the great palaces, and the +shafts of moonlight striking the polygonal paving-stones, and the empty +bridges, and the silvered yellow of the Arno, and the stillness broken +only by a homeward step, a step accompanied by a snatch of song from a +warm Italian voice. My room at the inn looked out on the river and was +flooded all day with sunshine. There was an absurd orange-coloured +paper on the walls; the Arno, of a hue not altogether different, flowed +beneath; and on the other side of it rose a line of sallow houses, of +extreme antiquity, crumbling and mouldering, bulging and protruding over +the stream. (I seem to speak of their fronts; but what I saw was their +shabby backs, which were exposed to the cheerful flicker of the river, +while the fronts stood for ever in the deep damp shadow of a narrow +mediaeval street.) All this brightness and yellowness was a perpetual +delight; it was a part of that indefinably charming colour which +Florence always seems to wear as you look up and down at it from +the river, and from the bridges and quays. This is a kind of grave +radiance--a harmony of high tints--which I scarce know how to describe. +There are yellow walls and green blinds and red roofs, there are +intervals of brilliant brown and natural-looking blue; but the picture +is not spotty nor gaudy, thanks to the distribution of the colours in +large and comfortable masses, and to the washing-over of the scene by +some happy softness of sunshine. The river-front of Florence is in short +a delightful composition. Part of its charm comes of course from the +generous aspect of those high-based Tuscan palaces which a renewal of +acquaintance with them has again commended to me as the most dignified +dwellings in the world. Nothing can be finer than that look of giving +up the whole immense ground-floor to simple purposes of vestibule and +staircase, of court and high-arched entrance; as if this were all but +a massive pedestal for the real habitation and people weren't properly +housed unless, to begin with, they should be lifted fifty feet above +the pavement. The great blocks of the basement; the great intervals, +horizontally and vertically, from window to window (telling of the +height and breadth of the rooms within); the armorial shield hung +forward at one of the angles; the wide-brimmed roof, overshadowing +the narrow street; the rich old browns and yellows of the walls: these +definite elements put themselves together with admirable art. + +{Illustration: ROMAN GATEWAY, RIMINI.} + +Take a Tuscan pile of this type out of its oblique situation in the +town; call it no longer a palace, but a villa; set it down by a terrace +on one of the hills that encircle Florence, place a row of high-waisted +cypresses beside it, give it a grassy court-yard and a view of the +Florentine towers and the valley of the Arno, and you will think it +perhaps even more worthy of your esteem. It was a Sunday noon, and +brilliantly warm, when I again arrived; and after I had looked from my +windows a while at that quietly-basking river-front I have spoken of +I took my way across one of the bridges and then out of one of the +gates--that immensely tall Roman Gate in which the space from the top of +the arch to the cornice (except that there is scarcely a cornice, it is +all a plain massive piece of wall) is as great, or seems to be, as that +from the ground to the former point. Then I climbed a steep and winding +way--much of it a little dull if one likes, being bounded by mottled, +mossy garden-walls--to a villa on a hill-top, where I found various +things that touched me with almost too fine a point. Seeing them again, +often, for a week, both by sunlight and moonshine, I never quite learned +not to covet them; not to feel that not being a part of them was somehow +to miss an exquisite chance. What a tranquil, contented life it seemed, +with romantic beauty as a part of its daily texture!--the sunny terrace, +with its tangled _podere_ beneath it; the bright grey olives against +the bright blue sky; the long, serene, horizontal lines of other villas, +flanked by their upward cypresses, disposed upon the neighbouring hills; +the richest little city in the world in a softly-scooped hollow at one's +feet, and beyond it the most appealing of views, the most majestic, +yet the most familiar. Within the villa was a great love of art and +a painting-room full of felicitous work, so that if human life there +confessed to quietness, the quietness was mostly but that of the intent +act. A beautiful occupation in that beautiful position, what could +possibly be better? That is what I spoke just now of envying--a way +of life that doesn't wince at such refinements of peace and ease. When +labour self-charmed presents itself in a dull or an ugly place we esteem +it, we admire it, but we scarce feel it to be the ideal of good fortune. +When, however, its votaries move as figures in an ancient, noble +landscape, and their walks and contemplations are like a turning of the +leaves of history, we seem to have before us an admirable case of virtue +made easy; meaning here by virtue contentment and concentration, a real +appreciation of the rare, the exquisite though composite, medium of +life. You needn't want a rush or a crush when the scene itself, the mere +scene, shares with you such a wealth of consciousness. + +It is true indeed that I might after a certain time grow weary of a +regular afternoon stroll among the Florentine lanes; of sitting on low +parapets, in intervals of flower-topped wall, and looking across at +Fiesole or down the rich-hued valley of the Arno; of pausing at the open +gates of villas and wondering at the height of cypresses and the depth +of loggias; of walking home in the fading light and noting on a dozen +westward-looking surfaces the glow of the opposite sunset. But for a +week or so all this was delightful. The villas are innumerable, and if +you're an aching alien half the talk is about villas. This one has a +story; that one has another; they all look as if they had stories--none +in truth predominantly gay. Most of them are offered to rent (many of +them for sale) at prices unnaturally low; you may have a tower and a +garden, a chapel and an expanse of thirty windows, for five hundred +dollars a year. In imagination you hire three or four; you take +possession and settle and stay. Your sense of the fineness of the finest +is of something very grave and stately; your sense of the bravery of two +or three of the best something quite tragic and sinister. From what does +this latter impression come? You gather it as you stand there in the +early dusk, with your eyes on the long, pale-brown facade, the enormous +windows, the iron cages fastened to the lower ones. Part of the brooding +expression of these great houses comes, even when they have not fallen +into decay, from their look of having outlived their original use. Their +extraordinary largeness and massiveness are a satire on their present +fate. They weren't built with such a thickness of wall and depth of +embrasure, such a solidity of staircase and superfluity of stone, +simply to afford an economical winter residence to English and American +families. I don't know whether it was the appearance of these stony old +villas, which seemed so dumbly conscious of a change of manners, that +threw a tinge of melancholy over the general prospect; certain it is +that, having always found this note as of a myriad old sadnesses in +solution in the view of Florence, it seemed to me now particularly +strong. "Lovely, lovely, but it makes me 'blue,'" the sensitive stranger +couldn't but murmur to himself as, in the late afternoon, he looked +at the landscape from over one of the low parapets, and then, with his +hands in his pockets, turned away indoors to candles and dinner. + + +V + +Below, in the city, through all frequentation of streets and churches +and museums, it was impossible not to have a good deal of the same +feeling; but here the impression was more easy to analyse. It came from +a sense of the perfect separateness of all the great productions of +the Renaissance from the present and the future of the place, from the +actual life and manners, the native ideal. I have already spoken of +the way in which the vast aggregation of beautiful works of art in the +Italian cities strikes the visitor nowadays--so far as present Italy +is concerned--as the mere stock-in-trade of an impecunious but thrifty +people. It is this spiritual solitude, this conscious disconnection of +the great works of architecture and sculpture that deposits a certain +weight upon the heart; when we see a great tradition broken we feel +something of the pain with which we hear a stifled cry. But regret +is one thing and resentment is another. Seeing one morning, in a +shop-window, the series of _Mornings in Florence_ published a few years +since by Mr. Ruskin, I made haste to enter and purchase these amusing +little books, some passages of which I remembered formerly to have +read. I couldn't turn over many pages without observing that the +"separateness" of the new and old which I just mentioned had produced +in their author the liveliest irritation. With the more acute phases of +this condition it was difficult to sympathise, for the simple reason, it +seems to me, that it savours of arrogance to demand of any people, as +a right of one's own, that they shall be artistic. "Be artistic +yourselves!" is the very natural reply that young Italy has at hand for +English critics and censors. When a people produces beautiful statues +and pictures it gives us something more than is set down in the bond, +and we must thank it for its generosity; and when it stops producing +them or caring for them we may cease thanking, but we hardly have a +right to begin and rail. The wreck of Florence, says Mr. Ruskin, "is now +too ghastly and heart-breaking to any human soul that remembers the days +of old"; and these desperate words are an allusion to the fact that the +little square in front of the cathedral, at the foot of Giotto's Tower, +with the grand Baptistery on the other side, is now the resort of +a number of hackney-coaches and omnibuses. This fact is doubtless +lamentable, and it would be a hundred times more agreeable to see among +people who have been made the heirs of so priceless a work of art as the +sublime campanile some such feeling about it as would keep it free even +from the danger of defilement. A cab-stand is a very ugly and dirty +thing, and Giotto's Tower should have nothing in common with such +conveniences. But there is more than one way of taking such things, and +the sensitive stranger who has been walking about for a week with his +mind full of the sweetness and suggestiveness of a hundred Florentine +places may feel at last in looking into Mr. Ruskin's little tracts that, +discord for discord, there isn't much to choose between the importunity +of the author's personal ill-humour and the incongruity of horse-pails +and bundles of hay. And one may say this without being at all a partisan +of the doctrine of the inevitableness of new desecrations. For my own +part, I believe there are few things in this line that the new Italian +spirit isn't capable of, and not many indeed that we aren't destined to +see. Pictures and buildings won't be completely destroyed, because in +that case the _forestieri_, scatterers of cash, would cease to arrive +and the turn-stiles at the doors of the old palaces and convents, with +the little patented slit for absorbing your half-franc, would grow quite +rusty, would stiffen with disuse. But it's safe to say that the +new Italy growing into an old Italy again will continue to take her +elbow-room wherever she may find it. + +{Illustration: SANTA MARIA NOVELLA, FLORENCE} + +I am almost ashamed to say what I did with Mr. Ruskin's little books. I +put them into my pocket and betook myself to Santa Maria Novella. There +I sat down and, after I had looked about for a while at the beautiful +church, drew them forth one by one and read the greater part of them. +Occupying one's self with light literature in a great religious edifice +is perhaps as bad a piece of profanation as any of those rude dealings +which Mr. Ruskin justly deplores; but a traveller has to make the most +of odd moments, and I was waiting for a friend in whose company I was +to go and look at Giotto's beautiful frescoes in the cloister of the +church. My friend was a long time coming, so that I had an hour with Mr. +Ruskin, whom I called just now a light _littrateur_ because in these +little Mornings in Florence he is for ever making his readers laugh. +I remembered of course where I was, and in spite of my latent hilarity +felt I had rarely got such a snubbing. I had really been enjoying the +good old city of Florence, but I now learned from Mr. Ruskin that this +was a scandalous waste of charity. I should have gone about with an +imprecation on my lips, I should have worn a face three yards long. I +had taken great pleasure in certain frescoes by Ghirlandaio in the choir +of that very church; but it appeared from one of the little books that +these frescoes were as naught. I had much admired Santa Croce and had +thought the Duomo a very noble affair; but I had now the most positive +assurance I knew nothing about them. After a while, if it was only +ill-humour that was needed for doing honour to the city of the Medici, +I felt that I had risen to a proper level; only now it was Mr. Ruskin +himself I had lost patience with, not the stupid Brunelleschi, not the +vulgar Ghirlandaio. Indeed I lost patience altogether, and asked myself +by what right this informal votary of form pretended to run riot through +a poor charmed _flaneur's_ quiet contemplations, his attachment to the +noblest of pleasures, his enjoyment of the loveliest of cities. The +little books seemed invidious and insane, and it was only when I +remembered that I had been under no obligation to buy them that I +checked myself in repenting of having done so. + +Then at last my friend arrived and we passed together out of the church, +and, through the first cloister beside it, into a smaller enclosure +where we stood a while to look at the tomb of the Marchesa +Strozzi-Ridolfi, upon which the great Giotto has painted four superb +little pictures. It was easy to see the pictures were superb; but I drew +forth one of my little books again, for I had observed that Mr. Ruskin +spoke of them. Hereupon I recovered my tolerance; for what could be +better in this case, I asked myself, than Mr. Ruskin's remarks? They +are in fact excellent and charming--full of appreciation of the deep +and simple beauty of the great painter's work. I read them aloud to my +companion; but my companion was rather, as the phrase is, "put off" +by them. One of the frescoes--it is a picture of the birth of the +Virgin--contains a figure coming through a door. "Of ornament," I quote, +"there is only the entirely simple outline of the vase which the servant +carries; of colour two or three masses of sober red and pure white, +with brown and grey. That is all," Mr. Ruskin continues. "And if you are +pleased with this you can see Florence. But if not, by all means amuse +yourself there, if you find it amusing, as long as you like; you +can never see it." _You can never see it._ This seemed to my friend +insufferable, and I had to shuffle away the book again, so that we might +look at the fresco with the unruffled geniality it deserves. We agreed +afterwards, when in a more convenient place I read aloud a good many +more passages from the precious tracts, that there are a great many +ways of seeing Florence, as there are of seeing most beautiful and +interesting things, and that it is very dry and pedantic to say that +the happy vision depends upon our squaring our toes with a certain +particular chalk-mark. We see Florence wherever and whenever we enjoy +it, and for enjoying it we find a great many more pretexts than Mr. +Ruskin seems inclined to allow. My friend and I convinced ourselves +also, however, that the little books were an excellent purchase, on +account of the great charm and felicity of much of their incidental +criticism; to say nothing, as I hinted just now, of their being +extremely amusing. Nothing in fact is more comical than the familiar +asperity of the author's style and the pedagogic fashion in which he +pushes and pulls his unhappy pupils about, jerking their heads toward +this, rapping their knuckles for that, sending them to stand in +corners and giving them Scripture texts to copy. But it is neither the +felicities nor the aberrations of detail, in Mr. Ruskin's writings, that +are the main affair for most readers; it is the general tone that, as +I have said, puts them off or draws them on. For many persons he will +never bear the test of being read in this rich old Italy, where art, so +long as it really lived at all, was spontaneous, joyous, irresponsible. +If the reader is in daily contact with those beautiful Florentine +works which do still, in away, force themselves into notice through the +vulgarity and cruelty of modern profanation, it will seem to him that +this commentator's comment is pitched in the strangest falsetto key. +"One may read a hundred pages of this sort of thing," said my friend, +"without ever dreaming that he is talking about _art_. You can say +nothing worse about him than that." Which is perfectly true. Art is the +one corner of human life in which we may take our ease. To justify our +presence there the only thing demanded of us is that we shall have felt +the representational impulse. In other connections our impulses are +conditioned and embarrassed; we are allowed to have only so many as +are consistent with those of our neighbours; with their convenience +and well-being, with their convictions and prejudices, their rules and +regulations. Art means an escape from all this. Wherever her shining +standard floats the need for apology and compromise is over; there it +is enough simply that we please or are pleased. There the tree is judged +only by its fruits. If these are sweet the tree is justified--and not +less so the consumer. + +One may read a great many pages of Mr. Ruskin without getting a hint of +this delightful truth; a hint of the not unimportant fact that art after +all is made for us and not we for art. This idea that the value of +a work is in the amount of illusion it yields is conspicuous by its +absence. And as for Mr. Ruskin's world's being a place--his world of +art--where we may take life easily, woe to the luckless mortal who +enters it with any such disposition. Instead of a garden of delight, he +finds a sort of assize court in perpetual session. Instead of a place +in which human responsibilities are lightened and suspended, he finds a +region governed by a kind of Draconic legislation. His responsibilities +indeed are tenfold increased; the gulf between truth and error is for +ever yawning at his feet; the pains and penalties of this same error are +advertised, in apocalyptic terminology, upon a thousand sign-posts; and +the rash intruder soon begins to look back with infinite longing to the +lost paradise of the artless. There can be no greater want of tact in +dealing with those things with which men attempt to ornament life than +to be perpetually talking about "error." A truce to all rigidities is +the law of the place; the only thing absolute there is that some force +and some charm have worked. The grim old bearer of the scales excuses +herself; she feels this not to be her province. Differences here are not +iniquity and righteousness; they are simply variations of temperament, +kinds of curiosity. We are not under theological government. + + +VI + +It was very charming, in the bright, warm days, to wander from one +corner of Florence to another, paying one's respects again to remembered +masterpieces. It was pleasant also to find that memory had played no +tricks and that the rarest things of an earlier year were as rare as +ever. To enumerate these felicities would take a great deal of space; +for I never had been more struck with the mere quantity of brilliant +Florentine work. Even giving up the Duomo and Santa Croce to Mr. Ruskin +as very ill-arranged edifices, the list of the Florentine treasures is +almost inexhaustible. Those long outer galleries of the Uffizi had +never beguiled me more; sometimes there were not more than two or +three figures standing there, Baedeker in hand, to break the charming +perspective. One side of this upstairs portico, it will be remembered, +is entirely composed of glass; a continuity of old-fashioned windows, +draped with white curtains of rather primitive fashion, which hang there +till they acquire a perceptible tone. The light, passing through +them, is softly filtered and diffused; it rests mildly upon the +old marbles--chiefly antique Roman busts--which stand in the narrow +intervals of the casements. It is projected upon the numerous pictures +that cover the opposite wall and that are not by any means, as a general +thing, the gems of the great collection; it imparts a faded brightness +to the old ornamental arabesques upon the painted wooden ceiling, and it +makes a great soft shining upon the marble floor, in which, as you look +up and down, you see the strolling tourists and the motionless copyists +almost reflected. I don't know why I should find all this very pleasant, +but in fact, I have seldom gone into the Uffizi without walking the +length of this third-story cloister, between the (for the most part) +third-rate canvases and panels and the faded cotton curtains. Why is +it that in Italy we see a charm in things in regard to which in other +countries we always take vulgarity for granted? If in the city of +New York a great museum of the arts were to be provided, by way of +decoration, with a species of verandah enclosed on one side by a series +of small-paned windows draped in dirty linen, and furnished on the other +with an array of pictorial feebleness, the place being surmounted by +a thinly-painted wooden roof, strongly suggestive of summer heat, +of winter cold, of frequent leakage, those amateurs who had had the +advantage of foreign travel would be at small pains to conceal their +contempt. Contemptible or respectable, to the judicial mind, this quaint +old loggia of the Uffizi admitted me into twenty chambers where I found +as great a number of ancient favourites. I don't know that I had a +warmer greeting for any old friend than for Andrea del Sarto, that most +touching of painters who is not one of the first. But it was on the +other side of the Arno that I found him in force, in those dusky +drawing-rooms of the Pitti Palace to which you take your way along +the tortuous tunnel that wanders through the houses of Florence and is +supported by the little goldsmiths' booths on the Ponte Vecchio. In the +rich insufficient light of these beautiful rooms, where, to look at the +pictures, you sit in damask chairs and rest your elbows on tables of +malachite, the elegant Andrea becomes deeply effective. Before long he +has drawn you close. But the great pleasure, after all, was to revisit +the earlier masters, in those specimens of them chiefly that bloom +so unfadingly on the big plain walls of the Academy. Fra Angelico and +Filippo Lippi, Botticelli and Lorenzo di Credi are the clearest, +the sweetest and best of all painters; as I sat for an hour in +their company, in the cold great hall of the institution I have +mentioned--there are shabby rafters above and an immense expanse of +brick tiles below, and many bad pictures as well as good--it seemed +to me more than ever that if one really had to choose one couldn't do +better than choose here. You may rest at your ease at the Academy, in +this big first room--at the upper end especially, on the left--because +more than many other places it savours of old Florence. More for +instance, in reality, than the Bargello, though the Bargello makes great +pretensions. Beautiful and masterful though the Bargello is, it smells +too strongly of restoration, and, much of old Italy as still lurks in +its furbished and renovated chambers, it speaks even more distinctly +of the ill-mannered young kingdom that has--as "unavoidably" as you +please--lifted down a hundred delicate works of sculpture from the +convent-walls where their pious authors placed them. If the early Tuscan +painters are exquisite I can think of no praise pure enough for the +sculptors of the same period, Donatello and Luca della Robbia, Matteo +Civitale and Mina da Fiesole, who, as I refreshed my memory of them, +seemed to me to leave absolutely nothing to be desired in the way of +straightness of inspiration and grace of invention. The Bargello is full +of early Tuscan sculpture, most of the pieces of which have come from +suppressed religious houses; and even if the visitor be an ardent +liberal he is uncomfortably conscious of the rather brutal process by +which it has been collected. One can hardly envy young Italy the number +of odious things she has had to do. + +The railway journey from Florence to Rome has been altered both for the +better and for the worse; for the better in that it has been shortened +by a couple of hours; for the worse inasmuch as when about half the +distance has been traversed the train deflects to the west and leaves +the beautiful old cities of Assisi, Perugia, Terni, Narni, unvisited. +Of old it was possible to call at these places, in a manner, from the +window of the train; even if you didn't stop, as you probably couldn't, +every time you passed, the immensely interesting way in which, like a +loosened belt on an aged and shrunken person, their ample walls held +them easily together was something well worth noting. Now, however, +for compensation, the express train to Rome stops at Orvieto, and in +consequence... In consequence what? What is the result of the stop of +an express train at Orvieto? As I glibly wrote that sentence I suddenly +paused, aware of the queer stuff I was uttering. That an express train +would graze the base of the horrid purple mountain from the apex of +which this dark old Catholic city uplifts the glittering front of +its cathedral--that might have been foretold by a keen observer of +contemporary manners. But that it would really have the grossness to +hang about is a fact over which, as he records it, an inveterate, a +perverse cherisher of the sense of the past order, the order still +largely prevailing at the time of his first visit to Italy, may well +make what is vulgarly called an ado. The train does stop at Orvieto, +not very long, it is true, but long enough to let you out. The same +phenomenon takes place on the following day, when, having visited the +city, you get in again. I availed myself without scruple of both of +these occasions, having formerly neglected to drive to the place in a +post-chaise. But frankly, the railway-station being in the plain and the +town on the summit of an extraordinary hill, you have time to forget +the puffing indiscretion while you wind upwards to the city-gate. The +position of Orvieto is superb--worthy of the "middle distance" of an +eighteenth-century landscape. But, as every one knows, the splendid +Cathedral is the proper attraction of the spot, which, indeed, save +for this fine monument and for its craggy and crumbling ramparts, is a +meanly arranged and, as Italian cities go, not particularly impressive +little town. I spent a beautiful Sunday there and took in the charming +church. I gave it my best attention, though on the whole I fear I found +it inferior to its fame. A high concert of colour, however, is the +densely carved front, richly covered with radiant mosaics. The old white +marble of the sculptured portions is as softly yellow as ancient ivory; +the large exceedingly bright pictures above them flashed and twinkled +in the glorious weather. Very striking and interesting the theological +frescoes of Luca Signorelli, though I have seen compositions of this +general order that appealed to me more. Characteristically fresh, +finally, the clear-faced saints and seraphs, in robes of pink and azure, +whom Fra Angelico has painted upon the ceiling of the great chapel, +along with a noble sitting figure--more expressive of movement than most +of the creations of this pictorial peace-maker--of Christ in judgment. +Yet the interest of the cathedral of Orvieto is mainly not the visible +result, but the historical process that lies behind it; those three +hundred years of the applied devotion of a people of which an American +scholar has written an admirable account.{1} + +1877. + +{1} Charles Eliot Norton, _Notes of Travel and Study in Italy_. + + + + + +A ROMAN HOLIDAY + + +It is certainly sweet to be merry at the right moment; but the right +moment hardly seems to me the ten days of the Roman Carnival. It was +my rather cynical suspicion perhaps that they wouldn't keep to my +imagination the brilliant promise of legend; but I have been justified +by the event and have been decidedly less conscious of the festal +influences of the season than of the inalienable gravity of the place. +There was a time when the Carnival was a serious matter--that is a +heartily joyous one; but, thanks to the seven-league boots the kingdom +of Italy has lately donned for the march of progress in quite other +directions, the fashion of public revelry has fallen woefully out of +step. The state of mind and manners under which the Carnival was kept in +generous good faith I doubt if an American can exactly conceive: he can +only say to himself that for a month in the year there must have been +things--things considerably of humiliation--it was comfortable to +forget. But now that Italy is made the Carnival is unmade; and we are +not especially tempted to envy the attitude of a population who have +lost their relish for play and not yet acquired to any striking extent +an enthusiasm for work. The spectacle on the Corso has seemed to me, on +the whole, an illustration of that great breach with the past of which +Catholic Christendom felt the somewhat muffled shock in September, 1870. +A traveller acquainted with the fully papal Rome, coming back any time +during the past winter, must have immediately noticed that something +momentous had happened--something hostile to the elements of picture +and colour and "style." My first warning was that ten minutes after +my arrival I found myself face to face with a newspaper stand. The +impossibility in the other days of having anything in the journalistic +line but the _Osservatore Romano_ and the _Voce della Verit_ used to +seem to me much connected with the extraordinary leisure of thought and +stillness of mind to which the place admitted you. But now the slender +piping of the Voice of Truth is stifled by the raucous note of eventide +vendors of the _Capitale_, the _Libert_ and the _Fanfulla_; and Rome +reading unexpurgated news is another Rome indeed. For every subscriber +to the _Libert_ there may well be an antique masker and reveller less. +As striking a sign of the new rgime is the extraordinary increase of +population. The Corso was always a well-filled street, but now it's +a perpetual crush. I never cease to wonder where the new-comers are +lodged, and how such spotless flowers of fashion as the gentlemen who +stare at the carriages can bloom in the atmosphere of those _camere +mobiliate_ of which I have had glimpses. This, however, is their own +question, and bravely enough they meet it. They proclaimed somehow, to +the first freshness of my wonder, as I say, that by force of numbers +Rome had been secularised. An Italian dandy is a figure visually +to reckon with, but these goodly throngs of them scarce offered +compensation for the absent monsignori, treading the streets in their +purple stockings and followed by the solemn servants who returned on +their behalf the bows of the meaner sort; for the mourning gear of the +cardinals' coaches that formerly glittered with scarlet and swung with +the weight of the footmen clinging behind; for the certainty that you'll +not, by the best of traveller's luck, meet the Pope sitting deep in the +shadow of his great chariot with uplifted fingers like some inaccessible +idol in his shrine. You may meet the King indeed, who is as ugly, as +imposingly ugly, as some idols, though not so inaccessible. The other +day as I passed the Quirinal he drove up in a low carriage with a single +attendant; and a group of men and women who had been waiting near +the gate rushed at him with a number of folded papers. The carriage +slackened pace and he pocketed their offerings with a business-like +air--hat of a good-natured man accepting handbills at a street-corner. +Here was a monarch at his palace gate receiving petitions from his +subjects--being adjured to right their wrongs. The scene ought to have +thrilled me, but somehow it had no more intensity than a woodcut in an +illustrated newspaper. Homely I should call it at most; admirably so, +certainly, for there were lately few sovereigns standing, I believe, +with whom their people enjoyed these filial hand-to-hand relations. The +King this year, however, has had as little to do with the Carnival as +the Pope, and the innkeepers and Americans have marked it for their own. + +It was advertised to begin at half-past two o'clock of a certain +Saturday, and punctually at the stroke of the hour, from my room across +a wide court, I heard a sudden multiplication of sounds and confusion +of tongues in the Corso. I was writing to a friend for whom I cared +more than for any mere romp; but as the minutes elapsed and the hubbub +deepened curiosity got the better of affection, and I remembered that I +was really within eye-shot of an affair the fame of which had ministered +to the daydreams of my infancy. I used to have a scrap-book with a +coloured print of the starting of the bedizened wild horses, and the use +of a library rich in keepsakes and annuals with a frontispiece commonly +of a masked lady in a balcony, the heroine of a delightful tale further +on. Agitated by these tender memories I descended into the street; but +I confess I looked in vain for a masked lady who might serve as a +frontispiece, in vain for any object whatever that might adorn a tale. +Masked and muffled ladies there were in abundance; but their masks were +of ugly wire, perfectly resembling the little covers placed upon strong +cheese in German hotels, and their drapery was a shabby water-proof +with the hood pulled over their chignons. They were armed with great tin +scoops or funnels, with which they solemnly shovelled lime and flour +out of bushel-baskets and down on the heads of the people in the street. +They were packed into balconies all the way along the straight vista of +the Corso, in which their calcareous shower maintained a dense, gritty, +unpalatable fog. The crowd was compact in the street, and the Americans +in it were tossing back confetti out of great satchels hung round their +necks. It was quite the "you're another" sort of repartee, and less +seasoned than I had hoped with the airy mockery tradition hangs about +this festival. The scene was striking, in a word; but somehow not as +I had dreamed of its being. I stood regardful, I suppose, but with a +peculiarly tempting blankness of visage, for in a moment I received +half a bushel of flour on my too-philosophic head. Decidedly it was an +ignoble form of humour. I shook my ears like an emergent diver, and had +a sudden vision of how still and sunny and solemn, how peculiarly and +undisturbedly themselves, how secure from any intrusion less sympathetic +than one's own, certain outlying parts of Rome must just then be. The +Carnival had received its deathblow in my imagination; and it has been +ever since but a thin and dusky ghost of pleasure that has flitted at +intervals in and out of my consciousness. + +I turned my back accordingly on the Corso and wandered away to the +grass-grown quarters delightfully free even from the possibility of +a fellow-countryman. And so having set myself an example I have been +keeping Carnival by strolling perversely along the silent circumference +of Rome. I have doubtless lost a great deal. The Princess Margaret has +occupied a balcony opposite the open space which leads into Via Condotti +and, I believe, like the discreet princess she is, has dealt in no +missiles but bonbons, bouquets and white doves. I would have waited +half an hour any day to see the Princess Margaret hold a dove on her +forefinger; but I never chanced to notice any preparation for that +effect. And yet do what you will you can't really elude the Carnival. As +the days elapse it filters down into the manners of the common people, +and before the week is over the very beggars at the church-doors seem to +have gone to the expense of a domino. When you meet these specimens of +dingy drollery capering about in dusky back-streets at all hours of +the day and night, meet them flitting out of black doorways between the +greasy groups that cluster about Roman thresholds, you feel that a love +of "pranks," the more vivid the better, must from far back have +been implanted in the Roman temperament with a strong hand. An +unsophisticated American is wonderstruck at the number of persons, of +every age and various conditions, whom it costs nothing in the nature of +an ingenuous blush to walk up and down the streets in the costume of a +theatrical supernumerary. Fathers of families do it at the head of an +admiring progeniture; aunts and uncles and grandmothers do it; all +the family does it, with varying splendour but with the same good +conscience. "A pack of babies!" the doubtless too self-conscious alien +pronounces it for its pains, and tries to imagine himself strutting +along Broadway in a battered tin helmet and a pair of yellow tights. Our +vices are certainly different; it takes those of the innocent sort to be +so ridiculous. A self-consciousness lapsing so easily, in fine, strikes +me as so near a relation to amenity, urbanity and general gracefulness +that, for myself, I should be sorry to lay a tax on it, lest these other +commodities should also cease to come to market. + +I was rewarded, when I had turned away with my ears full of flour, by +a glimpse of an intenser life than the dingy foolery of the Corso. +I walked down by the back streets to the steps mounting to the +Capitol--that long inclined plane, rather, broken at every two paces, +which is the unfailing disappointment, I believe, of tourists primed for +retrospective raptures. Certainly the Capitol seen from this side isn't +commanding. The hill is so low, the ascent so narrow, Michael Angelo's +architecture in the quadrangle at the top so meagre, the whole place +somehow so much more of a mole-hill than a mountain, that for the first +ten minutes of your standing there Roman history seems suddenly to have +sunk through a trap-door. It emerges however on the other side, in the +Forum; and here meanwhile, if you get no sense of the sublime, you get +gradually a sense of exquisite composition. Nowhere in Rome is more +colour, more charm, more sport for the eye. The mild incline, during +the winter months, is always covered with lounging sun-seekers, and +especially with those more constantly obvious members of the Roman +population--beggars, soldiers, monks and tourists. The beggars and +peasants lie kicking their heels along that grandest of loafing-places +the great steps of the Ara Coeli. The dwarfish look of the Capitol is +intensified, I think, by the neighbourhood of this huge blank staircase, +mouldering away in disuse, the weeds thick in its crevices, and climbing +to the rudely solemn facade of the church. The sunshine glares on this +great unfinished wall only to light up its featureless despair, its +expression of conscious, irremediable incompleteness. Sometimes, massing +its rusty screen against the deep blue sky, with the little cross and +the sculptured porch casting a clear-cut shadow on the bricks, it seems +to have even more than a Roman desolation, it confusedly suggests Spain +and Africa--lands with no latent _risorgimenti_, with absolutely +nothing but a fatal past. The legendary wolf of Rome has lately been +accommodated with a little artificial grotto, among the cacti and the +palms, in the fantastic triangular garden squeezed between the steps of +the church and the ascent to the Capitol, where she holds a perpetual +levee and "draws" apparently as powerfully as the Pope himself. Above, +in the piazzetta before the stuccoed palace which rises so jauntily on a +basement of thrice its magnitude, are more loungers and knitters in the +sun, seated round the massively inscribed base of the statue of Marcus +Aurelius. Hawthorne has perfectly expressed the attitude of this +admirable figure in saying that it extends its arm with "a command which +is in itself a benediction." I doubt if any statue of king or captain +in the public places of the world has more to commend it to the general +heart. Irrecoverable simplicity--residing so in irrecoverable Style--has +no sturdier representative. Here is an impression that the sculptors of +the last three hundred years have been laboriously trying to reproduce; +but contrasted with this mild old monarch their prancing horsemen +suggest a succession of riding-masters taking out young ladies' +schools. The admirably human character of the figure survives the rusty +decomposition of the bronze and the slight "debasement" of the art; and +one may call it singular that in the capital of Christendom the portrait +most suggestive of a Christian conscience is that of a pagan emperor. + +You recover in some degree your stifled hopes of sublimity as you +pass beyond the palace and take your choice of either curving slope to +descend into the Forum. Then you see that the little stuccoed edifice +is but a modern excrescence on the mighty cliff of a primitive +construction, whose great squares of porous tufa, as they underlie each +other, seem to resolve themselves back into the colossal cohesion of +unhewn rock. There are prodigious strangenesses in the union of +this airy and comparatively fresh-faced superstructure and these +deep-plunging, hoary foundations; and few things in Rome are more +entertaining to the eye than to measure the long plumb-line which drops +from the inhabited windows of the palace, with their little over-peeping +balconies, their muslin curtains and their bird-cages, down to the +rugged constructional work of the Republic. In the Forum proper the +sublime is eclipsed again, though the late extension of the excavations +gives a chance for it. + +Nothing in Rome helps your fancy to a more vigorous backward flight than +to lounge on a sunny day over the railing which guards the great central +researches. It "says" more things to you than you can repeat to see the +past, the ancient world, as you stand there, bodily turned up with the +spade and transformed from an immaterial, inaccessible fact of time into +a matter of soils and surfaces. The pleasure is the same--in kind--as +what you enjoy of Pompeii, and the pain the same. It wasn't here, +however, that I found my compensation for forfeiting the spectacle on +the Corso, but in a little church at the end of the narrow byway which +diverges up the Palatine from just beside the Arch of Titus. This byway +leads you between high walls, then takes a bend and introduces you to a +long row of rusty, dusty little pictures of the stations of the cross. +Beyond these stands a small church with a front so modest that you +hardly recognise it till you see the leather curtain. I never see a +leather curtain without lifting it; it is sure to cover a constituted +_scene_ of some sort--good, bad or indifferent. The scene this time was +meagre--whitewash and tarnished candlesticks and mouldy muslin flowers +being its principal features. I shouldn't have remained if I hadn't +been struck with the attitude of the single worshipper--a young priest +kneeling before one of the sidealtars, who, as I entered, lifted his +head and gave me a sidelong look so charged with the languor of devotion +that he immediately became an object of interest. He was visiting each +of the altars in turn and kissing the balustrade beneath them. He was +alone in the church, and indeed in the whole region. There were no +beggars even at the door; they were plying their trade on the skirts +of the Carnival. In the entirely deserted place he alone knelt for +religion, and as I sat respectfully by it seemed to me I could hear in +the perfect silence the far-away uproar of the maskers. It was my +late impression of these frivolous people, I suppose, joined with the +extraordinary gravity of the young priest's face--his pious fatigue, +his droning prayer and his isolation--that gave me just then and there a +supreme vision of the religious passion, its privations and resignations +and exhaustions and its terribly small share of amusement. He was +young and strong and evidently of not too refined a fibre to enjoy the +Carnival; but, planted there with his face pale with fasting and his +knees stiff with praying, he seemed so stern a satire on it and on +the crazy thousands who were preferring it to _his_ way, that I half +expected to see some heavenly portent out of a monastic legend come down +and confirm his choice. Yet I confess that though I wasn't enamoured of +the Carnival myself, his seemed a grim preference and this forswearing +of the world a terrible game--a gaining one only if your zeal never +falters; a hard fight when it does. In such an hour, to a stout young +fellow like the hero of my anecdote, the smell of incense must seem +horribly stale and the muslin flowers and gilt candlesticks to figure no +great bribe. And it wouldn't have helped him much to think that not so +very far away, just beyond the Forum, in the Corso, there was sport for +the million, and for nothing. I doubt on the other hand whether my young +priest had thought of this. He had made himself a temple out of the very +elements of his innocence, and his prayers followed each other too +fast for the tempter to slip in a whisper. And so, as I say, I found a +solider fact of human nature than the love of _coriandoli_. + +One of course never passes the Colosseum without paying it one's +respects--without going in under one of the hundred portals and crossing +the long oval and sitting down a while, generally at the foot of the +cross in the centre. I always feel, as I do so, as if I were seated in +the depths of some Alpine valley. The upper portions of the side toward +the Esquiline look as remote and lonely as an Alpine ridge, and you +raise your eyes to their rugged sky-line, drinking in the sun and +silvered by the blue air, with much the same feeling with which you +would take in a grey cliff on which an eagle might lodge. This roughly +mountainous quality of the great ruin is its chief interest; beauty +of detail has pretty well vanished, especially since the high-growing +wild-flowers have been plucked away by the new government, whose +functionaries, surely, at certain points of their task, must have felt +as if they shared the dreadful trade of those who gather samphire. +Even if you are on your way to the Lateran you won't grudge the twenty +minutes it will take you, on leaving the Colosseum, to turn away under +the Arch of Constantine, whose noble battered bas-reliefs, with the +chain of tragic statues--fettered, drooping barbarians--round its +summit, I assume you to have profoundly admired, toward the piazzetta of +the church of San Giovanni e Paolo, on the slope of Caelian. No spot in +Rome can show a cluster of more charming accidents. The ancient brick +apse of the church peeps down into the trees of the little wooded walk +before the neighbouring church of San Gregorio, intensely venerable +beneath its excessive modernisation; and a series of heavy brick +buttresses, flying across to an opposite wall, overarches the short, +steep, paved passage which leads into the small square. This is flanked +on one side by the long mediaeval portico of the church of the two +saints, sustained by eight time-blackened columns of granite and marble. +On another rise the great scarce-windowed walls of a Passionist convent, +and on the third the portals of a grand villa, whose tall porter, +with his cockade and silver-topped staff, standing sublime behind his +grating, seems a kind of mundane St. Peter, I suppose, to the beggars +who sit at the church door or lie in the sun along the farther slope +which leads to the gate of the convent. The place always seems to me the +perfection of an out-of-the-way corner--a place you would think twice +before telling people about, lest you should find them there the next +time you were to go. It is such a group of objects, singly and in their +happy combination, as one must come to Rome to find at one's house +door; but what makes it peculiarly a picture is the beautiful dark +red campanile of the church, which stands embedded in the mass of +the convent. It begins, as so many things in Rome begin, with a stout +foundation of antique travertine, and rises high, in delicately quaint +mediaeval brickwork--little tiers and apertures sustained on miniature +columns and adorned with small cracked slabs of green and yellow marble, +inserted almost at random. When there are three or four brown-breasted +contadini sleeping in the sun before the convent doors, and a departing +monk leading his shadow down over them, I think you will not find +anything in Rome more _sketchable_. + +If you stop, however, to observe everything worthy of your water-colours +you will never reach St. John Lateran. My business was much less with +the interior of that vast and empty, that cold clean temple, which I +have never found peculiarly interesting, than with certain charming +features of its surrounding precinct--the crooked old court beside it, +which admits you to the Baptistery and to a delightful rear-view of +the queer architectural odds and ends that may in Rome compose a florid +ecclesiastical faade. There are more of these, a stranger jumble +of chance detail, of lurking recesses and wanton projections and +inexplicable windows, than I have memory or phrase for; but the gem +of the collection is the oddly perched peaked turret, with its yellow +travertine welded upon the rusty brickwork, which was not meant to be +suspected, and the brickwork retreating beneath and leaving it in the +odd position of a tower _under_ which you may see the sky. As to the +great front of the church overlooking the Porta San Giovanni, you are +not admitted behind the scenes; the term is quite in keeping, for the +architecture has a vastly theatrical air. It is extremely imposing--that +of St. Peter's alone is more so; and when from far off on the Campagna +you see the colossal images of the mitred saints along the top standing +distinct against the sky, you forget their coarse construction and their +inflated draperies. The view from the great space which stretches from +the church steps to the city wall is the very prince of views. Just +beside you, beyond the great alcove of mosaic, is the Scala Santa, the +marble staircase which (says the legend) Christ descended under the +weight of Pilate's judgment, and which all Christians must for ever +ascend on their knees; before you is the city gate which opens upon the +Via Appia Nuova, the long gaunt file of arches of the Claudian aqueduct, +their jagged ridge stretching away like the vertebral column of some +monstrous mouldering skeleton, and upon the blooming brown and purple +flats and dells of the Campagna and the glowing blue of the Alban +Mountains, spotted with their white, high-nestling towns; while to your +left is the great grassy space, lined with dwarfish mulberry-trees, +which stretches across to the damp little sister-basilica of Santa Croce +in Gerusalemme. During a former visit to Rome I lost my heart to this +idle tract,{1} + +{1} Utterly overbuilt and gone--1909. + +and wasted much time in sitting on the steps of the church and watching +certain white-cowled friars who were sure to be passing there for the +delight of my eyes. There are fewer friars now, and there are a great +many of the king's recruits, who inhabit the ex-conventual barracks +adjoining Santa Croce and are led forward to practise their goose-step +on the sunny turf. Here too the poor old cardinals who are no longer +to be seen on the Pincio descend from their mourning-coaches and +relax their venerable knees. These members alone still testify to the +traditional splendour of the princes of the Church; for as they advance +the lifted black petticoat reveals a flash of scarlet stockings and +makes you groan at the victory of civilisation over colour. + +{Illustration: THE FAADE OF ST. JOHN LATERAN, ROME.} + +If St. John Lateran disappoints you internally, you have an easy +compensation in pacing the long lane which connects it with Santa +Maria Maggiore and entering the singularly perfect nave of that most +delightful of churches. The first day of my stay in Rome under the +old dispensation I spent in wandering at random through the city, +with accident for my _valet-de-place_. It served me to perfection and +introduced me to the best things; among others to an immediate happy +relation with Santa Maria Maggiore. First impressions, memorable +impressions, are generally irrecoverable; they often leave one the +wiser, but they rarely return in the same form. I remember, of my coming +uninformed and unprepared into the place of worship and of curiosity +that I have named, only that I sat for half an hour on the edge of the +base of one of the marble columns of the beautiful nave and enjoyed a +perfect revel of--what shall I call it?--taste, intelligence, fancy, +perceptive emotion? The place proved so endlessly suggestive that +perception became a throbbing confusion of images, and I departed with +a sense of knowing a good deal that is not set down in Murray. I have +seated myself more than once again at the base of the same column; +but you live your life only once, the parts as well as the whole. The +obvious charm of the church is the elegant grandeur of the nave--its +perfect shapeliness and its rich simplicity, its long double row of +white marble columns and its high flat roof, embossed with intricate +gildings and mouldings. It opens into a choir of an extraordinary +splendour of effect, which I recommend you to look out for of a fine +afternoon. At such a time the glowing western light, entering the high +windows of the tribune, kindles the scattered masses of colour into +sombre bright-ness, scintillates on the great solemn mosaic of the +vault, touches the porphyry columns of the superb baldachino with ruby +lights, and buries its shining shafts in the deep-toned shadows that +hang about frescoes and sculptures and mouldings. The deeper charm even +than in such things, however, is the social or historic note or tone or +atmosphere of the church--I fumble, you see, for my right expression; +the sense it gives you, in common with most of the Roman churches, and +more than any of them, of having been prayed in for several centuries by +an endlessly curious and complex society. It takes no great attention to +let it come to you that the authority of Italian Catholicism has lapsed +not a little in these days; not less also perhaps than to feel that, as +they stand, these deserted temples were the fruit of a society leavened +through and through by ecclesiastical manners, and that they formed for +ages the constant background of the human drama. They are, as one +may say, the _churchiest_ churches in Europe--the fullest of gathered +memories, of the experience of their office. There's not a figure one +has read of in old-world annals that isn't to be imagined on proper +occasion kneeling before the lamp-decked Confession beneath the altar of +Santa Maria Maggiore. One sees after all, however, even among the +most palpable realities, very much what the play of one's imagination +projects there; and I present my remarks simply as a reminder that one's +constant excursions into these places are not the least interesting +episodes of one's walks in Rome. + +I had meant to give a simple illustration of the church-habit, so to +speak, but I have given it at such a length as leaves scant space to +touch on the innumerable topics brushed by the pen that begins to take +Roman notes. It is by the aimless _flnerie_ which leaves you free to +follow capriciously every hint of entertainment that you get to know +Rome. The greater part of the life about you goes on in the streets; +and for an observer fresh from a country in which town scenery is at the +least monotonous incident and character and picture seem to abound. I +become conscious with compunction, let me hasten to add, that I have +launched myself thus on the subject of Roman churches and Roman walks +without so much as a preliminary allusion to St. Peter's. One is apt to +proceed thither on rainy days with intentions of exercise--to put the +case only at that--and to carry these out body and mind. Taken as a walk +not less than as a church, St. Peter's of course reigns alone. Even +for the profane "constitutional" it serves where the Boulevards, where +Piccadilly and Broadway, fall short, and if it didn't offer to our use +the grandest area in the world it would still offer the most diverting. +Few great works of art last longer to the curiosity, to the perpetually +transcended attention. You think you have taken the whole thing in, but +it expands, it rises sublime again, and leaves your measure itself poor. +You never let the ponderous leather curtain bang down behind you--your +weak lift of a scant edge of whose padded vastness resembles the +liberty taken in folding back the parchment corner of some mighty folio +page--without feeling all former visits to have been but missed attempts +at apprehension and the actual to achieve your first real possession. +The conventional question is ever as to whether one hasn't been +"disappointed in the size," but a few honest folk here and there, I +hope, will never cease to say no. The place struck me from the first as +the hugest thing conceivable--a real exaltation of one's idea of space; +so that one's entrance, even from the great empty square which either +glares beneath the deep blue sky or makes of the cool far-cast shadow of +the immense front something that resembles a big slate-coloured country +on a map, seems not so much a going in somewhere as a going out. The +mere man of pleasure in quest of new sensations might well not know +where to better his encounter there of the sublime shock that brings +him, within the threshold, to an immediate gasping pause. There are +days when the vast nave looks mysteriously vaster than on others and +the gorgeous baldachino a longer journey beyond the far-spreading +tessellated plain of the pavement, and when the light has yet a quality +which lets things loom their largest, while the scattered figures--I +mean the human, for there are plenty of others--mark happily the scale +of items and parts. Then you have only to stroll and stroll and gaze and +gaze; to watch the glorious altar-canopy lift its bronze architecture, +its colossal embroidered contortions, like a temple within a temple, and +feel yourself, at the bottom of the abysmal shaft of the dome, dwindle +to a crawling dot. + +Much of the constituted beauty resides in the fact that it is all +general beauty, that you are appealed to by no specific details, or that +these at least, practically never importunate, are as taken for granted +as the lieutenants and captains are taken for granted in a great +standing army--among whom indeed individual aspects may figure here +the rather shifting range of decorative dignity in which details, when +observed, often prove poor (though never not massive and substantially +precious) and sometimes prove ridiculous. The sculptures, with the sole +exception of Michael Angelo's ineffable "Pieta," which lurks obscurely +in a side-chapel--this indeed to my sense the rarest artistic +_combination_ of the greatest things the hand of man has produced--are +either bad or indifferent; and the universal incrustation of marble, +though sumptuous enough, has a less brilliant effect than much later +work of the same sort, that for instance of St. Paul's without the +Walls. The supreme beauty is the splendidly sustained simplicity of the +whole. The thing represents a prodigious imagination extraordinarily +strained, yet strained, at its happiest pitch, without breaking. Its +happiest pitch I say, because this is the only creation of its strenuous +author in presence of which you are in presence of serenity. You +may invoke the idea of ease at St. Peter's without a sense of +sacrilege--which you can hardly do, if you are at all spiritually +nervous, in Westminster Abbey or Notre Dame. The vast enclosed clearness +has much to do with the idea. There are no shadows to speak of, no +marked effects of shade; only effects of light innumerably--points at +which this element seems to mass itself in airy density and scatter +itself in enchanting gradations and cadences. It performs the office of +gloom or of mystery in Gothic churches; hangs like a rolling mist along +the gilded vault of the nave, melts into bright interfusion the mosaic +scintillations of the dome, clings and clusters and lingers, animates +the whole huge and otherwise empty shell. A good Catholic, I suppose, is +the same Catholic anywhere, before the grandest as well as the humblest +altars; but to a visitor not formally enrolled St. Peter's speaks less +of aspiration than of full and convenient assurance. The soul infinitely +expands there, if one will, but all on its quite human level. It marvels +at the reach of our dreams and the immensity of our resources. To be so +impressed and put in our place, we say, is to be sufficiently "saved"; +we can't be more than the heaven itself; and what specifically celestial +beauty such a show or such a substitute may lack it makes up for in +certainty and tangibility. And yet if one's hours on the scene are not +actually spent in praying, the spirit seeks it again as for the finer +comfort, for the blessing, exactly, of its example, its protection and +its exclusion. When you are weary of the swarming democracy of your +fellow-tourists, of the unremunerative aspects of human nature on Corso +and Pincio, of the oppressively frequent combination of coronets on +carriage panels and stupid faces in carriages, of addled brains and +lacquered boots, of ruin and dirt and decay, of priests and beggars and +takers of advantage, of the myriad tokens of a halting civilisation, the +image of the great temple depresses the balance of your doubts, seems to +rise above even the highest tide of vulgarity and make you still believe +in the heroic will and the heroic act. It's a relief, in other words, to +feel that there's nothing but a cab-fare between your pessimism and one +of the greatest of human achievements. + +{Illustration: THE COLONNADE OF ST. PETER, ROME.} + +This might serve as a Lenten peroration to these remarks of mine which +have strayed so woefully from their jovial text, save that I ought +fairly to confess that my last impression of the Carnival was altogether +Carnivalesque.. The merry-making of Shrove Tuesday had life and +felicity; the dead letter of tradition broke out into nature and grace. +I pocketed my scepticism and spent a long afternoon on the Corso. Almost +every one was a masker, but you had no need to conform; the pelting rain +of confetti effectually disguised you. I can't say I found it all +very exhilarating; but here and there I noticed a brighter episode--a +capering clown inflamed with contagious jollity, some finer humourist +forming a circle every thirty yards to crow at his indefatigable +sallies. One clever performer so especially pleased me that I should +have been glad to catch a glimpse of the natural man. You imagined for +him that he was taking a prodigious intellectual holiday and that +his gaiety was in inverse ratio to his daily mood. Dressed as a needy +scholar, in an ancient evening-coat and with a rusty black hat and +gloves fantastically patched, he carried a little volume carefully +under his arm. His humours were in excellent taste, his whole manner the +perfection of genteel comedy. The crowd seemed to relish him vastly, +and he at once commanded a glee-fully attentive audience. Many of his +sallies I lost; those I caught were excellent. His trick was often +to begin by taking some one urbanely and caressingly by the chin and +complimenting him on the _intelligenza della sua fisionomia_. I kept +near him as long as I could; for he struck me as a real ironic artist, +cherishing a disinterested, and yet at the same time a motived and +a moral, passion for the grotesque. I should have liked, however--if +indeed I shouldn't have feared--to see him the next morning, or when he +unmasked that night over his hard-earned supper in a smoky _trattoria_. +As the evening went on the crowd thickened and became a motley press of +shouting, pushing, scrambling, everything but squabbling, revellers. The +rain of missiles ceased at dusk, but the universal deposit of chalk and +flour was trampled into a cloud made lurid by flaring pyramids of the +gas-lamps that replaced for the occasion the stingy Roman luminaries. +Early in the evening came off the classic exhibition of the +_moccoletti_, which I but half saw, like a languid reporter resigned +beforehand to be cashiered for want of enterprise. From the mouth of +a side-street, over a thousand heads, I caught a huge slow-moving +illuminated car, from which blue-lights and rockets and Roman candles +were in course of discharge, meeting all in a dim fuliginous glare +far above the house-tops. It was like a glimpse of some public orgy in +ancient Babylon. In the small hours of the morning, walking homeward +from a private entertainment, I found Ash Wednesday still kept at bay. +The Corso, flaring with light, smelt like a circus. Every one was taking +friendly liberties with every one else and using up the dregs of his +festive energy in convulsive hootings and gymnastics. Here and there +certain indefatigable spirits, clad all in red after the manner of +devils and leaping furiously about with torches, were supposed to +affright you. But they shared the universal geniality and bequeathed +me no midnight fears as a pretext for keeping Lent, the _carnevale dei +preti_, as I read in that profanely radical sheet the _Capitale_. Of +this too I have been having glimpses. Going lately into Santa Francesca +Romana, the picturesque church near the Temple of Peace, I found a feast +for the eyes--a dim crimson-toned light through curtained windows, +a great festoon of tapers round the altar, a bulging girdle of lamps +before the sunken shrine beneath, and a dozen white-robed Dominicans +scattered in the happiest composition on the pavement. It was better +than the _moccoletti_. + +1873. + + + + + +ROMAN RIDES + + +I shall always remember the first I took: out of the Porta del Popolo, +to where the Ponte Molle, whose single arch sustains a weight of +historic tradition, compels the sallow Tiber to flow between its four +great-mannered ecclesiastical statues, over the crest of the hill and +along the old posting-road to Florence. It was mild midwinter, the +season peculiarly of colour on the Roman Campagna; and the light was +full of that mellow purple glow, that tempered intensity, which haunts +the after-visions of those who have known Rome like the memory of some +supremely irresponsible pleasure. An hour away I pulled up and at the +edge of a meadow gazed away for some time into remoter distances. Then +and there, it seemed to me, I measured the deep delight of knowing +the Campagna. But I saw more things in it than I can easily tell. The +country rolled away around me into slopes and dells of long-drawn +grace, chequered with purple and blue and blooming brown. The lights and +shadows were at play on the Sabine Mountains--an alternation of tones +so exquisite as to be conveyed only by some fantastic comparison to +sapphire and amber. In the foreground a contadino in his cloak and +peaked hat jogged solitary on his ass; and here and there in the +distance, among blue undulations, some white village, some grey tower, +helped deliciously to make the picture the typical "Italian landscape" +of old-fashioned art. It was so bright and yet so sad, so still and yet +so charged, to the supersensuous ear, with the murmur of an extinguished +life, that you could only say it was intensely and adorably strange, +could only impute to the whole overarched scene an unsurpassed +secret for bringing tears of appreciation to no matter how +ignorant--archaeologically ignorant--eyes. To ride once, in these +conditions, is of course to ride again and to allot to the Campagna a +generous share of the time one spends in Rome. + +It is a pleasure that doubles one's horizon, and one can scarcely say +whether it enlarges or limits one's impression of the city proper. It +certainly makes St. Peter's seem a trifle smaller and blunts the edge of +one's curiosity in the Forum. It must be the effect of the experience, +at all extended, that when you think of Rome afterwards you will think +still respectfully and regretfully enough of the Vatican and the Pincio, +the streets and the picture-making street life; but will even more +wonder, with an irrepressible contraction of the heart, when again you +shall feel yourself bounding over the flower-smothered turf, or pass +from one framed picture to another beside the open arches of the +crumbling aqueducts. You look back at the City so often from some grassy +hill-top--hugely compact within its walls, with St. Peter's overtopping +all things and yet seeming small, and the vast girdle of marsh and +meadow receding on all sides to the mountains and the sea--that you come +to remember it at last as hardly more than a respectable parenthesis in +a great sweep of generalisation. Within the walls, on the other hand, +you think of your intended ride as the most romantic of all your +possibilities; of the Campagna generally as an illimitable experience. +One's rides certainly give Rome an inordinate scope for the +reflective--by which I suppose I mean after all the aesthetic and the +"esoteric"--life. To dwell in a city which, much as you grumble at +it, is after all very fairly a modern city; with crowds and shops and +theatres and cafes and balls and receptions and dinner-parties, and all +the modern confusion of social pleasures and pains; to have at your +door the good and evil of it all; and yet to be able in half an hour to +gallop away and leave it a hundred miles, a hundred years, behind, and +to look at the tufted broom glowing on a lonely tower-top in the still +blue air, and the pale pink asphodels trembling none the less for the +stillness, and the shaggy-legged shepherds leaning on their sticks in +motionless brotherhood with the heaps of ruin, and the scrambling goats +and staggering little kids treading out wild desert smells from the +top of hollow-sounding mounds; and then to come back through one of the +great gates and a couple of hours later find yourself in the "world," +dressed, introduced, entertained, inquiring, talking about "Middlemarch" +to a young English lady or listening to Neapolitan songs from a +gentleman in a very low-cut shirt--all this is to lead in a manner a +double life and to gather from the hurrying hours more impressions than +a mind of modest capacity quite knows how to dispose of. + +I touched lately upon this theme with a friend who, I fancied, would +understand me, and who immediately assured me that he had just spent a +day that this mingled diversity of sensation made to the days one spends +elsewhere what an uncommonly good novel may be to the daily paper. +"There was an air of idleness about it, if you will," he said, "and it +was certainly pleasant enough to have been wrong. Perhaps, being after +all unused to long stretches of dissipation, this was why I had a +half-feeling that I was reading an odd chapter in the history of a +person very much more of a _hros de roman_ than myself." Then he +proceeded to relate how he had taken a long ride with a lady whom he +extremely admired. "We turned off from the Tor di Quinto Road to that +castellated farm-house you know of--once a Ghibelline fortress--whither +Claude Lorraine used to come to paint pictures of which the surrounding +landscape is still so artistically, so compositionally, suggestive. We +went into the inner court, a cloister almost, with the carven capitals +of its loggia columns, and looked at a handsome child swinging shyly +against the half-opened door of a room whose impenetrable shadow, behind +her, made her, as it were, a sketch in bituminous water-colours. We +talked with the farmer, a handsome, pale, fever-tainted fellow with a +well-to-do air that didn't in the least deter his affability from a turn +compatible with the acceptance of small coin; and then we galloped away +and away over the meadows which stretch with hardly a break to Veii. The +day was strangely delicious, with a cool grey sky and just a touch of +moisture in the air stirred by our rapid motion. The Campagna, in the +colourless even light, was more solemn and romantic than ever; and a +ragged shepherd, driving a meagre straggling flock, whom we stopped to +ask our way of, was a perfect type of pastoral, weather-beaten misery. +He was precisely the shepherd for the foreground of a scratchy etching. +There were faint odours of spring in the air, and the grass here and +there was streaked with great patches of daisies; but it was spring +with a foreknowledge of autumn, a day to be enjoyed with a substrain of +sadness, the foreboding of regret, a day somehow to make one feel as if +one had seen and felt a great deal--quite, as I say, like a _heros +de roman_. Touching such characters, it was the illustrious Pelham, +I think, who, on being asked if he rode, replied that he left those +violent exercises to the ladies. But under such a sky, in such an +air, over acres of daisied turf, a long, long gallop is certainly +a supersubtle joy. The elastic bound of your horse is the poetry +of motion; and if you are so happy as to add to it not the prose of +companionship riding comes almost to affect you as a spiritual exercise. +My gallop, at any rate," said my friend, "threw me into a mood which +gave an extraordinary zest to the rest of the day." He was to go to a +dinner-party at a villa on the edge of Rome, and Madam X--, who was also +going, called for him in her carriage. "It was a long drive," he went +on, "through the Forum, past the Colosseum. She told me a long story +about a most interesting person. Toward the end my eyes caught through +the carriage window a slab of rugged sculptures. We were passing under +the Arch of Constantine. In the hall pavement of the villa is a rare +antique mosaic--one of the largest and most perfect; the ladies on their +way to the drawing-room trail over it the flounces of Worth. We drove +home late, and there's my day." + +On your exit from most of the gates of Rome you have generally +half-an-hour's progress through winding lanes, many of which are hardly +less charming than the open meadows. On foot the walls and high hedges +would vex you and spoil your walk; but in the saddle you generally +overtop them, to an endless peopling of the minor vision. Yet a Roman +wall in the springtime is for that matter almost as interesting as +anything it conceals. Crumbling grain by grain, coloured and mottled +to a hundred tones by sun and storm, with its rugged structure of brick +extruding through its coarse complexion of peeling stucco, its creeping +lacework of wandering ivy starred with miniature violets, and its wild +fringe of stouter flowers against the sky--it is as little as possible a +blank partition; it is practically a luxury of landscape. At the moment +at which I write, in mid-April, all the ledges and cornices are wreathed +with flaming poppies, nodding there as if they knew so well what faded +greys and yellows are an offset to their scarlet. But the best point in +a dilapidated enclosing surface of vineyard or villa is of course the +gateway, lifting its great arch of cheap rococo scroll-work, its balls +and shields and mossy dish-covers--as they always perversely figure +to me--and flanked with its dusky cypresses. I never pass one without +taking out my mental sketch-book and jotting it down as a vignette in +the insubstantial record of my ride. They are as sad and dreary as if +they led to the moated grange where Mariana waited in desperation for +something to happen; and it's easy to take the usual inscription over +the porch as a recommendation to those who enter to renounce all hope of +anything but a glass of more or less agreeably acrid _vino romano_. For +what you chiefly see over the walls and at the end of the straight short +avenue of rusty cypresses are the appurtenances of a _vigna_--a couple +of acres of little upright sticks blackening in the sun, and a vast +sallow-faced, scantily windowed mansion, whose expression denotes +little of the life of the mind beyond what goes to the driving of a hard +bargain over the tasted hogsheads. If Mariana is there she certainly has +no pile of old magazines to beguile her leisure. The life of the mind, +if the term be in any application here not ridiculous, appears to any +asker of curious questions, as he wanders about Rome, the very thinnest +deposit of the past. Within the rococo gateway, which itself has a +vaguely esthetic self-consciousness, at the end of the cypress walk, +you will probably see a mythological group in rusty marble--a Cupid and +Psyche, a Venus and Paris, an Apollo and Daphne--the relic of an age +when a Roman proprietor thought it fine to patronise the arts. But I +imagine you are safe in supposing it to constitute the only allusion +savouring of culture that has been made on the premises for three or +four generations. + +There is a franker cheerfulness--though certainly a proper amount of +that forlornness which lurks about every object to which the Campagna +forms a background--in the primitive little taverns where, on the +homeward stretch, in the waning light, you are often glad to rein up and +demand a bottle of their best. Their best and their worst are indeed +the same, though with a shifting price, and plain _vino bianco_ or _vino +rosso_ (rarely both) is the sole article of refreshment in which they +deal. There is a ragged bush over the door, and within, under a dusky +vault, on crooked cobble-stones, sit half-a-dozen contadini in their +indigo jackets and goatskin breeches and with their elbows on the table. +There is generally a rabble of infantile beggars at the door, pretty +enough in their dusty rags, with their fine eyes and intense Italian +smile, to make you forget your private vow of doing your individual best +I to make these people, whom you like so much, unlearn their old vices. +Was Porta Pia bombarded three years ago that Peppino should still grow +up to whine for a copper? But the Italian shells had no direct message +for Peppino's stomach--and you are going to a dinner-party at a villa. +So Peppino "points" an instant for the copper in the dust and grows up a +Roman beggar. The whole little place represents the most primitive form +of hostelry; but along any of the roads leading out of the city you may +find establishments of a higher type, with Garibaldi, superbly mounted +and foreshortened, painted on the wall, or a lady in a low-necked dress +opening a fictive lattice with irresistible hospitality, and a yard with +the classic vine-wreathed arbour casting thin shadows upon benches and +tables draped and cushioned with the white dust from which the highways +from the gates borrow most of their local colour. None the less, I +say, you avoid the highroads, and, if you are a person of taste, don't +grumble at the occasional need of following the walls of the city. City +walls, to a properly constituted American, can never be an object of +indifference; and it is emphatically "no end of a sensation" to pace in +the shadow of this massive cincture of Rome. I have found myself, as I +skirted its base, talking of trivial things, but never without a sudden +reflection on the deplorable impermanence of first impressions. A +twelvemonth ago the raw plank fences of a Boston suburb, inscribed with +the virtues of healing drugs, bristled along my horizon: now I glance +with idle eyes at a compacted antiquity in which a more learned sense +may read portentous dates and signs--Servius, Aurelius, Honorius. But +even to idle eyes the prodigious, the continuous thing bristles with +eloquent passages. In some places, where the huge brickwork is black +with time and certain strange square towers look down at you with still +blue eyes, the Roman sky peering through lidless loopholes, and there is +nothing but white dust in the road and solitude in the air, I might take +myself for a wandering Tartar touching on the confines of the Celestial +Empire. The wall of China must have very much such a gaunt robustness. +The colour of the Roman ramparts is everywhere fine, and their rugged +patchwork has been subdued by time and weather into a mellow harmony +that the brush only asks to catch up. On the northern side of the city, +behind the Vatican, St. Peter's and the Trastevere, I have seen them +glowing in the late afternoon with the tones of ancient bronze and rusty +gold. Here at various points they are embossed with the Papal insignia, +the tiara with its flying bands and crossed keys; to the high style +of which the grace that attaches to almost any lost cause--even if not +quite the "tender" grace of a day that is dead--considerably adds a +style. With the dome of St. Peter's resting on their cornice and the +hugely clustered architecture of the Vatican rising from them as from a +terrace, they seem indeed the valid bulwark of an ecclesiastical city. +Vain bulwark, alas! sighs the sentimental tourist, fresh from the meagre +entertainment of this latter Holy Week. But he may find monumental +consolation in this neighbourhood at a source where, as I pass, I never +fail to apply for it. At half-an-hour's walk beyond Porta San Pancrazio, +beneath the wall of the Villa Doria, is a delightfully pompous +ecclesiastical gateway of the seventeenth century, erected by Paul V to +commemorate his restoration of the aqueducts through which the stream +bearing his name flows towards the fine florid portico protecting its +clear-sheeted outgush on the crest of the Janiculan. It arches across +the road in the most ornamental manner of the period, and one can hardly +pause before it without seeming to assist at a ten minutes' revival of +old Italy--without feeling as if one were in a cocked hat and sword and +were coming up to Rome, in another mood than Luther's, with a letter of +recommendation to the mistress of a cardinal. + +The Campagna differs greatly on the two sides of the Tiber; and it is +hard to say which, for the rider, has the greater charm. The half-dozen +rides you may take from Porta San Giovanni possess the perfection of +traditional Roman interest and lead you through a far-strewn wilderness +of ruins--a scattered maze of tombs and towers and nameless fragments of +antique masonry. The landscape here has two great features; close before +you on one side is the long, gentle swell of the Alban Hills, deeply, +fantastically blue in most weathers, and marbled with the vague white +masses of their scattered towns and villas. It would be difficult to +draw the hard figure to a softer curve than that with which the heights +sweep from Albano to the plain; this a perfect example of the classic +beauty of line in the Italian landscape--that beauty which, when it +fills the background of a picture, makes us look in the foreground for +a broken column couched upon flowers and a shepherd piping to dancing +nymphs. At your side, constantly, you have the broken line of the +Claudian Aqueduct, carrying its broad arches far away into the plain. +The meadows along which it lies are not the smoothest in the world for +a gallop, but there is no pleasure greater than to wander near it. It +stands knee-deep in the flower-strewn grass, and its rugged piers are +hung with ivy as the columns of a church are draped for a festa. Every +archway is a picture, massively framed, of the distance beyond--of the +snow-tipped Sabines and lonely Soracte. As the spring advances the whole +Campagna smiles and waves with flowers; but I think they are nowhere +more rank and lovely than in the shifting shadow of the aqueducts, where +they muffle the feet of the columns and smother the half-dozen brooks +which wander in and out like silver meshes between the legs of a file +of giants. They make a niche for themselves too in every crevice and +tremble on the vault of the empty conduits. The ivy hereabouts in the +springtime is peculiarly brilliant and delicate; and though it cloaks +and muffles these Roman fragments far less closely than the castles +and abbeys of England it hangs with the light elegance of all Italian +vegetation. It is partly doubtless because their mighty outlines are +still unsoftened that the aqueducts are so impressive. They seem +the very source of the solitude in which they stand; they look like +architectural spectres and loom through the light mists of their grassy +desert, as you recede along the line, with the same insubstantial +vastness as if they rose out of Egyptian sands. It is a great +neighbourhood of ruins, many of which, it must be confessed, you have +applauded in many an album. But station a peasant with sheepskin +coat and bandaged legs in the shadow of a tomb or tower best known to +drawing-room art, and scatter a dozen goats on the mound above him, and +the picture has a charm which has not yet been sketched away. + +The other quarter of the Campagna has wider fields and smoother turf and +perhaps a greater number of delightful rides; the earth is sounder, and +there are fewer pitfalls and ditches. The land for the most part lies +higher and catches more wind, and the grass is here and there for great +stretches as smooth and level as a carpet. You have no Alban Mountains +before you, but you have in the distance the waving ridge of the nearer +Apennines, and west of them, along the course of the Tiber, the long +seaward level of deep-coloured fields, deepening as they recede to the +blue and purple of the sea itself. Beyond them, of a very clear day, +you may see the glitter of the Mediterranean. These are the occasions +perhaps to remember most fondly, for they lead you to enchanting nooks, +and the landscape has details of the highest refinement. Indeed when my +sense reverts to the lingering impressions of so blest a time, it seems +a fool's errand to have attempted to express them, and a waste of words +to do more than recommend the reader to go citywards at twilight of the +end of March, making for Porta Cavalleggieri, and note what he sees. At +this hour the Campagna is to the last point its melancholy self, and +I remember roadside "effects" of a strange and intense suggestiveness. +Certain mean, mouldering villas behind grass-grown courts have an +indefinably sinister look; there was one in especial of which it was +impossible not to argue that a despairing creature must have once +committed suicide there, behind bolted door and barred window, and that +no one has since had the pluck to go in and see why he never came out. +Every wayside mark of manners, of history, every stamp of the past in +the country about Rome, touches my sense to a thrill, and I may thus +exaggerate the appeal of very common things. This is the more likely +because the appeal seems ever to rise out of heaven knows what depths +of ancient trouble. To delight in the aspects of _sentient_ ruin might +appear a heartless pastime, and the pleasure, I confess, shows the note +of perversity. The sombre and the hard are as common an influence from +southern things as the soft and the bright, I think; sadness rarely +fails to assault a northern observer when he misses what he takes for +comfort. Beauty is no compensation for the loss, only making it more +poignant. Enough beauty of climate hangs over these Roman cottages and +farm-houses--beauty of light, of atmosphere and of vegetation; but their +charm for the maker-out of the stories in things is the way the golden +air shows off their desolation. Man lives more with Nature in Italy than +in New or than in Old England; she does more work for him and gives +him more holidays than in our short-summered climes, and his home is +therefore much more bare of devices for helping him to do without her, +forget her and forgive her. These reflections are perhaps the source of +the character you find in a moss-coated stone stairway climbing outside +of a wall; in a queer inner court, befouled with rubbish and drearily +bare of convenience; in an ancient quaintly carven well, worked with +infinite labour from an overhanging window; in an arbour of time-twisted +vines under which you may sit with your feet in the dirt and remember +as a dim fable that there are races for which the type of domestic +allurement is the parlour hearth-rug. For reasons apparent or otherwise +these things amuse me beyond expression, and I am never weary of staring +into gateways, of lingering by dreary, shabby, half-barbaric farm-yards, +of feasting a foolish gaze on sun-cracked plaster and unctuous indoor +shadows. I mustn't forget, however, that it's not for wayside effects +that one rides away behind St. Peter's, but for the strong sense +of wandering over boundless space, of seeing great classic lines of +landscape, of watching them dispose themselves into pictures so full of +"style" that you can think of no painter who deserves to have you admit +that they suggest him--hardly knowing whether it is better pleasure +to gallop far and drink deep of air and grassy distance and the whole +delicious opportunity, or to walk and pause and linger, and try and +grasp some ineffaceable memory of sky and colour and outline. Your +pace can hardly help falling into a contemplative measure at the time, +everywhere so wonderful, but in Rome so persuasively divine, when the +winter begins palpably to soften and quicken. Far out on the Campagna, +early in February, you feel the first vague earthly emanations, which +in a few weeks come wandering into the heart of the city and throbbing +through the close, dark streets. Springtime in Rome is an immensely +poetic affair; but you must stand often far out in the ancient waste, +between grass and sky, to measure its deep, full, steadily accelerated +rhythm. The winter has an incontestable beauty, and is pre-eminently the +time of colour--the time when it is no affectation, but homely verity, +to talk about the "purple" tone of the atmosphere. As February comes and +goes your purple is streaked with green and the rich, dark bloom of the +distance begins to lose its intensity. But your loss is made up by other +gains; none more precious than that inestimable gain to the ear--the +disembodied voice of the lark. It comes with the early flowers, the +white narcissus and the cyclamen, the half-buried violets and the pale +anemones, and makes the whole atmosphere ring like a vault of tinkling +glass. You never see the source of the sound, and are utterly unable to +localise his note, which seems to come from everywhere at once, to be +some hundred-throated voice of the air. Sometimes you fancy you just +catch him, a mere vague spot against the blue, an intenser throb in the +universal pulsation of light. As the weeks go on the flowers multiply +and the deep blues and purples of the hills, turning to azure and +violet, creep higher toward the narrowing snow-line of the Sabines. The +temperature rises, the first hour of your ride you feel the heat, but +you beguile it with brushing the hawthorn-blossoms as you pass along the +hedges, and catching at the wild rose and honeysuckle; and when you get +into the meadows there is stir enough in the air to lighten the dead +weight of the sun. The Roman air, however, is not a tonic medicine, and +it seldom suffers exercise to be all exhilarating. It has always +seemed to me indeed part of the charm of the latter that your keenest +consciousness is haunted with a vague languor. Occasionally when the +sirocco blows that sensation becomes strange and exquisite. Then, under +the grey sky, before the dim distances which the south-wind mostly +brings with it, you seem to ride forth into a world from which all +hope has departed and in which, in spite of the flowers that make your +horse's footfalls soundless, nothing is left save some queer probability +that your imagination is unable to measure, but from which it hardly +shrinks. This quality in the Roman element may now and then "relax" +you almost to ecstasy; but a season of sirocco would be an overdose of +morbid pleasure. You may at any rate best feel the peculiar beauty of +the Campagna on those mild days of winter when the mere quality and +temper of the sunshine suffice to move the landscape to joy, and you +pause on the brown grass in the sunny stillness and, by listening long +enough, almost fancy you hear the shrill of the midsummer cricket. It +is detail and ornament that vary from month to month, from week to +week even, and make your returns to the same places a constant feast +of unexpectedness; but the great essential features of the prospect +preserve throughout the year the same impressive serenity. Soracte, be +it January or May, rises from its blue horizon like an island from the +sea and with an elegance of contour which no mood of the year can deepen +or diminish. You know it well; you have seen it often in the mellow +backgrounds of Claude; and it has such an irresistibly classic, academic +air that while you look at it you begin to take your saddle for a +faded old arm-chair in a palace gallery. A month's rides in different +directions will show you a dozen prime Claudes. After I had seen them +all I went piously to the Doria gallery to refresh my memory of its +two famous specimens and to enjoy to the utmost their delightful air of +reference to something that had become a part of my personal experience. +Delightful it certainly is to feel the common element in one's own +sensibility and those of a genius whom that element has helped to do +great things. Claude must have haunted the very places of one's personal +preference and adjusted their divine undulations to his splendid scheme +of romance, his view of the poetry of life. He was familiar with aspects +in which there wasn't a single uncompromising line. I saw a few days ago +a small finished sketch from his hand, in the possession of an American +artist, which was almost startling in its clear reflection of forms +unaltered by the two centuries that have dimmed and cracked the paint +and canvas. + +This unbroken continuity of the impressions I have tried to indicate is +an excellent example of the intellectual background of all enjoyment in +Rome. It effectually prevents pleasure from becoming vulgar, for your +sensation rarely begins and ends with itself; it reverberates--it +recalls, commemorates, resuscitates something else. At least half the +merit of everything you enjoy must be that it suits you absolutely; but +the larger half here is generally that it has suited some one else and +that you can never flatter yourself you have discovered it. It has been +addressed to some use a million miles out of your range, and has had +great adventures before ever condescending to please you. It was in +admission of this truth that my discriminating friend who showed me the +Claudes found it impossible to designate a certain delightful region +which you enter at the end of an hour's riding from Porta Cavalleggieri +as anything but Arcadia. The exquisite correspondence of the term in +this case altogether revived its faded bloom; here veritably the oaten +pipe must have stirred the windless air and the satyrs have laughed +among the brookside reeds. Three or four long grassy dells stretch away +in a chain between low hills over which delicate trees are so discreetly +scattered that each one is a resting place for a shepherd. The elements +of the scene are simple enough, but the composition has extraordinary +refinement. By one of those happy chances which keep observation in +Italy always in her best humour a shepherd had thrown himself down under +one of the trees in the very attitude of Meliboeus. He had been washing +his feet, I suppose, in the neighbouring brook, and had found it +pleasant afterwards to roll his short breeches well up on his thighs. +Lying thus in the shade, on his elbow, with his naked legs stretched out +on the turf and his soft peaked hat over his long hair crushed back +like the veritable bonnet of Arcady, he was exactly the figure of the +background of this happy valley. The poor fellow, lying there in +rustic weariness and ignorance, little fancied that he was a symbol of +old-world meanings to new-world eyes. + +Such eyes may find as great a store of picturesque meanings in the +cork-woods of Monte Mario, tenderly loved of all equestrians. These are +less severely pastoral than our Arcadia, and you might more properly +lodge there a damosel of Ariosto than a nymph of Theocritus. Among them +is strewn a lovely wilderness of flowers and shrubs, and the whole place +has such a charming woodland air, that, casting about me the other day +for a compliment, I declared that it reminded me of New Hampshire. My +compliment had a double edge, and I had no sooner uttered it than I +smiled--or sighed--to perceive in all the undiscriminated botany about +me the wealth of detail, the idle elegance and grace of Italy alone, the +natural stamp of the land which has the singular privilege of making one +love her unsanctified beauty all but as well as those features of one's +own country toward which nature's small allowance doubles that of one's +own affection. For this effect of casting a spell no rides have more +value than those you take in Villa Doria or Villa Borghese; or don't +take, possibly, if you prefer to reserve these particular regions--the +latter in especial--for your walking hours. People do ride, however, +in both villas, which deserve honourable mention in this regard. Villa +Doria, with its noble site, its splendid views, its great groups of +stone-pines, so clustered and yet so individual, its lawns and flowers +and fountains, its altogether princely disposition, is a place where one +may pace, well mounted, of a brilliant day, with an agreeable sense of +its being rather a more elegant pastime to balance in one's stirrups +than to trudge on even the smoothest gravel. But at Villa Borghese +the walkers have the best of it; for they are free of those adorable +outlying corners and bosky byways which the rumble of barouches never +reaches. In March the place becomes a perfect epitome of the spring. +You cease to care much for the melancholy greenness of the disfeatured +statues which has been your chief winter's intimation of verdure; and +before you are quite conscious of the tender streaks and patches in the +great quaint grassy arena round which the Propaganda students, in their +long skirts, wander slowly, like dusky seraphs revolving the gossip of +Paradise, you spy the brave little violets uncapping their azure brows +beneath the high-stemmed pines. One's walks here would take us too far, +and one's pauses detain us too long, when in the quiet parts under +the wall one comes across a group of charming small school-boys in +full-dress suits and white cravats, shouting over their play in clear +Italian, while a grave young priest, beneath a tree, watches them over +the top of his book. It sounds like nothing, but the force behind it and +the frame round it, the setting, the air, the chord struck, make it a +hundred wonderful things. + +1873. + + + + + +ROMAN NEIGHBOURHOODS + + +I made a note after my first stroll at Albano to the effect that I had +been talking of the "picturesque" all my life, but that now for a change +I beheld it. I had been looking all winter across the Campagna at the +free-flowing outline of the Alban Mount, with its half-dozen towns +shining on its purple side even as vague sun-spots in the shadow of +a cloud, and thinking it simply an agreeable incident in the varied +background of Rome. But now that during the last few days I have been +treating it as a foreground, have been suffering St. Peter's to play +the part of a small mountain on the horizon, with the Campagna swimming +mistily through the ambiguous lights and shadows of the interval, I find +the interest as great as in the best of the by-play of Rome. The walk +I speak of was just out of the village, to the south, toward the +neighbouring town of L'Ariccia, neighbouring these twenty years, since +the Pope (the late Pope, I was on the point of calling him) threw his +superb viaduct across the deep ravine which divides it from Albano. At +the risk of seeming to fantasticate I confess that the Pope's having +built the viaduct--in this very recent antiquity--made me linger there +in a pensive posture and marvel at the march of history and at Pius the +Ninth's beginning already to profit by the sentimental allowances we +make to vanished powers. An ardent _nero_ then would have had his own +way with me and obtained a frank admission that the Pope was indeed a +father to his people. Far down into the charming valley which slopes out +of the ancestral woods of the Chigis into the level Campagna winds the +steep stone-paved road at the bottom of which, in the good old days, +tourists in no great hurry saw the mules and oxen tackled to their +carriage for the opposite ascent. And indeed even an impatient tourist +might have been content to lounge back in his jolting chaise and look +out at the mouldy foundations of the little city plunging into the +verdurous flank of the gorge. Questioned, as a cherisher of quaintness, +as to the best "bit" hereabouts, I should certainly name the way in +which the crumbling black houses of these ponderous villages plant their +weary feet on the flowery edges of all the steepest chasms. Before you +enter one of them you invariably find yourself lingering outside its +pretentious old gateway to see it clutched and stitched to the stony +hillside by this rank embroidery of the wildest and bravest things that +grow. Just at this moment nothing is prettier than the contrast between +their dusky ruggedness and the tender, the yellow and pink and violet +fringe of that mantle. All this you may observe from the viaduct at +the Ariccia; but you must wander below to feel the full force of the +eloquence of our imaginary _papalino_. The pillars and arches of +pale grey peperino arise in huge tiers with a magnificent spring and +solidity. The older Romans built no better; and the work has a deceptive +air of being one of their sturdy bequests which help one to drop +another sigh over the antecedents the Italians of to-day are so eager to +repudiate. Will those _they_ give their descendants be as good? + +At the Ariccia, in any case, I found a little square with a couple of +mossy fountains, occupied on one side by a vast dusky-faced Palazzo +Chigi and on the other by a goodly church with an imposing dome. +The dome, within, covers the whole edifice and is adorned with some +extremely elegant stucco-work of the seventeenth century. It gave a +great value to this fine old decoration that preparations were going +forward for a local festival and that the village carpenter was hanging +certain mouldy strips of crimson damask against the piers of the vaults. +The damask might have been of the seventeenth century too, and a group +of peasant-women were seeing it unfurled with evident awe. I regarded +it myself with interest--it seemed so the tattered remnant of a fashion +that had gone out for ever. I thought again of the poor disinherited +Pope, wondering whether, when such venerable frippery will no longer +bear the carpenter's nails, any more will be provided. It was hard to +fancy anything but shreds and patches in that musty tabernacle. Wherever +you go in Italy you receive some such intimation as this of the shrunken +proportions of Catholicism, and every church I have glanced into on my +walks hereabouts has given me an almost pitying sense of it. One finds +one's self at last--without fatuity, I hope--feeling sorry for the +solitude of the remaining faithful. It's as if the churches had been +made so for the world, in its social sense, and the world had so +irrevocably moved away. They are in size out of all modern proportion to +the local needs, and the only thing at all alive in the melancholy waste +they collectively form is the smell of stale incense. There are pictures +on all the altars by respectable third-rate painters; pictures which I +suppose once were ordered and paid for and criticised by worshippers who +united taste with piety. At Genzano, beyond the Ariccia, rises on the +grey village street a pompous Renaissance temple whose imposing nave +and aisles would contain the population of a capital. But where is the +_taste_ of the Ariccia and Genzano? Where are the choice spirits for +whom Antonio Raggi modelled the garlands of his dome and a hundred +clever craftsmen imitated Guido and Caravaggio? Here and there, from the +pavement, as you pass, a dusky crone interlards her devotions with more +profane importunities, or a grizzled peasant on rusty-jointed knees, +tilted forward with his elbows on a bench, reveals the dimensions of +the patch in his blue breeches. But where is the connecting link between +Guido and Caravaggio and those poor souls for whom an undoubted original +is only a something behind a row of candlesticks, of no very clear +meaning save that you must bow to it? You find a vague memory of it at +best in the useless grandeurs about you, and you seem to be looking at a +structure of which the stubborn earth-scented foundations alone remain, +with the carved and painted shell that bends above them, while the +central substance has utterly crumbled away. + +I shall seem to have adopted a more meditative pace than befits a brisk +constitutional if I say that I also fell a-thinking before the shabby +faade of the old Chigi Palace. But it seemed somehow in its grey +forlornness to respond to the sadly superannuated expression of the +opposite church; and indeed in any condition what self-respecting +cherisher of quaintness can forbear to do a little romancing in the +shadow of a provincial palazzo? On the face of the matter, I know, +there is often no very salient peg to hang a romance on. A sort of dusky +blankness invests the establishment, which has often a rather imbecile +old age. But a hundred brooding secrets lurk in this inexpressive mask, +and the Chigi Palace did duty for me in the suggestive twilight as +the most haunted of houses. Its basement walls sloped outward like the +beginning of a pyramid, and its lower windows were covered with massive +iron cages. Within the doorway, across the court, I saw the pale glimmer +of flowers on a terrace, and I made much, for the effect of the roof, of +a great covered loggia or belvedere with a dozen window-panes missing +or mended with paper. Nothing gives one a stronger impression of old +manners than an ancestral palace towering in this haughty fashion over +a shabby little town; you hardly stretch a point when you call it an +impression of feudalism. The scene may pass for feudal to American eyes, +for which a hundred windows on a facade mean nothing more exclusive than +a hotel kept (at the most invidious) on the European plan. The mouldy +grey houses on the steep crooked street, with their black cavernous +archways pervaded by bad smells, by the braying of asses and by human +intonations hardly more musical, the haggard and tattered peasantry +staring at you with hungry-heavy eyes, the brutish-looking monks +(there are still enough to point a moral), the soldiers, the mounted +constables, the dirt, the dreariness, the misery, and the dark +over-grown palace frowning over it all from barred window and guarded +gateway--what more than all this do we dimly descry in a mental image of +the dark ages? For all his desire to keep the peace with the vivid image +of things if it be only vivid enough, the votary of this ideal may well +occasionally turn over such values with the wonder of what one takes +them as paying for. They pay sometimes for such sorry "facts of life." +At Genzano, out of the very midst of the village squalor, rises the +Palazzo Cesarini, separated from its gardens by a dirty lane. Between +peasant and prince, the contact is unbroken, and one would suppose +Italian good-nature sorely taxed by their mutual allowances; that the +prince in especial must cultivate a firm impervious shell. There are +no comfortable townsfolk about him to remind him of the blessings of a +happy mediocrity of fortune. When he looks out of his window he sees a +battered old peasant against a sunny wall sawing off his dinner from a +hunch of black bread. + +I must confess, however, that "feudal" as it amused me to find the +little piazza of the Ariccia, it appeared to threaten in no manner an +exasperated rising. On the contrary, the afternoon being cool, many of +the villagers were contentedly muffled in those ancient cloaks, lined +with green baize, which, when tossed over the shoulder and surmounted +with a peaked hat, form one of the few lingering remnants of "costume" +in Italy; others were tossing wooden balls light-heartedly enough on the +grass outside the town. The egress on this side is under a great stone +archway thrown out from the palace and surmounted with the family arms. +Nothing could better confirm your theory that the townsfolk are groaning +serfs. The road leads away through the woods, like many of the roads +hereabouts, among trees less remarkable for their size than for their +picturesque contortions and posturings. The woods, at the moment at +which I write, are full of the raw green light of early spring, a _jour_ +vastly becoming to the various complexions of the wild flowers that +cover the waysides. I have never seen these untended parterres in such +lovely exuberance; the sturdiest pedestrian becomes a lingering idler if +he allows them to catch his eye. The pale purple cyclamen, with its hood +thrown back, stands up in masses as dense as tulip-beds; and here and +there in the duskier places great sheets of forget-me-not seem to exhale +a faint blue mist. These are the commonest plants; there are dozens +more I know no name for--a rich profusion in especial of a beautiful +five-petalled flower whose white texture is pencilled with hair-strokes +certain fair copyists I know of would have to hold their breath to +imitate. An Italian oak has neither the girth nor the height of its +English brothers, but it contrives in proportion to be perhaps even +more effective. It crooks its back and twists its arms and clinches its +hundred fists with the queerest extravagance, and wrinkles its bark +into strange rugosities from which its first scattered sprouts of yellow +green seem to break out like a morbid fungus. But the tree which has the +greatest charm to northern eyes is the cold grey-green ilex, whose clear +crepuscular shade drops against a Roman sun a veil impenetrable, yet not +oppressive. The ilex has even less colour than the cypress, but it is +much less funereal, and a landscape in which it is frequent may still +be said to smile faintly, though by no means to laugh. It abounds in +old Italian gardens, where the boughs are trimmed and interlocked into +vaulted corridors in which, from point to point, as in the niches of +some dimly frescoed hall, you see mildewed busts stare at you with a +solemnity which the even grey light makes strangely intense. A +humbler relative of the ilex, though it does better things than help +broken-nosed emperors to look dignified, is the olive, which covers many +of the neighbouring hillsides with its little smoky puffs of foliage. A +stroke of composition I never weary of is that long blue stretch of the +Campagna which makes a high horizon and rests on this vaporous base of +olive-tops. A reporter intent upon a simile might liken it to the ocean +seen above the smoke of watch-fires kindled on the strand. + +To do perfect justice to the wood-walk away from the Ariccia I ought +to touch upon the birds that were singing vespers as I passed. But the +reader would find my rhapsody as poor entertainment as the programme of +a concert he had been unable to attend. I have no more learning about +bird-music than would help me to guess that a dull dissyllabic refrain +in the heart of the wood came from the cuckoo; and when at moments I +heard a twitter of fuller tone, with a more suggestive modulation, +I could only _hope_ it was the nightingale. I have listened for the +nightingale more than once in places so charming that his song would +have seemed but the articulate expression of their beauty, and have +never heard much beyond a provoking snatch or two--a prelude that came +to nothing. In spite of a natural grudge, however, I generously believe +him a great artist or at least a great genius--a creature who despises +any prompting short of absolute inspiration. For the rich, the +multitudinous melody around me seemed but the offering to my ear of the +prodigal spirit of tradition. The wood was ringing with sound because it +was twilight, spring and Italy. It was also because of these good things +and various others besides that I relished so keenly my visit to the +Capuchin convent upon which I emerged after half-an-hour in the wood. +It stands above the town on the slope of the Alban Mount, and its wild +garden climbs away behind it and extends its melancholy influence. +Before it is a small stiff avenue of trimmed live-oaks which conducts +you to a grotesque little shrine beneath the staircase ascending to the +church. Just here, if you are apt to grow timorous at twilight, you may +take a very pretty fright; for as you draw near you catch behind the +grating of the shrine the startling semblance of a gaunt and livid monk. +A sickly lamplight plays down upon his face, and he stares at you from +cavernous eyes with a dreadful air of death in life. Horror of horrors, +you murmur, is this a Capuchin penance? You discover of course in a +moment that it is only a Capuchin joke, that the monk is a pious dummy +and his spectral visage a matter of the paint-brush. You resent his +intrusion on the surrounding loveliness; and as you proceed to demand +entertainment at their convent you pronounce the Capuchins very foolish +fellows. This declaration, as I made it, was supported by the conduct of +the simple brother who opened the door of the cloister in obedience to +my knock and, on learning my errand, demurred about admitting me at +so late an hour. If I would return on the morrow morning he'd be most +happy. He broke into a blank grin when I assured him that this was the +very hour of my desire and that the garish morning light would do no +justice to the view. These were mysteries beyond his ken, and it was +only his good-nature (of which he had plenty) and not his imagination +that was moved. So that when, passing through the narrow cloister and +out upon the grassy terrace, I saw another cowled brother standing with +folded hands profiled against the sky, in admirable harmony with the +scene, I questioned his knowing the uses for which he is still most +precious. This, however, was surely too much to ask of him, and it was +cause enough for gratitude that, though he was there before me, he was +not a fellow-tourist with an opera-glass slung over his shoulder. There +was support to my idea of the convent in the expiring light, for the +scene was in its way unsurpassable. Directly below the terrace lay the +deep-set circle of the Alban Lake, shining softly through the light +mists of evening. This beautiful pool--it is hardly more--occupies the +crater of a prehistoric volcano, a perfect cup, shaped and smelted by +furnace-fires. The rim of the cup, rising high and densely wooded round +the placid stone-blue water, has a sort of natural artificiality. The +sweep and contour of the long circle are admirable; never was a lake so +charmingly lodged. It is said to be of extraordinary depth; and though +stone-blue water seems at first a very innocent substitute for boiling +lava, it has a sinister look which betrays its dangerous antecedents. +The winds never reach it and its surface is never ruffled; but its +deep-bosomed placidity seems to cover guilty secrets, and you fancy it +in communication with the capricious and treacherous forces of nature. +Its very colour is of a joyless beauty, a blue as cold and opaque as a +solidified sheet of lava. Streaked and wrinkled by a mysterious motion +of its own, it affects the very type of a legendary pool, and I could +easily have believed that I had only to sit long enough into the evening +to see the ghosts of classic nymphs and naiads cleave its sullen flood +and beckon me with irresistible arms. Is it because its shores are +haunted with these vague Pagan influences that two convents have risen +there to purge the atmosphere? From the Capuchin terrace you look +across at the grey Franciscan monastery of Palazzuola, which is not less +romantic certainly than the most obstinate myth it may have exorcised. +The Capuchin garden is a wild tangle of great trees and shrubs and +clinging, trembling vines which in these hard days are left to take care +of themselves; a weedy garden, if there ever was one, but none the less +charming for that, in the deepening dusk, with its steep grassy vistas +struggling away into impenetrable shadow. I braved the shadow for the +sake of climbing upon certain little flat-roofed crumbling pavilions +that rise from the corners of the further wall and give you a wider and +lovelier view of lake and hills and sky. + +I have perhaps justified to the reader the mild proposition with which I +started--convinced him, that is, that Albano is worth a walk. It may be +a different walk each day, moreover, and not resemble its predecessors +save by its keeping in the shade. "Galleries" the roads are prettily +called, and with the justice that they are vaulted and draped overhead +and hung with an immense succession of pictures. As you follow the few +miles from Genzano to Frascati you have perpetual views of the Campagna +framed by clusters of trees; the vast iridescent expanse of which +completes the charm and comfort of your verdurous dusk. I compared it +just now to the sea, and with a good deal of truth, for it has the same +incalculable lights and shades, the same confusion of glitter and gloom. +But I have seen it at moments--chiefly in the misty twilight--when it +resembled less the waste of waters than something more portentous, the +land itself in fatal dissolution. I could believe the fields to be dimly +surging and tossing and melting away into quicksands, and that one's +very last chance of an impression was taking place. A view, however, +which has the merit of being really as interesting as it seems, is that +of the Lake of Nemi; which the enterprising traveller hastens to compare +with its sister sheet of Albano. Comparison in this case is particularly +odious, for in order to prefer one lake to the other you have to +discover faults where there are none. Nemi is a smaller circle, but lies +in a deeper cup, and if with no grey Franciscan pile to guard its woody +shores, at least, in the same position, the little high-perched black +town to which it gives its name and which looks across at Genzano on the +opposite shore as Palazzuola regards Castel Gandolfo. The walk from the +Ariccia to Genzano is charming, most of all when it reaches a certain +grassy piazza from which three public avenues stretch away under a +double row of stunted and twisted elms. The Duke Cesarini has a villa at +Genzano--I mentioned it just now--whose gardens overhang the lake; but +he has also a porter in a faded rakish-looking livery who shakes his +head at your proffered franc unless you can reinforce it with a permit +countersigned at Rome. For this annoying complication of dignities he is +justly to be denounced; but I forgive him for the sake of that ancestor +who in the seventeenth century planted this shady walk. Never was a +prettier approach to a town than by these low-roofed light-chequered +corridors. Their only defect is that they prepare you for a town of +rather more rustic coquetry than Genzano exhibits. It has quite the +usual allowance, the common cynicism, of accepted decay, and looks +dismally as if its best families had all fallen into penury together and +lost the means of keeping anything better than donkeys in their great +dark, vaulted basements and mending their broken window-panes with +anything better than paper. It was on the occasion of this drear Genzano +that I had a difference of opinion with a friend who maintained that +there was nothing in the same line so pretty in Europe as a pretty New +England village. The proposition seemed to a cherisher of quaintness on +the face of it inacceptable; but calmly considered it has a measure of +truth. I am not fond of chalk-white painted planks, certainly; I vastly +prefer the dusky tones of ancient stucco and peperino; but I succumb +on occasion to the charms of a vine-shaded porch, of tulips and dahlias +glowing in the shade of high-arching elms, of heavy-scented lilacs +bending over a white paling to brush your cheek. + +"I prefer Siena to Lowell," said my friend; "but I prefer Farmington to +such a thing as this." In fact an Italian village is simply a miniature +Italian city, and its various parts imply a town of fifty times the +size. At Genzano are neither dahlias nor lilacs, and no odours but +foul ones. Flowers and other graces are all confined to the high-walled +precincts of Duke Cesarini, to which you must obtain admission twenty +miles away. The houses on the other hand would generally lodge a New +England cottage, porch and garden and high-arching elms included, in +one of their cavernous basements. These vast grey dwellings are all of +a fashion denoting more generous social needs than any they serve +nowadays. They speak of better days and of a fabulous time when Italy +was either not shabby or could at least "carry off" her shabbiness. For +what follies are they doing penance? Through what melancholy stages have +their fortunes ebbed? You ask these questions as you choose the shady +side of the long blank street and watch the hot sun glare upon the +dust-coloured walls and pause before the fetid gloom of open doors. + +I should like to spare a word for mouldy little Nemi, perched upon a +cliff high above the lake, at the opposite side; but after all, when I +had climbed up into it from the water-side, passing beneath a great arch +which I suppose once topped a gateway, and counted its twenty or thirty +apparent inhabitants peeping at me from black doorways, and looked at +the old round tower at whose base the village clusters, and declared +that it was all queer, queer, desperately queer, I had said all that is +worth saying about it. Nemi has a much better appreciation of its +lovely position than Genzano, where your only view of the lake is from a +dunghill behind one of the houses. At the foot of the round tower is +an overhanging terrace, from which you may feast your eyes on the only +freshness they find in these dusky human hives--the blooming seam, as +one may call it, of strong wild flowers which binds the crumbling walls +to the face of the cliff. Of Rocca di Papa I must say as little, It +consorted generally with the bravery of its name; but the only object +I made a note of as I passed through it on my way to Monte Cavo, which +rises directly above it, was a little black house with a tablet in its +face setting forth that Massimo d' Azeglio had dwelt there. The story +of his sojourn is not the least attaching episode in his delightful +_Ricordi_. From the summit of Monte Cavo is a prodigious view, which you +may enjoy with whatever good-nature is left you by the reflection that +the modern Passionist convent occupying this admirable site was erected +by the Cardinal of York (grandson of James II) on the demolished ruins +of an immemorial temple of Jupiter: the last foolish act of a foolish +race. For me I confess this folly spoiled the convent, and the convent +all but spoiled the view; for I kept thinking how fine it would have +been to emerge upon the old pillars and sculptures from the lava +pavement of the Via Triumphalis, which wanders grass-grown and untrodden +through the woods. A convent, however, which nothing spoils is that of +Palazzuola, to which I paid my respects on this same occasion. It rises +on a lower spur of Monte Cavo, on the edge, as we have seen, of the +Alban Lake, and though it occupies a classic site, that of early Alba +Longa, it displaced nothing more precious than memories and legends so +dim that the antiquarians are still quarrelling about them. It has a +meagre little church and the usual sham Perugino with a couple of tinsel +crowns for the Madonna and the Infant inserted into the canvas; and it +has also a musty old room hung about with faded portraits and charts and +queer ecclesiastical knick-knacks, which borrowed a mysterious +interest from the sudden assurance of the simple Franciscan brother who +accompanied me that it was the room of the Son of the King of Portugal. +But my peculiar pleasure was the little thick-shaded garden which +adjoins the convent and commands from its massive artificial foundations +an enchanting view of the lake. Part of it is laid out in cabbages and +lettuce, over which a rubicund brother, with his frock tucked up, was +bending with a solicitude which he interrupted to remove his skullcap +and greet me with the unsophisticated sweet-humoured smile that every +now and then in Italy does so much to make you forget the ambiguities of +monachism. The rest is occupied by cypresses and other funereal +umbrage, making a dank circle round an old cracked fountain black with +water-moss. The parapet of the terrace is furnished with good stone +seats where you may lean on your elbows to gaze away a sunny half-hour +and, feeling the general charm of the scene, declare that the best +mission of such a country in the world has been simply to produce, in +the way of prospect and picture, these masterpieces of mildness. Mild +here as a dream the whole attained effect, mild as resignation, mild +as one's thoughts of another life. Such a session wasn't surely an +experience of the irritable flesh; it was the deep degustation, on a +summer's day, of something immortally expressed by a man of genius. + +{Illustration: CASTEL GANDOLFO.} + +From Albano you may take your way through several ancient little cities +to Frascati, a rival centre of _villeggiatura_, the road following the +hillside for a long morning's walk and passing through alternations +of denser and clearer shade--the dark vaulted alleys of ilex and the +brilliant corridors of fresh-sprouting oak. The Campagna is beneath you +continually, with the sea beyond Ostia receiving the silver arrows of +the sun upon its chased and burnished shield, and mighty Rome, to the +north, lying at no great length in the idle immensity around it. +The highway passes below Castel Gandolfo, which stands perched on an +eminence behind a couple of gateways surmounted with the Papal tiara and +twisted cordon; and I have more than once chosen the roundabout road for +the sake of passing beneath these pompous insignia. Castel Gandolfo is +indeed an ecclesiastical village and under the peculiar protection of +the Popes, whose huge summer-palace rises in the midst of it like a +rural Vatican. In speaking of the road to Frascati I necessarily revert +to my first impressions, gathered on the occasion of the feast of the +Annunziata, which falls on the 25th of March and is celebrated by +a peasants' fair. As Murray strongly recommends you to visit this +spectacle, at which you are promised a brilliant exhibition of all +the costumes of modern Latium, I took an early train to Frascati and +measured, in company with a prodigious stream of humble pedestrians, the +half-hour's interval to Grotta Ferrata, where the fair is held. The road +winds along the hillside, among the silver-sprinkled olives and through +a charming wood where the ivy seemed tacked upon the oaks by women's +fingers and the birds were singing to the late anemones. It was +covered with a very jolly crowd of vulgar pleasure-takers, and the only +creatures not in a state of manifest hilarity were the pitiful +little overladen, overbeaten donkeys (who surely deserve a chapter to +themselves in any description of these neighbourhoods) and the horrible +beggars who were thrusting their sores and stumps at you from under +every tree. Every one was shouting, singing, scrambling, making light of +dust and distance and filling the air with that childlike jollity which +the blessed Italian temperament never goes roundabout to conceal. There +is no crowd surely at once so jovial and so gentle as an Italian crowd, +and I doubt if in any other country the tightly packed third-class +car in which I went out from Rome would have introduced me to so much +smiling and so little swearing. Grotta Ferrata is a very dirty little +village, with a number of raw new houses baking on the hot hillside and +nothing to charm the fond gazer but its situation and its old fortified +abbey. After pushing about among the shabby little booths and declining +a number of fabulous bargains in tinware, shoes and pork, I was glad +to retire to a comparatively uninvaded corner of the abbey and +divert myself with the view. This grey ecclesiastical stronghold is +a thoroughly scenic affair, hanging over the hillside on plunging +foundations which bury themselves among the dense olives. It has massive +round towers at the corners and a grass-grown moat, enclosing a church +and a monastery. The fore-court, within the abbatial gateway, now serves +as the public square of the village and in fair-time of course witnesses +the best of the fun. The best of the fun was to be found in certain +great vaults and cellars of the abbey, where wine was in free flow +from gigantic hogsheads. At the exit of these trickling grottos shady +trellises of bamboo and gathered twigs had been improvised, and under +them a grand guzzling proceeded. All of which was so in the fine old +style that I was roughly reminded of the wedding-feast of Gamacho. The +banquet was far less substantial of course, but it had a note as of +immemorial manners that couldn't fail to suggest romantic analogies to a +pilgrim from the land of no cooks. There was a feast of reason close +at hand, however, and I was careful to visit the famous frescoes of +Domenichino in the adjoining church. It sounds rather brutal perhaps to +say that, when I came back into the clamorous little piazza, the sight +of the peasants swilling down their sour wine appealed to me more than +the masterpieces--Murray calls them so--of the famous Bolognese. It +amounts after all to saying that I prefer Teniers to Domenichino; which +I am willing to let pass for the truth. The scene under the rickety +trellises was the more suggestive of Teniers that there were no costumes +to make it too Italian. Murray's attractive statement on this point was, +like many of his statements, much truer twenty years ago than to-day. +Costume is gone or fast going; I saw among the women not a single +crimson bodice and not a couple of classic head-cloths. The poorer sort, +dressed in vulgar rags of no fashion and colour, and the smarter ones +in calico gowns and printed shawls of the vilest modern fabric, had +honoured their dusky tresses but with rich applications of grease. The +men are still in jackets and breeches, and, with their slouched and +pointed hats and open-breasted shirts and rattling leather leggings, +may remind one sufficiently of the Italian peasant as he figured in the +woodcuts familiar to our infancy. After coming out of the church I found +a delightful nook--a queer little terrace before a more retired and +tranquil drinking-shop--where I called for a bottle of wine to help me +to guess why I "drew the line" at Domenichino. + +This little terrace was a capricious excrescence at the end of +the piazza, itself simply a greater terrace; and one reached it, +picturesquely, by ascending a short inclined plane of grass-grown +cobble-stones and passing across a little dusky kitchen through whose +narrow windows the light of the mighty landscape beyond touched up old +earthen pots. The terrace was oblong and so narrow that it held but a +single small table, placed lengthwise; yet nothing could be pleasanter +than to place one's bottle on the polished parapet. Here you seemed +by the time you had emptied it to be swinging forward into +immensity--hanging poised above the Campagna. A beautiful gorge with +a twinkling stream wandered down the hill far below you, beyond which +Marino and Castel Gandolfo peeped above the trees. In front you could +count the towers of Rome and the tombs of the Appian Way. I don't know +that I came to any very distinct conclusion about Domenichino; but it +was perhaps because the view was perfection that he struck me as more +than ever mediocrity. And yet I don't think it was one's bottle of wine, +either, that made one after all maudlin about him; it was the sense of +the foolishly usurped in his tenure of fame, of the derisive in his ever +having been put forward. To say so indeed savours of flogging a dead +horse, but it is surely an unkind stroke of fate for him that Murray +assures ten thousand Britons every winter in the most emphatic manner +that his Communion of St. Jerome is the second finest picture in the +world. If this were so one would certainly here in Rome, where such +institutions are convenient, retire into the very nearest convent; with +such a world one would have a standing quarrel. And yet this sport +of destiny is an interesting case, in default of being an interesting +painter, and I would take a moderate walk, in most moods, to see one of +his pictures. He is so supremely good an example of effort detached from +inspiration and school-merit divorced from spontaneity, that one of his +fine frigid performances ought to hang in a conspicuous place in every +academy of design. Few things of the sort contain more urgent lessons +or point a more precious moral; and I would have the head-master in the +drawing-school take each ingenuous pupil by the hand and lead him up +to the Triumph of David or the Chase of Diana or the red-nosed Persian +Sibyl and make him some such little speech as the following: "This great +picture, my son, was hung here to show you how you must _never_ paint; +to give you a perfect specimen of what in its boundless generosity the +providence of nature created for our fuller knowledge--an artist whose +development was a negation. The great thing in art is charm, and the +great thing in charm is spontaneity. Domenichino, having talent, is here +and there an excellent model--he was devoted, conscientious, observant, +industrious; but now that we've seen pretty well what can simply be +learned do its best, these things help him little with us, because his +imagination was cold. It loved nothing, it lost itself in nothing, its +efforts never gave it the heartache. It went about trying this and +that, concocting cold pictures after cold receipts, dealing in the +second-hand, in the ready-made, and putting into its performances +a little of everything but itself. When you see so many things in a +composition you might suppose that among them all some charm might be +born; yet they're really but the hundred mouths through which you may +hear the unhappy thing murmur 'I'm dead!' It's by the simplest thing it +has that a picture lives--by its temper. Look at all the great talents, +Domenichino as well as at Titian; but think less of dogma than of plain +nature, and I can almost promise you that yours will remain true." This +is very little to what the aesthetic sage I have imagined _might_ say; +and we are after all unwilling to let our last verdict be an unkind one +on any great bequest of human effort. The faded frescoes in the chapel +at Grotta Ferrata leave us a memory the more of man's effort to dream +beautifully; and they thus mingle harmoniously enough with our multifold +impressions of Italy, where dreams and realities have both kept such +pace and so strangely diverged. It was absurd--that was the truth--to +be critical at all among the appealing old Italianisms round me and to +treat the poor exploded Bolognese more harshly than, when I walked +back to Frascati, I treated the charming old water-works of the Villa +Aldobrandini. I confound these various products of antiquated art in a +genial absolution, and should like especially to tell how fine it was to +watch this prodigious fountain come tumbling down its channel of mouldy +rock-work, through its magnificent vista of ilex, to the fantastic old +hemicycle where a dozen tritons and naiads sit posturing to receive it. +The sky above the ilexes was incredibly blue and the ilexes themselves +incredibly black; and to see the young white moon peeping above the +trees you could easily have fancied it was midnight. I should like +furthermore to expatiate on Villa Mondragone, the most grandly +impressive hereabouts, of all such domestic monuments. The Casino in the +midst is as big as the Vatican, which it strikingly resembles, and +it stands perched on a terrace as vast as the parvise of St. Peter's, +looking straight away over black cypress-tops into the shining vastness +of the Campagna. Everything somehow seemed immense and solemn; there +was nothing small but certain little nestling blue shadows on the Sabine +Mountains, to which the terrace seems to carry you wonderfully near. +The place been for some time lost to private uses, since it figures +fantastically in a novel of George Sand--_La Daniella_--and now, in +quite another way, as a Jesuit college for boys. The afternoon was +perfect, and as it waned it filled the dark alleys with a wonderful +golden haze. Into this came leaping and shouting a herd of little +collegians with a couple of long-skirted Jesuits striding at their +heels. We all know--I make the point for my antithesis--the monstrous +practices of these people; yet as I watched the group I verily believe +I declared that if I had a little son he should go to Mondragone and +receive their crooked teachings for the sake of the other memories, the +avenues of cypress and ilex, the view of the Campagna, the atmosphere +of antiquity. But doubtless when a sense of "mere character," shameless +incomparable character, has brought one to this it is time one should +pause. + + + + + +THE AFTER-SEASON IN ROME + + +One may at the blest end of May say without injustice to anybody that +the state of mind of many a _forestiero_ in Rome is one of intense +impatience for the moment when all other _forestieri_ shall have +taken themselves off. One may confess to this state of mind and be no +misanthrope. The place has passed so completely for the winter months +into the hands of the barbarians that that estimable character the +passionate pilgrim finds it constantly harder to keep his passion clear. +He has a rueful sense of impressions perverted and adulterated; the +all-venerable visage disconcerts us by a vain eagerness to see itself +mirrored in English, American, German eyes. It isn't simply that you are +never first or never alone at the classic or historic spots where +you have dreamt of persuading the shy _genius loci_ into confidential +utterance; it isn't simply that St. Peter's, the Vatican, the Palatine, +are for ever ringing with the false note of the languages without style: +it is the general oppressive feeling that the city of the soul +has become for the time a monstrous mixture of watering-place and +curiosity-shop and that its most ardent life is that of the tourists who +haggle over false intaglios and yawn through palaces and temples. But +you are told of a happy time when these abuses begin to pass away, when +Rome becomes Rome again and you may have her all to yourself. "You may +like her more or less now," I was assured at the height of the season; +"but you must wait till the month of May, when she'll give you _all_ she +has, to love her. Then the foreigners, or the excess of them, are gone; +the galleries and ruins are empty, and the place," said my informant, +who was a happy Frenchman of the Acadmie de France, _"renait a +ellememe."_ Indeed I was haunted all winter by an irresistible prevision +of what Rome _must_ be in declared spring. Certain charming places +seemed to murmur: "Ah, this is nothing! Come back at the right weeks and +see the sky above us almost black with its excess of blue, and the +new grass already deep, but still vivid, and the white roses tumble in +odorous spray and the warm radiant air distil gold for the smelting-pot +that the _genius loci_ then dips his brush into before making play with +it, in his inimitable way, for the general effect of complexion." + +A month ago I spent a week in the country, and on my return, the first +time I approached the Corso, became conscious of a change. Something +delightful had happened, to which at first I couldn't give a name, but +which presently shone out as the fact that there were but half as +many people present and that these were chiefly the natural or the +naturalised. We had been docked of half our irrelevance, our motley +excess, and now physically, morally, esthetically there was elbow-room. +In the afternoon I went to the Pincio, and the Pincio was almost dull. +The band was playing to a dozen ladies who lay in landaus poising their +lace-fringed parasols; but they had scarce more than a light-gloved +dandy apiece hanging over their carriage doors. By the parapet to the +great terrace that sweeps the city stood but three or four interlopers +looking at the sunset and with their Baedekers only just showing in +their pockets--the sunsets not being down among the tariffed articles +in these precious volumes. I went so far as to hope for them that, +like myself, they were, under every precaution, taking some amorous +intellectual liberty with the scene. + +Practically I violate thus the instinct of monopoly, since it's a +shame not to publish that Rome in May is indeed exquisitely worth your +patience. I have just been so gratified at finding myself in undisturbed +possession for a couple of hours of the Museum of the Lateran that I can +afford to be magnanimous. It's almost as if the old all-papal paradise +had come back. The weather for a month has been perfect, the sky an +extravagance of blue, the air lively enough, the nights cool, nippingly +cool, and the whole ancient greyness lighted with an irresistible smile. +Rome, which in some moods, especially to new-comers, seems a place of +almost sinister gloom, has an occasional art, as one knows her better, +of brushing away care by the grand gesture with which some splendid +impatient mourning matron--just the Niobe of Nations, surviving, +emerging and looking about her again--might pull off and cast aside an +oppression of muffling crape. This admirable power still temperamentally +to react and take notice lurks in all her darkness and dirt and decay--a +something more careless and hopeless than our thrifty northern cheer, +and yet more genial and urbane than the Parisian spirit of _blague_. +The collective Roman nature is a healthy and hearty one, and you feel it +abroad in the streets even when the sirocco blows and the medium of life +seems to proceed more or less from the mouth of a furnace. But who shall +analyse even the simplest Roman impression? It is compounded of so +many things, it says so much, it involves so much, it so quickens the +intelligence and so flatters the heart, that before we fairly grasp +the case the imagination has marked it for her own and exposed us to a +perilous likelihood of talking nonsense about it. + +The smile of Rome, as I have called it, and its insidious message to +those who incline to ramble irresponsibly and take things as they come, +is ushered in with the first breath of spring, and then grows and grows +with the advancing season till it wraps the whole place in its tenfold +charm. As the process develops you can do few better things than +go often to Villa Borghese and sit on the grass--on a stout bit of +drapery--and watch its exquisite stages. It has a frankness and a +sweetness beyond any relenting of _our_ clumsy climates even when ours +leave off their damnable faces and begin. Nature departs from every +reserve with a confidence that leaves one at a loss where, as it were, +to look--leaves one, as I say, nothing to do but to lay one's head among +the anemones at the base of a high-stemmed pine and gaze up crestward +and sky-ward along its slanting silvery column. You may watch the whole +business from a dozen of these choice standpoints and have a different +villa for it every day in the week. The Doria, the Ludovisi, the Medici, +the Albani, the Wolkonski, the Chigi, the Mellini, the Massimo--there +are more of them, with all their sights and sounds and odours and +memories, than you have senses for. But I prefer none of them to the +Borghese, which is free to all the world at all times and yet never +crowded; for when the whirl of carriages is great in the middle regions +you may find a hundred untrodden spots and silent corners, tenanted at +the worst by a group of those long-skirted young Propagandists who +stalk about with solemn angularity, each with a book under his arm, like +silhouettes from a medieval missal, and "compose" so extremely well +with the still more processional cypresses and with stretches of +golden-russet wall overtopped by ultramarine. And yet if the Borghese is +good the Medici is strangely charming, and you may stand in the little +belvedere which rises with such surpassing oddity out of the dusky heart +of the Boschetto at the latter establishment--a miniature presentation +of the wood of the Sleeping Beauty--and look across at the Ludovisi +pines lifting their crooked parasols into a sky of what a painter would +call the most morbid blue, and declare that the place where _they_ grow +is the most delightful in the world. Villa Ludovisi has been all winter +the residence of the lady familiarly known in Roman society as "Rosina," +Victor Emmanuel's morganatic wife, the only familiarity it would +seem, that she allows, for the grounds were rigidly closed, to the +inconsolable regret of old Roman sojourners. Just as the nightingales +began to sing, however, the quasi-august _padrona_ departed, and the +public, with certain restrictions, have been admitted to hear them. +The place takes, where it lies, a princely ease, and there could be no +better example of the expansive tendencies of ancient privilege than the +fact that its whole vast extent is contained by the city walls. It has +in this respect very much the same enviable air of having got up early +that marks the great intramural demesne of Magdalen College at Oxford. +The stern old ramparts of Rome form the outer enclosure of the villa, +and hence a series of "striking scenic effects" which it would be +unscrupulous flattery to say you can imagine. The grounds are laid out +in the formal last-century manner; but nowhere do the straight black +cypresses lead off the gaze into vistas of a melancholy more charged +with associations--poetic, romantic, historic; nowhere are there +grander, smoother walls of laurel and myrtle. + +I recently spent an afternoon hour at the little Protestant cemetery +close to St. Paul's Gate, where the ancient and the modern world are +insidiously contrasted. They make between them one of the solemn places +of Rome--although indeed when funereal things are so interfused it seems +ungrateful to call them sad. Here is a mixture of tears and smiles, of +stones and flowers, of mourning cypresses and radiant sky, which gives +us the impression of our looking back at death from the brighter side +of the grave. The cemetery nestles in an angle of the city wall, and the +older graves are sheltered by a mass of ancient brickwork, through whose +narrow loopholes you peep at the wide purple of the Campagna. Shelley's +grave is here, buried in roses--a happy grave every way for the very +type and figure of the Poet. Nothing could be more impenetrably tranquil +than this little corner in the bend of the protecting rampart, where a +cluster of modern ashes is held tenderly in the rugged hand of the Past. +The past is tremendously embodied in the hoary pyramid of Caius Cestius, +which rises hard by, half within the wall and half without, cutting +solidly into the solid blue of the sky and casting its pagan shadow upon +the grass of English graves--that of Keats, among them--with an effect +of poetic justice. It is a wonderful confusion of mortality and a grim +enough admonition of our helpless promiscuity in the crucible of time. +But the most touching element of all is the appeal of the pious English +inscriptions among all these Roman memories; touching because of their +universal expression of that trouble within trouble, misfortune in +a foreign land. Something special stirs the heart through the fine +Scriptural language in which everything is recorded. The echoes of +massive Latinity with which the atmosphere is charged suggest nothing +more majestic and monumental. I may seem unduly to refine, but the +injunction to the reader in the monument to Miss Bathurst, drowned in +the Tiber in 1824, "If thou art young and lovely, build not thereon, +for she who lies beneath thy feet in death was the loveliest flower ever +cropt in its bloom," affects us irresistibly as a case for tears on the +spot. The whole elaborate inscription indeed says something over and +beyond all it does say. The English have the reputation of being the +most reticent people in the world, and as there is no smoke without fire +I suppose they have done something to deserve it; yet who can say that +one doesn't constantly meet the most startling examples of the insular +faculty to "gush"? In this instance the mother of the deceased takes +the public into her confidence with surprising frankness and omits +no detail, seizing the opportunity to mention by the way that she had +already lost her husband by a most mysterious visitation. The appeal +to one's attention and the confidence in it are withal most moving. The +whole record has an old-fashioned gentility that makes its frankness +tragic. You seem to hear the garrulity of passionate grief. + +To be choosing these positive commonplaces of the Roman tone for a theme +when there are matters of modern moment going on may seem none the +less to require an apology. But I make no claim to your special +correspondent's faculty for getting an "inside" view of things, and I +have hardly more than a pictorial impression of the Pope's illness and +of the discussion of the Law of the Convents. Indeed I am afraid +to speak of the Pope's illness at all, lest I should say something +egregiously heartless about it, recalling too forcibly that unnatural +husband who was heard to wish that his wife would "either" get well--! +He had his reasons, and Roman tourists have theirs in the shape of a +vague longing for something spectacular at St. Peter's. If it takes the +sacrifice of somebody to produce it let somebody then be sacrificed. +Meanwhile we have been having a glimpse of the spectacular side of the +Religious Corporations Bill. Hearing one morning a great hubbub in the +Corso I stepped forth upon my balcony. A couple of hundred men were +strolling slowly down the street with their hands in their pockets, +shouting in unison "Abbasso il ministero!" and huzzaing in chorus. Just +beneath my window they stopped and began to murmur "Al Quirinale, al +Quirinale!" The crowd surged a moment gently and then drifted to the +Quirinal, where it scuffled harmlessly with half-a-dozen of the king's +soldiers. It ought to have been impressive, for what was it, strictly, +unless the seeds of revolution? But its carriage was too gentle and +its cries too musical to send the most timorous tourist to packing +his trunk. As I began with saying: in Rome, in May, everything has an +amiable side, even popular uprisings. + + + + + +FROM A ROMAN NOTE-BOOK + + +December 28, 1872.--In Rome again for the last three days--that second +visit which, when the first isn't followed by a fatal illness in +Florence, the story goes that one is doomed to pay. I didn't drink of +the Fountain of Trevi on the eve of departure the other time; but I feel +as if I had drunk of the Tiber itself. Nevertheless as I drove from +the station in the evening I wondered what I should think of it at this +first glimpse hadn't I already known it. All manner of evil perhaps. +Paris, as I passed along the Boulevards three evenings before to take +the train, was swarming and glittering as befits a great capital. Here, +in the black, narrow, crooked, empty streets, I saw nothing I would +fain regard as eternal. But there were new gas-lamps round the spouting +Triton in Piazza Barberini and a newspaper stall on the corner of the +Condotti and the Corso--salient signs of the emancipated state. An hour +later I walked up to Via Gregoriana by Piazza di Spagna. It was all +silent and deserted, and the great flight of steps looked surprisingly +small. Everything seemed meagre, dusky, provincial. Could Rome after all +really _be_ a world-city? That queer old rococo garden gateway at +the top of the Gregoriana stirred a dormant memory; it awoke into a +consciousness of the delicious mildness of the air, and very soon, in +a little crimson drawing-room, I was reconciled and re-initiated.... +Everything is dear (in the way of lodgings), but it hardly matters, as +everything is taken and some one else paying for it. I must make up my +mind to a bare perch. But it seems poorly perverse here to aspire to +an "interior" or to be conscious of the economic side of life. The +esthetic is so intense that you feel you should live on the taste +of it, should extract the nutritive essence of the atmosphere. For +positively it's _such_ an atmosphere! The weather is perfect, the sky as +blue as the most exploded tradition fames it, the whole air glowing +and throbbing with lovely colour.... The glitter of Paris is now all +gaslight. And oh the monotonous miles of rain-washed asphalte! + +_December 30th_.--I have had nothing to do with the "ceremonies." In +fact I believe there have hardly been any--no midnight mass at the +Sistine chapel, no silver trumpets at St. Peter's. Everything is +remorselessly clipped and curtailed--the Vatican in deepest mourning. +But I saw it in its superbest scarlet in '69.... I went yesterday with +L. to the Colonna gardens--an adventure that would have reconverted me +to Rome if the thing weren't already done. It's a rare old place--rising +in mouldy bosky terraces and mossy stairways and winding walks from the +back of the palace to the top of the Quirinal. It's the grand style +of gardening, and resembles the present natural manner as a chapter of +Johnsonian rhetoric resembles a piece of clever contemporary journalism. +But it's a better style in horticulture than in literature; I prefer +one of the long-drawn blue-green Colonna vistas, with a maimed and +mossy-coated garden goddess at the end, to the finest possible quotation +from a last-century classic. Perhaps the best thing there is the +old orangery with its trees in fantastic terra-cotta tubs. The late +afternoon light was gilding the monstrous jars and suspending golden +chequers among the golden-fruited leaves. Or perhaps the best thing is +the broad terrace with its mossy balustrade and its benches; also its +view of the great naked Torre di Nerone (I think), which might look +stupid if the rosy brickwork didn't take such a colour in the blue +air. Delightful, at any rate, to stroll and talk there in the afternoon +sunshine. + +_January 2nd,_ 1873.--Two or three drives with A.--one to St. Paul's +without the Walls and back by a couple of old churches on the Aventine. +I was freshly struck with the rare distinction of the little Protestant +cemetery at the Gate, lying in the shadow of the black sepulchral +Pyramid and the thick-growing black cypresses. Bathed in the clear Roman +light the place is heartbreaking for what it asks you--in such a world +as _this_--to renounce. If it should "make one in love with death to lie +there," that's only if death should be conscious. As the case stands, +the weight of a tremendous past presses upon the flowery sod, and the +sleeper's mortality feels the contact of all the mortality with which +the brilliant air is tainted.... The restored Basilica is incredibly +splendid. It seems a last pompous effort of formal Catholicism, and +there are few more striking emblems of later Rome--the Rome foredoomed +to see Victor Emmanuel in the Quirinal, the Rome of abortive councils +and unheeded anathemas. It rises there, gorgeous and useless, on its +miasmatic site, with an air of conscious bravado--a florid advertisement +of the superabundance of faith. Within it's magnificent, and its +magnificence has no shabby spots--a rare thing in Rome. Marble and +mosaic, alabaster and malachite, lapis and porphyry, incrust it from +pavement to cornice and flash back their polished lights at each other +with such a splendour of effect that you seem to stand at the heart of +some immense prismatic crystal. One has to come to Italy to know marbles +and love them. I remember the fascination of the first great show of +them I met in Venice--at the Scalzi and Gesuiti. Colour has in no other +form so cool and unfading a purity and lustre. Softness of tone and +hardness of substance--isn't that the sum of the artist's desire? G., +with his beautiful caressing, open-lipped Roman utterance, so easy to +understand and, to my ear, so finely suggestive of genuine Latin, not +our horrible Anglo-Saxon and Protestant kind, urged upon us the charms +of a return by the Aventine and the sight of a couple of old churches. +The best is Santa Sabina, a very fine old structure of the fifth +century, mouldering in its dusky solitude and consuming its own +antiquity. What a massive heritage Christianity and Catholicism are +leaving here! What a substantial fact, in all its decay, this memorial +Christian temple outliving its uses among the sunny gardens and +vineyards! It has a noble nave, filled with a stale smell which +(like that of the onion) brought tears to my eyes, and bordered with +twenty-four fluted marble columns of Pagan origin. The crudely primitive +little mosaics along the entablature are extremely curious. A Dominican +monk, still young, who showed us the church, seemed a creature generated +from its musty shadows I odours. His physiognomy was wonderfully _de +l'emploi_, and his voice, most agreeable, had the strangest jaded +humility. His lugubrious salute and sanctimonious impersonal +appropriation of my departing franc would have been a master-touch on +the stage. While we were still in the church a bell rang that he had to +go and answer, and as he came back and approached us along the nave he +made with his white gown and hood and his cadaverous face, against the +dark church background, one of those pictures which, thank the Muses, +have not yet been reformed out of Italy. It was the exact illustration, +for insertion in a text, of heaven knows how many old romantic and +conventional literary Italianisms--plays, poems, mysteries of Udolpho. +We got back into the carriage and talked of profane things and went home +to dinner--drifting recklessly, it seemed to me, from aesthetic luxury +to social. + +On the 31st we went to the musical vesper-service at the Gesu--hitherto +done so splendidly before the Pope and the cardinals. The manner of it +was eloquent of change--no Pope, no cardinals, and indifferent music; +but a great _mise-en-scne_ nevertheless. The church is gorgeous; late +Renaissance, of great proportions, and full, like so many others, but in +a pre-eminent degree, of seventeenth and eighteenth century Romanism. +It doesn't impress the imagination, but richly feeds the curiosity, +by which I mean one's sense of the curious; suggests no legends, but +innumerable anecdotes la Stendhal. There is a vast dome, filled with a +florid concave fresco of tumbling foreshortened angels, and all over +the ceilings and cornices a wonderful outlay of dusky gildings +and mouldings. There are various Bernini saints and seraphs in +stucco-sculpture, astride of the tablets and door-tops, backing against +their rusty machinery of coppery _nimbi_ and egg-shaped cloudlets. +Marble, damask and tapers in gorgeous profusion. The high altar a great +screen of twinkling chandeliers. The choir perched in a little loft high +up in the right transept, like a balcony in a side-scene at the opera, +and indulging in surprising roulades and flourishes.... Near me sat a +handsome, opulent-looking nun--possibly an abbess or prioress of noble +lineage. Can a holy woman of such a complexion listen to a fine operatic +barytone in a sumptuous temple and receive none but ascetic impressions? +What a cross-fire of influences does Catholicism provide! + +_January 4th._--A drive with A. out of Porta San Giovanni and along Via +Appia Nuova. More and more beautiful as you get well away from the walls +and the great view opens out before you--the rolling green-brown dells +and flats of the Campagna, the long, disjointed arcade of the aqueducts, +the deep-shadowed blue of the Alban Hills, touched into pale lights by +their scattered towns. We stopped at the ruined basilica of San Stefano, +an affair of the fifth century, rather meaningless without a learned +companion. But the perfect little sepulchral chambers of the Pancratii, +disinterred beneath the church, tell their own tale--in their hardly +dimmed frescoes, their beautiful sculptured coffin and great sepulchral +slab. Better still the tomb of the Valerii adjoining it--a single +chamber with an arched roof, covered with stucco mouldings perfectly +intact, exquisite figures and arabesques as sharp and delicate as if the +plasterer's scaffold had just been taken from under them. Strange enough +to think of these things--so many of them as there are--surviving their +immemorial eclipse in this perfect shape and coming up like long-lost +divers on the sea of time. + +_January 16th._--A delightful walk last Sunday with F. to Monte Mario. +We drove to Porta Angelica, the little gate hidden behind the right wing +of Bernini's colonnade, and strolled thence up the winding road to the +Villa Mellini, where one of the greasy peasants huddled under the wall +in the sun admits you for half franc into the finest old ilex-walk in +Italy. It is all vaulted grey-green shade with blue Campagna stretches +in the interstices. The day was perfect; the still sunshine, as we sat +at the twisted base of the old trees, seemed to have the drowsy hum of +mid-summer--with that charm of Italian vegetation that comes to us as +its confession of having scenically served, to weariness at last, for +some pastoral these many centuries a classic. In a certain cheapness +and thinness of substance--as compared with the English stoutness, never +left athirst--it reminds me of our own, and it is relatively dry enough +and pale enough to explain the contempt of many unimaginative Britons. +But it has an idle abundance and wantonness, a romantic shabbiness +and dishevelment. At the Villa Mellini is the famous lonely pine which +"tells" so in the landscape from other points, bought off from the axe +by (I believe) Sir George Beaumont, commemorated in a like connection in +Wordsworth's great sonnet. He at least was not an unimaginative Briton. +As you stand under it, its far-away shallow dome, supported on a single +column almost white enough to be marble, seems to dwell in the dizziest +depths of the blue. Its pale grey-blue boughs and its silvery stem make +a wonderful harmony with the ambient air. The Villa Mellini is full +of the elder Italy of one's imagination--the Italy of Boccaccio and +Ariosto. There are twenty places where the Florentine story-tellers +might have sat round on the grass. Outside the villa walls, beneath the +over-crowding orange-boughs, straggled old Italy as well--but not in +Boccaccio's velvet: a row of ragged and livid contadini, some simply +stupid in their squalor, but some downright brigands of romance, or of +reality, with matted locks and terribly sullen eyes. + +A couple of days later I walked for old acquaintance' sake over to San +Onofrio on the Janiculan. The approach is one of the dirtiest adventures +in Rome, and though the view is fine from the little terrace, the church +and convent are of a meagre and musty pattern. Yet here--almost like +pearls in a dunghill--are hidden mementos of two of the most exquisite +of Italian minds. Torquato Tasso spent the last months of his life here, +and you may visit his room and various warped and faded relics. The most +interesting is a cast of his face taken after death--looking, like all +such casts, almost more than mortally gallant and distinguished. But +who should look all ideally so if not he? In a little shabby, chilly +corridor adjoining is a fresco of Leonardo, a Virgin and Child with +the _donatorio_. It is very small, simple and faded, but it has all the +artist's magic, that mocking, illusive refinement and hint of a vague +_arriere-pensee_ which mark every stroke of Leonardo's brush. Is it the +perfection of irony or the perfection of tenderness? What does he mean, +what does he affirm, what does he deny? Magic wouldn't be magic, nor the +author of such things stand so absolutely alone, if we were ready with +an explanation. As I glanced from the picture to the poor stupid little +red-faced brother at my side I wondered if the thing mightn't pass for +an elegant epigram on monasticism. Certainly, at any rate, there is more +intellect in it than under all the monkish tonsures it has seen coming +and going these three hundred years. + +_January 21st._--The last three or four days I have regularly spent a +couple of hours from noon baking myself in the sun of the Pincio to get +rid of a cold. The weather perfect and the crowd (especially to-day) +amazing. Such a staring, lounging, dandified, amiable crowd! Who does +the vulgar stay-at-home work of Rome? All the grandees and half the +foreigners are there in their carriages, the _bourgeoisie_ on foot +staring at them and the beggars lining all the approaches. The great +difference between public places in America and Europe is in the number +of unoccupied people of every age and condition sitting about early and +late on benches and gazing at you, from your hat to your boots, as you +pass. Europe is certainly the continent of the practised stare. The +ladies on the Pincio have to run the gauntlet; but they seem to do so +complacently enough. The European woman is brought up to the sense +of having a definite part in the way of manners or manner to play in +public. To lie back in a barouche alone, balancing a parasol and seeming +to ignore the extremely immediate gaze of two serried ranks of male +creatures on each side of her path, save here and there to recognise +one of them with an imperceptible nod, is one of her daily duties. +The number of young men here who, like the coenobites of old, lead the +purely contemplative life is enormous. They muster in especial force +on the Pincio, but the Corso all day is thronged with them. They are +well-dressed, good-humoured, good-looking, polite; but they seem never +to do a harder stroke of work than to stroll from the Piazza Colonna to +the Hotel de Rome or _vice versa_. Some of them don't even stroll, but +stand leaning by the hour against the doorways, sucking the knobs of +their canes, feeling their back hair and settling their shirt-cuffs. At +my cafe in the morning several stroll in already (at nine o'clock) in +light, in "evening" gloves. But they order nothing, turn on their heels, +glance at the mirrors and stroll out again. When it rains they herd +under the _portes-cochres_ and in the smaller cafes.... Yesterday +Prince Humbert's little _primogenito_ was on the Pincio in an open +landau with his governess. He's a sturdy blond little man and the image +of the King. They had stopped to listen to the music, and the crowd was +planted about the carriage-wheels, staring and criticising under the +child's snub little nose. It appeared bold cynical curiosity, without +the slightest manifestation of "loyalty," and it gave me a singular +sense of the vulgarisation of Rome under the new regime. When the Pope +drove abroad it was a solemn spectacle; even if you neither kneeled nor +uncovered you were irresistibly impressed. But the Pope never stopped to +listen to opera tunes, and he had no little popelings, under the charge +of superior nurse-maids, whom you might take liberties with. The family +at the Quirinal make something of a merit, I believe, of their +modest and inexpensive way of life. The merit is great; yet, +representationally, what a change for the worse from an order which +proclaimed stateliness a part of its essence! The divinity that doth +hedge a king must be pretty well on the wane. But how many more fine old +traditions will the extremely sentimental traveller miss in the Italians +over whom that little jostled prince in the landau will have come +into his kinghood? ... The Pincio continues to beguile; it's a great +resource. I am for ever being reminded of the "aesthetic luxury," as I +called it above, of living in Rome. To be able to choose of an afternoon +for a lounge (respectfully speaking) between St. Peter's and the high +precinct you approach by the gate just beyond Villa Medici--counting +nothing else--is a proof that if in Rome you may suffer from ennui, at +least your ennui has a throbbing soul in it. It is something to say for +the Pincio that you don't always choose St. Peter's. Sometimes I lose +patience with its parade of eternal idleness, but at others this very +idleness is balm to one's conscience. Life on just these terms seems so +easy, so monotonously sweet, that you feel it would be unwise, would be +really unsafe, to change. The Roman air is charged with an elixir, the +Roman cup seasoned with some insidious drop, of which the action is +fatally, yet none the less agreeably, "lowering." + +_January 26th._--With S. to the Villa Medici--perhaps on the whole +the most enchanting place in Rome. The part of the garden called the +Boschetto has an incredible, impossible charm; an upper terrace, behind +locked gates, covered with a little dusky forest of evergreen oaks. +Such a dim light as of a fabled, haunted place, such a soft suffusion +of tender grey-green tones, such a company of gnarled and twisted little +miniature trunks--dwarfs playing with each other at being giants--and +such a shower of golden sparkles drifting in from the vivid west! At +the end of the wood is a steep, circular mound, up which the short trees +scramble amain, with a long mossy staircase climbing up to a belvedere. +This staircase, rising suddenly out of the leafy dusk to you don't see +where, is delightfully fantastic. You expect to see an old woman in a +crimson petticoat and with a distaff come hobbling down and turn into +a fairy and offer you three wishes. I should name for my own first wish +that one didn't have to be a Frenchman to come and live and dream and +work at the Acadmie de France. Can there be for a while a happier +destiny than that of a young artist conscious of talent and of no errand +but to educate, polish and perfect it, transplanted to these sacred +shades? One has fancied Plato's Academy--his gleaming colonnades, his +blooming gardens and Athenian sky; but was it as good as this one, where +Monsieur Hebert does the Platonic? The blessing in Rome is not that this +or that or the other isolated object is so very unsurpassable; but that +the general air so contributes to interest, to impressions that are not +as any other impressions anywhere in the world. And from this general +air the Villa Medici has distilled an essence of its own--walled it in +and made it delightfully private. The great faade on the gardens +is like an enormous rococo clock-face all incrusted with images and +arabesques and tablets. What mornings and afternoons one might +spend there, brush in hand, unpreoccupied, untormented, pensioned, +satisfied--either persuading one's self that one would be "doing +something" in consequence or not caring if one shouldn't be. + +_At a later date--middle of March_.--A ride with S. W. out of the Porta +Pia to the meadows beyond the Ponte Nomentana--close to the site of +Phaon's villa where Nero in hiding had himself stabbed. It all spoke as +things here only speak, touching more chords than one can _now_ really +know or say. For these are predestined memories and the stuff that +regrets are made of; the mild divine efflorescence of spring, the +wonderful landscape, the talk suspended for another gallop.... +Returning, we dismounted at the gate of the Villa Medici and walked +through the twilight of the vaguely perfumed, bird-haunted alleys to +H.'s studio, hidden in the wood like a cottage in a fairy tale. I spent +there a charming half-hour in the fading light, looking at the pictures +while my companion discoursed of her errand. The studio is small and +more like a little salon; the painting refined, imaginative, somewhat +morbid, full of consummate French ability. A portrait, idealised and +etherealised, but a likeness of Mme. de---(from last year's Salon) +in white satin, quantities of lace, a coronet, diamonds and pearls; a +striking combination of brilliant silvery tones. A "Femme Sauvage," +a naked dusky girl in a wood, with a wonderfully clever pair of shy, +passionate eyes. The author is different enough from any of the numerous +American artists. They may be producers, but he's a product as well--a +product of influences of a sort of which we have as yet no +general command. One of them is his charmed lapse of life in that +unprofessional-looking little studio, with his enchanted wood on one +side and the plunging wall of Rome on the other. + +_January 30th._--A drive the other day with a friend to Villa Madama, +on the side of Monte Mario; a place like a page out of one of Browning's +richest evocations of this clime and civilisation. Wondrous in its +haunting melancholy, it might have inspired half "The Ring and the Book" +at a stroke. What a grim commentary on history such a scene--what an +irony of the past! The road up to it through the outer enclosure is +almost impassable with mud and stones. At the end, on a terrace, rises +the once elegant Casino, with hardly a whole pane of glass in its +faade, reduced to its sallow stucco and degraded ornaments. The front +away from Rome has in the basement a great loggia, now walled in from +the weather, preceded by a grassy be littered platform with an immense +sweeping view of the Campagna; the sad-looking, more than sad-looking, +evil-looking, Tiber beneath (the colour of gold, the sentimentalists +say, the colour of mustard, the realists); a great vague stretch beyond, +of various complexions and uses; and on the horizon the ever-iridescent +mountains. The place has become the shabbiest farm-house, with muddy +water in the old _pices d'eau_ and dunghills on the old parterres. +The "feature" is the contents of the loggia: a vaulted roof and walls +decorated by Giulio Romano; exquisite stucco-work and still brilliant +frescoes; arabesques and figurini, nymphs and fauns, animals and +flowers--gracefully lavish designs of every sort. Much of the +colour--especially the blues--still almost vivid, and all the work +wonderfully ingenious, elegant and charming. Apartments so decorated can +have been meant only for the recreation of people greater than any +we know, people for whom life was impudent ease and success. Margaret +Farnese was the lady of the house, but where she trailed her cloth of +gold the chickens now scamper between your legs over rotten straw. It is +all inexpressibly dreary. A stupid peasant scratching his head, a +couple of critical Americans picking their steps, the walls tattered and +befouled breast-high, dampness and decay striking in on your heart, and +the scene overbowed by these heavenly frescoes, moulering there in their +airy artistry! It's poignant; it provokes tears; it tells so of the +waste of effort. Something human seems to pant beneath the grey pall +of time and to implore you to rescue it, to pity it, to stand by it +somehow. But you leave it to its lingering death without compunction, +almost with pleasure; for the place seems vaguely crime-haunted--paying +at least the penalty of some hard immorality. The end of a Renaissance +pleasure-house. Endless for the didactic observer the moral, abysmal for +the storyseeker the tale. + +_February 12th_.--Yesterday to the Villa Albani. Over-formal and (as my +companion says) too much like a tea-garden; but with beautiful stairs +and splendid geometrical lines of immense box-hedge, intersected +with high pedestals supporting little antique busts. The light to-day +magnificent; the Alban Hills of an intenser broken purple than I had +yet seen them--their white towns blooming upon it like vague projected +lights. It was like a piece of very modern painting, and a good example +of how Nature has at times a sort of mannerism which ought to make +us careful how we condemn out of hand the more refined and affected +artists. The collection of marbles in the Casino (Winckelmann's) +admirable and to be seen again. The famous Antinous crowned with lotus +a strangely beautiful and impressive thing. The "Greek manner," on the +showing of something now and again encountered here, moves one to feel +that even for purely romantic and imaginative effects it surpasses any +since invented. If there be not imagination, even in our comparatively +modern sense of the word, in the baleful beauty of that perfect young +profile there is none in "Hamlet" or in "Lycidas." There is five hundred +times as much as in "The Transfiguration." With this at any rate to +point to it's not for sculpture not professedly to produce any emotion +producible by painting. There are numbers of small and delicate +fragments of bas-reliefs of exquisite grace, and a huge piece (two +combatants--one, on horseback, beating down another--murder made eternal +and beautiful) attributed to the Parthenon and certainly as grandly +impressive as anything in the Elgin marbles. S. W. suggested again the +Roman villas as a "subject." Excellent if one could find a feast of +facts la Stendhal. A lot of vague ecstatic descriptions and anecdotes +wouldn't at all pay. There have been too many already. Enough facts are +recorded, I suppose; one should discover them and soak in them for +a twelvemonth. And yet a Roman villa, in spite of statues, ideas and +atmosphere, affects me as of a scanter human and social _portee_, a +shorter, thinner reverberation, than an old English country-house, +round which experience seems piled so thick. But this perhaps is either +hair-splitting or "racial" prejudice. + +{Illustration: ENTRANCE TO THE VATICAN, ROME} + +_March 9th._--The Vatican is still deadly cold; a couple of hours there +yesterday with R. W. E. Yet he, illustrious and enviable man, fresh from +the East, had no overcoat and wanted none. Perfect bliss, I think, would +be to live in Rome without thinking of overcoats. The Vatican seems +very familiar, but strangely smaller than of old. I never lost the sense +before of confusing vastness. _Sancta simplicitas!_ All my old friends +however stand there in undimmed radiance, keeping most of them their +old pledges. I am perhaps more struck now with the enormous amount of +padding--the number of third-rate, fourth-rate things that weary the eye +desirous to approach freshly the twenty and thirty best. In spite of the +padding there are dozens of treasures that one passes regretfully; but +the impression of the whole place is the great thing--the feeling that +through these solemn vistas flows the source of an incalculable part of +our present conception of Beauty. + +_April 10th._--Last night, in the rain, to the Teatro Valle to see a +comedy of Goldoni in Venetian dialect--"I Quattro Rustighi." I could but +half follow it; enough, however, to be sure that, for all its humanity +of irony, it wasn't so good as Molire. The acting was capital--broad, +free and natural; the play of talk easier even than life itself; but, +like all the Italian acting I have seen, it was wanting in _finesse_, +that shade of the shade by which, and by which alone, one really knows +art. I contrasted the affair with the evening in December last that I +walked over (also in the rain) to the Odeon and saw the "Plaideurs" and +the "Malade lmaginaire." There, too, was hardly more than a handful of +spectators; but what rich, ripe, fully representational and above +all intellectual comedy, and what polished, educated playing! These +Venetians in particular, however, have a marvellous _entrain_ of their +own; they seem even less than the French to recite. In some of the +women--ugly, with red hands and shabby dresses--an extraordinary gift of +natural utterance, of seeming to invent joyously as they go. + +_Later_.--Last evening in H.'s box at the Apollo to hear Ernesto Rossi +in "Othello." He shares supremacy with Salvini in Italian tragedy. +Beautiful great theatre with boxes you can walk about in; brilliant +audience. The Princess Margaret was there--I have never been to +the theatre that she was not--and a number of other princesses in +neighbouring boxes. G. G. came in and instructed us that they were the +M., the L., the P., &c. Rossi is both very bad and very fine; bad where +anything like taste and discretion is required, but "all there," and +more than there, in violent passion. The last act reduced too much, +however, to mere exhibitional sensibility. The interesting thing to me +was to observe the Italian conception of the part--to see how crude +it was, how little it expressed the hero's moral side, his depth, +his dignity--anything more than his being a creature terrible in mere +tantrums. The great point was his seizing Iago's head and whacking it +half-a-dozen times on the floor, and then flinging him twenty yards +away. It was wonderfully done, but in the doing of it and in the evident +relish for it in the house there was I scarce knew what force of easy +and thereby rather cheap expression. + +_April 27th_.--A morning with L. B. at Villa Ludovisi, which we agreed +that we shouldn't soon forget. The villa now belongs to the King, who +has lodged his morganatic wife there. There is nothing so blissfully +_right_ in Rome, nothing more consummately consecrated to style. The +grounds and gardens are immense, and the great rusty-red city wall +stretches away behind them and makes the burden of the seven hills +seem vast without making _them_ seem small. There is everything--dusky +avenues trimmed by the clippings of centuries, groves and dells and +glades and glowing pastures and reedy fountains and great flowering +meadows studded with enormous slanting pines. The day was delicious, +the trees all one melody, the whole place a revelation of what Italy +and hereditary pomp can do together. Nothing could be more in the +grand manner than this garden view of the city ramparts, lifting +their fantastic battlements above the trees and flowers. They are all +tapestried with vines and made to serve as sunny fruit-walls--grim old +defence as they once were; now giving nothing but a splendid buttressed +privacy. The sculptures in the little Casino are few, but there are two +great ones--the beautiful sitting Mars and the head of the great Juno, +the latter thrust into a corner behind a shutter. These things it's +almost impossible to praise; we can only mark them well and keep them +clear, as we insist on silence to hear great music.... If I don't praise +Guercino's Aurora in the greater Casino, it's for another reason; this +is certainly a very muddy masterpiece. It figures on the ceiling of +a small low hall; the painting is coarse and the ceiling too near. +Besides, it's unfair to pass straight from the Greek mythology to the +Bolognese. We were left to roam at will through the house; the custode +shut us in and went to walk in the park. The apartments were all open, +and I had an opportunity to reconstruct, from its _milieu_ at least, the +character of a morganatic queen. I saw nothing to indicate that it +was not amiable; but I should have thought more highly of the lady's +discrimination if she had had the Juno removed from behind her shutter. +In such a house, girdled about with such a park, me thinks I could be +amiable--and perhaps discriminating too. The Ludovisi Casino is small, +but the perfection of the life of ease might surely be led there. There +are English houses enough in wondrous parks, but they expose you to too +many small needs and observances--to say nothing of a red-faced butler +dropping his h's. You are oppressed with the detail of accommodation. +Here the billiard-table is old-fashioned, perhaps a trifle crooked; but +you have Guercino above your head, and Guercino, after all, is almost +as good as Guido. The rooms, I noticed, all pleased by their shape, by +a lovely proportion, by a mass of delicate ornamentation on the high +concave ceilings. One might live over again in them some deliciously +benighted life of a forgotten type--with graceful old _sale_, and +immensely thick walls, and a winding stone staircase, and a view from +the loggia at the top; a view of twisted parasol-pines balanced, high +above a wooden horizon, against a sky of faded sapphire. + +_May 17th._--It was wonderful yesterday at St. John Lateran. The spring +now has turned to perfect summer; there are cascades of verdure over +all the walls; the early flowers are a fading memory, and the new grass +knee-deep in the Villa Borghese. The winter aspect of the region about +the Lateran is one of the best things in Rome; the sunshine is nowhere +so golden and the lean shadows nowhere so purple as on the long grassy +walk to Santa Croce. But yesterday I seemed to see nothing but green +and blue. The expanse before Santa Croce was vivid green; the Campagna +rolled away in great green billows, which seemed to break high about the +gaunt aqueducts; and the Alban Hills, which in January and February +keep shifting and melting along the whole scale of azure, were almost +monotonously fresh, and had lost some of their finer modelling. But the +sky was ultramarine and everything radiant with light and warmth--warmth +which a soft steady breeze kept from excess. I strolled some time about +the church, which has a grand air enough, though I don't seize the point +of view of Miss----, who told me the other day how vastly finer she +thought it than St. Peter's. But on Miss----'s lips this seemed a very +pretty paradox. The choir and transepts have a sombre splendour, and +I like the old vaulted passage with its slabs and monuments behind +the choir. The charm of charms at St. John Lateran is the admirable +twelfth-century cloister, which was never more charming than yesterday. +The shrubs and flowers about the ancient well were blooming away in the +intense light, and the twisted pillars and chiselled capitals of the +perfect little colonnade seemed to enclose them like the sculptured rim +of a precious vase. Standing out among the flowers you may look up and +see a section of the summit of the great faade of the church. The robed +and mitred apostles, bleached and rain-washed by the ages, rose into the +blue air like huge snow figures. I spent at the incorporated museum a +subsequent hour of fond vague attention, having it quite to myself. +It is rather scantily stocked, but the great cool halls open out +impressively one after the other, and the wide spaces between the +statues seem to suggest at first that each is a masterpiece. I was in +the loving mood of one's last days in Rome, and when I had nothing else +to admire I admired the magnificent thickness of the embrasures of the +doors and windows. If there were no objects of interest at all in the +Lateran the palace would be worth walking through every now and then, +to keep up one's idea of solid architecture. I went over to the +Scala Santa, where was no one but a very shabby priest sitting like a +ticket-taker at the door. But he let me pass, and I ascended one of the +profane lateral stairways and treated myself to a glimpse of the Sanctum +Sanctorum. Its threshold is crossed but once or twice a year, I believe, +by three or four of the most exalted divines, but you may look into it +freely enough through a couple of gilded lattices. It is very sombre +and splendid, and conveys the impression of a very holy place. And yet +somehow it suggested irreverent thoughts; it had to my fancy--perhaps on +account of the lattice--an Oriental, a Mahometan note. I expected every +moment to see a sultana appear in a silver veil and silken trousers and +sit down on the crimson carpet. + +Farewell, packing, the sharp pang of going. One would like to be able +after five months in Rome to sum up for tribute and homage, one's +experience, one's gains, the whole adventure of one's sensibility. But +one has really vibrated too much--the addition of so many items isn't +easy. What is simply clear is the sense of an acquired passion for the +place and of an incalculable number of gathered impressions. Many +of these have been intense and momentous, but one has trodden on the +other--there are always the big fish that swallow up the little--and +one can hardly say what has become of them. They store themselves +noiselessly away, I suppose, in the dim but safe places of memory and +"taste," and we live in a quiet faith that they will emerge into vivid +relief if life or art should demand them. As for the passion we needn't +perhaps trouble ourselves about that. Fifty swallowed palmfuls of the +Fountain of Trevi couldn't make us more ardently sure that we shall at +any cost come back. + +1873. + + + + + +A FEW OTHER ROMAN NEIGHBOURHOODS + + +If I find my old notes, in all these Roman connections, inevitably +bristle with the spirit of the postscript, so I give way to this +prompting to the extent of my scant space and with the sense of +other occasions awaiting me on which I shall have to do no less. The +impression of Rome was repeatedly to renew itself for the author of +these now rather antique and artless accents; was to overlay itself +again and again with almost heavy thicknesses of experience, the last of +which is, as I write, quite fresh to memory; and he has thus felt almost +ashamed to drop his subject (though it be one that tends so easily to +turn to the infinite) as if the law of change had in all the years had +nothing to say to his case. It's of course but of his case alone that he +speaks--wondering little what he may make of it for the profit of others +by an attempt, however brief, to point the moral of the matter, or in +other words compare the musing _mature_ visitor's "feeling about Rome" +with that of the extremely agitated, even if though extremely inexpert, +consciousness reflected in the previous pages. The actual, the current +Rome affects him as a world governed by new conditions altogether and +ruefully pleading that sorry fact in the ear of the antique wanderer +wherever he may yet mournfully turn for some re-capture of what he +misses. The city of his first unpremeditated rapture shines to memory, +on the other hand, in the manner of a lost paradise the rustle of whose +gardens is still just audible enough in the air to make him wonder if +some sudden turn, some recovered vista, mayn't lead him back to the +thing itself. My genial, my helpful tag, at this point, would doubtless +properly resolve itself, for the reader, into a clue toward some such +successful ingenuity of quest; a remark I make, I may add, even while +reflecting that the Paradise isn't apparently at all "lost" to visitors +not of my generation. It is the seekers of _that_ remote and romantic +tradition who have seen it, from one period of ten, or even of five, +years to another, systematically and remorselessly built out from their +view. Their helpless plaint, their sense of the generally irrecoverable +and unspeakable, is not, however, what I desire here most to express; +I should like, on the contrary, with ampler opportunity, positively to +enumerate the cases, the cases of contact, impression, experience, +in which the cold ashes of a long-chilled passion may fairly feel +themselves made to glow again. No one who has ever loved Rome as Rome +could be loved in youth and before her poised basketful of the finer +appeals to fond fancy was actually upset, wants to stop loving her; +so that our bleeding and wounded, though perhaps not wholly moribund, +loyalty attends us as a hovering admonitory, anticipatory ghost, one +of those magnanimous life-companions who before complete extinction +designate to the other member of the union their approved successor. So +it is at any rate that I conceive the pilgrim old enough to have become +aware in all these later years of what he misses to be counselled and +pacified in the interest of recognitions that shall a little make up for +it. + +It was this wisdom I was putting into practice, no doubt, for instance, +when I lately resigned myself to motoring of a splendid June day "out +to" Subiaco; as a substitute for a resignation that had anciently taken, +alas, but the form of my never getting there at all. Everything that +day, moreover, seemed right, surely; everything on certain other days +that were like it through their large indebtedness, at this, that and +the other point, to the last new thing, seemed so right that they come +back to me now, after a moderate interval, in the full light of +that unchallenged felicity. I couldn't at all gloriously recall, for +instance, as I floated to Subiaco on vast brave wings, how on the +occasion of my first visit to Rome, thirty-eight years before, I had +devoted certain evenings, evenings of artless "preparation" in my room +at the inn, to the perusal of Alphonse Dantier's admirable _Monastres +Bndictins d'ltalie_, taking piously for granted that I should get +myself somehow conveyed to Monte Cassino and to Subiaco at least: such +an affront to the passion of curiosity, the generally infatuated +state then kindled, would any suspicion of my foredoomed, my all +but interminable, privation during visits to come have seemed to me. +Fortune, in the event, had never favoured my going, but I was to give +myself up at last to the sense of her quite taking me by the hand, and +that is how I now think of our splendid June day at Subiaco. The note +of the wondrous place itself is conventional "wild" Italy raised to the +highest intensity, the ideally, the sublimely conventional and wild, +complete and supreme in itself, without a disparity or a flaw; which +character of perfect picturesque orthodoxy seemed more particularly +to begin for me, I remember, as we passed, on our way, through that +indescribable and indestructible Tivoli, where the jumble of the +elements of the familiarly and exploitedly, the all too notoriously +fair and queer, was more violent and vociferous than ever--so the whole +spectacle there seemed at once to rejoice in cockneyfication and to +resist it. There at least I had old memories to renew--including that +in especial, from a few years back, of one of the longest, hottest, +dustiest return-drives to Rome that the Campagna on a sirocco day was +ever to have treated me to. + +{Illustration: VILLA D'ESTE, TIVOLI} + +That was to be more than made up on this later occasion by an hour of +early evening, snatched on the run back to Rome, that remains with me as +one of those felicities we are wise to leave for ever, just as they are, +just, that is, where they fell, never attempting to renew or improve +them. So happy a chance was it that ensured me at the afternoon's end +a solitary stroll through the Villa d' Este, where the day's invasion, +whatever it might have been, had left no traces and where I met nobody +in the great rococo passages and chambers, and in the prodigious alleys +and on the repeated flights of tortuous steps, but the haunting Genius +of Style, into whose noble battered old face, as if it had come out +clearer in the golden twilight and on recognition of response so deeply +moved, I seemed to exhale my sympathy. This was truly, amid a conception +and order of things all mossed over from disuse, but still without +a form abandoned or a principle disowned, one of the hours that one +doesn't forget. The ruined fountains seemed strangely to _wait_, in the +stillness and under cover of the approaching dusk, not to begin ever +again to play, also, but just only to be tenderly imagined to do so; +quite as everything held its breath, at the mystic moment, for the drop +of the cruel and garish exposure, for the Spirit of the place to steal +forth and go his round. The vistas of the innumerable mighty cypresses +ranged themselves, in their files and companies, like beaten heroes +for their captain's, review; the great artificial "works" of every +description, cascades, hemicycles, all graded and grassed and +stone-seated as for floral games, mazes and bowers and alcoves and +grottos, brave indissoluble unions of the planted and the builded +symmetry, with the terraces and staircases that overhang and the arcades +and cloisters that underspread, made common cause together as for one's +taking up a little, in kindly lingering wonder, the "feeling" out of +which they have sprung. One didn't see it, under the actual influence, +one wouldn't for the world have seen it, as that they longed to be +justified, during a few minutes in the twenty-four hours, of their +absurdity of pomp and circumstance--but only that they asked for +company, once in a way, as they were so splendidly formed to give it, +and that the best company, in a changed world, at the end of time, +what could they hope it to be but just the lone, the dawdling person of +taste, the visitor with a flicker of fancy, not to speak of a pang of +pity, to spare for them? It was in the flicker of fancy, no doubt, that +as I hung about the great top-most terrace in especial, and then again +took my way through the high gaunt corridors and the square and bare +alcoved and recessed saloons, all overscored with such a dim waste +of those painted, those delicate and capricious decorations which the +loggie of the Vatican promptly borrowed from the ruins of the Palatine, +or from whatever other revealed and inspiring ancientries, and which +make ghostly confession here of that descent, I gave the rein to my +sense of the sinister too, of that vague after-taste as of evil things +that lurks so often, for a suspicious sensibility, wherever the terrible +game of the life of the Renaissance was played as the Italians played +it; wherever the huge tessellated chessboard seems to stretch about us; +swept bare, almost always violently swept bare, of its chiselled and +shifting figures, of every value and degree, but with this echoing +desolation itself representing the long gasp, as it were, of +overstrained time, the great after-hush that follows on things too +wonderful or dreadful. + +I am putting here, however, my cart before my horse, for the hour just +glanced at was but a final tag to a day of much brighter curiosity, +and which seemed to take its baptism, as we passed through prodigious +perched and huddled, adorably scattered and animated and even crowded +Tivoli, from the universal happy spray of the drumming Anio waterfalls, +all set in their permanent rainbows and Sibylline temples and classic +allusions and Byronic quotations; a wondrous romantic jumble of such +things and quite others--heterogeneous inns and clamorous _guingettes_ +and factories grabbing at the torrent, to say nothing of innumerable +guides and donkeys and white-tied, swallow-tailed waiters dashing out +of grottos and from under cataracts, and of the air, on the part of +the whole population, of standing about, in the most characteristic +_contadino_ manner, to pounce on you and take you somewhere, snatch you +from somebody else, shout something at you, the aqueous and other uproar +permitting, and then charge you for it, your innocence aiding. I'm +afraid our run the rest of the way to Subiaco remains with me but as +an after-sense of that exhilaration, in spite of our rising admirably +higher, all the while, and plunging constantly deeper into splendid +solitary gravities, supreme romantic solemnities and sublimities, of +landscape. The Benedictine convent, which clings to certain more or less +vertiginous ledges and slopes of a vast precipitous gorge, constitutes, +with the whole perfection of its setting, the very ideal of the +tradition of that _extraordinary in the romantic_ handed down to us, as +the most attaching and inviting spell of Italy, by all the old academic +literature of travel and art of the Salvator Rosas and Claudes. This is +the main tribute I may pay in a few words to an impression of which a +sort of divine rightness of oddity, a pictorial felicity that was almost +not of this world, but of a higher degree of distinction altogether, +affected me as the leading note; yet about the whole exquisite +complexity of which I can't pretend to be informing. + +All the elements of the scene melted for me together; even from the +pause for luncheon on a grassy wayside knoll, over heaven knows what +admirable preparatory headlong slopes and ravines and iridescent +distances, under spreading chestnuts and in the high air that was cool +and sweet, to the final pedestrian climb of sinuous mountain-paths that +the shining limestone and the strong green of shrub and herbage made as +white as silver. There the miraculous home of St. Benedict awaited us +in the form of a builded and pictured-over maze of chapels and shrines, +cells and corridors, stupefying rock-chambers and caves, places all +at an extraordinary variety of different levels and with labyrinthine +intercommunications; there the spirit of the centuries sat like some +invisible icy presence that only permits you to stare and wonder. I +stared, I wondered, I went up and down and in and out and lost myself +in the fantastic fable of the innumerable hard facts themselves; and +whenever I could, above all, I peeped out of small windows and hung over +chance terraces for the love of the general outer picture, the splendid +fashion in which the fretted mountains of marble, as they might have +been, round about, seemed to inlay themselves, for the effect of the +"distinction" I speak of, with vegetations of dark emerald. There above +all--or at least in what such aspects did further for the prodigy of the +Convent, whatever that prodigy might for do _them_--was, to a life-long +victim of Italy, almost verily as never before, the operation of the +old love-philtre; there were the inexhaustible sources of interest and +charm. + +{Illustration: SUBIACO} + +These mystic fountains broke out for me elsewhere, again and again, I +rejoice to say--and perhaps more particularly, to be frank about it, +where the ground about them was pressed with due emphasis of appeal by +the firm wheels of the great winged car. I motored, under invitation +and protection, repeatedly back into the sense of the other years, +that sense of the "old" and comparatively idle Rome of my particular +infatuated prime which I was living to see superseded, and this even +when the fond vista bristled with innumerable "signs of the times," +unmistakable features of the new era, that, by I scarce know what +perverse law, succeeded in ministering to a happy effect. Some of these +false notes proceed simply from the immense growth of every sort of +facilitation--so that people are much more free than of old to come and +go and do, to inquire and explore, to pervade and generally "infest"; +with a consequent loss, for the fastidious individual, of his +blest earlier sense, not infrequent, of having the occasion and the +impression, as he used complacently to say, all to himself. We none of +us had anything quite all to ourselves during an afternoon at Ostia, +on a beautiful June Sunday; it was a different affair, rather, from the +long, the comparatively slow and quite unpeopled drive that I was to +remember having last taken early in the autumn thirty years before, and +which occupied the day--with the aid of a hamper from once supreme old +Spillman, the provider for picnics to a vanished world (since I suspect +the antique ideal of "a picnic in the Campagna," the fondest conception +of a happy day, has lost generally much of its glamour). Our idyllic +afternoon, at any rate, left no chord of sensibility that could possibly +have been in question untouched--not even that of tea on the shore at +Fiumincino, after we had spent an hour among the ruins of Ostia and +seen our car ferried across the Tiber, almost saffron-coloured here and +swirling towards its mouth, on a boat that was little more than a big +rustic raft and that yet bravely resisted the prodigious weight. What +shall I say, in the way of the particular, of the general felicity +before me, for the sweetness of the hour to which the incident just +named, with its strange and amusing juxtapositions of the patriarchally +primitive and the insolently supersubtle, the earliest and the latest +efforts of restless science, were almost immediately to succeed? + +We had but skirted the old gold-and-brown walls of Castel Fusano, where +the massive Chigi tower and the immemorial stone-pines and the afternoon +sky and the desolate sweetness and concentrated rarity of the picture +all kept their appointment, to fond memory, with that especial form of +Roman faith, the fine aesthetic conscience in things, that is never, +never broken. We had wound through tangled lanes and met handsome sallow +country-folk lounging at leisure, as became the Sunday, and ever so +pleasantly and garishly clothed, if not quite consistently costumed, as +just on purpose to feed our wanton optimism; and then we had addressed +ourselves with a soft superficiality to the open, the exquisite little +Ostian reliquary, an exhibition of stony vaguenesses half straightened +out. The ruins of the ancient port of Rome, the still recoverable +identity of streets and habitations and other forms of civil life, are +a not inconsiderable handful, though making of the place at best a very +small sister to Pompeii; but a soft superficiality is ever the refuge of +my shy sense before any ghost of informed reconstitution, and I plead my +surrender to it with the less shame that I believe I "enjoy" such scenes +even on such futile pretexts as much as it can be appointed them by the +invidious spirit of History to _be_ enjoyed. It may be said, of course, +that enjoyment, question-begging term at best, isn't in these austere +connections designated--but rather some principle of appreciation that +can at least give a coherent account of itself. On that basis then--as +I could, I profess, _but_ revel in the looseness of my apprehension, +so wide it seemed to fling the gates of vision and divination--I won't +pretend to dot, as it were, too many of the i's of my incompetence. +I was competent only to have been abjectly interested. On reflection, +moreover, I see that no impression of over-much company invaded +the picture till the point was exactly reached for its contributing +thoroughly to character and amusement; across at Fiumincino, which the +age of the bicycle has made, in a small way, the handy Gravesend or +Coney Island of Rome, the cafs and _birrerie_ were at high pressure, +and the bustle all motley and friendly beside the melancholy river, +where the water-side life itself had twenty quaint and vivid notes and +where a few upstanding objects, ancient or modern, looked eminent and +interesting against the delicate Roman sky that dropped down and down +to the far-spreading marshes of malaria. Besides which "company" is ever +intensely gregarious, hanging heavily together and easily outwitted; +so that we had but to proceed a scant distance further and meet the +tideless Mediterranean, where it tumbled in a trifle breezily on the +sands, to be all to ourselves with our tea-basket, quite as in the good +old fashion--only in truth with the advantage that the contemporary +tea-basket is so much improved. + +I jumble my memories as a tribute to the whole idyll--I give the golden +light in which they come back to me for what it is worth; worth, I mean, +as allowing that the possibilities of charm of the Witch of the Seven +Hills, as we used to call her in magazines, haven't all been vulgarised +away. It was precisely there, on such an occasion and in such a place, +that this might seem signally to have happened; whereas in fact the mild +suburban riot, in which the so gay but so light potations before the +array of little houses of entertainment were what struck one as really +making most for mildness, was brushed over with a fabled grace, was +harmonious, felicitous, distinguished, quite after the fashion of some +thoroughly trained chorus or phalanx of opera or ballet. Bicycles were +stacked up by the hundred; the youth of Rome are ardent cyclists, with +a great taste for flashing about in more or less denuded or costumed +athletic and romantic bands and guilds, and on our return cityward, +toward evening, along the right bank of the river, the road swarmed with +the patient wheels and bent backs of these budding _cives Romani_ quite +to the effect of its finer interest. Such at least, I felt, could only +be one's acceptance of almost any feature of a scene bathed in that +extraordinarily august air that the waning Roman day is so insidiously +capable of taking on when any other element of style happens at all to +contribute. Weren't they present, these other elements, in the great +classic lines and folds, the fine academic or historic attitudes of +the darkening land itself as it hung about the old highway, varying +its vague accidents, but achieving always perfect "composition"? I +shamelessly add that cockneyfied impression, at all events, to what I +have called my jumble; Rome, to which we all swept on together in the +wondrous glowing medium, _saved_ everything, spreading afar her wide +wing and applying after all but her supposed grand gift of the secret +of salvation. We kept on and on into the great dim rather sordidly papal +streets that approach the quarter of St. Peter's; to the accompaniment, +finally, of that markedly felt provocation of fond wonder which had +never failed to lie in wait for me under any question of a renewed +glimpse of the huge unvisited rear of the basilica. There was no renewed +glimpse just then, in the gloaming; but the region I speak of had been +for me, in fact, during the previous weeks, less unvisited than ever +before, so that I had come to count an occasional walk round and about +it as quite of the essence of the convenient small change with which the +heterogeneous City may still keep paying you. These frequentations in +the company of a sculptor friend had been incidental to our reaching +a small artistic foundry of fine metal, an odd and interesting little +establishment placed, as who should say in the case of such a mere +left-over scrap of a large loose margin, nowhere: it lurked so +unsuspectedly, that is, among the various queer things that Rome +comprehensively refers to as "behind St. Peter's." + +We had passed then, on the occasion of our several pilgrimages, in +beneath the great flying, or at least straddling buttresses to the left +of the mighty faade, where you enter that great idle precinct of fine +dense pavement and averted and sacrificed grandeur, the reverse of the +monstrous medal of the front. Here the architectural monster rears its +back and shoulders on an equal scale and this whole unregarded world +of colossal consistent symmetry and hidden high finish gives you the +measure of the vast total treasure of items and features. The outward +face of all sorts of inward majesties of utility and ornament here +above all correspondingly reproduces itself; the expanses of golden +travertine--the freshness of tone, the cleanness of surface, in the +sunny air, being extraordinary--climb and soar and spread under the +crushing weight of a scheme carried out in every ponderous particular. +Never was such a show of _wasted_ art, of pomp for pomp's sake, as +where all the chapels bulge and all the windows, each one a separate +constructional masterpiece, tower above almost grassgrown vacancy; with +the full and immediate effect, of course, of reading us a lesson on +the value of lawful pride. The pride is the pride of indifference as to +whether a greatness so founded be gaped at in all its features or not. +My friend and I were alone to gape at them most often while, for the +unfailing impression of them, on our way to watch the casting of our +figure, we extended our circuit of the place. To which I may add, as +another example of that tentative, that appealing twitch of the garment +of Roman association of which one kept renewing one's consciousness, the +half-hour at the little foundry itself was all charming--with its quite +shabby and belittered and ramshackle recall of the old Roman "art-life" +of one's early dreams. Everything was somehow in the picture, the +rickety sheds, the loose paraphernalia, the sunny, grassy yard where a +goat was browsing; then the queer interior gloom of the pits, frilled +with little overlooking scaffoldings and bridges, for the sinking +fireward of the image that was to take on hardness; and all the +pleasantness and quickness, the beguiling refinement, of the three or +four light fine "hands" of whom the staff consisted and into whose type +and tone one liked to read, with whatever harmless extravagance, so many +signs that a lively sense of stiff processes, even in humble life, could +still leave untouched the traditional rare feeling for the artistic. +How delightful such an occupation in such a general setting--those of +my friend, I at such moments irrepressibly moralised; and how one might +after such a fashion endlessly go and come and ask nothing better; or if +better, only so to the extent of another impression I was to owe to him: +that of an evening meal spread, in the warm still darkness that made no +candle flicker, on the wide high space of an old loggia that overhung, +in one quarter, the great obelisked Square preceding one of the Gates, +and in the other the Tiber and the far Trastevere and more things than +I can say--above all, as it were, the whole backward past, the mild +confused romance of the Rome one had loved and of which one was exactly +taking leave under protection of the friendly lanterned and garlanded +feast and the commanding, all-embracing roof-garden. It was indeed a +reconciling, it was an altogether penetrating, last hour. + +1909. + + + + + +A CHAIN OF CITIES + +One day in midwinter, some years since, during a journey from Rome +to Florence perforce too rapid to allow much wayside sacrifice to +curiosity, I waited for the train at Narni. There was time to stroll +far enough from the station to have a look at the famous old bridge +of Augustus, broken short off in mid-Tiber. While I stood admiring the +measure of impression was made to overflow by the gratuitous grace of a +white-cowled monk who came trudging up the road that wound to the gate +of the town. Narni stood, in its own presented felicity, on a hill a +good space away, boxed in behind its perfect grey wall, and the monk, +to oblige me, crept slowly along and disappeared within the aperture. +Everything was distinct in the clear air, and the view exactly as like +the bit of background by an Umbrian master as it ideally should have +been. The winter is bare and brown enough in southern Italy and the +earth reduced to more of a mere anatomy than among ourselves, for whom +the very _crnerie_ of its exposed state, naked and unashamed, gives it +much of the robust serenity, not of a fleshless skeleton, but of a fine +nude statue. In these regions at any rate, the tone of the air, for +the eye, during the brief desolation, has often an extraordinary charm: +nature still smiles as with the deputed and provisional charity of +colour and light, the duty of not ceasing to cheer man's heart. Her +whole behaviour, at the time, cast such a spell on the broken bridge, +the little walled town and the trudging friar, that I turned away with +the impatient vow and the fond vision of how I would take the journey +again and pause to my heart's content at Narni, at Spoleto, at Assisi, +at Perugia, at Cortona, at Arezzo. But we have generally to clip our +vows a little when we come to fulfil them; and so it befell that when my +blest springtime arrived I had to begin as resignedly as possible, yet +with comparative meagreness, at Assisi. + +{Illustration: ASSISI.} + +I suppose enjoyment would have a simple zest which it often lacks if +we always did things at the moment we want to, for it's mostly when +we can't that we're thoroughly sure we _would_, and we can answer too +little for moods in the future conditional. Winter at least seemed to me +to have put something into these seats of antiquity that the May sun +had more or less melted away--a desirable strength of tone, a depth +upon depth of queerness and quaintness. Assisi had been in the January +twilight, after my mere snatch at Narni, a vignette out of some brown +old missal. But you'll have to be a fearless explorer now to find of a +fine spring day any such cluster of curious objects as doesn't seem made +to match before anything else Mr. Baedeker's polyglot estimate of its +chief recommendations. This great man was at Assisi in force, and a +brand-new inn for his accommodation has just been opened cheek by +jowl with the church of St. Francis. I don't know that even the dire +discomfort of this harbourage makes it seem less impertinent; but I +confess I sought its protection, and the great view seemed hardly less +beautiful from my window than from the gallery of the convent. This +view embraces the whole wide reach of Umbria, which becomes as twilight +deepens a purple counterfeit of the misty sea. The visitor's first +errand is with the church; and it's fair furthermore to admit that when +he has crossed that threshold the position and quality of his hotel +cease for the time to be matters of moment. This two-fold temple of St. +Francis is one of the very sacred places of Italy, and it would be +hard to breathe anywhere an air more heavy with holiness. Such seems +especially the case if you happen thus to have come from Rome, where +everything ecclesiastical is, in aspect, so very much of this world--so +florid, so elegant, so full of accommodations and excrescences. The mere +site here makes for authority, and they were brave builders who laid the +foundation-stones. The thing rises straight from a steep mountain-side +and plunges forward on its great substructure of arches even as a +crowned headland may frown over the main. Before it stretches a long, +grassy piazza, at the end of which you look up a small grey street, to +see it first climb a little way the rest of the hill and then pause +and leave a broad green slope, crested, high in the air, with a ruined +castle. When I say before it I mean before the upper church; for by +way of doing something supremely handsome and impressive the sturdy +architects of the thirteenth century piled temple upon temple and +bequeathed a double version of their idea. One may imagine them to have +intended perhaps an architectural image of the relation between heart +and head. Entering the lower church at the bottom of the great flight +of steps which leads from the upper door, you seem to push at least into +the very heart of Catholicism. + +For the first minutes after leaving the clearer gloom you catch nothing +but a vista of low black columns closed by the great fantastic cage +surrounding the altar, which is thus placed, by your impression, in +a sort of gorgeous cavern. Gradually you distinguish details, become +accustomed to the penetrating chill, and even manage to make out a +few frescoes; but the general effect remains splendidly sombre and +subterranean. The vaulted roof is very low and the pillars dwarfish, +though immense in girth, as befits pillars supporting substantially a +cathedral. The tone of the place is a triumph of mystery, the richest +harmony of lurking shadows and dusky corners, all relieved by scattered +images and scintillations. There was little light but what came through +the windows of the choir over which the red curtains had been dropped +and were beginning to glow with the downward sun. The choir was guarded +by a screen behind which a dozen venerable voices droned vespers; but +over the top of the screen came the heavy radiance and played among the +ornaments of the high fence round the shrine, casting the shadow of the +whole elaborate mass forward into the obscured nave. The darkness of +vaults and side-chapels is overwrought with vague frescoes, most of them +by Giotto and his school, out of which confused richness the terribly +distinct little faces characteristic of these artists stare at you with +a solemn formalism. Some are faded and injured, and many so ill-lighted +and ill-placed that you can only glance at them with decent conjecture; +the great group, however--four paintings by Giotto on the ceiling above +the altar--may be examined with some success. Like everything of that +grim and beautiful master they deserve examination; but with the effect +ever of carrying one's appreciation in and in, as it were, rather than +of carrying it out and out, off and off, as happens for us with those +artists who have been helped by the process of "evolution" to grow +wings. This one, "going in" for emphasis at any price, stamps hard, as +who should say, on the very spot of his idea--thanks to which fact +he has a concentration that has never been surpassed. He was in other +words, in proportion to his means, a genius supremely expressive; he +makes the very shade of an intended meaning or a represented attitude so +unmistakable that his figures affect us at moments as creatures all +too suddenly, too alarmingly, too menacingly met. Meagre, primitive, +undeveloped, he yet is immeasurably strong; he even suggests that if he +had lived the due span of years later Michael Angelo might have found +a rival. Not that he is given, however, to complicated postures or +superhuman flights. The something strange that troubles and haunts us in +his work springs rather from a kind of fierce familiarity. + +It is part of the wealth of the lower church that it contains an +admirable primitive fresco by an artist of genius rarely encountered, +Pietro Cavallini, pupil of Giotto. This represents the Crucifixion; the +three crosses rising into a sky spotted with the winged heads of angels +while a dense crowd presses below. You will nowhere see anything more +direfully lugubrious, or more approaching for direct force, though not +of course for amplitude of style, Tintoretto's great renderings of the +scene in Venice. The abject anguish of the crucified and the straddling +authority and brutality of the mounted guards in the foreground are +contrasted in a fashion worthy of a great dramatist. But the most +poignant touch is the tragic grimaces of the little angelic heads that +fall like hailstones through the dark air. It is genuine realistic +weeping, the act of irrepressible "crying," that the painter has +depicted, and the effect is pitiful at the same time as grotesque. There +are many more frescoes besides; all the chapels on one side are +lined with them, but these are chiefly interesting in their general +impressiveness--as they people the dim recesses with startling +presences, with apparitions out of scale. Before leaving the place I +lingered long near the door, for I was sure I shouldn't soon again enjoy +such a feast of scenic composition. The opposite end glowed with subdued +colour; the middle portion was vague and thick and brown, with two or +three scattered worshippers looming through the obscurity; while, all +the way down, the polished pavement, its uneven slabs glittering dimly +in the obstructed light, was of the very essence of expensive picture. +It is certainly desirable, if one takes the lower church of St. Francis +to represent the human heart, that one should find a few bright places +there. But if the general effect is of brightness terrorised and +smothered, is the symbol less valid? For the contracted, prejudiced, +passionate heart let it stand. + +One thing at all events we can say, that we should rejoice to boast as +capacious, symmetrical and well-ordered a head as the upper sanctuary. +Thanks to these merits, in spite of a brave array of Giottesque work +which has the advantage of being easily seen, it lacks the great +character of its counterpart. The frescoes, which are admirable, +represent certain leading events in the life of St. Francis, and +suddenly remind you, by one of those anomalies that are half the secret +of the consummate _mise-en-scene_ of Catholicism, that the apostle of +beggary, the saint whose only tenement in life was the ragged robe which +barely covered him, is the hero of this massive structure. Church upon +church, nothing less will adequately shroud his consecrated clay. The +great reality of Giotto's designs adds to the helpless wonderment with +which we feel the passionate pluck of the Hero, the sense of being +separated from it by an impassable gulf, the reflection on all that has +come and gone to make morality at that vertiginous pitch impossible. +There are no such high places of humility left to climb to. An observant +friend who has lived long in Italy lately declared to me, however, that +she detested the name of this moralist, deeming him chief propagator of +the Italian vice most trying to the would-be lover of the people, the +want of personal self-respect. There is a solidarity in the use of soap, +and every cringing beggar, idler, liar and pilferer flourished for her +under the shadow of the great Francisan indifference to it. She was +possibly right; at Rome, at Naples, I might have admitted she was right; +but at Assisi, face to face with Giotto's vivid chronicle, we admire too +much in its main subject the exquisite play of that subject's genius--we +don't remit to him, and this for very envy, a single throb of his +consciousness. It took in, that human, that divine embrace, everything +_but_ soap. + +I should find it hard to give an orderly account of my next adventures +or impressions at Assisi, which could n't well be anything more than +mere romantic _flanerie_. One may easily plead as the final result of +a meditation at the shrine of St. Francis a great and even an amused +charity. This state of mind led me slowly up and down for a couple of +hours through the steep little streets, and at last stretched itself +on the grass with me in the shadow of the great ruined castle that +decorates so grandly the eminence above the town. I remember edging +along the sunless side of the small mouldy houses and pausing very often +to look at nothing in particular. It was all very hot, very hushed, very +resignedly but very persistently old. A wheeled vehicle in such a place +is an event, and the _forestiero's_ interrogative tread in the blank +sonorous lanes has the privilege of bringing the inhabitants to their +doorways. Some of the better houses, however, achieve a sombre stillness +that protests against the least curiosity as to what may happen in any +such century as this. You wonder, as you pass, what lingering old-world +social types vegetate there, but you won't find out; albeit that in one +very silent little street I had a glimpse of an open door which I have +not forgotten. A long-haired peddler who must have been a Jew, and who +yet carried without prejudice a burden of mass-books and rosaries, was +offering his wares to a stout old priest. The priest had opened the +door rather stingily and appeared half-heartedly to dismiss him. But +the peddler held up something I couldn't see; the priest wavered with a +timorous concession to profane curiosity and then furtively pulled the +agent of sophistication, or whatever it might be, into the house. I +should have liked to enter with that worthy. + +I saw later some gentlemen of Assisi who also seemed bored enough to +have found entertainment in his tray. They were at the door of the cafe +on the Piazza, and were so thankful to me for asking them the way to the +cathedral that, answering all in chorus, they lighted up with smiles as +sympathetic as if I had done them a favour. Of that type were my mild, +my delicate adventures. The Piazza has a fine old portico of an ancient +Temple of Minerva--six fluted columns and a pediment, of beautiful +proportions, but sadly battered and decayed. Goethe, I believe, found it +much more interesting than the mighty mediaeval church, and Goethe, as a +cicerone, doubtless could have persuaded one that it was so; but in the +humble society of Murray we shall most of us find a richer sense in the +later monument. I found quaint old meanings enough in the dark yellow +facade of the small cathedral as I sat on a stone bench by the oblong +green stretched before it. This is a pleasing piece of Italian Gothic +and, like several of its companions at Assisi, has an elegant wheel +window and a number of grotesque little carvings of creatures human +and bestial. If with Goethe I were to balance anything against the +attractions of the double church I should choose the ruined castle +on the hill above the town. I had been having glimpses of it all the +afternoon at the end of steep street-vistas, and promising myself +half-an-hour beside its grey walls at sunset. The sun was very late +setting, and my half-hour became a long lounge in the lee of an abutment +which arrested the gentle uproar of the wind. The castle is a splendid +piece of ruin, perched on the summit of the mountain to whose slope +Assisi clings and dropping a pair of stony arms to enclose the little +town in its embrace. The city wall, in other words, straggles up the +steep green hill and meets the crumbling skeleton of the fortress. On +the side off from the town the mountain plunges into a deep ravine, the +opposite face of which is formed by the powerful undraped shoulder of +Monte Subasio, a fierce reflector of the sun. Gorge and mountain are +wild enough, but their frown expires in the teeming softness of the +great vale of Umbria. To lie aloft there on the grass, with silver-grey +ramparts at one's back and the warm rushing wind in one's ears, and +watch the beautiful plain mellow into the tones of twilight, was as +exquisite a form of repose as ever fell to a tired tourist's lot. + +{Illustration: PERUGIA.} + +Perugia too has an ancient stronghold, which one must speak of in +earnest as that unconscious humorist the classic American traveller +is supposed invariably to speak of the Colosseum: it will be a very +handsome building when it's finished. Even Perugia is going the way of +all Italy--straightening out her streets, preparing her ruins, laying +her venerable ghosts. The castle is being completely _remis a neuf_--a +Massachusetts schoolhouse could n't cultivate a "smarter" ideal. There +are shops in the basement and fresh putty on all the windows; so +that the only thing proper to a castle it has kept is its magnificent +position and range, which you may enjoy from the broad platform where +the Perugini assemble at eventide. Perugia is chiefly known to fame as +the city of Raphael's master; but it has a still higher claim to renown +and ought to figure in the gazetteer of fond memory as the little City +of the infinite View. The small dusky, crooked place tries by a hundred +prompt pretensions, immediate contortions, rich mantling flushes and +other ingenuities, to waylay your attention and keep it at home; but +your consciousness, alert and uneasy from the first moment, is all +abroad even when your back is turned to the vast alternative or when +fifty house-walls conceal it, and you are for ever rushing up by-streets +and peeping round corners in the hope of another glimpse or reach of it. +As it stretches away before you in that eminent indifference to limits +which is at the same time at every step an eminent homage to style, it +is altogether too free and fair for compasses and terms. You can only +say, and rest upon it, that you prefer it to any other visible fruit of +position or claimed empire of the eye that you are anywhere likely to +enjoy. + +For it is such a wondrous mixture of blooming plain and gleaming river +and wavily-multitudinous mountain vaguely dotted with pale grey cities, +that, placed as you are, roughly speaking, in the centre of Italy, you +all but span the divine peninsula from sea to sea. Up the long vista +of the Tiber you look--almost to Rome; past Assisi, Spello, Foligno, +Spoleto, all perched on their respective heights and shining through the +violet haze. To the north, to the east, to the west, you see a hundred +variations of the prospect, of which I have kept no record. Two +notes only I have made: one--though who hasn't made it over and over +again?--on the exquisite elegance of mountain forms in this endless play +of the excrescence, it being exactly as if there were variation of sex +in the upheaved mass, with the effect here mainly of contour and curve +and complexion determined in the feminine sense. It further came home to +me that the command of such an outlook on the world goes far, surely, to +give authority and centrality and experience, those of the great seats +of dominion, even to so scant a cluster of attesting objects as here. It +must deepen the civic consciousness and take off the edge of ennui. +It performs this kindly office, at any rate, for the traveller who +may overstay his curiosity as to Perugino and the Etruscan relics. It +continually solicits his wonder and praise--it reinforces the historic +page. I spent a week in the place, and when it was gone I had had enough +of Perugino, but had n't had enough of the View. + +I should perhaps do the reader a service by telling him just how a week +at Perugia may be spent. His first care must be to ignore the very dream +of haste, walking everywhere very slowly and very much at random, and +to impute an esoteric sense to almost anything his eye may happen to +encounter. Almost everything in fact lends itself to the historic, +the romantic, the sthetic fallacy--almost everything has an antique +queerness and richness that ekes out the reduced state; that of a grim +and battered old adventuress, the heroine of many shames and scandals, +surviving to an extraordinary age and a considerable penury, but with +ancient gifts of princes and other forms of the wages of sin to show, +and the most beautiful garden of all the world to sit and doze and count +her beads in and remember. He must hang a great deal about the huge +Palazzo Pubblico, which indeed is very well worth any acquaintance you +may scrape with it. It masses itself gloomily above the narrow street to +an immense elevation, and leads up the eye along a cliff-like surface +of rugged wall, mottled with old scars and new repairs, to the loggia +dizzily perched on its cornice. He must repeat his visit to the Etruscan +Gate, by whose immemorial composition he must indeed linger long to +resolve it back into the elements originally attending it. He must uncap +to the irrecoverable, the inimitable style of the statue of Pope Julius +III before the cathedral, remembering that Hawthorne fabled his Miriam, +in an air of romance from which we are well-nigh as far to-day as from +the building of Etruscan gates, to have given rendezvous to Kenyon at +its base. Its material is a vivid green bronze, and the mantle and tiara +are covered with a delicate embroidery worthy of a silver-smith. + +Then our leisurely friend must bestow on Perugino's frescoes in +the Exchange, and on his pictures in the University, all the placid +contemplation they deserve. He must go to the theatre every evening, +in an orchestra-chair at twenty-two soldi, and enjoy the curious +didacticism of "Amore senza Stima," "Severita e Debolezza," "La Societa +Equivoca," and other popular specimens of contemporaneous Italian +comedy--unless indeed the last-named be not the edifying title applied, +for peninsular use, to "Le Demi-Monde" of the younger Dumas. I shall +be very much surprised if, at the end of a week of this varied +entertainment, he hasn't learnt how to live, not exactly in, but with, +Perugia. His strolls will abound in small accidents and mercies of +vision, but of which a dozen pencil-strokes would be a better memento +than this poor word-sketching. From the hill on which the town is +planted radiate a dozen ravines, down whose sides the houses slide and +scramble with an alarming indifference to the cohesion of their little +rugged blocks of flinty red stone. You ramble really nowhither without +emerging on some small court or terrace that throws your view across a +gulf of tangled gardens or vineyards and over to a cluster of serried +black dwellings which have to hollow in their backs to keep their +balance on the opposite ledge. On archways and street-staircases and +dark alleys that bore through a density of massive basements, and curve +and climb and plunge as they go, all to the truest mediaeval tune, +you may feast your fill. These are the local, the architectural, +the compositional commonplaces.. Some of the little streets in +out-of-the-way corners are so rugged and brown and silent that you may +imagine them passages long since hewn by the pick-axe in a deserted +stone-quarry. The battered black houses, of the colour of buried +things--things buried, that is, in accumulations of time, closer packed, +even as such are, than spadefuls of earth--resemble exposed sections of +natural rock; none the less so when, beyond some narrow gap, you catch +the blue and silver of the sublime circle of landscape. + +{Illustration: ETRUSCAN GATEWAY, PERUGIA.} + +But I ought n't to talk of mouldy alleys, or yet of azure distances, +as if they formed the main appeal to taste in this accomplished little +city. In the Sala del Cambio, where in ancient days the money-changers +rattled their embossed coin and figured up their profits, you may enjoy +one of the serenest aesthetic pleasures that the golden age of art +anywhere offers us. Bank parlours, I believe, are always handsomely +appointed, but are even those of Messrs. Rothschild such models of mural +bravery as this little counting-house of a bygone fashion? The bravery +is Perugino's own; for, invited clearly to do his best, he left it as +a lesson to the ages, covering the four low walls and the vault with +scriptural and mythological figures of extraordinary beauty. They +are ranged in artless attitudes round the upper half of the +room--the sibyls, the prophets, the philosophers, the Greek and Roman +heroes--looking down with broad serene faces, with small mild eyes and +sweet mouths that commit them to nothing in particular unless to being +comfortably and charmingly alive, at the incongruous proceedings of a +Board of Brokers. Had finance a very high tone in those days, or were +genius and faith then simply as frequent as capital and enterprise are +among ourselves? The great distinction of the Sala del Cambio is that +it has a friendly Yes for both these questions. There was a rigid +transactional probity, it seems to say; there was also a high tide of +inspiration. About the artist himself many things come up for us--more +than I can attempt in their order; for he was not, I think, to an +attentive observer, the mere smooth and entire and devout spirit we at +first are inclined to take him for. He has that about him which leads +us to wonder if he may not, after all, play a proper part enough here +as the patron of the money-changers. He is the delight of a million of +young ladies; but who knows whether we should n't find in his works, +might we "go into" them a little, a trifle more of manner than of +conviction, and of system than of deep sincerity? + +This, I allow, would put no great affront on them, and one speculates +thus partly but because it's a pleasure to hang about him on any +pretext, and partly because his immediate effect is to make us quite +inordinately embrace the pretext of his lovely soul. His portrait, +painted on the wall of the Sala (you may see it also in Rome +and Florence) might at any rate serve for the likeness of Mr. +Worldly-Wiseman in Bunyan's allegory. He was fond of his glass, I +believe, and he made his art lucrative. This tradition is not refuted +by his preserved face, and after some experience--or rather after a good +deal, since you can't have a _little_ of Perugino, who abounds wherever +old masters congregate, so that one has constantly the sense of being +"in" for all there is--you may find an echo of it in the uniform type of +his creatures, their monotonous grace, their prodigious invariability. +He may very well have wanted to produce figures of a substantial, yet at +the same time of an impeccable innocence; but we feel that he had taught +himself _how_ even beyond his own belief in them, and had arrived at +a process that acted at last mechanically. I confess at the same time +that, so interpreted, the painter affects me as hardly less interesting, +and one can't but become conscious of one's style when one's style +has become, as it were, so conscious of one's, or at least of its own, +fortune. If he was the inventor of a remarkably calculable _facture_, a +calculation that never fails is in its way a grace of the first order, +and there are things in this special appearance of perfection of +practice that make him the forerunner of a mighty and more modern race. +More than any of the early painters who strongly charm, you may take all +his measure from a single specimen. The other samples infallibly match, +reproduce unerringly the one type he had mastered, but which had the +good fortune to be adorably fair, to seem to have dawned on a vision +unsullied by the shadows of earth. Which truth, moreover, leaves +Perugino all delightful as composer and draughtsman; he has in each of +these characters a sort of spacious neatness which suggests that the +whole conception has been washed clean by some spiritual chemistry the +last thing before reaching the canvas; after which it has been applied +to that surface with a rare economy of time and means. Giotto and Fra +Angelico, beside him, are full of interesting waste and irrelevant +passion. In the sacristy of the charming church of San Pietro--a museum +of pictures and carvings--is a row of small heads of saints formerly +covering the frame of the artist's Ascension, carried off by the French. +It is almost miniature work, and here at least Perugino triumphs in +sincerity, in apparent candour, as well as in touch. Two of the holy +men are reading their breviaries, but with an air of infantine innocence +quite consistent with their holding the book upside down. + +Between Perugia and Cortona lies the large weedy water of Lake +Thrasymene, turned into a witching word for ever by Hannibal's recorded +victory over Rome. Dim as such records have become to us and remote such +realities, he is yet a passionless pilgrim who does n't, as he passes, +of a heavy summer's day, feel the air and the light and the very +faintness of the breeze all charged and haunted with them, all +interfused as with the wasted ache of experience and with the vague +historic gaze. Processions of indistinguishable ghosts bore me company +to Cortona itself, most sturdily ancient of Italian towns. It must have +been a seat of ancient knowledge even when Hannibal and Flaminius came +to the shock of battle, and have looked down afar from its grey ramparts +on the contending swarm with something of the philosophic composure +suitable to a survivor of Pelasgic and Etruscan revolutions. These grey +ramparts are in great part still visible, and form the chief attraction +of Cortona. It is perched on the very pinnacle of a mountain, and I +wound and doubled interminably over the face of the great hill, while +the jumbled roofs and towers of the arrogant little city still seemed +nearer to the sky than to the railway-station. "Rather rough," Murray +pronounces the local inn; and rough indeed it was; there was scarce a +square foot of it that you would have cared to stroke with your hand. +The landlord himself, however, was all smoothness and the best fellow in +the world; he took me up into a rickety old loggia on the tip-top of his +establishment and played showman as to half the kingdoms of the earth. +I was free to decide at the same time whether my loss or my gain was the +greater for my seeing Cortona through the medium of a festa. On the +one hand the museum was closed (and in a certain sense the smaller +and obscurer the town the more I like the museum); the churches--an +interesting note of manners and morals--were impenetrably crowded, +though, for that matter, so was the cafe, where I found neither an empty +stool nor the edge of a table. I missed a sight of the famous painted +Muse, the art-treasure of Cortona and supposedly the most precious, as +it falls little short of being the only, sample of the Greek painted +picture that has come down to us. On the other hand, I saw--but this is +what I saw. + +{Illustration: A STREET, CORTONA.} + +A part of the mountain-top is occupied by the church of St. Margaret, +and this was St. Margaret's day. The houses pause roundabout it and +leave a grassy slope, planted here and there with lean black cypresses. +The contadini from near and far had congregated in force and were +crowding into the church or winding up the slope. When I arrived they +were all kneeling or uncovered; a bedizened procession, with banners +and censers, bearing abroad, I believe, the relics of the saint, was +re-entering the church. The scene made one of those pictures that +Italy still brushes in for you with an incomparable hand and from +an inexhaustible palette when you find her in the mood. The day was +superb--the sky blazed overhead like a vault of deepest sapphire. The +grave brown peasantry, with no great accent of costume, but with +sundry small ones--decked, that is, in cheap fineries of scarlet and +yellow--made a mass of motley colour in the high wind-stirred light. +The procession halted in the pious hush, and the lovely land around and +beneath us melted away, almost to either sea, in tones of azure scarcely +less intense than the sky. Behind the church was an empty crumbling +citadel, with half-a-dozen old women keeping the gate for coppers. +Here were views and breezes and sun and shade and grassy corners to the +heart's content, together with one could n't say what huge seated mystic +melancholy presence, the after-taste of everything the still open maw +of time had consumed. I chose a spot that fairly combined all these +advantages, a spot from which I seemed to look, as who should say, +straight down the throat of the monster, no dark passage now, but with +all the glorious day playing into it, and spent a good part of my stay +at Cortona lying there at my length and observing the situation over +the top of a volume that I must have brought in my pocket just for that +especial wanton luxury of the resource provided and slighted. In the +afternoon I came down and hustled a while through the crowded little +streets, and then strolled forth under the scorching sun and made the +outer circuit of the wall. There I found tremendous uncemented blocks; +they glared and twinkled in the powerful light, and I had to put on a +blue eye-glass in order to throw into its proper perspective the vague +Etruscan past, obtruded and magnified in such masses quite as with the +effect of inadequately-withdrawn hands and feet in photographs. + +I spent the next day at Arezzo, but I confess in very much the same +uninvestigating fashion--taking in the "general impression," I dare say, +at every pore, but rather systematically leaving the dust of the ages +unfingered on the stored records: I should doubtless, in the poor time +at my command, have fingered it to so little purpose. The seeker for +the story of things has moreover, if he be worth his salt, a hundred +insidious arts; and in that case indeed--by which I mean when his +sensibility has come duly to adjust itself--the story assaults him but +from too many sides. He even feels at moments that he must sneak along +on tiptoe in order not to have too much of it. Besides which the case +all depends on the kind of use, the range of application, his tangled +consciousness, or his intelligible genius, say, may come to recognize +for it. At Arezzo, however this might be, one was far from Rome, one +was well within genial Tuscany, and the historic, the romantic decoction +seemed to reach one's lips in less stiff doses. There at once was the +"general impression"--the exquisite sense of the scarce expressible +Tuscan quality, which makes immediately, for the whole pitch of one's +perception, a grateful, a not at all strenuous difference, attaches to +almost any coherent group of objects, to any happy aspect of the scene, +for a main note, some mild recall, through pleasant friendly colour, +through settled ample form, through something homely and economic too at +the very heart of "style," of an identity of temperament and habit with +those of the divine little Florence that one originally knew. Adorable +Italy in which, for the constant renewal of interest, of attention, of +affection, these refinements of variety, these so harmoniously-grouped +and individually-seasoned fruits of the great garden of history, keep +presenting themselves! It seemed to fall in with the cheerful Tuscan +mildness for instance--sticking as I do to that ineffectual expression +of the Tuscan charm, of the yellow-brown Tuscan dignity at large--that +the ruined castle on the hill (with which agreeable feature Arezzo is no +less furnished than Assisi and Cortona) had been converted into a great +blooming, and I hope all profitable, podere or market-garden. I lounged +away the half-hours there under a spell as potent as the "wildest" +forecast of propriety--propriety to all the particular conditions--could +have figured it. I had seen Santa Maria della Pieve and its campanile +of quaint colonnades, the stately, dusky cathedral--grass-plotted and +residenced about almost after the fashion of an English "close"--and +John of Pisa's elaborate marble shrine; I had seen the museum and its +Etruscan vases and majolica platters. These were very well, but the old +pacified citadel somehow, through a day of soft saturation, placed me +most in relation. Beautiful hills surrounded it, cypresses cast straight +shadows at its corners, while in the middle grew a wondrous Italian +tangle of wheat and corn, vines and figs, peaches and cabbages, memories +and images, anything and everything. + +1873. + + + + + +SIENA EARLY AND LATE + + +I + + +Florence being oppressively hot and delivered over to the mosquitoes, +the occasion seemed to favour that visit to Siena which I had more than +once planned and missed. I arrived late in the evening, by the light +of a magnificent moon, and while a couple of benignantly-mumbling old +crones were making up my bed at the inn strolled forth in quest of a +first impression. Five minutes brought me to where I might gather it +unhindered as it bloomed in the white moonshine. The great Piazza of +Siena is famous, and though in this day of multiplied photographs and +blunted surprises and profaned revelations none of the world's wonders +can pretend, like Wordsworth's phantom of delight, really to "startle +and waylay," yet as I stepped upon the waiting scene from under a dark +archway I was conscious of no loss of the edge of a precious presented +sensibility. The waiting scene, as I have called it, was in the shape of +a shallow horse-shoe--as the untravelled reader who has turned over his +travelled friends' portfolios will respectfully remember; or, better, of +a bow in which the high wide face of the Palazzo Pubblico forms the +cord and everything else the arc. It was void of any human presence that +could figure to me the current year; so that, the moonshine assisting, +I had half-an-hour's infinite vision of medival Italy. The Piazza being +built on the side of a hill--or rather, as I believe science affirms, in +the cup of a volcanic crater--the vast pavement converges downwards in +slanting radiations of stone, the spokes of a great wheel, to a point +directly before the Palazzo, which may mark the hub, though it is +nothing more ornamental than the mouth of a drain. The great monument +stands on the lower side and might seem, in spite of its goodly mass and +its embattled cornice, to be rather defiantly out-countenanced by vast +private constructions occupying the opposite eminence. This might be, +without the extraordinary dignity of the architectural gesture with +which the huge high-shouldered pile asserts itself. + +On the firm edge of the palace, from bracketed base to grey-capped +summit against the sky, where grows a tall slim tower which soars and +soars till it has given notice of the city's greatness over the blue +mountains that mark the horizon. It rises as slender and straight as a +pennoned lance planted on the steel-shod toe of a mounted knight, and +keeps all to itself in the blue air, far above the changing fashions of +the market, the proud consciousness or rare arrogance once built into +it. This beautiful tower, the finest thing in Siena and, in its rigid +fashion, as permanently fine thus as a really handsome nose on a face of +no matter what accumulated age, figures there still as a Declaration +of Independence beside which such an affair as ours, thrown off at +Philadelphia, appears to have scarce done more than helplessly give way +to time. Our Independence has become a dependence on a thousand such +dreadful things as the incorrupt declaration of Siena strikes us as +looking for ever straight over the level of. As it stood silvered by +the moonlight, while my greeting lasted, it seemed to speak, all as from +soul to soul, very much indeed as some ancient worthy of a lower order, +buttonholing one on the coveted chance and at the quiet hour, might +have done, of a state of things long and vulgarly superseded, but to the +pride and power, the once prodigious vitality, of which who could expect +any one effect to testify more incomparably, more indestructibly, quite, +as it were, more immortally? The gigantic houses enclosing the rest of +the Piazza took up the tale and mingled with it their burden. "We are +very old and a trifle weary, but we were built strong and piled high, +and we shall last for many an age. The present is cold and heedless, but +we keep ourselves in heart by brooding over our store of memories and +traditions. We are haunted houses in every creaking timber and aching +stone." Such were the gossiping connections I established with Siena +before I went to bed. + +Since that night I have had a week's daylight knowledge of the surface +of the subject at least, and don't know how I can better present it than +simply as another and a vivider page of the lesson that the ever-hungry +artist has only to _trust_ old Italy for her to feed him at every single +step from her hand--and if not with one sort of sweetly-stale grain from +that wondrous mill of history which during so many ages ground finer +than any other on earth, why then always with something else. Siena has +at any rate "preserved appearances"--kept the greatest number of them, +that is, unaltered for the eye--about as consistently as one can imagine +the thing done. Other places perhaps may treat you to as drowsy an odour +of antiquity, but few exhale it from so large an area. Lying massed +within her walls on a dozen clustered hill-tops, she shows you at every +turn in how much greater a way she once lived; and if so much of the +grand manner is extinct, the receptacle of the ashes still solidly +rounds itself. This heavy general stress of all her emphasis on the past +is what she constantly keeps in your eyes and your ears, and if you be +but a casual observer and admirer the generalised response is mainly +what you give her. The casual observer, however beguiled, is mostly +not very learned, not over-equipped in advance with data; he hasn't +specialised, his notions are necessarily vague, the chords of his +imagination, for all his good-will, are inevitably muffled and weak. But +such as it is, his received, his welcome impression serves his turn so +far as the life of sensibility goes, and reminds him from time to time +that even the lore of German doctors is but the shadow of satisfied +curiosity. I have been living at the inn, walking about the streets, +sitting in the Piazza; these are the simple terms of my experience. But +streets and inns in Italy are the vehicles of half one's knowledge; +if one has no fancy for their lessons one may burn one's note-book. +In Siena everything is Sienese. The inn has an English sign over the +door--a little battered plate with a rusty representation of the lion +and the unicorn; but advance hopefully into the mouldy stone alley which +serves as vestibule and you will find local colour enough. The landlord, +I was told, had been servant in an English family, and I was curious to +see how he met the probable argument of the casual Anglo-Saxon after the +latter's first twelve hours in his establishment. As he failed to appear +I asked the waiter if he, weren't at home. "Oh," said the latter, "he's +a _piccolo grasso vecchiotto_ who doesn't like to move." I'm afraid this +little fat old man has simply a bad conscience. It's no small burden for +one who likes the Italians--as who doesn't, under this restriction?--to +have so much indifference even to rudimentary purifying processes to +dispose of. What is the real philosophy of dirty habits, and are foul +surfaces merely superficial? If unclean manners have in truth the +moral meaning which I suspect in them we must love Italy better than +consistency. This a number of us are prepared to do, but while we are +making the sacrifice it is as well we should be aware. + +We may plead moreover for these impecunious heirs of the past that even +if it were easy to be clean in the midst of their mouldering heritage +it would be difficult to appear so. At the risk of seeming to flaunt the +silly superstition of restless renovation for the sake of renovation, +which is but the challenge of the infinitely precious principle of +duration, one is still moved to say that the prime result of one's +contemplative strolls in the dusky alleys of such a place is an +ineffable sense of disrepair. Everything is cracking, peeling, fading, +crumbling, rotting. No young Sienese eyes rest upon anything youthful; +they open into a world battered and befouled with long use. Everything +has passed its meridian except the brilliant faade of the cathedral, +which is being diligently retouched and restored, and a few private +palaces whose broad fronts seem to have been lately furbished and +polished. Siena was long ago mellowed to the pictorial tone; the +operation of time is now to deposit shabbiness upon shabbiness. But +it's for the most part a patient, sturdy, sympathetic shabbiness, +which soothes rather than irritates the nerves, and has in many cases +doubtless as long a career to run as most of our pert and shallow +freshnesses. It projects at all events a deeper shadow into the constant +twilight of the narrow streets--that vague historic dusk, as I may call +it, in which one walks and wonders. These streets are hardly more than +sinuous flagged alleys, into which the huge black houses, between their +almost meeting cornices, suffer a meagre light to filter down over +rough-hewn stone, past windows often of graceful Gothic form, and great +pendent iron rings and twisted sockets for torches. Scattered over +their many-headed hill, they suffer the roadway often to incline to the +perpendicular, becoming so impracticable for vehicles that the sound of +wheels is only a trifle less anomalous than it would be in Venice. But +all day long there comes up to my window an incessant shuffling of feet +and clangour of voices. The weather is very warm for the season, all the +world is out of doors, and the Tuscan tongue (which in Siena is reputed +to have a classic purity) wags in every imaginable key. It doesn't +rest even at night, and I am often an uninvited guest at concerts +and _conversazioni_ at two o'clock in the morning. The concerts are +sometimes charming. I not only don't curse my wakefulness, but go to my +window to listen. Three men come carolling by, trolling and quavering +with voices of delightful sweetness, or a lonely troubadour in his +shirt-sleeves draws such artful love-notes from his clear, fresh +tenor, that I seem for the moment to be behind the scenes at the opera, +watching some Rubini or Mario go "on" and waiting for the round of +applause. In the intervals a couple of friends or enemies stop--Italians +always make their points in conversation by pulling up, letting you walk +on a few paces, to turn and find them standing with finger on nose +and engaging your interrogative eye--they pause, by a happy instinct, +directly under my window, and dispute their point or tell their story +or make their confidence. One scarce is sure which it may be; everything +has such an explosive promptness, such a redundancy of inflection and +action. But everything for that matter takes on such dramatic life +as our lame colloquies never know--so that almost any uttered +communications here become an acted play, improvised, mimicked, +proportioned and rounded, carried bravely to its _dnoment_. The +speaker seems actually to establish his stage and face his foot-lights, +to create by a gesture a little scenic circumscription about him; he +rushes to and fro and shouts and stamps and postures, he ranges through +every phase of his inspiration. I noted the other evening a striking +instance of the spontaneity of the Italian gesture, in the person of a +small Sienese of I hardly know what exact age--the age of inarticulate +sounds and the experimental use of a spoon. It was a Sunday evening, and +this little man had accompanied his parents to the caf. The Caff +Greco at Siena is a most delightful institution; you get a capital +_demi-tasse_ for three sous, and an excellent ice for eight, and while +you consume these easy luxuries you may buy from a little hunchback the +local weekly periodical, the _Vita Nuova_, for three centimes (the two +centimes left from your sou, if you are under the spell of this magical +frugality, will do to give the waiter). My young friend was sitting on +his father's knee and helping himself to the half of a strawberry-ice +with which his mamma had presented him. He had so many misadventures +with his spoon that this lady at length confiscated it, there being +nothing left of the ice but a little crimson liquid which he might +dispose of by the common instinct of childhood. But he was no friend, +it appeared, to such freedoms; he was a perfect little gentleman and he +resented it being expected of him that he should drink down his remnant. +He protested therefore, and it was the manner of his protest that struck +me. He didn't cry audibly, though he made a very wry face. It was no +stupid squall, and yet he was too young to speak. It was a penetrating +concord of inarticulately pleading, accusing sounds, accompanied by +gestures of the most exquisite propriety. These were perfectly mature; +he did everything that a man of forty would have done if he had been +pouring out a flood of sonorous eloquence. He shrugged his shoulders +and wrinkled his eyebrows, tossed out his hands and folded his arms, +obtruded his chin and bobbed about his head--and at last, I am happy to +say, recovered his spoon. If I had had a solid little silver one I would +have presented it to him as a testimonial to a perfect, though as yet +unconscious, artist. + +My actual tribute to him, however, has diverted me from what I had in +mind--a much weightier matter--the great private palaces which are the +massive majestic syllables, sentences, periods, of the strange message +the place addresses to us. They are extraordinarily spacious and +numerous, and one wonders what part they can play in the meagre economy +of the actual city. The Siena of to-day is a mere shrunken semblance +of the rabid little republic which in the thirteenth century waged +triumphant war with Florence, cultivated the arts with splendour, +planned a cathedral (though it had ultimately to curtail the design) of +proportions almost unequalled, and contained a population of two hundred +thousand souls. Many of these dusky piles still bear the names of the +old mediaeval magnates the vague mild occupancy of whose descendants has +the effect of armour of proof worn over "pot" hats and tweed jackets and +trousers. Half-a-dozen of them are as high as the Strozzi and Riccardi +palaces in Florence; they couldn't well be higher. The very essence of +the romantic and the scenic is in the way these colossal dwellings are +packed together in their steep streets, in the depths of their little +enclosed, agglomerated city. When we, in our day and country, raise a +structure of half the mass and dignity, we leave a great space about +it in the manner of a pause after a showy speech. But when a Sienese +countess, as things are here, is doing her hair near the window, she +is a wonderfully near neighbour to the cavalier opposite, who is being +shaved by his valet. Possibly the countess doesn't object to a certain +chosen publicity at her toilet; what does an Italian gentleman assure +me but that the aristocracy make very free with each other? Some of the +palaces are shown, but only when the occupants are at home, and now they +are in _villeggiatura_. Their villeggiatura lasts eight months of the +year, the waiter at the inn informs me, and they spend little more than +the carnival in the city. The gossip of an inn-waiter ought perhaps to +be beneath the dignity of even such thin history as this; but I confess +that when, as a story-seeker always and ever, I have come in from my +strolls with an irritated sense of the dumbness of stones and mortar, +it has been to listen with avidity, over my dinner, to the proffered +confidences of the worthy man who stands by with a napkin. His talk is +really very fine, and he prides himself greatly on his cultivated tone, +to which he calls my attention. He has very little good to say about the +Sienese nobility. They are "proprio d'origine egoista"--whatever that +may be--and there are many who can't write their names. This may be +calumny; but I doubt whether the most blameless of them all could have +spoken more delicately of a lady of peculiar personal appearance who had +been dining near me. "She's too fat," I grossly said on her leaving +the room. The waiter shook his head with a little sniff: " troppo +materiale." This lady and her companion were the party whom, thinking +I might relish a little company--I had been dining alone for a week--he +gleefully announced to me as newly arrived Americans. They were +Americans, I found, who wore, pinned to their heads in permanence, the +black lace veil or mantilla, conveyed their beans to their mouth with +a knife, and spoke a strange raucous Spanish. They were in fine +compatriots from Montevideo. + +{Illustration: THE RED PALACE, SIENA.} + +The genius of old Siena, however, would make little of any stress of +such distinctions; one representative of a far-off social platitude +being about as much in order as another as he stands before the great +loggia of the Casino di Nobili, the club of the best society. The +nobility, which is very numerous and very rich, is still, says the +apparently competent native I began by quoting, perfectly feudal and +uplifted and separate. Morally and intellectually, behind the walls of +its palaces, the fourteenth century, it's thrilling to think, hasn't +ceased to hang on. There is no bourgeoisie to speak of; immediately +after the aristocracy come the poor people, who are very poor indeed. +My friend's account of these matters made me wish more than ever, as +a lover of the preserved social specimen, of type at almost any price, +that one weren't, a helpless victim of the historic sense, reduced +simply to staring at black stones and peeping up stately staircases; +and that when one had examined the street-face of the palace, Murray in +hand, one might walk up to the great drawing-room, make one's bow to the +master and mistress, the old abbe and the young count, and invite +them to favour one with a sketch of their social philosophy or a few +first-hand family anecdotes. + +The dusky labyrinth of the streets, we must in default of such +initiations content ourselves with noting, is interrupted by two great +candid spaces: the fan-shaped piazza, of which I just now said a word, +and the smaller square in which the cathedral erects its walls of +many-coloured marble. Of course since paying the great piazza my +compliments by moonlight I have strolled through it often at sunnier and +shadier hours. The market is held there, and wherever Italians buy and +sell, wherever they count and chaffer--as indeed you hear them do right +and left, at almost any moment, as you take your way among them--the +pulse of life beats fast. It has been doing so on the spot just named, I +suppose, for the last five hundred years, and during that time the cost +of eggs and earthen pots has been gradually but inexorably increasing. +The buyers nevertheless wrestle over their purchases as lustily as so +many fourteenth-century burghers suddenly waking up in horror to current +prices. You have but to walk aside, however, into the Palazzo Pubblico +really to feel yourself a thrifty old medievalist. The state affairs of +the Republic were formerly transacted here, but it now gives shelter +to modern law-courts and other prosy business. I was marched through +a number of vaulted halls and chambers, which, in the intervals of the +administrative sessions held in them, are peopled only by the great +mouldering archaic frescoes--anything but inanimate these even in their +present ruin--that cover the walls and ceiling. The chief painters of +the Sienese school lent a hand in producing the works I name, and you +may complete there the connoisseurship in which, possibly, you will have +embarked at the Academy. I say "possibly" to be very judicial, my own +observation having led me no great length. I have rather than otherwise +cherished the thought that the Sienese school suffers one's eagerness +peacefully to slumber--benignantly abstains in fact from whipping up +a languid curiosity and a tepid faith. "A formidable rival to the +Florentine," says some book--I forget which--into which I recently +glanced. Not a bit of it thereupon boldly say I; the Florentines may +rest on their laurels and the lounger on his lounge. The early painters +of the two groups have indeed much in common; but the Florentines had +the good fortune to see their efforts gathered up and applied by a few +pre-eminent spirits, such as never came to the rescue of the groping +Sienese. Fra Angelico and Ghirlandaio said all their feebler _confrres_ +dreamt of and a great deal more beside, but the inspiration of Simone +Memmi and Ambrogio Lorenzetti and Sano di Pietro has a painful air of +never efflorescing into a maximum. Sodoma and Beccafumi are to my taste +a rather abortive maximum. But one should speak of them all gently--and +I do, from my soul; for their labour, by their lights, has wrought a +precious heritage of still-living colour and rich figure-peopled shadow +for the echoing chambers of their old civic fortress. The faded frescoes +cover the walls like quaintly-storied tapestries; in one way or another +they cast their spell. If one owes a large debt of pleasure to pictorial +art one comes to think tenderly and easily of its whole evolution, as +of the conscious experience of a single mysterious, striving spirit, and +one shrinks from saying rude things about any particular phase of it, +just as one would from referring without precautions to some error or +lapse in the life of a person one esteemed. You don't care to remind a +grizzled veteran of his defeats, and why should we linger in Siena to +talk about Beccafumi? I by no means go so far as to say, with an amateur +with whom I have just been discussing the matter, that "Sodoma is a +precious poor painter and Beccafumi no painter at all"; but, opportunity +being limited, I am willing to let the remark about Beccafumi pass for +true. With regard to Sodoma, I remember seeing four years ago in the +choir of the Cathedral of Pisa a certain small dusky specimen of the +painter--an Abraham and Isaac, if I am not mistaken--which was charged +with a gloomy grace. One rarely meets him in general collections, and I +had never done so till the other day. He was not prolific, apparently; +he had however his own elegance, and his rarity is a part of it. + +Here in Siena are a couple of dozen scattered frescoes and three or four +canvases; his masterpiece, among others, an harmonious Descent from the +Cross. I wouldn't give a fig for the equilibrium of the figures or +the ladders; but while it lasts the scene is all intensely solemn and +graceful and sweet--too sweet for so bitter a subject. Sodoma's +women are strangely sweet; an imaginative sense of morbid appealing +attitude--as notably in the sentimental, the pathetic, but the none the +less pleasant, "Swooning of St. Catherine," the great Sienese heroine, +at San Domenico--seems to me the author's finest accomplishment. His +frescoes have all the same almost appealing evasion of difficulty, and a +kind of mild melancholy which I am inclined to think the sincerest +part of them, for it strikes me as practically the artist's depressed +suspicion of his own want of force. Once he determined, however, that if +he couldn't be strong he would make capital of his weakness, and painted +the Christ bound to the Column, of the Academy. Here he got much nearer +and I have no doubt mixed his colours with his tears; but the result +can't be better described than by saying that it is, pictorially, the +first of the modern Christs. Unfortunately it hasn't been the last. + +{Illustration: SAN DOMINICO, SIENA} + +The main strength of Sienese art went possibly into the erection of the +Cathedral, and yet even here the strength is not of the greatest strain. +If, however, there are more interesting temples in Italy, there are +few more richly and variously scenic and splendid, the comparative +meagreness of the architectural idea being overlaid by a marvellous +wealth of ingenious detail. Opposite the church--with the dull old +archbishop's palace on one side and a dismantled residence of the late +Grand Duke of Tuscany on the other--is an ancient hospital with a big +stone bench running all along its front. Here I have sat a while every +morning for a week, like a philosophic convalescent, watching the florid +faade of the cathedral glitter against the deep blue sky. It has been +lavishly restored of late years, and the fresh white marble of the +densely clustered pinnacles and statues and beasts and flowers +flashes in the sunshine like a mosaic of jewels. There is more of this +goldsmith's work in stone than I can remember or describe; it is piled +up over three great doors with immense margins of exquisite decorative +sculpture--still in the ancient cream-coloured marble--and beneath three +sharp pediments embossed with images relieved against red marble and +tipped with golden mosaics. It is in the highest degree fantastic and +luxuriant--it is on the whole very lovely. As a triumph of the many-hued +it prepares you for the interior, where the same parti-coloured +splendour is endlessly at play--a confident complication of harmonies +and contrasts and of the minor structural refinements and braveries. +The internal surface is mainly wrought in alternate courses of black and +white marble; but as the latter has been dimmed by the centuries to a +fine mild brown the place is all a concert of relieved and dispersed +glooms. Save for Pinturicchio's brilliant frescoes in the Sacristy +there are no pictures to speak of; but the pavement is covered with many +elaborate designs in black and white mosaic after cartoons by Beccafumi. +The patient skill of these compositions makes them a rare piece of +decoration; yet even here the friend whom I lately quoted rejects this +over-ripe fruit of the Sienese school. The designs are nonsensical, he +declares, and all his admiration is for the cunning artisans who have +imitated the hatchings and shadings and hair-strokes of the pencil +by the finest curves of inserted black stone. But the true romance of +handiwork at Siena is to be seen in the wondrous stalls of the choir, +under the coloured light of the great wheel-window. Wood-carving has +ever been a cherished craft of the place, and the best masters of the +art during the fifteenth century lavished themselves on this prodigious +task. It is the frost-work on one's window-panes interpreted in polished +oak. It would be hard to find, doubtless, a more moving illustration of +the peculiar patience, the sacred candour, of the great time. Into such +artistry as this the author seems to put more of his personal substance +than into any other; he has to wrestle not only with his subject, +but with his material. He is richly fortunate when his subject is +charming--when his devices, inventions and fantasies spring lightly to +his hand; for in the material itself, after age and use have ripened +and polished and darkened it to the richness of ebony and to a greater +warmth there is something surpassingly delectable and venerable. Wander +behind the altar at Siena when the chanting is over and the incense has +faded, and look well at the stalls of the Barili. + +1873. + + +II + + +I leave the impression noted in the foregoing pages to tell its own +small story, but have it on my conscience to wonder, in this connection, +quite candidly and publicly and by way of due penance, at the scantness +of such first-fruits of my sensibility. I was to see Siena repeatedly +in the years to follow, I was to know her better, and I would say that +I was to do her an ampler justice didn't that remark seem to reflect a +little on my earlier poor judgment. This judgment strikes me to-day as +having fallen short--true as it may be that I find ever a value, or +at least an interest, even in the moods and humours and lapses of any +brooding, musing or fantasticating observer to whom the finer sense +of things is _on the whole_ not closed. If he has on a given occasion +nodded or stumbled or strayed, this fact by itself speaks to me of +him--speaks to me, that is, of his faculty and his idiosyncrasies, and +I care nothing for the application of his faculty unless it be, first of +all, in itself interesting. Which may serve as my reply to any objection +here breaking out--on the ground that if a spectator's languors are +evidence, of a sort, about that personage, they are scarce evident about +the case before him, at least if the case be important. I let my perhaps +rather weak expression of the sense of Siena stand, at any rate--for the +sake of what I myself read into it; but I should like to amplify it by +other memories, and would do so eagerly if I might here enjoy the space. +The difficulty for these rectifications is that if the early vision has +failed of competence or of full felicity, if initiation has thus been +slow, so, with renewals and extensions, so, with the larger experience, +one hindrance is exchanged for another. There is quite such a +possibility as having lived into a relation too much to be able to make +a statement of it. + +I remember on one occasion arriving very late of a summer night, after +an almost unbroken run from London, and the note of that approach--I +was the only person alighting at the station below the great hill of +the little fortress city, under whose at once frowning and gaping gate I +must have passed, in the warm darkness and the absolute stillness, +very much after the felt fashion of a person of importance about to be +enormously incarcerated--gives me, for preservation thus belated, the +pitch, as I may call it, at various times, though always at one season, +of an almost systematised esthetic use of the place. It wasn't to be +denied that the immensely better "accommodations" instituted by the +multiplying, though alas more bustling, years had to be recognised as +supplying a basis, comparatively prosaic if one would, to that luxury. +No sooner have I written which words, however, than I find myself adding +that one "wouldn't," that one doesn't--doesn't, that is, consent now to +regard the then "new" hotel (pretty old indeed by this time) as anything +but an aid to a free play of perception. The strong and rank old Arme +d'Inghilterra, in the darker street, has passed away; but its ancient +rival the Aquila Nera put forth claims to modernisation, and the Grand +Hotel, the still fresher flower of modernity near the gate by which you +enter from the station, takes on to my present remembrance a mellowness +as of all sorts of comfort, cleanliness and kindness. The particular +facts, those of the visit I began here by alluding to and those of still +others, at all events, inveterately made in June or early in July, enter +together in a fusion as of hot golden-brown objects seen through the +practicable crevices of shutters drawn upon high, cool, darkened rooms +where the scheme of the scene involved longish days of quiet work, with +late afternoon emergence and contemplation waiting on the better or the +worse conscience. I thus associate the compact world of the admirable +hill-top, the world of a predominant golden-brown, with a general +invocation of sensibility and fancy, and think of myself as going forth +into the lingering light of summer evenings all attuned to intensity of +the idea of compositional beauty, or in other words, freely speaking, +to the question of colour, to intensity of picture. To communicate with +Siena in this charming way was thus, I admit, to have no great margin +for the prosecution of inquiries, but I am not sure that it wasn't, +little by little, to feel the whole combination of elements better than +by a more exemplary method, and this from beginning to end of the scale. + +More of the elements indeed, for memory, hang about the days that were +ushered in by that straight flight from the north than about any other +series--if partly, doubtless, but because of my having then stayed +longest. I specify it at all events for fond reminiscence as the year, +the only year, at which I was present at the Palio, the earlier one, +the series of furious horse-races between elected representatives of +different quarters of the town taking place toward the end of June, as +the second and still more characteristic exhibition of the same sort +is appointed to the month of August; a spectacle that I am far from +speaking of as the finest flower of my old and perhaps even a little +faded cluster of impressions, but which smudges that special sojourn as +with the big thumb--mark of a slightly soiled and decidedly ensanguined +hand. For really, after all, the great loud gaudy romp or heated frolic, +simulating ferocity if not achieving it, that is the annual pride of the +town, was not intrinsically, to my-view, extraordinarily impressive--in +spite of its bristling with all due testimony to the passionate Italian +clutch of any pretext for costume and attitude and utterance, for +mumming and masquerading and raucously representing; the vast cheap +vividness rather somehow refines itself, and the swarm and hubbub of the +immense square melt, to the uplifted sense of a very high-placed balcony +of the overhanging Chigi palace, where everything was superseded but the +intenser passage, across the ages, of the great Renaissance tradition +of architecture and the infinite sweetness of the waning golden day. +The Palio, indubitably, was _criard_--and the more so for quite +monopolising, at Siena, the note of crudity; and much of it demanded +doubtless of one's patience a due respect for the long local continuity +of such things; it drops into its humoured position, however, in any +retrospective command of the many brave aspects of the prodigious place. +Not that I am pretending here, even for rectification, to take these at +all in turn; I only go on a little with my rueful glance at the marked +gaps left in my original report of sympathies entertained. + +I bow my head for instance to the mystery of my not having mentioned +that the coolest and freshest flower of the day was ever that of one's +constant renewal of a charmed homage to Pinturicchio, coolest and +freshest and signally youngest and most matutinal (as distinguished from +merely primitive or crepuscular) of painters, in the library or +sacristy of the Cathedral. Did I _always_ find time before work to spend +half-an-hour of immersion, under that splendid roof, in the clearest +and tenderest, the very cleanest and "straightest," as it masters +our envious credulity, of all storied fresco-worlds? This wondrous +apartment, a monument in itself to the ancient pride and power of +the Church, and which contains an unsurpassed treasure of gloriously +illuminated missals, psalters and other vast parchment folios, almost +each of whose successive leaves gives the impression of rubies, +sapphires and emeralds set in gold and practically embedded in the page, +offers thus to view, after a fashion splendidly sustained, a pictorial +record of the career of Pope Pius II, Aeneas Sylvius of the Siena +Piccolomini (who gave him for an immediate successor a second of +their name), most profanely literary of Pontiffs and last of would-be +Crusaders, whose adventures and achievements under Pinturicchio's brush +smooth themselves out for us very much to the tune of the "stories" told +by some fine old man of the world, at the restful end of his life, to +the cluster of his grandchildren. The end of AEneas Sylvius was not +restful; he died at Ancona in troublous times, preaching war, and +attempting to make it, against the then terrific Turk; but over no great +worldly personal legend, among those of men of arduous affairs, arches a +fairer, lighter or more pacific memorial vault than the shining Libreria +of Siena. I seem to remember having it and its unfrequented enclosing +precinct so often all to myself that I must indeed mostly have resorted +to it for a prompt benediction on the day. Like no other strong +solicitation, among artistic appeals to which one may compare it up and +down the whole wonderful country, is the felt neighbouring presence of +the overwrought Cathedral in its little proud possessive town: you may +so often feel by the week at a time that it stands there really for your +own personal enjoyment, your romantic convenience, your small wanton +aesthetic use. In such a light shines for me, at all events, under such +an accumulation and complication of tone flushes and darkens and richly +recedes for me, across the years, the treasure-house of many-coloured +marbles in the untrodden, the drowsy, empty Sienese square. One +could positively do, in the free exercise of any responsible fancy or +luxurious taste, what one would with it. + +But that proposition holds true, after all, for almost any mild pastime +of the incurable student of loose meanings and stray relics and odd +references and dim analogies in an Italian hill-city bronzed and +seasoned by the ages. I ought perhaps, for justification of the right to +talk, to have plunged into the Siena archives of which, on one occasion, +a kindly custodian gave me, in rather dusty and stuffy conditions, +as the incident vaguely comes back to me, a glimpse that was like a +moment's stand at the mouth of a deep, dark mine. I didn't descend into +the pit; I did, instead of this, a much idler and easier thing: I simply +went every afternoon, my stint of work over, I like to recall, for a +musing stroll upon the Lizza--the Lizza which had its own unpretentious +but quite insidious art of meeting the lover of old stories halfway. The +great and subtle thing, if you are not a strenuous specialist, in places +of a heavily charged historic consciousness, is to profit by the sense +of that consciousness--or in other words to cultivate a relation with +the oracle--after the fashion that suits yourself; so that if the +general after-taste of experience, experience at large, the fine +distilled essence of the matter, seems to breathe, in such a case, from +the very stones and to make a thick strong liquor of the very air, you +may thus gather as you pass what is most to your purpose; which is +more the indestructible mixture of lived things, with its concentrated +lingering odour, than any interminable list of numbered chapters and +verses. Chapters and verses, literally scanned, refuse coincidence, +mostly, with the divisional proprieties of your own pile of +manuscript--which is but another way of saying, in short, that if the +Lizza is a mere fortified promontory of the great Sienese hill, serving +at once as a stronghold for the present military garrison and as a +planted and benched and band-standed walk and recreation-ground for the +citizens, so I could never, toward close of day, either have enough of +it or yet feel the vaguest saunterings there to be vain. They were vague +with the qualification always of that finer massing, as one wandered +off, of the bronzed and seasoned element, the huge rock pedestal, the +bravery of walls and gates and towers and palaces and loudly asserted +dominion; and then of that pervaded or mildly infested air in which +one feels the experience of the ages, of which I just spoke, to be +exquisitely in solution; and lastly of the wide, strange, sad, beautiful +horizon, a rim of far mountains that always pictured, for the leaner +on old rubbed and smoothed parapets at the sunset hour, a country not +exactly blighted or deserted, but that had had its life, on an immense +scale, and had gone, with all its memories and relics, into rather +austere, in fact into almost grim and misanthropic, retirement. This was +a manner and a mood, at any rate, in all the land, that favoured in the +late afternoons the divinest landscape blues and purples--not to speak +of its favouring still more my practical contention that the whole +guarded headland in question, with the immense ramparts of golden brown +and red that dropped into vineyards and orchards and cornfields and all +the rustic elegance of the Tuscan _podere_, was knitting for me a +chain of unforgettable hours; to the justice of which claim let these +divagations testify. + +It wasn't, however, that one mightn't without disloyalty to that scheme +of profit seek impressions further afield--though indeed I may best say +of such a matter as the long pilgrimage to the pictured convent of Monte +Oliveto that it but played on the same fine chords as the overhanging, +the far-gazing Lizza. What it came to was that one simply put to the +friendly test, as it were, the mood and manner of the country. This +remembrance is precious, but the demonstration of that sense as of +a great heaving region stilled by some final shock and returning +thoughtfully, in fact tragically, on itself, couldn't have been more +pointed. The long-drawn rural road I refer to, stretching over hill and +dale and to which I devoted the whole of the longest day of the year--I +was in a small single-horse conveyance, of which I had already made +appreciative use, and with a driver as disposed as myself ever to +sacrifice speed to contemplation--is doubtless familiar now with the +rush of the motor-car; the thought of whose free dealings with the +solitude of Monte Oliveto makes me a little ruefully reconsider, I +confess, the spirit in which I have elsewhere in these pages, on behalf +of the lust, the landscape lust, of the eyes, acknowledged our general +increasing debt to that vehicle. For that we met nothing whatever, as +I seem at this distance of time to recall, while we gently trotted and +trotted through the splendid summer hours and a dry desolation that yet +somehow smiled and smiled, was part of the charm and the intimacy of +the whole impression--the impression that culminated at last, before +the great cloistered square, lonely, bleak and stricken, in the almost +aching vision, more frequent in the Italy of to-day than anywhere in the +world, of the uncalculated waste of a myriad forms of piety, forces of +labour, beautiful fruits of genius. However, one gaped above all things +for the impression, and what one mainly asked was that it should be +strong of its kind. That was the case, I think I couldn't but feel, at +every moment of the couple of hours I spent in the vast, cold, empty +shell, out of which the Benedictine brotherhood sheltered there for ages +had lately been turned by the strong arm of a secular State. There was +but one good brother left, a very lean and tough survivor, a dusky, +elderly, friendly Abbate, of an indescribable type and a perfect manner, +of whom I think I felt immediately thereafter that I should have +liked to say much, but as to whom I must have yielded to the fact +that ingenious and vivid commemoration was even then in store for him. +Literary portraiture had marked him for its own, and in the short +story of _Un Saint_, one of the most finished of contemporary French +_nouvelles_, the art and the sympathy of Monsieur Paul Bourget preserve +his interesting image. He figures in the beautiful tale, the Abbate +of the desolate cloister and of those comparatively quiet years, as a +clean, clear type of sainthood; a circumstance this in itself to cause a +fond analyst of other than "Latin" race (model and painter in this +case having their Latinism so strongly in common) almost endlessly to +meditate. Oh, the unutterable differences in any scheme or estimate +of physiognomic values, in any range of sensibility to expressional +association, among observers of different, of inevitably more or +less opposed, traditional and "racial" points of view! One had heard +convinced Latins--or at least I had!--speak of situations of trust and +intimacy in which they couldn't have endured near them a Protestant or, +as who should say for instance, an Anglo-Saxon; but I was to remember +my own private attempt to measure such a change of sensibility as +might have permitted the prolonged close approach of the dear dingy, +half-starved, very possibly all heroic, and quite ideally urbane Abbate. +The depth upon depth of things, the cloud upon cloud of associations, on +one side and the other, that would have had to change first! + +To which I may add nevertheless that since one ever supremely invoked +intensity of impression and abundance of character, I feasted my fill +of it at Monte Oliveto, and that for that matter this would have +constituted my sole refreshment in the vast icy void of the blighted +refectory if I hadn't bethought myself of bringing with me a scrap of +food, too scantly apportioned, I recollect--very scantly indeed, since +my _cocchiere_ was to share with me--by my purveyor at Siena. Our +tragic--even if so tenderly tragic--entertainer had nothing to give us; +but the immemorial cold of the enormous monastic interior in which we +smilingly fasted would doubtless not have had for me without that such +a wealth of reference. I was to have "liked" the whole adventure, so +I must somehow have liked that; by which remark I am recalled to the +special treasure of the desecrated temple, those extraordinarily +strong and brave frescoes of Luca Signorelli and Sodoma that adorn, in +admirable condition, several stretches of cloister wall. These creations +in a manner took care of themselves; aided by the blue of the sky above +the cloister-court they glowed, they insistently lived; I remember the +frigid prowl through all the rest of the bareness, including that of the +big dishonoured church and that even of the Abbate's abysmally resigned +testimony to his mere human and personal situation; and then, with such +a force of contrast and effect of relief, the great sheltered sun-flares +and colour-patches of scenic composition and design where a couple of +hands centuries ago turned to dust had so wrought the defiant miracle +of life and beauty that the effect is of a garden blooming among ruins. +Discredited somehow, since they all would, the destroyers themselves, +the ancient piety, the general spirit and intention, but still bright +and assured and sublime--practically, enviably immortal--the other, the +still subtler, the all aesthetic good faith. + +1909. + + + + + +THE AUTUMN IN FLORENCE + + +Florence too has its "season," not less than Rome, and I have been +rejoicing for the past six weeks in the fact that this comparatively +crowded parenthesis hasn't yet been opened. Coming here in the first +days of October I found the summer still in almost unmenaced possession, +and ever since, till within a day or two, the weight of its hand has +been sensible. Properly enough, as the city of flowers, Florence mingles +the elements most artfully in the spring--during the divine crescendo of +March and April, the weeks when six months of steady shiver have still +not shaken New York and Boston free of the long Polar reach. But the +very quality of the decline of the year as we at present here feel it +suits peculiarly the mood in which an undiscourageable gatherer of the +sense of things, or taster at least of "charm," moves through these +many-memoried streets and galleries and churches. Old things, old +places, old people, or at least old races, ever strike us as giving out +their secrets most freely in such moist, grey, melancholy days as have +formed the complexion of the past fortnight. With Christmas arrives the +opera, the only opera worth speaking of--which indeed often means in +Florence the only opera worth talking through; the gaiety, the gossip, +the reminders in fine of the cosmopolite and watering-place character to +which the city of the Medici long ago began to bend her antique temper. +Meanwhile it is pleasant enough for the tasters of charm, as I say, and +for the makers of invidious distinctions, that the Americans haven't all +arrived, however many may be on their way, and that the weather has a +monotonous overcast softness in which, apparently, aimless contemplation +grows less and less ashamed. There is no crush along the Cascine, as +on the sunny days of winter, and the Arno, wandering away toward the +mountains in the haze, seems as shy of being looked at as a good picture +in a bad light. No light, to my eyes, nevertheless, could be better +than this, which reaches us, all strained and filtered and refined, +exquisitely coloured and even a bit conspicuously sophisticated, through +the heavy air of the past that hangs about the place for ever. + +I first knew Florence early enough, I am happy to say, to have heard the +change for the worse, the taint of the modern order, bitterly lamented +by old haunters, admirers, lovers--those qualified to present a picture +of the conditions prevailing under the good old Grand-Dukes, the two +last of their line in especial, that, for its blest reflection of +sweetness and mildness and cheapness and ease, of every immediate boon +in life to be enjoyed quite for nothing, could but draw tears from +belated listeners. Some of these survivors from the golden age--just the +beauty of which indeed was in the gold, of sorts, that it poured into +your lap, and not in the least in its own importunity on that head--have +needfully lingered on, have seen the ancient walls pulled down and +the compact and belted mass of which the Piazza della Signoria was the +immemorial centre expand, under the treatment of enterprising syndics, +into an ungirdled organism of the type, as they viciously say, of +Chicago; one of those places of which, as their grace of a circumference +is nowhere, the dignity of a centre can no longer be predicated. +Florence loses itself to-day in dusty boulevards and smart _beaux +quartiers_, such as Napoleon III and Baron Haussmann were to set the +fashion of to a too medival Europe--with the effect of some precious +page of antique text swallowed up in a marginal commentary that smacks +of the style of the newspaper. So much for what has happened on this +side of that line of demarcation which, by an odd law, makes us, with +our preference for what we are pleased to call the picturesque, object +to such occurrences even _as_ occurrences. The real truth is that +objections are too vain, and that he would be too rude a critic here, +just now, who shouldn't be in the humour to take the thick with the +thin and to try at least to read something of the old soul into the new +forms. + +There is something to be said moreover for your liking a city (once it's +a question of your actively circulating) to pretend to comfort you more +by its extent than by its limits; in addition to which Florence was +anciently, was in her palmy days peculiarly, a daughter of change and +movement and variety, of shifting moods, policies and rgimes--just +as the Florentine character, as we have it to-day, is a character that +takes all things easily for having seen so many come and go. It saw the +national capital, a few years since, arrive and sit down by the Arno, +and took no further thought than sufficed for the day; then it saw, the +odd visitor depart and whistled her cheerfully on her way to Rome. The +new boulevards of the Sindaco Peruzzi come, it may be said, but they +don't go; which, after all, it isn't from the sthetic point of view +strictly necessary they should. A part of the essential amiability of +Florence, of her genius for making you take to your favour on easy terms +everything that in any way belongs to her, is that she has already flung +an element of her grace over all their undried mortar and plaster. Such +modern arrangements as the Piazza d' Azeglio and the _viale_ or Avenue +of the Princess Margaret please not a little, I think--for what they +are!--and do so even in a degree, by some fine local privilege just +because they are Florentine. The afternoon lights rest on them as if to +thank them for not being worse, and their vistas are liberal where +they look toward the hills. They carry you close to these admirable +elevations, which hang over Florence on all sides, and if in the +foreground your sense is a trifle perplexed by the white pavements +dotted here and there with a policeman or a nursemaid, you have only to +reach beyond and see Fiesole turn to violet, on its ample eminence, from +the effect of the opposite sunset. + +Facing again then to Florence proper you have local colour enough and +to spare--which you enjoy the more, doubtless, from standing off to get +your light and your point of view. The elder streets abutting on all +this newness bore away into the heart of the city in narrow, dusky +perspectives that quite refine, in certain places, by an art of their +own, on the romantic appeal. There are temporal and other accidents +thanks to which, as you pause to look down them and to penetrate the +deepening shadows that accompany their retreat, they resemble little +corridors leading out from the past, mystical like the ladder in Jacob's +dream; so that when you see a single figure advance and draw nearer +you are half afraid to wait till it arrives--it must be too much of the +nature of a ghost, a messenger from an underworld. However this may be, +a place paved with such great mosaics of slabs and lined with palaces of +so massive a tradition, structures which, in their large dependence +on pure proportion for interest and beauty, reproduce more than other +modern styles the simple nobleness of Greek architecture, must ever have +placed dignity first in the scale of invoked effect and laid up no great +treasure of that ragged picturesqueness--the picturesqueness of large +poverty--on which we feast our idle eyes at Rome and Naples. Except in +the unfinished fronts of the churches, which, however, unfortunately, +are mere ugly blankness, one finds less of the poetry of ancient +over-use, or in other words less romantic southern shabbiness, than +in most Italian cities. At two or three points, none the less, this +sinister grace exists in perfection--just such perfection as so often +proves that what is literally hideous may be constructively delightful +and what is intrinsically tragic play on the finest chords of +appreciation. On the north side of the Arno, between Ponte Vecchio and +Ponte Santa Trinita, is a row of immemorial houses that back on the +river, in whose yellow flood they bathe their sore old feet. Anything +more battered and befouled, more cracked and disjointed, dirtier, +drearier, poorer, it would be impossible to conceive. They look as if +fifty years ago the liquid mud had risen over their chimneys and then +subsided again and left them coated for ever with its unsightly slime. +And yet forsooth, because the river is yellow, and the light is yellow, +and here and there, elsewhere, some mellow mouldering surface, some hint +of colour, some accident of atmosphere, takes up the foolish tale and +repeats the note--because, in short, it is Florence, it is Italy, and +the fond appraiser, the infatuated alien, may have had in his eyes, at +birth and afterwards, the micaceous sparkle of brown-stone fronts no +more interesting than so much sand-paper, these miserable dwellings, +instead of suggesting mental invocations to an enterprising board of +health, simply create their own standard of felicity and shamelessly +live in it. Lately, during the misty autumn nights, the moon has +shone on them faintly and refined their shabbiness away into something +ineffably strange and spectral. The turbid stream sweeps along without +a sound, and the pale tenements hang above it like a vague miasmatic +exhalation. The dimmest back-scene at the opera, when the tenor is +singing his sweetest, seems hardly to belong to a world more detached +from responsibility. + +{Illustration: ON THE ARNO, FLORENCE.} + +What it is that infuses so rich an interest into the general charm is +difficult to say in a few words; yet as we wander hither and thither in +quest of sacred canvas and immortal bronze and stone we still feel the +genius of the place hang about. Two industrious English ladies, the +Misses Horner, have lately published a couple of volumes of "Walks" by +the Arno-side, and their work is a long enumeration of great artistic +deeds. These things remain for the most part in sound preservation, and, +as the weeks go by and you spend a constant portion of your days among +them the sense of one of the happiest periods of human Taste--to put it +only at that--settles upon your spirit. It was not long; it lasted, in +its splendour, for less than a century; but it has stored away in the +palaces and churches of Florence a heritage of beauty that these three +enjoying centuries since haven't yet exhausted. This forms a clear +intellectual atmosphere into which you may turn aside from the modern +world and fill your lungs as with the breath of a forgotten creed. The +memorials of the past here address us moreover with a friendliness, win +us by we scarcely know what sociability, what equal amenity, that we +scarce find matched in other great esthetically endowed communities and +periods. Venice, with her old palaces cracking under the weight of their +treasures, is, in her influence, insupportably sad; Athens, with her +maimed marbles and dishonoured memories, transmutes the consciousness of +sensitive observers, I am told, into a chronic heartache; but in one's +impression of old Florence the abiding felicity, the sense of saving +sanity, of something sound and human, predominates, offering you a +medium still conceivable for life. The reason of this is partly, no +doubt, the "sympathetic" nature, the temperate joy, of Florentine art +in general--putting the sole Dante, greatest of literary artists, aside; +partly the tenderness of time, in its lapse, which, save in a few cases, +has been as sparing of injury as if it knew that when it should have +dimmed and corroded these charming things it would have nothing so sweet +again for its tooth to feed on. If the beautiful Ghirlandaios and Lippis +are fading, this generation will never know it. The large Fra Angelico +in the Academy is as clear and keen as if the good old monk stood +there wiping his brushes; the colours seem to _sing_, as it were, like +new-fledged birds in June. Nothing is more characteristic of early +Tuscan art than the high-reliefs of Luca della Robbia; yet there isn't +one of them that, except for the unique mixture of freshness with its +wisdom, of candour with its expertness, mightn't have been modelled +yesterday. + +But perhaps the best image of the absence of stale melancholy or wasted +splendour, of the positive presence of what I have called temperate joy, +in the Florentine impression and genius, is the bell-tower of Giotto, +which rises beside the cathedral. No beholder of it will have forgotten +how straight and slender it stands there, how strangely rich in the +common street, plated with coloured marble patterns, and yet so far from +simple or severe in design that we easily wonder how its author, the +painter of exclusively and portentously grave little pictures, should +have fashioned a building which in the way of elaborate elegance, of the +true play of taste, leaves a jealous modern criticism nothing to +miss. Nothing can be imagined at once more lightly and more pointedly +fanciful; it might have been handed over to the city, as it stands, +by some Oriental genie tired of too much detail. Yet for all that +suggestion it seems of no particular time--not grey and hoary like +a Gothic steeple, not cracked and despoiled like a Greek temple; +its marbles shining so little less freshly than when they were laid +together, and the sunset lighting up its cornice with such a friendly +radiance, that you come at last to regard it simply as the graceful, +indestructible soul of the place made visible. The Cathedral, +externally, for all its solemn hugeness, strikes the same note of +would-be reasoned elegance and cheer; it has conventional grandeur, of +course, but a grandeur so frank and ingenuous even in its _parti-pris_. +It has seen so much, and outlived so much, and served so many sad +purposes, and yet remains in aspect so full of the fine Tuscan +geniality, the feeling for life, one may almost say the feeling for +amusement, that inspired it. Its vast many-coloured marble walls become +at any rate, with this, the friendliest note of all Florence; there +is an unfailing charm in walking past them while they lift their great +acres of geometrical mosaic higher in the air than you have time or +other occasion to look. You greet them from the deep street as you greet +the side of a mountain when you move in the gorge--not twisting back +your head to keep looking at the top, but content with the minor +accidents, the nestling hollows and soft cloud-shadows, the general +protection of the valley. + +Florence is richer in pictures than we really know till we have begun to +look for them in outlying corners. Then, here and there, one comes upon +lurking values and hidden gems that it quite seems one might as a good +New Yorker quietly "bag" for the so aspiring Museum of that city without +their being missed. The Pitti Palace is of course a collection of +masterpieces; they jostle each other in their splendour, they perhaps +even, in their merciless multitude, rather fatigue our admiration. The +Uffizi is almost as fine a show, and together with that long serpentine +artery which crosses the Arno and connects them, making you ask +yourself, whichever way you take it, what goal can be grand enough to +crown such a journey, they form the great central treasure-chamber +of the town. But I have been neglecting them of late for love of the +Academy, where there are fewer copyists and tourists, above all fewer +pictorial lions, those whose roar is heard from afar and who strike +us as expecting overmuch to have it their own way in the jungle. The +pictures at the Academy are all, rather, doves--the whole impression is +less pompously tropical. Selection still leaves one too much to say, but +I noted here, on my last occasion, an enchanting Botticelli so obscurely +hung, in one of the smaller rooms, that I scarce knew whether most to +enjoy or to resent its relegation. Placed, in a mean black frame, where +you wouldn't have looked for a masterpiece, it yet gave out to a good +glass every characteristic of one. Representing as it does the walk of +Tobias with the angel, there are really parts of it that an angel might +have painted; but I doubt whether it is observed by half-a-dozen persons +a year. That was my excuse for my wanting to know, on the spot, though +doubtless all sophistically, what dishonour, could the transfer be +artfully accomplished, a strong American light and a brave gilded frame +would, comparatively speaking, do it. There and then it would, shine +with the intense authority that we claim for the fairest things--would +exhale its wondrous beauty as a sovereign example. What it comes to +is that this master is the most interesting of a great band--the only +Florentine save Leonardo and Michael in whom the impulse was original +and the invention rare. His imagination is of things strange, subtle and +complicated--things it at first strikes us that we moderns have reason +to know, and that it has taken us all the ages to learn; so that we +permit ourselves to wonder how a "primitive" could come by them. We soon +enough reflect, however, that we ourselves have come by them almost only +_through_ him, exquisite spirit that he was, and that when we enjoy, or +at least when we encounter, in our William Morrises, in our +Rossettis and Burne-Joneses, the note of the haunted or over-charged +consciousness, we are but treated, with other matters, to repeated doses +of diluted Botticelli. He practically set with his own hand almost all +the copies to almost all our so-called pre-Raphaelites, earlier and +later, near and remote. + +Let us at the same time, none the less, never fail of response to +the great Florentine geniality at large. Fra Angelico, Filippo Lippi, +Ghirlandaio, were not "subtly" imaginative, were not even riotously so; +but what other three were ever more gladly observant, more vividly and +richly true? If there should some time be a weeding out of the world's +possessions the best works of the early Florentines will certainly +be counted among the flowers. With the ripest performances of the +Venetians--by which I don't mean the over-ripe--we can but take them for +the most valuable things in the history of art. Heaven forbid we should +be narrowed down to a cruel choice; but if it came to a question of +keeping or losing between half-a-dozen Raphaels and half-a-dozen things +it would be a joy to pick out at the Academy, I fear that, for myself, +the memory of the Transfiguration, or indeed of the other Roman relics +of the painter, wouldn't save the Raphaels. And yet this was so far from +the opinion of a patient artist whom I saw the other day copying the +finest of Ghirlandaios--a beautiful Adoration of the Kings at the +Hospital of the Innocenti. Here was another sample of the buried +art-wealth of Florence. It hangs in an obscure chapel, far aloft, behind +an altar, and though now and then a stray tourist wanders in and puzzles +a while over the vaguely-glowing forms, the picture is never really +seen and enjoyed. I found an aged Frenchman of modest mien perched on a +little platform beneath it, behind a great hedge of altar-candlesticks, +with an admirable copy all completed. The difficulties of his task had +been well-nigh insuperable, and his performance seemed to me a real feat +of magic. He could scarcely move or turn, and could find room for his +canvas but by rolling it together and painting a small piece at a time, +so that he never enjoyed a view of his _ensemble_. The original is +gorgeous with colour and bewildering with decorative detail, but not +a gleam of the painter's crimson was wanting, not a curl in his gold +arabesques. It seemed to me that if I had copied a Ghirlandaio in such +conditions I would at least maintain for my own credit that he was the +first painter in the world. "Very good of its kind," said the weary old +man with a shrug of reply for my raptures; "but oh, how far short of +Raphael!" However that may be, if the reader chances to observe this +consummate copy in the so commendable Museum devoted in Paris to such +works, let him stop before it with a due reverence; it is one of the +patient things of art. Seeing it wrought there, in its dusky nook, under +such scant convenience, I found no bar in the painter's foreignness to +a thrilled sense that the old art-life of Florence isn't yet extinct. It +still at least works spells and almost miracles. + +1873. + + + + + +FLORENTINE NOTES + + +I + + +Yesterday that languid organism known as the Florentine Carnival put on +a momentary semblance of vigour, and decreed a general _corso_ through +the town. The spectacle was not brilliant, but it suggested some natural +reflections. I encountered the line of carriages in the square before +Santa Croce, of which they were making the circuit. They rolled solemnly +by, with their inmates frowning forth at each other in apparent wrath +at not finding each other more worth while. There were no masks, no +costumes, no decorations, no throwing of flowers or sweetmeats. It was +as if each carriageful had privately and not very heroically resolved +not to be at costs, and was rather discomfited at finding that it was +getting no better entertainment than it gave. The middle of the piazza +was filled with little tables, with shouting mountebanks, mostly +disguised in battered bonnets and crinolines, offering chances in +raffles for plucked fowls and kerosene lamps. I have never thought the +huge marble statue of Dante, which overlooks the scene, a work of the +last refinement; but, as it stood there on its high pedestal, chin in +hand, frowning down on all this cheap foolery, it seemed to have a great +moral intention. The carriages followed a prescribed course--through Via +Ghibellina, Via del Proconsolo, past the Badia and the Bargello, beneath +the great tessellated cliffs of the Cathedral, through Via Tornabuoni +and out into ten minutes' sunshine beside the Arno. Much of all this +is the gravest and stateliest part of Florence, a quarter of supreme +dignity, and there was an almost ludicrous incongruity in seeing +Pleasure leading her train through these dusky historic streets. It was +most uncomfortably cold, and in the absence of masks many a fair +nose was fantastically tipped with purple. But as the carriages crept +solemnly along they seemed to keep a funeral march--to follow an antique +custom, an exploded faith, to its tomb. The Carnival is dead, and these +good people who had come abroad to make merry were funeral mutes and +grave-diggers. Last winter in Rome it showed but a galvanised life, yet +compared with this humble exhibition it was operatic. At Rome indeed +it was too operatic. The knights on horseback there were a bevy of +circus-riders, and I'm sure half the mad revellers repaired every night +to the Capitol for their twelve sous a day. + +I have just been reading over the Letters of the President de Brosses. +A hundred years ago, in Venice, the Carnival lasted six months; and at +Rome for many weeks each year one was free, under cover of a mask, +to perpetrate the most fantastic follies and cultivate the most +remunerative vices. It's very well to read the President's notes, which +have indeed a singular interest; but they make us ask ourselves why we +should expect the Italians to persist in manners and practices which +we ourselves, if we had responsibilities in the matter, should find +intolerable. The Florentines at any rate spend no more money nor faith +on the carnivalesque. And yet this truth has a qualification; for +what struck me in the whole spectacle yesterday, and prompted these +observations, was not at all the more or less of costume of the +occupants of the carriages, but the obstinate survival of the +merrymaking instinct in the people at large. There could be no better +example of it than that so dim a shadow of entertainment should keep all +Florence standing and strolling, densely packed for hours, in the cold +streets. There was nothing to see that mightn't be seen on the Cascine +any fine day in the year--nothing but a name, a tradition, a pretext for +sweet staring idleness. The faculty of making much of common things +and converting small occasions into great pleasures is, to a son +of communities strenuous as ours are strenuous, the most salient +characteristic of the so-called Latin civilisations. It charms him and +vexes him, according to his mood; and for the most part it represents a +moral gulf between his own temperamental and indeed spiritual sense +of race, and that of Frenchmen and Italians, far wider than the watery +leagues that a steamer may annihilate. But I think his mood is wisest +when he accepts the "foreign" easy surrender to _all_ the senses as the +sign of an unconscious philosophy of life, instilled by the experience +of centuries--the philosophy of people who have lived long and much, +who have discovered no short cuts to happiness and no effective +circumvention of effort, and so have come to regard the average lot as a +ponderous fact that absolutely calls for a certain amount of sitting on +the lighter tray of the scales. Florence yesterday then took its holiday +in a natural, placid fashion that seemed to make its own temper an +affair quite independent of the splendour of the compensation decreed on +a higher line to the weariness of its legs. That the _corso_ was stupid +or lively was the shame or the glory of the powers "above"--the fates, +the gods, the _forestieri_, the town-councilmen, the rich or the stingy. +Common Florence, on the narrow footways, pressed against the houses, +obeyed a natural need in looking about complacently, patiently, gently, +and never pushing, nor trampling, nor swearing, nor staggering. This +liberal margin for festivals in Italy gives the masses a more than +man-of-the-world urbanity in taking their pleasure. + +Meanwhile it occurs to me that by a remote New England fireside an +unsophisticated young person of either sex is reading in an old volume +of travels or an old romantic tale some account of these anniversaries +and appointed revels as old Catholic lands offer them to view. Across +the page swims a vision of sculptured palace-fronts draped in crimson +and gold and shining in a southern sun; of a motley train of maskers +sweeping on in voluptuous confusion and pelting each other with nosegays +and love-letters. Into the quiet room, quenching the rhythm of the +Connecticut clock, floats an uproar of delighted voices, a medley of +stirring foreign sounds, an echo of far-heard music of a strangely alien +cadence. But the dusk is falling, and the unsophisticated young person +closes the book wearily and wanders to the window. The dusk is falling +on the beaten snow. Down the road is a white wooden meeting-house, +looking grey among the drifts. The young person surveys the prospect +a while, and then wanders back and stares at the fire. The Carnival of +Venice, of Florence, of Rome; colour and costume, romance and rapture! +The young person gazes in the firelight at the flickering chiaroscuro +of the future, discerns at last the glowing phantasm of opportunity, +and determines with a wild heart-beat to go and see it all--twenty years +hence! + + +II + + +A couple of days since, driving to Fiesole, we came back by the castle +of Vincigliata. The afternoon was lovely; and, though there is as yet +(February 10th) no visible revival of vegetation, the air was full of a +vague vernal perfume, and the warm colours of the hills and the yellow +western sunlight flooding the plain seemed to contain the promise of +Nature's return to grace. It's true that above the distant pale blue +gorge of Vallombrosa the mountain-line was tipped with snow; but the +liberated soul of Spring was nevertheless at large. The view from +Fiesole seems vaster and richer with each visit. The hollow in which +Florence lies, and which from below seems deep and contracted, opens +out into an immense and generous valley and leads away the eye into +a hundred gradations of distance. The place itself showed, amid its +chequered fields and gardens, with as many towers and spires as a +chess-board half cleared. The domes and towers were washed over with +a faint blue mist. The scattered columns of smoke, interfused with the +sinking sunlight, hung over them like streamers and pennons of silver +gauze; and the Arno, twisting and curling and glittering here and there, +was a serpent cross-striped with silver. + +Vincigliata is a product of the millions, the leisure and the +eccentricity, I suppose people say, of an English gentleman--Mr. Temple +Leader, whose name should be commemorated. You reach the castle from +Fiesole by a narrow road, returning toward Florence by a romantic twist +through the hills and passing nothing on its way save thin plantations +of cypress and cedar. Upward of twenty years ago, I believe, this +gentleman took a fancy to the crumbling shell of a medival fortress on +a breezy hill-top overlooking the Val d' Arno and forthwith bought it +and began to "restore" it. I know nothing of what the original ruin may +have cost; but in the dusky courts and chambers of the present elaborate +structure this impassioned archologist must have buried a fortune. He +has, however, the compensation of feeling that he has erected a monument +which, if it is never to stand a feudal siege, may encounter at least +some critical over-hauling. It is a disinterested work of art and really +a triumph of sthetic culture. The author has reproduced with minute +accuracy a sturdy home-fortress of the fourteenth century, and has kept +throughout such rigid terms with his model that the result is literally +uninhabitable to degenerate moderns. It is simply a massive facsimile, +an elegant museum of archaic images, mainly but most amusingly +counterfeit, perched on a spur of the Apennines. The place is most +politely shown. There is a charming cloister, painted with extremely +clever "quaint" frescoes, celebrating the deeds of the founders of the +castle--a cloister that is everything delightful a cloister should +be except truly venerable and employable. There is a beautiful castle +court, with the embattled tower climbing into the blue far above it, +and a spacious loggia with rugged medallions and mild-hued Luca della +Robbias fastened unevenly into the walls. But the apartments are the +great success, and each of them as good a "reconstruction" as a tale +of Walter Scott; or, to speak frankly, a much better one. They are all +low-beamed and vaulted, stone-paved, decorated in grave colours +and lighted, from narrow, deeply recessed windows, through small +leaden-ringed plates of opaque glass. + +The details are infinitely ingenious and elaborately grim, and the +indoor atmosphere of mediaevalism most forcibly revived. No compromising +fact of domiciliary darkness and cold is spared us, no producing +condition of mediaeval manners not glanced at. There are oaken benches +round the room, of about six inches in depth, and gaunt fauteuils of +wrought leather, illustrating the suppressed transitions which, as +George Eliot says, unite all contrasts--offering a visible link between +the modern conceptions of torture and of luxury. There are fireplaces +nowhere but in the kitchen, where a couple of sentry-boxes are inserted +on either side of the great hooded chimney-piece, into which people +might creep and take their turn at being toasted and smoked. One may +doubt whether this dearth of the hearthstone could have raged on such +a scale, but it's a happy stroke in the representation of an Italian +dwelling of any period. It shows how the graceful fiction that Italy +is all "meridional" flourished for some time before being refuted +by grumbling tourists. And yet amid this cold comfort you feel the +incongruous presence of a constant intuitive regard for beauty. The +shapely spring of the vaulted ceilings; the richly figured walls, coarse +and hard in substance as they are; the charming shapes of the great +platters and flagons in the deep recesses of the quaintly carved black +dressers; the wandering hand of ornament, as it were, playing here and +there for its own diversion in unlighted corners--such things redress, +to our fond credulity, with all sorts of grace, the balance of the +picture. + +And yet, somehow, with what dim, unillumined vision one fancies even +such inmates as those conscious of finer needs than the mere supply of +blows and beef and beer would meet passing their heavy eyes over +such slender household beguilements! These crepuscular chambers +at Vincigliata are a mystery and a challenge; they seem the mere +propounding of an answerless riddle. You long, as you wander through +them, turning up your coat-collar and wondering whether ghosts can catch +bronchitis, to answer it with some positive notion of what people so +encaged and situated "did," how they looked and talked and carried +themselves, how they took their pains and pleasures, how they counted +off the hours. Deadly ennui seems to ooze out of the stones and hang in +clouds in the brown corners. No wonder men relished a fight and panted +for a fray. "Skull-smashers" were sweet, ears ringing with pain and +ribs cracking in a tussle were soothing music, compared with the cruel +quietude of the dim-windowed castle. When they came back they could only +have slept a good deal and eased their dislocated bones on those meagre +oaken ledges. Then they woke up and turned about to the table and ate +their portion of roasted sheep. They shouted at each other across the +board and flung the wooden plates at the servingmen. They jostled and +hustled and hooted and bragged; and then, after gorging and boozing +and easing their doublets, they squared their elbows one by one on the +greasy table and buried their scarred foreheads and dreamed of a good +gallop after flying foes. And the women? They must have been strangely +simple--simpler far than any moral archraeologist can show us in a +learned restoration. Of course, their simplicity had its graces and +devices; but one thinks with a sigh that, as the poor things turned away +with patient looks from the viewless windows to the same, same looming +figures on the dusky walls, they hadn't even the consolation of knowing +that just this attitude and movement, set off by their peaked coifs, +their falling sleeves and heavily-twisted trains, would sow the seed of +yearning envy--of sorts--on the part of later generations. + +There are moods in which one feels the impulse to enter a tacit protest +against too gross an appetite for pure aesthetics in this starving and +sinning world. One turns half away, musingly, from certain beautiful +useless things. But the healthier state of mind surely is to lay no tax +on any really intelligent manifestation of the curious, and exquisite. +Intelligence hangs together essentially, all along the line; it only +needs time to make, as we say, its connections. The massive _pastiche_ +of Vincigliata has no superficial use; but, even if it were less +complete, less successful, less brilliant, I should feel a reflective +kindness for it. So disinterested and expensive a toy is its own +justification; it belongs to the heroics of dilettantism. + + +III + + +One grows to feel the collection of pictures at the Pitti Palace +splendid rather than interesting. After walking through it once or twice +you catch the key in which it is pitched--you know what you are +likely not to find on closer examination; none of the works of the +uncompromising period, nothing from the half-groping geniuses of the +early time, those whose colouring was sometimes harsh and their outlines +sometimes angular. Vague to me the principle on which the pictures +were originally gathered and of the aesthetic creed of the princes who +chiefly selected them. A princely creed I should roughly call it--the +creed of people who believed in things presenting a fine face to +society; who esteemed showy results rather than curious processes, and +would have hardly cared more to admit into their collection a work by +one of the laborious precursors of the full efflorescence than to see a +bucket and broom left standing in a state saloon. The gallery contains +in literal fact some eight or ten paintings of the early Tuscan +School--notably two admirable specimens of Filippo Lippi and one of the +frequent circular pictures of the great Botticelli--a Madonna, chilled +with tragic prescience, laying a pale cheek against that of a blighted +Infant. Such a melancholy mother as this of Botticelli would have +strangled her baby in its cradle to rescue it from the future. But of +Botticelli there is much to say. One of the Filippo Lippis is perhaps +his masterpiece--a Madonna in a small rose-garden (such a "flowery +close" as Mr. William Morris loves to haunt), leaning over an Infant who +kicks his little human heels on the grass while half-a-dozen curly-pated +angels gather about him, looking back over their shoulders with the +candour of children in _tableaux vivants_, and one of them drops an +armful of gathered roses one by one upon the baby. The delightful +earthly innocence of these winged youngsters is quite inexpressible. +Their heads are twisted about toward the spectator as if they were +playing at leap-frog and were expecting a companion to come and take +a jump. Never did "young" art, never did subjective freshness, attempt +with greater success to represent those phases. But these three fine +works are hung over the tops of doors in a dark back room--the bucket +and broom are thrust behind a curtain. It seems to me, nevertheless, +that a fine Filippo Lippi is good enough company for an Allori or a +Cigoli, and that that too deeply sentient Virgin of Botticelli might +happily balance the flower-like irresponsibility of Raphael's "Madonna +of the Chair." + +Taking the Pitti collection, however, simply for what it pretends to +be, it gives us the very flower of the sumptuous, the courtly, the +grand-ducal. It is chiefly official art, as one may say, but it presents +the fine side of the type--the brilliancy, the facility, the amplitude, +the sovereignty of good taste. I agree on the whole with a nameless +companion and with what he lately remarked about his own humour on +these matters; that, having been on his first acquaintance with +pictures nothing if not critical, and held the lesson incomplete and +the opportunity slighted if he left a gallery without a headache, he +had come, as he grew older, to regard them more as the grandest of +all pleasantries and less as the most strenuous of all lessons, and to +remind himself that, after all, it is the privilege of art to make us +friendly to the human mind and not to make us suspicious of it. We do +in fact as we grow older unstring the critical bow a little and strike +a truce with invidious comparisons. We work off the juvenile impulse +to heated partisanship and discover that one spontaneous producer isn't +different enough from another to keep the all-knowing Fates from smiling +over our loves and our aversions. We perceive a certain human solidarity +in all cultivated effort, and are conscious of a growing accommodation +of judgment--an easier disposition, the fruit of experience, to take +the joke for what it is worth as it passes. We have in short less of a +quarrel with the masters we don't delight in, and less of an impulse +to pin all our faith on those in whom, in more zealous days, we fancied +that we made our peculiar meanings. The meanings no longer seem quite so +peculiar. Since then we have arrived at a few in the depths of our own +genius that are not sensibly less striking. + +And yet it must be added that all this depends vastly on one's mood--as +a traveller's impressions do, generally, to a degree which those who +give them to the world would do well more explicitly to declare. We have +our hours of expansion and those of contraction, and yet while we follow +the traveller's trade we go about gazing and judging with unadjusted +confidence. We can't suspend judgment; we must take our notes, and the +notes are florid or crabbed, as the case may be. A short time ago I +spent a week in an ancient city on a hill-top, in the humour, for which +I was not to blame, which produces crabbed notes. I knew it at the +time, but couldn't help it. I went through all the motions of liberal +appreciation; I uncapped in all the churches and on the massive ramparts +stared all the views fairly out of countenance; but my imagination, +which I suppose at bottom had very good reasons of its own and knew +perfectly what it was about, refused to project into the dark old town +and upon the yellow hills that sympathetic glow which forms half the +substance of our genial impressions. So it is that in museums and +palaces we are alternate radicals and conservatives. On some days we ask +but to be somewhat sensibly affected; on others, Ruskin-haunted, to be +spiritually steadied. After a long absence from the Pitti Palace I went +back there the other morning and transferred myself from chair to +chair in the great golden-roofed saloons--the chairs are all gilded and +covered with faded silk--in the humour to be diverted at any price. I +needn't mention the things that diverted me; I yawn now when I think of +some of them. But an artist, for instance, to whom my kindlier judgment +has made permanent concessions is that charming Andrea del Sarto. When +I first knew him, in my cold youth, I used to say without mincing that +I didn't like him. _Cet ge est sans piti_. The fine sympathetic, +melancholy, pleasing painter! He has a dozen faults, and if you insist +pedantically on your rights the conclusive word you use about him will +be the word weak. But if you are a generous soul you will utter it +low--low as the mild grave tone of his own sought harmonies. He is +monotonous, narrow, incomplete; he has but a dozen different figures and +but two or three ways of distributing them; he seems able to utter but +half his thought, and his canvases lack apparently some final return on +the whole matter--some process which his impulse failed him before he +could bestow. And yet in spite of these limitations his genius is both +itself of the great pattern and lighted by the air of a great period. +Three gifts he had largely: an instinctive, unaffected, unerring grace; +a large and rich, and yet a sort of withdrawn and indifferent sobriety; +and best of all, as well as rarest of all, an indescribable property +of relatedness as to the moral world. Whether he was aware of the +connection or not, or in what measure, I cannot say; but he gives, so to +speak, the taste of it. Before his handsome vague-browed Madonnas; the +mild, robust young saints who kneel in his foregrounds and look round +at you with a conscious anxiety which seems to say that, though in the +picture, they are not of it, but of your own sentient life of commingled +love and weariness; the stately apostles, with comely heads and +harmonious draperies, who gaze up at the high-seated Virgin like early +astronomers at a newly seen star--there comes to you the brush of the +dark wing of an inward life. A shadow falls for the moment, and in it +you feel the chill of moral suffering. Did the Lippis suffer, father +or son? Did Raphael suffer? Did Titian? Did Rubens suffer? Perish +the thought--it wouldn't be fair to _us_ that they should have had +everything. And I note in our poor second-rate Andrea an element of +interest lacking to a number of stronger talents. + +Interspersed with him at the Pitti hang the stronger and the weaker +in splendid abundance. Raphael is there, strong in portraiture--easy, +various, bountiful genius that he was--and (strong here isn't the word, +but) happy beyond the common dream in his beautiful "Madonna of the +Chair." The general instinct of posterity seems to have been to +treat this lovely picture as a semi-sacred, an almost miraculous, +manifestation. People stand in a worshipful silence before it, as they +would before a taper-studded shrine. If we suspend in imagination on the +right of it the solid, realistic, unidealised portrait of Leo the Tenth +(which hangs in another room) and transport to the left the fresco of +the School of Athens from the Vatican, and then reflect that these were +three separate fancies of a single youthful, amiable genius we recognise +that such a producing consciousness must have been a "treat." My +companion already quoted has a phrase that he "doesn't care for +Raphael," but confesses, when pressed, that he was a most remarkable +young man. Titian has a dozen portraits of unequal interest. I never +particularly noticed till lately--it is very ill hung--that portentous +image of the Emperor Charles the Fifth. He was a burlier, more imposing +personage than his usual legend figures, and in his great puffed sleeves +and gold chains and full-skirted over-dress he seems to tell of a +tread that might sometimes have been inconveniently resonant. But the +_purpose_ to have his way and work his will is there--the great stomach +for divine right, the old monarchical temperament. The great Titian, in +portraiture, however, remains that formidable young man in black, with +the small compact head, the delicate nose and the irascible blue eye. +Who was he? What was he? "_Ritratto virile_" is all the catalogue is +able to call the picture. "Virile!" Rather! you vulgarly exclaim. You +may weave what romance you please about it, but a romance your dream +must be. Handsome, clever, defiant, passionate, dangerous, it was not +his own fault if he hadn't adventures and to spare. He was a gentleman +and a warrior, and his adventures balanced between camp and court. +I imagine him the young orphan of a noble house, about to come into +mortgaged estates. One wouldn't have cared to be his guardian, bound to +paternal admonitions once a month over his precocious transactions with +the Jews or his scandalous abduction from her convent of such and such a +noble maiden. + +The Pitti Gallery contains none of Titian's golden-toned groups; but +it boasts a lovely composition by Paul Veronese, the dealer in silver +hues--a Baptism of Christ. W---- named it to me the other day as the +picture he most enjoyed, and surely painting seems here to have proposed +to itself to discredit and annihilate--and even on the occasion of such +a subject--everything but the loveliness of life. The picture bedims and +enfeebles its neighbours. We ask ourselves whether painting as such can +go further. It is simply that here at last the art stands complete. +The early Tuscans, as well as Leonardo, as Raphael, as Michael, saw the +great spectacle that surrounded them in beautiful sharp-edged elements +and parts. The great Venetians felt its indissoluble unity and +recognised that form and colour and earth and air were equal members +of every possible subject; and beneath their magical touch the hard +outlines melted together and the blank intervals bloomed with meaning. +In this beautiful Paul Veronese of the Pitti everything is part of +the charm--the atmosphere as well as the figures, the look of radiant +morning in the white-streaked sky as well as the living human limbs, the +cloth of Venetian purple about the loins of the Christ as well as the +noble humility of his attitude. The relation to Nature of the other +Italian schools differs from that of the Venetian as courtship--even +ardent courtship--differs from marriage. + + +IV + + +I went the other day to the secularised Convent of San Marco, paid my +franc at the profane little wicket which creaks away at the door--no +less than six custodians, apparently, are needed to turn it, as if it +may have a recusant conscience--passed along the bright, still cloister +and paid my respects to Fra Angelico's Crucifixion, in that dusky +chamber in the basement. I looked long; one can hardly do otherwise. The +fresco deals with the pathetic on the grand scale, and after taking +in its beauty you feel as little at liberty to go away abruptly as +you would to leave church during the sermon. You may be as little of +a formal Christian as Fra Angelico was much of one; you yet feel +admonished by spiritual decency to let so yearning a view of the +Christian story work its utmost will on you. The three crosses rise high +against a strange completely crimson sky, which deepens mysteriously +the tragic expression of the scene, though I remain perforce vague as to +whether this lurid background be a fine intended piece of symbolism or +an effective accident of time. In the first case the extravagance quite +triumphs. Between the crosses, under no great rigour of composition, +are scattered the most exemplary saints--kneeling, praying, weeping, +pitying, worshipping. The swoon of the Madonna is depicted at the left, +and this gives the holy presences, in respect to the case, the strangest +historical or actual air. Everything is so real that you feel a vague +impatience and almost ask yourself how it was that amid the army of his +consecrated servants our Lord was permitted to suffer. On reflection you +see that the painter's design, so far as coherent, has been simply to +offer an immense representation of Pity, and all with such concentrated +truth that his colours here seem dissolved in tears that drop and drop, +however softly, through all time. Of this single yearning consciousness +the figures are admirably expressive. No later painter learned to render +with deeper force than Fra Angelico the one state of the spirit he could +conceive--a passionate pious tenderness. Immured in his quiet convent, +he apparently never received an intelligible impression of evil; and his +conception of human life was a perpetual sense of sacredly loving +and being loved. But how, immured in his quiet convent, away from the +streets and the studios, did he become that genuine, finished, perfectly +professional painter? No one is less of a mere mawkish amateur. His +range was broad, from this really heroic fresco to the little trumpeting +seraphs, in their opaline robes, enamelled, as it were, on the gold +margins of his pictures. + +I sat out the sermon and departed, I hope, with the gentle preacher's +blessing. I went into the smaller refectory, near by, to refresh my +memory of the beautiful Last Supper of Domenico Ghirlandaio. It would be +putting things coarsely to say that I adjourned thus from a sernlon to +a comedy, though Ghirlandaio's theme, as contrasted with the blessed +Angelico's, was the dramatic spectacular side of human life. How keenly +he observed it and how richly he rendered it, the world about him of +colour and costume, of handsome heads and pictorial groupings! In his +admirable school there is no painter one enjoys--_pace_ Ruskin--more +sociably and irresponsibly. Lippo Lippi is simpler, quainter, +more frankly expressive; but we retain before him a remnant of the +sympathetic discomfort provoked by the masters whose conceptions were +still a trifle too large for their means. The pictorial vision in their +minds seems to stretch and strain their undeveloped skill almost to a +sense of pain. In Ghirlandaio the skill and the imagination are equal, +and he gives us a delightful impression of enjoying his own resources. +Of all the painters of his time he affects us least as positively not +of ours. He enjoyed a crimson mantle spreading and tumbling in curious +folds and embroidered with needlework of gold, just as he enjoyed a +handsome well-rounded head, with vigorous dusky locks, profiled in +courteous adoration. He enjoyed in short the various reality of things, +and had the good fortune to live in an age when reality flowered into a +thousand amusing graces--to speak only of those. He was not especially +addicted to giving spiritual hints; and yet how hard and meagre they +seem, the professed and finished realists of our own day, with the +spiritual _bonhomie_ or candour that makes half Ghirlandaio's richness +left out! The Last Supper at San Marco is an excellent example of the +natural reverence of an artist of that time with whom reverence was +not, as one may say, a specialty. The main idea with him has been the +variety, the material bravery and positively social charm of the +scene, which finds expression, with irrepressible generosity, in the +accessories of the background. Instinctively he imagines an opulent +garden--imagines it with a good faith which quite tides him over the +reflection that Christ and his disciples were poor men and unused to sit +at meat in palaces. Great full-fruited orange-trees peep over the wall +before which the table is spread, strange birds fly through the air, +while a peacock perches on the edge of the partition and looks down +on the sacred repast. It is striking that, without any at all intense +religious purpose, the figures, in their varied naturalness, have a +dignity and sweetness of attitude that admits of numberless reverential +constructions. I should call all this the happy tact of a robust faith. + +On the staircase leading up to the little painted cells of the Beato +Angelico, however, I suddenly faltered and paused. Somehow I had grown +averse to the intenser zeal of the Monk of Fiesole. I wanted no more of +him that day. I wanted no more macerated friars and spear-gashed sides. +Ghirlandaio's elegant way of telling his story had put me in the humour +for something more largely intelligent, more profanely pleasing. +I departed, walked across the square, and found it in the Academy, +standing in a particular spot and looking up at a particular high-hung +picture. It is difficult to speak adequately, perhaps even intelligibly, +of Sandro Botticelli. An accomplished critic--Mr. Pater, in his _Studies +on the History of the Renaissance_--has lately paid him the tribute +of an exquisite, a supreme, curiosity. He was rarity and distinction +incarnate, and of all the multitudinous masters of his group +incomparably the most interesting, the one who detains and perplexes +and fascinates us most. Exquisitely fine his imagination--infinitely +audacious and adventurous his fancy. Alone among the painters of his +time he strikes us as having invention. The glow and thrill of expanding +observation--this was the feeling that sent his comrades to their +easels; but Botticelli's moved him to reactions and emotions of which +they knew nothing, caused his faculty to sport and wander and explore +on its own account. These impulses have fruits often so ingenious and so +lovely that it would be easy to talk nonsense about them. I hope it is +not nonsense, however, to say that the picture to which I just alluded +(the "Coronation of the Virgin," with a group of life-sized saints +below and a garland of miniature angels above) is one of the supremely +beautiful productions of the human mind. It is hung so high that +you need a good glass to see it; to say nothing of the unprecedented +delicacy of the work. The lower half is of moderate interest; but the +dance of hand-clasped angels round the heavenly couple above has a +beauty newly exhaled from the deepest sources of inspiration. Their +perfect little hands are locked with ineffable elegance; their blowing +robes are tossed into folds of which each line is a study; their +charming feet have the relief of the most delicate sculpture. But, as +I have already noted, of Botticelli there is much, too much to +say--besides which Mr. Pater has said all. Only add thus to his +inimitable grace of design that the exquisite pictorial force driving +him goes a-Maying not on wanton errands of its own, but on those of some +mystic superstition which trembles for ever in his heart. + +{Illustration: THE GREAT EAVES, FLORENCE} + + +V + + +The more I look at the old Florentine domestic architecture the more I +like it--that of the great examples at least; and if I ever am able to +build myself a lordly pleasure-house I don't see how in conscience I can +build it different from these. They are sombre and frowning, and look +a trifle more as if they were meant to keep people out than to let +them in; but what equally "important" type--if there be an equally +important--is more expressive of domiciliary dignity and security and +yet attests them with a finer esthetic economy? They are impressively +"handsome," and yet contrive to be so by the simplest means. I don't say +at the smallest pecuniary cost--that's another matter. There is money +buried in the thick walls and diffused through the echoing excess of +space. The merchant nobles of the fifteenth century had deep and full +pockets, I suppose, though the present bearers of their names are glad +to let out their palaces in suites of apartments which are occupied by +the commercial aristocracy of another republic. One is told of fine old +mouldering chambers of which possession is to be enjoyed for a sum not +worth mentioning. I am afraid that behind these so gravely harmonious +fronts there is a good deal of dusky discomfort, and I speak now simply +of the large serious faces themselves as you can see them from the +street; see them ranged cheek to cheek, in the grey historic light of +Via dei Bardi, Via Maggio, Via degli Albizzi. The force of character, +the familiar severity and majesty, depend on a few simple features: on +the great iron-caged windows of the rough-hewn basement; on the noble +stretch of space between the summit of one high, round-topped window +and the bottom of that above; on the high-hung sculptured shield at the +angle of the house; on the flat far-projecting roof; and, finally, on +the magnificent tallness of the whole building, which so dwarfs our +modern attempts at size. The finest of these Florentine palaces are, I +imagine, the tallest habitations in Europe that are frankly and +amply habitations--not mere shafts for machinery of the American +grain-elevator pattern. Some of the creations of M. Haussmann in Paris +may climb very nearly as high; but there is all the difference in the +world between the impressiveness of a building which takes breath, as +it were, some six or seven times, from storey to storey, and of one that +erects itself to an equal height in three long-drawn pulsations. When +a house is ten windows wide and the drawing-room floor is as high as a +chapel it can afford but three floors. The spaciousness of some of those +ancient drawing-rooms is that of a Russian steppe. The "family circle," +gathered anywhere within speaking distance, must resemble a group of +pilgrims encamped in the desert on a little oasis of carpet. Madame +Gryzanowska, living at the top of a house in that dusky, tortuous old +Borgo Pinti, initiated me the other evening most good-naturedly, lamp in +hand, into the far-spreading mysteries of her apartment. Such quarters +seem a translation into space of the old-fashioned idea of leisure. +Leisure and "room" have been passing out of our manners together, but +here and there, being of stouter structure, the latter lingers and +survives. + +Here and there, indeed, in this blessed Italy, reluctantly modern in +spite alike of boasts and lamentations, it seems to have been preserved +for curiosity's and fancy's sake, with a vague, sweet odour of the +embalmer's spices about it. I went the other morning to the Corsini +Palace. The proprietors obviously are great people. One of the ornaments +of Rome is their great white-faced palace in the dark Trastevere and +its voluminous gallery, none the less delectable for the poorness of +the pictures. Here they have a palace on the Arno, with another large, +handsome, respectable and mainly uninteresting collection. It contains +indeed three or four fine examples of early Florentines. It was not +especially for the pictures that I went, however; and certainly not for +the pictures that I stayed. I was under the same spell as the inveterate +companion with whom I walked the other day through the beautiful private +apartments of the Pitti Palace and who said: "I suppose I care for +nature, and I know there have been times when I have thought it the +greatest pleasure in life to lie under a tree and gaze away at blue +hills. But just now I had rather lie on that faded sea-green satin sofa +and gaze down through the open door at that retreating vista of gilded, +deserted, haunted chambers. In other words I prefer a good 'interior' +to a good landscape. The impression has a greater intensity--the thing +itself a more complex animation. I like fine old rooms that have been +occupied in a fine old way. I like the musty upholstery, the antiquated +knick-knacks, the view out of the tall deep-embrasured windows at garden +cypresses rocking against a grey sky. If you don't know why, I'm afraid +I can't tell you." It seemed to me at the Palazzo Corsini that I did +know why. In places that have been lived in so long and so much and in +such a fine old way, as my friend said--that is under social conditions +so multifold and to a comparatively starved and democratic sense so +curious--the past seems to have left a sensible deposit, an aroma, an +atmosphere. This ghostly presence tells you no secrets, but it prompts +you to try and guess a few. What has been done and said here through so +many years, what has been ventured or suffered, what has been dreamed or +despaired of? Guess the riddle if you can, or if you think it worth +your ingenuity. The rooms at Palazzo Corsini suggest indeed, and seem +to recall, but a monotony of peace and plenty. One of them imaged such +a noble perfection of a home-scene that I dawdled there until the old +custodian came shuffling back to see whether possibly I was trying +to conceal a Caravaggio about my person: a great crimson-draped +drawing-room of the amplest and yet most charming proportions; walls +hung with large dark pictures, a great concave ceiling frescoed and +moulded with dusky richness, and half-a-dozen south windows looking out +on the Arno, whose swift yellow tide sends up the light in a cheerful +flicker. I fear that in my appreciation of the particular effect so +achieved I uttered a monstrous folly--some momentary willingness to be +maimed or crippled all my days if I might pass them in such a place. In +fact half the pleasure of inhabiting this spacious saloon would be that +of using one's legs, of strolling up and down past the windows, one by +one, and making desultory journeys from station to station and corner +to corner. Near by is a colossal ball-room, domed and pilastered like +a Renaissance cathedral, and super-abundantly decorated with marble +effigies, all yellow and grey with the years. + + +VI + + +In the Carthusian Monastery outside the Roman Gate, mutilated and +profaned though it is, one may still snuff up a strong if stale +redolence of old Catholicism and old Italy. The road to it is ugly, +being encumbered with vulgar waggons and fringed with tenements +suggestive of an Irish-American suburb. Your interest begins as you +come in sight of the convent perched on its little mountain and lifting +against the sky, around the bell-tower of its gorgeous chapel, a coronet +of clustered cells. You make your way into the lower gate, through a +clamouring press of deformed beggars who thrust at you their stumps +of limbs, and you climb the steep hillside through a shabby plantation +which it is proper to fancy was better tended in the monkish time. The +monks are not totally abolished, the government having the grace to +await the natural extinction of the half-dozen old brothers who remain, +and who shuffle doggedly about the cloisters, looking, with their white +robes and their pale blank old faces, quite anticipatory ghosts of their +future selves. A prosaic, profane old man in a coat and trousers serves +you, however, as custodian. The melancholy friars have not even the +privilege of doing you the honours of their dishonour. One must imagine +the pathetic effect of their former silent pointings to this and that +conventual treasure under stress of the feeling that such pointings were +narrowly numbered. The convent is vast and irregular--it bristles with +those picture-making arts and accidents which one notes as one lingers +and passes, but which in Italy the overburdened memory learns to resolve +into broadly general images. I rather deplore its position at the gates +of a bustling city--it ought rather to be lodged in some lonely fold of +the Apennines. And yet to look out from the shady porch of one of the +quiet cells upon the teeming vale of the Arno and the clustered towers +of Florence must have deepened the sense of monastic quietude. + +The chapel, or rather the church, which is of great proportions and +designed by Andrea Orcagna, the primitive painter, refines upon the +consecrated type or even quite glorifies it. The massive cincture +of black sculptured stalls, the dusky Gothic roof, the high-hung, +deep-toned pictures and the superb pavement of verd-antique and dark red +marble, polished into glassy lights, must throw the white-robed figures +of the gathered friars into the highest romantic relief. All this luxury +of worship has nowhere such value as in the chapels of monasteries, +where we find it contrasted with the otherwise so ascetic economy of the +worshippers. The paintings and gildings of their church, the gem-bright +marbles and fantastic carvings, are really but the monastic tribute to +sensuous delight--an imperious need for which the fond imagination of +Rome has officiously opened the door. One smiles when one thinks how +largely a fine starved sense for the forbidden things of earth, if it +makes the most of its opportunities, may gratify this need under +cover of devotion. Nothing is too base, too hard, too sordid for real +humility, but nothing too elegant, too amiable, too caressing, caressed, +caressable, for the exaltation of faith. The meaner the convent cell the +richer the convent chapel. Out of poverty and solitude, inanition and +cold, your honest friar may rise at his will into a Mahomet's Paradise +of luxurious analogies. + +There are further various dusky subterranean oratories where a number +of bad pictures contend faintly with the friendly gloom. Two or three of +these funereal vaults, however, deserve mention. In one of them, side +by side, sculptured by Donatello in low relief, lie the white marble +effigies of the three members of the Accaiuoli family who founded the +convent in the thirteenth century. In another, on his back, on the +pavement, rests a grim old bishop of the same stout race by the same +honest craftsman. Terribly grim he is, and scowling as if in his stony +sleep he still dreamed of his hates and his hard ambitions. Last and +best, in another low chapel, with the trodden pavement for its bed, +shines dimly a grand image of a later bishop--Leonardo Buonafede, who, +dying in 1545, owes his monument to Francesco di San Gallo. I have seen +little from this artist's hand, but it was clearly of the cunningest. +His model here was a very sturdy old prelate, though I should say a very +genial old man. The sculptor has respected his monumental ugliness, +but has suffused it with a singular homely charm--a look of confessed +physical comfort in the privilege of paradise. All these figures have +an inimitable reality, and their lifelike marble seems such an +incorruptible incarnation of the genius of the place that you begin to +think of it as even more reckless than cruel on the part of the present +public powers to have begun to pull the establishment down, morally +speaking, about their ears. They are lying quiet yet a while; but when +the last old friar dies and the convent formally lapses, won't they rise +on their stiff old legs and hobble out to the gates and thunder forth +anathemas before which even a future and more enterprising rgime may be +disposed to pause? + +Out of the great central cloister open the snug little detached +dwellings of the absent fathers. When I said just now that the Certosa +in Val d'Ema gives you a glimpse of old Italy I was thinking of this +great pillared quadrangle, lying half in sun and half in shade, of its +tangled garden-growth in the centre, surrounding the ancient customary +well, and of the intense blue sky bending above it, to say nothing of +the indispensable old white-robed monk who pokes about among the lettuce +and parsley. We have seen such places before; we have visited them in +that divinatory glance which strays away into space for a moment over +the top of a suggestive book. I don't quite know whether it's more or +less as one's fancy would have it that the monkish cells are no cells +at all, but very tidy little _appartements complets_, consisting of a +couple of chambers, a sitting-room and a spacious loggia, projecting out +into space from the cliff-like wall of the monastery and sweeping from +pole to pole the loveliest view in the world. It's poor work, however, +taking notes on views, and I will let this one pass. The little chambers +are terribly cold and musty now. Their odour and atmosphere are such +as one used, as a child, to imagine those of the school-room during +Saturday and Sunday. + + +VII + + +In the Roman streets, wherever you turn, the facade of a church in more +or less degenerate flamboyance is the principal feature of the scene; +and if, in the absence of purer motives, you are weary of aesthetic +trudging over the corrugated surface of the Seven Hills, a system of +pavement in which small cobble-stones anomalously endowed with angles +and edges are alone employed, you may turn aside at your pleasure and +take a reviving sniff at the pungency of incense. In Florence, one soon +observes, the churches are relatively few and the dusky house-fronts +more rarely interrupted by specimens of that extraordinary architecture +which in Rome passes for sacred. In Florence, in other words, +ecclesiasticism is less cheap a commodity and not dispensed in the same +abundance at the street-corners. Heaven forbid, at the same time, that +I should undervalue the Roman churches, which are for the most +part treasure-houses of history, of curiosity, of promiscuous and +associational interest. It is a fact, nevertheless, that, after St. +Peter's, I know but one really beautiful church by the Tiber, the +enchanting basilica of St. Mary Major. Many have structural character, +some a great _allure_, but as a rule they all lack the dignity of +the best of the Florentine temples. Here, the list being immeasurably +shorter and the seed less scattered, the principal churches are all +beautiful. And yet I went into the Annunziata the other day and sat +there for half-an-hour because, forsooth, the gildings and the marbles +and the frescoed dome and the great rococo shrine near the door, with +its little black jewelled fetish, reminded me so poignantly of Rome. +Such is the city properly styled eternal--since it is eternal, at least, +as regards the consciousness of the individual. One loves it in its +sophistications--though for that matter isn't it all rich and precious +sophistication?--better than other places in their purity. + +Coming out of the Annunziata you look past the bronze statue of the +Grand Duke Ferdinand I (whom Mr. Browning's heroine used to watch +for--in the poem of "The Statue and the Bust"--from the red palace near +by), and down a street vista of enchanting picturesqueness. The street +is narrow and dusky and filled with misty shadows, and at its opposite +end rises the vast bright-coloured side of the Cathedral. It stands up +in very much the same mountainous fashion as the far-shining mass of the +bigger prodigy at Milan, of which your first glimpse as you leave your +hotel is generally through another such dark avenue; only that, if we +talk of mountains, the white walls of Milan must be likened to snow and +ice from their base, while those of the Duomo of Florence may be the +image of some mighty hillside enamelled with blooming flowers. The big +bleak interior here has a naked majesty which, though it may fail of +its effect at first, becomes after a while extraordinarily touching. +Originally disconcerting, it soon inspired me with a passion. +Externally, at any rate, it is one of the loveliest works of man's +hands, and an overwhelming proof into the bargain that when elegance +belittles grandeur you have simply had a bungling artist. + +Santa Croce within not only triumphs here, but would triumph anywhere. +"A trifle naked if you like," said my irrepressible companion, "but +that's what I call architecture, just as I don't call bronze or marble +clothes (save under urgent stress of portraiture) statuary." And indeed +we are far enough away from the clustering odds and ends borrowed from +every art and every province without which the ritually builded thing +doesn't trust its spell to work in Rome. The vastness, the lightness, +the open spring of the arches at Santa Croce, the beautiful shape of the +high and narrow choir, the impression made as of mass without weight and +the gravity yet reigning without gloom--these are my frequent delight, +and the interest grows with acquaintance. The place is the great +Florentine Valhalla, the final home or memorial harbour of the native +illustrious dead, but that consideration of it would take me far. It +must be confessed moreover that, between his coarsely-imagined statue +out in front and his horrible monument in one of the aisles, the author +of _The Divine Comedy_, for instance, is just hereabouts rather an +extravagant figure. "Ungrateful Florence," declaims Byron. Ungrateful +indeed--would she were more so! the susceptible spirit of the great +exile may be still aware enough to exclaim; in common, that is, with +most of the other immortals sacrificed on so very large a scale to +current Florentine "plastic" facility. In explanation of which remark, +however, I must confine myself to noting that, as almost all the old +monuments at Santa Croce are small, comparatively small, and interesting +and exquisite, so the modern, well nigh without exception, are +disproportionately vast and pompous, or in other words distressingly +vague and vain. The aptitude of hand, the compositional assurance, with +which such things are nevertheless turned out, constitutes an anomaly +replete with suggestion for an observer of the present state of the arts +on the soil and in the air that once befriended them, taking them all +together, as even the soil and the air of Greece scarce availed to do. +But on this head, I repeat, there would be too much to say; and I find +myself checked by the same warning at the threshold of the church in +Florence really interesting beyond Santa Croce, beyond all others. Such, +of course, easily, is Santa Maria Novella, where the chapels are lined +and plated with wonderful figured and peopled fresco-work even as most +of those in Rome with precious inanimate substances. These overscored +retreats of devotion, as dusky, some of them, as eremitic caves swarming +with importunate visions, have kept me divided all winter between the +love of Ghirlandaio and the fear of those seeds of catarrh to which +their mortal chill seems propitious till far on into the spring. So +I pause here just on the praise of that delightful painter--as to +the spirit of whose work the reflections I have already made are but +confirmed by these examples. In the choir at Santa Maria Novella, where +the incense swings and the great chants resound, between the gorgeous +coloured window and the florid grand altar, he still "goes in," with +all his might, for the wicked, the amusing world, the world of faces and +forms and characters, of every sort of curious human and rare material +thing. + +{Illustration: BOBOLI GARDEN, FLORENCE.} + + +VIII + + +I had always felt the Boboli Gardens charming enough for me to "haunt" +them; and yet such is the interest of Florence in every quarter that it +took another _corso_ of the same cheap pattern as the last to cause me +yesterday to flee the crowded streets, passing under that archway of the +Pitti Palace which might almost be the gate of an Etruscan city, so that +I might spend the afternoon among the mouldy statues that compose with +their screens of cypress, looking down at our clustered towers and our +background of pale blue hills vaguely freckled with white villas. These +pleasure-grounds of the austere Pitti pile, with its inconsequent charm +of being so rough-hewn and yet somehow so elegantly balanced, plead with +a voice all their own the general cause of the ample enclosed, planted, +cultivated private preserve--preserve of tranquillity and beauty and +immunity--in the heart of a city; a cause, I allow, for that matter, +easy to plead anywhere, once the pretext is found, the large, quiet, +distributed town-garden, with the vague hum of big grudging boundaries +all about it, but with everything worse excluded, being of course the +most insolently-pleasant thing in the world. In addition to which, when +the garden is in the Italian manner, with flowers rather remarkably +omitted, as too flimsy and easy and cheap, and without lawns that +are too smart, paths that are too often swept and shrubs that are too +closely trimmed, though with a fanciful formalism giving style to its +shabbiness, and here and there a dusky ilex-walk, and here and there a +dried-up fountain, and everywhere a piece of mildewed sculpture staring +at you from a green alcove, and just in the right place, above all, a +grassy amphitheatre curtained behind with black cypresses and sloping +downward in mossy marble steps--when, I say, the place possesses these +attractions, and you lounge there of a soft Sunday afternoon, the racier +spectacle of the streets having made your fellow-loungers few and left +you to the deep stillness and the shady vistas that lead you wonder +where, left you to the insidious irresistible mixture of nature and art, +nothing too much of either, only a supreme happy resultant, a divine +_tertium quid_: under these conditions, it need scarce be said the +revelation invoked descends upon you. + +The Boboli Gardens are not large--you wonder how compact little Florence +finds room for them within her walls. But they are scattered, to their +extreme, their all-romantic advantage and felicity, over a group +of steep undulations between the rugged and terraced palace and a +still-surviving stretch of city wall, where the unevenness of the ground +much adds to their apparent size. You may cultivate in them the fancy of +their solemn and haunted character, of something faint and dim and even, +if you like, tragic, in their prescribed, their functional smile; as if +they borrowed from the huge monument that overhangs them certain of its +ponderous memories and regrets. This course is open to you, I mention, +but it isn't enjoined, and will doubtless indeed not come up for you +at all if it isn't your habit, cherished beyond any other, to spin your +impressions to the last tenuity of fineness. Now that I bethink myself I +must always have happened to wander here on grey and melancholy days. It +remains none the less true that the place contains, thank goodness--or +at least thank the grave, the infinitely-distinguished traditional +_taste_ of Florence--no cheerful, trivial object, neither parterres, nor +pagodas, nor peacocks, nor swans. They have their famous amphitheatre +already referred to, with its degrees or stone benches of a thoroughly +aged and mottled complexion and its circular wall of evergreens behind, +in which small cracked images and vases, things that, according to +association, and with the law of the same quite indefinable, may make as +much on one occasion for exquisite dignity as they may make on another +for (to express it kindly) nothing at all. Something was once done in +this charmed and forsaken circle--done or meant to be done; what was it, +dumb statues, who saw it with your blank eyes? Opposite stands the +huge flat-roofed palace, putting forward two great rectangular arms and +looking, with its closed windows and its foundations of almost unreduced +rock, like some ghost of a sample of a ruder Babylon. In the wide +court-like space between the wings is a fine old white marble fountain +that never plays. Its dusty idleness completes the general air of +abandonment. Chancing on such a cluster of objects in Italy--glancing at +them in a certain light and a certain mood--I get (perhaps on too easy +terms, you may think) a sense of _history_ that takes away my breath. +Generations of Medici have stood at these closed windows, embroidered +and brocaded according to their period, and held _fetes champetres_ and +floral games on the greensward, beneath the mouldering hemicycle. And +the Medici were great people! But what remains of it all now is a mere +tone in the air, a faint sigh in the breeze, a vague expression in +things, a passive--or call it rather, perhaps, to be fair, a shyly, +pathetically responsive--accessibility to the yearning guess. Call +it much or call it little, the ineffaceability of this deep stain +of experience, it is the interest of old places and the bribe to the +brooding analyst. Time has devoured the doers and their doings, but +there still hangs about some effect of their passage. We can "layout" +parks on virgin soil, and cause them to bristle with the most expensive +importations, but we unfortunately can't scatter abroad again this seed +of the eventual human soul of a place--that comes but in its time and +takes too long to grow. There is nothing like it when it _has_ come. + + + + + +TUSCAN CITIES + + +The cities I refer to are Leghorn, Pisa, Lucca and Pistoia, among which +I have been spending the last few days. The most striking fact as to +Leghorn, it must be conceded at the outset, is that, being in Tuscany, +it should be so scantily Tuscan. The traveller curious in local colour +must content himself with the deep blue expanse of the Mediterranean. +The streets, away from the docks, are modern, genteel and rectangular; +Liverpool might acknowledge them if it weren't for their clean-coloured, +sun-bleached stucco. They are the offspring of the new industry which is +death to the old idleness. Of interesting architecture, fruit of the +old idleness or at least of the old leisure, Leghorn is singularly +destitute. It has neither a church worth one's attention, nor a +municipal palace, nor a museum, and it may claim the distinction, unique +in Italy, of being the city of no pictures. In a shabby corner near +the docks stands a statue of one of the elder Grand Dukes of Tuscany, +appealing to posterity on grounds now vague--chiefly that of having +placed certain Moors under tribute. Four colossal negroes, in very bad +bronze, are chained to the base of the monument, which forms with their +assistance a sufficiently fantastic group; but to patronise the arts is +not the line of the Livornese, and for want of the slender annuity +which would keep its precinct sacred this curious memorial is buried +in dockyard rubbish. I must add that on the other hand there is a very +well-conditioned and, in attitude and gesture, extremely natural and +familiar statue of Cavour in one of the city squares, and in another a +couple of effigies of recent Grand Dukes, represented, that is dressed, +or rather undressed, in the character of heroes of Plutarch. Leghorn +is a city of magnificent spaces, and it was so long a journey from the +sidewalk to the pedestal of these images that I never took the time +to go and read the inscriptions. And in truth, vaguely, I bore the +originals a grudge, and wished to know as little about them as possible; +for it seemed to me that as _patres patrae_, in their degree, they might +have decreed that the great blank, ochre-faced piazza should be a trifle +less ugly. There is a distinct amenity, however, in any experience of +Italy almost anywhere, and I shall probably in the future not be above +sparing a light regret to several of the hours of which the one I speak +of was composed. I shall remember a large cool bourgeois villa in the +garden of a noiseless suburb--a middle-aged Villa Franco (I owe it as a +genial pleasant _pension_ the tribute of recognition), roomy and stony, +as an Italian villa should be. I shall remember that, as I sat in the +garden, and, looking up from my book, saw through a gap in the shrubbery +the red house-tiles against the deep blue sky and the grey underside of +the ilex-leaves turned up by the Mediterranean breeze, it was all still +quite Tuscany, if Tuscany in the minor key. + +If you should naturally desire, in such conditions, a higher intensity, +you have but to proceed, by a very short journey, to Pisa--where, for +that matter, you will seem to yourself to have hung about a good deal +already, and from an early age. Few of us can have had a childhood +so unblessed by contact with the arts as that one of its occasional +diversions shan't have been a puzzled scrutiny of some alabaster model +of the Leaning Tower under a glass cover in a back-parlour. Pisa and its +monuments have, in other words, been industriously vulgarised, but it +is astonishing how well they have survived the process. The charm of the +place is in fact of a high order and but partially foreshadowed by the +famous crookedness of its campanile. I felt it irresistibly and yet +almost inexpressibly the other afternoon, as I made my way to the +classic corner of the city through the warm drowsy air which nervous +people come to inhale as a sedative. I was with an invalid companion who +had had no sleep to speak of for a fortnight. "Ah! stop the carriage," +she sighed, or yawned, as I could feel, deliciously, "in the shadow of +this old slumbering palazzo, and let me sit here and close my eyes, and +taste for an hour of oblivion." Once strolling over the grass, however, +out of which the quartette of marble monuments rises, we awaked +responsively enough to the present hour. Most people remember the happy +remark of tasteful, old-fashioned Forsyth (who touched a hundred other +points in his "Italy" scarce less happily) as to the fact that the +four famous objects are "fortunate alike in their society and their +solitude." It must be admitted that they are more fortunate in their +society than we felt ourselves to be in ours; for the scene presented +the animated appearance for which, on any fine spring day, all the +choicest haunts of ancient quietude in Italy are becoming yearly more +remarkable. There were clamorous beggars at all the sculptured portals, +and bait for beggars, in abundance, trailing in and out of them under +convoy of loquacious ciceroni. I forget just how I apportioned the +responsibility, of intrusion, for it was not long before fellow-tourists +and fellow-countrymen became a vague, deadened, muffled presence, that +of the dentist's last words when he is giving you ether. They suffered +mystic disintegration in the dense, bright, tranquil air, so charged +with its own messages. The Cathedral and its companions are fortunate +indeed in everything--fortunate in the spacious angle of the grey old +city-wall which folds about them in their sculptured elegance like a +strong protecting arm; fortunate in the broad greensward which stretches +from the marble base of Cathedral and cemetery to the rugged foot of the +rampart; fortunate in the little vagabonds who dot the grass, plucking +daisies and exchanging Italian cries; fortunate in the pale-gold tone to +which time and the soft sea-damp have mellowed and darkened their marble +plates; fortunate, above all, in an indescribable grace of grouping, +half hazard, half design, which insures them, in one's memory of things +admired, very much the same isolated corner that they occupy in the +charming city. + +Of the smaller cathedrals of Italy I know none I prefer to that of Pisa; +none that, on a moderate scale, produces more the impression of a great +church. It has without so modest a measurability, represents so clean +and compact a mass, that you are startled when you cross the threshold +at the apparent space it encloses. An architect of genius, for all that +he works with colossal blocks and cumbrous pillars, is certainly the +most cunning of conjurors. The front of the Duomo is a small pyramidal +screen, covered with delicate carvings and chasings, distributed over +a series of short columns upholding narrow arches. It might be a +sought imitation of goldsmith's work in stone, and the area covered is +apparently so small that extreme fineness has been prescribed. How it is +therefore that on the inner side of this faade the wall should appear +to rise to a splendid height and to support one end of a ceiling as +remote in its gilded grandeur, one could almost fancy, as that of St. +Peter's; how it is that the nave should stretch away in such solemn +vastness, the shallow transepts emphasise the grand impression and the +apse of the choir hollow itself out like a dusky cavern fretted +with golden stalactites, is all matter for exposition by a keener +architectural analyst than I. To sit somewhere against a pillar where +the vista is large and the incidents cluster richly, and vaguely revolve +these mysteries without answering them, is the best of one's usual +enjoyment of a great church. It takes no deep sounding to conclude +indeed that a gigantic Byzantine Christ in mosaic, on the concave roof +of the choir, contributes largely to the particular impression here as +of very old and choice and original and individual things. It has even +more of stiff solemnity than is common to works of its school, and +prompts to more wonder than ever on the nature of the human mind at a +time when such unlovely shapes could satisfy its conception of holiness. +Truly pathetic is the fate of these huge mosaic idols, thanks to the +change that has overtaken our manner of acceptance of them. Strong the +contrast between the original sublimity of their pretensions and the way +in which they flatter that free sense of the grotesque which the modern +imagination has smuggled even into the appreciation of religious forms. +They were meant to yield scarcely to the Deity itself in grandeur, but +the only part they play now is to stare helplessly at our critical, our +aesthetic patronage of them. The spiritual refinement marking the hither +end of a progress had n't, however, to wait for us to signalise it; it +found expression three centuries ago in the beautiful specimen of the +painter Sodoma on the wall of the choir. This latter, a small Sacrifice +of Isaac, is one of the best examples of its exquisite author, and +perhaps, as chance has it, the most perfect opposition that could +be found in the way of the range of taste to the effect of the great +mosaic. There are many painters more powerful than Sodoma--painters who, +like the author of the mosaic, attempted and compassed grandeur; but +none has a more persuasive grace, none more than he was to sift and +chasten a conception till it should affect one with the sweetness of a +perfectly distilled perfume. + +Of the patient successive efforts of painting to arrive at the supreme +refinement of such a work as the Sodoma the Campo Santo hard by offers a +most interesting memorial. It presents a long, blank marble wall to the +relative profaneness of the Cathedral close, but within it is a perfect +treasure-house of art. This quadrangular defence surrounds an open court +where weeds and wild roses are tangled together and a sunny stillness +seems to rest consentingly, as if Nature had been won to consciousness +of the precious relics committed to her. Something in the quality of the +place recalls the collegiate cloisters of Oxford, but it must be added +that this is the handsomest compliment to that seat of learning. The +open arches of the quadrangles of Magdalen and Christ Church are not +of mellow Carrara marble, nor do they offer to sight columns, slim and +elegant, that seem to frame the unglazed windows of a cathedral. To be +buried in the Campo Santo of Pisa, I may however further qualify, you +need only be, or to have more or less anciently been, illustrious, and +there is a liberal allowance both as to the character and degree of +your fame. The most obtrusive object in one of the long vistas is a most +complicated monument to Madame Catalani, the singer, recently erected +by her possibly too-appreciative heirs. The wide pavement is a mosaic of +sepulchral slabs, and the walls, below the base of the paling frescoes, +are incrusted with inscriptions and encumbered with urns and antique +sarcophagi. The place is at once a cemetery and a museum, and its +especial charm is its strange mixture of the active and the passive, +of art and rest, of life and death. Originally its walls were one vast +continuity of closely pressed frescoes; but now the great capricious +scars and stains have come to outnumber the pictures, and the cemetery +has grown to be a burial-place of pulverised masterpieces as well as of +finished lives. The fragments of painting that remain are fortunately +the best; for one is safe in believing that a host of undimmed +neighbours would distract but little from the two great works of +Orcagna. Most people know the "Triumph of Death" and the "Last Judgment" +from descriptions and engravings; but to measure the possible good faith +of imitative art one must stand there and see the painter's howling +potentates dragged into hell in all the vividness of his bright hard +colouring; see his feudal courtiers, on their palfreys, hold their noses +at what they are so fast coming to; see his great Christ, in judgment, +refuse forgiveness with a gesture commanding enough, really inhuman +enough, to make virtue merciless for ever. The charge that Michael +Angelo borrowed his cursing Saviour from this great figure of Orcagna is +more valid than most accusations of plagiarism; but of the two figures +one at least could be spared. For direct, triumphant expressiveness +these two superb frescoes have probably never been surpassed. The +painter aims at no very delicate meanings, but he drives certain gross +ones home so effectively that for a parallel to his process one must +look to the art of the actor, the emphasising "point"-making mime. +Some of his female figures are superb--they represent creatures of a +formidable temperament. + +There are charming women, however, on the other side of the cloister--in +the beautiful frescoes of Benozzo Gozzoli. If Orcagna's work was +appointed to survive the ravage of time it is a happy chance that +it should be balanced by a group of performances of such a different +temper. The contrast is the more striking that in subject the +inspiration of both painters is strictly, even though superficially, +theological. But Benozzo cares, in his theology, for nothing but the +story, the scene and the drama--the chance to pile up palaces and spires +in his backgrounds against pale blue skies cross-barred with pearly, +fleecy clouds, and to scatter sculptured arches and shady trellises over +the front, with every incident of human life going forward lightly and +gracefully beneath them. Lightness and grace are the painter's great +qualities, marking the hithermost limit of unconscious elegance, after +which "style" and science and the wisdom of the serpent set in. +His charm is natural fineness; a little more and we should have +refinement--which is a very different thing. Like all _les dlicats_ of +this world, as M. Renan calls them, Benozzo has suffered greatly. The +space on the walls he originally covered with his Old Testament stories +is immense; but his exquisite handiwork has peeled off by the acre, +as one may almost say, and the latter compartments of the series are +swallowed up in huge white scars, out of which a helpless head or hand +peeps forth like those of creatures sinking into a quicksand. As +for Pisa at large, although it is not exactly what one would call +a mouldering city--for it has a certain well-aired cleanness and +brightness, even in its supreme tranquillity--it affects the imagination +very much in the same way as the Campo Santo. And, in truth, a city +so ancient and deeply historic as Pisa is at every step but the +burial-ground of a larger life than its present one. The wide empty +streets, the goodly Tuscan palaces--which look as if about all of them +there were a genteel private understanding, independent of placards, +that they are to be let extremely cheap--the delicious relaxing air, +the full-flowing yellow river, the lounging Pisani, smelling, +metaphorically, their poppy-flowers, seemed to me all so many +admonitions to resignation and oblivion. And this is what I mean by +saying that the charm of Pisa (apart from its cluster of monuments) is +a charm of a high order. The architecture has but a modest dignity; the +lions are few; there are no fixed points for stopping and gaping. And +yet the impression is profound; the charm is a moral charm. If I were +ever to be incurably disappointed in life, if I had lost my health, +my money, or my friends, if I were resigned forevermore to pitching my +expectations in a minor key, I should go and invoke the Pisan peace. Its +quietude would seem something more than a stillness--a hush. Pisa may be +a dull place to live in, but it's an ideal place to wait for death. + +Nothing could be more charming than the country between Pisa and +Lucca--unless possibly the country between Lucca and Pistoia. If Pisa is +dead Tuscany, Lucca is Tuscany still living and enjoying, desiring and +intending. The town is a charming mixture of antique "character" and +modern inconsequence; and! not only the town, but the country--the +blooming romantic country which you admire from the famous promenade +on the city-wall. The wall is of superbly solid and intensely "toned" +brickwork and of extraordinary breadth, and its summit, planted with +goodly trees and swelling here and there into bastions and outworks and +little open gardens, surrounds the city with a circular lounging-place +of a splendid dignity. This well-kept, shady, ivy-grown rampart reminded +me of certain mossy corners of England; but it looks away to a prospect +of more than English loveliness--a broad green plain where the summer +yields a double crop of grain, and a circle of bright blue mountains +speckled with high-hung convents and profiled castles and nestling +villas, and traversed by valleys of a deeper and duskier blue. In one of +the deepest and shadiest of these recesses one of the most "sympathetic" +of small watering-places is hidden away yet a while longer from +easy invasion--the Baths to which Lucca has lent its name. Lucca is +pre-eminently a city of churches; ecclesiastical architecture being +indeed the only one of the arts to which it seems to have given +attention. There are curious bits of domestic architecture, but no +great palaces, and no importunate frequency of pictures. The Cathedral, +however, sums up the merits of its companions and is a singularly noble +and interesting church. Its peculiar boast is a wonderful inlaid front, +on which horses and hounds and hunted beasts are lavishly figured in +black marble over a white ground. What I chiefly appreciated in the grey +solemnity of the nave and transepts was the superb effect of certain +second-storey Gothic arches--those which rest on the pavement being +Lombard. These arches are delicate and slender, like those of the +cloister at Pisa, and they play their part in the dusky upper air with +real sublimity. + +At Pistoia there is of course a Cathedral, and there is nothing +unexpected in its being, externally at least, highly impressive; in its +having a grand campanile at its door, a gaudy baptistery, in alternate +layers of black and white marble, across the way, and a stately civic +palace on either side. But even had I the space to do otherwise I should +prefer to speak less of the particular objects of interest in the place +than of the pleasure I found it to lounge away in the empty streets the +quiet hours of a warm afternoon. To say where I lingered longest would +be to tell of a little square before the hospital, out of which you +look up at the beautiful frieze in coloured earthernware by the brothers +Della Robbia, which runs across the front of the building. It represents +the seven orthodox offices of charity and, with its brilliant blues and +yellows and its tender expressiveness, brightens up amazingly, to the +sense and soul, this little grey corner of the mediaeval city. Pi stoia +is still mediaeval. How grass-grown it seemed, how drowsy, how full of +idle vistas and melancholy nooks! If nothing was supremely wonderful, +everything was delicious. + +{Illustration: THE HOSPITAL, PISTOIA.} + +1874. + + + + + +OTHER TUSCAN CITIES + + +I + + +I had scanted charming Pisa even as I had scanted great Siena in my +original small report of it, my scarce more than stammering notes of +years before; but even if there had been meagreness of mere gaping +vision--which there in fact hadn't been--as well as insufficiency of +public tribute, the indignity would soon have ceased to weigh on my +conscience. For to this affection I was to return again still oftener +than to the strong call of Siena my eventual frequentations of Pisa, all +merely impressionistic and amateurish as they might be--and I pretended, +up and down the length of the land, to none other--leave me at the +hither end of time with little more than a confused consciousness of +exquisite _quality_ on the part of the small sweet scrap of a place of +ancient glory; a consciousness so pleadingly content to be general and +vague that I shrink from pulling it to pieces. The Republic of Pisa +fought with the Republic of Florence, through the ages so ferociously +and all but invincibly that what is so pale and languid in her to-day +may well be the aspect of any civil or, still more, military creature +bled and bled and bled at the "critical" time of its life. She has +verily a just languor and is touchingly anmic; the past history, or +at any rate the present perfect acceptedness, of which condition hangs +about her with the last grace of weakness, making her state in this +particular the very secret of her irresistible appeal. I was to find the +appeal, again and again, one of the sweetest, tenderest, even if not +one of the fullest and richest impressions possible; and if I went back +whenever I could it was very much as one doesn't indecently neglect a +gentle invalid friend. The couch of the invalid friend, beautifully, +appealingly resigned, has been wheeled, say, for the case, into the warm +still garden, and your visit but consists of your sitting beside it with +kind, discreet, testifying silences. Such is the figurative form under +which the once rugged enemy of Florence, stretched at her length by the +rarely troubled Arno, to-day presents herself; and I find my analogy +complete even to my sense of the mere mild _sance_, the inevitably +tacit communion or rather blank interchange, between motionless cripple +and hardly more incurable admirer. + +The terms of my enjoyment of Pisa scarce departed from that ideal--slow +contemplative perambulations, rather late in the day and after work done +mostly in the particular decent inn-room that was repeatedly my portion; +where the sunny flicker of the river played up from below to the very +ceiling, which, by the same sign, anciently and curiously raftered and +hanging over my table at a great height, had been colour-pencilled into +ornament as fine (for all practical purposes) as the page of a missal. +I add to this, for remembrance, an inveteracy of evening idleness and of +reiterated ices in front of one of the quiet cafs--quiet as everything +at Pisa is quiet, or will certainly but in these latest days have ceased +to be; one in especial so beautifully, so mysteriously void of bustle +that almost always the neighbouring presence and admirable chatter of +some group of the local University students would fall upon my ear, by +the half-hour at a time, not less as a privilege, frankly, than as a +clear-cut image of the young Italian mind and life, by which I lost +nothing. I use such terms as "admirable" and "privilege," in this last +most casual of connections--which was moreover no connection at all but +what my attention made it--simply as an acknowledgment of the interest +that might play there through some inevitable thoughts. These were, for +that matter, intensely in keeping with the ancient scene and air: +they dealt with the exquisite difference between that tone and type of +ingenuous adolescence--in the mere relation of charmed _audition_--and +other forms of juvenility of whose mental and material accent one had +elsewhere met the assault. Civilised, charmingly civilised, were my +loquacious neighbours--as how had n't they to be, one asked one's self, +through the use of a medium of speech that is in itself a sovereign +saturation? _There_ was the beautiful congruity of the happily-caught +impression; the fact of my young men's general Tuscanism of tongue, +which related them so on the spot to the whole historic consensus +of things. It wasn't dialect--as it of course easily might have been +elsewhere, at Milan, at Turin, at Bologna, at Naples; it was the clear +Italian in which all the rest of the surrounding story was told, all +the rest of the result of time recorded; and it made them delightful, +prattling, unconscious men of the particular little constituted and +bequeathed world which everything else that was charged with old +meanings and old beauty referred to--all the more that their talk was +never by any chance of romping games or deeds of violence, but kept +flowering, charmingly and incredibly, into eager ideas and literary +opinions and philosophic discussions and, upon my honour, vital +questions. + +They have taken me too far, for so light a reminiscence; but I claim +for the loose web of my impressions at no point a heavier texture. Which +comes back to what I was a moment ago saying--that just in proportion +as you "feel" the morbid charm of Pisa you press on it gently, and this +somehow even under stress of whatever respectful attention. I found +this last impulse, at all events, so far as I was concerned, quite +contentedly spend itself in a renewed sense of the simple large pacified +felicity of such an afternoon aspect as that of the Lung' Arno, taken up +or down its course; whether to within sight of small Santa Maria della +Spina, the tiny, the delicate, the exquisite Gothic chapel perched where +the quay drops straight, or, in the other direction, toward the melting +perspective of the narrow local pleasure-ground, the rather thin and +careless bosky grace of which recedes, beside the stream whose very +turbidity pleases, to a middle distance of hot and tangled and exuberant +rural industry and a proper blue horizon of Carrara mountains. The Pisan +Lung' Arno is shorter and less featured and framed than the Florentine, +but it has the fine accent of a marked curve and is quite as bravely +Tuscan; witness the type of river-fronting palace which, in half-a-dozen +massive specimens, the last word of the anciently "handsome," are of +the essence of the physiognomy of the place. In the glow of which +retrospective admission I ask myself how I came, under my first flush, +reflected in other pages, to fail of justice to so much proud domestic +architecture--in the very teeth moreover of the fact that I was for ever +paying my compliments, in a wistful, wondering way, to the fine Palazzo +Lanfranchi, occupied in 1822 by the migratory Byron, and whither Leigh +Hunt, as commemorated in the latter's Autobiography, came out to join +him in an odd journalistic scheme. + +Of course, however, I need scarcely add, the centre of my daily +revolution--quite thereby on the circumference--was the great Company of +Four in their sequestered corner; objects of regularly recurrent pious +pilgrimage, if for no other purpose than to see whether each would +each time again so inimitably carry itself as one of a group of +wonderfully-worked old ivories. Their charm of relation to each other +and to everything else that concerns them, that of the quartette of +monuments, is more or less inexpressible all round; but not the least of +it, ever, is in their beautiful secret for taking at different hours +and seasons, in different states of the light, the sky, the wind, the +weather--in different states, even, it used verily to seem to me, of +an admirer's imagination or temper or nerves--different complexional +appearances, different shades and pallors, different glows and chills. +I have seen them look almost viciously black, and I have seen them as +clear and fair as pale gold. And these things, for the most part, off on +the large grassy carpet spread for them, and with the elbow of the old +city-wall, not elsewhere erect, respectfully but protectingly crooked +about, to the tune of a usual unanimity save perhaps in the case of +the Leaning Tower--so abnormal a member of any respectable family this +structure at best that I always somehow fancied its three companions, +the Cathedral, the Baptistery and the Campo Santo, capable of quiet +common understandings, for the major or the minor effect, into which +their odd fellow, no hint thrown out to him, was left to enter as he +might. If one haunted the place, one ended by yielding to the conceit +that, beautifully though the others of the group may be said to behave +about him, one sometimes caught them in the act of tacitly combining to +ignore him--as if he had, after so long, begun to give on their nerves. +Or is that absurdity but my shamefaced form of admission that, for all +the wonder of him, he finally gave on mine? Frankly--I would put it at +such moments--he becomes at last an optical bore or _betise_. + +{Illustration: THE LOGGIA, LUCCA.} + + +II + + +To Lucca I was not to return often--I was to return only once; when that +compact and admirable little city, the very model of a small _pays de +Cocagne_, overflowing with everything that makes for ease, for plenty, +for beauty, for interest and good example, renewed for me, in the +highest degree, its genial and robust appearance. The perfection of +this renewal must indeed have been, at bottom, the ground of my rather +hanging back from possible excess of acquaintance--with the instinct +that so right and rich and rounded a little impression had better be +left than endangered. I remember positively saying to myself the second +time that no brown-and-gold Tuscan city, even, could _be_ as happy as +Lucca looked--save always, exactly, Lucca; so that, on the chance of any +shade of human illusion in the case, I wouldn't, as a brooding analyst, +go within fifty miles of it again. Just so, I fear I must confess, it +was this mere face-value of the place that, when I went back, formed my +sufficiency; I spent all my scant time--or the greater part, for I took +a day to drive over to the Bagni--just gaping at its visible attitude. +This may be described as that of simply sitting there, through the +centuries, at the receipt of perfect felicity; on its splendid solid +seat of russet masonry, that is--for its great republican ramparts of +long ago still lock it tight--with its wide garden-land, its ancient +appanage or hereditary domain, teeming and blooming with everything that +is good and pleasant for man, all about, and with a ring of graceful and +noble, yet comparatively unbeneficed uplands and mountains watching +it, for very envy, across the plain, as a circle of bigger boys, in +the playground, may watch a privileged or pampered smaller one munch a +particularly fine apple. Half smothered thus in oil and wine and +corn and all the fruits of the earth, Lucca seems fairly to laugh for +good-humour, and it's as if one can't say more for her than that, thanks +to her putting forward for you a temperament somehow still richer than +her heritage, you forgive her at every turn her fortune. She smiles up +at you her greeting as you dip into her wide lap, out of which you may +select almost any rare morsel whatever. Looking back at my own choice +indeed I see it must have suffered a certain embarrassment--that of the +sense of too many things; for I scarce remember choosing at all, any +more than I recall having had to go hungry. I turned into all the +churches--taking care, however, to pause before one of them, though +before which I now irrecoverably forget, for verification of Ruskin's so +characteristically magnified rapture over the high and rather narrow +and obscure hunting-frieze on its front--and in the Cathedral paid my +respects at every turn to the greatest of Lucchesi, Matteo Civitale, +wisest, sanest, homeliest, kindest of _quattro-cento_ sculptors, to +whose works the Duomo serves almost as a museum. But my nearest approach +to anything so invidious as a discrimination or a preference, under the +spell of so felt an equilibrium, must have been the act of engaging a +carriage for the Baths. + +That inconsequence once perpetrated, let me add, the impression was as +right as any other--the impression of the drive through the huge general +tangled and fruited _podere_ of the countryside; that of the pair of +jogging hours that bring the visitor to where the wideish gate of the +valley of the Serchio opens. The question after this became quite other; +the narrowing, though always more or less smiling gorge that draws you +on and on is a different, a distinct proposition altogether, with its +own individual grace of appeal and association. It is the association, +exactly, that would even now, on this page, beckon me forward, or +perhaps I should rather say backward--weren't more than a glance at it +out of the question--to a view of that easier and not so inordinately +remote past when "people spent the summer" in these perhaps slightly +stuffy shades. I speak of that age, I think of it at least, as easier +than ours, in spite of the fact that even as I made my pilgrimage the +mark of modern change, the railway in construction, had begun to be +distinct, though the automobile was still pretty far in the future. The +relations and proportions of everything are of course now altered--I +indeed, I confess, wince at the vision of the cloud of motor-dust that +must in the fine season hang over the whole connection. That represents +greater promptness of approach to the bosky depths of Ponte-a-Serraglio +and the Bagni Caldi, but it throws back the other time, that of the +old jogging relation, of the Tuscan grand-ducal "season" and the small +cosmopolite sociability, into quite Arcadian air and the comparatively +primitive scale. The "easier" Italy of our infatuated precursors +there wears its glamour of facility not through any question of "the +development of communications," but through the very absence of the +dream of that boon, thanks to which every one (among the infatuated) +lived on terms of so much closer intercourse with the general object of +their passion. After we had crossed the Serchio that beautiful day we +passed into the charming, the amiably tortuous, the thickly umbrageous, +valley of the Lima, and then it was that I seemed fairly to remount the +stream of time; figuring to myself wistfully, at the small scattered +centres of entertainment--modest inns, pensions and other places of +convenience clustered where the friendly torrent is bridged or the +forested slopes adjust themselves--what the summer days and the summer +rambles and the summer dreams must have been, in the blest place, when +"people" (by which I mean the contingent of beguiled barbarians) didn't +know better, as we say, than to content themselves with such a mild +substitute, such a soft, sweet and essentially elegant apology, for +adventure. One wanted not simply to hang about a little, but really to +live back, as surely one might, have done by staying on, into the so +romantically strong, if mechanically weak, Italy of the associations of +one's youth. It was a pang to have to revert to the present even in the +form of Lucca--which says everything. + + +III + + +If undeveloped communications were to become enough for me at those +retrospective moments, I might have felt myself supplied to my taste, +let me go on to say, at the hour of my making, with great resolution, +an attempt on high-seated and quite grandly out-of-the-way Volterra: +a reminiscence associated with quite a different year and, I should +perhaps sooner have bethought myself, with my fond experience of +Pisa--inasmuch as it was during a pause under that bland and motionless +wing that I seem to have had to organise in the darkness of a summer +dawn my approach to the old Etruscan stronghold. The railway then +existed, but I rose in the dim small hours to take my train; moreover, +so far as that might too much savour of an incongruous facility, +the fault was in due course quite adequately repaired by an apparent +repudiation of any awareness of such false notes on the part of the +town. I may not invite the reader to penetrate with me by so much as a +step the boundless backward reach of history to which the more massive +of the Etruscan gates of Volterra, the Porta all' Arco, forms the +solidest of thresholds; since I perforce take no step myself, and am +even exceptionally condemned here to impressionism unashamed. My errand +was to spend a Sunday with an Italian friend, a native in fact of the +place, master of a house there in which he offered me hospitality; who, +also arriving from Florence the night before, had obligingly come on +with me from Pisa, and whose consciousness of a due urbanity, already +rather overstrained, and still well before noon, by the accumulation +of our matutinal vicissitudes and other grounds for patience, met +all ruefully at the station the supreme shock of an apparently great +desolate world of volcanic hills, of blank, though "engineered," +undulations, as the emergence of a road testified, unmitigated by the +smallest sign of a wheeled vehicle. The station, in other words, looked +out at that time (and I daresay the case hasn't strikingly altered) on a +mere bare huge hill-country, by some remote mighty shoulder of which +the goal of our pilgrimage, so questionably "served" by the railway, was +hidden from view. Served as well by a belated omnibus, a four-in-hand of +lame and lamentable quality, the place, I hasten to add, eventually +put forth some show of being; after a complete practical recognition of +which, let me at once further mention, all the other, the positive and +sublime, connections of Volterra established themselves for me without +my lifting a finger. + +The small shrunken, but still lordly prehistoric city is perched, when +once you have rather painfully zigzagged to within sight of it, very +much as an eagle's eyrie, oversweeping the land and the sea; and to +that type of position, the ideal of the airy peak of vantage, with all +accessories and minor features a drop, a slide and a giddiness, its +individual items and elements strike you at first as instinctively +conforming. This impression was doubtless after a little modified for +me; there were levels, there were small stony practicable streets, there +were walks and strolls, outside the gates and roundabout the cyclopean +wall, to the far end of downward-tending protrusions and promontories, +natural buttresses and pleasant terrene headlands, friendly suburban +spots (one would call them if the word had less detestable references) +where games of bowls and overtrellised wine-tables could put in their +note; in spite of which however my friend's little house of hospitality, +clean and charming and oh, so immemorially Tuscan, was as perpendicular +and ladder-like as so compact a residence could be; it kept up for me +beautifully--as regards posture and air, though humanly and socially +it rather cooed like a dovecote--the illusion of the vertiginously +"balanced" eagle's nest. The air, in truth, all the rest of that +splendid day, must have been the key to the promptly-produced intensity +of one's relation to every aspect of the charming episode; the light, +cool, keen air of those delightful high places, in Italy, that tonically +correct the ardours of July, and which at our actual altitude could but +affect me as the very breath of the grand local legend. I might have +"had" the little house, our particular eagle's nest, for the summer, +and even on such touching terms; and I well remember the force of the +temptation to take it, if only other complications had permitted; to +spend the series of weeks with that admirable _interesting_ freshness +in my lungs: interesting, I especially note, as the strong appropriate +medium in which a continuity with the irrecoverable but still effective +past had been so robustly preserved. I couldn't yield, alas, to the +conceived felicity, which had half-a-dozen appealing aspects; I could +only, while thus feeling how the atmospheric medium itself made for a +positively initiative exhilaration, enjoy my illusion till the morrow. +The exhilaration therefore supplies to memory the whole light in which, +for the too brief time, I went about "seeing" Volterra; so that my +glance at the seated splendour reduces itself, as I have said, to +the merest impressionism; nothing more was to be looked for, on the +stretched surface of consciousness, from one breezy wash of the brush. +I find there the clean strong image simplified to the three or four +unforgettable particulars of the vast rake of the view; with the +Maremma, of evil fame, more or less immediately below, but with those +islands of the sea, Corsica and Elba, the names of which are sharply +associational beyond any others, dressing the far horizon in the grand +manner, and the Ligurian coast-line melting northward into beauty and +history galore; with colossal uncemented blocks of Etruscan gates and +walls plunging you--and by their very interest--into a sweet surrender +of any privilege of appreciation more crushing than your general +synthetic stare; and with the rich and perfectly arranged museum, an +unsurpassed exhibition of monumental treasure from Etruscan tombs, +funereal urns mainly, reliquaries of an infinite power to move and charm +us still, contributing to this same so designed, but somehow at the same +time so inspired, collapse of the historic imagination under too heavy a +pressure, or abeyance of "private judgment" in too unequal a relation. + + +IV + + +I remember recovering private judgment indeed in the course of two or +three days following the excursion I have just noted; which must have +shaped themselves in some sort of consonance with the idea that as we +were hereabouts in the very middle of dim Etruria a common self-respect +prescribed our somehow profiting by the fact. This kindled in us the +spirit of exploration, but with results of which I here attempt to +record, so utterly does the whole impression swoon away, for present +memory, into vagueness, confusion and intolerable heat, Our self-respect +was of the common order, but the blaze of the July sun was, even for +Tuscany, of the uncommon; so that the project of a trudging quest for +Etruscan tombs in shadeless wastes yielded to its own temerity. +There comes back to me nevertheless at the same time, from the mild +misadventure, and quite as through this positive humility of failure, +the sense of a supremely intimate revelation of Italy in undress, so +to speak (the state, it seemed, in which one would most fondly, most +ideally, enjoy her); Italy no longer in winter starch and sobriety, with +winter manners and winter prices and winter excuses, all addressed to +the _forestieri_ and the philistines; but lolling at her length, with +her graces all relaxed, and thereby only the more natural; the brilliant +performer, in short, _en famille_, the curtain down and her salary +stopped for the season--thanks to which she is by so much more the easy +genius and the good creature as she is by so much less the advertised +_prima donna_. She received us nowhere more sympathetically, that is +with less ceremony or self-consciousness, I seem to recall, than at +Montepulciano, for instance--where it was indeed that the recovery of +private judgment I just referred to couldn't help taking place. What we +were doing, or what we expected to do, at Montepulciano I keep no other +trace of than is bound up in a present quite tender consciousness that I +wouldn't for the world not have been there. I think my reason must have +been largely just in the beauty of the name (for could any beauty be +greater?), reinforced no doubt by the fame of the local vintage and the +sense of how we should quaff it on the spot. Perhaps we quaffed it too +constantly; since the romantic picture reduces itself for me but to two +definite appearances; that of the more priggish discrimination so far +reasserting itself as to advise me that Montepulciano was dirty, even +remarkably dirty; and that of her being not much else besides but +perched and brown and queer and crooked, and noble withal (which is what +almost any Tuscan city more easily than not acquits herself of; all the +while she may on such occasions figure, when one looks off from her to +the end of dark street-vistas or catches glimpses through high arcades, +some big battered, blistered, overladen, overmasted ship, swimming in a +violet sea). + +If I have lost the sense of what we were doing, that could at all suffer +commemoration, at Montepulciano, so I sit helpless before the memory +of small stewing Torrita, which we must somehow have expected to yield, +under our confidence, a view of shy charms, but which did n't yield, to +my recollection, even anything that could fairly be called a breakfast +or a dinner. There may have been in the neighbourhood a rumour +of Etruscan tombs; the neighbourhood, however, was vast, and that +possibility not to be verified, in the conditions, save after due +refreshment. Then it was, doubtless, that the question of refreshment so +beckoned us, by a direct appeal, straight across country, from Perugia, +that, casting consistency, if not to the winds, since alas there were +none, but to the lifeless air, we made the sweltering best of our way +(and it took, for the distance, a terrible time) to the Grand Hotel of +that city. This course shines for me, in the retrospect, with a light +even more shameless than that in which my rueful conscience then saw it; +since we thus exchanged again, at a stroke, the tousled _bonne fille_ of +our vacational Tuscany for the formal and figged-out presence of Italy +on her good behaviour. We had never seen her conform more to all the +proprieties, we felt, than under this aspect of lavish hospitality to +that now apparently quite inveterate swarm of pampered _forestieri_, +English and Americans in especial, who, having had Roman palaces and +villas deliciously to linger in, break the northward journey, when once +they decide to take it, in the Umbrian paradise. They were, goodness +knows, within their rights, and we profited, as anyone may easily and +cannily profit at that time, by the sophistications paraded for them; +only I feel, as I pleasantly recover it all, that though we had arrived +perhaps at the most poetical of watering-places we had lost our finer +clue. (The difference from other days was immense, all the span of +evolution from the ancient malodorous inn which somehow did n't matter, +to that new type of polyglot caravanserai which everywhere insists on +mattering--mattering, even in places where other interests abound, so +much more than anything else.) That clue, the finer as I say, I would +fain at any rate to-day pick up for its close attachment to another +Tuscan city or two--for a felt pull from strange little San Gimignano +delle belle Torre in especial; by which I mean from the memory of a +summer Sunday spent there during a stay at Siena. But I have already +superabounded, for mere love of my general present rubric--the real +thickness of experience having a good deal evaporated, so that the Tiny +Town of the Many Towers hangs before me, not to say, rather, far +behind me, after the manner of an object directly meeting the wrong or +diminishing lens of one's telescope. + +It did everything, on the occasion of that pilgrimage, that it was +expected to do, presenting itself more or less in the guise of some rare +silvery shell, washed up by the sea of time, cracked and battered and +dishonoured, with its mutilated marks of adjustment to the extinct +type of creature it once harboured figuring against the sky as maimed +gesticulating arms flourished in protest against fate. If the centuries, +however, had pretty well cleaned out, vulgarly speaking, this amazing +little fortress-town, it wasn't that a mere aching void was bequeathed +us, I recognise as I consult a somewhat faded impression; the whole +scene and occasion come back to me as the exhibition, on the contrary, +of a stage rather crowded and agitated, of no small quantity of sound +and fury, of concussions, discussions, vociferations, hurryings to and +fro, that could scarce have reached a higher pitch in the old days of +the siege and the sortie. San Gimignano affected me, to a certainty, +as not dead, I mean, but as inspired with that strange and slightly +sinister new life that is now, in case after case, up and down the +peninsula, and even in presence of the dryest and most scattered bones, +producing the miracle of resurrection. The effect is often--and I find +it strikingly involved in this particular reminiscence--that of the +buried hero himself positively waking up to show you his bones for a +fee, and almost capering about in his appeal to your attention. What +has become of the soul of San Gimignano who shall say?--but, of a genial +modern Sunday, it is as if the heroic skeleton, risen from the dust, +were in high activity, officious for your entertainment and your +detention, clattering and changing plates at the informal friendly inn, +personally conducting you to a sight of the admirable Santa Fina of +Ghirlandaio, as I believe is supposed, in a dim chapel of the Collegiata +church; the poor young saint, on her low bed, in a state of ecstatic +vision (the angelic apparition is given), acconpanied by a few figures +and accessories of the most beautiful and touching truth. This image +is what has most vividly remained with me, of the day I thus so +ineffectually recover; the precious ill-set gem or domestic treasure of +Santa Fina, and then the wonderful drive, at eventide, back to Siena: +the progress through the darkening land that was like a dense fragrant +garden, all fireflies and warm emanations and dimly-seen motionless +festoons, extravagant vines and elegant branches intertwisted for miles, +with couples and companies of young countryfolk almost as fondly united +and raising their voices to the night as if superfluously to sing out at +you that they were happy, and above all were Tuscan. On reflection, and +to be just, I connect the slightly incongruous loudness that hung about +me under the Beautiful Towers with the really too coarse competition for +my favour among the young vetturini who lay in wait for my approach, +and with an eye to my subsequent departure, on my quitting, at some +unremembered spot, the morning train from Siena, from which point there +was then still a drive. That onset was of a fine mediaeval violence, but +the subsiding echoes of it alone must have afterwards borne me company; +mingled, at the worst, with certain reverberations of the animated +rather than concentrated presence of sundry young sketchers and copyists +of my own nationality, which element in the picture conveyed beyond +anything else how thoroughly it was all to sit again henceforth in the +eye of day. My final vision perhaps was of a sacred reliquary not so +much rudely as familiarly and "humorously" torn open. The note had, with +all its references, its own interest; but I never went again. + +{Illustration: TOWERS OF SAN GIMIGNANO.} + + + + + +RAVENNA + + +I write these lines on a cold Swiss mountain-top, shut in by an intense +white mist from any glimpse of the underworld of lovely Italy; but as +I jotted down the other day in the ancient capital of Honorius and +Theodoric the few notes of which they are composed, I let the original +date stand for local colour's sake. Its mere look, as I transcribe it, +emits a grateful glow in the midst of the Alpine rawness, and gives a +depressed imagination something tangible to grasp while awaiting the +return of fine weather. For Ravenna was glowing, less than a week since, +as I edged along the narrow strip of shadow binding one side of the +empty, white streets. After a long, chill spring the summer this year +descended upon Italy with a sudden jump and an ominous hot breath. I +stole away from Florence in the night, and even on top of the Apennines, +under the dull starlight and in the rushing train, one could but sit and +pant perspiringly. + +At Bologna I found a festa, or rather two festas, a civil and a +religious, going on in mutual mistrust and disparagement. The civil, +that of the Statuto, was the one fully national Italian holiday as by +law established--the day that signalises everywhere over the land at +once its achieved and hard-won unification; the religious was a jubilee +of certain local churches. The latter is observed by the Bolognese +parishes in couples, and comes round for each couple but once in ten +years--an arrangement by which the faithful at large insure themselves +a liberal recurrence of expensive processions. It was n't my business +to distinguish the sheep from the goats, the pious from the profane, the +prayers from the scoffers; it was enough that, melting together under +the scorching sun, they filled the admirably solid city with a flood +of spectacular life. The combination at one point was really dramatic. +While a long procession of priests and young virgins in white veils, +bearing tapers, marshalled itself in one of the streets, a review of +the King's troops went forward outside the town. On its return a large +detachment of cavalry passed across the space where the incense was +burning, the pictured banners swaying and the litany being droned, and +checked the advance of the little ecclesiastical troop. The long vista +of the street, between the porticoes, was festooned with garlands and +scarlet and tinsel; the robes and crosses and canopies of the priests, +the clouds of perfumed smoke and the white veils of the maidens, were +resolved by the hot bright air into a gorgeous medley of colour, across +which the mounted soldiers rattled and flashed as if it had been a +conquering army trampling on an embassy of propitiation. It was, to tell +the truth, the first time an' Italian festa had really exhibited to my +eyes the genial glow and the romantic particulars promised by song and +story; and I confess that those eyes found more pleasure in it than they +were to find an hour later in the picturesque on canvas as one observes +it in the Pinacoteca. I found myself scowling most unmercifully at Guido +and Domenichino. + +For Ravenna, however, I had nothing but smiles--grave, reflective, +philosophic smiles, I hasten to add, such as accord with the historic +dignity, not to say the mortal sunny sadness, of the place. I arrived +there in the evening, before, even at drowsy Ravenna, the festa of the +Statuto had altogether put itself to bed. I immediately strolled forth +from the inn, and found it sitting up a while longer on the piazza, +chiefly at the cafe door, listening to the band of the garrison by the +light of a dozen or so of feeble tapers, fastened along the front of +the palace of the Government. Before long, however, it had dispersed and +departed, and I was left alone with the grey illumination and with an +affable citizen whose testimony as to the manners and customs of +Ravenna I had aspired to obtain. I had, borrowing confidence from prompt +observation, suggested deferentially that it was n't the liveliest place +in the world, and my friend admitted that it was in fact not a seat of +ardent life. But had I seen the Corso? Without seeing the Corso one did +n't exhaust the possibilities. The Corso of Ravenna, of a hot summer +night, had an air of surprising seclusion and repose. Here and there in +an upper closed window glimmered a light; my companion's footsteps +and my own were the only sounds; not a creature was within sight. The +suffocating air helped me to believe for a moment that I walked in the +Italy of Boccaccio, hand-in-hand with the plague, through a city which +had lost half its population by pestilence and the other half by flight. +I turned back into my inn profoundly satisfied. This at last was the +old-world dulness of a prime distillation; this at last was antiquity, +history, repose. + +The impression was largely confirmed and enriched on the following day; +but it was obliged at an early stage of my visit to give precedence to +another--the lively perception, namely, of the thinness of my saturation +with Gibbon and the other sources of legend. At Ravenna the waiter at +the caf and the coachman who drives you to the Pine-Forest allude to +Galla Placidia and Justinian as to any attractive topic of the hour; +wherever you turn you encounter some fond appeal to your historic +presence of mind. For myself I could only attune my spirit vaguely to +so ponderous a challenge, could only feel I was breathing an air of +prodigious records and relics. I conned my guide-book and looked up +at the great mosaics, and then fumbled at poor Murray again for some +intenser light on the court of Justinian; but I can imagine that to +a visitor more intimate with the originals of the various great +almond-eyed mosaic portraits in the vaults of the churches these +extremely curious works of art may have a really formidable interest. I +found in the place at large, by daylight, the look of a vast straggling +depopulated village. The streets with hardly an exception are +grass-grown, and though I walked about all day I failed to encounter a +single wheeled vehicle. I remember no shop but the little establishment +of an urbane photographer, whose views of the Pineta, the great +legendary pine-forest just without the town, gave me an irresistible +desire to seek that refuge. There was no architecture to speak of; and +though there are a great many large domiciles with aristocratic names +they stand cracking and baking in the sun in no very comfortable +fashion. The houses have for the most part an all but rustic rudeness; +they are low and featureless and shabby, as well as interspersed +with high garden walls over which the long arms of tangled vines +hang motionless into the stagnant streets. Here and there in all this +dreariness, in some particularly silent and grassy corner, rises an old +brick church with a front more or less spoiled, by cheap modernisation, +and a strange cylindrical campanile pierced with small arched windows +and extremely suggestive of the fifth century. These churches constitute +the palpable interest of Ravenna, and their own principal interest, +after thirteen centuries of well-intentioned spoliation, resides +in their unequalled collection of early Christian mosaics. It is an +interest simple, as who should say, almost to harshness, and leads one's +attention along a straight and narrow way. There are older churches in +Rome, and churches which, looked at as museums, are more variously and +richly informing; but in Rome you stumble at every step on some curious +pagan memorial, often beautiful enough to make your thoughts wander far +from the strange stiff primitive Christian forms. + +Ravenna, on the other hand, began with the Church, and all her monuments +and relics are harmoniously rigid. By the middle of the first century +she possessed an exemplary saint, Apollinaris, a disciple of Peter, to +whom her two finest places of worship are dedicated. It was to one of +these, jocosely entitled the "new," that I first directed my steps. +I lingered outside a while and looked at the great red, barrel-shaped +bell-towers, so rusty, so crumbling, so archaic, and yet so resolute to +ring in another century or two, and then went in to the coolness, the +shining marble columns, the queer old sculptured slabs and sarcophagi +and the long mosaics that scintillated, under the roof, along the wall +of the nave. San Apollinare Nuovo, like most of its companions, is a +magazine of early Christian odds and ends; fragments of yellow marble +incrusted with quaint sculptured emblems of primitive dogma; great rough +troughs, containing the bones of old bishops; episcopal chairs with the +marble worn narrow by centuries of pressure from the solid episcopal +person; slabs from the fronts of old pulpits, covered with carven +hierogylphics of an almost Egyptian abstruseness--lambs and stags and +fishes and beasts of theological affinities even less apparent. Upon all +these strange things the strange figures in the great mosaic panorama +look down, with coloured cheeks and staring eyes, lifelike enough to +speak to you and answer your wonderment and tell you in bad Latin of +the decadence that it was in such and such a fashion they believed and +worshipped. First, on each side, near the door, are houses and ships and +various old landmarks of Ravenna; then begins a long procession, on +one side, of twenty-two white-robed virgins and three obsequious magi, +terminating in a throne bearing the Madonna and Child, surrounded +by four angels; on the other side, of an equal number of male saints +(twenty-five, that is) holding crowns in their hands and leading to a +Saviour enthroned between angels of singular expressiveness. What it +is these long slim seraphs express I cannot quite say, but they have an +odd, knowing, sidelong look out of the narrow ovals of their eyes which, +though not without sweetness, would certainly make me murmur a defensive +prayer or so were I to find myself alone in the church towards dusk. +All this work is of the latter part of the sixth century and brilliantly +preserved. The gold backgrounds twinkle as if they had been inserted +yesterday, and here and there a figure is executed almost too much in +the modern manner to be interesting; for the charm of mosaic work is, +to my sense, confined altogether to the infancy of the art. The great +Christ, in the series of which I speak, is quite an elaborate picture, +and yet he retains enough of the orthodox stiffness to make him +impressive in the simpler, elder sense. He is clad in a purple robe, +even as an emperor, his hair and beard are artfully curled, his eyebrows +arched, his complexion brilliant, his whole aspect such a one as the +popular mind may have attributed to Honorius or Valentinian. It is all +very Byzantine, and yet I found in it much of that interest which is +inseparable, to a facile imagination, from all early representations of +our Lord. Practically they are no more authentic than the more or less +plausible inventions of Ary Scheffer and Holman Hunt; in spite of which +they borrow a certain value, factitious perhaps but irresistible, from +the mere fact that they are twelve or thirteen centuries less distant +from the original. It is something that this was the way the people in +the sixth century imagined Jesus to have looked; the image has suffered +by so many the fewer accretions. The great purple-robed monarch on the +wall of Ravenna is at least a very potent and positive Christ, and the +only objection I have to make to him is that though in this character he +must have had a full apportionment of divine foreknowledge he betrays no +apprehension of Dr. Channing and M. Renan. If one's preference lies, for +distinctness' sake, between the old plainness and the modern fantasy, +one must admit that the plainness has here a very grand outline. + +{Illustration: SANT APOLLINAR NUOVO, RAVENNA.} + +I spent the rest of the morning in charmed transition between the hot +yellow streets and the cool grey interiors of the churches. The +greyness everywhere was lighted up by the scintillation, on vault and +entablature, of mosaics more or less archaic, but always brilliant and +elaborate, and everywhere too by the same deep amaze of the fact that, +while centuries had worn themselves away and empires risen and fallen, +these little cubes of coloured glass had stuck in their allotted places +and kept their freshness. I have no space for a list of the various +shrines so distinguished, and, to tell the truth, my memory of them has +already become a very generalised and undiscriminated record. The total +aspect of the place, its sepulchral stillness, its absorbing perfume +of evanescence and decay and mortality, confounds the distinctions +and blurs the details. The Cathedral, which is vast and high, has +been excessively modernised, and was being still more so by a lavish +application of tinsel and cotton-velvet in preparation for the centenary +feast of St. Apollinaris, which befalls next month. Things on this +occasion are to be done handsomely, and a fair Ravennese informed me +that a single family had contributed three thousand francs towards a +month's vesper-music. It seemed to me hereupon that I should like in +the August twilight to wander into the quiet nave of San Apollinare, +and look up at the great mosaics through the resonance of some fine +chanting. I remember distinctly enough, however, the tall +basilica of San Vitale, of octagonal shape, like an exchange or +custom-house--modelled, I believe, upon St. Sophia at Constantinople. +It has a great span of height and a great solemnity, as well as a choir +densely pictured over on arch and apse with mosaics of the time of +Justinian. These are regular pictures, full of movement, gesture and +perspective, and just enough sobered in hue by time to bring home their +remoteness. In the middle of the church, under the great dome, sat an +artist whom I envied, making at an effective angle a study of the choir +and its broken lights, its decorated altar and its incrusted twinkling +walls. The picture, when finished, will hang, I suppose, on the library +wall of some person of taste; but even if it is much better than is +probable--I did n't look at it--all his taste won't tell the owner, +unless he has been there, in just what a soundless, mouldering, +out-of-the-way corner of old Italy it was painted. An even better place +for an artist fond of dusky architectural nooks, except that here the +dusk is excessive and he would hardly be able to tell his green from +his red, is the extraordinary little church of the Santi Nazaro e Celso, +otherwise known as the mausoleum of Galla Placidia. This is perhaps on +the whole the spot in Ravenna where the impression is of most sovereign +authority and most thrilling force. It consists of a narrow low-browed +cave, shaped like a Latin cross, every inch of which except the floor +is covered with dense symbolic mosaics. Before you and on each side, +through the thick brown light, loom three enormous barbaric sarcophagi, +containing the remains of potentates of the Lower Empire. It is as if +history had burrowed under ground to escape from research and you +had fairly run it to earth. On the right lie the ashes of the Emperor +Honorius, and in the middle those of his sister, Galla Placidia, a lady +who, I believe, had great adventures. On the other side rest the bones +of Constantius III. The place might be a small natural grotto lined with +glimmering mineral substances, and there is something quite tremendous +in being shut up so closely with these three imperial ghosts. The shadow +of the great Roman name broods upon the huge sepulchres and abides for +ever within the narrow walls. + +But still other memories hang about than those of primitive bishops and +degenerate emperors. Byron lived here and Dante died here, and the tomb +of the one poet and the dwelling of the other are among the advertised +appeals. The grave of Dante, it must be said, is anything but Dantesque, +and the whole precinct is disposed with that odd vulgarity of taste +which distinguishes most modern Italian tributes to greatness. The +author of _The Divine Comedy_ commemorated in stucco, even in a +slumbering corner of Ravenna, is not "sympathetic." Fortunately of all +poets he least needs a monument, as he was pre-eminently an architect in +diction and built himself his temple of fame in verses more solid +than Cyclopean blocks. If Dante's tomb is not Dantesque, so neither is +Byron's house Byronic, being a homely, shabby, two-storied dwelling, +directly on the street, with as little as possible of isolation and +mystery. In Byron's time it was an inn, and it is rather a curious +reflection that "Cain" and the "Vision of Judgment" should have been +written at an hotel. The fact supplies a commanding precedent for +self-abstraction to tourists at once sentimental and literary. I must +declare indeed that my acquaintance with Ravenna considerably increased +my esteem for Byron and helped to renew my faith in the sincerity of +his inspiration. A man so much _de son temps_ as the author of the +above-named and other pieces can have spent two long years in this +stagnant city only by the help of taking a great deal of disinterested +pleasure in his own genius. He had indeed a notable pastime--the various +churches are adorned with monuments of ancestral Guicciolis--but it is +none the less obvious that Ravenna, fifty years ago, would have been an +intolerably dull residence to a foreigner of distinction unequipped with +intellectual resources. The hour one spends with Byron's memory then +is almost compassionate. After all, one says to one's self as one turns +away from the grandiloquent little slab in front of his house and looks +down the deadly provincial vista of the empty, sunny street, the author +of so many superb stanzas asked less from the world than he gave it. One +of his diversions was to ride in the Pineta, which, beginning a couple +of miles from the city, extends some twenty-five miles along the sands +of the Adriatic. I drove out to it for Byron's sake, and Dante's, and +Boccaccio's, all of whom have interwoven it with their fictions, and for +that of a possible whiff of coolness from the sea. Between the city and +the forest, in the midst of malarious rice-swamps, stands the finest of +the Ravennese churches, the stately temple of San Apollinare in Classe. +The Emperor Augustus constructed hereabouts a harbour for fleets, which +the ages have choked up, and which survives only in the title of this +ancient church. Its extreme loneliness makes it doubly impressive. They +opened the great doors for me, and let a shaft of heated air go wander +up the beautiful nave between the twenty-four lustrous, pearly columns +of cipollino marble, and mount the wide staircase of the choir and spend +itself beneath the mosaics of the vault. I passed a memorable half-hour +sitting in this wave of tempered light, looking down the cool grey +avenue of the nave, out of the open door, at the vivid green swamps, and +listening to the melancholy stillness. I rambled for an hour in the Wood +of Associations, between the tall smooth, silvery stems of the pines, +and beside a creek which led me to the outer edge of the wood and a +view of white sails, gleaming and gliding behind the sand-hills. It +was infinitely, it was nobly "quaint," but, as the trees stand at wide +intervals and bear far aloft in the blue air but a little parasol of +foliage, I suppose that, of a glaring summer day, the forest itself +was only the more characteristic of its clime and country for being +perfectly shadeless. + +{Illustration: RAVENNA PINETA.} + +1873. + + + + + +THE SAINT'S AFTERNOON AND OTHERS + + +Before and above all was the sense that, with the narrow limits of past +adventure, I had never yet had such an impression of what the summer +could be in the south or the south in the summer; but I promptly found +it, for the occasion, a good fortune that my terms of comparison were +restricted. It was really something, at a time when the stride of the +traveller had become as long as it was easy, when the seven-league boots +positively hung, for frequent use, in the closet of the most sedentary, +to have kept one's self so innocent of strange horizons that the Bay of +Naples in June might still seem quite final. That picture struck me--a +particular corner of it at least, and for many reasons--as the last +word; and it is this last word that comes back to me, after a short +interval, in a green, grey northern nook, and offers me again its warm, +bright golden meaning before it also inevitably catches the chill. Too +precious, surely, for us not to suffer it to help us as it may is the +faculty of putting together again in an order the sharp minutes and +hours that the wave of time has been as ready to pass over as the salt +sea to wipe out the letters and words your stick has traced in the sand. +Let me, at any rate, recover a sufficient number of such signs to make a +sort of sense. + + +I + + +Far aloft on the great rock was pitched, as the first note, and indeed +the highest, of the wondrous concert, the amazing creation of the friend +who had offered me hospitality, and whom, more almost than I had ever +envied anyone anything, I envied the privilege of being able to reward +a heated, artless pilgrim with a revelation of effects so incalculable. +There was none but the loosest prefigurement as the creaking and puffing +little boat, which had conveyed me only from Sorrento, drew closer +beneath the prodigious island--beautiful, horrible and haunted--that +does most, of all the happy elements and accidents, towards making +the Bay of Naples, for the study of composition, a lesson in the grand +style. There was only, above and below, through the blue of the air and +sea, a great confused shining of hot cliffs and crags and buttresses, +a loss, from nearness, of the splendid couchant outline and the more +comprehensive mass, and an opportunity--oh, not lost, I assure you--to +sit and meditate, even moralise, on the empty deck, while a happy +brotherhood of American and German tourists, including, of course, many +sisters, scrambled down into little waiting, rocking tubs and, after a +few strokes, popped systematically into the small orifice of the Blue +Grotto. There was an appreciable moment when they were all lost to view +in that receptacle, the daily "psychological" moment during which it +must so often befall the recalcitrant observer on the deserted deck to +find himself aware of how delightful it might be if none of them +should come out again. The charm, the fascination of the idea is not a +little--though also not wholly--in the fact that, as the wave rises +over the aperture, there is the most encouraging appearance that they +perfectly may not. There it is. There is no more of them. It is a case +to which nature has, by the neatest stroke and with the best taste in +the world, just quietly attended. + +Beautiful, horrible, haunted: that is the essence of what, about itself, +Capri says to you--dip again into your Tacitus and see why; and yet, +while you roast a little under the awning and in the vaster shadow, it +is not because the trail of Tiberius is ineffaceable that you are most +uneasy. The trail of Germanicus in Italy to-day ramifies further and +bites perhaps even deeper; a proof of which is, precisely, that his +eclipse in the Blue Grotto is inexorably brief, that here he is popping +out again, bobbing enthusiastically back and scrambling triumphantly +back. The spirit, in truth, of his effective appropriation of Capri has +a broad-faced candour against which there is no standing up, supremely +expressive as it is of the well-known "love that kills," of Germanicus's +fatal susceptibility. If I were to let myself, however, incline to +_that_ aspect of the serious case of Capri I should embark on strange +depths. The straightness and simplicity, the classic, synthetic +directness of the German passion for Italy, make this passion probably +the sentiment in the world that is in the act of supplying enjoyment in +the largest, sweetest mouthfuls; and there is something unsurpassably +marked in the way that on this irresistible shore it has seated itself +to ruminate and digest. It keeps the record in its own loud accents; it +breaks out in the folds of the hills and on the crests of the crags into +every manner of symptom and warning. Huge advertisements and portents +stare across the bay; the acclivities bristle with breweries and +"restorations" and with great ugly Gothic names. I hasten, of course, to +add that some such general consciousness as this may well oppress, under +any sky, at the century's end, the brooding tourist who makes himself a +prey by staying anywhere, when the gong sounds, "behind." It is behind, +in the track and the reaction, that he least makes out the end of it +all, perceives that to visit anyone's country for anyone's sake is more +and more to find some one quite other in possession. No one, least of +all the brooder himself, is in his own. + + +II + + +I certainly, at any rate, felt the force of this truth when, on scaling +the general rock with the eye of apprehension, I made out at a point +much nearer its summit than its base the gleam of a dizzily-perched +white sea-gazing front which I knew for my particular landmark and which +promised so much that it would have been welcome to keep even no +more than half. Let me instantly say that it kept still more than it +promised, and by no means least in the way of leaving far below it the +worst of the outbreak of restorations and breweries. There is a road at +present to the upper village, with which till recently communication was +all by rude steps cut in the rock and diminutive donkeys scrambling on +the flints; one of those fine flights of construction which the +great road-making "Latin races" take, wherever they prevail, without +advertisement or bombast; and even while I followed along the face of +the cliff its climbing consolidated ledge, I asked myself how I could +think so well of it without consistently thinking better still of +the temples of beer so obviously destined to enrich its terminus. The +perfect answer to that was of course that the brooding tourist is never +bound to be consistent. What happier law for him than this very one, +precisely, when on at last alighting, high up in the blue air, to +stare and gasp and almost disbelieve, he embraced little by little the +beautiful truth particularly, on this occasion, reserved for himself, +and took in the stupendous picture? For here above all had the thought +and the hand come from far away--even from _ultima Thule_, and yet were +in possession triumphant and acclaimed. Well, all one could say was that +the way they had felt their opportunity, the divine conditions of the +place, spoke of the advantage of some such intellectual perspective as a +remote original standpoint alone perhaps can give. If what had finally, +with infinite patience, passion, labour, taste, got itself done there, +was like some supreme reward of an old dream of Italy, something perfect +after long delays, was it not verily in _ultima Thule_ that the vow +would have been piously enough made and the germ tenderly enough +nursed? For a certain art of asking of Italy all she can give, you must +doubtless either be a rare _raffine_ or a rare genius, a sophisticated +Norseman or just a Gabriele d' Annunzio. + +All she can give appeared to me, assuredly, for that day and the +following, gathered up and enrolled there: in the wondrous cluster and +dispersal of chambers, corners, courts, galleries, arbours, arcades, +long white ambulatories and vertiginous points of view. The greatest +charm of all perhaps was that, thanks to the particular conditions, she +seemed to abound, to overflow, in directions in which I had never yet +enjoyed the chance to find her so free. The indispensable thing was +therefore, in observation, in reflection, to press the opportunity hard, +to recognise that as the abundance was splendid, so, by the same stroke, +it was immensely suggestive. It dropped into one's lap, naturally, at +the end of an hour or two, the little white flower of its formula: the +brooding tourist, in other words, could only continue to brood till he +had made out in a measure, as I may say, what was so wonderfully the +matter with him. He was simply then in the presence, more than ever yet, +of the possible poetry of the personal and social life of the south, and +the fun would depend much--as occasions are fleeting--on his arriving +in time, in the interest of that imagination which is his only field +of sport, at adequate new notations of it. The sense of all this, his +obscure and special fun in the general bravery, mixed, on the morrow, +with the long, human hum of the bright, hot day and filled up the golden +cup with questions and answers. The feast of St. Antony, the patron of +the upper town, was the one thing in the air, and of the private beauty +of the place, there on the narrow shelf, in the shining, shaded loggias +and above the blue gulfs, all comers were to be made free. + + +III + + +The church-feast of its saint is of course for Anacapri, as for any +self-respecting Italian town, the great day of the year, and the +smaller the small "country," in native parlance, as well as the simpler, +accordingly, the life, the less the chance for leakage, on other +pretexts, of the stored wine of loyalty. This pure fluid, it was easy +to feel overnight, had not sensibly lowered its level; so that nothing +indeed, when the hour came, could well exceed the outpouring. All up and +down the Sorrentine promontory the early summer happens to be the time +of the saints, and I had just been witness there of a week on every day +of which one might have travelled, through kicked-up clouds and other +demonstrations, to a different hot holiday. There had been no bland +evening that, somewhere or other, in the hills or by the sea, the white +dust and the red glow didn't rise to the dim stars. Dust, perspiration, +illumination, conversation--these were the regular elements. "They're +very civilised," a friend who knows them as well as they can be known +had said to me of the people in general; "plenty of fireworks and plenty +of talk--that's all they ever want." That they were "civilised"--on the +side on which they were most to show--was therefore to be the word of +the whole business, and nothing could have, in fact, had more interest +than the meaning that for the thirty-six hours I read into it. + +Seen from below and diminished by distance, Anacapri makes scarce a +sign, and the road that leads to it is not traceable over the rock; but +it sits at its ease on its high, wide table, of which it covers--and +with picturesque southern culture as well--as much as it finds +convenient. As much of it as possible was squeezed all the morning, for +St. Antony, into the piazzetta before the church, and as much more into +that edifice as the robust odour mainly prevailing there allowed room +for. It was the odour that was in prime occupation, and one could only +wonder how so many men, women and children could cram themselves into so +much smell. It was surely the smell, thick and resisting, that was least +successfully to be elbowed. Meanwhile the good saint, before he could +move into the air, had, among the tapers and the tinsel, the opera-music +and the pulpit poundings, bravely to snuff it up. The shade outside was +hot, and the sun was hot; but we waited as densely for him to come out, +or rather to come "on," as the pit at the opera waits for the great +tenor. There were people from below and people from the mainland and +people from Pomerania and a brass band from Naples. There were other +figures at the end of longer strings--strings that, some of them indeed, +had pretty well given way and were now but little snippets trailing in +the dust. Oh, the queer sense of the good old Capri of artistic legend, +of which the name itself was, in the more benighted years--years of the +contadina and the pifferaro--a bright evocation! Oh, the echo, on the +spot, of each romantic tale! Oh, the loafing painters, so bad and so +happy, the conscious models, the vague personalities! The "beautiful +Capri girl" was of course not missed, though not perhaps so beautiful +as in her ancient glamour, which none the less didn't at all exclude +the probable presence--with _his_ legendary light quite undimmed--of +the English lord in disguise who will at no distant date marry her. The +whole thing was there; one held it in one's hand. + +The saint comes out at last, borne aloft in long procession and under a +high canopy: a rejoicing, staring, smiling saint, openly delighted +with the one happy hour in the year on which he may take his own walk. +Frocked and tonsured, but not at all macerated, he holds in his hand a +small wax puppet of an infant Jesus and shows him to all their friends, +to whom he nods and bows: to whom, in the dazzle of the sun he literally +seems to grin and wink, while his litter sways and his banners flap and +every one gaily greets him. The ribbons and draperies flutter, and the +white veils of the marching maidens, the music blares and the guns go +off and the chants resound, and it is all as holy and merry and noisy +as possible. The procession--down to the delightful little tinselled and +bare-bodied babies, miniature St. Antonys irrespective of sex, led or +carried by proud papas or brown grandsires--includes so much of the +population that you marvel there is such a muster to look on--like the +charades given in a family in which every one wants to act. But it +is all indeed in a manner one house, the little high-niched island +community, and nobody therefore, even in the presence of the head of it, +puts on an air of solemnity. Singular and suggestive before everything +else is the absence of any approach to our notion of the posture of +respect, and this among people whose manners in general struck one as so +good and, in particular, as so cultivated. The office of the saint--of +which the festa is but the annual reaffirmation--involves not the +faintest attribute of remoteness or mystery. + +While, with my friend, I waited for him, we went for coolness into the +second church of the place, a considerable and bedizened structure, +with the rare curiosity of a wondrous pictured pavement of majolica, +the garden of Eden done in large coloured tiles or squares, with every +beast, bird and river, and a brave _diminuendo_, in especial, from +portal to altar, of perspective, so that the animals and objects of the +foreground are big and those of the successive distances differ with +much propriety. Here in the sacred shade the old women were knitting, +gossipping, yawning, shuffling about; here the children were romping and +"larking"; here, in a manner, were the open parlour, the nursery, the +kindergarten and the _conversazione_ of the poor. This is everywhere the +case by the southern sea. I remember near Sorrento a wayside chapel that +seemed the scene of every function of domestic life, including cookery +and others. The odd thing is that it all appears to interfere so little +with that special civilised note--the note of manners--which is so +constantly touched. It is barbarous to expectorate in the temple of your +faith, but that doubtless is an extreme case. Is civilisation really +measured by the number of things people do respect? There would seem to +be much evidence against it. The oldest societies, the societies +with most traditions, are naturally not the least ironic, the least +_blasees_, and the African tribes who take so many things into account +that they fear to quit their huts at night are not the fine flower. + + +IV + + +Where, on the other hand, it was impossible not to feel to the full +all the charming _riguardi_--to use their own good word--in which our +friends _could_ abound, was, that afternoon, in the extraordinary temple +of art and hospitality that had been benignantly opened to me. Hither, +from three o'clock to seven, all the world, from the small in particular +to the smaller and the smallest, might freely flock, and here, from the +first hour to the last, the huge straw-bellied flasks of purple wine +were tilted for all the thirsty. They were many, the thirsty, they were +three hundred, they were unending; but the draughts they drank were +neither countable nor counted. This boon was dispensed in a long, +pillared portico, where everything was white and light save the blue +of the great bay as it played up from far below or as you took it in, +between shining columns, with your elbows on the parapet. Sorrento and +Vesuvius were over against you; Naples furthest off, melted, in the +middle of the picture, into shimmering vagueness and innocence; and the +long arm of Posilippo and the presence of the other islands, Procida, +the stricken Ischia, made themselves felt to the left. The grand air of +it all was in one's very nostrils and seemed to come from sources too +numerous and too complex to name. It was antiquity in solution, with +every brown, mild figure, every note of the old speech, every tilt of +the great flask, every shadow cast by every classic fragment, adding +its touch to the impression. What was the secret of the surprising +amenity?--to the essence of which one got no nearer than simply by +feeling afresh the old story of the deep interfusion of the present with +the past. You had felt that often before, and all that could, at the +most, help you now was that, more than ever yet, the present appeared +to become again really classic, to sigh with strange elusive sounds of +Virgil and Theocritus. Heaven only knows how little they would in truth +have had to say to it, but we yield to these visions as we must, and +when the imagination fairly turns in its pain almost any soft name is +good enough to soothe it. + +It threw such difficulties but a step back to say that the secret of +the amenity was "style"; for what in the world was the secret of style, +which you might have followed up and down the abysmal old Italy for so +many a year only to be still vainly calling for it? Everything, at any +rate, that happy afternoon, in that place of poetry, was bathed and +blessed with it. The castle of Barbarossa had been on the height behind; +the villa of black Tiberius had overhung the immensity from the right; +the white arcades and the cool chambers offered to every step some sweet +old "piece" of the past, some rounded porphyry pillar supporting a bust, +some shaft of pale alabaster upholding a trellis, some mutilated marble +image, some bronze that had roughly resisted. Our host, if we came to +that, had the secret; but he could only express it in grand practical +ways. One of them was precisely this wonderful "afternoon tea," in which +tea only--_that_, good as it is, has never the note of style--was not to +be found. The beauty and the poetry, at all events, were clear enough, +and the extraordinary uplifted distinction; but where, in all this, +it may be asked, was the element of "horror" that I have spoken of as +sensible?--what obsession that was not charming could find a place in +that splendid light, out of which the long summer squeezes every secret +and shadow? I'm afraid I'm driven to plead that these evils were exactly +in one's imagination, a predestined victim always of the cruel, the +fatal historic sense. To make so much distinction, how much history had +been needed!--so that the whole air still throbbed and ached with it, +as with an accumulation of ghosts to whom the very climate was pitiless, +condemning them to blanch for ever in the general glare and grandeur, +offering them no dusky northern nook, no place at the friendly fireside, +no shelter of legend or song. + + +V + + +My friend had, among many original relics, in one of his white +galleries--and how he understood the effect and the "value" of +whiteness!--two or three reproductions of the finest bronzes of the +Naples museum, the work of a small band of brothers whom he had found +himself justified in trusting to deal with their problem honourably +and to bring forth something as different as possible from the usual +compromise of commerce. They had brought forth, in especial, for him, a +copy of the young resting, slightly-panting Mercury which it was a pure +delight to live with, and they had come over from Naples on St. Antony's +eve, as they had done the year before, to report themselves to their +patron, to keep up good relations, to drink Capri wine and to join +in the tarantella. They arrived late, while we were at supper; they +received their welcome and their billet, and I am not sure it was not +the conversation and the beautiful manners of these obscure young men +that most fixed in my mind for the time the sense of the side of life +that, all around, was to come out strongest. It would be artless, +no doubt, to represent them as high types of innocence or even of +energy--at the same time that, weighing them against _some_ ruder folk +of our own race, we might perhaps have made bold to place their share +even of these qualities in the scale. It was an impression indeed never +infrequent in Italy, of which I might, in these days, first have felt +the force during a stay, just earlier, with a friend at Sorrento--a +friend who had good-naturedly "had in," on his wondrous terrace, after +dinner, for the pleasure of the gaping alien, the usual local quartette, +violins, guitar and flute, the musical barber, the musical tailor, +sadler, joiner, humblest sons of the people and exponents of Neapolitan +song. Neapolitan song, as we know, has been blown well about the world, +and it is late in the day to arrive with a ravished ear for it. That, +however, was scarcely at all, for me, the question: the question, on the +Sorrento terrace, so high up in the cool Capri night, was of the present +outlook, in the world, for the races with whom it has been a tradition, +in intercourse, positively to please. + +The personal civilisation, for intercourse, of the musical barber and +tailor, of the pleasant young craftsmen of my other friend's company, +was something that could be trusted to make the brooding tourist brood +afresh--to say more to him in fact, all the rest of the second occasion, +than everything else put together. The happy address, the charming +expression, the indistinctive discretion, the complete eclipse, in +short, of vulgarity and brutality--these things easily became among +these people the supremely suggestive note, begetting a hundred hopes +and fears as to the place that, with the present general turn of affairs +about the globe, is being kept for them. They are perhaps what the races +politically feeble have still most to contribute--but what appears to +be the happy prospect for the races politically feeble? And so the +afternoon waned, among the mellow marbles and the pleasant folk---the +purple wine flowed, the golden light faded, song and dance grew free and +circulation slightly embarrassed. But the great impression remained and +finally was exquisite. It was all purple wine, all art and song, and +nobody a grain the worse. It was fireworks and conversation--the former, +in the piazzetta, were to come later; it was civilisation and amenity. I +took in the greater picture, but I lost nothing else; and I talked with +the contadini about antique sculpture. No, nobody was a grain the worse; +and I had plenty to think of. So it was I was quickened to remember +that we others, we of my own country, as a race politically _not_ +weak, had--by what I had somewhere just heard--opened "three hundred +'saloons'" at Manila. + + +VI + + +The "other" afternoons I here pass on to--and I may include in them, +for that matter, various mornings scarce less charmingly sacred to +memory--were occasions of another and a later year; a brief but all +felicitous impression of Naples itself, and of the approach to it from +Rome, as well as of the return to Rome by a different wonderful way, +which I feel I shall be wise never to attempt to "improve on." Let +me muster assurance to confess that this comparatively recent and +superlatively rich reminiscence gives me for its first train of +ineffable images those of a motor-run that, beginning betimes of a +splendid June day, and seeing me, with my genial companions, blissfully +out of Porta San Paolo, hung over us thus its benediction till the +splendour had faded in the lamplit rest of the Chiaja. "We'll go by the +mountains," my friend, of the chariot of fire, had said, "and we'll come +back, after three days, by the sea"; which handsome promise flowered +into such flawless performance that I could but feel it to have closed +and rounded for me, beyond any further rehandling, the long-drawn rather +indeed than thick-studded chaplet of my visitations of Naples--from the +first, seasoned with the highest sensibility of youth, forty years ago, +to this last the other day. I find myself noting with interest--and just +to be able to emphasise it is what inspires me with these remarks--that, +in spite of the milder and smoother and perhaps, pictorially speaking, +considerably emptier, Neapolitan face of things, things in general, +of our later time, I recognised in my final impression a grateful, +a beguiling serenity. The place is at the best wild and weird and +sinister, and yet seemed on this occasion to be seated more at her ease +in her immense natural dignity. My disposition to feel that, I hasten to +add, was doubtless my own secret; my three beautiful days, at any rate, +filled themselves with the splendid harmony, several of the minor notes +of which ask for a place, such as it may be, just here. + +Wondrously, it was a clean and cool and, as who should say, quiet +and amply interspaced Naples--in tune with itself, no harsh jangle of +_forestieri_ vulgarising the concert. I seemed in fact, under the blaze +of summer, the only stranger--though the blaze of summer itself was, +for that matter, everywhere but a higher pitch of light and colour and +tradition, and a lower pitch of everything else; even, it struck me, +of sound and fury. The appeal in short was genial, and, faring out to +Pompeii of a Sunday afternoon, I enjoyed there, for the only time I +can recall, the sweet chance of a late hour or two, the hour of +the lengthening shadows, absolutely alone. The impression remains +ineffaceable--it was to supersede half-a-dozen other mixed memories, the +sense that had remained with me, from far back, of a pilgrimage always +here beset with traps and shocks and vulgar importunities, achieved +under fatal discouragements. Even Pompeii, in fine, haunt of _all_ the +cockneys of creation, burned itself, in the warm still eventide, as +clear as glass, or as the glow of a pale topaz, and the particular +cockney who roamed without a plan and at his ease, but with his feet on +Roman slabs, his hands on Roman stones, his eyes on the Roman void, his +consciousness really at last of some good to him, could open himself +as never before to the fond luxurious fallacy of a close communion, a +direct revelation. With which there were other moments for him not less +the fruit of the slow unfolding of time; the clearest of these again +being those enjoyed on the terrace of a small island-villa--the island +a rock and the villa a wondrous little rock-garden, unless a better term +would be perhaps rock-salon, just off the extreme point of Posilippo +and where, thanks to a friendliest hospitality, he was to hang ecstatic, +through another sublime afternoon, on the wave of a magical wand. Here, +as happened, were charming wise, original people even down to delightful +amphibious American children, enamelled by the sun of the Bay as for +figures of miniature Tritons and Nereids on a Renaissance plaque; and +above all, on the part of the general prospect, a demonstration of the +grand style of composition and effect that one was never to wish to see +bettered. The way in which the Italian scene on such occasions as +this seems to purify itself to the transcendent and perfect _idea_ +alone--idea of beauty, of dignity, of comprehensive grace, with all +accidents merged, all defects disowned, all experience outlived, and +to gather itself up into the mere mute eloquence of what has just +incalculably _been_, remains for ever the secret and the lesson of the +subtlest daughter of History. All one could do, at the heart of +the overarching crystal, and in presence of the relegated City, +the far-trailing Mount, the grand Sorrentine headland, the islands +incomparably stationed and related, was to wonder what may well become +of the so many other elements of any poor human and social complexus, +what might become of any successfully working or only struggling and +floundering civilisation at all, when high Natural Elegance proceeds to +take such exclusive charge and recklessly assume, as it were, _all_ the +responsibilities. + + +VII + + +This indeed had been quite the thing I was asking myself all the +wondrous way down from Rome, and was to ask myself afresh, on the +return, largely within sight of the sea, as our earlier course had +kept to the ineffably romantic inland valleys, the great decorated blue +vistas in which the breasts of the mountains shine vaguely with strange +high-lying city and castle and church and convent, even as shoulders of +no diviner line might be hung about with dim old jewels. It was odd, +at the end of time, long after those initiations, of comparative youth, +that had then struck one as extending the very field itself of felt +charm, as exhausting the possibilities of fond surrender, it was odd +to have positively a new basis of enjoyment, a new gate of triumphant +passage, thrust into one's consciousness and opening to one's use; just +as I confess I have to brace myself a little to call by such fine names +our latest, our ugliest and most monstrous aid to motion. It is true of +the monster, as we have known him up to now, that one can neither quite +praise him nor quite blame him without a blush--he reflects so the +nature of the company he's condemned to keep. His splendid easy power +addressed to noble aims makes him assuredly on occasion a purely +beneficent creature. I parenthesise at any rate that I know him in no +other light--counting out of course the acquaintance that consists of a +dismayed arrest in the road, with back flattened against wall or hedge, +for the dusty, smoky, stenchy shock of his passage. To no end is his +easy power more blest than to that of ministering to the ramifications, +as it were, of curiosity, or to that, in other words, of achieving for +us, among the kingdoms of the earth, the grander and more genial, the +comprehensive and _complete_ introduction. Much as was ever to be said +for our old forms of pilgrimage--and I am convinced that they are far +from wholly superseded--they left, they had to leave, dreadful gaps in +our yearning, dreadful lapses in our knowledge, dreadful failures in our +energy; there were always things off and beyond, goals of delight +and dreams of desire, that dropped as a matter of course into the +unattainable, and over to which our wonder-working agent now flings the +firm straight bridge. Curiosity has lost, under this amazing extension, +its salutary renouncements perhaps; contemplation has become one with +action and satisfaction one with desire--speaking always in the spirit +of the inordinate lover of an enlightened use of our eyes. That may +represent, for all I know, an insolence of advantage on which there will +be eventual heavy charges, as yet obscure and incalculable, to pay, and +I glance at the possibility only to avoid all thought of the lesson +of the long run, and to insist that I utter this dithyramb but in the +immediate flush and fever of the short. For such a beat of time as +our fine courteous and contemplative advance upon Naples, and for such +another as our retreat northward under the same fine law of observation +and homage, the bribed consciousness could only decline to question its +security. The sword of Damocles suspended over that presumption, the +skeleton at the banquet of extravagant ease, would have been that even +at our actual inordinate rate--leaving quite apart "improvements" to +come--such savings of trouble begin to use up the world; some hard +grain of difficulty being always a necessary part of the composition of +pleasure. The hard grain in our old comparatively pedestrian mixture, +before this business of our learning not so much even to fly (which +might indeed involve trouble) as to be mechanically and prodigiously +flown, quite another matter, was the element of uncertainty, effort +and patience; the handful of silver nails which, I admit, drove many an +impression home. The seated motorist misses the silver nails, I fully +acknowledge, save in so far as his aesthetic (let alone his moral) +conscience may supply him with some artful subjective substitute; in +which case the thing becomes a precious secret of his own. + +However, I wander wild--by which I mean I look too far ahead; my +intention having been only to let my sense of the merciless June beauty +of Naples Bay at the sunset hour and on the island terrace associate +itself with the whole inexpressible taste of our two motor-days' feast +of scenery. That queer question of the exquisite grand manner as the +most emphasised _all_ of things--of what it may, seated so predominant +in nature, insidiously, through the centuries, let generations and +populations "in for," hadn't in the least waited for the special +emphasis I speak of to hang about me. I must have found myself more or +less consciously entertaining it by the way--since how couldn't it be of +the very essence of the truth, constantly and intensely before us, that +Italy is really so much the most beautiful country in the world, taking +all things together, that others must stand off and be hushed while she +speaks? Seen thus in great comprehensive iridescent stretches, it is +the incomparable wrought _fusion_, fusion of human history and mortal +passion with the elements of earth and air, of colour, composition and +form, that constitutes her appeal and gives it the supreme heroic grace. +The chariot of fire favours fusion rather than promotes analysis, +and leaves much of that first June picture for me, doubtless, a great +accepted blur of violet and silver. The various hours and successive +aspects, the different strong passages of our reverse process, on +the other hand, still figure for me even as some series of sublime +landscape-frescoes--if the great Claude, say, had ever used that +medium--in the immense gallery of a palace; the homeward run by Capua, +Terracina, Gaeta and its storied headland fortress, across the deep, +strong, indescribable Pontine Marshes, white-cattled, strangely +pastoral, sleeping in the afternoon glow, yet stirred by the near +sea-breath. Thick somehow to the imagination as some full-bodied +sweetness of syrup is thick to the palate the atmosphere of that +region--thick with the sense of history and the very taste of time; as +if the haunt and home (which indeed it is) of some great fair bovine +aristocracy attended and guarded by halberdiers in the form of the +mounted and long-lanced herdsmen, admirably congruous with the whole +picture at every point, and never more so than in their manner of gaily +taking up, as with bell-voices of golden bronze, the offered wayside +greeting. + +{Illustration: TERRACINA} + +There had been this morning among the impressions of our first hour an +unforgettable specimen of that general type--the image of one of those +human figures on which our perception of the romantic so often pounces +in Italy as on the genius of the scene personified; with this advantage, +that as the scene there has, at its best, an unsurpassable distinction, +so the physiognomic representative, standing for it all, and with +an animation, a complexion, an expression, a fineness and fulness of +humanity that appear to have gathered it in and to sum it up, becomes +beautiful by the same simple process, very much, that makes the heir to +a great capitalist rich. Our early start, our roundabout descent from +Posilippo by shining Baire for avoidance of the city, had been an hour +of enchantment beyond any notation I can here recover; all lustre and +azure, yet all composition and classicism, the prospect developed and +spread, till after extraordinary upper reaches of radiance and horizons +of pearl we came at the turn of a descent upon a stalwart young +gamekeeper, or perhaps substantial young farmer, who, well-appointed and +blooming, had unslung his gun and, resting on it beside a hedge, just +lived for us, in the rare felicity of his whole look, during that +moment and while, in recognition, or almost, as we felt, in homage, we +instinctively checked our speed. He pointed, as it were, the lesson, +giving the supreme right accent or final exquisite turn to the immense +magnificent phrase; which from those moments on, and on and on, +resembled doubtless nothing so much as a page written, by a consummate +verbal economist and master of style, in the noblest of all tongues. Our +splendid human plant by the wayside had flowered thus into style--and +there wasn't to be, all day, a lapse of eloquence, a wasted word or a +cadence missed. + +These things are personal memories, however, with the logic of certain +insistences of that sort often difficult to seize. Why should I have +kept so sacredly uneffaced, for instance, our small afternoon wait at +tea-time or, as we made it, coffee-time, in the little brown piazzetta +of Velletri, just short of the final push on through the flushed +Castelli Romani and the drop and home-stretch across the darkening +Campagna? We had been dropped into the very lap of the ancient civic +family, after the inveterate fashion of one's sense of such stations in +small Italian towns. There was a narrow raised terrace, with steps, +in front of the best of the two or three local cafes, and in the soft +enclosed, the warm waning light of June various benign contemplative +worthies sat at disburdened tables and, while they smoked long black +weeds, enjoyed us under those probable workings of subtlety with +which we invest so many quite unimaginably blank (I dare say) Italian +simplicities. The charm was, as always in Italy, in the tone and the air +and the happy hazard of things, which made any positive pretension or +claimed importance a comparatively trifling question. We slid, in the +steep little place, more or less down hill; we wished, stomachically, we +had rather addressed ourselves to a tea-basket; we suffered importunity +from unchidden infants who swarmed about our chairs and romped about +our feet; we stayed no long time, and "went to see" nothing; yet we +communicated to intensity, we lay at our ease in the bosom of the past, +we practised intimacy, in short, an intimacy so much greater than +the mere accidental and ostensible: the difficulty for the right and +grateful expression of which makes the old, the familiar tax on the +luxury of loving Italy. + + +1900-1909. + + + + + + + +End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Italian Hours, by Henry James + +*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ITALIAN HOURS *** + +***** This file should be named 6354-8.txt or 6354-8.zip ***** +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: + http://www.gutenberg.org/6/3/5/6354/ + +Produced by Richard Farris and the online team at +Distributed Proofreaders + + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + +Title: Italian Hours + +Author: Henry James + + +Release Date: August, 2004 [EBook #6354] +This file was first posted on November 29, 2002] +Last Updated: September 18, 2016 + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: UTF-8 + +*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ITALIAN HOURS *** + + + + +Produced by Richard Farris and the online team at +Distributed Proofreaders + +HTML file produced by David Widger + + + + +</pre> + + <div style="height: 8em;"> + <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /> + </div> + <h1> + ITALIAN HOURS + </h1> + <h2> + By Henry James + </h2> + <p> + <br /> + </p> + <h4> + Published November 1909 + </h4> + <p> + <a name="link2H_PREF" id="link2H_PREF"> + <!-- H2 anchor --> </a> + </p> + <div style="height: 4em;"> + <br /><br /><br /><br /> + </div> + <h2> + PREFACE + </h2> + <p> + The chapters of which this volume is composed have with few exceptions + already been collected, and were then associated with others commemorative + of other impressions of (no very extensive) excursions and wanderings. The + notes on various visits to Italy are here for the first time exclusively + placed together, and as they largely refer to quite other days than these—the + date affixed to each paper sufficiently indicating this—I have + introduced a few passages that speak for a later and in some cases a + frequently repeated vision of the places and scenes in question. I have + not hesitated to amend my text, expressively, wherever it seemed urgently + to ask for this, though I have not pretended to add the element of + information or the weight of curious and critical insistence to a brief + record of light inquiries and conclusions. The fond appeal of the observer + concerned is all to aspects and appearances—above all to the + interesting face of things as it mainly <i>used</i> to be. + </p> + <h3> + H. J. + </h3> + <p> + <br /> <br /> + </p> + <hr /> + <p> + <br /> <br /> + </p> + <p> + <b>CONTENTS</b> + </p> + <p class="toc"> + <a href="#link2H_PREF"> PREFACE </a> + </p> + <p class="toc"> + <a href="#link2H_4_0002"> VENICE </a> + </p> + <p class="toc"> + <a href="#link2H_4_0003"> THE GRAND CANAL </a> + </p> + <p class="toc"> + <a href="#link2H_4_0004"> VENICE: AN EARLY IMPRESSION </a> + </p> + <p class="toc"> + <a href="#link2H_4_0005"> TWO OLD HOUSES AND THREE YOUNG WOMEN </a> + </p> + <p class="toc"> + <a href="#link2H_4_0006"> CASA ALVISI </a> + </p> + <p class="toc"> + <a href="#link2H_4_0007"> FROM CHAMBÉRY TO MILAN </a> + </p> + <p class="toc"> + <a href="#link2H_4_0008"> THE OLD SAINT-GOTHARD LEAVES FROM A NOTE-BOOK + </a> + </p> + <p class="toc"> + <a href="#link2H_4_0009"> ITALY REVISITED </a> + </p> + <p class="toc"> + <a href="#link2H_4_0010"> A ROMAN HOLIDAY </a> + </p> + <p class="toc"> + <a href="#link2H_4_0011"> ROMAN RIDES </a> + </p> + <p class="toc"> + <a href="#link2H_4_0012"> ROMAN NEIGHBOURHOODS </a> + </p> + <p class="toc"> + <a href="#link2H_4_0013"> THE AFTER-SEASON IN ROME </a> + </p> + <p class="toc"> + <a href="#link2H_4_0014"> FROM A ROMAN NOTE-BOOK </a> + </p> + <p class="toc"> + <a href="#link2H_4_0015"> A FEW OTHER ROMAN NEIGHBOURHOODS </a> + </p> + <p class="toc"> + <a href="#link2H_4_0016"> A CHAIN OF CITIES </a> + </p> + <p class="toc"> + <a href="#link2H_4_0017"> SIENA EARLY AND LATE </a> + </p> + <p class="toc"> + <a href="#link2H_4_0018"> THE AUTUMN IN FLORENCE </a> + </p> + <p class="toc"> + <a href="#link2H_4_0019"> FLORENTINE NOTES </a> + </p> + <p class="toc"> + <a href="#link2H_4_0020"> TUSCAN CITIES </a> + </p> + <p class="toc"> + <a href="#link2H_4_0021"> OTHER TUSCAN CITIES </a> + </p> + <p class="toc"> + <a href="#link2H_4_0022"> RAVENNA </a> + </p> + <p class="toc"> + <a href="#link2H_4_0023"> THE SAINT’S AFTERNOON AND OTHERS </a> + </p> + <p> + <br /> <br /> + </p> + <hr /> + <p> + <a name="link2H_4_0002" id="link2H_4_0002"> + <!-- H2 anchor --> </a> + </p> + <div style="height: 4em;"> + <br /><br /><br /><br /> + </div> + <h2> + VENICE + </h2> + <p> + It is a great pleasure to write the word; but I am not sure there is not a + certain impudence in pretending to add anything to it. Venice has been + painted and described many thousands of times, and of all the cities of + the world is the easiest to visit without going there. Open the first book + and you will find a rhapsody about it; step into the first + picture-dealer’s and you will find three or four high-coloured “views” of + it. There is notoriously nothing more to be said on the subject. Every one + has been there, and every one has brought back a collection of + photographs. There is as little mystery about the Grand Canal as about our + local thoroughfare, and the name of St. Mark is as familiar as the + postman’s ring. It is not forbidden, however, to speak of familiar things, + and I hold that for the true Venice-lover Venice is always in order. There + is nothing new to be said about her certainly, but the old is better than + any novelty. It would be a sad day indeed when there should be something + new to say. I write these lines with the full consciousness of having no + information whatever to offer. I do not pretend to enlighten the reader; I + pretend only to give a fillip to his memory; and I hold any writer + sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme. + </p> + <h3> + I + </h3> + <p> + Mr. Ruskin has given it up, that is very true; but only after extracting + half a lifetime of pleasure and an immeasurable quantity of fame from it. + We all may do the same, after it has served our turn, which it probably + will not cease to do for many a year to come. Meantime it is Mr. Ruskin + who beyond anyone helps us to enjoy. He has indeed lately produced several + aids to depression in the shape of certain little humorous—ill-humorous—pamphlets + (the series of <i>St. Mark’s Rest</i>) which embody his latest reflections + on the subject of our city and describe the latest atrocities perpetrated + there. These latter are numerous and deeply to be deplored; but to admit + that they have spoiled Venice would be to admit that Venice may be spoiled—an + admission pregnant, as it seems to us, with disloyalty. Fortunately one + reacts against the Ruskinian contagion, and one hour of the lagoon is + worth a hundred pages of demoralised prose. This queer late-coming prose + of Mr. Ruskin (including the revised and condensed issue of the <i>Stones + of Venice</i>, only one little volume of which has been published, or + perhaps ever will be) is all to be read, though much of it appears + addressed to children of tender age. It is pitched in the nursery-key, and + might be supposed to emanate from an angry governess. It is, however, all + suggestive, and much of it is delightfully just. There is an inconceivable + want of form in it, though the author has spent his life in laying down + the principles of form and scolding people for departing from them; but it + throbs and flashes with the love of his subject—a love disconcerted + and abjured, but which has still much of the force of inspiration. Among + the many strange things that have befallen Venice, she has had the good + fortune to become the object of a passion to a man of splendid genius, who + has made her his own and in doing so has made her the world’s. There is no + better reading at Venice therefore, as I say, than Ruskin, for every true + Venice-lover can separate the wheat from the chaff. The narrow theological + spirit, the moralism <i>à tout propos</i>, the queer provincialities and + pruderies, are mere wild weeds in a mountain of flowers. One may doubtless + be very happy in Venice without reading at all—without criticising + or analysing or thinking a strenuous thought. It is a city in which, I + suspect, there is very little strenuous thinking, and yet it is a city in + which there must be almost as much happiness as misery. The misery of + Venice stands there for all the world to see; it is part of the spectacle—a + thoroughgoing devotee of local colour might consistently say it is part of + the pleasure. The Venetian people have little to call their own—little + more than the bare privilege of leading their lives in the most beautiful + of towns. Their habitations are decayed; their taxes heavy; their pockets + light; their opportunities few. One receives an impression, however, that + life presents itself to them with attractions not accounted for in this + meagre train of advantages, and that they are on better terms with it than + many people who have made a better bargain. They lie in the sunshine; they + dabble in the sea; they wear bright rags; they fall into attitudes and + harmonies; they assist at an eternal <i>conversazione</i>. It is not easy + to say that one would have them other than they are, and it certainly + would make an immense difference should they be better fed. The number of + persons in Venice who evidently never have enough to eat is painfully + large; but it would be more painful if we did not equally perceive that + the rich Venetian temperament may bloom upon a dog’s allowance. Nature has + been kind to it, and sunshine and leisure and conversation and beautiful + views form the greater part of its sustenance. It takes a great deal to + make a successful American, but to make a happy Venetian takes only a + handful of quick sensibility. The Italian people have at once the good and + the evil fortune to be conscious of few wants; so that if the civilisation + of a society is measured by the number of its needs, as seems to be the + common opinion to-day, it is to be feared that the children of the lagoon + would make but a poor figure in a set of comparative tables. Not their + misery, doubtless, but the way they elude their misery, is what pleases + the sentimental tourist, who is gratified by the sight of a beautiful race + that lives by the aid of its imagination. The way to enjoy Venice is to + follow the example of these people and make the most of simple pleasures. + Almost all the pleasures of the place are simple; this may be maintained + even under the imputation of ingenious paradox. There is no simpler + pleasure than looking at a fine Titian, unless it be looking at a fine + Tintoret or strolling into St. Mark’s,—abominable the way one falls + into the habit,—and resting one’s light-wearied eyes upon the + windowless gloom; or than floating in a gondola or than hanging over a + balcony or than taking one’s coffee at Florian’s. It is of such + superficial pastimes that a Venetian day is composed, and the pleasure of + the matter is in the emotions to which they minister. These are + fortunately of the finest—otherwise Venice would be insufferably + dull. Reading Ruskin is good; reading the old records is perhaps better; + but the best thing of all is simply staying on. The only way to care for + Venice as she deserves it is to give her a chance to touch you often—to + linger and remain and return. + </p> + <h3> + II + </h3> + <p> + The danger is that you will not linger enough—a danger of which the + author of these lines had known something. It is possible to dislike + Venice, and to entertain the sentiment in a responsible and intelligent + manner. There are travellers who think the place odious, and those who are + not of this opinion often find themselves wishing that the others were + only more numerous. The sentimental tourist’s sole quarrel with his Venice + is that he has too many competitors there. He likes to be alone; to be + original; to have (to himself, at least) the air of making discoveries. + The Venice of to-day is a vast museum where the little wicket that admits + you is perpetually turning and creaking, and you march through the + institution with a herd of fellow-gazers. There is nothing left to + discover or describe, and originality of attitude is completely + impossible. This is often very annoying; you can only turn your back on + your impertinent playfellow and curse his want of delicacy. But this is + not the fault of Venice; it is the fault of the rest of the world. The + fault of Venice is that, though she is easy to admire, she is not so easy + to live with as you count living in other places. After you have stayed a + week and the bloom of novelty has rubbed off you wonder if you can + accommodate yourself to the peculiar conditions. Your old habits become + impracticable and you find yourself obliged to form new ones of an + undesirable and unprofitable character. You are tired of your gondola (or + you think you are) and you have seen all the principal pictures and heard + the names of the palaces announced a dozen times by your gondolier, who + brings them out almost as impressively as if he were an English butler + bawling titles into a drawing-room. You have walked several hundred times + round the Piazza and bought several bushels of photographs. You have + visited the antiquity mongers whose horrible sign-boards dishonour some of + the grandest vistas in the Grand Canal; you have tried the opera and found + it very bad; you have bathed at the Lido and found the water flat. You + have begun to have a shipboard-feeling—to regard the Piazza as an + enormous saloon and the Riva degli Schiavoni as a promenade-deck. You are + obstructed and encaged; your desire for space is unsatisfied; you miss + your usual exercise. You try to take a walk and you fail, and meantime, as + I say, you have come to regard your gondola as a sort of magnified baby’s + cradle. You have no desire to be rocked to sleep, though you are + sufficiently kept awake by the irritation produced, as you gaze across the + shallow lagoon, by the attitude of the perpetual gondolier, with his + turned-out toes, his protruded chin, his absurdly unscientific stroke. The + canals have a horrible smell, and the everlasting Piazza, where you have + looked repeatedly at every article in every shop-window and found them all + rubbish, where the young Venetians who sell bead bracelets and “panoramas” + are perpetually thrusting their wares at you, where the same + tightly-buttoned officers are for ever sucking the same black weeds, at + the same empty tables, in front of the same cafés—the Piazza, as I + say, has resolved itself into a magnificent tread-mill. This is the state + of mind of those shallow inquirers who find Venice all very well for a + week; and if in such a state of mind you take your departure you act with + fatal rashness. The loss is your own, moreover; it is not—with all + deference to your personal attractions—that of your companions who + remain behind; for though there are some disagreeable things in Venice + there is nothing so disagreeable as the visitors. The conditions are + peculiar, but your intolerance of them evaporates before it has had time + to become a prejudice. When you have called for the bill to go, pay it and + remain, and you will find on the morrow that you are deeply attached to + Venice. It is by living there from day to day that you feel the fulness of + her charm; that you invite her exquisite influence to sink into your + spirit. The creature varies like a nervous woman, whom you know only when + you know all the aspects of her beauty. She has high spirits or low, she + is pale or red, grey or pink, cold or warm, fresh or wan, according to the + weather or the hour. She is always interesting and almost always sad; but + she has a thousand occasional graces and is always liable to happy + accidents. You become extraordinarily fond of these things; you count upon + them; they make part of your life. Tenderly fond you become; there is + something indefinable in those depths of personal acquaintance that + gradually establish themselves. The place seems to personify itself, to + become human and sentient and conscious of your affection. You desire to + embrace it, to caress it, to possess it; and finally a soft sense of + possession grows up and your visit becomes a perpetual love-affair. It is + very true that if you go, as the author of these lines on a certain + occasion went, about the middle of March, a certain amount of + disappointment is possible. He had paid no visit for several years, and in + the interval the beautiful and helpless city had suffered an increase of + injury. The barbarians are in full possession and you tremble for what + they may do. You are reminded from the moment of your arrival that Venice + scarcely exists any more as a city at all; that she exists only as a + battered peep-show and bazaar. There was a horde of savage Germans + encamped in the Piazza, and they filled the Ducal Palace and the Academy + with their uproar. The English and Americans came a little later. They + came in good time, with a great many French, who were discreet enough to + make very long repasts at the Caffè Quadri, during which they were out of + the way. The months of April and May of the year 1881 were not, as a + general thing, a favourable season for visiting the Ducal Palace and the + Academy. The <i>valet-de-place</i> had marked them for his own and held + triumphant possession of them. He celebrates his triumphs in a terrible + brassy voice, which resounds all over the place, and has, whatever + language he be speaking, the accent of some other idiom. During all the + spring months in Venice these gentry abound in the great resorts, and they + lead their helpless captives through churches and galleries in dense + irresponsible groups. They infest the Piazza; they pursue you along the + Riva; they hang about the bridges and the doors of the cafés. In saying + just now that I was disappointed at first, I had chiefly in mind the + impression that assails me to-day in the whole precinct of St. Mark’s. The + condition of this ancient sanctuary is surely a great scandal. The pedlars + and commissioners ply their trade—often a very unclean one—at + the very door of the temple; they follow you across the threshold, into + the sacred dusk, and pull your sleeve, and hiss into your ear, scuffling + with each other for customers. There is a great deal of dishonour about + St. Mark’s altogether, and if Venice, as I say, has become a great bazaar, + this exquisite edifice is now the biggest booth. + </p> + <h3> + III + </h3> + <p> + It is treated as a booth in all ways, and if it had not somehow a great + spirit of solemnity within it the traveller would soon have little warrant + for regarding it as a religious affair. The restoration of the outer + walls, which has lately been so much attacked and defended, is certainly a + great shock. Of the necessity of the work only an expert is, I suppose, in + a position to judge; but there is no doubt that, if a necessity it be, it + is one that is deeply to be regretted. To no more distressing necessity + have people of taste lately had to resign themselves. Wherever the hand of + the restorer has been laid all semblance of beauty has vanished; which is + a sad fact, considering that the external loveliness of St. Mark’s has + been for ages less impressive only than that of the still comparatively + uninjured interior. I know not what is the measure of necessity in such a + case, and it appears indeed to be a very delicate question. To-day, at any + rate, that admirable harmony of faded mosaic and marble which, to the eye + of the traveller emerging from the narrow streets that lead to the Piazza, + filled all the further end of it with a sort of dazzling silver presence—to-day + this lovely vision is in a way to be completely reformed and indeed + well-nigh abolished. The old softness and mellowness of colour—the + work of the quiet centuries and of the breath of the salt sea—is + giving way to large crude patches of new material which have the effect of + a monstrous malady rather than of a restoration to health. They look like + blotches of red and white paint and dishonourable smears of chalk on the + cheeks of a noble matron. The face toward the Piazzetta is in especial the + newest-looking thing conceivable—as new as a new pair of boots or as + the morning’s paper. We do not profess, however, to undertake a scientific + quarrel with these changes; we admit that our complaint is a purely + sentimental one. The march of industry in united Italy must doubtless be + looked at as a whole, and one must endeavour to believe that it is through + innumerable lapses of taste that this deeply interesting country is + groping her way to her place among the nations. For the present, it is not + to be denied, certain odd phases of the process are more visible than the + result, to arrive at which it seems necessary that, as she was of old a + passionate votary of the beautiful, she should to-day burn everything that + she has adored. It is doubtless too soon to judge her, and there are + moments when one is willing to forgive her even the restoration of St. + Mark’s. Inside as well there has been a considerable attempt to make the + place more tidy; but the general effect, as yet, has not seriously + suffered. What I chiefly remember is the straightening out of that dark + and rugged old pavement—those deep undulations of primitive mosaic + in which the fond spectator was thought to perceive an intended + resemblance to the waves of the ocean. Whether intended or not the analogy + was an image the more in a treasure-house of images; but from a + considerable portion of the church it has now disappeared. Throughout the + greater part indeed the pavement remains as recent generations have known + it—dark, rich, cracked, uneven, spotted with porphyry and + time-blackened malachite, polished by the knees of innumerable + worshippers; but in other large stretches the idea imitated by the + restorers is that of the ocean in a dead calm, and the model they have + taken the floor of a London club-house or of a New York hotel. I think no + Venetian and scarcely any Italian cares much for such differences; and + when, a year ago, people in England were writing to the <i>Times</i> about + the whole business and holding meetings to protest against it the dear + children of the lagoon—so far as they heard or heeded the rumour—thought + them partly busy-bodies and partly asses. Busy-bodies they doubtless were, + but they took a good deal of disinterested trouble. It never occurs to the + Venetian mind of to-day that such trouble may be worth taking; the + Venetian mind vainly endeavours to conceive a state of existence in which + personal questions are so insipid that people have to look for grievances + in the wrongs of brick and marble. I must not, however, speak of St. + Mark’s as if I had the pretension of giving a description of it or as if + the reader desired one. The reader has been too well served already. It is + surely the best-described building in the world. Open the <i>Stones of + Venice</i>, open Théophile Gautier’s <i>Italia</i>, and you will see. + These writers take it very seriously, and it is only because there is + another way of taking it that I venture to speak of it; the way that + offers itself after you have been in Venice a couple of months, and the + light is hot in the great Square, and you pass in under the pictured + porticoes with a feeling of habit and friendliness and a desire for + something cool and dark. There are moments, after all, when the church is + comparatively quiet and empty, and when you may sit there with an easy + consciousness of its beauty. From the moment, of course, that you go into + any Italian church for any purpose but to say your prayers or look at the + ladies, you rank yourself among the trooping barbarians I just spoke of; + you treat the place as an orifice in the peep-show. Still, it is almost a + spiritual function—or, at the worst, an amorous one—to feed + one’s eyes on the molten colour that drops from the hollow vaults and + thickens the air with its richness. It is all so quiet and sad and faded + and yet all so brilliant and living. The strange figures in the mosaic + pictures, bending with the curve of niche and vault, stare down through + the glowing dimness; the burnished gold that stands behind them catches + the light on its little uneven cubes. St. Mark’s owes nothing of its + character to the beauty of proportion or perspective; there is nothing + grandly balanced or far-arching; there are no long lines nor triumphs of + the perpendicular. The church arches indeed, but arches like a dusky + cavern. Beauty of surface, of tone, of detail, of things near enough to + touch and kneel upon and lean against—it is from this the effect + proceeds. In this sort of beauty the place is incredibly rich, and you may + go there every day and find afresh some lurking pictorial nook. It is a + treasury of bits, as the painters say; and there are usually three or four + of the fraternity with their easels set up in uncertain equilibrium on the + undulating floor. It is not easy to catch the real complexion of St. + Mark’s, and these laudable attempts at portraiture are apt to look either + lurid or livid. But if you cannot paint the old loose-looking marble + slabs, the great panels of basalt and jasper, the crucifixes of which the + lonely anguish looks deeper in the vertical light, the tabernacles whose + open doors disclose a dark Byzantine image spotted with dull, crooked gems—if + you cannot paint these things you can at least grow fond of them. You grow + fond even of the old benches of red marble, partly worn away by the + breeches of many generations and attached to the base of those wide + pilasters of which the precious plating, delightful in its faded + brownness, with a faint grey bloom upon it, bulges and yawns a little with + honourable age. + </p> + <p> + {Illustration: FLAGS AT ST. MARK’S VENICE} + </p> + <h3> + IV + </h3> + <p> + Even at first, when the vexatious sense of the city of the Doges reduced + to earning its living as a curiosity-shop was in its keenness, there was a + great deal of entertainment to be got from lodging on Riva Schiavoni and + looking out at the far-shimmering lagoon. There was entertainment indeed + in simply getting into the place and observing the queer incidents of a + Venetian installation. A great many persons contribute indirectly to this + undertaking, and it is surprising how they spring out at you during your + novitiate to remind you that they are bound up in some mysterious manner + with the constitution of your little establishment. It was an interesting + problem for instance to trace the subtle connection existing between the + niece of the landlady and the occupancy of the fourth floor. Superficially + it was none too visible, as the young lady in question was a dancer at the + Fenice theatre—or when that was closed at the Rossini—and + might have been supposed absorbed by her professional duties. It proved + necessary, however, that she should hover about the premises in a velvet + jacket and a pair of black kid gloves with one little white button; as + also, that she should apply a thick coating of powder to her face, which + had a charming oval and a sweet weak expression, like that of most of the + Venetian maidens, who, as a general thing—it was not a peculiarity + of the land-lady’s niece—are fond of besmearing themselves with + flour. You soon recognise that it is not only the many-twinkling lagoon + you behold from a habitation on the Riva; you see a little of everything + Venetian. Straight across, before my windows, rose the great pink mass of + San Giorgio Maggiore, which has for an ugly Palladian church a success + beyond all reason. It is a success of position, of colour, of the immense + detached Campanile, tipped with a tall gold angel. I know not whether it + is because San Giorgio is so grandly conspicuous, with a great deal of + worn, faded-looking brickwork; but for many persons the whole place has a + kind of suffusion of rosiness. Asked what may be the leading colour in the + Venetian concert, we should inveterately say Pink, and yet without + remembering after all that this elegant hue occurs very often. It is a + faint, shimmering, airy, watery pink; the bright sea-light seems to flush + with it and the pale whiteish-green of lagoon and canal to drink it in. + There is indeed a great deal of very evident brickwork, which is never + fresh or loud in colour, but always burnt out, as it were, always + exquisitely mild. + </p> + <p> + Certain little mental pictures rise before the collector of memories at + the simple mention, written or spoken, of the places he has loved. When I + hear, when I see, the magical name I have written above these pages, it is + not of the great Square that I think, with its strange basilica and its + high arcades, nor of the wide mouth of the Grand Canal, with the stately + steps and the well-poised dome of the Salute; it is not of the low lagoon, + nor the sweet Piazzetta, nor the dark chambers of St. Mark’s. I simply see + a narrow canal in the heart of the city—a patch of green water and a + surface of pink wall. The gondola moves slowly; it gives a great smooth + swerve, passes under a bridge, and the gondolier’s cry, carried over the + quiet water, makes a kind of splash in the stillness. A girl crosses the + little bridge, which has an arch like a camel’s back, with an old shawl on + her head, which makes her characteristic and charming; you see her against + the sky as you float beneath. The pink of the old wall seems to fill the + whole place; it sinks even into the opaque water. Behind the wall is a + garden, out of which the long arm of a white June rose—the roses of + Venice are splendid—has flung itself by way of spontaneous ornament. + On the other side of this small water-way is a great shabby facade of + Gothic windows and balconies—balconies on which dirty clothes are + hung and under which a cavernous-looking doorway opens from a low flight + of slimy water-steps. It is very hot and still, the canal has a queer + smell, and the whole place is enchanting. + </p> + <p> + {Illustration: A NARROW CANAL, VENICE} + </p> + <p> + It is poor work, however, talking about the colour of things in Venice. + The fond spectator is perpetually looking at it from his window, when he + is not floating about with that delightful sense of being for the moment a + part of it, which any gentleman in a gondola is free to entertain. + Venetian windows and balconies are a dreadful lure, and while you rest + your elbows on these cushioned ledges the precious hours fly away. But in + truth Venice isn’t in fair weather a place for concentration of mind. The + effort required for sitting down to a writing-table is heroic, and the + brightest page of MS. looks dull beside the brilliancy of your <i>milieu</i>. + All nature beckons you forth and murmurs to you sophistically that such + hours should be devoted to collecting impressions. Afterwards, in ugly + places, at unprivileged times, you can convert your impressions into + prose. Fortunately for the present proser the weather wasn’t always fine; + the first month was wet and windy, and it was better to judge of the + matter from an open casement than to respond to the advances of persuasive + gondoliers. Even then however there was a constant entertainment in the + view. It was all cold colour, and the steel-grey floor of the lagoon was + stroked the wrong way by the wind. Then there were charming cool + intervals, when the churches, the houses, the anchored fishing-boats, the + whole gently-curving line of the Riva, seemed to be washed with a pearly + white. Later it all turned warm—warm to the eye as well as to other + senses. After the middle of May the whole place was in a glow. The sea + took on a thousand shades, but they were only infinite variations of blue, + and those rosy walls I just spoke of began to flush in the thick sunshine. + Every patch of colour, every yard of weather-stained stucco, every glimpse + of nestling garden or daub of sky above a <i>calle</i>, began to shine and + sparkle—began, as the painters say, to “compose.” The lagoon was + streaked with odd currents, which played across it like huge smooth + finger-marks. The gondolas multiplied and spotted it allover; every + gondola and gondolier looking, at a distance, precisely like every other. + </p> + <p> + There is something strange and fascinating in this mysterious + impersonality of the gondola. It has an identity when you are in it, but, + thanks to their all being of the same size, shape and colour, and of the + same deportment and gait, it has none, or as little as possible, as you + see it pass before you. From my windows on the Riva there was always the + same silhouette—the long, black, slender skiff, lifting its head and + throwing it back a little, moving yet seeming not to move, with the + grotesquely-graceful figure on the poop. This figure inclines, as may be, + more to the graceful or to the grotesque—standing in the “second + position” of the dancing-master, but indulging from the waist upward in a + freedom of movement which that functionary would deprecate. One may say as + a general thing that there is something rather awkward in the movement + even of the most graceful gondolier, and something graceful in the + movement of the most awkward. In the graceful men of course the grace + predominates, and nothing can be finer than the large, firm way in which, + from their point of vantage, they throw themselves over their tremendous + oar. It has the boldness of a plunging bird and the regularity of a + pendulum. Sometimes, as you see this movement in profile, in a gondola + that passes you—see, as you recline on your own low cushions, the + arching body of the gondolier lifted up against the sky—it has a + kind of nobleness which suggests an image on a Greek frieze. The gondolier + at Venice is your very good friend—if you choose him happily—and + on the quality of the personage depends a good deal that of your + impressions. He is a part of your daily life, your double, your shadow, + your complement. Most people, I think, either like their gondolier or hate + him; and if they like him, like him very much. In this case they take an + interest in him after his departure; wish him to be sure of employment, + speak of him as the gem of gondoliers and tell their friends to be certain + to “secure” him. There is usually no difficulty in securing him; there is + nothing elusive or reluctant about a gondolier. Nothing would induce me + not to believe them for the most part excellent fellows, and the + sentimental tourist must always have a kindness for them. More than the + rest of the population, of course, they are the children of Venice; they + are associated with its idiosyncrasy, with its essence, with its silence, + with its melancholy. + </p> + <p> + When I say they are associated with its silence I should immediately add + that they are associated also with its sound. Among themselves they are an + extraordinarily talkative company. They chatter at the <i>traghetti</i>, + where they always have some sharp point under discussion; they bawl across + the canals; they bespeak your commands as you approach; they defy each + other from afar. If you happen to have a <i>traghetto</i> under your + window, you are well aware that they are a vocal race. I should go even + further than I went just now, and say that the voice of the gondolier is + in fact for audibility the dominant or rather the only note of Venice. + There is scarcely another heard sound, and that indeed is part of the + interest of the place. There is no noise there save distinctly human + noise; no rumbling, no vague uproar, nor rattle of wheels and hoofs. It is + all articulate and vocal and personal. One may say indeed that Venice is + emphatically the city of conversation; people talk all over the place + because there is nothing to interfere with its being caught by the ear. + Among the populace it is a general family party. The still water carries + the voice, and good Venetians exchange confidences at a distance of half a + mile. It saves a world of trouble, and they don’t like trouble. Their + delightful garrulous language helps them to make Venetian life a long <i>conversazione</i>. + This language, with its soft elisions, its odd transpositions, its kindly + contempt for consonants and other disagreeables, has in it something + peculiarly human and accommodating. If your gondolier had no other merit + he would have the merit that he speaks Venetian. This may rank as a merit + even—some people perhaps would say especially—when you don’t + understand what he says. But he adds to it other graces which make him an + agreeable feature in your life. The price he sets on his services is + touchingly small, and he has a happy art of being obsequious without + being, or at least without seeming, abject. For occasional liberalities he + evinces an almost lyrical gratitude. In short he has delightfully good + manners, a merit which he shares for the most part with the Venetians at + large. One grows very fond of these people, and the reason of one’s + fondness is the frankness and sweetness of their address. That of the + Italian family at large has much to recommend it; but in the Venetian + manner there is something peculiarly ingratiating. One feels that the race + is old, that it has a long and rich civilisation in its blood, and that if + it hasn’t been blessed by fortune it has at least been polished by time. + It hasn’t a genius for stiff morality, and indeed makes few pretensions in + that direction. It scruples but scantly to represent the false as the + true, and has been accused of cultivating the occasion to grasp and to + overreach, and of steering a crooked course—not to your and my + advantage—amid the sanctities of property. It has been accused + further of loving if not too well at least too often, of being in fine as + little austere as possible. I am not sure it is very brave, nor struck + with its being very industrious. But it has an unfailing sense of the + amenities of life; the poorest Venetian is a natural man of the world. He + is better company than persons of his class are apt to be among the + nations of industry and virtue—where people are also sometimes + perceived to lie and steal and otherwise misconduct themselves. He has a + great desire to please and to be pleased. + </p> + <h3> + V + </h3> + <p> + In that matter at least the cold-blooded stranger begins at last to + imitate him; begins to lead a life that shall be before all things easy; + unless indeed he allow himself, like Mr. Ruskin, to be put out of humour + by Titian and Tiepolo. The hours he spends among the pictures are his best + hours in Venice, and I am ashamed to have written so much of common things + when I might have been making festoons of the names of the masters. Only, + when we have covered our page with such festoons what more is left to say? + When one has said Carpaccio and Bellini, the Tintoret and the Veronese, + one has struck a note that must be left to resound at will. Everything has + been said about the mighty painters, and it is of little importance that a + pilgrim the more has found them to his taste. “Went this morning to the + Academy; was very much pleased with Titian’s ‘Assumption.’” That honest + phrase has doubtless been written in many a traveller’s diary, and was not + indiscreet on the part of its author. But it appeals little to the general + reader, and we must moreover notoriously not expose our deepest feelings. + Since I have mentioned Titian’s “Assumption” I must say that there are + some people who have been less pleased with it than the observer we have + just imagined. It is one of the possible disappointments of Venice, and + you may if you like take advantage of your privilege of not caring for it. + It imparts a look of great richness to the side of the beautiful room of + the Academy on which it hangs; but the same room contains two or three + works less known to fame which are equally capable of inspiring a passion. + “The ‘Annunciation’ struck me as coarse and superficial”: that note was + once made in a simple-minded tourist’s book. At Venice, strange to say, + Titian is altogether a disappointment; the city of his adoption is far + from containing the best of him. Madrid, Paris, London, Florence, Dresden, + Munich—these are the homes of his greatness. + </p> + <p> + There are other painters who have but a single home, and the greatest of + these is the Tintoret. Close beside him sit Carpaccio and Bellini, who + make with him the dazzling Venetian trio. The Veronese may be seen and + measured in other places; he is most splendid in Venice, but he shines in + Paris and in Dresden. You may walk out of the noon-day dusk of Trafalgar + Square in November, and in one of the chambers of the National Gallery see + the family of Darius rustling and pleading and weeping at the feet of + Alexander. Alexander is a beautiful young Venetian in crimson pantaloons, + and the picture sends a glow into the cold London twilight. You may sit + before it for an hour and dream you are floating to the water-gate of the + Ducal Palace, where a certain old beggar who has one of the handsomest + heads in the world—he has sat to a hundred painters for Doges and + for personages more sacred—has a prescriptive right to pretend to + pull your gondola to the steps and to hold out a greasy immemorial cap. + But you must go to Venice in very fact to see the other masters, who form + part of your life while you are there, who illuminate your view of the + universe. It is difficult to express one’s relation to them; the whole + Venetian art-world is so near, so familiar, so much an extension and + adjunct of the spreading actual, that it seems almost invidious to say one + owes more to one of them than to the other. Nowhere, not even in Holland, + where the correspondence between the real aspects and the little polished + canvases is so constant and so exquisite, do art and life seem so + interfused and, as it were, so consanguineous. All the splendour of light + and colour, all the Venetian air and the Venetian history are on the walls + and ceilings of the palaces; and all the genius of the masters, all the + images and visions they have left upon canvas, seem to tremble in the + sunbeams and dance upon the waves. That is the perpetual interest of the + place—that you live in a certain sort of knowledge as in a rosy + cloud. You don’t go into the churches and galleries by way of a change + from the streets; you go into them because they offer you an exquisite + reproduction of the things that surround you. All Venice was both model + and painter, and life was so pictorial that art couldn’t help becoming so. + With all diminutions life is pictorial still, and this fact gives an + extraordinary freshness to one’s perception of the great Venetian works. + You judge of them not as a connoisseur, but as a man of the world, and you + enjoy them because they are so social and so true. Perhaps of all works of + art that are equally great they demand least reflection on the part of the + spectator—they make least of a mystery of being enjoyed. Reflection + only confirms your admiration, yet is almost ashamed to show its head. + These things speak so frankly and benignantly to the sense that even when + they arrive at the highest style—as in the Tintoret’s “Presentation + of the little Virgin at the Temple”—they are still more familiar. + </p> + <p> + But it is hard, as I say, to express all this, and it is painful as well + to attempt it—painful because in the memory of vanished hours so + filled with beauty the consciousness of present loss oppresses. Exquisite + hours, enveloped in light and silence, to have known them once is to have + always a terrible standard of enjoyment. Certain lovely mornings of May + and June come back with an ineffaceable fairness. Venice isn’t smothered + in flowers at this season, in the manner of Florence and Rome; but the sea + and sky themselves seem to blossom and rustle. The gondola waits at the + wave-washed steps, and if you are wise you will take your place beside a + discriminating companion. Such a companion in Venice should of course be + of the sex that discriminates most finely. An intelligent woman who knows + her Venice seems doubly intelligent, and it makes no woman’s perceptions + less keen to be aware that she can’t help looking graceful as she is borne + over the waves. The handsome Pasquale, with uplifted oar, awaits your + command, knowing, in a general way, from observation of your habits, that + your intention is to go to see a picture or two. It perhaps doesn’t + immensely matter what picture you choose: the whole affair is so charming. + It is charming to wander through the light and shade of intricate canals, + with perpetual architecture above you and perpetual fluidity beneath. It + is charming to disembark at the polished steps of a little empty <i>campo</i>—a + sunny shabby square with an old well in the middle, an old church on one + side and tall Venetian windows looking down. Sometimes the windows are + tenantless; sometimes a lady in a faded dressing-gown leans vaguely on the + sill. There is always an old man holding out his hat for coppers; there + are always three or four small boys dodging possible umbrella-pokes while + they precede you, in the manner of custodians, to the door of the church. + </p> + <h3> + VI + </h3> + <p> + The churches of Venice are rich in pictures, and many a masterpiece lurks + in the unaccommodating gloom of side-chapels and sacristies. Many a noble + work is perched behind the dusty candles and muslin roses of a + scantily-visited altar; some of them indeed, hidden behind the altar, + suffer in a darkness that can never be explored. The facilities offered + you for approaching the picture in such cases are a mockery of your + irritated wish. You stand at tip-toe on a three-legged stool, you climb a + rickety ladder, you almost mount upon the shoulders of the <i>custode</i>. + You do everything but see the picture. You see just enough to be sure it’s + beautiful. You catch a glimpse of a divine head, of a fig tree against a + mellow sky, but the rest is impenetrable mystery. You renounce all hope, + for instance, of approaching the magnificent Cima da Conegliano in San + Giovanni in Bragora; and bethinking yourself of the immaculate purity that + shines in the spirit of this master, you renounce it with chagrin and + pain. Behind the high altar in that church hangs a Baptism of Christ by + Cima which I believe has been more or less repainted. You make the thing + out in spots, you see it has a fullness of perfection. But you turn away + from it with a stiff neck and promise yourself consolation in the Academy + and at the Madonna dell’ Orto, where two noble works by the same hand—pictures + as clear as a summer twilight—present themselves in better + circumstances. It may be said as a general thing that you never see the + Tintoret. You admire him, you adore him, you think him the greatest of + painters, but in the great majority of cases your eyes fail to deal with + him. This is partly his own fault; so many of his works have turned to + blackness and are positively rotting in their frames. At the Scuola di San + Rocco, where there are acres of him, there is scarcely anything at all + adequately visible save the immense “Crucifixion” in the upper story. It + is true that in looking at this huge composition you look at many + pictures; it has not only a multitude of figures but a wealth of episodes; + and you pass from one of these to the other as if you were “doing” a + gallery. Surely no single picture in the world contains more of human + life; there is everything in it, including the most exquisite beauty. It + is one of the greatest things of art; it is always interesting. There are + works of the artist which contain touches more exquisite, revelations of + beauty more radiant, but there is no other vision of so intense a reality, + an execution so splendid. The interest, the impressiveness, of that whole + corner of Venice, however melancholy the effect of its gorgeous and + ill-lighted chambers, gives a strange importance to a visit to the Scuola. + Nothing that all travellers go to see appears to suffer less from the + incursions of travellers. It is one of the loneliest booths of the bazaar, + and the author of these lines has always had the good fortune, which he + wishes to every other traveller, of having it to himself. I think most + visitors find the place rather alarming and wicked-looking. They walk + about a while among the fitful figures that gleam here and there out of + the great tapestry (as it were) with which the painter has hung all the + walls, and then, depressed and bewildered by the portentous solemnity of + these objects, by strange glimpses of unnatural scenes, by the echo of + their lonely footsteps on the vast stone floors, they take a hasty + departure, finding themselves again, with a sense of release from danger, + a sense that the <i>genius loci</i> was a sort of mad white-washer who + worked with a bad mixture, in the bright light of the <i>campo</i>, among + the beggars, the orange-vendors and the passing gondolas. Solemn indeed is + the place, solemn and strangely suggestive, for the simple reason that we + shall scarcely find four walls elsewhere that inclose within a like area + an equal quantity of genius. The air is thick with it and dense and + difficult to breathe; for it was genius that was not happy, inasmuch as + it, lacked the art to fix itself for ever. It is not immortality that we + breathe at the Scuola di San Rocco, but conscious, reluctant mortality. + </p> + <p> + Fortunately, however, we can turn to the Ducal Palace, where everything is + so brilliant and splendid that the poor dusky Tintoret is lifted in spite + of himself into the concert. This deeply original building is of course + the loveliest thing in Venice, and a morning’s stroll there is a wonderful + illumination. Cunningly select your hour—half the enjoyment of + Venice is a question of dodging—and enter at about one o’clock, when + the tourists have flocked off to lunch and the echoes of the charming + chambers have gone to sleep among the sunbeams. There is no brighter place + in Venice—by which I mean that on the whole there is none half so + bright. The reflected sunshine plays up through the great windows from the + glittering lagoon and shimmers and twinkles over gilded walls and + ceilings. All the history of Venice, all its splendid stately past, glows + around you in a strong sealight. Everyone here is magnificent, but the + great Veronese is the most magnificent of all. He swims before you in a + silver cloud; he thrones in an eternal morning. The deep blue sky burns + behind him, streaked across with milky bars; the white colonnades sustain + the richest canopies, under which the first gentlemen and ladies in the + world both render homage and receive it. Their glorious garments rustle in + the air of the sea and their sun-lighted faces are the very complexion of + Venice. The mixture of pride and piety, of politics and religion, of art + and patriotism, gives a splendid dignity to every scene. Never was a + painter more nobly joyous, never did an artist take a greater delight in + life, seeing it all as a kind of breezy festival and feeling it through + the medium of perpetual success. He revels in the gold-framed ovals of the + ceilings, multiplies himself there with the fluttering movement of an + embroidered banner that tosses itself into the blue. He was the happiest + of painters and produced the happiest picture in the world. “The Rape of + Europa” surely deserves this title; it is impossible to look at it without + aching with envy. Nowhere else in art is such a temperament revealed; + never did inclination and opportunity combine to express such enjoyment. + The mixture of flowers and gems and brocade, of blooming flesh and shining + sea and waving groves, of youth, health, movement, desire—all this + is the brightest vision that ever descended upon the soul of a painter. + Happy the artist who could entertain such a vision; happy the artist who + could paint it as the masterpiece I here recall is painted. + </p> + <p> + The Tintoret’s visions were not so bright as that; but he had several that + were radiant enough. In the room that contains the work just cited are + several smaller canvases by the greatly more complex genius of the Scuola + di San Rocco, which are almost simple in their loveliness, almost happy in + their simplicity. They have kept their brightness through the centuries, + and they shine with their neighbours in those golden rooms. There is a + piece of painting in one of them which is one of the sweetest things in + Venice and which reminds one afresh of those wild flowers of execution + that bloom so profusely and so unheeded in the dark corners of all of the + Tintoret’s work. “Pallas chasing away Mars” is, I believe, the name that + is given to the picture; and it represents in fact a young woman of noble + appearance administering a gentle push to a fine young man in armour, as + if to tell him to keep his distance. It is of the gentleness of this push + that I speak, the charming way in which she puts out her arm, with a + single bracelet on it, and rests her young hand, its rosy fingers parted, + on his dark breastplate. She bends her enchanting head with the effort—a + head which has all the strange fairness that the Tintoret always sees in + women—and the soft, living, flesh-like glow of all these members, + over which the brush has scarcely paused in its course, is as pretty an + example of genius as all Venice can show. But why speak of the Tintoret + when I can say nothing of the great “Paradise,” which unfolds its somewhat + smoky splendour and the wonder of its multitudinous circles in one of the + other chambers? If it were not one of the first pictures in the world it + would be about the biggest, and we must confess that the spectator gets + from it at first chiefly an impression of quantity. Then he sees that this + quantity is really wealth; that the dim confusion of faces is a + magnificent composition, and that some of the details of this composition + are extremely beautiful. It is impossible however in a retrospect of + Venice to specify one’s happiest hours, though as one looks backward + certain ineffaceable moments start here and there into vividness. How is + it possible to forget one’s visits to the sacristy of the Frari, however + frequent they may have been, and the great work of John Bellini which + forms the treasure of that apartment? + </p> + <h3> + VII + </h3> + <p> + Nothing in Venice is more perfect than this, and we know of no work of art + more complete. The picture is in three compartments; the Virgin sits in + the central division with her child; two venerable saints, standing close + together, occupy each of the others. It is impossible to imagine anything + more finished or more ripe. It is one of those things that sum up the + genius of a painter, the experience of a life, the teaching of a school. + It seems painted with molten gems, which have only been clarified by time, + and is as solemn as it is gorgeous and as simple as it is deep. Giovanni + Bellini is more or less everywhere in Venice, and, wherever he is, almost + certain to be first—first, I mean, in his own line: paints little + else than the Madonna and the saints; he has not Carpaccio’s care for + human life at large, nor the Tintoret’s nor the of the Veronese. Some of + his greater pictures, however, where several figures are clustered + together, have a richness of sanctity that is almost profane. There is one + of them on the dark side of the room at the Academy that contains Titian’s + “Assumption,” which if we could only see it—its position is an + inconceivable scandal—would evidently be one of the mightiest of + so-called sacred pictures. So too is the Madonna of San Zaccaria, hung in + a cold, dim, dreary place, ever so much too high, but so mild and serene, + and so grandly disposed and accompanied, that the proper attitude for even + the most critical amateur, as he looks at it, strikes one as the bended + knee. There is another noble John Bellini, one of the very few in which + there is no Virgin, at San Giovanni Crisostomo—a St. Jerome, in a + red dress, sitting aloft upon the rocks and with a landscape of + extraordinary purity behind him. The absence of the peculiarly erect + Madonna makes it an interesting surprise among the works of the painter + and gives it a somewhat less strenuous air. But it has brilliant beauty + and the St. Jerome is a delightful old personage. + </p> + <p> + The same church contains another great picture for which the haunter of + these places must find a shrine apart in his memory; one of the most + interesting things he will have seen, if not the most brilliant. Nothing + appeals more to him than three figures of Venetian ladies which occupy the + foreground of a smallish canvas of Sebastian del Piombo, placed above the + high altar of San Giovanni Crisostomo. Sebastian was a Venetian by birth, + but few of his productions are to be seen in his native place; few indeed + are to be seen anywhere. The picture represents the patron-saint of the + church, accompanied by other saints and by the worldly votaries I have + mentioned. These ladies stand together on the left, holding in their hands + little white caskets; two of them are in profile, but the foremost turns + her face to the spectator. This face and figure are almost unique among + the beautiful things of Venice, and they leave the susceptible observer + with the impression of having made, or rather having missed, a strange, a + dangerous, but a most valuable, acquaintance. The lady, who is superbly + handsome, is the typical Venetian of the sixteenth century, and she + remains for the mind the perfect flower of that society. Never was there a + greater air of breeding, a deeper expression of tranquil superiority. She + walks a goddess—as if she trod without sinking the waves of the + Adriatic. It is impossible to conceive a more perfect expression of the + aristocratic spirit either in its pride or in its benignity. This + magnificent creature is so strong and secure that she is gentle, and so + quiet that in comparison all minor assumptions of calmness suggest only a + vulgar alarm. But for all this there are depths of possible disorder in + her light-coloured eye. + </p> + <p> + I had meant however to say nothing about her, for it’s not right to speak + of Sebastian when one hasn’t found room for Carpaccio. These visions come + to one, and one can neither hold them nor brush them aside. Memories of + Carpaccio, the magnificent, the delightful—it’s not for want of such + visitations, but only for want of space, that I haven’t said of him what I + would. There is little enough need of it for Carpaccio’s sake, his fame + being brighter to-day—thanks to the generous lamp Mr. Ruskin has + held up to it—than it has ever been. Yet there is something + ridiculous in talking of Venice without making him almost the refrain. He + and the Tintoret are the two great realists, and it is hard to say which + is the more human, the more various. The Tintoret had the mightier + temperament, but Carpaccio, who had the advantage of more newness and more + responsibility, sailed nearer to perfection. Here and there he quite + touches it, as in the enchanting picture, at the Academy, of St. Ursula + asleep in her little white bed, in her high clean room, where the angel + visits her at dawn; or in the noble St. Jerome in his study at S. Giorgio + Schiavoni. This latter work is a pearl of sentiment, and I may add without + being fantastic a ruby of colour. It unites the most masterly finish with + a kind of universal largeness of feeling, and he who has it well in his + memory will never hear the name of Carpaccio without a throb of almost + personal affection. Such indeed is the feeling that descends upon you in + that wonderful little chapel of St. George of the Slaves, where this most + personal and sociable of artists has expressed all the sweetness of his + imagination. The place is small and incommodious, the pictures are out of + sight and ill-lighted, the custodian is rapacious, the visitors are + mutually intolerable, but the shabby little chapel is a palace of art. Mr. + Ruskin has written a pamphlet about it which is a real aid to enjoyment, + though I can’t but think the generous artist, with his keen senses and his + just feeling, would have suffered to hear his eulogist declare that one of + his other productions—in the Museo Civico of Palazzo Correr, a + delightful portrait of two Venetian ladies with pet animals—is the + “finest picture in the world.” It has no need of that to be thought + admirable; and what more can a painter desire? + </p> + <h3> + VIII + </h3> + <p> + May in Venice is better than April, but June is best of all. Then the days + are hot, but not too hot, and the nights are more beautiful than the days. + Then Venice is rosier than ever in the morning and more golden than ever + as the day descends. She seems to expand and evaporate, to multiply all + her reflections and iridescences. Then the life of her people and the + strangeness of her constitution become a perpetual comedy, or at least a + perpetual drama. Then the gondola is your sole habitation, and you spend + days between sea and sky. You go to the Lido, though the Lido has been + spoiled. When I first saw it, in 1869, it was a very natural place, and + there was but a rough lane across the little island from the landing-place + to the beach. There was a bathing-place in those days, and a restaurant, + which was very bad, but where in the warm evenings your dinner didn’t much + matter as you sat letting it cool on the wooden terrace that stretched out + into the sea. To-day the Lido is a part of united Italy and has been made + the victim of villainous improvements. A little cockney village has sprung + up on its rural bosom and a third-rate boulevard leads from Santa + Elisabetta to the Adriatic. There are bitumen walks and gas-lamps, + lodging-houses, shops and a <i>teatro diurno</i>. The + bathing-establishment is bigger than before, and the restaurant as well; + but it is a compensation perhaps that the cuisine is no better. Such as it + is, however, you won’t scorn occasionally to partake of it on the breezy + platform under which bathers dart and splash, and which looks out to where + the fishing-boats, with sails of orange and crimson, wander along the + darkening horizon. The beach at the Lido is still lonely and beautiful, + and you can easily walk away from the cockney village. The return to + Venice in the sunset is classical and indispensable, and those who at that + glowing hour have floated toward the towers that rise out of the lagoon + will not easily part with the impression. But you indulge in larger + excursions—you go to Burano and Torcello, to Malamocco and Chioggia. + Torcello, like the Lido, has been improved; the deeply interesting little + cathedral of the eighth century, which stood there on the edge of the sea, + as touching in its ruin, with its grassy threshold and its primitive + mosaics, as the bleached bones of a human skeleton washed ashore by the + tide, has now been restored and made cheerful, and the charm of the place, + its strange and suggestive desolation, has well-nigh departed. + </p> + <p> + It will still serve you as a pretext, however, for a day on the lagoon, + especially as you will disembark at Burano and admire the wonderful + fisher-folk, whose good looks—and bad manners, I am sorry to say—can + scarcely be exaggerated. Burano is celebrated for the beauty of its women + and the rapacity of its children, and it is a fact that though some of the + ladies are rather bold about it every one of them shows you a handsome + face. The children assail you for coppers, and in their desire to be + satisfied pursue your gondola into the sea. Chioggia is a larger Burano, + and you carry away from either place a half-sad, half-cynical, but + altogether pictorial impression; the impression of bright-coloured hovels, + of bathing in stagnant canals, of young girls with faces of a delicate + shape and a susceptible expression, with splendid heads of hair and + complexions smeared with powder, faded yellow shawls that hang like old + Greek draperies, and little wooden shoes that click as they go up and down + the steps of the convex bridges; of brown-cheeked matrons with lustrous + tresses and high tempers, massive throats encased with gold beads, and + eyes that meet your own with a certain traditional defiance. The men + throughout the islands of Venice are almost as handsome as the women; I + have never seen so many good-looking rascals. At Burano and Chioggia they + sit mending their nets, or lounge at the street corners, where + conversation is always high-pitched, or clamour to you to take a boat; and + everywhere they decorate the scene with their splendid colour—cheeks + and throats as richly brown as the sails of their fishing-smacks—their + sea-faded tatters which are always a “costume,” their soft Venetian + jargon, and the gallantry with which they wear their hats, an article that + nowhere sits so well as on a mass of dense Venetian curls. If you are + happy you will find yourself, after a June day in Venice (about ten + o’clock), on a balcony that overhangs the Grand Canal, with your elbows on + the broad ledge, a cigarette in your teeth and a little good company + beside you. The gondolas pass beneath, the watery surface gleams here and + there from their lamps, some of which are coloured lanterns that move + mysteriously in the darkness. There are some evenings in June when there + are too many gondolas, too many lanterns, too many serenades in front of + the hotels. The serenading in particular is overdone; but on such a + balcony as I speak of you needn’t suffer from it, for in the apartment + behind you—an accessible refuge—there is more good company, + there are more cigarettes. If you are wise you will step back there + presently. + </p> + <h3> + 1882. + </h3> + <p> + <a name="link2H_4_0003" id="link2H_4_0003"> + <!-- H2 anchor --> </a> + </p> + <div style="height: 4em;"> + <br /><br /><br /><br /> + </div> + <h2> + THE GRAND CANAL + </h2> + <p> + The honour of representing the plan and the place at their best might + perhaps appear, in the City of St. Mark, properly to belong to the + splendid square which bears the patron’s name and which is the centre of + Venetian life so far (this is pretty well all the way indeed) as Venetian + life is a matter of strolling and chaffering, of gossiping and gaping, of + circulating without a purpose, and of staring—too often with a + foolish one—through the shop-windows of dealers whose hospitality + makes their doorsteps dramatic, at the very vulgarest rubbish in all the + modern market. If the Grand Canal, however, is not quite technically a + “street,” the perverted Piazza is perhaps even less normal; and I hasten + to add that I am glad not to find myself studying my subject under the + international arcades, or yet (I will go the length of saying) in the + solemn presence of the church. For indeed in that case I foresee I should + become still more confoundingly conscious of the stumbling-block that + inevitably, even with his first few words, crops up in the path of the + lover of Venice who rashly addresses himself to expression. “Venetian + life” is a mere literary convention, though it be an indispensable figure. + The words have played an effective part in the literature of sensibility; + they constituted thirty years ago the title of Mr. Howells’s delightful + volume of impressions; but in using them to-day one owes some frank amends + to one’s own lucidity. Let me carefully premise therefore that so often as + they shall again drop from my pen, so often shall I beg to be regarded as + systematically superficial. + </p> + <p> + Venetian life, in the large old sense, has long since come to an end, and + the essential present character of the most melancholy of cities resides + simply in its being the most beautiful of tombs. Nowhere else has the past + been laid to rest with such tenderness, such a sadness of resignation and + remembrance. Nowhere else is the present so alien, so discontinuous, so + like a crowd in a cemetery without garlands for the graves. It has no + flowers in its hands, but, as a compensation perhaps—and the thing + is doubtless more to the point—it has money and little red books. + The everlasting shuffle of these irresponsible visitors in the Piazza is + contemporary Venetian life. Everything else is only a reverberation of + that. The vast mausoleum has a turnstile at the door, and a functionary in + a shabby uniform lets you in, as per tariff, to see how dead it is. From + this <i>constatation</i>, this cold curiosity, proceed all the industry, + the prosperity, the vitality of the place. The shopkeepers and gondoliers, + the beggars and the models, depend upon it for a living; they are the + custodians and the ushers of the great museum—they are even + themselves to a certain extent the objects of exhibition. It is in the + wide vestibule of the square that the polygot pilgrims gather most + densely; Piazza San Marco is the lobby of the opera in the intervals of + the performance. The present fortune of Venice, the lamentable difference, + is most easily measured there, and that is why, in the effort to resist + our pessimism, we must turn away both from the purchasers and from the + vendors of <i>ricordi</i>. The <i>ricordi</i> that we prefer are gathered + best where the gondola glides—best of all on the noble waterway that + begins in its glory at the Salute and ends in its abasement at the railway + station. It is, however, the cockneyfied Piazzetta (forgive me, shade of + St. Theodore—has not a brand new café begun to glare there, + electrically, this very year?) that introduces us most directly to the + great picture by which the Grand Canal works its first spell, and to which + a thousand artists, not always with a talent apiece, have paid their + tribute. We pass into the Piazzetta to look down the great throat, as it + were, of Venice, and the vision must console us for turning our back on + St. Mark’s. + </p> + <p> + We have been treated to it again and again, of course, even if we have + never stirred from home; but that is only a reason the more for catching + at any freshness that may be left in the world of photography. It is in + Venice above all that we hear the small buzz of this vulgarising voice of + the familiar; yet perhaps it is in Venice too that the picturesque fact + has best mastered the pious secret of how to wait for us. Even the classic + Salute waits like some great lady on the threshold of her saloon. She is + more ample and serene, more seated at her door, than all the copyists have + told us, with her domes and scrolls, her scolloped buttresses and statues + forming a pompous crown, and her wide steps disposed on the ground like + the train of a robe. This fine air of the woman of the world is carried + out by the well-bred assurance with which she looks in the direction of + her old-fashioned Byzantine neighbour; and the juxtaposition of two + churches so distinguished and so different, each splendid in its sort, is + a sufficient mark of the scale and range of Venice. However, we ourselves + are looking away from St. Mark’s—we must blind our eyes to that + dazzle; without it indeed there are brightnesses and fascinations enough. + We see them in abundance even while we look away from the shady steps of + the Salute. These steps are cool in the morning, yet I don’t know that I + can justify my excessive fondness for them any better than I can explain a + hundred of the other vague infatuations with which Venice sophisticates + the spirit. Under such an influence fortunately one need n’t explain—it + keeps account of nothing but perceptions and affections. It is from the + Salute steps perhaps, of a summer morning, that this view of the open + mouth of the city is most brilliantly amusing. The whole thing composes as + if composition were the chief end of human institutions. The charming + architectural promontory of the Dogana stretches out the most graceful of + arms, balancing in its hand the gilded globe on which revolves the + delightful satirical figure of a little weathercock of a woman. This + Fortune, this Navigation, or whatever she is called—she surely needs + no name—catches the wind in the bit of drapery of which she has + divested her rotary bronze loveliness. On the other side of the Canal + twinkles and glitters the long row of the happy palaces which are mainly + expensive hotels. There is a little of everything everywhere, in the + bright Venetian air, but to these houses belongs especially the appearance + of sitting, across the water, at the receipt of custom, of watching in + their hypocritical loveliness for the stranger and the victim. I call them + happy, because even their sordid uses and their vulgar signs melt somehow, + with their vague sea-stained pinks and drabs, into that strange gaiety of + light and colour which is made up of the reflection of superannuated + things. The atmosphere plays over them like a laugh, they are of the + essence of the sad old joke. They are almost as charming from other places + as they are from their own balconies, and share fully in that universal + privilege of Venetian objects which consists of being both the picture and + the point of view. + </p> + <p> + This double character, which is particularly strong in the Grand Canal, + adds a difficulty to any control of one’s notes. The Grand Canal may be + practically, as in impression, the cushioned balcony of a high and + well-loved palace—the memory of irresistible evenings, of the + sociable elbow, of endless lingering and looking; or it may evoke the + restlessness of a fresh curiosity, of methodical inquiry, in a gondola + piled with references. There are no references, I ought to mention, in the + present remarks, which sacrifice to accident, not to completeness. A + rhapsody of Venice is always in order, but I think the catalogues are + finished. I should not attempt to write here the names of all the palaces, + even if the number of those I find myself able to remember in the immense + array were less insignificant. There are many I delight in that I don’t + know, or at least don’t keep, apart. Then there are the bad reasons for + preference that are better than the good, and all the sweet bribery of + association and recollection. These things, as one stands on the Salute + steps, are so many delicate fingers to pick straight out of the row a dear + little featureless house which, with its pale green shutters, looks + straight across at the great door and through the very keyhole, as it + were, of the church, and which I needn’t call by a name—a pleasant + American name—that every one in Venice, these many years, has had on + grateful lips. It is the very friendliest house in all the wide world, and + it has, as it deserves to have, the most beautiful position. It is a real + <i>porto di mare</i>, as the gondoliers say—a port within a port; it + sees everything that comes and goes, and takes it all in with practised + eyes. Not a tint or a hint of the immense iridescence is lost upon it, and + there are days of exquisite colour on which it may fancy itself the heart + of the wonderful prism. We wave to it from the Salute steps, which we must + decidedly leave if we wish to get on, a grateful hand across the water, + and turn into the big white church of Longhena—an empty shaft + beneath a perfunctory dome—where an American family and a German + party, huddled in a corner upon a pair of benches, are gazing, with a + conscientiousness worthy of a better cause, at nothing in particular. + </p> + <p> + For there is nothing particular in this cold and conventional temple to + gaze at save the great Tintoretto of the sacristy, to which we quickly pay + our respects, and which we are glad to have for ten minutes to ourselves. + The picture, though full of beauty, is not the finest of the master’s; but + it serves again as well as another to transport—there is no other + word—those of his lovers for whom, in far-away days when Venice was + an early rapture, this strange and mystifying painter was almost the + supreme revelation. The plastic arts may have less to say to us than in + the hungry years of youth, and the celebrated picture in general be more + of a blank; but more than the others any fine Tintoret still carries us + back, calling up not only the rich particular vision but the freshness of + the old wonder. Many things come and go, but this great artist remains for + us in Venice a part of the company of the mind. The others are there in + their obvious glory, but he is the only one for whom the imagination, in + our expressive modern phrase, sits up. “The Marriage in Cana,” at the + Salute, has all his characteristic and fascinating unexpectedness—the + sacrifice of the figure of our Lord, who is reduced to the mere final + point of a clever perspective, and the free, joyous presentation of all + the other elements of the feast. Why, in spite of this queer + one-sidedness, does the picture give us no impression of a lack of what + the critics call reverence? For no other reason that I can think of than + because it happens to be the work of its author, in whose very mistakes + there is a singular wisdom. Mr. Ruskin has spoken with sufficient + eloquence of the serious loveliness of the row of heads of the women on + the right, who talk to each other as they sit at the foreshortened + banquet. There could be no better example of the roving independence of + the painter’s vision, a real spirit of adventure for which his subject was + always a cluster of accidents; not an obvious order, but a sort of peopled + and agitated chapter of life, in which the figures are submissive + pictorial notes. These notes are all there in their beauty and + heterogeneity, and if the abundance is of a kind to make the principle of + selection seem in comparison timid, yet the sense of “composition” in the + spectator—if it happen to exist—reaches out to the painter in + peculiar sympathy. Dull must be the spirit of the worker tormented in any + field of art with that particular question who is not moved to recognise + in the eternal problem the high fellowship of Tintoretto. + </p> + <p> + If the long reach from this point to the deplorable iron bridge which + discharges the pedestrian at the Academy—or, more comprehensively, + to the painted and gilded Gothic of the noble Palazzo Foscari—is too + much of a curve to be seen at any one point as a whole, it represents the + better the arched neck, as it were, of the undulating serpent of which the + Canalazzo has the likeness. We pass a dozen historic houses, we note in + our passage a hundred component “bits,” with the baffled sketcher’s sense, + and with what would doubtless be, save for our intensely Venetian + fatalism, the baffled sketcher’s temper. It is the early palaces, of + course, and also, to be fair, some of the late, if we could take them one + by one, that give the Canal the best of its grand air. The fairest are + often cheek-by-jowl with the foulest, and there are few, alas, so fair as + to have been completely protected by their beauty. The ages and the + generations have worked their will on them, and the wind and the weather + have had much to say; but disfigured and dishonoured as they are, with the + bruises of their marbles and the patience of their ruin, there is nothing + like them in the world, and the long succession of their faded, conscious + faces makes of the quiet waterway they overhang a <i>promenade historique</i> + of which the lesson, however often we read it, gives, in the depth of its + interest, an incomparable dignity to Venice. We read it in the Romanesque + arches, crooked to-day in their very curves, of the early middle-age, in + the exquisite individual Gothic of the splendid time, and in the cornices + and columns of a decadence almost as proud. These things at present are + almost equally touching in their good faith; they have each in their + degree so effectually parted with their pride. They have lived on as they + could and lasted as they might, and we hold them to no account of their + infirmities, for even those of them whose blank eyes to-day meet criticism + with most submission are far less vulgar than the uses we have mainly + managed to put them to. We have botched them and patched them and covered + them with sordid signs; we have restored and improved them with a + merciless taste, and the best of them we have made over to the pedlars. + Some of the most striking objects in the finest vistas at present are the + huge advertisements of the curiosity-shops. + </p> + <p> + The antiquity-mongers in Venice have all the courage of their opinion, and + it is easy to see how well they know they can confound you with an + unanswerable question. What is the whole place but a curiosity-shop, and + what are you here for yourself but to pick up odds and ends? “We pick them + up <i>for</i> you,” say these honest Jews, whose prices are marked in + dollars, “and who shall blame us if, the flowers being pretty well + plucked, we add an artificial rose or two to the composition of the + bouquet?” They take care, in a word, that there be plenty of relics, and + their establishments are huge and active. They administer the antidote to + pedantry, and you can complain of them only if you never cross their + thresholds. If you take this step you are lost, for you have parted with + the correctness of your attitude. Venice becomes frankly from such a + moment the big depressing dazzling joke in which after all our sense of + her contradictions sinks to rest—the grimace of an over-strained + philosophy. It’s rather a comfort, for the curiosity-shops are amusing. + You have bad moments indeed as you stand in their halls of humbug and, in + the intervals of haggling, hear through the high windows the soft splash + of the sea on the old water-steps, for you think with anger of the noble + homes that are laid waste in such scenes, of the delicate lives that must + have been, that might still be, led there. You reconstruct the admirable + house according to your own needs; leaning on a back balcony, you drop + your eyes into one of the little green gardens with which, for the most + part, such establishments are exasperatingly blessed, and end by feeling + it a shame that you yourself are not in possession. (I take for granted, + of course, that as you go and come you are, in imagination, perpetually + lodging yourself and setting up your gods; for if this innocent pastime, + this borrowing of the mind, be not your favourite sport there is a flaw in + the appeal that Venice makes to you.) There may be happy cases in which + your envy is tempered, or perhaps I should rather say intensified, by real + participation. If you have had the good fortune to enjoy the hospitality + of an old Venetian home and to lead your life a little in the painted + chambers that still echo with one of the historic names, you have entered + by the shortest step into the inner spirit of the place. If it did n’t + savour of treachery to private kindness I should like to speak frankly of + one of these delightful, even though alienated, structures, to refer to it + as a splendid example of the old palatial type. But I can only do so in + passing, with a hundred precautions, and, lifting the curtain at the edge, + drop a commemorative word on the success with which, in this particularly + happy instance, the cosmopolite habit, the modern sympathy, the + intelligent, flexible attitude, the latest fruit of time, adjust + themselves to the great gilded, relinquished shell and try to fill it out. + A Venetian palace that has not too grossly suffered and that is not + overwhelming by its mass makes almost any life graceful that may be led in + it. With cultivated and generous contemporary ways it reveals a + pre-established harmony. As you live in it day after day its beauty and + its interest sink more deeply into your spirit; it has its moods and its + hours and its mystic voices and its shifting expressions. If in the + absence of its masters you have happened to have it to yourself for + twenty-four hours you will never forget the charm of its haunted + stillness, late on the summer afternoon for instance, when the call of + playing children comes in behind from the campo, nor the way the old + ghosts seemed to pass on tip-toe on the marble floors. It gives you + practically the essence of the matter that we are considering, for beneath + the high balconies Venice comes and goes, and the particular stretch you + command contains all the characteristics. Everything has its turn, from + the heavy barges of merchandise, pushed by long poles and the patient + shoulder, to the floating pavilions of the great serenades, and you may + study at your leisure the admirable Venetian arts of managing a boat and + organising a spectacle. Of the beautiful free stroke with which the + gondola, especially when there are two oars, is impelled, you never, in + the Venetian scene, grow weary; it is always in the picture, and the large + profiled action that lets the standing rowers throw themselves forward to + a constant recovery has the double value of being, at the fag-end of + greatness, the only energetic note. The people from the hotels are always + afloat, and, at the hotel pace, the solitary gondolier (like the solitary + horseman of the old-fashioned novel) is, I confess, a somewhat melancholy + figure. Perched on his poop without a mate, he re-enacts perpetually, in + high relief, with his toes turned out, the comedy of his odd and charming + movement. He always has a little the look of an absent-minded nursery-maid + pushing her small charges in a perambulator. + </p> + <p> + But why should I risk too free a comparison, where this picturesque and + amiable class are concerned? I delight in their sun-burnt complexions and + their childish dialect; I know them only by their merits, and I am grossly + prejudiced in their favour. They are interesting and touching, and alike + in their virtues and their defects human nature is simplified as with a + big effective brush. Affecting above all is their dependence on the + stranger, the whimsical stranger who swims out of their ken, yet whom + Providence sometimes restores. The best of them at any rate are in their + line great artists. On the swarming feast-days, on the strange feast-night + of the Redentore, their steering is a miracle of ease. The master-hands, + the celebrities and winners of prizes—you may see them on the + private gondolas in spotless white, with brilliant sashes and ribbons, and + often with very handsome persons—take the right of way with a + pardonable insolence. They penetrate the crush of boats with an authority + of their own. The crush of boats, the universal sociable bumping and + squeezing, is great when, on the summer nights, the ladies shriek with + alarm, the city pays the fiddlers, and the illuminated barges, scattering + music and song, lead a long train down the Canal. The barges used to be + rowed in rhythmic strokes, but now they are towed by the steamer. The + coloured lamps, the vocalists before the hotels, are not to my sense the + greatest seduction of Venice; but it would be an uncandid sketch of the + Canalazzo that shouldn’t touch them with indulgence. Taking one nuisance + with another, they are probably the prettiest in the world, and if they + have in general more magic for the new arrival than for the old + Venice-lover, they in any case, at their best, keep up the immemorial + tradition. The Venetians have had from the beginning of time the pride of + their processions and spectacles, and it’s a wonder how with empty pockets + they still make a clever show. The Carnival is dead, but these are the + scraps of its inheritance. Vauxhall on the water is of course more + Vauxhall than ever, with the good fortune of home-made music and of a + mirror that reduplicates and multiplies. The feast of the Redeemer—the + great popular feast of the year—is a wonderful Venetian Vauxhall. + All Venice on this occasion takes to the boats for the night and loads + them with lamps and provisions. Wedged together in a mass it sups and + sings; every boat is a floating arbour, a private <i>café-concert</i>. Of + all Christian commemorations it is the most ingenuously and harmlessly + pagan. Toward morning the passengers repair to the Lido, where, as the sun + rises, they plunge, still sociably, into the sea. The night of the + Redentore has been described, but it would be interesting to have an + account, from the domestic point of view, of its usual morrow. It is + mainly an affair of the Giudecca, however, which is bridged over from the + Zattere to the great church. The pontoons are laid together during the day—it + is all done with extraordinary celerity and art—and the bridge is + prolonged across the Canalazzo (to Santa Maria Zobenigo), which is my only + warrant for glancing at the occasion. We glance at it from our palace + windows; lengthening our necks a little, as we look up toward the Salute, + we see all Venice, on the July afternoon, so serried as to move slowly, + pour across the temporary footway. It is a flock of very good children, + and the bridged Canal is their toy. All Venice on such occasions is gentle + and friendly; not even all Venice pushes anyone into the water. + </p> + <p> + But from the same high windows we catch without any stretching of the neck + a still more indispensable note in the picture, a famous pretender eating + the bread of bitterness. This repast is served in the open air, on a neat + little terrace, by attendants in livery, and there is no indiscretion in + our seeing that the pretender dines. Ever since the table d’hôte in + “Candide” Venice has been the refuge of monarchs in want of thrones—she + would n’t know herself without her <i>rois en exil.</i> The exile is + agreeable and soothing, the gondola lets them down gently. Its movement is + an anodyne, its silence a philtre, and little by little it rocks all + ambitions to sleep. The proscript has plenty of leisure to write his + proclamations and even his memoirs, and I believe he has organs in which + they are published; but the only noise he makes in the world is the + harmless splash of his oars. He comes and goes along the Canalazzo, and he + might be much worse employed. He is but one of the interesting objects it + presents, however, and I am by no means sure that he is the most striking. + He has a rival, if not in the iron bridge, which, alas, is within our + range, at least—to take an immediate example—in the + Montecuculi Palace. Far-descended and weary, but beautiful in its crooked + old age, with its lovely proportions, its delicate round arches, its + carvings and its disks of marble, is the haunted Montecuculi. Those who + have a kindness for Venetian gossip like to remember that it was once for + a few months the property of Robert Browning, who, however, never lived in + it, and who died in the splendid Rezzonico, the residence of his son and a + wonderful cosmopolite “document,” which, as it presents itself, in an + admirable position, but a short way farther down the Canal, we can almost + see, in spite of the curve, from the window at which we stand. This great + seventeenth century pile, throwing itself upon the water with a peculiar + florid assurance, a certain upward toss of its cornice which gives it the + air of a rearing sea-horse, decorates immensely—and within, as well + as without—the wide angle that it commands. + </p> + <p> + There is a more formal greatness in the high square Gothic Foscari, just + below it, one of the noblest creations of the fifteenth century, a + masterpiece of symmetry and majesty. Dedicated to-day to official uses—it + is the property of the State—it looks conscious of the consideration + it enjoys, and is one of the few great houses within our range whose old + age strikes us as robust and painless. It is visibly “kept up”; perhaps it + is kept up too much; perhaps I am wrong in thinking so well of it. These + doubts and fears course rapidly through my mind—I am easily their + victim when it is a question of architecture—as they are apt to do + to-day, in Italy, almost anywhere, in the presence of the beautiful, of + the desecrated or the neglected. We feel at such moments as if the eye of + Mr. Ruskin were upon us; we grow nervous and lose our confidence. This + makes me inevitably, in talking of Venice, seek a pusillanimous safety in + the trivial and the obvious. I am on firm ground in rejoicing in the + little garden directly opposite our windows—it is another proof that + they really show us everything—and in feeling that the gardens of + Venice would deserve a page to themselves. They are infinitely more + numerous than the arriving stranger can suppose; they nestle with a charm + all their own in the complications of most back-views. Some of them are + exquisite, many are large, and even the scrappiest have an artful + understanding, in the interest of colour, with the waterways that edge + their foundations. On the small canals, in the hunt for amusement, they + are the prettiest surprises of all. The tangle of plants and flowers + crowds over the battered walls, the greenness makes an arrangement with + the rosy sordid brick. Of all the reflected and liquefied things in + Venice, and the number of these is countless, I think the lapping water + loves them most. They are numerous on the Canalazzo, but wherever they + occur they give a brush to the picture and in particular, it is easy to + guess, give a sweetness to the house. Then the elements are complete—the + trio of air and water and of things that grow. Venice without them would + be too much a matter of the tides and the stones. Even the little + trellises of the <i>traghetti</i> count charmingly as reminders, amid so + much artifice, of the woodland nature of man. The vine-leaves, trained on + horizontal poles, make a roof of chequered shade for the gondoliers and + ferrymen, who doze there according to opportunity, or chatter or hail the + approaching “fare.” There is no “hum” in Venice, so that their voices + travel far; they enter your windows and mingle even with your dreams. I + beg the reader to believe that if I had time to go into everything, I + would go into the <i>traghetti</i>, which have their manners and their + morals, and which used to have their piety. This piety was always a <i>madonnina</i>, + the protectress of the passage—a quaint figure of the Virgin with + the red spark of a lamp at her feet. The lamps appear for the most part to + have gone out, and the images doubtless have been sold for <i>bric-a-brac</i>. + The ferrymen, for aught I know, are converted to Nihilism—a faith + consistent happily with a good stroke of business. One of the figures has + been left, however—the Madonnetta which gives its name to a <i>traghetto</i> + near the Rialto. But this sweet survivor is a carven stone inserted ages + ago in the corner of an old palace and doubtless difficult of removal. <i>Pazienza</i>, + the day will come when so marketable a relic will also be extracted from + its socket and purchased by the devouring American. I leave that + expression, on second thought, standing; but I repent of it when I + remember that it is a devouring American—a lady long resident in + Venice and whose kindnesses all Venetians, as well as her country-people, + know, who has rekindled some of the extinguished tapers, setting up + especially the big brave Gothic shrine, of painted and gilded wood, which, + on the top of its stout <i>palo</i>, sheds its influence on the place of + passage opposite the Salute. + </p> + <p> + If I may not go into those of the palaces this devious discourse has left + behind, much less may I enter the great galleries of the Academy, which + rears its blank wall, surmounted by the lion of St. Mark, well within + sight of the windows at which we are still lingering. This wondrous temple + of Venetian art—for all it promises little from without—overhangs, + in a manner, the Grand Canal, but if we were so much as to cross its + threshold we should wander beyond recall. It contains, in some of the most + magnificent halls—where the ceilings have all the glory with which + the imagination of Venice alone could over-arch a room—some of the + noblest pictures in the world; and whether or not we go back to them on + any particular occasion for another look, it is always a comfort to know + that they are there, as the sense of them on the spot is a part of the + furniture of the mind—the sense of them close at hand, behind every + wall and under every cover, like the inevitable reverse of a medal, of the + side exposed to the air that reflects, intensifies, completes the scene. + In other words, as it was the inevitable destiny of Venice to be painted, + and painted with passion, so the wide world of picture becomes, as we live + there, and however much we go about our affairs, the constant habitation + of our thoughts. The truth is, we are in it so uninterruptedly, at home + and abroad, that there is scarcely a pressure upon us to seek it in one + place more than in another. Choose your standpoint at random and trust the + picture to come to you. This is manifestly why I have not, I find myself + conscious, said more about the features of the Canalazzo which occupy the + reach between the Salute and the position we have so obstinately taken up. + It is still there before us, however, and the delightful little Palazzo + Dario, intimately familiar to English and American travellers, picks + itself out in the foreshortened brightness. The Dario is covered with the + loveliest little marble plates and sculptured circles; it is made up of + exquisite pieces—as if there had been only enough to make it small—so + that it looks, in its extreme antiquity, a good deal like a house of cards + that hold together by a tenure it would be fatal to touch. An old Venetian + house dies hard indeed, and I should add that this delicate thing, with + submission in every feature, continues to resist the contact of + generations of lodgers. It is let out in floors (it used to be let as a + whole) and in how many eager hands—for it is in great requisition—under + how many fleeting dispensations have we not known and loved it? People are + always writing in advance to secure it, as they are to secure the + Jenkins’s gondolier, and as the gondola passes we see strange faces at the + windows—though it’s ten to one we recognise them—and the + millionth artist coming forth with his traps at the water-gate. The poor + little patient Dario is one of the most flourishing booths at the fair. + </p> + <p> + The faces in the window look out at the great Sansovino—the splendid + pile that is now occupied by the Prefect. I feel decidedly that I don’t + object as I ought to the palaces of the sixteenth and seventeenth + centuries. Their pretensions impose upon me, and the imagination peoples + them more freely than it can people the interiors of the prime. Was not + moreover this masterpiece of Sansovino once occupied by the Venetian + post-office, and thereby intimately connected with an ineffaceable first + impression of the author of these remarks? He had arrived, wondering, + palpitating, twenty-three years ago, after nightfall, and, the first thing + on the morrow, had repaired to the post-office for his letters. They had + been waiting a long time and were full of delayed interest, and he + returned with them to the gondola and floated slowly down the Canal. The + mixture, the rapture, the wonderful temple of the <i>poste restante</i>, + the beautiful strangeness, all humanised by good news—the memory of + this abides with him still, so that there always proceeds from the + splendid waterfront I speak of a certain secret appeal, something that + seems to have been uttered first in the sonorous chambers of youth. Of + course this association falls to the ground—or rather splashes into + the water—if I am the victim of a confusion. <i>Was</i> the edifice + in question twenty-three years ago the post-office, which has occupied + since, for many a day, very much humbler quarters? I am afraid to take the + proper steps for finding out, lest I should learn that during these years + I have misdirected my emotion. A better reason for the sentiment, at any + rate, is that such a great house has surely, in the high beauty of its + tiers, a refinement of its own. They make one think of colosseums and + aqueducts and bridges, and they constitute doubtless, in Venice, the most + pardonable specimen of the imitative. I have even a timid kindness for the + huge Pesaro, far down the Canal, whose main reproach, more even than the + coarseness of its forms, is its swaggering size, its want of consideration + for the general picture, which the early examples so reverently respect. + The Pesaro is as far out of the frame as a modern hotel, and the Cornaro, + close to it, oversteps almost equally the modesty of art. One more thing + they and their kindred do, I must add, for which, unfortunately, we can + patronise them less. They make even the most elaborate material + civilisation of the present day seem woefully shrunken and <i>bourgeois</i>, + for they simply—I allude to the biggest palaces—can’t be lived + in as they were intended to be. The modern tenant may take in all the + magazines, but he bends not the bow of Achilles. He occupies the place, + but he doesn’t fill it, and he has guests from the neighbouring inns with + ulsters and Baedekers. We are far at the Pesaro, by the way, from our + attaching window, and we take advantage of it to go in rather a melancholy + mood to the end. The long straight vista from the Foscari to the Rialto, + the great middle stretch of the Canal, contains, as the phrase is, a + hundred objects of interest, but it contains most the bright oddity of its + general Deluge air. In all these centuries it has never got over its + resemblance to a flooded city; for some reason or other it is the only + part of Venice in which the houses look as if the waters had overtaken + them. Everywhere else they reckon with them—have chosen them; here + alone the lapping seaway seems to confess itself an accident. + </p> + <p> + {Illustration: PALAZZO MONCENIGO, VENICE} + </p> + <p> + There are persons who hold this long, gay, shabby, spotty perspective, in + which, with its immense field of confused reflection, the houses have + infinite variety, the dullest expanse in Venice. It was not dull, we + imagine, for Lord Byron, who lived in the midmost of the three Mocenigo + palaces, where the writing-table is still shown at which he gave the rein + to his passions. For other observers it is sufficiently enlivened by so + delightful a creation as the Palazzo Loredan, once a masterpiece and at + present the Municipio, not to speak of a variety of other immemorial bits + whose beauty still has a degree of freshness. Some of the most touching + relics of early Venice are here—for it was here she precariously + clustered—peeping out of a submersion more pitiless than the sea. As + we approach the Rialto indeed the picture falls off and a comparative + commonness suffuses it. There is a wide paved walk on either side of the + Canal, on which the waterman—and who in Venice is not a waterman?—is + prone to seek repose. I speak of the summer days—it is the summer + Venice that is the visible Venice. The big tarry barges are drawn up at + the <i>fondamenta</i>, and the bare-legged boatmen, in faded blue cotton, + lie asleep on the hot stones. If there were no colour anywhere else there + would be enough in their tanned personalities. Half the low doorways open + into the warm interior of waterside drinking-shops, and here and there, on + the quay, beneath the bush that overhangs the door, there are rickety + tables and chairs. Where in Venice is there not the amusement of character + and of detail? The tone in this part is very vivid, and is largely that of + the brown plebeian faces looking out of the patchy miscellaneous houses—the + faces of fat undressed women and of other simple folk who are not aware + that they enjoy, from balconies once doubtless patrician, a view the + knowing ones of the earth come thousands of miles to envy them. The effect + is enhanced by the tattered clothes hung to dry in the windows, by the + sun-faded rags that flutter from the polished balustrades—these are + ivory-smooth with time; and the whole scene profits by the general law + that renders decadence and ruin in Venice more brilliant than any + prosperity. Decay is in this extraordinary place golden in tint and misery + <i>couleur de rose</i>. The gondolas of the correct people are unmitigated + sable, but the poor market-boats from the islands are kaleidoscopic. + </p> + <p> + The Bridge of the Rialto is a name to conjure with, but, honestly + speaking, it is scarcely the gem of the composition. There are of course + two ways of taking it—from the water or from the upper passage, + where its small shops and booths abound in Venetian character; but it + mainly counts as a feature of the Canal when seen from the gondola or even + from the awful <i>vaporetto</i>. The great curve of its single arch is + much to be commended, especially when, coming from the direction of the + railway-station, you see it frame with its sharp compass-line the perfect + picture, the reach of the Canal on the other side. But the backs of the + little shops make from the water a graceless collective hump, and the + inside view is the diverting one. The big arch of the bridge—like + the arches of all the bridges—is the waterman’s friend in wet + weather. The gondolas, when it rains, huddle beside the peopled barges, + and the young ladies from the hotels, vaguely fidgeting, complain of the + communication of insect life. Here indeed is a little of everything, and + the jewellers of this celebrated precinct—they have their immemorial + row—make almost as fine a show as the fruiterers. It is a universal + market, and a fine place to study Venetian types. The produce of the + islands is discharged there, and the fishmongers announce their presence. + All one’s senses indeed are vigorously attacked; the whole place is + violently hot and bright, all odorous and noisy. The churning of the screw + of the <i>vaporetto</i> mingles with the other sounds—not indeed + that this offensive note is confined to one part of the Canal. But Just + here the little piers of the resented steamer are particularly near + together, and it seems somehow to be always kicking up the water. As we go + further down we see it stopping exactly beneath the glorious windows of + the Ca’d’Oro. It has chosen its position well, and who shall gainsay it + for having put itself under the protection of the most romantic facade in + Europe? The companionship of these objects is a symbol; it expresses + supremely the present and the future of Venice. Perfect, in its prime, was + the marble Ca’d’Oro, with the noble recesses of its <i>loggie</i>, but + even then it probably never “met a want,” like the successful <i>vaporetto</i>. + If, however, we are not to go into the Museo Civico—the old Museo + Correr, which rears a staring renovated front far down on the left, near + the station, so also we must keep out of the great vexed question of steam + on the Canalazzo, just as a while since we prudently kept out of the + Accademia. These are expensive and complicated excursions. It is obvious + that if the <i>vaporetti</i> have contributed to the ruin of the + gondoliers, already hard pressed by fate, and to that of the palaces, + whose foundations their waves undermine, and that if they have robbed the + Grand Canal of the supreme distinction of its tranquillity, so on the + other hand they have placed “rapid transit,” in the New York phrase, in + everybody’s reach, and enabled everybody—save indeed those who + wouldn’t for the world—to rush about Venice as furiously as people + rush about New York. The suitability of this consummation needn’t be + pointed out. + </p> + <p> + Even we ourselves, in the irresistible contagion, are going so fast now + that we have only time to note in how clever and costly a fashion the + Museo Civico, the old Fondaco dei Turchi, has been reconstructed and + restored. It is a glare of white marble without, and a series of showy + majestic halls within, where a thousand curious mementos and relics of old + Venice are gathered and classified. Of its miscellaneous treasures I fear + I may perhaps frivolously prefer the series of its remarkable living + Longhis, an illustration of manners more copious than the celebrated + Carpaccio, the two ladies with their little animals and their long sticks. + Wonderful indeed today are the museums of Italy, where the renovations and + the <i>belle ordonnance</i> speak of funds apparently unlimited, in spite + of the fact that the numerous custodians frankly look starved. What is the + pecuniary source of all this civic magnificence—it is shown in a + hundred other ways—and how do the Italian cities manage to acquit + themselves of expenses that would be formidable to communities richer and + doubtless less aesthetic? Who pays the bills for the expressive statues + alone, the general exuberance of sculpture, with which every <i>piazzetta</i> + of almost every village is patriotically decorated? Let us not seek an + answer to the puzzling question, but observe instead that we are passing + the mouth of the populous Canareggio, next widest of the waterways, where + the race of Shylock abides, and at the corner of which the big colourless + church of San Geremia stands gracefully enough on guard. The Canareggio, + with its wide lateral footways and humpbacked bridges, makes on the feast + of St. John an admirable noisy, tawdry theatre for one of the prettiest + and the most infantile of the Venetian processions. + </p> + <p> + The rest of the course is a reduced magnificence, in spite of interesting + bits, of the battered pomp of the Pesaro and the Cornaro, of the recurrent + memories of royalty in exile which cluster about the Palazzo Vendramin + Calergi, once the residence of the Comte de Chambord and still that of his + half-brother, in spite too of the big Papadopoli gardens, opposite the + station, the largest private grounds in Venice, but of which Venice in + general mainly gets the benefit in the usual form of irrepressible + greenery climbing over walls and nodding at water. The rococo church of + the Scalzi is here, all marble and malachite, all a cold, hard glitter and + a costly, curly ugliness, and here too, opposite, on the top of its high + steps, is San Simeone Profeta, I won’t say immortalised, but unblushingly + misrepresented, by the perfidious Canaletto. I shall not stay to unravel + the mystery of this prosaic painter’s malpractices; he falsified without + fancy, and as he apparently transposed at will the objects he reproduced, + one is never sure of the particular view that may have constituted his + subject. It would look exactly like such and such a place if almost + everything were not different. San Simeone Profeta appears to hang there + upon the wall; but it is on the wrong side of the Canal and the other + elements quite fail to correspond. One’s confusion is the greater because + one doesn’t know that everything may not really have changed, even beyond + all probability—though it’s only in America that churches cross the + street or the river—and the mixture of the recognisable and the + different makes the ambiguity maddening, all the more that the painter is + almost as attaching as he is bad. Thanks at any rate to the white church, + domed and porticoed, on the top of its steps, the traveller emerging for + the first time upon the terrace of the railway-station seems to have a + Canaletto before him. He speedily discovers indeed even in the presence of + this scene of the final accents of the Canalazzo—there is a charm in + the old pink warehouses on the hot <i>fondamenta</i>—that he has + something much better. He looks up and down at the gathered gondolas; he + has his surprise after all, his little first Venetian thrill; and as the + terrace of the station ushers in these things we shall say no harm of it, + though it is not lovely. It is the beginning of his experience, but it is + the end of the Grand Canal. + </p> + <h3> + 1892. + </h3> + <p> + <a name="link2H_4_0004" id="link2H_4_0004"> + <!-- H2 anchor --> </a> + </p> + <div style="height: 4em;"> + <br /><br /><br /><br /> + </div> + <h2> + VENICE: AN EARLY IMPRESSION + </h2> + <p> + There would be much to say about that golden chain of historic cities + which stretches from Milan to Venice, in which the very names—Brescia, + Verona, Mantua, Padua—are an ornament to one’s phrase; but I should + have to draw upon recollections now three years old and to make my short + story a long one. Of Verona and Venice only have I recent impressions, and + even to these must I do hasty justice. I came into Venice, just as I had + done before, toward the end of a summer’s day, when the shadows begin to + lengthen and the light to glow, and found that the attendant sensations + bore repetition remarkably well. There was the same last intolerable delay + at Mestre, just before your first glimpse of the lagoon confirms the + already distinct sea-smell which has added speed to the precursive flight + of your imagination; then the liquid level, edged afar off by its band of + undiscriminated domes and spires, soon distinguished and proclaimed, + however, as excited and contentious heads multiply at the windows of the + train; then your long rumble on the immense white railway-bridge, which, + in spite of the invidious contrast drawn, and very properly, by Mr. Ruskin + between the old and the new approach, does truly, in a manner, shine + across the green lap of the lagoon like a mighty causeway of marble; then + the plunge into the station, which would be exactly similar to every other + plunge save for one little fact—that the keynote of the great medley + of voices borne back from the exit is not “Cab, sir!” but “Barca, + signore!” + </p> + <p> + I do not mean, however, to follow the traveller through every phase of his + initiation, at the risk of stamping poor Venice beyond repair as the + supreme bugbear of literature; though for my own part I hold that to a + fine healthy romantic appetite the subject can’t be too diffusely treated. + Meeting in the Piazza on the evening of my arrival a young American + painter who told me that he had been spending the summer just where I + found him, I could have assaulted him for very envy. He was painting + forsooth the interior of St. Mark’s. To be a young American painter + unperplexed by the mocking, elusive soul of things and satisfied with + their wholesome light-bathed surface and shape; keen of eye; fond of + colour, of sea and sky and anything that may chance between them; of old + lace and old brocade and old furniture (even when made to order); of + time-mellowed harmonies on nameless canvases and happy contours in cheap + old engravings; to spend one’s mornings in still, productive analysis of + the clustered shadows of the Basilica, one’s afternoons anywhere, in + church or campo, on canal or lagoon, and one’s evenings in star-light + gossip at Florian’s, feeling the sea-breeze throb languidly between the + two great pillars of the Piazzetta and over the low black domes of the + church—this, I consider, is to be as happy as is consistent with the + preservation of reason. + </p> + <p> + The mere use of one’s eyes in Venice is happiness enough, and generous + observers find it hard to keep an account of their profits in this line. + Everything the attention touches holds it, keeps playing with it—thanks + to some inscrutable flattery of the atmosphere. Your brown-skinned, + white-shirted gondolier, twisting himself in the light, seems to you, as + you lie at contemplation beneath your awning, a perpetual symbol of + Venetian “effect.” The light here is in fact a mighty magician and, with + all respect to Titian, Veronese and Tintoret, the greatest artist of them + all. You should see in places the material with which it deals—slimy + brick, marble battered and befouled, rags, dirt, decay. Sea and sky seem + to meet half-way, to blend their tones into a soft iridescence, a lustrous + compound of wave and cloud and a hundred nameless local reflections, and + then to fling the clear tissue against every object of vision. You may see + these elements at work everywhere, but to see them in their intensity you + should choose the finest day in the month and have yourself rowed far away + across the lagoon to Torcello. Without making this excursion you can + hardly pretend to know Venice or to sympathise with that longing for pure + radiance which animated her great colourists. It is a perfect bath of + light, and I couldn’t get rid of a fancy that we were cleaving the upper + atmosphere on some hurrying cloud-skiff. At Torcello there is nothing but + the light to see—nothing at least but a sort of blooming sand-bar + intersected by a single narrow creek which does duty as a canal and + occupied by a meagre cluster of huts, the dwellings apparently of + market-gardeners and fishermen, and by a ruinous church of the eleventh + century. It is impossible to imagine a more penetrating case of unheeded + collapse. Torcello was the mother-city of Venice, and she lies there now, + a mere mouldering vestige, like a group of weather-bleached parental bones + left impiously unburied. I stopped my gondola at the mouth of the shallow + inlet and walked along the grass beside a hedge to the low-browed, + crumbling cathedral. The charm of certain vacant grassy spaces, in Italy, + overfrowned by masses of brickwork that are honeycombed by the suns of + centuries, is something that I hereby renounce once for all the attempt to + express; but you may be sure that whenever I mention such a spot + enchantment lurks in it. + </p> + <p> + A delicious stillness covered the little campo at Torcello; I remember + none so subtly audible save that of the Roman Campagna. There was no life + but the visible tremor of the brilliant air and the cries of half-a-dozen + young children who dogged our steps and clamoured for coppers. These + children, by the way, were the handsomest little brats in the world, and, + each was furnished with a pair of eyes that could only have signified the + protest of nature against the meanness of fortune. They were very nearly + as naked as savages, and their little bellies protruded like those of + infant cannibals in the illustrations of books of travel; but as they + scampered and sprawled in the soft, thick grass, grinning like + suddenly-translated cherubs and showing their hungry little teeth, they + suggested forcibly that the best assurance of happiness in this world is + to be found in the maximum of innocence and the minimum of wealth. One + small urchin—framed, if ever a child was, to be the joy of an + aristocratic mamma—was the most expressively beautiful creature I + had ever looked upon. He had a smile to make Correggio sigh in his grave; + and yet here he was running wild among the sea-stunted bushes, on the + lonely margin of a decaying world, in prelude to how blank or to how dark + a destiny? Verily nature is still at odds with propriety; though indeed if + they ever really pull together I fear nature will quite lose her + distinction. An infant citizen of our own republic, straight-haired, + pale-eyed and freckled, duly darned and catechised, marching into a New + England schoolhouse, is an object often seen and soon forgotten; but I + think I shall always remember with infinite tender conjecture, as the + years roll by, this little unlettered Eros of the Adriatic strand. Yet all + youthful things at Torcello were not cheerful, for the poor lad who + brought us the key of the cathedral was shaking with an ague, and his + melancholy presence seemed to point the moral of forsaken nave and choir. + The church, admirably primitive and curious, reminded me of the two or + three oldest churches of Rome—St. Clement and St. Agnes. The + interior is rich in grimly mystical mosaics of the twelfth century and the + patchwork of precious fragments in the pavement not inferior to that of + St. Mark’s. But the terribly distinct Apostles are ranged against their + dead gold backgrounds as stiffly as grenadiers presenting arms—intensely + personal sentinels of a personal Deity. Their stony stare seems to wait + for ever vainly for some visible revival of primitive orthodoxy, and one + may well wonder whether it finds much beguilement in idly-gazing troops of + Western heretics—passionless even in their heresy. + </p> + <p> + I had been curious to see whether in the galleries and temples of Venice I + should be disposed to transpose my old estimates—to burn what I had + adored and adore what I had burned. It is a sad truth that one can stand + in the Ducal Palace for the first time but once, with the deliciously + ponderous sense of that particular half-hour’s being an era in one’s + mental history; but I had the satisfaction of finding at least—a + great comfort in a short stay—that none of my early memories were + likely to change places and that I could take up my admirations where I + had left them. I still found Carpaccio delightful, Veronese magnificent, + Titian supremely beautiful and Tintoret scarce to be appraised. I repaired + immediately to the little church of San Cassano, which contains the + smaller of Tintoret’s two great Crucifixions; and when I had looked at it + a while I drew a long breath and felt I could now face any other picture + in Venice with proper self-possession. It seemed to me I had advanced to + the uttermost limit of painting; that beyond this another art—inspired + poetry—begins, and that Bellini, Veronese, Giorgione, and Titian, + all joining hands and straining every muscle of their genius, reach + forward not so far but that they leave a visible space in which Tintoret + alone is master. I well remember the exaltations to which he lifted me + when first I learned to know him; but the glow of that comparatively + youthful amazement is dead, and with it, I fear, that confident vivacity + of phrase of which, in trying to utter my impressions, I felt less the + magniloquence than the impotence. In his power there are many weak spots, + mysterious lapses and fitful intermissions; but when the list of his + faults is complete he still remains to me the most <i>interesting</i> of + painters. His reputation rests chiefly on a more superficial sort of merit—his + energy, his unsurpassed productivity, his being, as Théophile Gautier + says, <i>le roi des fougueux</i>. These qualities are immense, but the + great source of his impressiveness is that his indefatigable hand never + drew a line that was not, as one may say, a moral line. No painter ever + had such breadth and such depth; and even Titian, beside him, scarce + figures as more than a great decorative artist. Mr. Ruskin, whose + eloquence in dealing with the great Venetians sometimes outruns his + discretion, is fond of speaking even of Veronese as a painter of deep + spiritual intentions. This, it seems to me, is pushing matters too far, + and the author of “The Rape of Europa” is, pictorially speaking, no + greater casuist than any other genius of supreme good taste. Titian was + assuredly a mighty poet, but Tintoret—well, Tintoret was almost a + prophet. Before his greatest works you are conscious of a sudden + evaporation of old doubts and dilemmas, and the eternal problem of the + conflict between idealism and realism dies the most natural of deaths. In + his genius the problem is practically solved; the alternatives are so + harmoniously interfused that I defy the keenest critic to say where one + begins and the other ends. The homeliest prose melts into the most + ethereal poetry—the literal and the imaginative fairly confound + their identity. + </p> + <p> + This, however, is vague praise. Tintoret’s great merit, to my mind, was + his unequalled distinctness of vision. When once he had conceived the germ + of a scene it defined itself to his imagination with an intensity, an + amplitude, an individuality of expression, which makes one’s observation + of his pictures seem less an operation of the mind than a kind of + supplementary experience of life. Veronese and Titian are content with a + much looser specification, as their treatment of any subject that the + author of the Crucifixion at San Cassano has also treated abundantly + proves. There are few more suggestive contrasts than that between the + absence of a total character at all commensurate with its scattered + variety and brilliancy in Veronese’s “Marriage of Cana,” at the Louvre, + and the poignant, almost startling, completeness of Tintoret’s + illustration of the theme at the Salute church. To compare his + “Presentation of the Virgin,” at the Madonna dell’ Orto, with Titian’s at + the Academy, or his “Annunciation” with Titian’s close at hand, is to + measure the essential difference between observation and imagination. One + has certainly not said all that there is to say for Titian when one has + called him an observer. <i>Il y mettait du sien</i>, and I use the term to + designate roughly the artist whose apprehension, infinitely deep and + strong when applied to the single figure or to easily balanced groups, + spends itself vainly on great dramatic combinations—or rather leaves + them ungauged. It was the whole scene that Tintoret seemed to have beheld + in a flash of inspiration intense enough to stamp it ineffaceably on his + perception; and it was the whole scene, complete, peculiar, individual, + unprecedented, that he committed to canvas with all the vehemence of his + talent. Compare his “Last Supper,” at San Giorgio—its long, + diagonally placed table, its dusky spaciousness, its scattered lamp-light + and halo-light, its startled, gesticulating figures, its richly realistic + foreground—with the customary formal, almost mathematical rendering + of the subject, in which impressiveness seems to have been sought in + elimination rather than comprehension. You get from Tintoret’s work the + impression that he <i>felt</i>, pictorially, the great, beautiful, + terrible spectacle of human life very much as Shakespeare felt it + poetically—with a heart that never ceased to beat a passionate + accompaniment to every stroke of his brush. Thanks to this fact his works + are signally grave, and their almost universal and rapidly increasing + decay doesn’t relieve their gloom. Nothing indeed can well be sadder than + the great collection of Tintorets at San Rocco. Incurable blackness is + settling fast upon all of them, and they frown at you across the sombre + splendour of their great chambers like gaunt twilight phantoms of + pictures. To our children’s children Tintoret, as things are going, can be + hardly more than a name; and such of them as shall miss the tragic beauty, + already so dimmed and stained, of the great “Bearing of the Cross” in that + temple of his spirit will live and die without knowing the largest + eloquence of art. If you wish to add the last touch of solemnity to the + place recall as vividly as possible while you linger at San Rocco the + painter’s singularly interesting portrait of himself, at the Louvre. The + old man looks out of the canvas from beneath a brow as sad as a sunless + twilight, with just such a stoical hopelessness as you might fancy him to + wear if he stood at your side gazing at his rotting canvases. It isn’t + whimsical to read it as the face of a man who felt that he had given the + world more than the world was likely to repay. Indeed before every picture + of Tintoret you may remember this tremendous portrait with profit. On one + side the power, the passion, the illusion of his art; on the other the + mortal fatigue of his spirit. The world’s knowledge of him is so small + that the portrait throws a doubly precious light on his personality; and + when we wonder vainly what manner of man he was, and what were his + purpose, his faith and his method, we may find forcible assurance there + that they were at any rate his life—one of the most intellectually + passionate ever led. + </p> + <p> + Verona, which was my last Italian stopping-place, is in any conditions a + delightfully interesting city; but the kindness of my own memory of it is + deepened by a subsequent ten days’ experience of Germany. I rose one + morning at Verona, and went to bed at night at Botzen! The statement needs + no comment, and the two places, though but fifty miles apart, are as + painfully dissimilar as their names. I had prepared myself for your + delectation with a copious tirade on German manners, German scenery, + German art and the German stage—on the lights and shadows of + Innsbrück, Munich, Nüremberg and Heidelberg; but just as I was about to + put pen to paper I glanced into a little volume on these very topics + lately published by that famous novelist and moralist, M. Ernest Feydeau, + the fruit of a summer’s observation at Homburg. This work produced a + reaction; and if I chose to follow M. Feydeau’s own example when he wishes + to qualify his approbation I might call his treatise by any vile name + known to the speech of man. But I content myself with pronouncing it + superficial. I then reflect that my own opportunities for seeing and + judging were extremely limited, and I suppress my tirade, lest some more + enlightened critic should come and hang me with the same rope. Its sum and + substance was to have been that—superficially—Germany is ugly; + that Munich is a nightmare, Heidelberg a disappointment (in spite of its + charming castle) and even Nüremberg not a joy for ever. But comparisons + are odious, and if Munich is ugly Verona is beautiful enough. You may + laugh at my logic, but will probably assent to my meaning. I carried away + from Verona a precious mental picture upon which I cast an introspective + glance whenever between Botzen and Strassburg the oppression of external + circumstance became painful. It was a lovely August afternoon in the Roman + arena—a ruin in which repair and restoration have been so watchfully + and plausibly practised that it seems all of one harmonious antiquity. The + vast stony oval rose high against the sky in a single clear, continuous + line, broken here and there only by strolling and reclining loungers. The + massive tiers inclined in solid monotony to the central circle, in which a + small open-air theatre was in active operation. A small quarter of the + great slope of masonry facing the stage was roped off into an auditorium, + in which the narrow level space between the foot-lights and the lowest + step figured as the pit. Foot-lights are a figure of speech, for the + performance was going on in the broad glow of the afternoon, with a + delightful and apparently by no means misplaced confidence in the + good-will of the spectators. What the piece was that was deemed so + superbly able to shift for itself I know not—very possibly the same + drama that I remember seeing advertised during my former visit to Verona; + nothing less than <i>La Tremenda Giustizia di Dio</i>. If titles are worth + anything this product of the melodramatist’s art might surely stand upon + its own legs. Along the tiers above the little group of regular spectators + was gathered a free-list of unauthorised observers, who, although beyond + ear-shot, must have been enabled by the generous breadth of Italian + gesture to follow the tangled thread of the piece. It was all deliciously + Italian—the mixture of old life and new, the mountebank’s booth (it + was hardly more) grafted on the antique circus, the dominant presence of a + mighty architecture, the loungers and idlers beneath the kindly sky and + upon the sun-warmed stones. I never felt more keenly the difference + between the background to life in very old and very new civilisations. + There are other things in Verona to make it a liberal education to be born + there, though that it is one for the contemporary Veronese I don’t pretend + to say. The Tombs of the Scaligers, with their soaring pinnacles, their + high-poised canopies, their exquisite refinement and concentration of the + Gothic idea, I can’t profess, even after much worshipful gazing, to have + fully comprehended and enjoyed. They seemed to me full of deep + architectural meanings, such as must drop gently into the mind one by one, + after infinite tranquil contemplation. But even to the hurried and + preoccupied traveller the solemn little chapel-yard in the city’s heart, + in which they stand girdled by their great swaying curtain of linked and + twisted iron, is one of the most impressive spots in Italy. Nowhere else + is such a wealth of artistic achievement crowded into so narrow a space; + nowhere else are the daily comings and goings of men blessed by the + presence of <i>manlier</i> art. Verona is rich furthermore in beautiful + churches—several with beautiful names: San Fermo, Santa Anastasia, + San Zenone. This last is a structure of high antiquity and of the most + impressive loveliness. The nave terminates in a double choir, that is a + sub-choir or crypt into which you descend and where you wander among + primitive columns whose variously grotesque capitals rise hardly higher + than your head, and an upper choral plane reached by broad stairways of + the bravest effect. I shall never forget the impression of majestic + chastity that I received from the great nave of the building on my former + visit. I then decided to my satisfaction that every church is from the + devotional point of view a solecism that has not something of a similar + absolute felicity of proportion; for strictly formal beauty seems best to + express our conception of spiritual beauty. The nobly serious character of + San Zenone is deepened by its single picture—a masterpiece of the + most serious of painters, the severe and exquisite Mantegna. + </p> + <p> + {Illustration: THE AMPHITHEATRE, VERONA} + </p> + <h3> + 1872 + </h3> + <p> + <a name="link2H_4_0005" id="link2H_4_0005"> + <!-- H2 anchor --> </a> + </p> + <div style="height: 4em;"> + <br /><br /><br /><br /> + </div> + <h2> + TWO OLD HOUSES AND THREE YOUNG WOMEN + </h2> + <p> + There are times and places that come back yet again, but that, when the + brooding tourist puts out his hand to them, meet it a little slowly, or + even seem to recede a step, as if in slight fear of some liberty he may + take. Surely they should know by this time that he is capable of taking + none. He has his own way—he makes it all right. It now becomes just + a part of the charming solicitation that it presents precisely a problem—that + of giving the particular thing as much as possible without at the same + time giving it, as we say, away. There are considerations, proprieties, a + necessary indirectness—he must use, in short, a little art. No + necessity, however, more than this, makes him warm to his work, and thus + it is that, after all, he hangs his three pictures. + </p> + <h3> + I + </h3> + <p> + The evening that was to give me the first of them was by no means the + first occasion of my asking myself if that inveterate “style” of which we + talk so much be absolutely conditioned—in dear old Venice and + elsewhere—on decrepitude. Is it the style that has brought about the + decrepitude, or the decrepitude that has, as it were, intensified and + consecrated the style? There is an ambiguity about it all that constantly + haunts and beguiles. Dear old Venice has lost her complexion, her figure, + her reputation, her self-respect; and yet, with it all, has so puzzlingly + not lost a shred of her distinction. Perhaps indeed the case is simpler + than it seems, for the poetry of misfortune is familiar to us all, + whereas, in spite of a stroke here and there of some happy justice that + charms, we scarce find ourselves anywhere arrested by the poetry of a run + of luck. The misfortune of Venice being, accordingly, at every point, what + we most touch, feel and see, we end by assuming it to be of the essence of + her dignity; a consequence, we become aware, by the way, sufficiently + discouraging to the general application or pretension of style, and all + the more that, to make the final felicity deep, the original greatness + must have been something tremendous. If it be the ruins that are noble we + have known plenty that were not, and moreover there are degrees and + varieties: certain monuments, solid survivals, hold up their heads and + decline to ask for a grain of your pity. Well, one knows of course when to + keep one’s pity to oneself; yet one clings, even in the face of the colder + stare, to one’s prized Venetian privilege of making the sense of doom and + decay a part of every impression. Cheerful work, it may be said of course; + and it is doubtless only in Venice that you gain more by such a trick than + you lose. What was most beautiful is gone; what was next most beautiful + is, thank goodness, going—that, I think, is the monstrous + description of the better part of your thought. Is it really your fault if + the place makes you want so desperately to read history into everything? + </p> + <p> + You do that wherever you turn and wherever you look, and you do it, I + should say, most of all at night. It comes to you there with longer + knowledge, and with all deference to what flushes and shimmers, that the + night is the real time. It perhaps even wouldn’t take much to make you + award the palm to the nights of winter. This is certainly true for the + form of progression that is most characteristic, for every question of + departure and arrival by gondola. The little closed cabin of this perfect + vehicle, the movement, the darkness and the plash, the indistinguishable + swerves and twists, all the things you don’t see and all the things you do + feel—each dim recognition and obscure arrest is a possible throb of + your sense of being floated to your doom, even when the truth is simply + and sociably that you are going out to tea. Nowhere else is anything as + innocent so mysterious, nor anything as mysterious so pleasantly deterrent + to protest. These are the moments when you are most daringly Venetian, + most content to leave cheap trippers and other aliens the high light of + the mid-lagoon and the pursuit of pink and gold. The splendid day is good + enough for <i>them</i>; what is best for you is to stop at last, as you + are now stopping, among clustered <i>pali</i> and softly-shifting poops + and prows, at a great flight of water-steps that play their admirable part + in the general effect of a great entrance. The high doors stand open from + them to the paved chamber of a basement tremendously tall and not vulgarly + lighted, from which, in turn, mounts the slow stone staircase that draws + you further on. The great point is, that if you are worthy of this + impression at all, there isn’t a single item of it of which the + association isn’t noble. Hold to it fast that there is no other such + dignity of arrival as arrival by water. Hold to it that to float and + slacken and gently bump, to creep out of the low, dark <i>felze</i> and + make the few guided movements and find the strong crooked and offered arm, + and then, beneath lighted palace-windows, pass up the few damp steps on + the precautionary carpet—hold to it that these things constitute a + preparation of which the only defect is that it may sometimes perhaps + really prepare too much. It’s so stately that what can come after?—it’s + so good in itself that what, upstairs, as we comparative vulgarians say, + can be better? Hold to it, at any rate, that if a lady, in especial, + scrambles out of a carriage, tumbles out of a cab, flops out of a + tram-car, and hurtles, projectile-like, out of a “lightning-elevator,” she + alights from the Venetian conveyance as Cleopatra may have stepped from + her barge. Upstairs—whatever may be yet in store for her—her + entrance shall still advantageously enjoy the support most opposed to the + “momentum” acquired. The beauty of the matter has been in the absence of + all momentum—elsewhere so scientifically applied to us, from behind, + by the terrible life of our day—and in the fact that, as the + elements of slowness, the felicities of deliberation, doubtless thus all + hang together, the last of calculable dangers is to enter a great Venetian + room with a rush. + </p> + <p> + Not the least happy note, therefore, of the picture I am trying to frame + is that there was absolutely no rushing; not only in the sense of a + scramble over marble floors, but, by reason of something dissuasive and + distributive in the very air of the place, a suggestion, under the fine + old ceilings and among types of face and figure abounding in the + unexpected, that here were many things to consider. Perhaps the simplest + rendering of a scene into the depths of which there are good grounds of + discretion for not sinking would be just this emphasis on the value of the + unexpected for such occasions—with due qualification, naturally, of + its degree. Unexpectedness pure and simple, it is needless to say, may + easily endanger any social gathering, and I hasten to add moreover that + the figures and faces I speak of were probably not in the least unexpected + to each other. The stage they occupied was a stage of variety—Venice + has ever been a garden of strange social flowers. It is only as reflected + in the consciousness of the visitor from afar—brooding tourist even + call him, or sharp-eyed bird on the branch—that I attempt to give + you the little drama; beginning with the felicity that most appealed to + him, the visible, unmistakable fact that he was the only representative of + his class. The whole of the rest of the business was but what he saw and + felt and fancied—what he was to remember and what he was to forget. + Through it all, I may say distinctly, he clung to his great Venetian clue—the + explanation of everything by the historic idea. It was a high historic + house, with such a quantity of recorded past twinkling in the + multitudinous candles that one grasped at the idea of something waning and + displaced, and might even fondly and secretly nurse the conceit that what + one was having was just the very last. Wasn’t it certainly, for instance, + no mere illusion that there is no appreciable future left for such manners—an + urbanity so comprehensive, a form so transmitted, as those of such a + hostess and such a host? The future is for a different conception of the + graceful altogether—so far as it’s for a conception of the graceful + at all. Into that computation I shall not attempt to enter; but these + representative products of an antique culture, at least, and one of which + the secret seems more likely than not to be lost, were not common, nor + indeed was any one else—in the circle to which the picture most + insisted on restricting itself. + </p> + <p> + Neither, on the other hand, was anyone either very beautiful or very + fresh: which was again, exactly, a precious “value” on an occasion that + was to shine most, to the imagination, by the complexity of its + references. Such old, old women with such old, old jewels; such ugly, ugly + ones with such handsome, becoming names; such battered, fatigued gentlemen + with such inscrutable decorations; such an absence of youth, for the most + part, in either sex—of the pink and white, the “bud” of new worlds; + such a general personal air, in fine, of being the worse for a good deal + of wear in various old ones. It was not a society—that was clear—in + which little girls and boys set the tune; and there was that about it all + that might well have cast a shadow on the path of even the most successful + little girl. Yet also—let me not be rudely inexact—it was in + honour of youth and freshness that we had all been convened. The <i>fiançailles</i> + of the last—unless it were the last but one—unmarried daughter + of the house had just been brought to a proper climax; the contract had + been signed, the betrothal rounded off—I’m not sure that the civil + marriage hadn’t, that day, taken place. The occasion then had in fact the + most charming of heroines and the most ingenuous of heroes, a young man, + the latter, all happily suffused with a fair Austrian blush. The young + lady had had, besides other more or less shining recent ancestors, a very + famous paternal grandmother, who had played a great part in the political + history of her time and whose portrait, in the taste and dress of 1830, + was conspicuous in one of the rooms. The grand-daughter of this celebrity, + of royal race, was strikingly like her and, by a fortunate stroke, had + been habited, combed, curled in a manner exactly to reproduce the + portrait. These things were charming and amusing, as indeed were several + other things besides. The great Venetian beauty of our period was there, + and nature had equipped the great Venetian beauty for her part with the + properest sense of the suitable, or in any case with a splendid generosity—since + on the ideally suitable <i>character</i> of so brave a human symbol who + shall have the last word? This responsible agent was at all events the + beauty in the world about whom probably, most, the absence of question (an + absence never wholly propitious) would a little smugly and monotonously + flourish: the one thing wanting to the interest she inspired was thus the + possibility of ever discussing it. There were plenty of suggestive + subjects round about, on the other hand, as to which the exchange of ideas + would by no means necessarily have dropped. You profit to the full at such + times by all the old voices, echoes, images—by that element of the + history of Venice which represents all Europe as having at one time and + another revelled or rested, asked for pleasure or for patience there; + which gives you the place supremely as the refuge of endless strange + secrets, broken fortunes and wounded hearts. + </p> + <h3> + II + </h3> + <p> + There had been, on lines of further or different speculation, a young + Englishman to luncheon, and the young Englishman had proved “sympathetic”; + so that when it was a question afterwards of some of the more hidden + treasures, the browner depths of the old churches, the case became one for + mutual guidance and gratitude—for a small afternoon tour and the + wait of a pair of friends in the warm little <i>campi</i>, at locked doors + for which the nearest urchin had scurried off to fetch the keeper of the + key. There are few brown depths to-day into which the light of the hotels + doesn’t shine, and few hidden treasures about which pages enough, + doubtless, haven’t already been printed: my business, accordingly, let me + hasten to say, is not now with the fond renewal of any discovery—at + least in the order of impressions most usual. Your discovery may be, for + that matter, renewed every week; the only essential is the good luck—which + a fair amount of practice has taught you to count upon-of not finding, for + the particular occasion, other discoverers in the field. Then, in the + quiet corner, with the closed door—then in the presence of the + picture and of your companion’s sensible emotion—not only the + original happy moment, but everything else, is renewed. Yet once again it + can all come back. The old custode, shuffling about in the dimness, jerks + away, to make sure of his tip, the old curtain that isn’t much more modern + than the wonderful work itself. He does his best to create light where + light can never be; but you have your practised groping gaze, and in + guiding the young eyes of your less confident associate, moreover, you + feel you possess the treasure. These are the refined pleasures that Venice + has still to give, these odd happy passages of communication and response. + </p> + <p> + But the point of my reminiscence is that there were other communications + that day, as there were certainly other responses. I have forgotten + exactly what it was we were looking for—without much success—when + we met the three Sisters. Nothing requires more care, as a long knowledge + of Venice works in, than not to lose the useful faculty of getting lost. I + had so successfully done my best to preserve it that I could at that + moment conscientiously profess an absence of any suspicion of where we + might be. It proved enough that, wherever we were, we were where the three + sisters found us. This was on a little bridge near a big campo, and a part + of the charm of the matter was the theory that it was very much out of the + way. They took us promptly in hand—they were only walking over to + San Marco to match some coloured wool for the manufacture of such belated + cushions as still bloom with purple and green in the long leisures of old + palaces; and that mild errand could easily open a parenthesis. The obscure + church we had feebly imagined we were looking for proved, if I am not + mistaken, that of the sisters’ parish; as to which I have but a confused + recollection of a large grey void and of admiring for the first time a + fine work of art of which I have now quite lost the identity. This was the + effect of the charming beneficence of the three sisters, who presently + were to give our adventure a turn in the emotion of which everything that + had preceded seemed as nothing. It actually strikes me even as a little + dim to have been told by them, as we all fared together, that a certain + low, wide house, in a small square as to which I found myself without + particular association, had been in the far-off time the residence of + George Sand. And yet this was a fact that, though I could then only feel + it must be for another day, would in a different connection have set me + richly reconstructing. + </p> + <p> + Madame Sand’s famous Venetian year has been of late immensely in the air—a + tub of soiled linen which the muse of history, rolling her sleeves well + up, has not even yet quite ceased energetically and publicly to wash. The + house in question must have been the house to which the wonderful lady + betook herself when, in 1834, after the dramatic exit of Alfred de Musset, + she enjoyed that remarkable period of rest and refreshment with the so + long silent, the but recently rediscovered, reported, extinguished, Doctor + Pagello. As an old Sandist—not exactly indeed of the <i>première + heure</i>, but of the fine high noon and golden afternoon of the great + career—I had been, though I confess too inactively, curious as to a + few points in the topography of the eminent adventure to which I here + allude; but had never got beyond the little public fact, in itself always + a bit of a thrill to the Sandist, that the present Hotel Danieli had been + the scene of its first remarkable stages. I am not sure indeed that the + curiosity I speak of has not at last, in my breast, yielded to another + form of wonderment—truly to the rather rueful question of why we + have so continued to concern ourselves, and why the fond observer of the + footprints of genius is likely so to continue, with a body of discussion, + neither in itself and in its day, nor in its preserved and attested + records, at all positively edifying. The answer to such an inquiry would + doubtless reward patience, but I fear we can now glance at its + possibilities only long enough to say that interesting persons—so + they be of a sufficiently approved and established interest—render + in some degree interesting whatever happens to them, and give it an + importance even when very little else (as in the case I refer to) may have + operated to give it a dignity. Which is where I leave the issue of further + identifications. + </p> + <p> + For the three sisters, in the kindest way in the world, had asked us if we + already knew their sequestered home and whether, in case we didn’t, we + should be at all amused to see it. My own acquaintance with them, though + not of recent origin, had hitherto lacked this enhancement, at which we + both now grasped with the full instinct, indescribable enough, of what it + was likely to give. But how, for that matter, either, can I find the right + expression of what was to remain with us of this episode? It is the fault + of the sad-eyed old witch of Venice that she so easily puts more into + things that can pass under the common names that do for them elsewhere. + Too much for a rough sketch was to be seen and felt in the home of the + three sisters, and in the delightful and slightly pathetic deviation of + their doing us so simply and freely the honours of it. What was most + immediately marked was their resigned cosmopolite state, the effacement of + old conventional lines by foreign contact and example; by the action, too, + of causes full of a special interest, but not to be emphasised perhaps—granted + indeed they be named at all—without a certain sadness of sympathy. + If “style,” in Venice, sits among ruins, let us always lighten our tread + when we pay her a visit. + </p> + <p> + Our steps were in fact, I am happy to think, almost soft enough for a + death-chamber as we stood in the big, vague <i>sala</i> of the three + sisters, spectators of their simplified state and their beautiful blighted + rooms, the memories, the portraits, the shrunken relics of nine Doges. If + I wanted a first chapter it was here made to my hand; the painter of life + and manners, as he glanced about, could only sigh—as he so + frequently has to—over the vision of so much more truth than he can + use. What on earth is the need to “invent,” in the midst of tragedy and + comedy that never cease? Why, with the subject itself, all round, so + inimitable, condemn the picture to the silliness of trying not to be aware + of it? The charming lonely girls, carrying so simply their great name and + fallen fortunes, the despoiled <i>decaduta</i> house, the unfailing + Italian grace, the space so out of scale with actual needs, the absence of + books, the presence of ennui, the sense of the length of the hours and the + shortness of everything else—all this was a matter not only for a + second chapter and a third, but for a whole volume, a <i>dénoûment</i> and + a sequel. + </p> + <p> + This time, unmistakably, it <i>was</i> the last—Wordsworth’s stately + “shade of that which once was great”; and it was <i>almost</i> as if our + distinguished young friends had consented to pass away slowly in order to + treat us to the vision. Ends are only ends in truth, for the painter of + pictures, when they are more or less conscious and prolonged. One of the + sisters had been to London, whence she had brought back the impression of + having seen at the British Museum a room exclusively filled with books and + documents devoted to the commemoration of her family. She must also then + have encountered at the National Gallery the exquisite specimen of an + early Venetian master in which one of her ancestors, then head of the + State, kneels with so sweet a dignity before the Virgin and Child. She was + perhaps old enough, none the less, to have seen this precious work taken + down from the wall of the room in which we sat and—on terms so far + too easy—carried away for ever; and not too young, at all events, to + have been present, now and then, when her candid elders, enlightened too + late as to what their sacrifice might really have done for them, looked at + each other with the pale hush of the irreparable. We let ourselves note + that these were matters to put a great deal of old, old history into sweet + young Venetian faces. + </p> + <h3> + III + </h3> + <p> + In Italy, if we come to that, this particular appearance is far from being + only in the streets, where we are apt most to observe it—in + countenances caught as we pass and in the objects marked by the + guide-books with their respective stellar allowances. It is behind the + walls of the houses that old, old history is thick and that the multiplied + stars of Baedeker might often best find their application. The feast of + St. John the Baptist is the feast of the year in Florence, and it seemed + to me on that night that I could have scattered about me a handful of + these signs. I had the pleasure of spending a couple of hours on a signal + high terrace that overlooks the Arno, as well as in the galleries that + open out to it, where I met more than ever the pleasant curious question + of the disparity between the old conditions and the new manners. Make our + manners, we moderns, as good as we can, there is still no getting over it + that they are not good enough for many of the great places. This was one + of those scenes, and its greatness came out to the full into the hot + Florentine evening, in which the pink and golden fires of the pyrotechnics + arranged on Ponte Carraja—the occasion of our assembly—lighted + up the large issue. The “good people” beneath were a huge, hot, gentle, + happy family; the fireworks on the bridge, kindling river as well as sky, + were delicate and charming; the terrace connected the two wings that give + bravery to the front of the palace, and the close-hung pictures in the + rooms, open in a long series, offered to a lover of quiet perambulation an + alternative hard to resist. + </p> + <p> + Wherever he stood—on the broad loggia, in the cluster of company, + among bland ejaculations and liquefied ices, or in the presence of the + mixed masters that led him from wall to wall—such a seeker for the + spirit of each occasion could only turn it over that in the first place + this was an intenser, finer little Florence than ever, and that in the + second the testimony was again wonderful to former fashions and ideas. + What did they do, in the other time, the time of so much smaller a + society, smaller and fewer fortunes, more taste perhaps as to some + particulars, but fewer tastes, at any rate, and fewer habits and wants—what + did they do with chambers so multitudinous and so vast? Put their “state” + at its highest—and we know of many ways in which it must have broken + down—how did they live in them without the aid of variety? How did + they, in minor communities in which every one knew every one, and every + one’s impression and effect had been long, as we say, discounted, find + representation and emulation sufficiently amusing? Much of the charm of + thinking of it, however, is doubtless that we are not able to say. This + leaves us with the conviction that does them most honour: the old + generations built and arranged greatly for the simple reason that they + liked it, and they could bore themselves—to say nothing of each + other, when it came to that—better in noble conditions than in mean + ones. + </p> + <p> + It was not, I must add, of the far-away Florentine age that I most + thought, but of periods more recent and of which the sound and beautiful + house more directly spoke. If one had always been homesick for the + Arno-side of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, here was a chance, + and a better one than ever, to taste again of the cup. Many of the + pictures—there was a charming quarter of an hour when I had them to + myself—were bad enough to have passed for good in those delightful + years. Shades of Grand-Dukes encompassed me—Dukes of the pleasant + later sort who weren’t really grand. There was still the sense of having + come too late—yet not too late, after all, for this glimpse and this + dream. My business was to people the place—its own business had + never been to save us the trouble of understanding it. And then the + deepest spell of all was perhaps that just here I was supremely out of the + way of the so terribly actual Florentine question. This, as all the world + knows, is a battle-ground, to-day, in many journals, with all Italy + practically pulling on one side and all England, America and Germany + pulling on the other: I speak of course of the more or less articulate + opinion. The “improvement,” the rectification of Florence is in the air, + and the problem of the particular ways in which, given such desperately + delicate cases, these matters should be understood. The little + treasure-city is, if there ever was one, a delicate case—more + delicate perhaps than any other in the world save that of our taking on + ourselves to persuade the Italians that they mayn’t do as they like with + their own. They so absolutely may that I profess I see no happy issue from + the fight. It will take more tact than our combined tactful genius may at + all probably muster to convince them that their own is, by an ingenious + logic, much rather <i>ours</i>. It will take more subtlety still to muster + for them that dazzling show of examples from which they may learn that + what in general is “ours” shall appear to them as a rule a sacrifice to + beauty and a triumph of taste. The situation, to the truly analytic mind, + offers in short, to perfection, all the elements of despair; and I am + afraid that if I hung back, at the Corsini palace, to woo illusions and + invoke the irrelevant, it was because I could think, in the conditions, of + no better way to meet the acute responsibility of the critic than just to + shirk it. + </p> + <h3> + {1899.} + </h3> + <p> + <a name="link2H_4_0006" id="link2H_4_0006"> + <!-- H2 anchor --> </a> + </p> + <div style="height: 4em;"> + <br /><br /><br /><br /> + </div> + <h2> + CASA ALVISI + </h2> + <p> + Invited to “introduce” certain pages of cordial and faithful reminiscence + from another hand, {1} + </p> + <p> + {1} “Browning in Venice,” being Recollections of the late Katharine De Kay + Bronson, with a Prefatory Note by H. J. (<i>Cornhill Magazine</i>, + February, 1902).} + </p> + <p> + in which a frankly predominant presence seems to live again, I undertook + that office with an interest inevitably somewhat sad—so passed and + gone to-day is so much of the life suggested. Those who fortunately knew + Mrs. Bronson will read into her notes still more of it—more of her + subject, more of herself too, and of many things—than she gives, and + some may well even feel tempted to do for her what she has done here for + her distinguished friend. In Venice, during a long period, for many + pilgrims, Mrs. Arthur Bronson, originally of New York, was, so far as + society, hospitality, a charming personal welcome were concerned, almost + in sole possession; she had become there, with time, quite the prime + representative of those private amenities which the Anglo-Saxon abroad is + apt to miss just in proportion as the place visited is publicly wonderful, + and in which he therefore finds a value twice as great as at home. Mrs. + Bronson really earned in this way the gratitude of mingled generations and + races. She sat for twenty years at the wide mouth, as it were, of the + Grand Canal, holding out her hand, with endless good-nature, patience, + charity, to all decently accredited petitioners, the incessant troop of + those either bewilderedly making or fondly renewing acquaintance with the + dazzling city. + </p> + <p> + {Illustration: CASA ALVISI, VENICE} + </p> + <p> + Casa Alvisi is directly opposite the high, broad-based florid church of S. + Maria della Salute—so directly that from the balcony over the + water-entrance your eye, crossing the canal, seems to find the key-hole of + the great door right in a line with it; and there was something in this + position that for the time made all Venice-lovers think of the genial <i>padrona</i> + as thus levying in the most convenient way the toll of curiosity and + sympathy. Every one passed, every one was seen to pass, and few were those + not seen to stop and to return. The most generous of hostesses died a year + ago at Florence; her house knows her no more—it had ceased to do so + for some time before her death; and the long, pleased procession—the + charmed arrivals, the happy sojourns at anchor, the reluctant departures + that made Ca’ Alvisi, as was currently said, a social <i>porto di mare</i>—is, + for remembrance and regret, already a possession of ghosts; so that, on + the spot, at present, the attention ruefully averts itself from the dear + little old faded but once familiarly bright façade, overtaken at last by + the comparatively vulgar uses that are doing their best to “paint out” in + Venice, right and left, by staring signs and other vulgarities, the + immemorial note of distinction. The house, in a city of palaces, was + small, but the tenant clung to her perfect, her inclusive position—the + one right place that gave her a better command, as it were, than a better + house obtained by a harder compromise; not being fond, moreover, of + spacious halls and massive treasures, but of compact and familiar rooms, + in which her remarkable accumulation of minute and delicate Venetian + objects could show. She adored—in the way of the Venetian, to which + all her taste addressed itself—the small, the domestic and the + exquisite; so that she would have given a Tintoretto or two, I think, + without difficulty, for a cabinet of tiny gilded glasses or a + dinner-service of the right old silver. + </p> + <p> + The general receptacle of these multiplied treasures played at any rate, + through the years, the part of a friendly private-box at the constant + operatic show, a box at the best point of the best tier, with the + cushioned ledge of its front raking the whole scene and with its + withdrawing rooms behind for more detached conversation; for easy—when + not indeed slightly difficult—polyglot talk, artful <i>bibite</i>, + artful cigarettes too, straight from the hand of the hostess, who could do + all that belonged to a hostess, place people in relation and keep them so, + take up and put down the topic, cause delicate tobacco and little gilded + glasses to circulate, without ever leaving her sofa-cushions or + intermitting her good-nature. She exercised in these conditions, with + never a block, as we say in London, in the traffic, with never an + admission, an acceptance of the least social complication, her positive + genius for easy interest, easy sympathy, easy friendship. It was as if, at + last, she had taken the human race at large, quite irrespective of + geography, for her neighbours, with neighbourly relations as a matter of + course. These things, on her part, had at all events the greater + appearance of ease from their having found to their purpose—and as + if the very air of Venice produced them—a cluster of forms so light + and immediate, so pre-established by picturesque custom. The old bright + tradition, the wonderful Venetian legend had appealed to her from the + first, closing round her house and her well-plashed water-steps, where the + waiting gondolas were thick, quite as if, actually, the ghost of the + defunct Carnival—since I have spoken of ghosts—still played + some haunting part. + </p> + <p> + Let me add, at the same time, that Mrs. Bronson’s social facility, which + was really her great refuge from importunity, a defence with serious + thought and serious feeling quietly cherished behind it, had its + discriminations as well as its inveteracies, and that the most marked of + all these, perhaps, was her attachment to Robert Browning. Nothing in all + her beneficent life had probably made her happier than to have found + herself able to minister, each year, with the returning autumn, to his + pleasure and comfort. Attached to Ca’ Alvisi, on the land side, is a + somewhat melancholy old section of a Giustiniani palace, which she had + annexed to her own premises mainly for the purpose of placing it, in + comfortable guise, at the service of her friends. She liked, as she + professed, when they were the real thing, to have them under her hand; and + here succeeded each other, through the years, the company of the + privileged and the more closely domesticated, who liked, harmlessly, to + distinguish between themselves and outsiders. Among visitors partaking of + this pleasant provision Mr. Browning was of course easily first. But I + must leave her own pen to show him as her best years knew him. The point + was, meanwhile, that if her charity was great even for the outsider, this + was by reason of the inner essence of it—her perfect tenderness for + Venice, which she always recognised as a link. That was the true principle + of fusion, the key to communication. She communicated in proportion—little + or much, measuring it as she felt people more responsive or less so; and + she expressed herself, or in other words her full affection for the place, + only to those who had most of the same sentiment. The rich and interesting + form in which she found it in Browning may well be imagined—together + with the quite independent quantity of the genial at large that she also + found; but I am not sure that his favour was not primarily based on his + paid tribute of such things as “Two in a Gondola” and “A Toccata of + Galuppi.” He had more ineffaceably than anyone recorded his initiation + from of old. + </p> + <p> + She was thus, all round, supremely faithful; yet it was perhaps after all + with the very small folk, those to the manner born, that she made the + easiest terms. She loved, she had from the first enthusiastically adopted, + the engaging Venetian people, whose virtues she found touching and their + infirmities but such as appeal mainly to the sense of humour and the love + of anecdote; and she befriended and admired, she studied and spoiled them. + There must have been a multitude of whom it would scarce be too much to + say that her long residence among them was their settled golden age. When + I consider that they have lost her now I fairly wonder to what shifts they + have been put and how long they may not have to wait for such another + messenger of Providence. She cultivated their dialect, she renewed their + boats, she piously relighted—at the top of the tide-washed <i>pali</i> + of traghetto or lagoon—the neglected lamp of the tutelary + Madonnetta; she took cognisance of the wives, the children, the accidents, + the troubles, as to which she became, perceptibly, the most prompt, the + established remedy. On lines where the amusement was happily less + one-sided she put together in dialect many short comedies, dramatic + proverbs, which, with one of her drawing-rooms permanently arranged as a + charming diminutive theatre, she caused to be performed by the young + persons of her circle—often, when the case lent itself, by the + wonderful small offspring of humbler friends, children of the Venetian + lower class, whose aptitude, teachability, drollery, were her constant + delight. It was certainly true that an impression of Venice as humanly + sweet might easily found itself on the frankness and quickness and + amiability of these little people. They were at least so much to the good; + for the philosophy of their patroness was as Venetian as everything else; + helping her to accept experience without bitterness and to remain fresh, + even in the fatigue which finally overtook her, for pleasant surprises and + proved sincerities. She was herself sincere to the last for the place of + her predilection; inasmuch as though she had arranged herself, in the + later time—and largely for the love of “Pippa Passes”—an + alternative refuge at Asolo, she absented herself from Venice with + continuity only under coercion of illness. + </p> + <p> + At Asolo, periodically, the link with Browning was more confirmed than + weakened, and there, in old Venetian territory, and with the invasion of + visitors comparatively checked, her preferentially small house became + again a setting for the pleasure of talk and the sense of Italy. It + contained again its own small treasures, all in the pleasant key of the + homelier Venetian spirit. The plain beneath it stretched away like a + purple sea from the lower cliffs of the hills, and the white <i>campanili</i> + of the villages, as one was perpetually saying, showed on the expanse like + scattered sails of ships. The rumbling carriage, the old-time, rattling, + red-velveted carriage of provincial, rural Italy, delightful and quaint, + did the office of the gondola; to Bassano, to Treviso, to high-walled + Castelfranco, all pink and gold, the home of the great Giorgione. Here + also memories cluster; but it is in Venice again that her vanished + presence is most felt, for there, in the real, or certainly the finer, the + more sifted Cosmopolis, it falls into its place among the others evoked, + those of the past seekers of poetry and dispensers of romance. It is a + fact that almost every one interesting, appealing, melancholy, memorable, + odd, seems at one time or another, after many days and much life, to have + gravitated to Venice by a happy instinct, settling in it and treating it, + cherishing it, as a sort of repository of consolations; all of which + to-day, for the conscious mind, is mixed with its air and constitutes its + unwritten history. The deposed, the defeated, the disenchanted, the + wounded, or even only the bored, have seemed to find there something that + no other place could give. But such people came for themselves, as we seem + to see them—only with the egotism of their grievances and the vanity + of their hopes. Mrs. Bronson’s case was beautifully different—she + had come altogether for others. + </p> + <p> + <a name="link2H_4_0007" id="link2H_4_0007"> + <!-- H2 anchor --> </a> + </p> + <div style="height: 4em;"> + <br /><br /><br /><br /> + </div> + <h2> + FROM CHAMBÉRY TO MILAN + </h2> + <p> + Your truly sentimental tourist will never take it from any occasion that + there is absolutely nothing for him, and it was at Chambéry—but four + hours from Geneva—that I accepted the situation and decided there + might be mysterious delights in entering Italy by a whizz through an + eight-mile tunnel, even as a bullet through the bore of a gun. I found my + reward in the Savoyard landscape, which greets you betimes with the smile + of anticipation. If it is not so Italian as Italy it is at least more + Italian than anything <i>but</i> Italy—more Italian, too, I should + think, than can seem natural and proper to the swarming red-legged + soldiery who so publicly proclaim it of the empire of M. Thiers. The light + and the complexion of things had to my eyes not a little of that mollified + depth last loved by them rather further on. It was simply perhaps that the + weather was hot and the mountains drowsing in that iridescent haze that I + have seen nearer home than at Chambéry. But the vegetation, assuredly, had + an all but Transalpine twist and curl, and the classic wayside tangle of + corn and vines left nothing to be desired in the line of careless grace. + Chambéry as a town, however, constitutes no foretaste of the monumental + cities. There is shabbiness and shabbiness, the fond critic of such things + will tell you; and that of the ancient capital of Savoy lacks style. I + found a better pastime, however, than strolling through the dark dull + streets in quest of effects that were not forthcoming. The first urchin + you meet will show you the way to Les Charmettes and the Maison + Jean-Jacques. A very pleasant way it becomes as soon as it leaves the town—a + winding, climbing by-road, bordered with such a tall and sturdy hedge as + to give it the air of an English lane—if you can fancy an English + lane introducing you to the haunts of a Madame de Warens. + </p> + <p> + The house that formerly sheltered this lady’s singular ménage stands on a + hillside above the road, which a rapid path connects with the little + grass-grown terrace before it. It is a small shabby, homely dwelling, with + a certain reputable solidity, however, and more of internal spaciousness + than of outside promise. The place is shown by an elderly competent dame + who points out the very few surviving objects which you may touch with the + reflection—complacent in whatsoever degree suits you—that they + have known the familiarity of Rousseau’s hand. It was presumably a + meagrely-appointed house, and I wondered that on such scanty features so + much expression should linger. But the structure has an ancient + ponderosity, and the dust of the eighteenth century seems to lie on its + worm-eaten floors, to cling to the faded old <i>papiers à ramages</i> on + the walls and to lodge in the crevices of the brown wooden ceilings. + Madame de Warens’s bed remains, with the narrow couch of Jean-Jacques as + well, his little warped and cracked yellow spinet, and a battered, + turnip-shaped silver timepiece, engraved with its master’s name—its + primitive tick as extinct as his passionate heart-beats. It cost me, I + confess, a somewhat pitying acceleration of my own to see this intimately + personal relic of the <i>genius loci</i>—for it had dwelt; in his + waistcoat-pocket, than which there is hardly a material point in space + nearer to a man’s consciousness—tossed so the dog’s-eared visitors’ + record or <i>livre de cuisine</i> recently denounced by Madame George + Sand. In fact the place generally, in so far as some faint ghostly + presence of its famous inmates seems to linger there, is by no means + exhilarating. Coppet and Ferney tell, if not of pure happiness, at least + of prosperity and, honour, wealth and success. But Les Charmettes is + haunted by ghosts unclean and forlorn. The place tells of poverty, + perversity, distress. A good deal of clever modern talent in France has + been employed in touching up the episode of which it was the scene and + tricking it out in idyllic love-knots. But as I stood on the charming + terrace I have mentioned—a little jewel of a terrace, with grassy + flags and a mossy parapet, and an admirable view of great swelling violet + hills—stood there reminded how much sweeter Nature is than man, the + story looked rather wan and unlovely beneath these literary decorations, + and I could pay it no livelier homage than is implied in perfect pity. + Hero and heroine have become too much creatures of history to take up + attitudes as part of any poetry. But, not to moralise too sternly for a + tourist between trains, I should add that, as an illustration, to be + inserted mentally in the text of the “Confessions,” a glimpse of Les + Charmettes is pleasant enough. It completes the rare charm of good + autobiography to behold with one’s eyes the faded and battered background + of the story; and Rousseau’s narrative is so incomparably vivid and + forcible that the sordid little house at Chambéry seems of a hardly deeper + shade of reality than so many other passages of his projected truth. + </p> + <p> + If I spent an hour at Les Charmettes, fumbling thus helplessly with the + past, I recognised on the morrow how strongly the Mont Cenis Tunnel smells + of the time to come. As I passed along the Saint-Gothard highway a couple + of months since, I perceived, half up the Swiss ascent, a group of navvies + at work in a gorge beneath the road. They had laid bare a broad surface of + granite and had punched in the centre of it a round black cavity, of about + the dimensions, as it seemed to me, of a soup-plate. This was to attain + its perfect development some eight years hence. The Mont Cenis may + therefore be held to have set a fashion which will be followed till the + highest Himalaya is but the ornamental apex or snow-capped gable-tip of + some resounding fuliginous corridor. The tunnel differs but in length from + other tunnels; you spend half an hour in it. But you whirl out into the + blest peninsula, and as you look back seem to see the mighty mass shrug + its shoulders over the line, the mere turn of a dreaming giant in his + sleep. The tunnel is certainly not a poetic object, out there is no + perfection without its beauty; and as you measure the long rugged outline + of the pyramid of which it forms the base you accept it as the perfection + of a short cut. Twenty-four hours from Paris to Turin is speed for the + times—speed which may content us, at any rate, until expansive + Berlin has succeeded in placing itself at thirty-six from Milan. + </p> + <p> + To enter Turin then of a lovely August afternoon was to find a city of + arcades, of pink and yellow stucco, of innumerable cafes, of blue-legged + officers, of ladies draped in the North-Italian mantilla. An old friend of + Italy coming back to her finds an easy waking for dormant memories. Every + object is a reminder and every reminder a thrill. Half an hour after my + arrival, as I stood at my window, which overhung the great square, I found + the scene, within and without, a rough epitome of every pleasure and every + impression I had formerly gathered from Italy: the balcony and the + Venetian-blind, the cool floor of speckled concrete, the lavish delusions + of frescoed wall and ceiling, the broad divan framed for the noonday + siesta, the massive medieval Castello in mid-piazza, with its shabby rear + and its pompous Palladian front, the brick campaniles beyond, the milder, + yellower light, the range of colour, the suggestion of sound. Later, + beneath the arcades, I found many an old acquaintance: beautiful officers, + resplendent, slow-strolling, contemplative of female beauty; civil and + peaceful dandies, hardly less gorgeous, with that religious faith in + moustache and shirt-front which distinguishes the <i>belle jeunesse of + Italy</i>; ladies with heads artfully shawled in Spanish-looking lace, but + with too little art—or too much nature at least—in the region + of the bodice; well-conditioned young <i>abbati</i> with neatly drawn + stockings. These indeed are not objects of first-rate interest, and with + such Turin is rather meagrely furnished. It has no architecture, no + churches, no monuments, no romantic street-scenery. It has the great + votive temple of the Superga, which stands on a high hilltop above the + city, gazing across at Monte Rosa and lifting its own fine dome against + the sky with no contemptible art. But when you have seen the Superga from + the quay beside the Po, a skein of a few yellow threads in August, despite + its frequent habit of rising high and running wild, and said to yourself + that in architecture position is half the battle, you have nothing left to + visit but the Museum of pictures. The Turin Gallery, which is large and + well arranged, is the fortunate owner of three or four masterpieces: a + couple of magnificent Vandycks and a couple of Paul Veroneses; the latter + a Queen of Sheba and a Feast of the House of Levi—the usual splendid + combination of brocades, grandees and marble colonnades dividing those + skies <i>de turquoise malade</i> to which Théophile Gautier is fond of + alluding. The Veroneses are fine, but with Venice in prospect the + traveller feels at liberty to keep his best attention in reserve. If, + however, he has the proper relish for Vandyck, let him linger long and + fondly here; for that admiration will never be more potently stirred than + by the adorable group of the three little royal highnesses, sons and the + daughter of Charles I. All the purity of childhood is here, and all its + soft solidity of structure, rounded tenderly beneath the spangled satin + and contrasted charmingly with the pompous rigidity. Clad respectively in + crimson, white and blue, these small scions stand up in their ruffs and + fardingales in dimpled serenity, squaring their infantine stomachers at + the spectator with an innocence, a dignity, a delightful grotesqueness, + which make the picture a thing of close truth as well as of fine decorum. + You might kiss their hands, but you certainly would think twice before + pinching their cheeks—provocative as they are of this tribute of + admiration—and would altogether lack presumption to lift them off + the ground or the higher level or dais on which they stand so sturdily + planted by right of birth. There is something inimitable in the paternal + gallantry with which the painter has touched off the young lady. She was a + princess, yet she was a baby, and he has contrived, we let ourselves + fancy, to interweave an intimation that she was a creature whom, in her + teens, the lucklessly smitten—even as he was prematurely—must + vainly sigh for. Though the work is a masterpiece of execution its merits + under this head may be emulated, at a distance; the lovely modulations of + colour in the three contrasted and harmonised little satin petticoats, the + solidity of the little heads, in spite of all their prettiness, the happy, + unexaggerated squareness and maturity of <i>pose</i>, are, severally, + points to study, to imitate, and to reproduce with profit. But the taste + of such a consummate thing is its great secret as well as its great merit—a + taste which seems one of the lost instincts of mankind. Go and enjoy this + supreme expression of Vandyck’s fine sense, and admit that never was a + politer production. + </p> + <p> + Milan speaks to us of a burden of felt life of which Turin is innocent, + but in its general aspect still lingers a northern reserve which makes the + place rather perhaps the last of the prose capitals than the first of the + poetic. The long Austrian occupation perhaps did something to Germanise + its physiognomy; though indeed this is an indifferent explanation when one + remembers how well, temperamentally speaking, Italy held her own in + Venetia. Milan, at any rate, if not bristling with the æsthetic impulse, + opens to us frankly enough the thick volume of her past. Of that volume + the Cathedral is the fairest and fullest page—a structure not + supremely interesting, not logical, not even, to some minds, commandingly + beautiful, but grandly curious and superbly rich. I hope, for my own part, + never to grow too particular to admire it. If it had no other distinction + it would still have that of impressive, immeasurable achievement. As I + strolled beside its vast indented base one evening, and felt it, above me, + rear its grey mysteries into the starlight while the restless human tide + on which I floated rose no higher than the first few layers of + street-soiled marble, I was tempted to believe that beauty in great + architecture is almost a secondary merit, and that the main point is mass—such + mass as may make it a supreme embodiment of vigorous effort. Viewed in + this way a great building is the greatest conceivable work of art. More + than any other it represents difficulties mastered, resources combined, + labour, courage and patience. And there are people who tell us that art + has nothing to do with morality! Little enough, doubtless, when it is + concerned, even ever so little, in painting the roof of Milan Cathedral + within to represent carved stone-work. Of this famous roof every one has + heard—how good it is, how bad, how perfect a delusion, how + transparent an artifice. It is the first thing your cicerone shows you on + entering the church. The occasionally accommodating art-lover may accept + it philosophically, I think; for the interior, though admirably effective + as a whole, has no great sublimity, nor even purity, of pitch. It is + splendidly vast and dim; the altarlamps twinkle afar through the + incense-thickened air like foglights at sea, and the great columns rise + straight to the roof, which hardly curves to meet them, with the girth and + altitude of oaks of a thousand years; but there is little refinement of + design—few of those felicities of proportion which the eye caresses, + when it finds them, very much as the memory retains and repeats some happy + lines of poetry or some haunting musical phrase. Consistently brave, none + the less, is the result produced, and nothing braver than a certain + exhibition that I privately enjoyed of the relics of St. Charles + Borromeus. This holy man lies at his eternal rest in a small but gorgeous + sepulchral chapel, beneath the boundless pavement and before the high + altar; and for the modest sum of five francs you may have his shrivelled + mortality unveiled and gaze at it with whatever reserves occur to you. The + Catholic Church never renounces a chance of the sublime for fear of a + chance of the ridiculous—especially when the chance of the sublime + may be the very excellent chance of five francs. The performance in + question, of which the good San Carlo paid in the first instance the cost, + was impressive certainly, but as a monstrous matter or a grim comedy may + still be. The little sacristan, having secured his audience, whipped on a + white tunic over his frock, lighted a couple of extra candles and + proceeded to remove from above the altar, by means of a crank, a sort of + sliding shutter, just as you may see a shop-boy do of a morning at his + master’s window. In this case too a large sheet of plate-glass was + uncovered, and to form an idea of the <i>étalage</i> you must imagine that + a jeweller, for reasons of his own, has struck an unnatural partnership + with an undertaker. The black mummified corpse of the saint is stretched + out in a glass coffin, clad in his mouldering canonicals, mitred, + crosiered and gloved, glittering with votive jewels. It is an + extraordinary mixture of death and life; the desiccated clay, the ashen + rags, the hideous little black mask and skull, and the living, glowing, + twinkling splendour of diamonds, emeralds and sapphires. The collection is + really fine, and many great historic names are attached to the different + offerings. Whatever may be the better opinion as to the future of the + Church, I can’t help thinking she will make a figure in the world so long + as she retains this great fund of precious “properties,” this prodigious + capital decoratively invested and scintillating throughout Christendom at + effectively-scattered points. You see I am forced to agree after all, in + spite of the sliding shutter and the profane swagger of the sacristan, + that a certain pastoral majesty saved the situation, or at least made + irony gape. Yet it was from a natural desire to breathe a sweeter air that + I immediately afterwards undertook the interminable climb to the roof of + the cathedral. This is another world of wonders, and one which enjoys due + renown, every square inch of wall on the winding stairways being + bescribbled with a traveller’s name. There is a great glare from the + far-stretching slopes of marble, a confusion (like the masts of a navy or + the spears of an army) of image-capped pinnacles, biting the impalpable + blue, and, better than either, the goodliest view of level Lombardy + sleeping in its rich transalpine light and resembling, with its + white-walled dwellings and the spires on its horizon, a vast green sea + spotted with ships. After two months of Switzerland the Lombard plain is a + rich rest to the eye, and the yellow, liquid, free-flowing light—as + if on favoured Italy the vessels of heaven were more widely opened—had + for mine a charm which made me think of a great opaque mountain as a + blasphemous invasion of the atmospheric spaces. + </p> + <p> + {Illustration: THE SIMPLON GATE, MILAN} + </p> + <p> + I have mentioned the cathedral first, but the prime treasure of Milan at + the present hour is the beautiful, tragical Leonardo. The cathedral is + good for another thousand years, but we ask whether our children will find + in the most majestic and most luckless of frescoes much more than the + shadow of a shadow. Its fame has been for a century or two that, as one + may say, of an illustrious invalid whom people visit to see how he lasts, + with leave-taking sighs and almost death-bed or tiptoe precautions. The + picture needs not another scar or stain, now, to be the saddest work of + art in the world; and battered, defaced, ruined as it is, it remains one + of the greatest. We may really compare its anguish of decay to the slow + conscious ebb of life in a human organism. The production of the prodigy + was a breath from the infinite, and the painter’s conception not + immeasurably less complex than the scheme, say, of his own mortal + constitution. There has been much talk lately of the irony of fate, but I + suspect fate was never more ironical than when she led the most + scientific, the most calculating of all painters to spend fifteen long + years in building his goodly house upon the sand. And yet, after all, may + not the playing of that trick represent but a deeper wisdom, since if the + thing enjoyed the immortal health and bloom of a first-rate Titian we + should have lost one of the most pertinent lessons in the history of art? + We know it as hearsay, but here is the plain proof, that there is no limit + to the amount of “stuff” an artist may put into his work. Every painter + ought once in his life to stand before the Cenacolo and decipher its + moral. Mix with your colours and mess on your palette every particle of + the very substance of your soul, and this lest perchance your “prepared + surface” shall play you a trick! Then, and then only, it will fight to the + last—it will resist even in death. Raphael was a happier genius; you + look at his lovely “Marriage of the Virgin” at the Brera, beautiful as + some first deep smile of conscious inspiration, but to feel that he + foresaw no complaint against fate, and that he knew the world he wanted to + know and charmed it into never giving him away. But I have left no space + to speak of the Brera, nor of that paradise of book-worms with an eye for + their background—if such creatures exist—the Ambrosian + Library; nor of that mighty basilica of St. Ambrose, with its spacious + atrium and its crudely solemn mosaics, in which it is surely your own + fault if you don’t forget Dr. Strauss and M. Renan and worship as grimly + as a Christian of the ninth century. + </p> + <p> + It is part of the sordid prose of the Mont Cenis road that, unlike those + fine old unimproved passes, the Simplon, the Splügen and—yet awhile + longer—the Saint-Gothard, it denies you a glimpse of that paradise + adorned by the four lakes even as that of uncommented Scripture by the + rivers of Eden. I made, however, an excursion to the Lake of Como, which, + though brief, lasted long enough to suggest to me that I too was a hero of + romance with leisure for a love-affair, and not a hurrying tourist with a + Bradshaw in his pocket. The Lake of Como has figured largely in novels of + “immoral” tendency—being commonly the spot to which inflamed young + gentlemen invite the wives of other gentlemen to fly with them and ignore + the restrictions of public opinion. But even the Lake of Como has been + revised and improved; the fondest prejudices yield to time; it gives one + somehow a sense of an aspiringly high tone. I should pay a poor compliment + at least to the swarming inmates of the hotels which now alternate + attractively by the water-side with villas old and new were I to read the + appearances more cynically. But if it is lost to florid fiction it still + presents its blue bosom to most other refined uses, and the + unsophisticated tourist, the American at least, may do any amount of + private romancing there. The pretty hotel at Cadenabbia offers him, for + instance, in the most elegant and assured form, the so often precarious + adventure of what he calls at home summer board. It is all so unreal, so + fictitious, so elegant and idle, so framed to undermine a rigid sense of + the chief end of man not being to float for ever in an ornamental boat, + beneath an awning tasselled like a circus-horse, impelled by an affable + Giovanni or Antonio from one stately stretch of lake-laved villa steps to + another, that departure seems as harsh and unnatural as the + dream-dispelling note of some punctual voice at your bedside on a dusky + winter morning. Yet I wondered, for my own part, where I had seen it all + before—the pink-walled villas gleaming through their shrubberies of + orange and oleander, the mountains shimmering in the hazy light like so + many breasts of doves, the constant presence of the melodious Italian + voice. Where indeed but at the Opera when the manager has been more than + usually regardless of expense? Here in the foreground was the palace of + the nefarious barytone, with its banqueting-hall opening as freely on the + stage as a railway buffet on the platform; beyond, the delightful back + scene, with its operatic gamut of colouring; in the middle the + scarlet-sashed <i>barcaiuoli</i>, grouped like a chorus, hat in hand, + awaiting the conductor’s signal. It was better even than being in a novel—this + being, this fairly wallowing, in a libretto. + </p> + <p> + <a name="link2H_4_0008" id="link2H_4_0008"> + <!-- H2 anchor --> </a> + </p> + <div style="height: 4em;"> + <br /><br /><br /><br /> + </div> + <h2> + THE OLD SAINT-GOTHARD LEAVES FROM A NOTE-BOOK + </h2> + <p> + Berne, <i>September</i>, 1873.—In Berne again, some eleven weeks + after having left it in July. I have never been in Switzerland so late, + and I came hither innocently supposing the last Cook’s tourist to have + paid out his last coupon and departed. But I was lucky, it seems, to + discover an empty cot in an attic and a very tight place at a table + d’hôte. People are all flocking out of Switzerland, as in July they were + flocking in, and the main channels of egress are terribly choked. I have + been here several days, watching them come and go; it is like the + march-past of an army. It gives one, for an occasional change from darker + thoughts, a lively impression of the numbers of people now living, and + above all now moving, at extreme ease in the world. Here is little + Switzerland disgorging its tens of thousands of honest folk, chiefly + English, and rarely, to judge by their faces and talk, children of light + in any eminent degree; for whom snow-peaks and glaciers and passes and + lakes and chalets and sunsets and a <i>café complet</i>, “including + honey,” as the coupon says, have become prime necessities for six weeks + every year. It’s not so long ago that lords and nabobs monopolised these + pleasures; but nowadays in a month’s tour in Switzerland is no more a <i>jeu + de prince</i> than a Sunday excursion. To watch this huge Anglo-Saxon wave + ebbing through Berne suggests, no doubt most fallaciously, that the common + lot of mankind isn’t after all so very hard and that the masses have + reached a high standard of comfort. The view of the Oberland chain, as you + see it from the garden of the hotel, really butters one’s bread most + handsomely; and here are I don’t know how many hundred Cook’s tourists a + day looking at it through the smoke of their pipes. Is it really the + “masses,” however, that I see every day at the table d’hôte? They have + rather too few h’s to the dozen, but their good-nature is great. Some + people complain that they “vulgarise” Switzerland; but as far as I am + concerned I freely give it up to them and offer them a personal welcome + and take a peculiar satisfaction in seeing them here. Switzerland is a + “show country”—I am more and more struck with the bearings of that + truth; and its use in the world is to reassure persons of a benevolent + imagination when they begin to wish for the drudging millions a greater + supply of elevating amusement. Here is amusement for a thousand years, and + as elevating certainly as mountains three miles high can make it. I expect + to live to see the summit of Monte Rosa heated by steam-tubes and adorned + with a hotel setting three tables d’hôte a day. + </p> + <p> + {Illustration: THE CLOCK TOWER, BERNE} + </p> + <p> + I have been walking about the arcades, which used to bestow a grateful + shade in July, but which seem rather dusky and chilly in these shortening + autumn days. I am struck with the way the English always speak of them—with + a shudder, as gloomy, as dirty, as evil-smelling, as suffocating, as + freezing, as anything and everything but admirably picturesque. I take us + Americans for the only people who, in travelling, judge things on the + first impulse—when we do judge them at all—not from the + standpoint of simple comfort. Most of us, strolling forth into these + bustling basements, are, I imagine, too much amused, too much diverted + from the sense of an alienable right to public ease, to be conscious of + heat or cold, of thick air, or even of the universal smell of strong <i>charcuterie</i>. + If the visible romantic were banished from the face of the earth I am sure + the idea of it would still survive in some typical American heart.... + </p> + <p> + <i>Lucerne, September</i>.—Berne, I find, has been filling with + tourists at the expense of Lucerne, which I have been having almost to + myself. There are six people at the table d’hôte; the excellent dinner + denotes on the part of the <i>chef</i> the easy leisure in which true + artists love to work. The waiters have nothing to do but lounge about the + hall and chink in their pockets the fees of the past season. The day has + been lovely in itself, and pervaded, to my sense, by the gentle glow of a + natural satisfaction at my finding myself again on the threshold of Italy. + I am lodged <i>en prince</i>, in a room with a balcony hanging over the + lake—a balcony on which I spent a long time this morning at dawn, + thanking the mountain-tops, from the depths of a landscape-lover’s heart, + for their promise of superbly fair weather. There were a great many + mountain-tops to thank, for the crags and peaks and pinnacles tumbled away + through the morning mist in an endless confusion of grandeur. I have been + all day in better humour with Lucerne than ever before—a forecast + reflection of Italian moods. If Switzerland, as I wrote the other day, is + so furiously a show-place, Lucerne is certainly one of the biggest booths + at the fair. The little quay, under the trees, squeezed in between the + decks of the steamboats and the doors of the hotels, is a terrible medley + of Saxon dialects—a jumble of pilgrims in all the phases of + devotion, equipped with book and staff, alpenstock and Baedeker. There are + so many hotels and trinket-shops, so many omnibuses and steamers, so many + Saint-Gothard <i>vetturini</i>, so many ragged urchins poking photographs, + minerals and Lucernese English at you, that you feel as if lake and + mountains themselves, in all their loveliness, were but a part of the + “enterprise” of landlords and pedlars, and half expect to see the Righi + and Pilatus and the fine weather figure as items on your hotel-bill + between the <i>bougie</i> and the <i>siphon</i>. Nature herself assists + you to this conceit; there is something so operatic and suggestive of + footlights and scene-shifters in the view on which Lucerne looks out. You + are one of five thousand—fifty thousand—“accommodated” + spectators; you have taken your season-ticket and there is a responsible + impresario somewhere behind the scenes. There is such a luxury of beauty + in the prospect—such a redundancy of composition and effect—so + many more peaks and pinnacles than are needed to make one heart happy or + regale the vision of one quiet observer, that you finally accept the + little Babel on the quay and the looming masses in the clouds as equal + parts of a perfect system, and feel as if the mountains had been waiting + so many ages for the hotels to come and balance the colossal group, that + they show a right, after all, to have them big and numerous. The + scene-shifters have been at work all day long, composing and discomposing + the beautiful background of the prospect—massing the clouds and + scattering the light, effacing and reviving, making play with their + wonderful machinery of mist and haze. The mountains rise, one behind the + other, in an enchanting gradation of distances and of melting blues and + greys; you think each successive tone the loveliest and haziest possible + till you see another loom dimly behind it. I couldn’t enjoy even <i>The + Swiss Times</i>, over my breakfast, till I had marched forth to the office + of the Saint-Gothard service of coaches and demanded the banquette for + to-morrow. The one place at the disposal of the office was taken, but I + might possibly <i>m’entendre</i> with the conductor for his own seat—the + conductor being generally visible, in the intervals of business, at the + post-office. To the post-office, after breakfast, I repaired, over the + fine new bridge which now spans the green Reuss and gives such a woeful + air of country-cousinship to the crooked old wooden structure which did + sole service when I was here four years ago. The old bridge is covered + with a running hood of shingles and adorned with a series of very quaint + and vivid little paintings of the “Dance of Death,” quite in the Holbein + manner; the new sends up a painful glare from its white limestone, and is + ornamented with candelabra in a meretricious imitation of platinum. As an + almost professional cherisher of the quaint I ought to have chosen to + return at least by the dark and narrow way; but mark how luxury unmans us. + I was already demoralised. I crossed the threshold of the timbered portal, + took a few steps, and retreated. It <i>smelt badly!</i> So I marched back, + counting the lamps in their fine falsity. But the other, the crooked and + covered way, smelt very badly indeed; and no good American is without a + fund of accumulated sensibility to the odour of stale timber. + </p> + <p> + Meanwhile I had spent an hour in the great yard of the postoffice, waiting + for my conductor to turn up and seeing the yellow malles-postes pushed to + and fro. At last, being told my man was at my service, I was brought to + speech of a huge, jovial, bearded, delightful Italian, clad in the blue + coat and waistcoat, with close, round silver buttons, which are a heritage + of the old postilions. No, it was not he; it was a friend of his; and + finally the friend was produced, <i>en costume de ville</i>, but equally + jovial, and Italian enough—a brave Lucernese, who had spent half of + his life between Bellinzona and Camerlata. For ten francs this worthy + man’s perch behind the luggage was made mine as far as Bellinzona, and we + separated with reciprocal wishes for good weather on the morrow. To-morrow + is so manifestly determined to be as fine as any other 30th of September + since the weather became on this planet a topic of conversation that I + have had nothing to do but stroll about Lucerne, staring, loafing and + vaguely intent on regarding the fact that, whatever happens, my place is + paid to Milan. I loafed into the immense new Hotel National and read the + <i>New York Tribune</i> on a blue satin divan; after which I was rather + surprised, on coming out, to find myself staring at a green Swiss lake and + not at the Broadway omnibuses. The Hotel National is adorned with a + perfectly appointed Broadway bar—one of the “prohibited” ones + seeking hospitality in foreign lands after the manner of an old-fashioned + French or Italian refugee. + </p> + <p> + <i>Milan, October</i>.—My journey hither was such a pleasant piece + of traveller’s luck that I feel a delicacy for taking it to pieces to see + what it was made of. Do what we will, however, there remains in all deeply + agreeable impressions a charming something we can’t analyse. I found it + agreeable even, given the rest of my case, to turn out of bed, at Lucerne, + by four o’clock, into the chilly autumn darkness. The thick-starred sky + was cloudless, and there was as yet no flush of dawn; but the lake was + wrapped in a ghostly white mist which crept halfway up the mountains and + made them look as if they too had been lying down for the night and were + casting away the vaporous tissues of their bedclothes. Into this fantastic + fog the little steamer went creaking away, and I hung about the deck with + the two or three travellers who had known better than to believe it would + save them francs or midnight sighs—over those debts you “pay with + your person”—to go and wait for the diligence at the Poste at + Fliielen, or yet at the Guillaume Tell. The dawn came sailing up over the + mountain-tops, flushed but unperturbed, and blew out the little stars and + then the big ones, as a thrifty matron after a party blows out her candles + and lamps; the mist went melting and wandering away into the duskier + hollows and recesses of the mountains, and the summits defined their + profiles against the cool soft light. + </p> + <p> + At Flüelen, before the landing, the big yellow coaches were actively + making themselves bigger, and piling up boxes and bags on their roofs in a + way to turn nervous people’s thoughts to the sharp corners of the downward + twists of the great road. I climbed into my own banquette, and stood + eating peaches—half-a-dozen women were hawking them about under the + horses’ legs—with an air of security that might have been offensive + to the people scrambling and protesting below between coupé and intérieur. + They were all English and all had false alarms about the claim of somebody + else to their place, the place for which they produced their ticket, with + a declaration in three or four different tongues of the inalienable right + to it given them by the expenditure of British gold. They were all + serenely confuted by the stout, purple-faced, many-buttoned conductors, + patted on the backs, assured that their bath-tubs had every advantage of + position on the top, and stowed away according to their dues. When once + one has fairly started on a journey and has but to go and go by the + impetus received, it is surprising what entertainment one finds in very + small things. We surrender to the gaping traveller’s mood, which surely + isn’t the unwisest the heart knows. I don’t envy people, at any rate, who + have outlived or outworn the simple sweetness of feeling settled to go + somewhere with bag and umbrella. If we are settled on the top of a coach, + and the “somewhere” contains an element of the new and strange, the case + is at its best. In this matter wise people are content to become children + again. We don’t turn about on our knees to look out of the omnibus-window, + but we indulge in very much the same round-eyed contemplation of + accessible objects. Responsibility is left at home or at the worst packed + away in the valise, relegated to quite another part of the diligence with + the clean shirts and the writing-case. I sucked in the gladness of gaping, + for this occasion, with the somewhat acrid juice of my indifferent + peaches; it made me think them very good. This was the first of a series + of kindly services it rendered me. It made me agree next, as we started, + that the gentleman at the booking-office at Lucerne had but played a + harmless joke when he told me the regular seat in the banquette was taken. + No one appeared to claim it; so the conductor and I reversed positions, + and I found him quite as conversible as the usual Anglo-Saxon. + </p> + <p> + He was trolling snatches of melody and showing his great yellow teeth in a + jovial grin all the way to Bellinzona—and this in face of the sombre + fact that the Saint-Gothard tunnel is scraping away into the mountain, all + the while, under his nose, and numbering the days of the many-buttoned + brotherhood. But he hopes, for long service’s sake, to be taken into the + employ of the railway; <i>he</i> at least is no cherisher of quaintness + and has no romantic perversity. I found the railway coming on, however, in + a manner very shocking to mine. About an hour short of Andermatt they have + pierced a huge black cavity in the mountain, around which has grown up a + swarming, digging, hammering, smoke-compelling colony. There are great + barracks, with tall chimneys, down in the gorge that bristled the other + day but with natural graces, and a wonderful increase of wine-shops in the + little village of Göschenen above. Along the breast of the mountain, + beside the road, come wandering several miles of very handsome iron pipes, + of a stupendous girth—a conduit for the water-power with which some + of the machinery is worked. It lies at its mighty length among the rocks + like an immense black serpent, and serves, as a mere detail, to give one + the measure of the central enterprise. When at the end of our long day’s + journey, well down in warm Italy, we came upon the other aperture of the + tunnel, I could but uncap with a grim reverence. Truly Nature is great, + but she seems to me to stand in very much the shoes of my poor friend the + conductor. She is being superseded at her strongest points, successively, + and nothing remains but for her to take humble service with her master. If + she can hear herself think amid that din of blasting and hammering she + must be reckoning up the years to elapse before the cleverest of + Ober-Ingénieurs decides that mountains are mere obstructive matter and has + the Jungfrau melted down and the residuum carried away in balloons and + dumped upon another planet. + </p> + <p> + The Devil’s Bridge, with the same failing apparently as the good Homer, + was decidedly nodding. The volume of water in the torrent was shrunken, + and I missed the thunderous uproar and far-leaping spray that have kept up + a miniature tempest in the neighbourhood on my other passages. It suddenly + occurs to me that the fault is not in the good Homer’s inspiration, but + simply in the big black pipes above-mentioned. They dip into the rushing + stream higher up, presumably, and pervert its fine frenzy to their prosaic + uses. There could hardly be a more vivid reminder of the standing quarrel + between use and beauty, and of the hard time poor beauty is having. I + looked wistfully, as we rattled into dreary Andermatt, at the great white + zigzags of the Oberalp road which climbed away to the left. Even on one’s + way to Italy one may spare a throb of desire for the beautiful vision of + the castled Grisons. Dear to me the memory of my day’s drive last summer + through that long blue avenue of mountains, to queer little mouldering + Ilanz, visited before supper in the ghostly dusk. At Andermatt a sign over + a little black doorway flanked by two dung-hills seemed to me tolerably + comical: <i>Mineraux</i>, <i>Quadrupedes</i>, <i>Oiseaux</i>, <i>OEufs</i>, + <i>Tableaux Antiques</i>. We bundled in to dinner and the American + gentleman in the banquette made the acquaintance of the Irish lady in the + coupé, who talked of the weather as <i>foine</i> and wore a Persian scarf + twisted about her head. At the other end of the table sat an Englishman, + out of the intérieur, who bore an extraordinary resemblance to the + portraits of Edward VI’s and Mary’s reigns. He walking, a convincing + Holbein. The impression was of value to a cherisher of quaintness, and he + must have wondered—not knowing me for such a character—why I + stared at him. It wasn’t him I was staring at, but some handsome Seymour + or Dudley or Digby with a ruff and a round cap and plume. + </p> + <p> + From Andermatt, through its high, cold, sunny valley, we passed into + rugged little Hospenthal, and then up the last stages of the ascent. From + here the road was all new to me. Among the summits of the various Alpine + passes there is little to choose. You wind and double slowly into keener + cold and deeper stillness; you put on your overcoat and turn up the + collar; you count the nestling snow-patches and then you cease to count + them; you pause, as you trudge before the lumbering coach, and listen to + the last-heard cow-bell tinkling away below you in kindlier herbage. The + sky was tremendously blue, and the little stunted bushes on the + snow-streaked slopes were all dyed with autumnal purples and crimsons. It + was a great display of colour. Purple and crimson too, though not so fine, + were the faces thrust out at us from the greasy little double casements of + a barrack beside the road, where the horses paused before the last pull. + There was one little girl in particular, beginning to <i>lisser</i> her + hair, as civilisation approached, in a manner not to be described, with + her poor little blue-black hands. At the summit are the two usual grim + little stone taverns, the steel-blue tarn, the snow-white peaks, the pause + in the cold sunshine. Then we begin to rattle down with two horses. In + five minutes we are swinging along the famous zigzags. Engineer, driver, + horses—it’s very handsomely done by all of them. The road curves and + curls and twists and plunges like the tail of a kite; sitting perched in + the banquette, you see it making below you and in mid-air certain bold + gyrations which bring you as near as possible, short of the actual + experience, to the philosophy of that immortal Irishman who wished that + his fall from the house-top would only last. But the zigzags last no more + than Paddy’s fall, and in due time we were all coming to our senses over + <i>cafe au lait</i> in the little inn at Faido. After Faido the valley, + plunging deeper, began to take thick afternoon shadows from the hills, and + at Airolo we were fairly in the twilight. But the pink and yellow houses + shimmered through the gentle gloom, and Italy began in broken syllables to + whisper that she was at hand. For the rest of the way to Bellinzona her + voice was muffled in the grey of evening, and I was half vexed to lose the + charming sight of the changing vegetation. But only half vexed, for the + moon was climbing all the while nearer the edge of the crags that + overshadowed us, and a thin magical light came trickling down into the + winding, murmuring gorges. It was a most enchanting business. The + chestnut-trees loomed up with double their daylight stature; the vines + began to swing their low festoons like nets to trip up the fairies. At + last the ruined towers of Bellinzona stood gleaming in the moonshine, and + we rattled into the great post-yard. It was eleven o’clock and I had risen + at four; moonshine apart I wasn’t sorry. + </p> + <p> + All that was very well; but the drive next day from Bellinzona to Como is + to my mind what gives its supreme beauty to this great pass. One can’t + describe the beauty of the Italian lakes, nor would one try if one could; + the floweriest rhetoric can recall it only as a picture on a fireboard + recalls a Claude. But it lay spread before me for a whole perfect day: in + the long gleam of the Major, from whose head the diligence swerves away + and begins to climb the bosky hills that divide it from Lugano; in the + shimmering, melting azure of the southern slopes and masses; in the + luxurious tangle of nature and the familiar amenity of man; in the + lawn-like inclinations, where the great grouped chestnuts make so cool a + shadow in so warm a light; in the rusty vineyards, the littered cornfields + and the tawdry wayside shrines. But most of all it’s the deep yellow light + that enchants you and tells you where you are. See it come filtering down + through a vine-covered trellis on the red handkerchief with which a ragged + contadina has bound her hair, and all the magic of Italy, to the eye, + makes an aureole about the poor girl’s head. Look at a brown-breasted + reaper eating his chunk of black bread under a spreading chestnut; nowhere + is shadow so charming, nowhere is colour so charged, nowhere has accident + such grace. The whole drive to Lugano was one long loveliness, and the + town itself is admirably Italian. There was a great unlading of the coach, + during which I wandered under certain brown old arcades and bought for six + sous, from a young woman in a gold necklace, a hatful of peaches and figs. + When I came back I found the young man holding open the door of the second + diligence, which had lately come up, and beckoning to me with a despairing + smile. The young man, I must note, was the most amiable of Ticinese; + though he wore no buttons he was attached to the diligence in some + amateurish capacity, and had an eye to the mail-bags and other valuables + in the boot. I grumbled at Berne over the want of soft curves in the Swiss + temperament; but the children of the tangled Tessin are cast in the + Italian mould. My friend had as many quips and cranks as a Neapolitan; we + walked together for an hour under the chestnuts, while the coach was + plodding up from Bellinzona, and he never stopped singing till we reached + a little wine-house where he got his mouth full of bread and cheese. I + looked into his open door, a la Sterne, and saw the young woman sitting + rigid and grim, staring over his head and with a great pile of bread and + butter in her lap. He had only informed her most politely that she was to + be transferred to another diligence and must do him the favour to descend; + but she evidently knew of but one way for a respectable young insulary of + her sex to receive the politeness of a foreign adventurer guilty of an eye + betraying latent pleasantry. Heaven only knew what he was saying! I told + her, and she gathered up her parcels and emerged. A part of the day’s + great pleasure perhaps was my grave sense of being an instrument in the + hands of the powers toward the safe consignment of this young woman and + her boxes. When once you have really bent to the helpless you are caught; + there is no such steel trap, and it holds you fast. My rather grim Abigail + was a neophyte in foreign travel, though doubtless cunning enough at her + trade, which I inferred to be that of making up those prodigious chignons + worn mainly by English ladies. Her mistress had gone on a mule over the + mountains to Cadenabbia, and she herself was coming up with the wardrobe, + two big boxes and a bath-tub. I had played my part, under the powers, at + Bellinzona, and had interposed between the poor girl’s frightened English + and the dreadful Ticinese French of the functionaries in the post-yard. At + the custom-house on the Italian frontier I was of peculiar service; there + was a kind of fateful fascination in it. The wardrobe was voluminous; I + exchanged a paternal glance with my charge as the <i>douanier</i> plunged + his brown fists into it. Who was the lady at Cadenabbia? What was she to + me or I to her? She wouldn’t know, when she rustled down to dinner next + day, that it was I who had guided the frail skiff of her public basis of + vanity to port. So unseen but not unfelt do we cross each other’s orbits. + The skiff however may have foundered that evening in sight of land. I + disengaged the young woman from among her fellow-travellers and placed her + boxes on a hand-cart in the picturesque streets of Como, within a stone’s + throw of that lovely striped and toned cathedral which has the facade of + cameo medallions. I could only make the <i>facchino</i> swear to take her + to the steamboat. He too was a jovial dog, but I hope he was polite with + precautions. + </p> + <h3> + 1873. + </h3> + <p> + <a name="link2H_4_0009" id="link2H_4_0009"> + <!-- H2 anchor --> </a> + </p> + <div style="height: 4em;"> + <br /><br /><br /><br /> + </div> + <h2> + ITALY REVISITED + </h2> + <h3> + I + </h3> + <p> + I waited in Paris until after the elections for the new Chamber (they took + place on the 14th of October); as only after one had learned that the + famous attempt of Marshal MacMahon and his ministers to drive the French + nation to the polls like a flock of huddling sheep, each with the white + ticket of an official candidate round his neck, had not achieved the + success which the energy of the process might have promised—only + then it was possible to draw a long breath and deprive the republican + party of such support as might have been conveyed in one’s sympathetic + presence. Seriously speaking too, the weather had been enchanting—there + were Italian fancies to be gathered without leaving the banks of the + Seine. Day after day the air was filled with golden light, and even those + chalkish vistas of the Parisian <i>beaux quartiers</i> assumed the + iridescent tints of autumn. Autumn weather in Europe is often such a very + sorry affair that a fair-minded American will have it on his conscience to + call attention to a rainless and radiant October. + </p> + <p> + The echoes of the electoral strife kept me company for a while after + starting upon that abbreviated journey to Turin which, as you leave Paris + at night, in a train unprovided with encouragements to slumber, is a + singular mixture of the odious and the charming. The charming indeed I + think prevails; for the dark half of the journey is the least interesting. + The morning light ushers you into the romantic gorges of the Jura, and + after a big bowl of <i>cafe au lait</i> at Culoz you may compose yourself + comfortably for the climax of your spectacle. The day before leaving Paris + I met a French friend who had just returned from a visit to a Tuscan + country-seat where he had been watching the vintage. “Italy,” he said, “is + more lovely than words can tell, and France, steeped in this electoral + turmoil, seems no better than a bear-garden.” The part of the bear-garden + through which you travel as you approach the Mont Cenis seemed to me that + day very beautiful. The autumn colouring, thanks to the absence of rain, + had been vivid and crisp, and the vines that swung their low garlands + between the mulberries round about Chambery looked like long festoons of + coral and amber. The frontier station of Modane, on the further side of + the Mont Cenis Tunnel, is a very ill-regulated place; but even the most + irritable of tourists, meeting it on his way southward, will be disposed + to consider it good-naturedly. There is far too much bustling and + scrambling, and the facilities afforded you for the obligatory process of + ripping open your luggage before the officers of the Italian custom-house + are much scantier than should be; but for myself there is something that + deprecates irritation in the shabby green and grey uniforms of all the + Italian officials who stand loafing about and watching the northern + invaders scramble back into marching order. Wearing an administrative + uniform doesn’t necessarily spoil a man’s temper, as in France one is + sometimes led to believe; for these excellent under-paid Italians carry + theirs as lightly as possible, and their answers to your inquiries don’t + in the least bristle with rapiers, buttons and cockades. After leaving + Modane you slide straight downhill into the Italy of your desire; from + which point the road edges, after the grand manner, along those It + precipices that stand shoulder to shoulder, in a prodigious perpendicular + file, till they finally admit you to a distant glimpse he ancient capital + of Piedmont. + </p> + <p> + Turin is no city of a name to conjure with, and I pay an extravagant + tribute to subjective emotion in speaking of it as ancient, if the place + is less bravely peninsular than Florence and Rome, at least it is more in + the scenic tradition than New York Paris; and while I paced the great + arcades and looked at the fourth-rate shop windows I didn’t scruple to + cultivate a shameless optimism. Relatively speaking, Turin touches a + chord; but there is after all no reason in a large collection of + shabbily-stuccoed houses, disposed in a rigidly rectangular manner, for + passing a day of deep, still gaiety. The only reason, I am afraid, is the + old superstition of Italy—that property in the very look of the + written word, the evocation of a myriad images, that makes any lover of + the arts take Italian satisfactions on easier terms than any others. The + written word stands for something that eternally tricks us; we juggle to + our credulity even with such inferior apparatus as is offered to our hand + at Turin. I roamed all the morning under the tall porticoes, thinking it + sufficient joy to take note of the soft, warm air, of that local colour of + things that is at once so broken and so harmonious, and of the comings and + goings, the physiognomy and manners, of the excellent Turinese. I had + opened the old book again; the old charm was in the style; I was in a more + delightful world. I saw nothing surpassingly beautiful or curious; but + your true taster of the most seasoned of dishes finds well-nigh the whole + mixture in any mouthful. Above all on the threshold of Italy he knows + again the solid and perfectly definable pleasure of finding himself among + the traditions of the grand style in architecture. It must be said that we + have still to go there to recover the sense of the domiciliary mass. In + northern cities there are beautiful houses, picturesque and curious + houses; sculptured gables that hang over the street, charming bay-windows, + hooded doorways, elegant proportions, a profusion of delicate ornament; + but a good specimen of an old Italian palazzo has a nobleness that is all + its own. We laugh at Italian “palaces,” at their peeling paint, their + nudity, their dreariness; but they have the great palatial quality—elevation + and extent. They make of smaller things the apparent abode of pigmies; + they round their great arches and interspace their huge windows with a + proud indifference to the cost of materials. These grand proportions—the + colossal basements, the doorways that seem meant for cathedrals, the far + away cornices—impart by contrast a humble and <i>bourgeois</i> + expression to interiors founded on the sacrifice of the whole to the part, + and in which the air of grandeur depends largely on the help of the + upholsterer. At Turin my first feeling was really one of renewed shame for + our meaner architectural manners. If the Italians at bottom despise the + rest of mankind and regard them as barbarians, disinherited of the + tradition of form, the idea proceeds largely, no doubt, from our living in + comparative mole-hills. They alone were really to build their + civilisation. + </p> + <p> + {Illustration: UNDER THE ARCADES, TURIN.} + </p> + <p> + An impression which on coming back to Italy I find even stronger than when + it was first received is that of the contrast between the fecundity of the + great artistic period and the vulgarity there of the genius of to-day. The + first few hours spent on Italian soil are sufficient to renew it, and the + question I allude to is, historically speaking, one of the oddest. That + the people who but three hundred years ago had the best taste in the world + should now have the worst; that having produced the noblest, loveliest, + costliest works, they should now be given up to the manufacture of objects + at once ugly and paltry; that the race of which Michael Angelo and + Raphael, Leonardo and Titian were characteristic should have no other + title to distinction than third-rate <i>genre</i> pictures and catchpenny + statues—all this is a frequent perplexity to the observer of actual + Italian life. The flower of “great” art in these latter years ceased to + bloom very powerfully anywhere; but nowhere does it seem so drooping and + withered as in the shadow of the immortal embodiments of the old Italian + genius. You go into a church or a gallery and feast your fancy upon a + splendid picture or an exquisite piece of sculpture, and on issuing from + the door that has admitted you to the beautiful past are confronted with + something that has the effect of a very bad joke. The aspect of your + lodging—the carpets, the curtains, the upholstery in general, with + their crude and violent colouring and their vulgar material—the + trumpery things in the shops, the extreme bad taste of the dress of the + women, the cheapness and baseness of every attempt at decoration in the + cafes and railway-stations, the hopeless frivolity of everything that + pretends to be a work of art—all this modern crudity runs riot over + the relics of the great period. + </p> + <p> + We can do a thing for the first time but once; it is but once for all that + we can have a pleasure in its freshness. This is a law not on the whole, I + think, to be regretted, for we sometimes learn to know things better by + not enjoying them too much. It is certain, however, at the same time, that + a visitor who has worked off the immediate ferment for this inexhaustibly + interesting country has by no means entirely drained the cup. After + thinking of Italy as historical and artistic it will do him no great harm + to think of her for a while as panting both for a future and for a balance + at the bank; aspirations supposedly much at variance with the Byronic, the + Ruskinian, the artistic, poetic, aesthetic manner of considering our + eternally attaching peninsula. He may grant—I don’t say it is + absolutely necessary—that its actual aspects and economics are ugly, + prosaic, provokingly out of relation to the diary and the album; it is + nevertheless true that, at the point things have come to, modern Italy in + a manner imposes herself. I hadn’t been many hours in the country before + that truth assailed me; and I may add that, the first irritation past, I + found myself able to accept it. For, if we think, nothing is more easy to + understand than an honest ire on the part of the young Italy of to-day at + being looked at by all the world as a kind of soluble pigment. Young + Italy, preoccupied with its economical and political future, must be + heartily tired of being admired for its eyelashes and its pose. In one of + Thackeray’s novels occurs a mention of a young artist who sent to the + Royal Academy a picture representing “A Contadino dancing with a + Trasteverina at the door of a Locanda, to the music of a Pifferaro.” It is + in this attitude and with these conventional accessories that the world + has hitherto seen fit to represent young Italy, and one doesn’t wonder + that if the youth has any spirit he should at last begin to resent our + insufferable aesthetic patronage. He has established a line of tram-cars + in Rome, from the Porta del Popolo to the Ponte Molle, and it is on one of + these democratic vehicles that I seem to see him taking his triumphant + course down the vista of the future. I won’t pretend to rejoice with him + any more than I really do; I won’t pretend, as the sentimental tourists + say about it all, as if it were the setting of an intaglio or the border + of a Roman scarf, to “like” it. Like it or not, as we may, it is evidently + destined to be; I see a new Italy in the future which in many important + respects will equal, if not surpass, the most enterprising sections of our + native land. Perhaps by that time Chicago and San Francisco will have + acquired a pose, and their sons and daughters will dance at the doors of + <i>locande</i>. + </p> + <p> + However this may be, the accomplished schism between the old order and the + new is the promptest moral of a fresh visit to this ever-suggestive part + of the world. The old has become more and more a museum, preserved and + perpetuated in the midst of the new, but without any further relation to + it—it must be admitted indeed that such a relation is considerable—than + that of the stock on his shelves to the shopkeeper, or of the Siren of the + South to the showman who stands before his booth. More than once, as we + move about nowadays in the Italian cities, there seems to pass before our + eyes a vision of the coming years. It represents to our satisfaction an + Italy united and prosperous, but altogether scientific and commercial. The + Italy indeed that we sentimentalise and romance about was an ardently + mercantile country; though I suppose it loved not its ledgers less, but + its frescoes and altar-pieces more. Scattered through this paradise + regained of trade—this country of a thousand ports—we see a + large number of beautiful buildings in which an endless series of dusky + pictures are darkening, dampening, fading, failing, through the years. By + the doors of the beautiful buildings are little turnstiles at which there + sit a great many uniformed men to whom the visitor pays a tenpenny fee. + Inside, in the vaulted and frescoed chambers, the art of Italy lies buried + as in a thousand mausoleums. It is well taken care of; it is constantly + copied; sometimes it is “restored”—as in the case of that beautiful + boy-figure of Andrea del Sarto at Florence, which may be seen at the + gallery of the Uffizi with its honourable duskiness quite peeled off and + heaven knows what raw, bleeding cuticle laid bare. One evening lately, + near the same Florence, in the soft twilight, I took a stroll among those + encircling hills on which the massive villas are mingled with the vaporous + olives. Presently I arrived where three roads met at a wayside shrine, in + which, before some pious daub of an old-time Madonna, a little votive lamp + glimmered through the evening air. The hour, the atmosphere, the place, + the twinkling taper, the sentiment of the observer, the thought that some + one had been rescued here from an assassin or from some other peril and + had set up a little grateful altar in consequence, against the + yellow-plastered wall of a tangled <i>podere</i>; all this led me to + approach the shrine with a reverent, an emotional step. I drew near it, + but after a few steps I paused. I became aware of an incongruous odour; it + seemed to me that the evening air was charged with a perfume which, + although to a certain extent familiar, had not hitherto associated itself + with rustic frescoes and wayside altars. I wondered, I gently sniffed, and + the question so put left me no doubt. The odour was that of petroleum; the + votive taper was nourished with the essence of Pennsylvania. I confess + that I burst out laughing, and a picturesque contadino, wending his + homeward way in the dusk, stared at me as if I were an iconoclast. He + noticed the petroleum only, I imagine, to snuff it fondly up; but to me + the thing served as a symbol of the Italy of the future. There is a + horse-car from the Porta del Popolo to the Ponte Molle, and the Tuscan + shrines are fed with kerosene. + </p> + <h3> + II + </h3> + <p> + If it’s very well meanwhile to come to Turin first it’s better still to go + to Genoa afterwards. Genoa is the tightest topographic tangle in the + world, which even a second visit helps you little to straighten out. In + the wonderful crooked, twisting, climbing, soaring, burrowing Genoese + alleys the traveller is really up to his neck in the old Italian + sketchability. The pride of the place, I believe, is a port of great + capacity, and the bequest of the late Duke of Galliera, who left four + millions of dollars for the purpose of improving and enlarging it, will + doubtless do much toward converting it into one of the great commercial + stations of Europe. But as, after leaving my hotel the afternoon I + arrived, I wandered for a long time at hazard through the tortuous by-ways + of the city, I said to myself, not without an accent of private triumph, + that here at last was something it would be almost impossible to + modernise. I had found my hotel, in the first place, extremely + entertaining—the Croce di Malta, as it is called, established in a + gigantic palace on the edge of the swarming and not over-clean harbour. It + was the biggest house I had ever entered—the basement alone would + have contained a dozen American caravansaries. I met an American gentleman + in the vestibule who (as he had indeed a perfect right to be) was annoyed + by its troublesome dimensions—one was a quarter of an hour ascending + out of the basement—and desired to know if it were a “fair sample” + of the Genoese inns. It appeared an excellent specimen of Genoese + architecture generally; so far as I observed there were few houses + perceptibly smaller than this Titanic tavern. I lunched in a dusky + ballroom whose ceiling was vaulted, frescoed and gilded with the fatal + facility of a couple of centuries ago, and which looked out upon another + ancient housefront, equally huge and equally battered, separated from it + only by a little wedge of dusky space—one of the principal streets, + I believe, of Genoa—whence out of dim abysses the population sent up + to the windows (I had to crane out very far to see it) a perpetual + clattering, shuffling, chaffering sound. Issuing forth presently into this + crevice of a street I found myself up to my neck in that element of the + rich and strange—as to visible and reproducible “effect,” I mean—for + the love of which one revisits Italy. It offered itself indeed in a + variety of colours, some of which were not remarkable for their freshness + or purity. But their combined charm was not to be resisted, and the + picture glowed with the rankly human side of southern lowlife. + </p> + <p> + Genoa, as I have hinted, is the crookedest and most incoherent of cities; + tossed about on the sides and crests of a dozen hills, it is seamed with + gullies and ravines that bristle with those innumerable palaces for which + we have heard from our earliest years that the place is celebrated. These + great structures, with their mottled and faded complexions, lift their big + ornamental cornices to a tremendous height in the air, where, in a certain + indescribably forlorn and desolate fashion, overtopping each other, they + seem to reflect the twinkle and glitter of the warm Mediterranean. Down + about the basements, in the close crepuscular alleys, the people are for + ever moving to and fro or standing in their cavernous doorways and their + dusky, crowded shops, calling, chattering, laughing, lamenting, living + their lives in the conversational Italian fashion. I had for a long time + had no such vision of possible social pressure. I hadn’t for a long time + seen people elbowing each other so closely or swarming so thickly out of + populous hives. A traveller is often moved to ask himself whether it has + been worth while to leave his home—whatever his home may have been—only + to encounter new forms of human suffering, only to be reminded that toil + and privation, hunger and sorrow and sordid effort, are the portion of the + mass of mankind. To travel is, as it were, to go to the play, to attend a + spectacle; and there is something heartless in stepping forth into foreign + streets to feast on “character” when character consists simply of the + slightly different costume in which labour and want present themselves. + These reflections were forced upon me as I strolled as through a twilight + patched with colour and charged with stale smells; but after a time they + ceased to bear me company. The reason of this, I think, is because—at + least to foreign eyes—the sum of Italian misery is, on the whole, + less than the sum of the Italian knowledge of life. That people should + thank you, with a smile of striking sweetness, for the gift of twopence, + is a proof, certainly, of extreme and constant destitution; but (keeping + in mind the sweetness) it also attests an enviable ability not to be + depressed by circumstances. I know that this may possibly be great + nonsense; that half the time we are acclaiming the fine quality of the + Italian smile the creature so constituted for physiognomic radiance may be + in a sullen frenzy of impatience and pain. Our observation in any foreign + land is extremely superficial, and our remarks are happily not addressed + to the inhabitants themselves, who would be sure to exclaim upon the + impudence of the fancy-picture. + </p> + <p> + The other day I visited a very picturesque old city upon a mountain-top, + where, in the course of my wanderings, I arrived at an old disused gate in + the ancient town-wall. The gate hadn’t been absolutely forfeited; but the + recent completion of a modern road down the mountain led most vehicles + away to another egress. The grass-grown pavement, which wound into the + plain by a hundred graceful twists and plunges, was now given up to ragged + contadini and their donkeys, and to such wayfarers as were not alarmed at + the disrepair into which it had fallen. I stood in the shadow of the tall + old gateway admiring the scene, looking to right and left at the wonderful + walls of the little town, perched on the edge of a shaggy precipice; at + the circling mountains over against them; at the road dipping downward + among the chestnuts and olives. There was no one within sight but a young + man who slowly trudged upward with his coat slung over his shoulder and + his hat upon his ear in the manner of a cavalier in an opera. Like an + operatic performer too he sang as he came; the spectacle, generally, was + operatic, and as his vocal flourishes reached my ear I said to myself that + in Italy accident was always romantic and that such a figure had been + exactly what was wanted to set off the landscape. It suggested in a high + degree that knowledge of life for which I just now commended the Italians. + I was turning back under the old gateway when the young man overtook me + and, suspending his song, asked me if I could favour him with a match to + light the hoarded remnant of a cigar. This request led, as I took my way + again to the inn, to my falling into talk with him. He was a native of the + ancient city, and answered freely all my inquiries as to its manners and + customs and its note of public opinion. But the point of my anecdote is + that he presently acknowledged himself a brooding young radical and + communist, filled with hatred of the present Italian government, raging + with discontent and crude political passion, professing a ridiculous hope + that Italy would soon have, as France had had, her “‘89,” and declaring + that he for his part would willingly lend a hand to chop off the heads of + the king and the royal family. He was an unhappy, underfed, unemployed + young man, who took a hard, grim view of everything and was operatic only + quite in spite of himself. This made it very absurd of me to have looked + at him simply as a graceful ornament to the prospect, an harmonious little + figure in the middle distance. “Damn the prospect, damn the middle + distance!” would have been all <i>his</i> philosophy. Yet but for the + accident of my having gossipped with him I should have made him do + service, in memory, as an example of sensuous optimism! + </p> + <p> + I am bound to say however that I believe a great deal of the sensuous + optimism observable in the Genoese alleys and beneath the low, crowded + arcades along the port was very real. Here every one was magnificently + sunburnt, and there were plenty of those queer types, mahogany-coloured, + bare-chested mariners with earrings and crimson girdles, that seem to + people a southern seaport with the chorus of “Masaniello.” But it is not + fair to speak as if at Genoa there were nothing but low-life to be seen, + for the place is the residence of some of the grandest people in the + world. Nor are all the palaces ranged upon dusky alleys; the handsomest + and most impressive form a splendid series on each side of a couple of + very proper streets, in which there is plenty of room for a coach-and-four + to approach the big doorways. Many of these doorways are open, revealing + great marble staircases with couchant lions for balustrades and + ceremonious courts surrounded by walls of sun-softened yellow. One of the + great piles in the array is coloured a goodly red and contains in + particular the grand people I just now spoke of. They live indeed on the + third floor; but here they have suites of wonderful painted and gilded + chambers, in which foreshortened frescoes also cover the vaulted ceilings + and florid mouldings emboss the ample walls. These distinguished tenants + bear the name of Vandyck, though they are members of the noble family of + Brignole-Sale, one of whose children—the Duchess of Galliera—has + lately given proof of nobleness in presenting the gallery of the red + palace to the city of Genoa. + </p> + <h3> + III + </h3> + <p> + On leaving Genoa I repaired to Spezia, chiefly with a view of + accomplishing a sentimental pilgrimage, which I in fact achieved in the + most agreeable conditions. The Gulf of Spezia is now the headquarters of + the Italian fleet, and there were several big iron-plated frigates riding + at anchor in front of the town. The streets were filled with lads in blue + flannel, who were receiving instruction at a schoolship in the harbour, + and in the evening—there was a brilliant moon—the little + breakwater which stretched out into the Mediterranean offered a scene of + recreation to innumerable such persons. But this fact is from the point of + view of the cherisher of quaintness of little account, for since it has + become prosperous Spezia has grown ugly. The place is filled with long, + dull stretches of dead wall and great raw expanses of artificial land. It + wears that look of monstrous, of more than far-western newness which + distinguishes all the creations of the young Italian State. Nor did I find + any great compensation in an immense inn of recent birth, an establishment + seated on the edge of the sea in anticipation of a <i>passeggiata</i> + which is to come that way some five years hence, the region being in the + meantime of the most primitive formation. The inn was filled with grave + English people who looked respectable and bored, and there was of course a + Church of England service in the gaudily-frescoed parlour. Neither was it + the drive to Porto Venere that chiefly pleased me—a drive among + vines and olives, over the hills and beside the Mediterranean, to a queer + little crumbling village on a headland, as sweetly desolate and + superannuated as the name it bears. There is a ruined church near the + village, which occupies the site (according to tradition) of an ancient + temple of Venus; and if Venus ever revisits her desecrated shrines she + must sometimes pause a moment in that sunny stillness and listen to the + murmur of the tideless sea at the base of the narrow promontory. If Venus + sometimes comes there Apollo surely does as much; for close to the temple + is a gateway surmounted by an inscription in Italian and English, which + admits you to a curious, and it must be confessed rather cockneyfied, cave + among the rocks. It was here, says the inscription, that the great Byron, + swimmer and poet, “defied the waves of the Ligurian sea.” The fact is + interesting, though not supremely so; for Byron was always defying + something, and if a slab had been put up wherever this performance came + off these commemorative tablets would be in many parts of Europe as thick + as milestones. + </p> + <p> + No; the great merit of Spezia, to my eye, is that I engaged a boat there + of a lovely October afternoon and had myself rowed across the gulf—it + took about an hour and a half—to the little bay of Lerici, which + opens out of it. This bay of Lerici is charming; the bosky grey-green + hills close it in, and on either side of the entrance, perched on a bold + headland, a wonderful old crumbling castle keeps ineffectual guard. The + place is classic to all English travellers, for in the middle of the + curving shore is the now desolate little villa in which Shelley spent the + last months of his short life. He was living at Lerici when he started on + that short southern cruise from which he never returned. The house he + occupied is strangely shabby and as sad as you may choose to find it. It + stands directly upon the beach, with scarred and battered walls and a + loggia of several arches opening to a little terrace with a rugged + parapet, which, when the wind blows, must be drenched with the salt spray. + The place is very lonely—all overwearied with sun and breeze and + brine—very close to nature, as it was Shelley’s passion to be. I can + fancy a great lyric poet sitting on the terrace of a warm evening and + feeling very far from England in the early years of the century. In that + place, and with his genius, he would as a matter of course have heard in + the voice of nature a sweetness which only the lyric movement could + translate. It is a place where an English-speaking pilgrim himself may + very honestly think thoughts and feel moved to lyric utterance. But I must + content myself with saying in halting prose that I remember few episodes + of Italian travel more sympathetic, as they have it here, than that + perfect autumn afternoon; the half-hour’s station on the little battered + terrace of the villa; the climb to the singularly felicitous old castle + that hangs above Lerici; the meditative lounge, in the fading light, on + the vine-decked platform that looked out toward the sunset and the + darkening mountains and, far below, upon the quiet sea, beyond which the + pale-faced tragic villa stared up at the brightening moon. + </p> + <h3> + IV + </h3> + <p> + I had never known Florence more herself, or in other words more attaching, + than I found her for a week in that brilliant October. She sat in the + sunshine beside her yellow river like the little treasure-city she has + always seemed, without commerce, without other industry than the + manufacture of mosaic paper-weights and alabaster Cupids, without + actuality or energy or earnestness or any of those rugged virtues which in + most cases are deemed indispensable for civic cohesion; with nothing but + the little unaugmented stock of her mediaeval memories, her + tender-coloured mountains, her churches and palaces, pictures and statues. + There were very few strangers; one’s detested fellow-pilgrim was + infrequent; the native population itself seemed scanty; the sound of + wheels in the streets was but occasional; by eight o’clock at night, + apparently, every one had gone to bed, and the musing wanderer, still + wandering and still musing, had the place to himself—had the thick + shadow-masses of the great palaces, and the shafts of moonlight striking + the polygonal paving-stones, and the empty bridges, and the silvered + yellow of the Arno, and the stillness broken only by a homeward step, a + step accompanied by a snatch of song from a warm Italian voice. My room at + the inn looked out on the river and was flooded all day with sunshine. + There was an absurd orange-coloured paper on the walls; the Arno, of a hue + not altogether different, flowed beneath; and on the other side of it rose + a line of sallow houses, of extreme antiquity, crumbling and mouldering, + bulging and protruding over the stream. (I seem to speak of their fronts; + but what I saw was their shabby backs, which were exposed to the cheerful + flicker of the river, while the fronts stood for ever in the deep damp + shadow of a narrow mediaeval street.) All this brightness and yellowness + was a perpetual delight; it was a part of that indefinably charming colour + which Florence always seems to wear as you look up and down at it from the + river, and from the bridges and quays. This is a kind of grave radiance—a + harmony of high tints—which I scarce know how to describe. There are + yellow walls and green blinds and red roofs, there are intervals of + brilliant brown and natural-looking blue; but the picture is not spotty + nor gaudy, thanks to the distribution of the colours in large and + comfortable masses, and to the washing-over of the scene by some happy + softness of sunshine. The river-front of Florence is in short a delightful + composition. Part of its charm comes of course from the generous aspect of + those high-based Tuscan palaces which a renewal of acquaintance with them + has again commended to me as the most dignified dwellings in the world. + Nothing can be finer than that look of giving up the whole immense + ground-floor to simple purposes of vestibule and staircase, of court and + high-arched entrance; as if this were all but a massive pedestal for the + real habitation and people weren’t properly housed unless, to begin with, + they should be lifted fifty feet above the pavement. The great blocks of + the basement; the great intervals, horizontally and vertically, from + window to window (telling of the height and breadth of the rooms within); + the armorial shield hung forward at one of the angles; the wide-brimmed + roof, overshadowing the narrow street; the rich old browns and yellows of + the walls: these definite elements put themselves together with admirable + art. + </p> + <p> + {Illustration: ROMAN GATEWAY, RIMINI.} + </p> + <p> + Take a Tuscan pile of this type out of its oblique situation in the town; + call it no longer a palace, but a villa; set it down by a terrace on one + of the hills that encircle Florence, place a row of high-waisted cypresses + beside it, give it a grassy court-yard and a view of the Florentine towers + and the valley of the Arno, and you will think it perhaps even more worthy + of your esteem. It was a Sunday noon, and brilliantly warm, when I again + arrived; and after I had looked from my windows a while at that + quietly-basking river-front I have spoken of I took my way across one of + the bridges and then out of one of the gates—that immensely tall + Roman Gate in which the space from the top of the arch to the cornice + (except that there is scarcely a cornice, it is all a plain massive piece + of wall) is as great, or seems to be, as that from the ground to the + former point. Then I climbed a steep and winding way—much of it a + little dull if one likes, being bounded by mottled, mossy garden-walls—to + a villa on a hill-top, where I found various things that touched me with + almost too fine a point. Seeing them again, often, for a week, both by + sunlight and moonshine, I never quite learned not to covet them; not to + feel that not being a part of them was somehow to miss an exquisite + chance. What a tranquil, contented life it seemed, with romantic beauty as + a part of its daily texture!—the sunny terrace, with its tangled <i>podere</i> + beneath it; the bright grey olives against the bright blue sky; the long, + serene, horizontal lines of other villas, flanked by their upward + cypresses, disposed upon the neighbouring hills; the richest little city + in the world in a softly-scooped hollow at one’s feet, and beyond it the + most appealing of views, the most majestic, yet the most familiar. Within + the villa was a great love of art and a painting-room full of felicitous + work, so that if human life there confessed to quietness, the quietness + was mostly but that of the intent act. A beautiful occupation in that + beautiful position, what could possibly be better? That is what I spoke + just now of envying—a way of life that doesn’t wince at such + refinements of peace and ease. When labour self-charmed presents itself in + a dull or an ugly place we esteem it, we admire it, but we scarce feel it + to be the ideal of good fortune. When, however, its votaries move as + figures in an ancient, noble landscape, and their walks and contemplations + are like a turning of the leaves of history, we seem to have before us an + admirable case of virtue made easy; meaning here by virtue contentment and + concentration, a real appreciation of the rare, the exquisite though + composite, medium of life. You needn’t want a rush or a crush when the + scene itself, the mere scene, shares with you such a wealth of + consciousness. + </p> + <p> + It is true indeed that I might after a certain time grow weary of a + regular afternoon stroll among the Florentine lanes; of sitting on low + parapets, in intervals of flower-topped wall, and looking across at + Fiesole or down the rich-hued valley of the Arno; of pausing at the open + gates of villas and wondering at the height of cypresses and the depth of + loggias; of walking home in the fading light and noting on a dozen + westward-looking surfaces the glow of the opposite sunset. But for a week + or so all this was delightful. The villas are innumerable, and if you’re + an aching alien half the talk is about villas. This one has a story; that + one has another; they all look as if they had stories—none in truth + predominantly gay. Most of them are offered to rent (many of them for + sale) at prices unnaturally low; you may have a tower and a garden, a + chapel and an expanse of thirty windows, for five hundred dollars a year. + In imagination you hire three or four; you take possession and settle and + stay. Your sense of the fineness of the finest is of something very grave + and stately; your sense of the bravery of two or three of the best + something quite tragic and sinister. From what does this latter impression + come? You gather it as you stand there in the early dusk, with your eyes + on the long, pale-brown facade, the enormous windows, the iron cages + fastened to the lower ones. Part of the brooding expression of these great + houses comes, even when they have not fallen into decay, from their look + of having outlived their original use. Their extraordinary largeness and + massiveness are a satire on their present fate. They weren’t built with + such a thickness of wall and depth of embrasure, such a solidity of + staircase and superfluity of stone, simply to afford an economical winter + residence to English and American families. I don’t know whether it was + the appearance of these stony old villas, which seemed so dumbly conscious + of a change of manners, that threw a tinge of melancholy over the general + prospect; certain it is that, having always found this note as of a myriad + old sadnesses in solution in the view of Florence, it seemed to me now + particularly strong. “Lovely, lovely, but it makes me ‘blue,’” the + sensitive stranger couldn’t but murmur to himself as, in the late + afternoon, he looked at the landscape from over one of the low parapets, + and then, with his hands in his pockets, turned away indoors to candles + and dinner. + </p> + <h3> + V + </h3> + <p> + Below, in the city, through all frequentation of streets and churches and + museums, it was impossible not to have a good deal of the same feeling; + but here the impression was more easy to analyse. It came from a sense of + the perfect separateness of all the great productions of the Renaissance + from the present and the future of the place, from the actual life and + manners, the native ideal. I have already spoken of the way in which the + vast aggregation of beautiful works of art in the Italian cities strikes + the visitor nowadays—so far as present Italy is concerned—as + the mere stock-in-trade of an impecunious but thrifty people. It is this + spiritual solitude, this conscious disconnection of the great works of + architecture and sculpture that deposits a certain weight upon the heart; + when we see a great tradition broken we feel something of the pain with + which we hear a stifled cry. But regret is one thing and resentment is + another. Seeing one morning, in a shop-window, the series of <i>Mornings + in Florence</i> published a few years since by Mr. Ruskin, I made haste to + enter and purchase these amusing little books, some passages of which I + remembered formerly to have read. I couldn’t turn over many pages without + observing that the “separateness” of the new and old which I just + mentioned had produced in their author the liveliest irritation. With the + more acute phases of this condition it was difficult to sympathise, for + the simple reason, it seems to me, that it savours of arrogance to demand + of any people, as a right of one’s own, that they shall be artistic. “Be + artistic yourselves!” is the very natural reply that young Italy has at + hand for English critics and censors. When a people produces beautiful + statues and pictures it gives us something more than is set down in the + bond, and we must thank it for its generosity; and when it stops producing + them or caring for them we may cease thanking, but we hardly have a right + to begin and rail. The wreck of Florence, says Mr. Ruskin, “is now too + ghastly and heart-breaking to any human soul that remembers the days of + old”; and these desperate words are an allusion to the fact that the + little square in front of the cathedral, at the foot of Giotto’s Tower, + with the grand Baptistery on the other side, is now the resort of a number + of hackney-coaches and omnibuses. This fact is doubtless lamentable, and + it would be a hundred times more agreeable to see among people who have + been made the heirs of so priceless a work of art as the sublime campanile + some such feeling about it as would keep it free even from the danger of + defilement. A cab-stand is a very ugly and dirty thing, and Giotto’s Tower + should have nothing in common with such conveniences. But there is more + than one way of taking such things, and the sensitive stranger who has + been walking about for a week with his mind full of the sweetness and + suggestiveness of a hundred Florentine places may feel at last in looking + into Mr. Ruskin’s little tracts that, discord for discord, there isn’t + much to choose between the importunity of the author’s personal ill-humour + and the incongruity of horse-pails and bundles of hay. And one may say + this without being at all a partisan of the doctrine of the inevitableness + of new desecrations. For my own part, I believe there are few things in + this line that the new Italian spirit isn’t capable of, and not many + indeed that we aren’t destined to see. Pictures and buildings won’t be + completely destroyed, because in that case the <i>forestieri</i>, + scatterers of cash, would cease to arrive and the turn-stiles at the doors + of the old palaces and convents, with the little patented slit for + absorbing your half-franc, would grow quite rusty, would stiffen with + disuse. But it’s safe to say that the new Italy growing into an old Italy + again will continue to take her elbow-room wherever she may find it. + </p> + <p> + {Illustration: SANTA MARIA NOVELLA, FLORENCE} + </p> + <p> + I am almost ashamed to say what I did with Mr. Ruskin’s little books. I + put them into my pocket and betook myself to Santa Maria Novella. There I + sat down and, after I had looked about for a while at the beautiful + church, drew them forth one by one and read the greater part of them. + Occupying one’s self with light literature in a great religious edifice is + perhaps as bad a piece of profanation as any of those rude dealings which + Mr. Ruskin justly deplores; but a traveller has to make the most of odd + moments, and I was waiting for a friend in whose company I was to go and + look at Giotto’s beautiful frescoes in the cloister of the church. My + friend was a long time coming, so that I had an hour with Mr. Ruskin, whom + I called just now a light <i>littérateur</i> because in these little + Mornings in Florence he is for ever making his readers laugh. I remembered + of course where I was, and in spite of my latent hilarity felt I had + rarely got such a snubbing. I had really been enjoying the good old city + of Florence, but I now learned from Mr. Ruskin that this was a scandalous + waste of charity. I should have gone about with an imprecation on my lips, + I should have worn a face three yards long. I had taken great pleasure in + certain frescoes by Ghirlandaio in the choir of that very church; but it + appeared from one of the little books that these frescoes were as naught. + I had much admired Santa Croce and had thought the Duomo a very noble + affair; but I had now the most positive assurance I knew nothing about + them. After a while, if it was only ill-humour that was needed for doing + honour to the city of the Medici, I felt that I had risen to a proper + level; only now it was Mr. Ruskin himself I had lost patience with, not + the stupid Brunelleschi, not the vulgar Ghirlandaio. Indeed I lost + patience altogether, and asked myself by what right this informal votary + of form pretended to run riot through a poor charmed <i>flaneur’s</i> + quiet contemplations, his attachment to the noblest of pleasures, his + enjoyment of the loveliest of cities. The little books seemed invidious + and insane, and it was only when I remembered that I had been under no + obligation to buy them that I checked myself in repenting of having done + so. + </p> + <p> + Then at last my friend arrived and we passed together out of the church, + and, through the first cloister beside it, into a smaller enclosure where + we stood a while to look at the tomb of the Marchesa Strozzi-Ridolfi, upon + which the great Giotto has painted four superb little pictures. It was + easy to see the pictures were superb; but I drew forth one of my little + books again, for I had observed that Mr. Ruskin spoke of them. Hereupon I + recovered my tolerance; for what could be better in this case, I asked + myself, than Mr. Ruskin’s remarks? They are in fact excellent and charming—full + of appreciation of the deep and simple beauty of the great painter’s work. + I read them aloud to my companion; but my companion was rather, as the + phrase is, “put off” by them. One of the frescoes—it is a picture of + the birth of the Virgin—contains a figure coming through a door. “Of + ornament,” I quote, “there is only the entirely simple outline of the vase + which the servant carries; of colour two or three masses of sober red and + pure white, with brown and grey. That is all,” Mr. Ruskin continues. “And + if you are pleased with this you can see Florence. But if not, by all + means amuse yourself there, if you find it amusing, as long as you like; + you can never see it.” <i>You can never see it.</i> This seemed to my + friend insufferable, and I had to shuffle away the book again, so that we + might look at the fresco with the unruffled geniality it deserves. We + agreed afterwards, when in a more convenient place I read aloud a good + many more passages from the precious tracts, that there are a great many + ways of seeing Florence, as there are of seeing most beautiful and + interesting things, and that it is very dry and pedantic to say that the + happy vision depends upon our squaring our toes with a certain particular + chalk-mark. We see Florence wherever and whenever we enjoy it, and for + enjoying it we find a great many more pretexts than Mr. Ruskin seems + inclined to allow. My friend and I convinced ourselves also, however, that + the little books were an excellent purchase, on account of the great charm + and felicity of much of their incidental criticism; to say nothing, as I + hinted just now, of their being extremely amusing. Nothing in fact is more + comical than the familiar asperity of the author’s style and the pedagogic + fashion in which he pushes and pulls his unhappy pupils about, jerking + their heads toward this, rapping their knuckles for that, sending them to + stand in corners and giving them Scripture texts to copy. But it is + neither the felicities nor the aberrations of detail, in Mr. Ruskin’s + writings, that are the main affair for most readers; it is the general + tone that, as I have said, puts them off or draws them on. For many + persons he will never bear the test of being read in this rich old Italy, + where art, so long as it really lived at all, was spontaneous, joyous, + irresponsible. If the reader is in daily contact with those beautiful + Florentine works which do still, in away, force themselves into notice + through the vulgarity and cruelty of modern profanation, it will seem to + him that this commentator’s comment is pitched in the strangest falsetto + key. “One may read a hundred pages of this sort of thing,” said my friend, + “without ever dreaming that he is talking about <i>art</i>. You can say + nothing worse about him than that.” Which is perfectly true. Art is the + one corner of human life in which we may take our ease. To justify our + presence there the only thing demanded of us is that we shall have felt + the representational impulse. In other connections our impulses are + conditioned and embarrassed; we are allowed to have only so many as are + consistent with those of our neighbours; with their convenience and + well-being, with their convictions and prejudices, their rules and + regulations. Art means an escape from all this. Wherever her shining + standard floats the need for apology and compromise is over; there it is + enough simply that we please or are pleased. There the tree is judged only + by its fruits. If these are sweet the tree is justified—and not less + so the consumer. + </p> + <p> + One may read a great many pages of Mr. Ruskin without getting a hint of + this delightful truth; a hint of the not unimportant fact that art after + all is made for us and not we for art. This idea that the value of a work + is in the amount of illusion it yields is conspicuous by its absence. And + as for Mr. Ruskin’s world’s being a place—his world of art—where + we may take life easily, woe to the luckless mortal who enters it with any + such disposition. Instead of a garden of delight, he finds a sort of + assize court in perpetual session. Instead of a place in which human + responsibilities are lightened and suspended, he finds a region governed + by a kind of Draconic legislation. His responsibilities indeed are tenfold + increased; the gulf between truth and error is for ever yawning at his + feet; the pains and penalties of this same error are advertised, in + apocalyptic terminology, upon a thousand sign-posts; and the rash intruder + soon begins to look back with infinite longing to the lost paradise of the + artless. There can be no greater want of tact in dealing with those things + with which men attempt to ornament life than to be perpetually talking + about “error.” A truce to all rigidities is the law of the place; the only + thing absolute there is that some force and some charm have worked. The + grim old bearer of the scales excuses herself; she feels this not to be + her province. Differences here are not iniquity and righteousness; they + are simply variations of temperament, kinds of curiosity. We are not under + theological government. + </p> + <h3> + VI + </h3> + <p> + It was very charming, in the bright, warm days, to wander from one corner + of Florence to another, paying one’s respects again to remembered + masterpieces. It was pleasant also to find that memory had played no + tricks and that the rarest things of an earlier year were as rare as ever. + To enumerate these felicities would take a great deal of space; for I + never had been more struck with the mere quantity of brilliant Florentine + work. Even giving up the Duomo and Santa Croce to Mr. Ruskin as very + ill-arranged edifices, the list of the Florentine treasures is almost + inexhaustible. Those long outer galleries of the Uffizi had never beguiled + me more; sometimes there were not more than two or three figures standing + there, Baedeker in hand, to break the charming perspective. One side of + this upstairs portico, it will be remembered, is entirely composed of + glass; a continuity of old-fashioned windows, draped with white curtains + of rather primitive fashion, which hang there till they acquire a + perceptible tone. The light, passing through them, is softly filtered and + diffused; it rests mildly upon the old marbles—chiefly antique Roman + busts—which stand in the narrow intervals of the casements. It is + projected upon the numerous pictures that cover the opposite wall and that + are not by any means, as a general thing, the gems of the great + collection; it imparts a faded brightness to the old ornamental arabesques + upon the painted wooden ceiling, and it makes a great soft shining upon + the marble floor, in which, as you look up and down, you see the strolling + tourists and the motionless copyists almost reflected. I don’t know why I + should find all this very pleasant, but in fact, I have seldom gone into + the Uffizi without walking the length of this third-story cloister, + between the (for the most part) third-rate canvases and panels and the + faded cotton curtains. Why is it that in Italy we see a charm in things in + regard to which in other countries we always take vulgarity for granted? + If in the city of New York a great museum of the arts were to be provided, + by way of decoration, with a species of verandah enclosed on one side by a + series of small-paned windows draped in dirty linen, and furnished on the + other with an array of pictorial feebleness, the place being surmounted by + a thinly-painted wooden roof, strongly suggestive of summer heat, of + winter cold, of frequent leakage, those amateurs who had had the advantage + of foreign travel would be at small pains to conceal their contempt. + Contemptible or respectable, to the judicial mind, this quaint old loggia + of the Uffizi admitted me into twenty chambers where I found as great a + number of ancient favourites. I don’t know that I had a warmer greeting + for any old friend than for Andrea del Sarto, that most touching of + painters who is not one of the first. But it was on the other side of the + Arno that I found him in force, in those dusky drawing-rooms of the Pitti + Palace to which you take your way along the tortuous tunnel that wanders + through the houses of Florence and is supported by the little goldsmiths’ + booths on the Ponte Vecchio. In the rich insufficient light of these + beautiful rooms, where, to look at the pictures, you sit in damask chairs + and rest your elbows on tables of malachite, the elegant Andrea becomes + deeply effective. Before long he has drawn you close. But the great + pleasure, after all, was to revisit the earlier masters, in those + specimens of them chiefly that bloom so unfadingly on the big plain walls + of the Academy. Fra Angelico and Filippo Lippi, Botticelli and Lorenzo di + Credi are the clearest, the sweetest and best of all painters; as I sat + for an hour in their company, in the cold great hall of the institution I + have mentioned—there are shabby rafters above and an immense expanse + of brick tiles below, and many bad pictures as well as good—it + seemed to me more than ever that if one really had to choose one couldn’t + do better than choose here. You may rest at your ease at the Academy, in + this big first room—at the upper end especially, on the left—because + more than many other places it savours of old Florence. More for instance, + in reality, than the Bargello, though the Bargello makes great + pretensions. Beautiful and masterful though the Bargello is, it smells too + strongly of restoration, and, much of old Italy as still lurks in its + furbished and renovated chambers, it speaks even more distinctly of the + ill-mannered young kingdom that has—as “unavoidably” as you please—lifted + down a hundred delicate works of sculpture from the convent-walls where + their pious authors placed them. If the early Tuscan painters are + exquisite I can think of no praise pure enough for the sculptors of the + same period, Donatello and Luca della Robbia, Matteo Civitale and Mina da + Fiesole, who, as I refreshed my memory of them, seemed to me to leave + absolutely nothing to be desired in the way of straightness of inspiration + and grace of invention. The Bargello is full of early Tuscan sculpture, + most of the pieces of which have come from suppressed religious houses; + and even if the visitor be an ardent liberal he is uncomfortably conscious + of the rather brutal process by which it has been collected. One can + hardly envy young Italy the number of odious things she has had to do. + </p> + <p> + The railway journey from Florence to Rome has been altered both for the + better and for the worse; for the better in that it has been shortened by + a couple of hours; for the worse inasmuch as when about half the distance + has been traversed the train deflects to the west and leaves the beautiful + old cities of Assisi, Perugia, Terni, Narni, unvisited. Of old it was + possible to call at these places, in a manner, from the window of the + train; even if you didn’t stop, as you probably couldn’t, every time you + passed, the immensely interesting way in which, like a loosened belt on an + aged and shrunken person, their ample walls held them easily together was + something well worth noting. Now, however, for compensation, the express + train to Rome stops at Orvieto, and in consequence... In consequence what? + What is the result of the stop of an express train at Orvieto? As I glibly + wrote that sentence I suddenly paused, aware of the queer stuff I was + uttering. That an express train would graze the base of the horrid purple + mountain from the apex of which this dark old Catholic city uplifts the + glittering front of its cathedral—that might have been foretold by a + keen observer of contemporary manners. But that it would really have the + grossness to hang about is a fact over which, as he records it, an + inveterate, a perverse cherisher of the sense of the past order, the order + still largely prevailing at the time of his first visit to Italy, may well + make what is vulgarly called an ado. The train does stop at Orvieto, not + very long, it is true, but long enough to let you out. The same phenomenon + takes place on the following day, when, having visited the city, you get + in again. I availed myself without scruple of both of these occasions, + having formerly neglected to drive to the place in a post-chaise. But + frankly, the railway-station being in the plain and the town on the summit + of an extraordinary hill, you have time to forget the puffing indiscretion + while you wind upwards to the city-gate. The position of Orvieto is superb—worthy + of the “middle distance” of an eighteenth-century landscape. But, as every + one knows, the splendid Cathedral is the proper attraction of the spot, + which, indeed, save for this fine monument and for its craggy and + crumbling ramparts, is a meanly arranged and, as Italian cities go, not + particularly impressive little town. I spent a beautiful Sunday there and + took in the charming church. I gave it my best attention, though on the + whole I fear I found it inferior to its fame. A high concert of colour, + however, is the densely carved front, richly covered with radiant mosaics. + The old white marble of the sculptured portions is as softly yellow as + ancient ivory; the large exceedingly bright pictures above them flashed + and twinkled in the glorious weather. Very striking and interesting the + theological frescoes of Luca Signorelli, though I have seen compositions + of this general order that appealed to me more. Characteristically fresh, + finally, the clear-faced saints and seraphs, in robes of pink and azure, + whom Fra Angelico has painted upon the ceiling of the great chapel, along + with a noble sitting figure—more expressive of movement than most of + the creations of this pictorial peace-maker—of Christ in judgment. + Yet the interest of the cathedral of Orvieto is mainly not the visible + result, but the historical process that lies behind it; those three + hundred years of the applied devotion of a people of which an American + scholar has written an admirable account.{1} + </p> + <h3> + 1877. + </h3> + <p> + {1} Charles Eliot Norton, <i>Notes of Travel and Study in Italy</i>. + </p> + <p> + <a name="link2H_4_0010" id="link2H_4_0010"> + <!-- H2 anchor --> </a> + </p> + <div style="height: 4em;"> + <br /><br /><br /><br /> + </div> + <h2> + A ROMAN HOLIDAY + </h2> + <p> + It is certainly sweet to be merry at the right moment; but the right + moment hardly seems to me the ten days of the Roman Carnival. It was my + rather cynical suspicion perhaps that they wouldn’t keep to my imagination + the brilliant promise of legend; but I have been justified by the event + and have been decidedly less conscious of the festal influences of the + season than of the inalienable gravity of the place. There was a time when + the Carnival was a serious matter—that is a heartily joyous one; + but, thanks to the seven-league boots the kingdom of Italy has lately + donned for the march of progress in quite other directions, the fashion of + public revelry has fallen woefully out of step. The state of mind and + manners under which the Carnival was kept in generous good faith I doubt + if an American can exactly conceive: he can only say to himself that for a + month in the year there must have been things—things considerably of + humiliation—it was comfortable to forget. But now that Italy is made + the Carnival is unmade; and we are not especially tempted to envy the + attitude of a population who have lost their relish for play and not yet + acquired to any striking extent an enthusiasm for work. The spectacle on + the Corso has seemed to me, on the whole, an illustration of that great + breach with the past of which Catholic Christendom felt the somewhat + muffled shock in September, 1870. A traveller acquainted with the fully + papal Rome, coming back any time during the past winter, must have + immediately noticed that something momentous had happened—something + hostile to the elements of picture and colour and “style.” My first + warning was that ten minutes after my arrival I found myself face to face + with a newspaper stand. The impossibility in the other days of having + anything in the journalistic line but the <i>Osservatore Romano</i> and + the <i>Voce della Verità</i> used to seem to me much connected with the + extraordinary leisure of thought and stillness of mind to which the place + admitted you. But now the slender piping of the Voice of Truth is stifled + by the raucous note of eventide vendors of the <i>Capitale</i>, the <i>Libertà</i> + and the <i>Fanfulla</i>; and Rome reading unexpurgated news is another + Rome indeed. For every subscriber to the <i>Libertà</i> there may well be + an antique masker and reveller less. As striking a sign of the new régime + is the extraordinary increase of population. The Corso was always a + well-filled street, but now it’s a perpetual crush. I never cease to + wonder where the new-comers are lodged, and how such spotless flowers of + fashion as the gentlemen who stare at the carriages can bloom in the + atmosphere of those <i>camere mobiliate</i> of which I have had glimpses. + This, however, is their own question, and bravely enough they meet it. + They proclaimed somehow, to the first freshness of my wonder, as I say, + that by force of numbers Rome had been secularised. An Italian dandy is a + figure visually to reckon with, but these goodly throngs of them scarce + offered compensation for the absent monsignori, treading the streets in + their purple stockings and followed by the solemn servants who returned on + their behalf the bows of the meaner sort; for the mourning gear of the + cardinals’ coaches that formerly glittered with scarlet and swung with the + weight of the footmen clinging behind; for the certainty that you’ll not, + by the best of traveller’s luck, meet the Pope sitting deep in the shadow + of his great chariot with uplifted fingers like some inaccessible idol in + his shrine. You may meet the King indeed, who is as ugly, as imposingly + ugly, as some idols, though not so inaccessible. The other day as I passed + the Quirinal he drove up in a low carriage with a single attendant; and a + group of men and women who had been waiting near the gate rushed at him + with a number of folded papers. The carriage slackened pace and he + pocketed their offerings with a business-like air—hat of a + good-natured man accepting handbills at a street-corner. Here was a + monarch at his palace gate receiving petitions from his subjects—being + adjured to right their wrongs. The scene ought to have thrilled me, but + somehow it had no more intensity than a woodcut in an illustrated + newspaper. Homely I should call it at most; admirably so, certainly, for + there were lately few sovereigns standing, I believe, with whom their + people enjoyed these filial hand-to-hand relations. The King this year, + however, has had as little to do with the Carnival as the Pope, and the + innkeepers and Americans have marked it for their own. + </p> + <p> + It was advertised to begin at half-past two o’clock of a certain Saturday, + and punctually at the stroke of the hour, from my room across a wide + court, I heard a sudden multiplication of sounds and confusion of tongues + in the Corso. I was writing to a friend for whom I cared more than for any + mere romp; but as the minutes elapsed and the hubbub deepened curiosity + got the better of affection, and I remembered that I was really within + eye-shot of an affair the fame of which had ministered to the daydreams of + my infancy. I used to have a scrap-book with a coloured print of the + starting of the bedizened wild horses, and the use of a library rich in + keepsakes and annuals with a frontispiece commonly of a masked lady in a + balcony, the heroine of a delightful tale further on. Agitated by these + tender memories I descended into the street; but I confess I looked in + vain for a masked lady who might serve as a frontispiece, in vain for any + object whatever that might adorn a tale. Masked and muffled ladies there + were in abundance; but their masks were of ugly wire, perfectly resembling + the little covers placed upon strong cheese in German hotels, and their + drapery was a shabby water-proof with the hood pulled over their chignons. + They were armed with great tin scoops or funnels, with which they solemnly + shovelled lime and flour out of bushel-baskets and down on the heads of + the people in the street. They were packed into balconies all the way + along the straight vista of the Corso, in which their calcareous shower + maintained a dense, gritty, unpalatable fog. The crowd was compact in the + street, and the Americans in it were tossing back confetti out of great + satchels hung round their necks. It was quite the “you’re another” sort of + repartee, and less seasoned than I had hoped with the airy mockery + tradition hangs about this festival. The scene was striking, in a word; + but somehow not as I had dreamed of its being. I stood regardful, I + suppose, but with a peculiarly tempting blankness of visage, for in a + moment I received half a bushel of flour on my too-philosophic head. + Decidedly it was an ignoble form of humour. I shook my ears like an + emergent diver, and had a sudden vision of how still and sunny and solemn, + how peculiarly and undisturbedly themselves, how secure from any intrusion + less sympathetic than one’s own, certain outlying parts of Rome must just + then be. The Carnival had received its deathblow in my imagination; and it + has been ever since but a thin and dusky ghost of pleasure that has + flitted at intervals in and out of my consciousness. + </p> + <p> + I turned my back accordingly on the Corso and wandered away to the + grass-grown quarters delightfully free even from the possibility of a + fellow-countryman. And so having set myself an example I have been keeping + Carnival by strolling perversely along the silent circumference of Rome. I + have doubtless lost a great deal. The Princess Margaret has occupied a + balcony opposite the open space which leads into Via Condotti and, I + believe, like the discreet princess she is, has dealt in no missiles but + bonbons, bouquets and white doves. I would have waited half an hour any + day to see the Princess Margaret hold a dove on her forefinger; but I + never chanced to notice any preparation for that effect. And yet do what + you will you can’t really elude the Carnival. As the days elapse it + filters down into the manners of the common people, and before the week is + over the very beggars at the church-doors seem to have gone to the expense + of a domino. When you meet these specimens of dingy drollery capering + about in dusky back-streets at all hours of the day and night, meet them + flitting out of black doorways between the greasy groups that cluster + about Roman thresholds, you feel that a love of “pranks,” the more vivid + the better, must from far back have been implanted in the Roman + temperament with a strong hand. An unsophisticated American is + wonderstruck at the number of persons, of every age and various + conditions, whom it costs nothing in the nature of an ingenuous blush to + walk up and down the streets in the costume of a theatrical supernumerary. + Fathers of families do it at the head of an admiring progeniture; aunts + and uncles and grandmothers do it; all the family does it, with varying + splendour but with the same good conscience. “A pack of babies!” the + doubtless too self-conscious alien pronounces it for its pains, and tries + to imagine himself strutting along Broadway in a battered tin helmet and a + pair of yellow tights. Our vices are certainly different; it takes those + of the innocent sort to be so ridiculous. A self-consciousness lapsing so + easily, in fine, strikes me as so near a relation to amenity, urbanity and + general gracefulness that, for myself, I should be sorry to lay a tax on + it, lest these other commodities should also cease to come to market. + </p> + <p> + I was rewarded, when I had turned away with my ears full of flour, by a + glimpse of an intenser life than the dingy foolery of the Corso. I walked + down by the back streets to the steps mounting to the Capitol—that + long inclined plane, rather, broken at every two paces, which is the + unfailing disappointment, I believe, of tourists primed for retrospective + raptures. Certainly the Capitol seen from this side isn’t commanding. The + hill is so low, the ascent so narrow, Michael Angelo’s architecture in the + quadrangle at the top so meagre, the whole place somehow so much more of a + mole-hill than a mountain, that for the first ten minutes of your standing + there Roman history seems suddenly to have sunk through a trap-door. It + emerges however on the other side, in the Forum; and here meanwhile, if + you get no sense of the sublime, you get gradually a sense of exquisite + composition. Nowhere in Rome is more colour, more charm, more sport for + the eye. The mild incline, during the winter months, is always covered + with lounging sun-seekers, and especially with those more constantly + obvious members of the Roman population—beggars, soldiers, monks and + tourists. The beggars and peasants lie kicking their heels along that + grandest of loafing-places the great steps of the Ara Coeli. The dwarfish + look of the Capitol is intensified, I think, by the neighbourhood of this + huge blank staircase, mouldering away in disuse, the weeds thick in its + crevices, and climbing to the rudely solemn facade of the church. The + sunshine glares on this great unfinished wall only to light up its + featureless despair, its expression of conscious, irremediable + incompleteness. Sometimes, massing its rusty screen against the deep blue + sky, with the little cross and the sculptured porch casting a clear-cut + shadow on the bricks, it seems to have even more than a Roman desolation, + it confusedly suggests Spain and Africa—lands with no latent <i>risorgimenti</i>, + with absolutely nothing but a fatal past. The legendary wolf of Rome has + lately been accommodated with a little artificial grotto, among the cacti + and the palms, in the fantastic triangular garden squeezed between the + steps of the church and the ascent to the Capitol, where she holds a + perpetual levee and “draws” apparently as powerfully as the Pope himself. + Above, in the piazzetta before the stuccoed palace which rises so jauntily + on a basement of thrice its magnitude, are more loungers and knitters in + the sun, seated round the massively inscribed base of the statue of Marcus + Aurelius. Hawthorne has perfectly expressed the attitude of this admirable + figure in saying that it extends its arm with “a command which is in + itself a benediction.” I doubt if any statue of king or captain in the + public places of the world has more to commend it to the general heart. + Irrecoverable simplicity—residing so in irrecoverable Style—has + no sturdier representative. Here is an impression that the sculptors of + the last three hundred years have been laboriously trying to reproduce; + but contrasted with this mild old monarch their prancing horsemen suggest + a succession of riding-masters taking out young ladies’ schools. The + admirably human character of the figure survives the rusty decomposition + of the bronze and the slight “debasement” of the art; and one may call it + singular that in the capital of Christendom the portrait most suggestive + of a Christian conscience is that of a pagan emperor. + </p> + <p> + You recover in some degree your stifled hopes of sublimity as you pass + beyond the palace and take your choice of either curving slope to descend + into the Forum. Then you see that the little stuccoed edifice is but a + modern excrescence on the mighty cliff of a primitive construction, whose + great squares of porous tufa, as they underlie each other, seem to resolve + themselves back into the colossal cohesion of unhewn rock. There are + prodigious strangenesses in the union of this airy and comparatively + fresh-faced superstructure and these deep-plunging, hoary foundations; and + few things in Rome are more entertaining to the eye than to measure the + long plumb-line which drops from the inhabited windows of the palace, with + their little over-peeping balconies, their muslin curtains and their + bird-cages, down to the rugged constructional work of the Republic. In the + Forum proper the sublime is eclipsed again, though the late extension of + the excavations gives a chance for it. + </p> + <p> + Nothing in Rome helps your fancy to a more vigorous backward flight than + to lounge on a sunny day over the railing which guards the great central + researches. It “says” more things to you than you can repeat to see the + past, the ancient world, as you stand there, bodily turned up with the + spade and transformed from an immaterial, inaccessible fact of time into a + matter of soils and surfaces. The pleasure is the same—in kind—as + what you enjoy of Pompeii, and the pain the same. It wasn’t here, however, + that I found my compensation for forfeiting the spectacle on the Corso, + but in a little church at the end of the narrow byway which diverges up + the Palatine from just beside the Arch of Titus. This byway leads you + between high walls, then takes a bend and introduces you to a long row of + rusty, dusty little pictures of the stations of the cross. Beyond these + stands a small church with a front so modest that you hardly recognise it + till you see the leather curtain. I never see a leather curtain without + lifting it; it is sure to cover a constituted <i>scene</i> of some sort—good, + bad or indifferent. The scene this time was meagre—whitewash and + tarnished candlesticks and mouldy muslin flowers being its principal + features. I shouldn’t have remained if I hadn’t been struck with the + attitude of the single worshipper—a young priest kneeling before one + of the sidealtars, who, as I entered, lifted his head and gave me a + sidelong look so charged with the languor of devotion that he immediately + became an object of interest. He was visiting each of the altars in turn + and kissing the balustrade beneath them. He was alone in the church, and + indeed in the whole region. There were no beggars even at the door; they + were plying their trade on the skirts of the Carnival. In the entirely + deserted place he alone knelt for religion, and as I sat respectfully by + it seemed to me I could hear in the perfect silence the far-away uproar of + the maskers. It was my late impression of these frivolous people, I + suppose, joined with the extraordinary gravity of the young priest’s face—his + pious fatigue, his droning prayer and his isolation—that gave me + just then and there a supreme vision of the religious passion, its + privations and resignations and exhaustions and its terribly small share + of amusement. He was young and strong and evidently of not too refined a + fibre to enjoy the Carnival; but, planted there with his face pale with + fasting and his knees stiff with praying, he seemed so stern a satire on + it and on the crazy thousands who were preferring it to <i>his</i> way, + that I half expected to see some heavenly portent out of a monastic legend + come down and confirm his choice. Yet I confess that though I wasn’t + enamoured of the Carnival myself, his seemed a grim preference and this + forswearing of the world a terrible game—a gaining one only if your + zeal never falters; a hard fight when it does. In such an hour, to a stout + young fellow like the hero of my anecdote, the smell of incense must seem + horribly stale and the muslin flowers and gilt candlesticks to figure no + great bribe. And it wouldn’t have helped him much to think that not so + very far away, just beyond the Forum, in the Corso, there was sport for + the million, and for nothing. I doubt on the other hand whether my young + priest had thought of this. He had made himself a temple out of the very + elements of his innocence, and his prayers followed each other too fast + for the tempter to slip in a whisper. And so, as I say, I found a solider + fact of human nature than the love of <i>coriandoli</i>. + </p> + <p> + One of course never passes the Colosseum without paying it one’s respects—without + going in under one of the hundred portals and crossing the long oval and + sitting down a while, generally at the foot of the cross in the centre. I + always feel, as I do so, as if I were seated in the depths of some Alpine + valley. The upper portions of the side toward the Esquiline look as remote + and lonely as an Alpine ridge, and you raise your eyes to their rugged + sky-line, drinking in the sun and silvered by the blue air, with much the + same feeling with which you would take in a grey cliff on which an eagle + might lodge. This roughly mountainous quality of the great ruin is its + chief interest; beauty of detail has pretty well vanished, especially + since the high-growing wild-flowers have been plucked away by the new + government, whose functionaries, surely, at certain points of their task, + must have felt as if they shared the dreadful trade of those who gather + samphire. Even if you are on your way to the Lateran you won’t grudge the + twenty minutes it will take you, on leaving the Colosseum, to turn away + under the Arch of Constantine, whose noble battered bas-reliefs, with the + chain of tragic statues—fettered, drooping barbarians—round + its summit, I assume you to have profoundly admired, toward the piazzetta + of the church of San Giovanni e Paolo, on the slope of Caelian. No spot in + Rome can show a cluster of more charming accidents. The ancient brick apse + of the church peeps down into the trees of the little wooded walk before + the neighbouring church of San Gregorio, intensely venerable beneath its + excessive modernisation; and a series of heavy brick buttresses, flying + across to an opposite wall, overarches the short, steep, paved passage + which leads into the small square. This is flanked on one side by the long + mediaeval portico of the church of the two saints, sustained by eight + time-blackened columns of granite and marble. On another rise the great + scarce-windowed walls of a Passionist convent, and on the third the + portals of a grand villa, whose tall porter, with his cockade and + silver-topped staff, standing sublime behind his grating, seems a kind of + mundane St. Peter, I suppose, to the beggars who sit at the church door or + lie in the sun along the farther slope which leads to the gate of the + convent. The place always seems to me the perfection of an out-of-the-way + corner—a place you would think twice before telling people about, + lest you should find them there the next time you were to go. It is such a + group of objects, singly and in their happy combination, as one must come + to Rome to find at one’s house door; but what makes it peculiarly a + picture is the beautiful dark red campanile of the church, which stands + embedded in the mass of the convent. It begins, as so many things in Rome + begin, with a stout foundation of antique travertine, and rises high, in + delicately quaint mediaeval brickwork—little tiers and apertures + sustained on miniature columns and adorned with small cracked slabs of + green and yellow marble, inserted almost at random. When there are three + or four brown-breasted contadini sleeping in the sun before the convent + doors, and a departing monk leading his shadow down over them, I think you + will not find anything in Rome more <i>sketchable</i>. + </p> + <p> + If you stop, however, to observe everything worthy of your water-colours + you will never reach St. John Lateran. My business was much less with the + interior of that vast and empty, that cold clean temple, which I have + never found peculiarly interesting, than with certain charming features of + its surrounding precinct—the crooked old court beside it, which + admits you to the Baptistery and to a delightful rear-view of the queer + architectural odds and ends that may in Rome compose a florid + ecclesiastical façade. There are more of these, a stranger jumble of + chance detail, of lurking recesses and wanton projections and inexplicable + windows, than I have memory or phrase for; but the gem of the collection + is the oddly perched peaked turret, with its yellow travertine welded upon + the rusty brickwork, which was not meant to be suspected, and the + brickwork retreating beneath and leaving it in the odd position of a tower + <i>under</i> which you may see the sky. As to the great front of the + church overlooking the Porta San Giovanni, you are not admitted behind the + scenes; the term is quite in keeping, for the architecture has a vastly + theatrical air. It is extremely imposing—that of St. Peter’s alone + is more so; and when from far off on the Campagna you see the colossal + images of the mitred saints along the top standing distinct against the + sky, you forget their coarse construction and their inflated draperies. + The view from the great space which stretches from the church steps to the + city wall is the very prince of views. Just beside you, beyond the great + alcove of mosaic, is the Scala Santa, the marble staircase which (says the + legend) Christ descended under the weight of Pilate’s judgment, and which + all Christians must for ever ascend on their knees; before you is the city + gate which opens upon the Via Appia Nuova, the long gaunt file of arches + of the Claudian aqueduct, their jagged ridge stretching away like the + vertebral column of some monstrous mouldering skeleton, and upon the + blooming brown and purple flats and dells of the Campagna and the glowing + blue of the Alban Mountains, spotted with their white, high-nestling + towns; while to your left is the great grassy space, lined with dwarfish + mulberry-trees, which stretches across to the damp little sister-basilica + of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme. During a former visit to Rome I lost my + heart to this idle tract,{1} + </p> + <p> + {1} Utterly overbuilt and gone—1909. + </p> + <p> + and wasted much time in sitting on the steps of the church and watching + certain white-cowled friars who were sure to be passing there for the + delight of my eyes. There are fewer friars now, and there are a great many + of the king’s recruits, who inhabit the ex-conventual barracks adjoining + Santa Croce and are led forward to practise their goose-step on the sunny + turf. Here too the poor old cardinals who are no longer to be seen on the + Pincio descend from their mourning-coaches and relax their venerable + knees. These members alone still testify to the traditional splendour of + the princes of the Church; for as they advance the lifted black petticoat + reveals a flash of scarlet stockings and makes you groan at the victory of + civilisation over colour. + </p> + <p> + {Illustration: THE FAÇADE OF ST. JOHN LATERAN, ROME.} + </p> + <p> + If St. John Lateran disappoints you internally, you have an easy + compensation in pacing the long lane which connects it with Santa Maria + Maggiore and entering the singularly perfect nave of that most delightful + of churches. The first day of my stay in Rome under the old dispensation I + spent in wandering at random through the city, with accident for my <i>valet-de-place</i>. + It served me to perfection and introduced me to the best things; among + others to an immediate happy relation with Santa Maria Maggiore. First + impressions, memorable impressions, are generally irrecoverable; they + often leave one the wiser, but they rarely return in the same form. I + remember, of my coming uninformed and unprepared into the place of worship + and of curiosity that I have named, only that I sat for half an hour on + the edge of the base of one of the marble columns of the beautiful nave + and enjoyed a perfect revel of—what shall I call it?—taste, + intelligence, fancy, perceptive emotion? The place proved so endlessly + suggestive that perception became a throbbing confusion of images, and I + departed with a sense of knowing a good deal that is not set down in + Murray. I have seated myself more than once again at the base of the same + column; but you live your life only once, the parts as well as the whole. + The obvious charm of the church is the elegant grandeur of the nave—its + perfect shapeliness and its rich simplicity, its long double row of white + marble columns and its high flat roof, embossed with intricate gildings + and mouldings. It opens into a choir of an extraordinary splendour of + effect, which I recommend you to look out for of a fine afternoon. At such + a time the glowing western light, entering the high windows of the + tribune, kindles the scattered masses of colour into sombre bright-ness, + scintillates on the great solemn mosaic of the vault, touches the porphyry + columns of the superb baldachino with ruby lights, and buries its shining + shafts in the deep-toned shadows that hang about frescoes and sculptures + and mouldings. The deeper charm even than in such things, however, is the + social or historic note or tone or atmosphere of the church—I + fumble, you see, for my right expression; the sense it gives you, in + common with most of the Roman churches, and more than any of them, of + having been prayed in for several centuries by an endlessly curious and + complex society. It takes no great attention to let it come to you that + the authority of Italian Catholicism has lapsed not a little in these + days; not less also perhaps than to feel that, as they stand, these + deserted temples were the fruit of a society leavened through and through + by ecclesiastical manners, and that they formed for ages the constant + background of the human drama. They are, as one may say, the <i>churchiest</i> + churches in Europe—the fullest of gathered memories, of the + experience of their office. There’s not a figure one has read of in + old-world annals that isn’t to be imagined on proper occasion kneeling + before the lamp-decked Confession beneath the altar of Santa Maria + Maggiore. One sees after all, however, even among the most palpable + realities, very much what the play of one’s imagination projects there; + and I present my remarks simply as a reminder that one’s constant + excursions into these places are not the least interesting episodes of + one’s walks in Rome. + </p> + <p> + I had meant to give a simple illustration of the church-habit, so to + speak, but I have given it at such a length as leaves scant space to touch + on the innumerable topics brushed by the pen that begins to take Roman + notes. It is by the aimless <i>flânerie</i> which leaves you free to + follow capriciously every hint of entertainment that you get to know Rome. + The greater part of the life about you goes on in the streets; and for an + observer fresh from a country in which town scenery is at the least + monotonous incident and character and picture seem to abound. I become + conscious with compunction, let me hasten to add, that I have launched + myself thus on the subject of Roman churches and Roman walks without so + much as a preliminary allusion to St. Peter’s. One is apt to proceed + thither on rainy days with intentions of exercise—to put the case + only at that—and to carry these out body and mind. Taken as a walk + not less than as a church, St. Peter’s of course reigns alone. Even for + the profane “constitutional” it serves where the Boulevards, where + Piccadilly and Broadway, fall short, and if it didn’t offer to our use the + grandest area in the world it would still offer the most diverting. Few + great works of art last longer to the curiosity, to the perpetually + transcended attention. You think you have taken the whole thing in, but it + expands, it rises sublime again, and leaves your measure itself poor. You + never let the ponderous leather curtain bang down behind you—your + weak lift of a scant edge of whose padded vastness resembles the liberty + taken in folding back the parchment corner of some mighty folio page—without + feeling all former visits to have been but missed attempts at apprehension + and the actual to achieve your first real possession. The conventional + question is ever as to whether one hasn’t been “disappointed in the size,” + but a few honest folk here and there, I hope, will never cease to say no. + The place struck me from the first as the hugest thing conceivable—a + real exaltation of one’s idea of space; so that one’s entrance, even from + the great empty square which either glares beneath the deep blue sky or + makes of the cool far-cast shadow of the immense front something that + resembles a big slate-coloured country on a map, seems not so much a going + in somewhere as a going out. The mere man of pleasure in quest of new + sensations might well not know where to better his encounter there of the + sublime shock that brings him, within the threshold, to an immediate + gasping pause. There are days when the vast nave looks mysteriously vaster + than on others and the gorgeous baldachino a longer journey beyond the + far-spreading tessellated plain of the pavement, and when the light has + yet a quality which lets things loom their largest, while the scattered + figures—I mean the human, for there are plenty of others—mark + happily the scale of items and parts. Then you have only to stroll and + stroll and gaze and gaze; to watch the glorious altar-canopy lift its + bronze architecture, its colossal embroidered contortions, like a temple + within a temple, and feel yourself, at the bottom of the abysmal shaft of + the dome, dwindle to a crawling dot. + </p> + <p> + Much of the constituted beauty resides in the fact that it is all general + beauty, that you are appealed to by no specific details, or that these at + least, practically never importunate, are as taken for granted as the + lieutenants and captains are taken for granted in a great standing army—among + whom indeed individual aspects may figure here the rather shifting range + of decorative dignity in which details, when observed, often prove poor + (though never not massive and substantially precious) and sometimes prove + ridiculous. The sculptures, with the sole exception of Michael Angelo’s + ineffable “Pieta,” which lurks obscurely in a side-chapel—this + indeed to my sense the rarest artistic <i>combination</i> of the greatest + things the hand of man has produced—are either bad or indifferent; + and the universal incrustation of marble, though sumptuous enough, has a + less brilliant effect than much later work of the same sort, that for + instance of St. Paul’s without the Walls. The supreme beauty is the + splendidly sustained simplicity of the whole. The thing represents a + prodigious imagination extraordinarily strained, yet strained, at its + happiest pitch, without breaking. Its happiest pitch I say, because this + is the only creation of its strenuous author in presence of which you are + in presence of serenity. You may invoke the idea of ease at St. Peter’s + without a sense of sacrilege—which you can hardly do, if you are at + all spiritually nervous, in Westminster Abbey or Notre Dame. The vast + enclosed clearness has much to do with the idea. There are no shadows to + speak of, no marked effects of shade; only effects of light innumerably—points + at which this element seems to mass itself in airy density and scatter + itself in enchanting gradations and cadences. It performs the office of + gloom or of mystery in Gothic churches; hangs like a rolling mist along + the gilded vault of the nave, melts into bright interfusion the mosaic + scintillations of the dome, clings and clusters and lingers, animates the + whole huge and otherwise empty shell. A good Catholic, I suppose, is the + same Catholic anywhere, before the grandest as well as the humblest + altars; but to a visitor not formally enrolled St. Peter’s speaks less of + aspiration than of full and convenient assurance. The soul infinitely + expands there, if one will, but all on its quite human level. It marvels + at the reach of our dreams and the immensity of our resources. To be so + impressed and put in our place, we say, is to be sufficiently “saved”; we + can’t be more than the heaven itself; and what specifically celestial + beauty such a show or such a substitute may lack it makes up for in + certainty and tangibility. And yet if one’s hours on the scene are not + actually spent in praying, the spirit seeks it again as for the finer + comfort, for the blessing, exactly, of its example, its protection and its + exclusion. When you are weary of the swarming democracy of your + fellow-tourists, of the unremunerative aspects of human nature on Corso + and Pincio, of the oppressively frequent combination of coronets on + carriage panels and stupid faces in carriages, of addled brains and + lacquered boots, of ruin and dirt and decay, of priests and beggars and + takers of advantage, of the myriad tokens of a halting civilisation, the + image of the great temple depresses the balance of your doubts, seems to + rise above even the highest tide of vulgarity and make you still believe + in the heroic will and the heroic act. It’s a relief, in other words, to + feel that there’s nothing but a cab-fare between your pessimism and one of + the greatest of human achievements. + </p> + <p> + {Illustration: THE COLONNADE OF ST. PETER, ROME.} + </p> + <p> + This might serve as a Lenten peroration to these remarks of mine which + have strayed so woefully from their jovial text, save that I ought fairly + to confess that my last impression of the Carnival was altogether + Carnivalesque.. The merry-making of Shrove Tuesday had life and felicity; + the dead letter of tradition broke out into nature and grace. I pocketed + my scepticism and spent a long afternoon on the Corso. Almost every one + was a masker, but you had no need to conform; the pelting rain of confetti + effectually disguised you. I can’t say I found it all very exhilarating; + but here and there I noticed a brighter episode—a capering clown + inflamed with contagious jollity, some finer humourist forming a circle + every thirty yards to crow at his indefatigable sallies. One clever + performer so especially pleased me that I should have been glad to catch a + glimpse of the natural man. You imagined for him that he was taking a + prodigious intellectual holiday and that his gaiety was in inverse ratio + to his daily mood. Dressed as a needy scholar, in an ancient evening-coat + and with a rusty black hat and gloves fantastically patched, he carried a + little volume carefully under his arm. His humours were in excellent + taste, his whole manner the perfection of genteel comedy. The crowd seemed + to relish him vastly, and he at once commanded a glee-fully attentive + audience. Many of his sallies I lost; those I caught were excellent. His + trick was often to begin by taking some one urbanely and caressingly by + the chin and complimenting him on the <i>intelligenza della sua fisionomia</i>. + I kept near him as long as I could; for he struck me as a real ironic + artist, cherishing a disinterested, and yet at the same time a motived and + a moral, passion for the grotesque. I should have liked, however—if + indeed I shouldn’t have feared—to see him the next morning, or when + he unmasked that night over his hard-earned supper in a smoky <i>trattoria</i>. + As the evening went on the crowd thickened and became a motley press of + shouting, pushing, scrambling, everything but squabbling, revellers. The + rain of missiles ceased at dusk, but the universal deposit of chalk and + flour was trampled into a cloud made lurid by flaring pyramids of the + gas-lamps that replaced for the occasion the stingy Roman luminaries. + Early in the evening came off the classic exhibition of the <i>moccoletti</i>, + which I but half saw, like a languid reporter resigned beforehand to be + cashiered for want of enterprise. From the mouth of a side-street, over a + thousand heads, I caught a huge slow-moving illuminated car, from which + blue-lights and rockets and Roman candles were in course of discharge, + meeting all in a dim fuliginous glare far above the house-tops. It was + like a glimpse of some public orgy in ancient Babylon. In the small hours + of the morning, walking homeward from a private entertainment, I found Ash + Wednesday still kept at bay. The Corso, flaring with light, smelt like a + circus. Every one was taking friendly liberties with every one else and + using up the dregs of his festive energy in convulsive hootings and + gymnastics. Here and there certain indefatigable spirits, clad all in red + after the manner of devils and leaping furiously about with torches, were + supposed to affright you. But they shared the universal geniality and + bequeathed me no midnight fears as a pretext for keeping Lent, the <i>carnevale + dei preti</i>, as I read in that profanely radical sheet the <i>Capitale</i>. + Of this too I have been having glimpses. Going lately into Santa Francesca + Romana, the picturesque church near the Temple of Peace, I found a feast + for the eyes—a dim crimson-toned light through curtained windows, a + great festoon of tapers round the altar, a bulging girdle of lamps before + the sunken shrine beneath, and a dozen white-robed Dominicans scattered in + the happiest composition on the pavement. It was better than the <i>moccoletti</i>. + </p> + <h3> + 1873. + </h3> + <p> + <a name="link2H_4_0011" id="link2H_4_0011"> + <!-- H2 anchor --> </a> + </p> + <div style="height: 4em;"> + <br /><br /><br /><br /> + </div> + <h2> + ROMAN RIDES + </h2> + <p> + I shall always remember the first I took: out of the Porta del Popolo, to + where the Ponte Molle, whose single arch sustains a weight of historic + tradition, compels the sallow Tiber to flow between its four + great-mannered ecclesiastical statues, over the crest of the hill and + along the old posting-road to Florence. It was mild midwinter, the season + peculiarly of colour on the Roman Campagna; and the light was full of that + mellow purple glow, that tempered intensity, which haunts the + after-visions of those who have known Rome like the memory of some + supremely irresponsible pleasure. An hour away I pulled up and at the edge + of a meadow gazed away for some time into remoter distances. Then and + there, it seemed to me, I measured the deep delight of knowing the + Campagna. But I saw more things in it than I can easily tell. The country + rolled away around me into slopes and dells of long-drawn grace, chequered + with purple and blue and blooming brown. The lights and shadows were at + play on the Sabine Mountains—an alternation of tones so exquisite as + to be conveyed only by some fantastic comparison to sapphire and amber. In + the foreground a contadino in his cloak and peaked hat jogged solitary on + his ass; and here and there in the distance, among blue undulations, some + white village, some grey tower, helped deliciously to make the picture the + typical “Italian landscape” of old-fashioned art. It was so bright and yet + so sad, so still and yet so charged, to the supersensuous ear, with the + murmur of an extinguished life, that you could only say it was intensely + and adorably strange, could only impute to the whole overarched scene an + unsurpassed secret for bringing tears of appreciation to no matter how + ignorant—archaeologically ignorant—eyes. To ride once, in + these conditions, is of course to ride again and to allot to the Campagna + a generous share of the time one spends in Rome. + </p> + <p> + It is a pleasure that doubles one’s horizon, and one can scarcely say + whether it enlarges or limits one’s impression of the city proper. It + certainly makes St. Peter’s seem a trifle smaller and blunts the edge of + one’s curiosity in the Forum. It must be the effect of the experience, at + all extended, that when you think of Rome afterwards you will think still + respectfully and regretfully enough of the Vatican and the Pincio, the + streets and the picture-making street life; but will even more wonder, + with an irrepressible contraction of the heart, when again you shall feel + yourself bounding over the flower-smothered turf, or pass from one framed + picture to another beside the open arches of the crumbling aqueducts. You + look back at the City so often from some grassy hill-top—hugely + compact within its walls, with St. Peter’s overtopping all things and yet + seeming small, and the vast girdle of marsh and meadow receding on all + sides to the mountains and the sea—that you come to remember it at + last as hardly more than a respectable parenthesis in a great sweep of + generalisation. Within the walls, on the other hand, you think of your + intended ride as the most romantic of all your possibilities; of the + Campagna generally as an illimitable experience. One’s rides certainly + give Rome an inordinate scope for the reflective—by which I suppose + I mean after all the aesthetic and the “esoteric”—life. To dwell in + a city which, much as you grumble at it, is after all very fairly a modern + city; with crowds and shops and theatres and cafes and balls and + receptions and dinner-parties, and all the modern confusion of social + pleasures and pains; to have at your door the good and evil of it all; and + yet to be able in half an hour to gallop away and leave it a hundred + miles, a hundred years, behind, and to look at the tufted broom glowing on + a lonely tower-top in the still blue air, and the pale pink asphodels + trembling none the less for the stillness, and the shaggy-legged shepherds + leaning on their sticks in motionless brotherhood with the heaps of ruin, + and the scrambling goats and staggering little kids treading out wild + desert smells from the top of hollow-sounding mounds; and then to come + back through one of the great gates and a couple of hours later find + yourself in the “world,” dressed, introduced, entertained, inquiring, + talking about “Middlemarch” to a young English lady or listening to + Neapolitan songs from a gentleman in a very low-cut shirt—all this + is to lead in a manner a double life and to gather from the hurrying hours + more impressions than a mind of modest capacity quite knows how to dispose + of. + </p> + <p> + I touched lately upon this theme with a friend who, I fancied, would + understand me, and who immediately assured me that he had just spent a day + that this mingled diversity of sensation made to the days one spends + elsewhere what an uncommonly good novel may be to the daily paper. “There + was an air of idleness about it, if you will,” he said, “and it was + certainly pleasant enough to have been wrong. Perhaps, being after all + unused to long stretches of dissipation, this was why I had a half-feeling + that I was reading an odd chapter in the history of a person very much + more of a <i>héros de roman</i> than myself.” Then he proceeded to relate + how he had taken a long ride with a lady whom he extremely admired. “We + turned off from the Tor di Quinto Road to that castellated farm-house you + know of—once a Ghibelline fortress—whither Claude Lorraine + used to come to paint pictures of which the surrounding landscape is still + so artistically, so compositionally, suggestive. We went into the inner + court, a cloister almost, with the carven capitals of its loggia columns, + and looked at a handsome child swinging shyly against the half-opened door + of a room whose impenetrable shadow, behind her, made her, as it were, a + sketch in bituminous water-colours. We talked with the farmer, a handsome, + pale, fever-tainted fellow with a well-to-do air that didn’t in the least + deter his affability from a turn compatible with the acceptance of small + coin; and then we galloped away and away over the meadows which stretch + with hardly a break to Veii. The day was strangely delicious, with a cool + grey sky and just a touch of moisture in the air stirred by our rapid + motion. The Campagna, in the colourless even light, was more solemn and + romantic than ever; and a ragged shepherd, driving a meagre straggling + flock, whom we stopped to ask our way of, was a perfect type of pastoral, + weather-beaten misery. He was precisely the shepherd for the foreground of + a scratchy etching. There were faint odours of spring in the air, and the + grass here and there was streaked with great patches of daisies; but it + was spring with a foreknowledge of autumn, a day to be enjoyed with a + substrain of sadness, the foreboding of regret, a day somehow to make one + feel as if one had seen and felt a great deal—quite, as I say, like + a <i>heros de roman</i>. Touching such characters, it was the illustrious + Pelham, I think, who, on being asked if he rode, replied that he left + those violent exercises to the ladies. But under such a sky, in such an + air, over acres of daisied turf, a long, long gallop is certainly a + supersubtle joy. The elastic bound of your horse is the poetry of motion; + and if you are so happy as to add to it not the prose of companionship + riding comes almost to affect you as a spiritual exercise. My gallop, at + any rate,” said my friend, “threw me into a mood which gave an + extraordinary zest to the rest of the day.” He was to go to a dinner-party + at a villa on the edge of Rome, and Madam X—, who was also going, + called for him in her carriage. “It was a long drive,” he went on, + “through the Forum, past the Colosseum. She told me a long story about a + most interesting person. Toward the end my eyes caught through the + carriage window a slab of rugged sculptures. We were passing under the + Arch of Constantine. In the hall pavement of the villa is a rare antique + mosaic—one of the largest and most perfect; the ladies on their way + to the drawing-room trail over it the flounces of Worth. We drove home + late, and there’s my day.” + </p> + <p> + On your exit from most of the gates of Rome you have generally + half-an-hour’s progress through winding lanes, many of which are hardly + less charming than the open meadows. On foot the walls and high hedges + would vex you and spoil your walk; but in the saddle you generally overtop + them, to an endless peopling of the minor vision. Yet a Roman wall in the + springtime is for that matter almost as interesting as anything it + conceals. Crumbling grain by grain, coloured and mottled to a hundred + tones by sun and storm, with its rugged structure of brick extruding + through its coarse complexion of peeling stucco, its creeping lacework of + wandering ivy starred with miniature violets, and its wild fringe of + stouter flowers against the sky—it is as little as possible a blank + partition; it is practically a luxury of landscape. At the moment at which + I write, in mid-April, all the ledges and cornices are wreathed with + flaming poppies, nodding there as if they knew so well what faded greys + and yellows are an offset to their scarlet. But the best point in a + dilapidated enclosing surface of vineyard or villa is of course the + gateway, lifting its great arch of cheap rococo scroll-work, its balls and + shields and mossy dish-covers—as they always perversely figure to me—and + flanked with its dusky cypresses. I never pass one without taking out my + mental sketch-book and jotting it down as a vignette in the insubstantial + record of my ride. They are as sad and dreary as if they led to the moated + grange where Mariana waited in desperation for something to happen; and + it’s easy to take the usual inscription over the porch as a recommendation + to those who enter to renounce all hope of anything but a glass of more or + less agreeably acrid <i>vino romano</i>. For what you chiefly see over the + walls and at the end of the straight short avenue of rusty cypresses are + the appurtenances of a <i>vigna</i>—a couple of acres of little + upright sticks blackening in the sun, and a vast sallow-faced, scantily + windowed mansion, whose expression denotes little of the life of the mind + beyond what goes to the driving of a hard bargain over the tasted + hogsheads. If Mariana is there she certainly has no pile of old magazines + to beguile her leisure. The life of the mind, if the term be in any + application here not ridiculous, appears to any asker of curious + questions, as he wanders about Rome, the very thinnest deposit of the + past. Within the rococo gateway, which itself has a vaguely esthetic + self-consciousness, at the end of the cypress walk, you will probably see + a mythological group in rusty marble—a Cupid and Psyche, a Venus and + Paris, an Apollo and Daphne—the relic of an age when a Roman + proprietor thought it fine to patronise the arts. But I imagine you are + safe in supposing it to constitute the only allusion savouring of culture + that has been made on the premises for three or four generations. + </p> + <p> + There is a franker cheerfulness—though certainly a proper amount of + that forlornness which lurks about every object to which the Campagna + forms a background—in the primitive little taverns where, on the + homeward stretch, in the waning light, you are often glad to rein up and + demand a bottle of their best. Their best and their worst are indeed the + same, though with a shifting price, and plain <i>vino bianco</i> or <i>vino + rosso</i> (rarely both) is the sole article of refreshment in which they + deal. There is a ragged bush over the door, and within, under a dusky + vault, on crooked cobble-stones, sit half-a-dozen contadini in their + indigo jackets and goatskin breeches and with their elbows on the table. + There is generally a rabble of infantile beggars at the door, pretty + enough in their dusty rags, with their fine eyes and intense Italian + smile, to make you forget your private vow of doing your individual best I + to make these people, whom you like so much, unlearn their old vices. Was + Porta Pia bombarded three years ago that Peppino should still grow up to + whine for a copper? But the Italian shells had no direct message for + Peppino’s stomach—and you are going to a dinner-party at a villa. So + Peppino “points” an instant for the copper in the dust and grows up a + Roman beggar. The whole little place represents the most primitive form of + hostelry; but along any of the roads leading out of the city you may find + establishments of a higher type, with Garibaldi, superbly mounted and + foreshortened, painted on the wall, or a lady in a low-necked dress + opening a fictive lattice with irresistible hospitality, and a yard with + the classic vine-wreathed arbour casting thin shadows upon benches and + tables draped and cushioned with the white dust from which the highways + from the gates borrow most of their local colour. None the less, I say, + you avoid the highroads, and, if you are a person of taste, don’t grumble + at the occasional need of following the walls of the city. City walls, to + a properly constituted American, can never be an object of indifference; + and it is emphatically “no end of a sensation” to pace in the shadow of + this massive cincture of Rome. I have found myself, as I skirted its base, + talking of trivial things, but never without a sudden reflection on the + deplorable impermanence of first impressions. A twelvemonth ago the raw + plank fences of a Boston suburb, inscribed with the virtues of healing + drugs, bristled along my horizon: now I glance with idle eyes at a + compacted antiquity in which a more learned sense may read portentous + dates and signs—Servius, Aurelius, Honorius. But even to idle eyes + the prodigious, the continuous thing bristles with eloquent passages. In + some places, where the huge brickwork is black with time and certain + strange square towers look down at you with still blue eyes, the Roman sky + peering through lidless loopholes, and there is nothing but white dust in + the road and solitude in the air, I might take myself for a wandering + Tartar touching on the confines of the Celestial Empire. The wall of China + must have very much such a gaunt robustness. The colour of the Roman + ramparts is everywhere fine, and their rugged patchwork has been subdued + by time and weather into a mellow harmony that the brush only asks to + catch up. On the northern side of the city, behind the Vatican, St. + Peter’s and the Trastevere, I have seen them glowing in the late afternoon + with the tones of ancient bronze and rusty gold. Here at various points + they are embossed with the Papal insignia, the tiara with its flying bands + and crossed keys; to the high style of which the grace that attaches to + almost any lost cause—even if not quite the “tender” grace of a day + that is dead—considerably adds a style. With the dome of St. Peter’s + resting on their cornice and the hugely clustered architecture of the + Vatican rising from them as from a terrace, they seem indeed the valid + bulwark of an ecclesiastical city. Vain bulwark, alas! sighs the + sentimental tourist, fresh from the meagre entertainment of this latter + Holy Week. But he may find monumental consolation in this neighbourhood at + a source where, as I pass, I never fail to apply for it. At half-an-hour’s + walk beyond Porta San Pancrazio, beneath the wall of the Villa Doria, is a + delightfully pompous ecclesiastical gateway of the seventeenth century, + erected by Paul V to commemorate his restoration of the aqueducts through + which the stream bearing his name flows towards the fine florid portico + protecting its clear-sheeted outgush on the crest of the Janiculan. It + arches across the road in the most ornamental manner of the period, and + one can hardly pause before it without seeming to assist at a ten minutes’ + revival of old Italy—without feeling as if one were in a cocked hat + and sword and were coming up to Rome, in another mood than Luther’s, with + a letter of recommendation to the mistress of a cardinal. + </p> + <p> + The Campagna differs greatly on the two sides of the Tiber; and it is hard + to say which, for the rider, has the greater charm. The half-dozen rides + you may take from Porta San Giovanni possess the perfection of traditional + Roman interest and lead you through a far-strewn wilderness of ruins—a + scattered maze of tombs and towers and nameless fragments of antique + masonry. The landscape here has two great features; close before you on + one side is the long, gentle swell of the Alban Hills, deeply, + fantastically blue in most weathers, and marbled with the vague white + masses of their scattered towns and villas. It would be difficult to draw + the hard figure to a softer curve than that with which the heights sweep + from Albano to the plain; this a perfect example of the classic beauty of + line in the Italian landscape—that beauty which, when it fills the + background of a picture, makes us look in the foreground for a broken + column couched upon flowers and a shepherd piping to dancing nymphs. At + your side, constantly, you have the broken line of the Claudian Aqueduct, + carrying its broad arches far away into the plain. The meadows along which + it lies are not the smoothest in the world for a gallop, but there is no + pleasure greater than to wander near it. It stands knee-deep in the + flower-strewn grass, and its rugged piers are hung with ivy as the columns + of a church are draped for a festa. Every archway is a picture, massively + framed, of the distance beyond—of the snow-tipped Sabines and lonely + Soracte. As the spring advances the whole Campagna smiles and waves with + flowers; but I think they are nowhere more rank and lovely than in the + shifting shadow of the aqueducts, where they muffle the feet of the + columns and smother the half-dozen brooks which wander in and out like + silver meshes between the legs of a file of giants. They make a niche for + themselves too in every crevice and tremble on the vault of the empty + conduits. The ivy hereabouts in the springtime is peculiarly brilliant and + delicate; and though it cloaks and muffles these Roman fragments far less + closely than the castles and abbeys of England it hangs with the light + elegance of all Italian vegetation. It is partly doubtless because their + mighty outlines are still unsoftened that the aqueducts are so impressive. + They seem the very source of the solitude in which they stand; they look + like architectural spectres and loom through the light mists of their + grassy desert, as you recede along the line, with the same insubstantial + vastness as if they rose out of Egyptian sands. It is a great + neighbourhood of ruins, many of which, it must be confessed, you have + applauded in many an album. But station a peasant with sheepskin coat and + bandaged legs in the shadow of a tomb or tower best known to drawing-room + art, and scatter a dozen goats on the mound above him, and the picture has + a charm which has not yet been sketched away. + </p> + <p> + The other quarter of the Campagna has wider fields and smoother turf and + perhaps a greater number of delightful rides; the earth is sounder, and + there are fewer pitfalls and ditches. The land for the most part lies + higher and catches more wind, and the grass is here and there for great + stretches as smooth and level as a carpet. You have no Alban Mountains + before you, but you have in the distance the waving ridge of the nearer + Apennines, and west of them, along the course of the Tiber, the long + seaward level of deep-coloured fields, deepening as they recede to the + blue and purple of the sea itself. Beyond them, of a very clear day, you + may see the glitter of the Mediterranean. These are the occasions perhaps + to remember most fondly, for they lead you to enchanting nooks, and the + landscape has details of the highest refinement. Indeed when my sense + reverts to the lingering impressions of so blest a time, it seems a fool’s + errand to have attempted to express them, and a waste of words to do more + than recommend the reader to go citywards at twilight of the end of March, + making for Porta Cavalleggieri, and note what he sees. At this hour the + Campagna is to the last point its melancholy self, and I remember roadside + “effects” of a strange and intense suggestiveness. Certain mean, + mouldering villas behind grass-grown courts have an indefinably sinister + look; there was one in especial of which it was impossible not to argue + that a despairing creature must have once committed suicide there, behind + bolted door and barred window, and that no one has since had the pluck to + go in and see why he never came out. Every wayside mark of manners, of + history, every stamp of the past in the country about Rome, touches my + sense to a thrill, and I may thus exaggerate the appeal of very common + things. This is the more likely because the appeal seems ever to rise out + of heaven knows what depths of ancient trouble. To delight in the aspects + of <i>sentient</i> ruin might appear a heartless pastime, and the + pleasure, I confess, shows the note of perversity. The sombre and the hard + are as common an influence from southern things as the soft and the + bright, I think; sadness rarely fails to assault a northern observer when + he misses what he takes for comfort. Beauty is no compensation for the + loss, only making it more poignant. Enough beauty of climate hangs over + these Roman cottages and farm-houses—beauty of light, of atmosphere + and of vegetation; but their charm for the maker-out of the stories in + things is the way the golden air shows off their desolation. Man lives + more with Nature in Italy than in New or than in Old England; she does + more work for him and gives him more holidays than in our short-summered + climes, and his home is therefore much more bare of devices for helping + him to do without her, forget her and forgive her. These reflections are + perhaps the source of the character you find in a moss-coated stone + stairway climbing outside of a wall; in a queer inner court, befouled with + rubbish and drearily bare of convenience; in an ancient quaintly carven + well, worked with infinite labour from an overhanging window; in an arbour + of time-twisted vines under which you may sit with your feet in the dirt + and remember as a dim fable that there are races for which the type of + domestic allurement is the parlour hearth-rug. For reasons apparent or + otherwise these things amuse me beyond expression, and I am never weary of + staring into gateways, of lingering by dreary, shabby, half-barbaric + farm-yards, of feasting a foolish gaze on sun-cracked plaster and unctuous + indoor shadows. I mustn’t forget, however, that it’s not for wayside + effects that one rides away behind St. Peter’s, but for the strong sense + of wandering over boundless space, of seeing great classic lines of + landscape, of watching them dispose themselves into pictures so full of + “style” that you can think of no painter who deserves to have you admit + that they suggest him—hardly knowing whether it is better pleasure + to gallop far and drink deep of air and grassy distance and the whole + delicious opportunity, or to walk and pause and linger, and try and grasp + some ineffaceable memory of sky and colour and outline. Your pace can + hardly help falling into a contemplative measure at the time, everywhere + so wonderful, but in Rome so persuasively divine, when the winter begins + palpably to soften and quicken. Far out on the Campagna, early in + February, you feel the first vague earthly emanations, which in a few + weeks come wandering into the heart of the city and throbbing through the + close, dark streets. Springtime in Rome is an immensely poetic affair; but + you must stand often far out in the ancient waste, between grass and sky, + to measure its deep, full, steadily accelerated rhythm. The winter has an + incontestable beauty, and is pre-eminently the time of colour—the + time when it is no affectation, but homely verity, to talk about the + “purple” tone of the atmosphere. As February comes and goes your purple is + streaked with green and the rich, dark bloom of the distance begins to + lose its intensity. But your loss is made up by other gains; none more + precious than that inestimable gain to the ear—the disembodied voice + of the lark. It comes with the early flowers, the white narcissus and the + cyclamen, the half-buried violets and the pale anemones, and makes the + whole atmosphere ring like a vault of tinkling glass. You never see the + source of the sound, and are utterly unable to localise his note, which + seems to come from everywhere at once, to be some hundred-throated voice + of the air. Sometimes you fancy you just catch him, a mere vague spot + against the blue, an intenser throb in the universal pulsation of light. + As the weeks go on the flowers multiply and the deep blues and purples of + the hills, turning to azure and violet, creep higher toward the narrowing + snow-line of the Sabines. The temperature rises, the first hour of your + ride you feel the heat, but you beguile it with brushing the + hawthorn-blossoms as you pass along the hedges, and catching at the wild + rose and honeysuckle; and when you get into the meadows there is stir + enough in the air to lighten the dead weight of the sun. The Roman air, + however, is not a tonic medicine, and it seldom suffers exercise to be all + exhilarating. It has always seemed to me indeed part of the charm of the + latter that your keenest consciousness is haunted with a vague languor. + Occasionally when the sirocco blows that sensation becomes strange and + exquisite. Then, under the grey sky, before the dim distances which the + south-wind mostly brings with it, you seem to ride forth into a world from + which all hope has departed and in which, in spite of the flowers that + make your horse’s footfalls soundless, nothing is left save some queer + probability that your imagination is unable to measure, but from which it + hardly shrinks. This quality in the Roman element may now and then “relax” + you almost to ecstasy; but a season of sirocco would be an overdose of + morbid pleasure. You may at any rate best feel the peculiar beauty of the + Campagna on those mild days of winter when the mere quality and temper of + the sunshine suffice to move the landscape to joy, and you pause on the + brown grass in the sunny stillness and, by listening long enough, almost + fancy you hear the shrill of the midsummer cricket. It is detail and + ornament that vary from month to month, from week to week even, and make + your returns to the same places a constant feast of unexpectedness; but + the great essential features of the prospect preserve throughout the year + the same impressive serenity. Soracte, be it January or May, rises from + its blue horizon like an island from the sea and with an elegance of + contour which no mood of the year can deepen or diminish. You know it + well; you have seen it often in the mellow backgrounds of Claude; and it + has such an irresistibly classic, academic air that while you look at it + you begin to take your saddle for a faded old arm-chair in a palace + gallery. A month’s rides in different directions will show you a dozen + prime Claudes. After I had seen them all I went piously to the Doria + gallery to refresh my memory of its two famous specimens and to enjoy to + the utmost their delightful air of reference to something that had become + a part of my personal experience. Delightful it certainly is to feel the + common element in one’s own sensibility and those of a genius whom that + element has helped to do great things. Claude must have haunted the very + places of one’s personal preference and adjusted their divine undulations + to his splendid scheme of romance, his view of the poetry of life. He was + familiar with aspects in which there wasn’t a single uncompromising line. + I saw a few days ago a small finished sketch from his hand, in the + possession of an American artist, which was almost startling in its clear + reflection of forms unaltered by the two centuries that have dimmed and + cracked the paint and canvas. + </p> + <p> + This unbroken continuity of the impressions I have tried to indicate is an + excellent example of the intellectual background of all enjoyment in Rome. + It effectually prevents pleasure from becoming vulgar, for your sensation + rarely begins and ends with itself; it reverberates—it recalls, + commemorates, resuscitates something else. At least half the merit of + everything you enjoy must be that it suits you absolutely; but the larger + half here is generally that it has suited some one else and that you can + never flatter yourself you have discovered it. It has been addressed to + some use a million miles out of your range, and has had great adventures + before ever condescending to please you. It was in admission of this truth + that my discriminating friend who showed me the Claudes found it + impossible to designate a certain delightful region which you enter at the + end of an hour’s riding from Porta Cavalleggieri as anything but Arcadia. + The exquisite correspondence of the term in this case altogether revived + its faded bloom; here veritably the oaten pipe must have stirred the + windless air and the satyrs have laughed among the brookside reeds. Three + or four long grassy dells stretch away in a chain between low hills over + which delicate trees are so discreetly scattered that each one is a + resting place for a shepherd. The elements of the scene are simple enough, + but the composition has extraordinary refinement. By one of those happy + chances which keep observation in Italy always in her best humour a + shepherd had thrown himself down under one of the trees in the very + attitude of Meliboeus. He had been washing his feet, I suppose, in the + neighbouring brook, and had found it pleasant afterwards to roll his short + breeches well up on his thighs. Lying thus in the shade, on his elbow, + with his naked legs stretched out on the turf and his soft peaked hat over + his long hair crushed back like the veritable bonnet of Arcady, he was + exactly the figure of the background of this happy valley. The poor + fellow, lying there in rustic weariness and ignorance, little fancied that + he was a symbol of old-world meanings to new-world eyes. + </p> + <p> + Such eyes may find as great a store of picturesque meanings in the + cork-woods of Monte Mario, tenderly loved of all equestrians. These are + less severely pastoral than our Arcadia, and you might more properly lodge + there a damosel of Ariosto than a nymph of Theocritus. Among them is + strewn a lovely wilderness of flowers and shrubs, and the whole place has + such a charming woodland air, that, casting about me the other day for a + compliment, I declared that it reminded me of New Hampshire. My compliment + had a double edge, and I had no sooner uttered it than I smiled—or + sighed—to perceive in all the undiscriminated botany about me the + wealth of detail, the idle elegance and grace of Italy alone, the natural + stamp of the land which has the singular privilege of making one love her + unsanctified beauty all but as well as those features of one’s own country + toward which nature’s small allowance doubles that of one’s own affection. + For this effect of casting a spell no rides have more value than those you + take in Villa Doria or Villa Borghese; or don’t take, possibly, if you + prefer to reserve these particular regions—the latter in especial—for + your walking hours. People do ride, however, in both villas, which deserve + honourable mention in this regard. Villa Doria, with its noble site, its + splendid views, its great groups of stone-pines, so clustered and yet so + individual, its lawns and flowers and fountains, its altogether princely + disposition, is a place where one may pace, well mounted, of a brilliant + day, with an agreeable sense of its being rather a more elegant pastime to + balance in one’s stirrups than to trudge on even the smoothest gravel. But + at Villa Borghese the walkers have the best of it; for they are free of + those adorable outlying corners and bosky byways which the rumble of + barouches never reaches. In March the place becomes a perfect epitome of + the spring. You cease to care much for the melancholy greenness of the + disfeatured statues which has been your chief winter’s intimation of + verdure; and before you are quite conscious of the tender streaks and + patches in the great quaint grassy arena round which the Propaganda + students, in their long skirts, wander slowly, like dusky seraphs + revolving the gossip of Paradise, you spy the brave little violets + uncapping their azure brows beneath the high-stemmed pines. One’s walks + here would take us too far, and one’s pauses detain us too long, when in + the quiet parts under the wall one comes across a group of charming small + school-boys in full-dress suits and white cravats, shouting over their + play in clear Italian, while a grave young priest, beneath a tree, watches + them over the top of his book. It sounds like nothing, but the force + behind it and the frame round it, the setting, the air, the chord struck, + make it a hundred wonderful things. + </p> + <h3> + 1873. + </h3> + <p> + <a name="link2H_4_0012" id="link2H_4_0012"> + <!-- H2 anchor --> </a> + </p> + <div style="height: 4em;"> + <br /><br /><br /><br /> + </div> + <h2> + ROMAN NEIGHBOURHOODS + </h2> + <p> + I made a note after my first stroll at Albano to the effect that I had + been talking of the “picturesque” all my life, but that now for a change I + beheld it. I had been looking all winter across the Campagna at the + free-flowing outline of the Alban Mount, with its half-dozen towns shining + on its purple side even as vague sun-spots in the shadow of a cloud, and + thinking it simply an agreeable incident in the varied background of Rome. + But now that during the last few days I have been treating it as a + foreground, have been suffering St. Peter’s to play the part of a small + mountain on the horizon, with the Campagna swimming mistily through the + ambiguous lights and shadows of the interval, I find the interest as great + as in the best of the by-play of Rome. The walk I speak of was just out of + the village, to the south, toward the neighbouring town of L’Ariccia, + neighbouring these twenty years, since the Pope (the late Pope, I was on + the point of calling him) threw his superb viaduct across the deep ravine + which divides it from Albano. At the risk of seeming to fantasticate I + confess that the Pope’s having built the viaduct—in this very recent + antiquity—made me linger there in a pensive posture and marvel at + the march of history and at Pius the Ninth’s beginning already to profit + by the sentimental allowances we make to vanished powers. An ardent <i>nero</i> + then would have had his own way with me and obtained a frank admission + that the Pope was indeed a father to his people. Far down into the + charming valley which slopes out of the ancestral woods of the Chigis into + the level Campagna winds the steep stone-paved road at the bottom of + which, in the good old days, tourists in no great hurry saw the mules and + oxen tackled to their carriage for the opposite ascent. And indeed even an + impatient tourist might have been content to lounge back in his jolting + chaise and look out at the mouldy foundations of the little city plunging + into the verdurous flank of the gorge. Questioned, as a cherisher of + quaintness, as to the best “bit” hereabouts, I should certainly name the + way in which the crumbling black houses of these ponderous villages plant + their weary feet on the flowery edges of all the steepest chasms. Before + you enter one of them you invariably find yourself lingering outside its + pretentious old gateway to see it clutched and stitched to the stony + hillside by this rank embroidery of the wildest and bravest things that + grow. Just at this moment nothing is prettier than the contrast between + their dusky ruggedness and the tender, the yellow and pink and violet + fringe of that mantle. All this you may observe from the viaduct at the + Ariccia; but you must wander below to feel the full force of the eloquence + of our imaginary <i>papalino</i>. The pillars and arches of pale grey + peperino arise in huge tiers with a magnificent spring and solidity. The + older Romans built no better; and the work has a deceptive air of being + one of their sturdy bequests which help one to drop another sigh over the + antecedents the Italians of to-day are so eager to repudiate. Will those + <i>they</i> give their descendants be as good? + </p> + <p> + At the Ariccia, in any case, I found a little square with a couple of + mossy fountains, occupied on one side by a vast dusky-faced Palazzo Chigi + and on the other by a goodly church with an imposing dome. The dome, + within, covers the whole edifice and is adorned with some extremely + elegant stucco-work of the seventeenth century. It gave a great value to + this fine old decoration that preparations were going forward for a local + festival and that the village carpenter was hanging certain mouldy strips + of crimson damask against the piers of the vaults. The damask might have + been of the seventeenth century too, and a group of peasant-women were + seeing it unfurled with evident awe. I regarded it myself with interest—it + seemed so the tattered remnant of a fashion that had gone out for ever. I + thought again of the poor disinherited Pope, wondering whether, when such + venerable frippery will no longer bear the carpenter’s nails, any more + will be provided. It was hard to fancy anything but shreds and patches in + that musty tabernacle. Wherever you go in Italy you receive some such + intimation as this of the shrunken proportions of Catholicism, and every + church I have glanced into on my walks hereabouts has given me an almost + pitying sense of it. One finds one’s self at last—without fatuity, I + hope—feeling sorry for the solitude of the remaining faithful. It’s + as if the churches had been made so for the world, in its social sense, + and the world had so irrevocably moved away. They are in size out of all + modern proportion to the local needs, and the only thing at all alive in + the melancholy waste they collectively form is the smell of stale incense. + There are pictures on all the altars by respectable third-rate painters; + pictures which I suppose once were ordered and paid for and criticised by + worshippers who united taste with piety. At Genzano, beyond the Ariccia, + rises on the grey village street a pompous Renaissance temple whose + imposing nave and aisles would contain the population of a capital. But + where is the <i>taste</i> of the Ariccia and Genzano? Where are the choice + spirits for whom Antonio Raggi modelled the garlands of his dome and a + hundred clever craftsmen imitated Guido and Caravaggio? Here and there, + from the pavement, as you pass, a dusky crone interlards her devotions + with more profane importunities, or a grizzled peasant on rusty-jointed + knees, tilted forward with his elbows on a bench, reveals the dimensions + of the patch in his blue breeches. But where is the connecting link + between Guido and Caravaggio and those poor souls for whom an undoubted + original is only a something behind a row of candlesticks, of no very + clear meaning save that you must bow to it? You find a vague memory of it + at best in the useless grandeurs about you, and you seem to be looking at + a structure of which the stubborn earth-scented foundations alone remain, + with the carved and painted shell that bends above them, while the central + substance has utterly crumbled away. + </p> + <p> + I shall seem to have adopted a more meditative pace than befits a brisk + constitutional if I say that I also fell a-thinking before the shabby + façade of the old Chigi Palace. But it seemed somehow in its grey + forlornness to respond to the sadly superannuated expression of the + opposite church; and indeed in any condition what self-respecting + cherisher of quaintness can forbear to do a little romancing in the shadow + of a provincial palazzo? On the face of the matter, I know, there is often + no very salient peg to hang a romance on. A sort of dusky blankness + invests the establishment, which has often a rather imbecile old age. But + a hundred brooding secrets lurk in this inexpressive mask, and the Chigi + Palace did duty for me in the suggestive twilight as the most haunted of + houses. Its basement walls sloped outward like the beginning of a pyramid, + and its lower windows were covered with massive iron cages. Within the + doorway, across the court, I saw the pale glimmer of flowers on a terrace, + and I made much, for the effect of the roof, of a great covered loggia or + belvedere with a dozen window-panes missing or mended with paper. Nothing + gives one a stronger impression of old manners than an ancestral palace + towering in this haughty fashion over a shabby little town; you hardly + stretch a point when you call it an impression of feudalism. The scene may + pass for feudal to American eyes, for which a hundred windows on a facade + mean nothing more exclusive than a hotel kept (at the most invidious) on + the European plan. The mouldy grey houses on the steep crooked street, + with their black cavernous archways pervaded by bad smells, by the braying + of asses and by human intonations hardly more musical, the haggard and + tattered peasantry staring at you with hungry-heavy eyes, the + brutish-looking monks (there are still enough to point a moral), the + soldiers, the mounted constables, the dirt, the dreariness, the misery, + and the dark over-grown palace frowning over it all from barred window and + guarded gateway—what more than all this do we dimly descry in a + mental image of the dark ages? For all his desire to keep the peace with + the vivid image of things if it be only vivid enough, the votary of this + ideal may well occasionally turn over such values with the wonder of what + one takes them as paying for. They pay sometimes for such sorry “facts of + life.” At Genzano, out of the very midst of the village squalor, rises the + Palazzo Cesarini, separated from its gardens by a dirty lane. Between + peasant and prince, the contact is unbroken, and one would suppose Italian + good-nature sorely taxed by their mutual allowances; that the prince in + especial must cultivate a firm impervious shell. There are no comfortable + townsfolk about him to remind him of the blessings of a happy mediocrity + of fortune. When he looks out of his window he sees a battered old peasant + against a sunny wall sawing off his dinner from a hunch of black bread. + </p> + <p> + I must confess, however, that “feudal” as it amused me to find the little + piazza of the Ariccia, it appeared to threaten in no manner an exasperated + rising. On the contrary, the afternoon being cool, many of the villagers + were contentedly muffled in those ancient cloaks, lined with green baize, + which, when tossed over the shoulder and surmounted with a peaked hat, + form one of the few lingering remnants of “costume” in Italy; others were + tossing wooden balls light-heartedly enough on the grass outside the town. + The egress on this side is under a great stone archway thrown out from the + palace and surmounted with the family arms. Nothing could better confirm + your theory that the townsfolk are groaning serfs. The road leads away + through the woods, like many of the roads hereabouts, among trees less + remarkable for their size than for their picturesque contortions and + posturings. The woods, at the moment at which I write, are full of the raw + green light of early spring, a <i>jour</i> vastly becoming to the various + complexions of the wild flowers that cover the waysides. I have never seen + these untended parterres in such lovely exuberance; the sturdiest + pedestrian becomes a lingering idler if he allows them to catch his eye. + The pale purple cyclamen, with its hood thrown back, stands up in masses + as dense as tulip-beds; and here and there in the duskier places great + sheets of forget-me-not seem to exhale a faint blue mist. These are the + commonest plants; there are dozens more I know no name for—a rich + profusion in especial of a beautiful five-petalled flower whose white + texture is pencilled with hair-strokes certain fair copyists I know of + would have to hold their breath to imitate. An Italian oak has neither the + girth nor the height of its English brothers, but it contrives in + proportion to be perhaps even more effective. It crooks its back and + twists its arms and clinches its hundred fists with the queerest + extravagance, and wrinkles its bark into strange rugosities from which its + first scattered sprouts of yellow green seem to break out like a morbid + fungus. But the tree which has the greatest charm to northern eyes is the + cold grey-green ilex, whose clear crepuscular shade drops against a Roman + sun a veil impenetrable, yet not oppressive. The ilex has even less colour + than the cypress, but it is much less funereal, and a landscape in which + it is frequent may still be said to smile faintly, though by no means to + laugh. It abounds in old Italian gardens, where the boughs are trimmed and + interlocked into vaulted corridors in which, from point to point, as in + the niches of some dimly frescoed hall, you see mildewed busts stare at + you with a solemnity which the even grey light makes strangely intense. A + humbler relative of the ilex, though it does better things than help + broken-nosed emperors to look dignified, is the olive, which covers many + of the neighbouring hillsides with its little smoky puffs of foliage. A + stroke of composition I never weary of is that long blue stretch of the + Campagna which makes a high horizon and rests on this vaporous base of + olive-tops. A reporter intent upon a simile might liken it to the ocean + seen above the smoke of watch-fires kindled on the strand. + </p> + <p> + To do perfect justice to the wood-walk away from the Ariccia I ought to + touch upon the birds that were singing vespers as I passed. But the reader + would find my rhapsody as poor entertainment as the programme of a concert + he had been unable to attend. I have no more learning about bird-music + than would help me to guess that a dull dissyllabic refrain in the heart + of the wood came from the cuckoo; and when at moments I heard a twitter of + fuller tone, with a more suggestive modulation, I could only <i>hope</i> + it was the nightingale. I have listened for the nightingale more than once + in places so charming that his song would have seemed but the articulate + expression of their beauty, and have never heard much beyond a provoking + snatch or two—a prelude that came to nothing. In spite of a natural + grudge, however, I generously believe him a great artist or at least a + great genius—a creature who despises any prompting short of absolute + inspiration. For the rich, the multitudinous melody around me seemed but + the offering to my ear of the prodigal spirit of tradition. The wood was + ringing with sound because it was twilight, spring and Italy. It was also + because of these good things and various others besides that I relished so + keenly my visit to the Capuchin convent upon which I emerged after + half-an-hour in the wood. It stands above the town on the slope of the + Alban Mount, and its wild garden climbs away behind it and extends its + melancholy influence. Before it is a small stiff avenue of trimmed + live-oaks which conducts you to a grotesque little shrine beneath the + staircase ascending to the church. Just here, if you are apt to grow + timorous at twilight, you may take a very pretty fright; for as you draw + near you catch behind the grating of the shrine the startling semblance of + a gaunt and livid monk. A sickly lamplight plays down upon his face, and + he stares at you from cavernous eyes with a dreadful air of death in life. + Horror of horrors, you murmur, is this a Capuchin penance? You discover of + course in a moment that it is only a Capuchin joke, that the monk is a + pious dummy and his spectral visage a matter of the paint-brush. You + resent his intrusion on the surrounding loveliness; and as you proceed to + demand entertainment at their convent you pronounce the Capuchins very + foolish fellows. This declaration, as I made it, was supported by the + conduct of the simple brother who opened the door of the cloister in + obedience to my knock and, on learning my errand, demurred about admitting + me at so late an hour. If I would return on the morrow morning he’d be + most happy. He broke into a blank grin when I assured him that this was + the very hour of my desire and that the garish morning light would do no + justice to the view. These were mysteries beyond his ken, and it was only + his good-nature (of which he had plenty) and not his imagination that was + moved. So that when, passing through the narrow cloister and out upon the + grassy terrace, I saw another cowled brother standing with folded hands + profiled against the sky, in admirable harmony with the scene, I + questioned his knowing the uses for which he is still most precious. This, + however, was surely too much to ask of him, and it was cause enough for + gratitude that, though he was there before me, he was not a fellow-tourist + with an opera-glass slung over his shoulder. There was support to my idea + of the convent in the expiring light, for the scene was in its way + unsurpassable. Directly below the terrace lay the deep-set circle of the + Alban Lake, shining softly through the light mists of evening. This + beautiful pool—it is hardly more—occupies the crater of a + prehistoric volcano, a perfect cup, shaped and smelted by furnace-fires. + The rim of the cup, rising high and densely wooded round the placid + stone-blue water, has a sort of natural artificiality. The sweep and + contour of the long circle are admirable; never was a lake so charmingly + lodged. It is said to be of extraordinary depth; and though stone-blue + water seems at first a very innocent substitute for boiling lava, it has a + sinister look which betrays its dangerous antecedents. The winds never + reach it and its surface is never ruffled; but its deep-bosomed placidity + seems to cover guilty secrets, and you fancy it in communication with the + capricious and treacherous forces of nature. Its very colour is of a + joyless beauty, a blue as cold and opaque as a solidified sheet of lava. + Streaked and wrinkled by a mysterious motion of its own, it affects the + very type of a legendary pool, and I could easily have believed that I had + only to sit long enough into the evening to see the ghosts of classic + nymphs and naiads cleave its sullen flood and beckon me with irresistible + arms. Is it because its shores are haunted with these vague Pagan + influences that two convents have risen there to purge the atmosphere? + From the Capuchin terrace you look across at the grey Franciscan monastery + of Palazzuola, which is not less romantic certainly than the most + obstinate myth it may have exorcised. The Capuchin garden is a wild tangle + of great trees and shrubs and clinging, trembling vines which in these + hard days are left to take care of themselves; a weedy garden, if there + ever was one, but none the less charming for that, in the deepening dusk, + with its steep grassy vistas struggling away into impenetrable shadow. I + braved the shadow for the sake of climbing upon certain little flat-roofed + crumbling pavilions that rise from the corners of the further wall and + give you a wider and lovelier view of lake and hills and sky. + </p> + <p> + I have perhaps justified to the reader the mild proposition with which I + started—convinced him, that is, that Albano is worth a walk. It may + be a different walk each day, moreover, and not resemble its predecessors + save by its keeping in the shade. “Galleries” the roads are prettily + called, and with the justice that they are vaulted and draped overhead and + hung with an immense succession of pictures. As you follow the few miles + from Genzano to Frascati you have perpetual views of the Campagna framed + by clusters of trees; the vast iridescent expanse of which completes the + charm and comfort of your verdurous dusk. I compared it just now to the + sea, and with a good deal of truth, for it has the same incalculable + lights and shades, the same confusion of glitter and gloom. But I have + seen it at moments—chiefly in the misty twilight—when it + resembled less the waste of waters than something more portentous, the + land itself in fatal dissolution. I could believe the fields to be dimly + surging and tossing and melting away into quicksands, and that one’s very + last chance of an impression was taking place. A view, however, which has + the merit of being really as interesting as it seems, is that of the Lake + of Nemi; which the enterprising traveller hastens to compare with its + sister sheet of Albano. Comparison in this case is particularly odious, + for in order to prefer one lake to the other you have to discover faults + where there are none. Nemi is a smaller circle, but lies in a deeper cup, + and if with no grey Franciscan pile to guard its woody shores, at least, + in the same position, the little high-perched black town to which it gives + its name and which looks across at Genzano on the opposite shore as + Palazzuola regards Castel Gandolfo. The walk from the Ariccia to Genzano + is charming, most of all when it reaches a certain grassy piazza from + which three public avenues stretch away under a double row of stunted and + twisted elms. The Duke Cesarini has a villa at Genzano—I mentioned + it just now—whose gardens overhang the lake; but he has also a + porter in a faded rakish-looking livery who shakes his head at your + proffered franc unless you can reinforce it with a permit countersigned at + Rome. For this annoying complication of dignities he is justly to be + denounced; but I forgive him for the sake of that ancestor who in the + seventeenth century planted this shady walk. Never was a prettier approach + to a town than by these low-roofed light-chequered corridors. Their only + defect is that they prepare you for a town of rather more rustic coquetry + than Genzano exhibits. It has quite the usual allowance, the common + cynicism, of accepted decay, and looks dismally as if its best families + had all fallen into penury together and lost the means of keeping anything + better than donkeys in their great dark, vaulted basements and mending + their broken window-panes with anything better than paper. It was on the + occasion of this drear Genzano that I had a difference of opinion with a + friend who maintained that there was nothing in the same line so pretty in + Europe as a pretty New England village. The proposition seemed to a + cherisher of quaintness on the face of it inacceptable; but calmly + considered it has a measure of truth. I am not fond of chalk-white painted + planks, certainly; I vastly prefer the dusky tones of ancient stucco and + peperino; but I succumb on occasion to the charms of a vine-shaded porch, + of tulips and dahlias glowing in the shade of high-arching elms, of + heavy-scented lilacs bending over a white paling to brush your cheek. + </p> + <p> + “I prefer Siena to Lowell,” said my friend; “but I prefer Farmington to + such a thing as this.” In fact an Italian village is simply a miniature + Italian city, and its various parts imply a town of fifty times the size. + At Genzano are neither dahlias nor lilacs, and no odours but foul ones. + Flowers and other graces are all confined to the high-walled precincts of + Duke Cesarini, to which you must obtain admission twenty miles away. The + houses on the other hand would generally lodge a New England cottage, + porch and garden and high-arching elms included, in one of their cavernous + basements. These vast grey dwellings are all of a fashion denoting more + generous social needs than any they serve nowadays. They speak of better + days and of a fabulous time when Italy was either not shabby or could at + least “carry off” her shabbiness. For what follies are they doing penance? + Through what melancholy stages have their fortunes ebbed? You ask these + questions as you choose the shady side of the long blank street and watch + the hot sun glare upon the dust-coloured walls and pause before the fetid + gloom of open doors. + </p> + <p> + I should like to spare a word for mouldy little Nemi, perched upon a cliff + high above the lake, at the opposite side; but after all, when I had + climbed up into it from the water-side, passing beneath a great arch which + I suppose once topped a gateway, and counted its twenty or thirty apparent + inhabitants peeping at me from black doorways, and looked at the old round + tower at whose base the village clusters, and declared that it was all + queer, queer, desperately queer, I had said all that is worth saying about + it. Nemi has a much better appreciation of its lovely position than + Genzano, where your only view of the lake is from a dunghill behind one of + the houses. At the foot of the round tower is an overhanging terrace, from + which you may feast your eyes on the only freshness they find in these + dusky human hives—the blooming seam, as one may call it, of strong + wild flowers which binds the crumbling walls to the face of the cliff. Of + Rocca di Papa I must say as little, It consorted generally with the + bravery of its name; but the only object I made a note of as I passed + through it on my way to Monte Cavo, which rises directly above it, was a + little black house with a tablet in its face setting forth that Massimo d’ + Azeglio had dwelt there. The story of his sojourn is not the least + attaching episode in his delightful <i>Ricordi</i>. From the summit of + Monte Cavo is a prodigious view, which you may enjoy with whatever + good-nature is left you by the reflection that the modern Passionist + convent occupying this admirable site was erected by the Cardinal of York + (grandson of James II) on the demolished ruins of an immemorial temple of + Jupiter: the last foolish act of a foolish race. For me I confess this + folly spoiled the convent, and the convent all but spoiled the view; for I + kept thinking how fine it would have been to emerge upon the old pillars + and sculptures from the lava pavement of the Via Triumphalis, which + wanders grass-grown and untrodden through the woods. A convent, however, + which nothing spoils is that of Palazzuola, to which I paid my respects on + this same occasion. It rises on a lower spur of Monte Cavo, on the edge, + as we have seen, of the Alban Lake, and though it occupies a classic site, + that of early Alba Longa, it displaced nothing more precious than memories + and legends so dim that the antiquarians are still quarrelling about them. + It has a meagre little church and the usual sham Perugino with a couple of + tinsel crowns for the Madonna and the Infant inserted into the canvas; and + it has also a musty old room hung about with faded portraits and charts + and queer ecclesiastical knick-knacks, which borrowed a mysterious + interest from the sudden assurance of the simple Franciscan brother who + accompanied me that it was the room of the Son of the King of Portugal. + But my peculiar pleasure was the little thick-shaded garden which adjoins + the convent and commands from its massive artificial foundations an + enchanting view of the lake. Part of it is laid out in cabbages and + lettuce, over which a rubicund brother, with his frock tucked up, was + bending with a solicitude which he interrupted to remove his skullcap and + greet me with the unsophisticated sweet-humoured smile that every now and + then in Italy does so much to make you forget the ambiguities of + monachism. The rest is occupied by cypresses and other funereal umbrage, + making a dank circle round an old cracked fountain black with water-moss. + The parapet of the terrace is furnished with good stone seats where you + may lean on your elbows to gaze away a sunny half-hour and, feeling the + general charm of the scene, declare that the best mission of such a + country in the world has been simply to produce, in the way of prospect + and picture, these masterpieces of mildness. Mild here as a dream the + whole attained effect, mild as resignation, mild as one’s thoughts of + another life. Such a session wasn’t surely an experience of the irritable + flesh; it was the deep degustation, on a summer’s day, of something + immortally expressed by a man of genius. + </p> + <p> + {Illustration: CASTEL GANDOLFO.} + </p> + <p> + From Albano you may take your way through several ancient little cities to + Frascati, a rival centre of <i>villeggiatura</i>, the road following the + hillside for a long morning’s walk and passing through alternations of + denser and clearer shade—the dark vaulted alleys of ilex and the + brilliant corridors of fresh-sprouting oak. The Campagna is beneath you + continually, with the sea beyond Ostia receiving the silver arrows of the + sun upon its chased and burnished shield, and mighty Rome, to the north, + lying at no great length in the idle immensity around it. The highway + passes below Castel Gandolfo, which stands perched on an eminence behind a + couple of gateways surmounted with the Papal tiara and twisted cordon; and + I have more than once chosen the roundabout road for the sake of passing + beneath these pompous insignia. Castel Gandolfo is indeed an + ecclesiastical village and under the peculiar protection of the Popes, + whose huge summer-palace rises in the midst of it like a rural Vatican. In + speaking of the road to Frascati I necessarily revert to my first + impressions, gathered on the occasion of the feast of the Annunziata, + which falls on the 25th of March and is celebrated by a peasants’ fair. As + Murray strongly recommends you to visit this spectacle, at which you are + promised a brilliant exhibition of all the costumes of modern Latium, I + took an early train to Frascati and measured, in company with a prodigious + stream of humble pedestrians, the half-hour’s interval to Grotta Ferrata, + where the fair is held. The road winds along the hillside, among the + silver-sprinkled olives and through a charming wood where the ivy seemed + tacked upon the oaks by women’s fingers and the birds were singing to the + late anemones. It was covered with a very jolly crowd of vulgar + pleasure-takers, and the only creatures not in a state of manifest + hilarity were the pitiful little overladen, overbeaten donkeys (who surely + deserve a chapter to themselves in any description of these + neighbourhoods) and the horrible beggars who were thrusting their sores + and stumps at you from under every tree. Every one was shouting, singing, + scrambling, making light of dust and distance and filling the air with + that childlike jollity which the blessed Italian temperament never goes + roundabout to conceal. There is no crowd surely at once so jovial and so + gentle as an Italian crowd, and I doubt if in any other country the + tightly packed third-class car in which I went out from Rome would have + introduced me to so much smiling and so little swearing. Grotta Ferrata is + a very dirty little village, with a number of raw new houses baking on the + hot hillside and nothing to charm the fond gazer but its situation and its + old fortified abbey. After pushing about among the shabby little booths + and declining a number of fabulous bargains in tinware, shoes and pork, I + was glad to retire to a comparatively uninvaded corner of the abbey and + divert myself with the view. This grey ecclesiastical stronghold is a + thoroughly scenic affair, hanging over the hillside on plunging + foundations which bury themselves among the dense olives. It has massive + round towers at the corners and a grass-grown moat, enclosing a church and + a monastery. The fore-court, within the abbatial gateway, now serves as + the public square of the village and in fair-time of course witnesses the + best of the fun. The best of the fun was to be found in certain great + vaults and cellars of the abbey, where wine was in free flow from gigantic + hogsheads. At the exit of these trickling grottos shady trellises of + bamboo and gathered twigs had been improvised, and under them a grand + guzzling proceeded. All of which was so in the fine old style that I was + roughly reminded of the wedding-feast of Gamacho. The banquet was far less + substantial of course, but it had a note as of immemorial manners that + couldn’t fail to suggest romantic analogies to a pilgrim from the land of + no cooks. There was a feast of reason close at hand, however, and I was + careful to visit the famous frescoes of Domenichino in the adjoining + church. It sounds rather brutal perhaps to say that, when I came back into + the clamorous little piazza, the sight of the peasants swilling down their + sour wine appealed to me more than the masterpieces—Murray calls + them so—of the famous Bolognese. It amounts after all to saying that + I prefer Teniers to Domenichino; which I am willing to let pass for the + truth. The scene under the rickety trellises was the more suggestive of + Teniers that there were no costumes to make it too Italian. Murray’s + attractive statement on this point was, like many of his statements, much + truer twenty years ago than to-day. Costume is gone or fast going; I saw + among the women not a single crimson bodice and not a couple of classic + head-cloths. The poorer sort, dressed in vulgar rags of no fashion and + colour, and the smarter ones in calico gowns and printed shawls of the + vilest modern fabric, had honoured their dusky tresses but with rich + applications of grease. The men are still in jackets and breeches, and, + with their slouched and pointed hats and open-breasted shirts and rattling + leather leggings, may remind one sufficiently of the Italian peasant as he + figured in the woodcuts familiar to our infancy. After coming out of the + church I found a delightful nook—a queer little terrace before a + more retired and tranquil drinking-shop—where I called for a bottle + of wine to help me to guess why I “drew the line” at Domenichino. + </p> + <p> + This little terrace was a capricious excrescence at the end of the piazza, + itself simply a greater terrace; and one reached it, picturesquely, by + ascending a short inclined plane of grass-grown cobble-stones and passing + across a little dusky kitchen through whose narrow windows the light of + the mighty landscape beyond touched up old earthen pots. The terrace was + oblong and so narrow that it held but a single small table, placed + lengthwise; yet nothing could be pleasanter than to place one’s bottle on + the polished parapet. Here you seemed by the time you had emptied it to be + swinging forward into immensity—hanging poised above the Campagna. A + beautiful gorge with a twinkling stream wandered down the hill far below + you, beyond which Marino and Castel Gandolfo peeped above the trees. In + front you could count the towers of Rome and the tombs of the Appian Way. + I don’t know that I came to any very distinct conclusion about + Domenichino; but it was perhaps because the view was perfection that he + struck me as more than ever mediocrity. And yet I don’t think it was one’s + bottle of wine, either, that made one after all maudlin about him; it was + the sense of the foolishly usurped in his tenure of fame, of the derisive + in his ever having been put forward. To say so indeed savours of flogging + a dead horse, but it is surely an unkind stroke of fate for him that + Murray assures ten thousand Britons every winter in the most emphatic + manner that his Communion of St. Jerome is the second finest picture in + the world. If this were so one would certainly here in Rome, where such + institutions are convenient, retire into the very nearest convent; with + such a world one would have a standing quarrel. And yet this sport of + destiny is an interesting case, in default of being an interesting + painter, and I would take a moderate walk, in most moods, to see one of + his pictures. He is so supremely good an example of effort detached from + inspiration and school-merit divorced from spontaneity, that one of his + fine frigid performances ought to hang in a conspicuous place in every + academy of design. Few things of the sort contain more urgent lessons or + point a more precious moral; and I would have the head-master in the + drawing-school take each ingenuous pupil by the hand and lead him up to + the Triumph of David or the Chase of Diana or the red-nosed Persian Sibyl + and make him some such little speech as the following: “This great + picture, my son, was hung here to show you how you must <i>never</i> + paint; to give you a perfect specimen of what in its boundless generosity + the providence of nature created for our fuller knowledge—an artist + whose development was a negation. The great thing in art is charm, and the + great thing in charm is spontaneity. Domenichino, having talent, is here + and there an excellent model—he was devoted, conscientious, + observant, industrious; but now that we’ve seen pretty well what can + simply be learned do its best, these things help him little with us, + because his imagination was cold. It loved nothing, it lost itself in + nothing, its efforts never gave it the heartache. It went about trying + this and that, concocting cold pictures after cold receipts, dealing in + the second-hand, in the ready-made, and putting into its performances a + little of everything but itself. When you see so many things in a + composition you might suppose that among them all some charm might be + born; yet they’re really but the hundred mouths through which you may hear + the unhappy thing murmur ‘I’m dead!’ It’s by the simplest thing it has + that a picture lives—by its temper. Look at all the great talents, + Domenichino as well as at Titian; but think less of dogma than of plain + nature, and I can almost promise you that yours will remain true.” This is + very little to what the aesthetic sage I have imagined <i>might</i> say; + and we are after all unwilling to let our last verdict be an unkind one on + any great bequest of human effort. The faded frescoes in the chapel at + Grotta Ferrata leave us a memory the more of man’s effort to dream + beautifully; and they thus mingle harmoniously enough with our multifold + impressions of Italy, where dreams and realities have both kept such pace + and so strangely diverged. It was absurd—that was the truth—to + be critical at all among the appealing old Italianisms round me and to + treat the poor exploded Bolognese more harshly than, when I walked back to + Frascati, I treated the charming old water-works of the Villa + Aldobrandini. I confound these various products of antiquated art in a + genial absolution, and should like especially to tell how fine it was to + watch this prodigious fountain come tumbling down its channel of mouldy + rock-work, through its magnificent vista of ilex, to the fantastic old + hemicycle where a dozen tritons and naiads sit posturing to receive it. + The sky above the ilexes was incredibly blue and the ilexes themselves + incredibly black; and to see the young white moon peeping above the trees + you could easily have fancied it was midnight. I should like furthermore + to expatiate on Villa Mondragone, the most grandly impressive hereabouts, + of all such domestic monuments. The Casino in the midst is as big as the + Vatican, which it strikingly resembles, and it stands perched on a terrace + as vast as the parvise of St. Peter’s, looking straight away over black + cypress-tops into the shining vastness of the Campagna. Everything somehow + seemed immense and solemn; there was nothing small but certain little + nestling blue shadows on the Sabine Mountains, to which the terrace seems + to carry you wonderfully near. The place been for some time lost to + private uses, since it figures fantastically in a novel of George Sand—<i>La + Daniella</i>—and now, in quite another way, as a Jesuit college for + boys. The afternoon was perfect, and as it waned it filled the dark alleys + with a wonderful golden haze. Into this came leaping and shouting a herd + of little collegians with a couple of long-skirted Jesuits striding at + their heels. We all know—I make the point for my antithesis—the + monstrous practices of these people; yet as I watched the group I verily + believe I declared that if I had a little son he should go to Mondragone + and receive their crooked teachings for the sake of the other memories, + the avenues of cypress and ilex, the view of the Campagna, the atmosphere + of antiquity. But doubtless when a sense of “mere character,” shameless + incomparable character, has brought one to this it is time one should + pause. + </p> + <p> + <a name="link2H_4_0013" id="link2H_4_0013"> + <!-- H2 anchor --> </a> + </p> + <div style="height: 4em;"> + <br /><br /><br /><br /> + </div> + <h2> + THE AFTER-SEASON IN ROME + </h2> + <p> + One may at the blest end of May say without injustice to anybody that the + state of mind of many a <i>forestiero</i> in Rome is one of intense + impatience for the moment when all other <i>forestieri</i> shall have + taken themselves off. One may confess to this state of mind and be no + misanthrope. The place has passed so completely for the winter months into + the hands of the barbarians that that estimable character the passionate + pilgrim finds it constantly harder to keep his passion clear. He has a + rueful sense of impressions perverted and adulterated; the all-venerable + visage disconcerts us by a vain eagerness to see itself mirrored in + English, American, German eyes. It isn’t simply that you are never first + or never alone at the classic or historic spots where you have dreamt of + persuading the shy <i>genius loci</i> into confidential utterance; it + isn’t simply that St. Peter’s, the Vatican, the Palatine, are for ever + ringing with the false note of the languages without style: it is the + general oppressive feeling that the city of the soul has become for the + time a monstrous mixture of watering-place and curiosity-shop and that its + most ardent life is that of the tourists who haggle over false intaglios + and yawn through palaces and temples. But you are told of a happy time + when these abuses begin to pass away, when Rome becomes Rome again and you + may have her all to yourself. “You may like her more or less now,” I was + assured at the height of the season; “but you must wait till the month of + May, when she’ll give you <i>all</i> she has, to love her. Then the + foreigners, or the excess of them, are gone; the galleries and ruins are + empty, and the place,” said my informant, who was a happy Frenchman of the + Académie de France, <i>“renait a ellememe.”</i> Indeed I was haunted all + winter by an irresistible prevision of what Rome <i>must</i> be in + declared spring. Certain charming places seemed to murmur: “Ah, this is + nothing! Come back at the right weeks and see the sky above us almost + black with its excess of blue, and the new grass already deep, but still + vivid, and the white roses tumble in odorous spray and the warm radiant + air distil gold for the smelting-pot that the <i>genius loci</i> then dips + his brush into before making play with it, in his inimitable way, for the + general effect of complexion.” + </p> + <p> + A month ago I spent a week in the country, and on my return, the first + time I approached the Corso, became conscious of a change. Something + delightful had happened, to which at first I couldn’t give a name, but + which presently shone out as the fact that there were but half as many + people present and that these were chiefly the natural or the naturalised. + We had been docked of half our irrelevance, our motley excess, and now + physically, morally, æesthetically there was elbow-room. In the afternoon + I went to the Pincio, and the Pincio was almost dull. The band was playing + to a dozen ladies who lay in landaus poising their lace-fringed parasols; + but they had scarce more than a light-gloved dandy apiece hanging over + their carriage doors. By the parapet to the great terrace that sweeps the + city stood but three or four interlopers looking at the sunset and with + their Baedekers only just showing in their pockets—the sunsets not + being down among the tariffed articles in these precious volumes. I went + so far as to hope for them that, like myself, they were, under every + precaution, taking some amorous intellectual liberty with the scene. + </p> + <p> + Practically I violate thus the instinct of monopoly, since it’s a shame + not to publish that Rome in May is indeed exquisitely worth your patience. + I have just been so gratified at finding myself in undisturbed possession + for a couple of hours of the Museum of the Lateran that I can afford to be + magnanimous. It’s almost as if the old all-papal paradise had come back. + The weather for a month has been perfect, the sky an extravagance of blue, + the air lively enough, the nights cool, nippingly cool, and the whole + ancient greyness lighted with an irresistible smile. Rome, which in some + moods, especially to new-comers, seems a place of almost sinister gloom, + has an occasional art, as one knows her better, of brushing away care by + the grand gesture with which some splendid impatient mourning matron—just + the Niobe of Nations, surviving, emerging and looking about her again—might + pull off and cast aside an oppression of muffling crape. This admirable + power still temperamentally to react and take notice lurks in all her + darkness and dirt and decay—a something more careless and hopeless + than our thrifty northern cheer, and yet more genial and urbane than the + Parisian spirit of <i>blague</i>. The collective Roman nature is a healthy + and hearty one, and you feel it abroad in the streets even when the + sirocco blows and the medium of life seems to proceed more or less from + the mouth of a furnace. But who shall analyse even the simplest Roman + impression? It is compounded of so many things, it says so much, it + involves so much, it so quickens the intelligence and so flatters the + heart, that before we fairly grasp the case the imagination has marked it + for her own and exposed us to a perilous likelihood of talking nonsense + about it. + </p> + <p> + The smile of Rome, as I have called it, and its insidious message to those + who incline to ramble irresponsibly and take things as they come, is + ushered in with the first breath of spring, and then grows and grows with + the advancing season till it wraps the whole place in its tenfold charm. + As the process develops you can do few better things than go often to + Villa Borghese and sit on the grass—on a stout bit of drapery—and + watch its exquisite stages. It has a frankness and a sweetness beyond any + relenting of <i>our</i> clumsy climates even when ours leave off their + damnable faces and begin. Nature departs from every reserve with a + confidence that leaves one at a loss where, as it were, to look—leaves + one, as I say, nothing to do but to lay one’s head among the anemones at + the base of a high-stemmed pine and gaze up crestward and sky-ward along + its slanting silvery column. You may watch the whole business from a dozen + of these choice standpoints and have a different villa for it every day in + the week. The Doria, the Ludovisi, the Medici, the Albani, the Wolkonski, + the Chigi, the Mellini, the Massimo—there are more of them, with all + their sights and sounds and odours and memories, than you have senses for. + But I prefer none of them to the Borghese, which is free to all the world + at all times and yet never crowded; for when the whirl of carriages is + great in the middle regions you may find a hundred untrodden spots and + silent corners, tenanted at the worst by a group of those long-skirted + young Propagandists who stalk about with solemn angularity, each with a + book under his arm, like silhouettes from a medieval missal, and “compose” + so extremely well with the still more processional cypresses and with + stretches of golden-russet wall overtopped by ultramarine. And yet if the + Borghese is good the Medici is strangely charming, and you may stand in + the little belvedere which rises with such surpassing oddity out of the + dusky heart of the Boschetto at the latter establishment—a miniature + presentation of the wood of the Sleeping Beauty—and look across at + the Ludovisi pines lifting their crooked parasols into a sky of what a + painter would call the most morbid blue, and declare that the place where + <i>they</i> grow is the most delightful in the world. Villa Ludovisi has + been all winter the residence of the lady familiarly known in Roman + society as “Rosina,” Victor Emmanuel’s morganatic wife, the only + familiarity it would seem, that she allows, for the grounds were rigidly + closed, to the inconsolable regret of old Roman sojourners. Just as the + nightingales began to sing, however, the quasi-august <i>padrona</i> + departed, and the public, with certain restrictions, have been admitted to + hear them. The place takes, where it lies, a princely ease, and there + could be no better example of the expansive tendencies of ancient + privilege than the fact that its whole vast extent is contained by the + city walls. It has in this respect very much the same enviable air of + having got up early that marks the great intramural demesne of Magdalen + College at Oxford. The stern old ramparts of Rome form the outer enclosure + of the villa, and hence a series of “striking scenic effects” which it + would be unscrupulous flattery to say you can imagine. The grounds are + laid out in the formal last-century manner; but nowhere do the straight + black cypresses lead off the gaze into vistas of a melancholy more charged + with associations—poetic, romantic, historic; nowhere are there + grander, smoother walls of laurel and myrtle. + </p> + <p> + I recently spent an afternoon hour at the little Protestant cemetery close + to St. Paul’s Gate, where the ancient and the modern world are insidiously + contrasted. They make between them one of the solemn places of Rome—although + indeed when funereal things are so interfused it seems ungrateful to call + them sad. Here is a mixture of tears and smiles, of stones and flowers, of + mourning cypresses and radiant sky, which gives us the impression of our + looking back at death from the brighter side of the grave. The cemetery + nestles in an angle of the city wall, and the older graves are sheltered + by a mass of ancient brickwork, through whose narrow loopholes you peep at + the wide purple of the Campagna. Shelley’s grave is here, buried in roses—a + happy grave every way for the very type and figure of the Poet. Nothing + could be more impenetrably tranquil than this little corner in the bend of + the protecting rampart, where a cluster of modern ashes is held tenderly + in the rugged hand of the Past. The past is tremendously embodied in the + hoary pyramid of Caius Cestius, which rises hard by, half within the wall + and half without, cutting solidly into the solid blue of the sky and + casting its pagan shadow upon the grass of English graves—that of + Keats, among them—with an effect of poetic justice. It is a + wonderful confusion of mortality and a grim enough admonition of our + helpless promiscuity in the crucible of time. But the most touching + element of all is the appeal of the pious English inscriptions among all + these Roman memories; touching because of their universal expression of + that trouble within trouble, misfortune in a foreign land. Something + special stirs the heart through the fine Scriptural language in which + everything is recorded. The echoes of massive Latinity with which the + atmosphere is charged suggest nothing more majestic and monumental. I may + seem unduly to refine, but the injunction to the reader in the monument to + Miss Bathurst, drowned in the Tiber in 1824, “If thou art young and + lovely, build not thereon, for she who lies beneath thy feet in death was + the loveliest flower ever cropt in its bloom,” affects us irresistibly as + a case for tears on the spot. The whole elaborate inscription indeed says + something over and beyond all it does say. The English have the reputation + of being the most reticent people in the world, and as there is no smoke + without fire I suppose they have done something to deserve it; yet who can + say that one doesn’t constantly meet the most startling examples of the + insular faculty to “gush”? In this instance the mother of the deceased + takes the public into her confidence with surprising frankness and omits + no detail, seizing the opportunity to mention by the way that she had + already lost her husband by a most mysterious visitation. The appeal to + one’s attention and the confidence in it are withal most moving. The whole + record has an old-fashioned gentility that makes its frankness tragic. You + seem to hear the garrulity of passionate grief. + </p> + <p> + To be choosing these positive commonplaces of the Roman tone for a theme + when there are matters of modern moment going on may seem none the less to + require an apology. But I make no claim to your special correspondent’s + faculty for getting an “inside” view of things, and I have hardly more + than a pictorial impression of the Pope’s illness and of the discussion of + the Law of the Convents. Indeed I am afraid to speak of the Pope’s illness + at all, lest I should say something egregiously heartless about it, + recalling too forcibly that unnatural husband who was heard to wish that + his wife would “either” get well—! He had his reasons, and Roman + tourists have theirs in the shape of a vague longing for something + spectacular at St. Peter’s. If it takes the sacrifice of somebody to + produce it let somebody then be sacrificed. Meanwhile we have been having + a glimpse of the spectacular side of the Religious Corporations Bill. + Hearing one morning a great hubbub in the Corso I stepped forth upon my + balcony. A couple of hundred men were strolling slowly down the street + with their hands in their pockets, shouting in unison “Abbasso il + ministero!” and huzzaing in chorus. Just beneath my window they stopped + and began to murmur “Al Quirinale, al Quirinale!” The crowd surged a + moment gently and then drifted to the Quirinal, where it scuffled + harmlessly with half-a-dozen of the king’s soldiers. It ought to have been + impressive, for what was it, strictly, unless the seeds of revolution? But + its carriage was too gentle and its cries too musical to send the most + timorous tourist to packing his trunk. As I began with saying: in Rome, in + May, everything has an amiable side, even popular uprisings. + </p> + <p> + <a name="link2H_4_0014" id="link2H_4_0014"> + <!-- H2 anchor --> </a> + </p> + <div style="height: 4em;"> + <br /><br /><br /><br /> + </div> + <h2> + FROM A ROMAN NOTE-BOOK + </h2> + <p> + December 28, 1872.—In Rome again for the last three days—that + second visit which, when the first isn’t followed by a fatal illness in + Florence, the story goes that one is doomed to pay. I didn’t drink of the + Fountain of Trevi on the eve of departure the other time; but I feel as if + I had drunk of the Tiber itself. Nevertheless as I drove from the station + in the evening I wondered what I should think of it at this first glimpse + hadn’t I already known it. All manner of evil perhaps. Paris, as I passed + along the Boulevards three evenings before to take the train, was swarming + and glittering as befits a great capital. Here, in the black, narrow, + crooked, empty streets, I saw nothing I would fain regard as eternal. But + there were new gas-lamps round the spouting Triton in Piazza Barberini and + a newspaper stall on the corner of the Condotti and the Corso—salient + signs of the emancipated state. An hour later I walked up to Via + Gregoriana by Piazza di Spagna. It was all silent and deserted, and the + great flight of steps looked surprisingly small. Everything seemed meagre, + dusky, provincial. Could Rome after all really <i>be</i> a world-city? + That queer old rococo garden gateway at the top of the Gregoriana stirred + a dormant memory; it awoke into a consciousness of the delicious mildness + of the air, and very soon, in a little crimson drawing-room, I was + reconciled and re-initiated.... Everything is dear (in the way of + lodgings), but it hardly matters, as everything is taken and some one else + paying for it. I must make up my mind to a bare perch. But it seems poorly + perverse here to aspire to an “interior” or to be conscious of the + economic side of life. The æesthetic is so intense that you feel you + should live on the taste of it, should extract the nutritive essence of + the atmosphere. For positively it’s <i>such</i> an atmosphere! The weather + is perfect, the sky as blue as the most exploded tradition fames it, the + whole air glowing and throbbing with lovely colour.... The glitter of + Paris is now all gaslight. And oh the monotonous miles of rain-washed + asphalte! + </p> + <p> + <i>December 30th</i>.—I have had nothing to do with the + “ceremonies.” In fact I believe there have hardly been any—no + midnight mass at the Sistine chapel, no silver trumpets at St. Peter’s. + Everything is remorselessly clipped and curtailed—the Vatican in + deepest mourning. But I saw it in its superbest scarlet in ‘69.... I went + yesterday with L. to the Colonna gardens—an adventure that would + have reconverted me to Rome if the thing weren’t already done. It’s a rare + old place—rising in mouldy bosky terraces and mossy stairways and + winding walks from the back of the palace to the top of the Quirinal. It’s + the grand style of gardening, and resembles the present natural manner as + a chapter of Johnsonian rhetoric resembles a piece of clever contemporary + journalism. But it’s a better style in horticulture than in literature; I + prefer one of the long-drawn blue-green Colonna vistas, with a maimed and + mossy-coated garden goddess at the end, to the finest possible quotation + from a last-century classic. Perhaps the best thing there is the old + orangery with its trees in fantastic terra-cotta tubs. The late afternoon + light was gilding the monstrous jars and suspending golden chequers among + the golden-fruited leaves. Or perhaps the best thing is the broad terrace + with its mossy balustrade and its benches; also its view of the great + naked Torre di Nerone (I think), which might look stupid if the rosy + brickwork didn’t take such a colour in the blue air. Delightful, at any + rate, to stroll and talk there in the afternoon sunshine. + </p> + <p> + <i>January 2nd,</i> 1873.—Two or three drives with A.—one to + St. Paul’s without the Walls and back by a couple of old churches on the + Aventine. I was freshly struck with the rare distinction of the little + Protestant cemetery at the Gate, lying in the shadow of the black + sepulchral Pyramid and the thick-growing black cypresses. Bathed in the + clear Roman light the place is heartbreaking for what it asks you—in + such a world as <i>this</i>—to renounce. If it should “make one in + love with death to lie there,” that’s only if death should be conscious. + As the case stands, the weight of a tremendous past presses upon the + flowery sod, and the sleeper’s mortality feels the contact of all the + mortality with which the brilliant air is tainted.... The restored + Basilica is incredibly splendid. It seems a last pompous effort of formal + Catholicism, and there are few more striking emblems of later Rome—the + Rome foredoomed to see Victor Emmanuel in the Quirinal, the Rome of + abortive councils and unheeded anathemas. It rises there, gorgeous and + useless, on its miasmatic site, with an air of conscious bravado—a + florid advertisement of the superabundance of faith. Within it’s + magnificent, and its magnificence has no shabby spots—a rare thing + in Rome. Marble and mosaic, alabaster and malachite, lapis and porphyry, + incrust it from pavement to cornice and flash back their polished lights + at each other with such a splendour of effect that you seem to stand at + the heart of some immense prismatic crystal. One has to come to Italy to + know marbles and love them. I remember the fascination of the first great + show of them I met in Venice—at the Scalzi and Gesuiti. Colour has + in no other form so cool and unfading a purity and lustre. Softness of + tone and hardness of substance—isn’t that the sum of the artist’s + desire? G., with his beautiful caressing, open-lipped Roman utterance, so + easy to understand and, to my ear, so finely suggestive of genuine Latin, + not our horrible Anglo-Saxon and Protestant kind, urged upon us the charms + of a return by the Aventine and the sight of a couple of old churches. The + best is Santa Sabina, a very fine old structure of the fifth century, + mouldering in its dusky solitude and consuming its own antiquity. What a + massive heritage Christianity and Catholicism are leaving here! What a + substantial fact, in all its decay, this memorial Christian temple + outliving its uses among the sunny gardens and vineyards! It has a noble + nave, filled with a stale smell which (like that of the onion) brought + tears to my eyes, and bordered with twenty-four fluted marble columns of + Pagan origin. The crudely primitive little mosaics along the entablature + are extremely curious. A Dominican monk, still young, who showed us the + church, seemed a creature generated from its musty shadows I odours. His + physiognomy was wonderfully <i>de l’emploi</i>, and his voice, most + agreeable, had the strangest jaded humility. His lugubrious salute and + sanctimonious impersonal appropriation of my departing franc would have + been a master-touch on the stage. While we were still in the church a bell + rang that he had to go and answer, and as he came back and approached us + along the nave he made with his white gown and hood and his cadaverous + face, against the dark church background, one of those pictures which, + thank the Muses, have not yet been reformed out of Italy. It was the exact + illustration, for insertion in a text, of heaven knows how many old + romantic and conventional literary Italianisms—plays, poems, + mysteries of Udolpho. We got back into the carriage and talked of profane + things and went home to dinner—drifting recklessly, it seemed to me, + from aesthetic luxury to social. + </p> + <p> + On the 31st we went to the musical vesper-service at the Gesu—hitherto + done so splendidly before the Pope and the cardinals. The manner of it was + eloquent of change—no Pope, no cardinals, and indifferent music; but + a great <i>mise-en-scène</i> nevertheless. The church is gorgeous; late + Renaissance, of great proportions, and full, like so many others, but in a + pre-eminent degree, of seventeenth and eighteenth century Romanism. It + doesn’t impress the imagination, but richly feeds the curiosity, by which + I mean one’s sense of the curious; suggests no legends, but innumerable + anecdotes à la Stendhal. There is a vast dome, filled with a florid + concave fresco of tumbling foreshortened angels, and all over the ceilings + and cornices a wonderful outlay of dusky gildings and mouldings. There are + various Bernini saints and seraphs in stucco-sculpture, astride of the + tablets and door-tops, backing against their rusty machinery of coppery <i>nimbi</i> + and egg-shaped cloudlets. Marble, damask and tapers in gorgeous profusion. + The high altar a great screen of twinkling chandeliers. The choir perched + in a little loft high up in the right transept, like a balcony in a + side-scene at the opera, and indulging in surprising roulades and + flourishes.... Near me sat a handsome, opulent-looking nun—possibly + an abbess or prioress of noble lineage. Can a holy woman of such a + complexion listen to a fine operatic barytone in a sumptuous temple and + receive none but ascetic impressions? What a cross-fire of influences does + Catholicism provide! + </p> + <p> + <i>January 4th.</i>—A drive with A. out of Porta San Giovanni and + along Via Appia Nuova. More and more beautiful as you get well away from + the walls and the great view opens out before you—the rolling + green-brown dells and flats of the Campagna, the long, disjointed arcade + of the aqueducts, the deep-shadowed blue of the Alban Hills, touched into + pale lights by their scattered towns. We stopped at the ruined basilica of + San Stefano, an affair of the fifth century, rather meaningless without a + learned companion. But the perfect little sepulchral chambers of the + Pancratii, disinterred beneath the church, tell their own tale—in + their hardly dimmed frescoes, their beautiful sculptured coffin and great + sepulchral slab. Better still the tomb of the Valerii adjoining it—a + single chamber with an arched roof, covered with stucco mouldings + perfectly intact, exquisite figures and arabesques as sharp and delicate + as if the plasterer’s scaffold had just been taken from under them. + Strange enough to think of these things—so many of them as there are—surviving + their immemorial eclipse in this perfect shape and coming up like + long-lost divers on the sea of time. + </p> + <p> + <i>January 16th.</i>—A delightful walk last Sunday with F. to Monte + Mario. We drove to Porta Angelica, the little gate hidden behind the right + wing of Bernini’s colonnade, and strolled thence up the winding road to + the Villa Mellini, where one of the greasy peasants huddled under the wall + in the sun admits you for half franc into the finest old ilex-walk in + Italy. It is all vaulted grey-green shade with blue Campagna stretches in + the interstices. The day was perfect; the still sunshine, as we sat at the + twisted base of the old trees, seemed to have the drowsy hum of mid-summer—with + that charm of Italian vegetation that comes to us as its confession of + having scenically served, to weariness at last, for some pastoral these + many centuries a classic. In a certain cheapness and thinness of substance—as + compared with the English stoutness, never left athirst—it reminds + me of our own, and it is relatively dry enough and pale enough to explain + the contempt of many unimaginative Britons. But it has an idle abundance + and wantonness, a romantic shabbiness and dishevelment. At the Villa + Mellini is the famous lonely pine which “tells” so in the landscape from + other points, bought off from the axe by (I believe) Sir George Beaumont, + commemorated in a like connection in Wordsworth’s great sonnet. He at + least was not an unimaginative Briton. As you stand under it, its far-away + shallow dome, supported on a single column almost white enough to be + marble, seems to dwell in the dizziest depths of the blue. Its pale + grey-blue boughs and its silvery stem make a wonderful harmony with the + ambient air. The Villa Mellini is full of the elder Italy of one’s + imagination—the Italy of Boccaccio and Ariosto. There are twenty + places where the Florentine story-tellers might have sat round on the + grass. Outside the villa walls, beneath the over-crowding orange-boughs, + straggled old Italy as well—but not in Boccaccio’s velvet: a row of + ragged and livid contadini, some simply stupid in their squalor, but some + downright brigands of romance, or of reality, with matted locks and + terribly sullen eyes. + </p> + <p> + A couple of days later I walked for old acquaintance’ sake over to San + Onofrio on the Janiculan. The approach is one of the dirtiest adventures + in Rome, and though the view is fine from the little terrace, the church + and convent are of a meagre and musty pattern. Yet here—almost like + pearls in a dunghill—are hidden mementos of two of the most + exquisite of Italian minds. Torquato Tasso spent the last months of his + life here, and you may visit his room and various warped and faded relics. + The most interesting is a cast of his face taken after death—looking, + like all such casts, almost more than mortally gallant and distinguished. + But who should look all ideally so if not he? In a little shabby, chilly + corridor adjoining is a fresco of Leonardo, a Virgin and Child with the <i>donatorio</i>. + It is very small, simple and faded, but it has all the artist’s magic, + that mocking, illusive refinement and hint of a vague <i>arriere-pensee</i> + which mark every stroke of Leonardo’s brush. Is it the perfection of irony + or the perfection of tenderness? What does he mean, what does he affirm, + what does he deny? Magic wouldn’t be magic, nor the author of such things + stand so absolutely alone, if we were ready with an explanation. As I + glanced from the picture to the poor stupid little red-faced brother at my + side I wondered if the thing mightn’t pass for an elegant epigram on + monasticism. Certainly, at any rate, there is more intellect in it than + under all the monkish tonsures it has seen coming and going these three + hundred years. + </p> + <p> + <i>January 21st.</i>—The last three or four days I have regularly + spent a couple of hours from noon baking myself in the sun of the Pincio + to get rid of a cold. The weather perfect and the crowd (especially + to-day) amazing. Such a staring, lounging, dandified, amiable crowd! Who + does the vulgar stay-at-home work of Rome? All the grandees and half the + foreigners are there in their carriages, the <i>bourgeoisie</i> on foot + staring at them and the beggars lining all the approaches. The great + difference between public places in America and Europe is in the number of + unoccupied people of every age and condition sitting about early and late + on benches and gazing at you, from your hat to your boots, as you pass. + Europe is certainly the continent of the practised stare. The ladies on + the Pincio have to run the gauntlet; but they seem to do so complacently + enough. The European woman is brought up to the sense of having a definite + part in the way of manners or manner to play in public. To lie back in a + barouche alone, balancing a parasol and seeming to ignore the extremely + immediate gaze of two serried ranks of male creatures on each side of her + path, save here and there to recognise one of them with an imperceptible + nod, is one of her daily duties. The number of young men here who, like + the coenobites of old, lead the purely contemplative life is enormous. + They muster in especial force on the Pincio, but the Corso all day is + thronged with them. They are well-dressed, good-humoured, good-looking, + polite; but they seem never to do a harder stroke of work than to stroll + from the Piazza Colonna to the Hotel de Rome or <i>vice versa</i>. Some of + them don’t even stroll, but stand leaning by the hour against the + doorways, sucking the knobs of their canes, feeling their back hair and + settling their shirt-cuffs. At my cafe in the morning several stroll in + already (at nine o’clock) in light, in “evening” gloves. But they order + nothing, turn on their heels, glance at the mirrors and stroll out again. + When it rains they herd under the <i>portes-cochères</i> and in the + smaller cafes.... Yesterday Prince Humbert’s little <i>primogenito</i> was + on the Pincio in an open landau with his governess. He’s a sturdy blond + little man and the image of the King. They had stopped to listen to the + music, and the crowd was planted about the carriage-wheels, staring and + criticising under the child’s snub little nose. It appeared bold cynical + curiosity, without the slightest manifestation of “loyalty,” and it gave + me a singular sense of the vulgarisation of Rome under the new regime. + When the Pope drove abroad it was a solemn spectacle; even if you neither + kneeled nor uncovered you were irresistibly impressed. But the Pope never + stopped to listen to opera tunes, and he had no little popelings, under + the charge of superior nurse-maids, whom you might take liberties with. + The family at the Quirinal make something of a merit, I believe, of their + modest and inexpensive way of life. The merit is great; yet, + representationally, what a change for the worse from an order which + proclaimed stateliness a part of its essence! The divinity that doth hedge + a king must be pretty well on the wane. But how many more fine old + traditions will the extremely sentimental traveller miss in the Italians + over whom that little jostled prince in the landau will have come into his + kinghood? ... The Pincio continues to beguile; it’s a great resource. I am + for ever being reminded of the “aesthetic luxury,” as I called it above, + of living in Rome. To be able to choose of an afternoon for a lounge + (respectfully speaking) between St. Peter’s and the high precinct you + approach by the gate just beyond Villa Medici—counting nothing else—is + a proof that if in Rome you may suffer from ennui, at least your ennui has + a throbbing soul in it. It is something to say for the Pincio that you + don’t always choose St. Peter’s. Sometimes I lose patience with its parade + of eternal idleness, but at others this very idleness is balm to one’s + conscience. Life on just these terms seems so easy, so monotonously sweet, + that you feel it would be unwise, would be really unsafe, to change. The + Roman air is charged with an elixir, the Roman cup seasoned with some + insidious drop, of which the action is fatally, yet none the less + agreeably, “lowering.” + </p> + <p> + <i>January 26th.</i>—With S. to the Villa Medici—perhaps on + the whole the most enchanting place in Rome. The part of the garden called + the Boschetto has an incredible, impossible charm; an upper terrace, + behind locked gates, covered with a little dusky forest of evergreen oaks. + Such a dim light as of a fabled, haunted place, such a soft suffusion of + tender grey-green tones, such a company of gnarled and twisted little + miniature trunks—dwarfs playing with each other at being giants—and + such a shower of golden sparkles drifting in from the vivid west! At the + end of the wood is a steep, circular mound, up which the short trees + scramble amain, with a long mossy staircase climbing up to a belvedere. + This staircase, rising suddenly out of the leafy dusk to you don’t see + where, is delightfully fantastic. You expect to see an old woman in a + crimson petticoat and with a distaff come hobbling down and turn into a + fairy and offer you three wishes. I should name for my own first wish that + one didn’t have to be a Frenchman to come and live and dream and work at + the Académie de France. Can there be for a while a happier destiny than + that of a young artist conscious of talent and of no errand but to + educate, polish and perfect it, transplanted to these sacred shades? One + has fancied Plato’s Academy—his gleaming colonnades, his blooming + gardens and Athenian sky; but was it as good as this one, where Monsieur + Hebert does the Platonic? The blessing in Rome is not that this or that or + the other isolated object is so very unsurpassable; but that the general + air so contributes to interest, to impressions that are not as any other + impressions anywhere in the world. And from this general air the Villa + Medici has distilled an essence of its own—walled it in and made it + delightfully private. The great façade on the gardens is like an enormous + rococo clock-face all incrusted with images and arabesques and tablets. + What mornings and afternoons one might spend there, brush in hand, + unpreoccupied, untormented, pensioned, satisfied—either persuading + one’s self that one would be “doing something” in consequence or not + caring if one shouldn’t be. + </p> + <p> + <i>At a later date—middle of March</i>.—A ride with S. W. out + of the Porta Pia to the meadows beyond the Ponte Nomentana—close to + the site of Phaon’s villa where Nero in hiding had himself stabbed. It all + spoke as things here only speak, touching more chords than one can <i>now</i> + really know or say. For these are predestined memories and the stuff that + regrets are made of; the mild divine efflorescence of spring, the + wonderful landscape, the talk suspended for another gallop.... Returning, + we dismounted at the gate of the Villa Medici and walked through the + twilight of the vaguely perfumed, bird-haunted alleys to H.‘s studio, + hidden in the wood like a cottage in a fairy tale. I spent there a + charming half-hour in the fading light, looking at the pictures while my + companion discoursed of her errand. The studio is small and more like a + little salon; the painting refined, imaginative, somewhat morbid, full of + consummate French ability. A portrait, idealised and etherealised, but a + likeness of Mme. de—-(from last year’s Salon) in white satin, + quantities of lace, a coronet, diamonds and pearls; a striking combination + of brilliant silvery tones. A “Femme Sauvage,” a naked dusky girl in a + wood, with a wonderfully clever pair of shy, passionate eyes. The author + is different enough from any of the numerous American artists. They may be + producers, but he’s a product as well—a product of influences of a + sort of which we have as yet no general command. One of them is his + charmed lapse of life in that unprofessional-looking little studio, with + his enchanted wood on one side and the plunging wall of Rome on the other. + </p> + <p> + <i>January 30th.</i>—A drive the other day with a friend to Villa + Madama, on the side of Monte Mario; a place like a page out of one of + Browning’s richest evocations of this clime and civilisation. Wondrous in + its haunting melancholy, it might have inspired half “The Ring and the + Book” at a stroke. What a grim commentary on history such a scene—what + an irony of the past! The road up to it through the outer enclosure is + almost impassable with mud and stones. At the end, on a terrace, rises the + once elegant Casino, with hardly a whole pane of glass in its façade, + reduced to its sallow stucco and degraded ornaments. The front away from + Rome has in the basement a great loggia, now walled in from the weather, + preceded by a grassy be littered platform with an immense sweeping view of + the Campagna; the sad-looking, more than sad-looking, evil-looking, Tiber + beneath (the colour of gold, the sentimentalists say, the colour of + mustard, the realists); a great vague stretch beyond, of various + complexions and uses; and on the horizon the ever-iridescent mountains. + The place has become the shabbiest farm-house, with muddy water in the old + <i>pièces d’eau</i> and dunghills on the old parterres. The “feature” is + the contents of the loggia: a vaulted roof and walls decorated by Giulio + Romano; exquisite stucco-work and still brilliant frescoes; arabesques and + figurini, nymphs and fauns, animals and flowers—gracefully lavish + designs of every sort. Much of the colour—especially the blues—still + almost vivid, and all the work wonderfully ingenious, elegant and + charming. Apartments so decorated can have been meant only for the + recreation of people greater than any we know, people for whom life was + impudent ease and success. Margaret Farnese was the lady of the house, but + where she trailed her cloth of gold the chickens now scamper between your + legs over rotten straw. It is all inexpressibly dreary. A stupid peasant + scratching his head, a couple of critical Americans picking their steps, + the walls tattered and befouled breast-high, dampness and decay striking + in on your heart, and the scene overbowed by these heavenly frescoes, + moulering there in their airy artistry! It’s poignant; it provokes tears; + it tells so of the waste of effort. Something human seems to pant beneath + the grey pall of time and to implore you to rescue it, to pity it, to + stand by it somehow. But you leave it to its lingering death without + compunction, almost with pleasure; for the place seems vaguely + crime-haunted—paying at least the penalty of some hard immorality. + The end of a Renaissance pleasure-house. Endless for the didactic observer + the moral, abysmal for the storyseeker the tale. + </p> + <p> + <i>February 12th</i>.—Yesterday to the Villa Albani. Over-formal and + (as my companion says) too much like a tea-garden; but with beautiful + stairs and splendid geometrical lines of immense box-hedge, intersected + with high pedestals supporting little antique busts. The light to-day + magnificent; the Alban Hills of an intenser broken purple than I had yet + seen them—their white towns blooming upon it like vague projected + lights. It was like a piece of very modern painting, and a good example of + how Nature has at times a sort of mannerism which ought to make us careful + how we condemn out of hand the more refined and affected artists. The + collection of marbles in the Casino (Winckelmann’s) admirable and to be + seen again. The famous Antinous crowned with lotus a strangely beautiful + and impressive thing. The “Greek manner,” on the showing of something now + and again encountered here, moves one to feel that even for purely + romantic and imaginative effects it surpasses any since invented. If there + be not imagination, even in our comparatively modern sense of the word, in + the baleful beauty of that perfect young profile there is none in “Hamlet” + or in “Lycidas.” There is five hundred times as much as in “The + Transfiguration.” With this at any rate to point to it’s not for sculpture + not professedly to produce any emotion producible by painting. There are + numbers of small and delicate fragments of bas-reliefs of exquisite grace, + and a huge piece (two combatants—one, on horseback, beating down + another—murder made eternal and beautiful) attributed to the + Parthenon and certainly as grandly impressive as anything in the Elgin + marbles. S. W. suggested again the Roman villas as a “subject.” Excellent + if one could find a feast of facts à la Stendhal. A lot of vague ecstatic + descriptions and anecdotes wouldn’t at all pay. There have been too many + already. Enough facts are recorded, I suppose; one should discover them + and soak in them for a twelvemonth. And yet a Roman villa, in spite of + statues, ideas and atmosphere, affects me as of a scanter human and social + <i>portee</i>, a shorter, thinner reverberation, than an old English + country-house, round which experience seems piled so thick. But this + perhaps is either hair-splitting or “racial” prejudice. + </p> + <p> + {Illustration: ENTRANCE TO THE VATICAN, ROME} + </p> + <p> + <i>March 9th.</i>—The Vatican is still deadly cold; a couple of + hours there yesterday with R. W. E. Yet he, illustrious and enviable man, + fresh from the East, had no overcoat and wanted none. Perfect bliss, I + think, would be to live in Rome without thinking of overcoats. The Vatican + seems very familiar, but strangely smaller than of old. I never lost the + sense before of confusing vastness. <i>Sancta simplicitas!</i> All my old + friends however stand there in undimmed radiance, keeping most of them + their old pledges. I am perhaps more struck now with the enormous amount + of padding—the number of third-rate, fourth-rate things that weary + the eye desirous to approach freshly the twenty and thirty best. In spite + of the padding there are dozens of treasures that one passes regretfully; + but the impression of the whole place is the great thing—the feeling + that through these solemn vistas flows the source of an incalculable part + of our present conception of Beauty. + </p> + <p> + <i>April 10th.</i>—Last night, in the rain, to the Teatro Valle to + see a comedy of Goldoni in Venetian dialect—“I Quattro Rustighi.” I + could but half follow it; enough, however, to be sure that, for all its + humanity of irony, it wasn’t so good as Molière. The acting was capital—broad, + free and natural; the play of talk easier even than life itself; but, like + all the Italian acting I have seen, it was wanting in <i>finesse</i>, that + shade of the shade by which, and by which alone, one really knows art. I + contrasted the affair with the evening in December last that I walked over + (also in the rain) to the Odeon and saw the “Plaideurs” and the “Malade + lmaginaire.” There, too, was hardly more than a handful of spectators; but + what rich, ripe, fully representational and above all intellectual comedy, + and what polished, educated playing! These Venetians in particular, + however, have a marvellous <i>entrain</i> of their own; they seem even + less than the French to recite. In some of the women—ugly, with red + hands and shabby dresses—an extraordinary gift of natural utterance, + of seeming to invent joyously as they go. + </p> + <p> + <i>Later</i>.—Last evening in H.‘s box at the Apollo to hear Ernesto + Rossi in “Othello.” He shares supremacy with Salvini in Italian tragedy. + Beautiful great theatre with boxes you can walk about in; brilliant + audience. The Princess Margaret was there—I have never been to the + theatre that she was not—and a number of other princesses in + neighbouring boxes. G. G. came in and instructed us that they were the M., + the L., the P., &c. Rossi is both very bad and very fine; bad where + anything like taste and discretion is required, but “all there,” and more + than there, in violent passion. The last act reduced too much, however, to + mere exhibitional sensibility. The interesting thing to me was to observe + the Italian conception of the part—to see how crude it was, how + little it expressed the hero’s moral side, his depth, his dignity—anything + more than his being a creature terrible in mere tantrums. The great point + was his seizing Iago’s head and whacking it half-a-dozen times on the + floor, and then flinging him twenty yards away. It was wonderfully done, + but in the doing of it and in the evident relish for it in the house there + was I scarce knew what force of easy and thereby rather cheap expression. + </p> + <p> + <i>April 27th</i>.—A morning with L. B. at Villa Ludovisi, which we + agreed that we shouldn’t soon forget. The villa now belongs to the King, + who has lodged his morganatic wife there. There is nothing so blissfully + <i>right</i> in Rome, nothing more consummately consecrated to style. The + grounds and gardens are immense, and the great rusty-red city wall + stretches away behind them and makes the burden of the seven hills seem + vast without making <i>them</i> seem small. There is everything—dusky + avenues trimmed by the clippings of centuries, groves and dells and glades + and glowing pastures and reedy fountains and great flowering meadows + studded with enormous slanting pines. The day was delicious, the trees all + one melody, the whole place a revelation of what Italy and hereditary pomp + can do together. Nothing could be more in the grand manner than this + garden view of the city ramparts, lifting their fantastic battlements + above the trees and flowers. They are all tapestried with vines and made + to serve as sunny fruit-walls—grim old defence as they once were; + now giving nothing but a splendid buttressed privacy. The sculptures in + the little Casino are few, but there are two great ones—the + beautiful sitting Mars and the head of the great Juno, the latter thrust + into a corner behind a shutter. These things it’s almost impossible to + praise; we can only mark them well and keep them clear, as we insist on + silence to hear great music.... If I don’t praise Guercino’s Aurora in the + greater Casino, it’s for another reason; this is certainly a very muddy + masterpiece. It figures on the ceiling of a small low hall; the painting + is coarse and the ceiling too near. Besides, it’s unfair to pass straight + from the Greek mythology to the Bolognese. We were left to roam at will + through the house; the custode shut us in and went to walk in the park. + The apartments were all open, and I had an opportunity to reconstruct, + from its <i>milieu</i> at least, the character of a morganatic queen. I + saw nothing to indicate that it was not amiable; but I should have thought + more highly of the lady’s discrimination if she had had the Juno removed + from behind her shutter. In such a house, girdled about with such a park, + me thinks I could be amiable—and perhaps discriminating too. The + Ludovisi Casino is small, but the perfection of the life of ease might + surely be led there. There are English houses enough in wondrous parks, + but they expose you to too many small needs and observances—to say + nothing of a red-faced butler dropping his h’s. You are oppressed with the + detail of accommodation. Here the billiard-table is old-fashioned, perhaps + a trifle crooked; but you have Guercino above your head, and Guercino, + after all, is almost as good as Guido. The rooms, I noticed, all pleased + by their shape, by a lovely proportion, by a mass of delicate + ornamentation on the high concave ceilings. One might live over again in + them some deliciously benighted life of a forgotten type—with + graceful old <i>sale</i>, and immensely thick walls, and a winding stone + staircase, and a view from the loggia at the top; a view of twisted + parasol-pines balanced, high above a wooden horizon, against a sky of + faded sapphire. + </p> + <p> + <i>May 17th.</i>—It was wonderful yesterday at St. John Lateran. The + spring now has turned to perfect summer; there are cascades of verdure + over all the walls; the early flowers are a fading memory, and the new + grass knee-deep in the Villa Borghese. The winter aspect of the region + about the Lateran is one of the best things in Rome; the sunshine is + nowhere so golden and the lean shadows nowhere so purple as on the long + grassy walk to Santa Croce. But yesterday I seemed to see nothing but + green and blue. The expanse before Santa Croce was vivid green; the + Campagna rolled away in great green billows, which seemed to break high + about the gaunt aqueducts; and the Alban Hills, which in January and + February keep shifting and melting along the whole scale of azure, were + almost monotonously fresh, and had lost some of their finer modelling. But + the sky was ultramarine and everything radiant with light and warmth—warmth + which a soft steady breeze kept from excess. I strolled some time about + the church, which has a grand air enough, though I don’t seize the point + of view of Miss——, who told me the other day how vastly finer + she thought it than St. Peter’s. But on Miss——‘s lips this + seemed a very pretty paradox. The choir and transepts have a sombre + splendour, and I like the old vaulted passage with its slabs and monuments + behind the choir. The charm of charms at St. John Lateran is the admirable + twelfth-century cloister, which was never more charming than yesterday. + The shrubs and flowers about the ancient well were blooming away in the + intense light, and the twisted pillars and chiselled capitals of the + perfect little colonnade seemed to enclose them like the sculptured rim of + a precious vase. Standing out among the flowers you may look up and see a + section of the summit of the great façade of the church. The robed and + mitred apostles, bleached and rain-washed by the ages, rose into the blue + air like huge snow figures. I spent at the incorporated museum a + subsequent hour of fond vague attention, having it quite to myself. It is + rather scantily stocked, but the great cool halls open out impressively + one after the other, and the wide spaces between the statues seem to + suggest at first that each is a masterpiece. I was in the loving mood of + one’s last days in Rome, and when I had nothing else to admire I admired + the magnificent thickness of the embrasures of the doors and windows. If + there were no objects of interest at all in the Lateran the palace would + be worth walking through every now and then, to keep up one’s idea of + solid architecture. I went over to the Scala Santa, where was no one but a + very shabby priest sitting like a ticket-taker at the door. But he let me + pass, and I ascended one of the profane lateral stairways and treated + myself to a glimpse of the Sanctum Sanctorum. Its threshold is crossed but + once or twice a year, I believe, by three or four of the most exalted + divines, but you may look into it freely enough through a couple of gilded + lattices. It is very sombre and splendid, and conveys the impression of a + very holy place. And yet somehow it suggested irreverent thoughts; it had + to my fancy—perhaps on account of the lattice—an Oriental, a + Mahometan note. I expected every moment to see a sultana appear in a + silver veil and silken trousers and sit down on the crimson carpet. + </p> + <p> + Farewell, packing, the sharp pang of going. One would like to be able + after five months in Rome to sum up for tribute and homage, one’s + experience, one’s gains, the whole adventure of one’s sensibility. But one + has really vibrated too much—the addition of so many items isn’t + easy. What is simply clear is the sense of an acquired passion for the + place and of an incalculable number of gathered impressions. Many of these + have been intense and momentous, but one has trodden on the other—there + are always the big fish that swallow up the little—and one can + hardly say what has become of them. They store themselves noiselessly + away, I suppose, in the dim but safe places of memory and “taste,” and we + live in a quiet faith that they will emerge into vivid relief if life or + art should demand them. As for the passion we needn’t perhaps trouble + ourselves about that. Fifty swallowed palmfuls of the Fountain of Trevi + couldn’t make us more ardently sure that we shall at any cost come back. + </p> + <h3> + 1873. + </h3> + <p> + <a name="link2H_4_0015" id="link2H_4_0015"> + <!-- H2 anchor --> </a> + </p> + <div style="height: 4em;"> + <br /><br /><br /><br /> + </div> + <h2> + A FEW OTHER ROMAN NEIGHBOURHOODS + </h2> + <p> + If I find my old notes, in all these Roman connections, inevitably bristle + with the spirit of the postscript, so I give way to this prompting to the + extent of my scant space and with the sense of other occasions awaiting me + on which I shall have to do no less. The impression of Rome was repeatedly + to renew itself for the author of these now rather antique and artless + accents; was to overlay itself again and again with almost heavy + thicknesses of experience, the last of which is, as I write, quite fresh + to memory; and he has thus felt almost ashamed to drop his subject (though + it be one that tends so easily to turn to the infinite) as if the law of + change had in all the years had nothing to say to his case. It’s of course + but of his case alone that he speaks—wondering little what he may + make of it for the profit of others by an attempt, however brief, to point + the moral of the matter, or in other words compare the musing <i>mature</i> + visitor’s “feeling about Rome” with that of the extremely agitated, even + if though extremely inexpert, consciousness reflected in the previous + pages. The actual, the current Rome affects him as a world governed by new + conditions altogether and ruefully pleading that sorry fact in the ear of + the antique wanderer wherever he may yet mournfully turn for some + re-capture of what he misses. The city of his first unpremeditated rapture + shines to memory, on the other hand, in the manner of a lost paradise the + rustle of whose gardens is still just audible enough in the air to make + him wonder if some sudden turn, some recovered vista, mayn’t lead him back + to the thing itself. My genial, my helpful tag, at this point, would + doubtless properly resolve itself, for the reader, into a clue toward some + such successful ingenuity of quest; a remark I make, I may add, even while + reflecting that the Paradise isn’t apparently at all “lost” to visitors + not of my generation. It is the seekers of <i>that</i> remote and romantic + tradition who have seen it, from one period of ten, or even of five, years + to another, systematically and remorselessly built out from their view. + Their helpless plaint, their sense of the generally irrecoverable and + unspeakable, is not, however, what I desire here most to express; I should + like, on the contrary, with ampler opportunity, positively to enumerate + the cases, the cases of contact, impression, experience, in which the cold + ashes of a long-chilled passion may fairly feel themselves made to glow + again. No one who has ever loved Rome as Rome could be loved in youth and + before her poised basketful of the finer appeals to fond fancy was + actually upset, wants to stop loving her; so that our bleeding and + wounded, though perhaps not wholly moribund, loyalty attends us as a + hovering admonitory, anticipatory ghost, one of those magnanimous + life-companions who before complete extinction designate to the other + member of the union their approved successor. So it is at any rate that I + conceive the pilgrim old enough to have become aware in all these later + years of what he misses to be counselled and pacified in the interest of + recognitions that shall a little make up for it. + </p> + <p> + It was this wisdom I was putting into practice, no doubt, for instance, + when I lately resigned myself to motoring of a splendid June day “out to” + Subiaco; as a substitute for a resignation that had anciently taken, alas, + but the form of my never getting there at all. Everything that day, + moreover, seemed right, surely; everything on certain other days that were + like it through their large indebtedness, at this, that and the other + point, to the last new thing, seemed so right that they come back to me + now, after a moderate interval, in the full light of that unchallenged + felicity. I couldn’t at all gloriously recall, for instance, as I floated + to Subiaco on vast brave wings, how on the occasion of my first visit to + Rome, thirty-eight years before, I had devoted certain evenings, evenings + of artless “preparation” in my room at the inn, to the perusal of Alphonse + Dantier’s admirable <i>Monastères Bénédictins d’ltalie</i>, taking piously + for granted that I should get myself somehow conveyed to Monte Cassino and + to Subiaco at least: such an affront to the passion of curiosity, the + generally infatuated state then kindled, would any suspicion of my + foredoomed, my all but interminable, privation during visits to come have + seemed to me. Fortune, in the event, had never favoured my going, but I + was to give myself up at last to the sense of her quite taking me by the + hand, and that is how I now think of our splendid June day at Subiaco. The + note of the wondrous place itself is conventional “wild” Italy raised to + the highest intensity, the ideally, the sublimely conventional and wild, + complete and supreme in itself, without a disparity or a flaw; which + character of perfect picturesque orthodoxy seemed more particularly to + begin for me, I remember, as we passed, on our way, through that + indescribable and indestructible Tivoli, where the jumble of the elements + of the familiarly and exploitedly, the all too notoriously fair and queer, + was more violent and vociferous than ever—so the whole spectacle + there seemed at once to rejoice in cockneyfication and to resist it. There + at least I had old memories to renew—including that in especial, + from a few years back, of one of the longest, hottest, dustiest + return-drives to Rome that the Campagna on a sirocco day was ever to have + treated me to. + </p> + <p> + {Illustration: VILLA D’ESTE, TIVOLI} + </p> + <p> + That was to be more than made up on this later occasion by an hour of + early evening, snatched on the run back to Rome, that remains with me as + one of those felicities we are wise to leave for ever, just as they are, + just, that is, where they fell, never attempting to renew or improve them. + So happy a chance was it that ensured me at the afternoon’s end a solitary + stroll through the Villa d’ Este, where the day’s invasion, whatever it + might have been, had left no traces and where I met nobody in the great + rococo passages and chambers, and in the prodigious alleys and on the + repeated flights of tortuous steps, but the haunting Genius of Style, into + whose noble battered old face, as if it had come out clearer in the golden + twilight and on recognition of response so deeply moved, I seemed to + exhale my sympathy. This was truly, amid a conception and order of things + all mossed over from disuse, but still without a form abandoned or a + principle disowned, one of the hours that one doesn’t forget. The ruined + fountains seemed strangely to <i>wait</i>, in the stillness and under + cover of the approaching dusk, not to begin ever again to play, also, but + just only to be tenderly imagined to do so; quite as everything held its + breath, at the mystic moment, for the drop of the cruel and garish + exposure, for the Spirit of the place to steal forth and go his round. The + vistas of the innumerable mighty cypresses ranged themselves, in their + files and companies, like beaten heroes for their captain’s, review; the + great artificial “works” of every description, cascades, hemicycles, all + graded and grassed and stone-seated as for floral games, mazes and bowers + and alcoves and grottos, brave indissoluble unions of the planted and the + builded symmetry, with the terraces and staircases that overhang and the + arcades and cloisters that underspread, made common cause together as for + one’s taking up a little, in kindly lingering wonder, the “feeling” out of + which they have sprung. One didn’t see it, under the actual influence, one + wouldn’t for the world have seen it, as that they longed to be justified, + during a few minutes in the twenty-four hours, of their absurdity of pomp + and circumstance—but only that they asked for company, once in a + way, as they were so splendidly formed to give it, and that the best + company, in a changed world, at the end of time, what could they hope it + to be but just the lone, the dawdling person of taste, the visitor with a + flicker of fancy, not to speak of a pang of pity, to spare for them? It + was in the flicker of fancy, no doubt, that as I hung about the great + top-most terrace in especial, and then again took my way through the high + gaunt corridors and the square and bare alcoved and recessed saloons, all + overscored with such a dim waste of those painted, those delicate and + capricious decorations which the loggie of the Vatican promptly borrowed + from the ruins of the Palatine, or from whatever other revealed and + inspiring ancientries, and which make ghostly confession here of that + descent, I gave the rein to my sense of the sinister too, of that vague + after-taste as of evil things that lurks so often, for a suspicious + sensibility, wherever the terrible game of the life of the Renaissance was + played as the Italians played it; wherever the huge tessellated chessboard + seems to stretch about us; swept bare, almost always violently swept bare, + of its chiselled and shifting figures, of every value and degree, but with + this echoing desolation itself representing the long gasp, as it were, of + overstrained time, the great after-hush that follows on things too + wonderful or dreadful. + </p> + <p> + I am putting here, however, my cart before my horse, for the hour just + glanced at was but a final tag to a day of much brighter curiosity, and + which seemed to take its baptism, as we passed through prodigious perched + and huddled, adorably scattered and animated and even crowded Tivoli, from + the universal happy spray of the drumming Anio waterfalls, all set in + their permanent rainbows and Sibylline temples and classic allusions and + Byronic quotations; a wondrous romantic jumble of such things and quite + others—heterogeneous inns and clamorous <i>guingettes</i> and + factories grabbing at the torrent, to say nothing of innumerable guides + and donkeys and white-tied, swallow-tailed waiters dashing out of grottos + and from under cataracts, and of the air, on the part of the whole + population, of standing about, in the most characteristic <i>contadino</i> + manner, to pounce on you and take you somewhere, snatch you from somebody + else, shout something at you, the aqueous and other uproar permitting, and + then charge you for it, your innocence aiding. I’m afraid our run the rest + of the way to Subiaco remains with me but as an after-sense of that + exhilaration, in spite of our rising admirably higher, all the while, and + plunging constantly deeper into splendid solitary gravities, supreme + romantic solemnities and sublimities, of landscape. The Benedictine + convent, which clings to certain more or less vertiginous ledges and + slopes of a vast precipitous gorge, constitutes, with the whole perfection + of its setting, the very ideal of the tradition of that <i>extraordinary + in the romantic</i> handed down to us, as the most attaching and inviting + spell of Italy, by all the old academic literature of travel and art of + the Salvator Rosas and Claudes. This is the main tribute I may pay in a + few words to an impression of which a sort of divine rightness of oddity, + a pictorial felicity that was almost not of this world, but of a higher + degree of distinction altogether, affected me as the leading note; yet + about the whole exquisite complexity of which I can’t pretend to be + informing. + </p> + <p> + All the elements of the scene melted for me together; even from the pause + for luncheon on a grassy wayside knoll, over heaven knows what admirable + preparatory headlong slopes and ravines and iridescent distances, under + spreading chestnuts and in the high air that was cool and sweet, to the + final pedestrian climb of sinuous mountain-paths that the shining + limestone and the strong green of shrub and herbage made as white as + silver. There the miraculous home of St. Benedict awaited us in the form + of a builded and pictured-over maze of chapels and shrines, cells and + corridors, stupefying rock-chambers and caves, places all at an + extraordinary variety of different levels and with labyrinthine + intercommunications; there the spirit of the centuries sat like some + invisible icy presence that only permits you to stare and wonder. I + stared, I wondered, I went up and down and in and out and lost myself in + the fantastic fable of the innumerable hard facts themselves; and whenever + I could, above all, I peeped out of small windows and hung over chance + terraces for the love of the general outer picture, the splendid fashion + in which the fretted mountains of marble, as they might have been, round + about, seemed to inlay themselves, for the effect of the “distinction” I + speak of, with vegetations of dark emerald. There above all—or at + least in what such aspects did further for the prodigy of the Convent, + whatever that prodigy might for do <i>them</i>—was, to a life-long + victim of Italy, almost verily as never before, the operation of the old + love-philtre; there were the inexhaustible sources of interest and charm. + </p> + <p> + {Illustration: SUBIACO} + </p> + <p> + These mystic fountains broke out for me elsewhere, again and again, I + rejoice to say—and perhaps more particularly, to be frank about it, + where the ground about them was pressed with due emphasis of appeal by the + firm wheels of the great winged car. I motored, under invitation and + protection, repeatedly back into the sense of the other years, that sense + of the “old” and comparatively idle Rome of my particular infatuated prime + which I was living to see superseded, and this even when the fond vista + bristled with innumerable “signs of the times,” unmistakable features of + the new era, that, by I scarce know what perverse law, succeeded in + ministering to a happy effect. Some of these false notes proceed simply + from the immense growth of every sort of facilitation—so that people + are much more free than of old to come and go and do, to inquire and + explore, to pervade and generally “infest”; with a consequent loss, for + the fastidious individual, of his blest earlier sense, not infrequent, of + having the occasion and the impression, as he used complacently to say, + all to himself. We none of us had anything quite all to ourselves during + an afternoon at Ostia, on a beautiful June Sunday; it was a different + affair, rather, from the long, the comparatively slow and quite unpeopled + drive that I was to remember having last taken early in the autumn thirty + years before, and which occupied the day—with the aid of a hamper + from once supreme old Spillman, the provider for picnics to a vanished + world (since I suspect the antique ideal of “a picnic in the Campagna,” + the fondest conception of a happy day, has lost generally much of its + glamour). Our idyllic afternoon, at any rate, left no chord of sensibility + that could possibly have been in question untouched—not even that of + tea on the shore at Fiumincino, after we had spent an hour among the ruins + of Ostia and seen our car ferried across the Tiber, almost + saffron-coloured here and swirling towards its mouth, on a boat that was + little more than a big rustic raft and that yet bravely resisted the + prodigious weight. What shall I say, in the way of the particular, of the + general felicity before me, for the sweetness of the hour to which the + incident just named, with its strange and amusing juxtapositions of the + patriarchally primitive and the insolently supersubtle, the earliest and + the latest efforts of restless science, were almost immediately to + succeed? + </p> + <p> + We had but skirted the old gold-and-brown walls of Castel Fusano, where + the massive Chigi tower and the immemorial stone-pines and the afternoon + sky and the desolate sweetness and concentrated rarity of the picture all + kept their appointment, to fond memory, with that especial form of Roman + faith, the fine aesthetic conscience in things, that is never, never + broken. We had wound through tangled lanes and met handsome sallow + country-folk lounging at leisure, as became the Sunday, and ever so + pleasantly and garishly clothed, if not quite consistently costumed, as + just on purpose to feed our wanton optimism; and then we had addressed + ourselves with a soft superficiality to the open, the exquisite little + Ostian reliquary, an exhibition of stony vaguenesses half straightened + out. The ruins of the ancient port of Rome, the still recoverable identity + of streets and habitations and other forms of civil life, are a not + inconsiderable handful, though making of the place at best a very small + sister to Pompeii; but a soft superficiality is ever the refuge of my shy + sense before any ghost of informed reconstitution, and I plead my + surrender to it with the less shame that I believe I “enjoy” such scenes + even on such futile pretexts as much as it can be appointed them by the + invidious spirit of History to <i>be</i> enjoyed. It may be said, of + course, that enjoyment, question-begging term at best, isn’t in these + austere connections designated—but rather some principle of + appreciation that can at least give a coherent account of itself. On that + basis then—as I could, I profess, <i>but</i> revel in the looseness + of my apprehension, so wide it seemed to fling the gates of vision and + divination—I won’t pretend to dot, as it were, too many of the i’s + of my incompetence. I was competent only to have been abjectly interested. + On reflection, moreover, I see that no impression of over-much company + invaded the picture till the point was exactly reached for its + contributing thoroughly to character and amusement; across at Fiumincino, + which the age of the bicycle has made, in a small way, the handy Gravesend + or Coney Island of Rome, the cafés and <i>birrerie</i> were at high + pressure, and the bustle all motley and friendly beside the melancholy + river, where the water-side life itself had twenty quaint and vivid notes + and where a few upstanding objects, ancient or modern, looked eminent and + interesting against the delicate Roman sky that dropped down and down to + the far-spreading marshes of malaria. Besides which “company” is ever + intensely gregarious, hanging heavily together and easily outwitted; so + that we had but to proceed a scant distance further and meet the tideless + Mediterranean, where it tumbled in a trifle breezily on the sands, to be + all to ourselves with our tea-basket, quite as in the good old fashion—only + in truth with the advantage that the contemporary tea-basket is so much + improved. + </p> + <p> + I jumble my memories as a tribute to the whole idyll—I give the + golden light in which they come back to me for what it is worth; worth, I + mean, as allowing that the possibilities of charm of the Witch of the + Seven Hills, as we used to call her in magazines, haven’t all been + vulgarised away. It was precisely there, on such an occasion and in such a + place, that this might seem signally to have happened; whereas in fact the + mild suburban riot, in which the so gay but so light potations before the + array of little houses of entertainment were what struck one as really + making most for mildness, was brushed over with a fabled grace, was + harmonious, felicitous, distinguished, quite after the fashion of some + thoroughly trained chorus or phalanx of opera or ballet. Bicycles were + stacked up by the hundred; the youth of Rome are ardent cyclists, with a + great taste for flashing about in more or less denuded or costumed + athletic and romantic bands and guilds, and on our return cityward, toward + evening, along the right bank of the river, the road swarmed with the + patient wheels and bent backs of these budding <i>cives Romani</i> quite + to the effect of its finer interest. Such at least, I felt, could only be + one’s acceptance of almost any feature of a scene bathed in that + extraordinarily august air that the waning Roman day is so insidiously + capable of taking on when any other element of style happens at all to + contribute. Weren’t they present, these other elements, in the great + classic lines and folds, the fine academic or historic attitudes of the + darkening land itself as it hung about the old highway, varying its vague + accidents, but achieving always perfect “composition”? I shamelessly add + that cockneyfied impression, at all events, to what I have called my + jumble; Rome, to which we all swept on together in the wondrous glowing + medium, <i>saved</i> everything, spreading afar her wide wing and applying + after all but her supposed grand gift of the secret of salvation. We kept + on and on into the great dim rather sordidly papal streets that approach + the quarter of St. Peter’s; to the accompaniment, finally, of that + markedly felt provocation of fond wonder which had never failed to lie in + wait for me under any question of a renewed glimpse of the huge unvisited + rear of the basilica. There was no renewed glimpse just then, in the + gloaming; but the region I speak of had been for me, in fact, during the + previous weeks, less unvisited than ever before, so that I had come to + count an occasional walk round and about it as quite of the essence of the + convenient small change with which the heterogeneous City may still keep + paying you. These frequentations in the company of a sculptor friend had + been incidental to our reaching a small artistic foundry of fine metal, an + odd and interesting little establishment placed, as who should say in the + case of such a mere left-over scrap of a large loose margin, nowhere: it + lurked so unsuspectedly, that is, among the various queer things that Rome + comprehensively refers to as “behind St. Peter’s.” + </p> + <p> + We had passed then, on the occasion of our several pilgrimages, in beneath + the great flying, or at least straddling buttresses to the left of the + mighty façade, where you enter that great idle precinct of fine dense + pavement and averted and sacrificed grandeur, the reverse of the monstrous + medal of the front. Here the architectural monster rears its back and + shoulders on an equal scale and this whole unregarded world of colossal + consistent symmetry and hidden high finish gives you the measure of the + vast total treasure of items and features. The outward face of all sorts + of inward majesties of utility and ornament here above all correspondingly + reproduces itself; the expanses of golden travertine—the freshness + of tone, the cleanness of surface, in the sunny air, being extraordinary—climb + and soar and spread under the crushing weight of a scheme carried out in + every ponderous particular. Never was such a show of <i>wasted</i> art, of + pomp for pomp’s sake, as where all the chapels bulge and all the windows, + each one a separate constructional masterpiece, tower above almost + grassgrown vacancy; with the full and immediate effect, of course, of + reading us a lesson on the value of lawful pride. The pride is the pride + of indifference as to whether a greatness so founded be gaped at in all + its features or not. My friend and I were alone to gape at them most often + while, for the unfailing impression of them, on our way to watch the + casting of our figure, we extended our circuit of the place. To which I + may add, as another example of that tentative, that appealing twitch of + the garment of Roman association of which one kept renewing one’s + consciousness, the half-hour at the little foundry itself was all charming—with + its quite shabby and belittered and ramshackle recall of the old Roman + “art-life” of one’s early dreams. Everything was somehow in the picture, + the rickety sheds, the loose paraphernalia, the sunny, grassy yard where a + goat was browsing; then the queer interior gloom of the pits, frilled with + little overlooking scaffoldings and bridges, for the sinking fireward of + the image that was to take on hardness; and all the pleasantness and + quickness, the beguiling refinement, of the three or four light fine + “hands” of whom the staff consisted and into whose type and tone one liked + to read, with whatever harmless extravagance, so many signs that a lively + sense of stiff processes, even in humble life, could still leave untouched + the traditional rare feeling for the artistic. How delightful such an + occupation in such a general setting—those of my friend, I at such + moments irrepressibly moralised; and how one might after such a fashion + endlessly go and come and ask nothing better; or if better, only so to the + extent of another impression I was to owe to him: that of an evening meal + spread, in the warm still darkness that made no candle flicker, on the + wide high space of an old loggia that overhung, in one quarter, the great + obelisked Square preceding one of the Gates, and in the other the Tiber + and the far Trastevere and more things than I can say—above all, as + it were, the whole backward past, the mild confused romance of the Rome + one had loved and of which one was exactly taking leave under protection + of the friendly lanterned and garlanded feast and the commanding, + all-embracing roof-garden. It was indeed a reconciling, it was an + altogether penetrating, last hour. + </p> + <h3> + 1909. + </h3> + <p> + <a name="link2H_4_0016" id="link2H_4_0016"> + <!-- H2 anchor --> </a> + </p> + <div style="height: 4em;"> + <br /><br /><br /><br /> + </div> + <h2> + A CHAIN OF CITIES + </h2> + <p> + One day in midwinter, some years since, during a journey from Rome to + Florence perforce too rapid to allow much wayside sacrifice to curiosity, + I waited for the train at Narni. There was time to stroll far enough from + the station to have a look at the famous old bridge of Augustus, broken + short off in mid-Tiber. While I stood admiring the measure of impression + was made to overflow by the gratuitous grace of a white-cowled monk who + came trudging up the road that wound to the gate of the town. Narni stood, + in its own presented felicity, on a hill a good space away, boxed in + behind its perfect grey wall, and the monk, to oblige me, crept slowly + along and disappeared within the aperture. Everything was distinct in the + clear air, and the view exactly as like the bit of background by an + Umbrian master as it ideally should have been. The winter is bare and + brown enough in southern Italy and the earth reduced to more of a mere + anatomy than among ourselves, for whom the very <i>crânerie</i> of its + exposed state, naked and unashamed, gives it much of the robust serenity, + not of a fleshless skeleton, but of a fine nude statue. In these regions + at any rate, the tone of the air, for the eye, during the brief + desolation, has often an extraordinary charm: nature still smiles as with + the deputed and provisional charity of colour and light, the duty of not + ceasing to cheer man’s heart. Her whole behaviour, at the time, cast such + a spell on the broken bridge, the little walled town and the trudging + friar, that I turned away with the impatient vow and the fond vision of + how I would take the journey again and pause to my heart’s content at + Narni, at Spoleto, at Assisi, at Perugia, at Cortona, at Arezzo. But we + have generally to clip our vows a little when we come to fulfil them; and + so it befell that when my blest springtime arrived I had to begin as + resignedly as possible, yet with comparative meagreness, at Assisi. + </p> + <p> + {Illustration: ASSISI.} + </p> + <p> + I suppose enjoyment would have a simple zest which it often lacks if we + always did things at the moment we want to, for it’s mostly when we can’t + that we’re thoroughly sure we <i>would</i>, and we can answer too little + for moods in the future conditional. Winter at least seemed to me to have + put something into these seats of antiquity that the May sun had more or + less melted away—a desirable strength of tone, a depth upon depth of + queerness and quaintness. Assisi had been in the January twilight, after + my mere snatch at Narni, a vignette out of some brown old missal. But + you’ll have to be a fearless explorer now to find of a fine spring day any + such cluster of curious objects as doesn’t seem made to match before + anything else Mr. Baedeker’s polyglot estimate of its chief + recommendations. This great man was at Assisi in force, and a brand-new + inn for his accommodation has just been opened cheek by jowl with the + church of St. Francis. I don’t know that even the dire discomfort of this + harbourage makes it seem less impertinent; but I confess I sought its + protection, and the great view seemed hardly less beautiful from my window + than from the gallery of the convent. This view embraces the whole wide + reach of Umbria, which becomes as twilight deepens a purple counterfeit of + the misty sea. The visitor’s first errand is with the church; and it’s + fair furthermore to admit that when he has crossed that threshold the + position and quality of his hotel cease for the time to be matters of + moment. This two-fold temple of St. Francis is one of the very sacred + places of Italy, and it would be hard to breathe anywhere an air more + heavy with holiness. Such seems especially the case if you happen thus to + have come from Rome, where everything ecclesiastical is, in aspect, so + very much of this world—so florid, so elegant, so full of + accommodations and excrescences. The mere site here makes for authority, + and they were brave builders who laid the foundation-stones. The thing + rises straight from a steep mountain-side and plunges forward on its great + substructure of arches even as a crowned headland may frown over the main. + Before it stretches a long, grassy piazza, at the end of which you look up + a small grey street, to see it first climb a little way the rest of the + hill and then pause and leave a broad green slope, crested, high in the + air, with a ruined castle. When I say before it I mean before the upper + church; for by way of doing something supremely handsome and impressive + the sturdy architects of the thirteenth century piled temple upon temple + and bequeathed a double version of their idea. One may imagine them to + have intended perhaps an architectural image of the relation between heart + and head. Entering the lower church at the bottom of the great flight of + steps which leads from the upper door, you seem to push at least into the + very heart of Catholicism. + </p> + <p> + For the first minutes after leaving the clearer gloom you catch nothing + but a vista of low black columns closed by the great fantastic cage + surrounding the altar, which is thus placed, by your impression, in a sort + of gorgeous cavern. Gradually you distinguish details, become accustomed + to the penetrating chill, and even manage to make out a few frescoes; but + the general effect remains splendidly sombre and subterranean. The vaulted + roof is very low and the pillars dwarfish, though immense in girth, as + befits pillars supporting substantially a cathedral. The tone of the place + is a triumph of mystery, the richest harmony of lurking shadows and dusky + corners, all relieved by scattered images and scintillations. There was + little light but what came through the windows of the choir over which the + red curtains had been dropped and were beginning to glow with the downward + sun. The choir was guarded by a screen behind which a dozen venerable + voices droned vespers; but over the top of the screen came the heavy + radiance and played among the ornaments of the high fence round the + shrine, casting the shadow of the whole elaborate mass forward into the + obscured nave. The darkness of vaults and side-chapels is overwrought with + vague frescoes, most of them by Giotto and his school, out of which + confused richness the terribly distinct little faces characteristic of + these artists stare at you with a solemn formalism. Some are faded and + injured, and many so ill-lighted and ill-placed that you can only glance + at them with decent conjecture; the great group, however—four + paintings by Giotto on the ceiling above the altar—may be examined + with some success. Like everything of that grim and beautiful master they + deserve examination; but with the effect ever of carrying one’s + appreciation in and in, as it were, rather than of carrying it out and + out, off and off, as happens for us with those artists who have been + helped by the process of “evolution” to grow wings. This one, “going in” + for emphasis at any price, stamps hard, as who should say, on the very + spot of his idea—thanks to which fact he has a concentration that + has never been surpassed. He was in other words, in proportion to his + means, a genius supremely expressive; he makes the very shade of an + intended meaning or a represented attitude so unmistakable that his + figures affect us at moments as creatures all too suddenly, too + alarmingly, too menacingly met. Meagre, primitive, undeveloped, he yet is + immeasurably strong; he even suggests that if he had lived the due span of + years later Michael Angelo might have found a rival. Not that he is given, + however, to complicated postures or superhuman flights. The something + strange that troubles and haunts us in his work springs rather from a kind + of fierce familiarity. + </p> + <p> + It is part of the wealth of the lower church that it contains an admirable + primitive fresco by an artist of genius rarely encountered, Pietro + Cavallini, pupil of Giotto. This represents the Crucifixion; the three + crosses rising into a sky spotted with the winged heads of angels while a + dense crowd presses below. You will nowhere see anything more direfully + lugubrious, or more approaching for direct force, though not of course for + amplitude of style, Tintoretto’s great renderings of the scene in Venice. + The abject anguish of the crucified and the straddling authority and + brutality of the mounted guards in the foreground are contrasted in a + fashion worthy of a great dramatist. But the most poignant touch is the + tragic grimaces of the little angelic heads that fall like hailstones + through the dark air. It is genuine realistic weeping, the act of + irrepressible “crying,” that the painter has depicted, and the effect is + pitiful at the same time as grotesque. There are many more frescoes + besides; all the chapels on one side are lined with them, but these are + chiefly interesting in their general impressiveness—as they people + the dim recesses with startling presences, with apparitions out of scale. + Before leaving the place I lingered long near the door, for I was sure I + shouldn’t soon again enjoy such a feast of scenic composition. The + opposite end glowed with subdued colour; the middle portion was vague and + thick and brown, with two or three scattered worshippers looming through + the obscurity; while, all the way down, the polished pavement, its uneven + slabs glittering dimly in the obstructed light, was of the very essence of + expensive picture. It is certainly desirable, if one takes the lower + church of St. Francis to represent the human heart, that one should find a + few bright places there. But if the general effect is of brightness + terrorised and smothered, is the symbol less valid? For the contracted, + prejudiced, passionate heart let it stand. + </p> + <p> + One thing at all events we can say, that we should rejoice to boast as + capacious, symmetrical and well-ordered a head as the upper sanctuary. + Thanks to these merits, in spite of a brave array of Giottesque work which + has the advantage of being easily seen, it lacks the great character of + its counterpart. The frescoes, which are admirable, represent certain + leading events in the life of St. Francis, and suddenly remind you, by one + of those anomalies that are half the secret of the consummate <i>mise-en-scene</i> + of Catholicism, that the apostle of beggary, the saint whose only tenement + in life was the ragged robe which barely covered him, is the hero of this + massive structure. Church upon church, nothing less will adequately shroud + his consecrated clay. The great reality of Giotto’s designs adds to the + helpless wonderment with which we feel the passionate pluck of the Hero, + the sense of being separated from it by an impassable gulf, the reflection + on all that has come and gone to make morality at that vertiginous pitch + impossible. There are no such high places of humility left to climb to. An + observant friend who has lived long in Italy lately declared to me, + however, that she detested the name of this moralist, deeming him chief + propagator of the Italian vice most trying to the would-be lover of the + people, the want of personal self-respect. There is a solidarity in the + use of soap, and every cringing beggar, idler, liar and pilferer + flourished for her under the shadow of the great Francisan indifference to + it. She was possibly right; at Rome, at Naples, I might have admitted she + was right; but at Assisi, face to face with Giotto’s vivid chronicle, we + admire too much in its main subject the exquisite play of that subject’s + genius—we don’t remit to him, and this for very envy, a single throb + of his consciousness. It took in, that human, that divine embrace, + everything <i>but</i> soap. + </p> + <p> + I should find it hard to give an orderly account of my next adventures or + impressions at Assisi, which could n’t well be anything more than mere + romantic <i>flanerie</i>. One may easily plead as the final result of a + meditation at the shrine of St. Francis a great and even an amused + charity. This state of mind led me slowly up and down for a couple of + hours through the steep little streets, and at last stretched itself on + the grass with me in the shadow of the great ruined castle that decorates + so grandly the eminence above the town. I remember edging along the + sunless side of the small mouldy houses and pausing very often to look at + nothing in particular. It was all very hot, very hushed, very resignedly + but very persistently old. A wheeled vehicle in such a place is an event, + and the <i>forestiero’s</i> interrogative tread in the blank sonorous + lanes has the privilege of bringing the inhabitants to their doorways. + Some of the better houses, however, achieve a sombre stillness that + protests against the least curiosity as to what may happen in any such + century as this. You wonder, as you pass, what lingering old-world social + types vegetate there, but you won’t find out; albeit that in one very + silent little street I had a glimpse of an open door which I have not + forgotten. A long-haired peddler who must have been a Jew, and who yet + carried without prejudice a burden of mass-books and rosaries, was + offering his wares to a stout old priest. The priest had opened the door + rather stingily and appeared half-heartedly to dismiss him. But the + peddler held up something I couldn’t see; the priest wavered with a + timorous concession to profane curiosity and then furtively pulled the + agent of sophistication, or whatever it might be, into the house. I should + have liked to enter with that worthy. + </p> + <p> + I saw later some gentlemen of Assisi who also seemed bored enough to have + found entertainment in his tray. They were at the door of the cafe on the + Piazza, and were so thankful to me for asking them the way to the + cathedral that, answering all in chorus, they lighted up with smiles as + sympathetic as if I had done them a favour. Of that type were my mild, my + delicate adventures. The Piazza has a fine old portico of an ancient + Temple of Minerva—six fluted columns and a pediment, of beautiful + proportions, but sadly battered and decayed. Goethe, I believe, found it + much more interesting than the mighty mediaeval church, and Goethe, as a + cicerone, doubtless could have persuaded one that it was so; but in the + humble society of Murray we shall most of us find a richer sense in the + later monument. I found quaint old meanings enough in the dark yellow + facade of the small cathedral as I sat on a stone bench by the oblong + green stretched before it. This is a pleasing piece of Italian Gothic and, + like several of its companions at Assisi, has an elegant wheel window and + a number of grotesque little carvings of creatures human and bestial. If + with Goethe I were to balance anything against the attractions of the + double church I should choose the ruined castle on the hill above the + town. I had been having glimpses of it all the afternoon at the end of + steep street-vistas, and promising myself half-an-hour beside its grey + walls at sunset. The sun was very late setting, and my half-hour became a + long lounge in the lee of an abutment which arrested the gentle uproar of + the wind. The castle is a splendid piece of ruin, perched on the summit of + the mountain to whose slope Assisi clings and dropping a pair of stony + arms to enclose the little town in its embrace. The city wall, in other + words, straggles up the steep green hill and meets the crumbling skeleton + of the fortress. On the side off from the town the mountain plunges into a + deep ravine, the opposite face of which is formed by the powerful undraped + shoulder of Monte Subasio, a fierce reflector of the sun. Gorge and + mountain are wild enough, but their frown expires in the teeming softness + of the great vale of Umbria. To lie aloft there on the grass, with + silver-grey ramparts at one’s back and the warm rushing wind in one’s + ears, and watch the beautiful plain mellow into the tones of twilight, was + as exquisite a form of repose as ever fell to a tired tourist’s lot. + </p> + <p> + {Illustration: PERUGIA.} + </p> + <p> + Perugia too has an ancient stronghold, which one must speak of in earnest + as that unconscious humorist the classic American traveller is supposed + invariably to speak of the Colosseum: it will be a very handsome building + when it’s finished. Even Perugia is going the way of all Italy—straightening + out her streets, preparing her ruins, laying her venerable ghosts. The + castle is being completely <i>remis a neuf</i>—a Massachusetts + schoolhouse could n’t cultivate a “smarter" ideal. There are shops in the + basement and fresh putty on all the windows; so that the only thing proper + to a castle it has kept is its magnificent position and range, which you + may enjoy from the broad platform where the Perugini assemble at eventide. + Perugia is chiefly known to fame as the city of Raphael’s master; but it + has a still higher claim to renown and ought to figure in the gazetteer of + fond memory as the little City of the infinite View. The small dusky, + crooked place tries by a hundred prompt pretensions, immediate + contortions, rich mantling flushes and other ingenuities, to waylay your + attention and keep it at home; but your consciousness, alert and uneasy + from the first moment, is all abroad even when your back is turned to the + vast alternative or when fifty house-walls conceal it, and you are for + ever rushing up by-streets and peeping round corners in the hope of + another glimpse or reach of it. As it stretches away before you in that + eminent indifference to limits which is at the same time at every step an + eminent homage to style, it is altogether too free and fair for compasses + and terms. You can only say, and rest upon it, that you prefer it to any + other visible fruit of position or claimed empire of the eye that you are + anywhere likely to enjoy. + </p> + <p> + For it is such a wondrous mixture of blooming plain and gleaming river and + wavily-multitudinous mountain vaguely dotted with pale grey cities, that, + placed as you are, roughly speaking, in the centre of Italy, you all but + span the divine peninsula from sea to sea. Up the long vista of the Tiber + you look—almost to Rome; past Assisi, Spello, Foligno, Spoleto, all + perched on their respective heights and shining through the violet haze. + To the north, to the east, to the west, you see a hundred variations of + the prospect, of which I have kept no record. Two notes only I have made: + one—though who hasn’t made it over and over again?—on the + exquisite elegance of mountain forms in this endless play of the + excrescence, it being exactly as if there were variation of sex in the + upheaved mass, with the effect here mainly of contour and curve and + complexion determined in the feminine sense. It further came home to me + that the command of such an outlook on the world goes far, surely, to give + authority and centrality and experience, those of the great seats of + dominion, even to so scant a cluster of attesting objects as here. It must + deepen the civic consciousness and take off the edge of ennui. It performs + this kindly office, at any rate, for the traveller who may overstay his + curiosity as to Perugino and the Etruscan relics. It continually solicits + his wonder and praise—it reinforces the historic page. I spent a + week in the place, and when it was gone I had had enough of Perugino, but + had n’t had enough of the View. + </p> + <p> + I should perhaps do the reader a service by telling him just how a week at + Perugia may be spent. His first care must be to ignore the very dream of + haste, walking everywhere very slowly and very much at random, and to + impute an esoteric sense to almost anything his eye may happen to + encounter. Almost everything in fact lends itself to the historic, the + romantic, the æsthetic fallacy—almost everything has an antique + queerness and richness that ekes out the reduced state; that of a grim and + battered old adventuress, the heroine of many shames and scandals, + surviving to an extraordinary age and a considerable penury, but with + ancient gifts of princes and other forms of the wages of sin to show, and + the most beautiful garden of all the world to sit and doze and count her + beads in and remember. He must hang a great deal about the huge Palazzo + Pubblico, which indeed is very well worth any acquaintance you may scrape + with it. It masses itself gloomily above the narrow street to an immense + elevation, and leads up the eye along a cliff-like surface of rugged wall, + mottled with old scars and new repairs, to the loggia dizzily perched on + its cornice. He must repeat his visit to the Etruscan Gate, by whose + immemorial composition he must indeed linger long to resolve it back into + the elements originally attending it. He must uncap to the irrecoverable, + the inimitable style of the statue of Pope Julius III before the + cathedral, remembering that Hawthorne fabled his Miriam, in an air of + romance from which we are well-nigh as far to-day as from the building of + Etruscan gates, to have given rendezvous to Kenyon at its base. Its + material is a vivid green bronze, and the mantle and tiara are covered + with a delicate embroidery worthy of a silver-smith. + </p> + <p> + Then our leisurely friend must bestow on Perugino’s frescoes in the + Exchange, and on his pictures in the University, all the placid + contemplation they deserve. He must go to the theatre every evening, in an + orchestra-chair at twenty-two soldi, and enjoy the curious didacticism of + “Amore senza Stima,” “Severita e Debolezza,” “La Societa Equivoca,” and + other popular specimens of contemporaneous Italian comedy—unless + indeed the last-named be not the edifying title applied, for peninsular + use, to “Le Demi-Monde” of the younger Dumas. I shall be very much + surprised if, at the end of a week of this varied entertainment, he hasn’t + learnt how to live, not exactly in, but with, Perugia. His strolls will + abound in small accidents and mercies of vision, but of which a dozen + pencil-strokes would be a better memento than this poor word-sketching. + From the hill on which the town is planted radiate a dozen ravines, down + whose sides the houses slide and scramble with an alarming indifference to + the cohesion of their little rugged blocks of flinty red stone. You ramble + really nowhither without emerging on some small court or terrace that + throws your view across a gulf of tangled gardens or vineyards and over to + a cluster of serried black dwellings which have to hollow in their backs + to keep their balance on the opposite ledge. On archways and + street-staircases and dark alleys that bore through a density of massive + basements, and curve and climb and plunge as they go, all to the truest + mediaeval tune, you may feast your fill. These are the local, the + architectural, the compositional commonplaces.. Some of the little streets + in out-of-the-way corners are so rugged and brown and silent that you may + imagine them passages long since hewn by the pick-axe in a deserted + stone-quarry. The battered black houses, of the colour of buried things—things + buried, that is, in accumulations of time, closer packed, even as such + are, than spadefuls of earth—resemble exposed sections of natural + rock; none the less so when, beyond some narrow gap, you catch the blue + and silver of the sublime circle of landscape. + </p> + <p> + {Illustration: ETRUSCAN GATEWAY, PERUGIA.} + </p> + <p> + But I ought n’t to talk of mouldy alleys, or yet of azure distances, as if + they formed the main appeal to taste in this accomplished little city. In + the Sala del Cambio, where in ancient days the money-changers rattled + their embossed coin and figured up their profits, you may enjoy one of the + serenest aesthetic pleasures that the golden age of art anywhere offers + us. Bank parlours, I believe, are always handsomely appointed, but are + even those of Messrs. Rothschild such models of mural bravery as this + little counting-house of a bygone fashion? The bravery is Perugino’s own; + for, invited clearly to do his best, he left it as a lesson to the ages, + covering the four low walls and the vault with scriptural and mythological + figures of extraordinary beauty. They are ranged in artless attitudes + round the upper half of the room—the sibyls, the prophets, the + philosophers, the Greek and Roman heroes—looking down with broad + serene faces, with small mild eyes and sweet mouths that commit them to + nothing in particular unless to being comfortably and charmingly alive, at + the incongruous proceedings of a Board of Brokers. Had finance a very high + tone in those days, or were genius and faith then simply as frequent as + capital and enterprise are among ourselves? The great distinction of the + Sala del Cambio is that it has a friendly Yes for both these questions. + There was a rigid transactional probity, it seems to say; there was also a + high tide of inspiration. About the artist himself many things come up for + us—more than I can attempt in their order; for he was not, I think, + to an attentive observer, the mere smooth and entire and devout spirit we + at first are inclined to take him for. He has that about him which leads + us to wonder if he may not, after all, play a proper part enough here as + the patron of the money-changers. He is the delight of a million of young + ladies; but who knows whether we should n’t find in his works, might we + “go into” them a little, a trifle more of manner than of conviction, and + of system than of deep sincerity? + </p> + <p> + This, I allow, would put no great affront on them, and one speculates thus + partly but because it’s a pleasure to hang about him on any pretext, and + partly because his immediate effect is to make us quite inordinately + embrace the pretext of his lovely soul. His portrait, painted on the wall + of the Sala (you may see it also in Rome and Florence) might at any rate + serve for the likeness of Mr. Worldly-Wiseman in Bunyan’s allegory. He was + fond of his glass, I believe, and he made his art lucrative. This + tradition is not refuted by his preserved face, and after some experience—or + rather after a good deal, since you can’t have a <i>little</i> of + Perugino, who abounds wherever old masters congregate, so that one has + constantly the sense of being “in” for all there is—you may find an + echo of it in the uniform type of his creatures, their monotonous grace, + their prodigious invariability. He may very well have wanted to produce + figures of a substantial, yet at the same time of an impeccable innocence; + but we feel that he had taught himself <i>how</i> even beyond his own + belief in them, and had arrived at a process that acted at last + mechanically. I confess at the same time that, so interpreted, the painter + affects me as hardly less interesting, and one can’t but become conscious + of one’s style when one’s style has become, as it were, so conscious of + one’s, or at least of its own, fortune. If he was the inventor of a + remarkably calculable <i>facture</i>, a calculation that never fails is in + its way a grace of the first order, and there are things in this special + appearance of perfection of practice that make him the forerunner of a + mighty and more modern race. More than any of the early painters who + strongly charm, you may take all his measure from a single specimen. The + other samples infallibly match, reproduce unerringly the one type he had + mastered, but which had the good fortune to be adorably fair, to seem to + have dawned on a vision unsullied by the shadows of earth. Which truth, + moreover, leaves Perugino all delightful as composer and draughtsman; he + has in each of these characters a sort of spacious neatness which suggests + that the whole conception has been washed clean by some spiritual + chemistry the last thing before reaching the canvas; after which it has + been applied to that surface with a rare economy of time and means. Giotto + and Fra Angelico, beside him, are full of interesting waste and irrelevant + passion. In the sacristy of the charming church of San Pietro—a + museum of pictures and carvings—is a row of small heads of saints + formerly covering the frame of the artist’s Ascension, carried off by the + French. It is almost miniature work, and here at least Perugino triumphs + in sincerity, in apparent candour, as well as in touch. Two of the holy + men are reading their breviaries, but with an air of infantine innocence + quite consistent with their holding the book upside down. + </p> + <p> + Between Perugia and Cortona lies the large weedy water of Lake Thrasymene, + turned into a witching word for ever by Hannibal’s recorded victory over + Rome. Dim as such records have become to us and remote such realities, he + is yet a passionless pilgrim who does n’t, as he passes, of a heavy + summer’s day, feel the air and the light and the very faintness of the + breeze all charged and haunted with them, all interfused as with the + wasted ache of experience and with the vague historic gaze. Processions of + indistinguishable ghosts bore me company to Cortona itself, most sturdily + ancient of Italian towns. It must have been a seat of ancient knowledge + even when Hannibal and Flaminius came to the shock of battle, and have + looked down afar from its grey ramparts on the contending swarm with + something of the philosophic composure suitable to a survivor of Pelasgic + and Etruscan revolutions. These grey ramparts are in great part still + visible, and form the chief attraction of Cortona. It is perched on the + very pinnacle of a mountain, and I wound and doubled interminably over the + face of the great hill, while the jumbled roofs and towers of the arrogant + little city still seemed nearer to the sky than to the railway-station. + “Rather rough,” Murray pronounces the local inn; and rough indeed it was; + there was scarce a square foot of it that you would have cared to stroke + with your hand. The landlord himself, however, was all smoothness and the + best fellow in the world; he took me up into a rickety old loggia on the + tip-top of his establishment and played showman as to half the kingdoms of + the earth. I was free to decide at the same time whether my loss or my + gain was the greater for my seeing Cortona through the medium of a festa. + On the one hand the museum was closed (and in a certain sense the smaller + and obscurer the town the more I like the museum); the churches—an + interesting note of manners and morals—were impenetrably crowded, + though, for that matter, so was the cafe, where I found neither an empty + stool nor the edge of a table. I missed a sight of the famous painted + Muse, the art-treasure of Cortona and supposedly the most precious, as it + falls little short of being the only, sample of the Greek painted picture + that has come down to us. On the other hand, I saw—but this is what + I saw. + </p> + <p> + {Illustration: A STREET, CORTONA.} + </p> + <p> + A part of the mountain-top is occupied by the church of St. Margaret, and + this was St. Margaret’s day. The houses pause roundabout it and leave a + grassy slope, planted here and there with lean black cypresses. The + contadini from near and far had congregated in force and were crowding + into the church or winding up the slope. When I arrived they were all + kneeling or uncovered; a bedizened procession, with banners and censers, + bearing abroad, I believe, the relics of the saint, was re-entering the + church. The scene made one of those pictures that Italy still brushes in + for you with an incomparable hand and from an inexhaustible palette when + you find her in the mood. The day was superb—the sky blazed overhead + like a vault of deepest sapphire. The grave brown peasantry, with no great + accent of costume, but with sundry small ones—decked, that is, in + cheap fineries of scarlet and yellow—made a mass of motley colour in + the high wind-stirred light. The procession halted in the pious hush, and + the lovely land around and beneath us melted away, almost to either sea, + in tones of azure scarcely less intense than the sky. Behind the church + was an empty crumbling citadel, with half-a-dozen old women keeping the + gate for coppers. Here were views and breezes and sun and shade and grassy + corners to the heart’s content, together with one could n’t say what huge + seated mystic melancholy presence, the after-taste of everything the still + open maw of time had consumed. I chose a spot that fairly combined all + these advantages, a spot from which I seemed to look, as who should say, + straight down the throat of the monster, no dark passage now, but with all + the glorious day playing into it, and spent a good part of my stay at + Cortona lying there at my length and observing the situation over the top + of a volume that I must have brought in my pocket just for that especial + wanton luxury of the resource provided and slighted. In the afternoon I + came down and hustled a while through the crowded little streets, and then + strolled forth under the scorching sun and made the outer circuit of the + wall. There I found tremendous uncemented blocks; they glared and twinkled + in the powerful light, and I had to put on a blue eye-glass in order to + throw into its proper perspective the vague Etruscan past, obtruded and + magnified in such masses quite as with the effect of + inadequately-withdrawn hands and feet in photographs. + </p> + <p> + I spent the next day at Arezzo, but I confess in very much the same + uninvestigating fashion—taking in the “general impression,” I dare + say, at every pore, but rather systematically leaving the dust of the ages + unfingered on the stored records: I should doubtless, in the poor time at + my command, have fingered it to so little purpose. The seeker for the + story of things has moreover, if he be worth his salt, a hundred insidious + arts; and in that case indeed—by which I mean when his sensibility + has come duly to adjust itself—the story assaults him but from too + many sides. He even feels at moments that he must sneak along on tiptoe in + order not to have too much of it. Besides which the case all depends on + the kind of use, the range of application, his tangled consciousness, or + his intelligible genius, say, may come to recognize for it. At Arezzo, + however this might be, one was far from Rome, one was well within genial + Tuscany, and the historic, the romantic decoction seemed to reach one’s + lips in less stiff doses. There at once was the “general impression”—the + exquisite sense of the scarce expressible Tuscan quality, which makes + immediately, for the whole pitch of one’s perception, a grateful, a not at + all strenuous difference, attaches to almost any coherent group of + objects, to any happy aspect of the scene, for a main note, some mild + recall, through pleasant friendly colour, through settled ample form, + through something homely and economic too at the very heart of “style,” of + an identity of temperament and habit with those of the divine little + Florence that one originally knew. Adorable Italy in which, for the + constant renewal of interest, of attention, of affection, these + refinements of variety, these so harmoniously-grouped and + individually-seasoned fruits of the great garden of history, keep + presenting themselves! It seemed to fall in with the cheerful Tuscan + mildness for instance—sticking as I do to that ineffectual + expression of the Tuscan charm, of the yellow-brown Tuscan dignity at + large—that the ruined castle on the hill (with which agreeable + feature Arezzo is no less furnished than Assisi and Cortona) had been + converted into a great blooming, and I hope all profitable, podere or + market-garden. I lounged away the half-hours there under a spell as potent + as the “wildest” forecast of propriety—propriety to all the + particular conditions—could have figured it. I had seen Santa Maria + della Pieve and its campanile of quaint colonnades, the stately, dusky + cathedral—grass-plotted and residenced about almost after the + fashion of an English “close”—and John of Pisa’s elaborate marble + shrine; I had seen the museum and its Etruscan vases and majolica + platters. These were very well, but the old pacified citadel somehow, + through a day of soft saturation, placed me most in relation. Beautiful + hills surrounded it, cypresses cast straight shadows at its corners, while + in the middle grew a wondrous Italian tangle of wheat and corn, vines and + figs, peaches and cabbages, memories and images, anything and everything. + </p> + <h3> + 1873. + </h3> + <p> + <a name="link2H_4_0017" id="link2H_4_0017"> + <!-- H2 anchor --> </a> + </p> + <div style="height: 4em;"> + <br /><br /><br /><br /> + </div> + <h2> + SIENA EARLY AND LATE + </h2> + <h3> + I + </h3> + <p> + Florence being oppressively hot and delivered over to the mosquitoes, the + occasion seemed to favour that visit to Siena which I had more than once + planned and missed. I arrived late in the evening, by the light of a + magnificent moon, and while a couple of benignantly-mumbling old crones + were making up my bed at the inn strolled forth in quest of a first + impression. Five minutes brought me to where I might gather it unhindered + as it bloomed in the white moonshine. The great Piazza of Siena is famous, + and though in this day of multiplied photographs and blunted surprises and + profaned revelations none of the world’s wonders can pretend, like + Wordsworth’s phantom of delight, really to “startle and waylay,” yet as I + stepped upon the waiting scene from under a dark archway I was conscious + of no loss of the edge of a precious presented sensibility. The waiting + scene, as I have called it, was in the shape of a shallow horse-shoe—as + the untravelled reader who has turned over his travelled friends’ + portfolios will respectfully remember; or, better, of a bow in which the + high wide face of the Palazzo Pubblico forms the cord and everything else + the arc. It was void of any human presence that could figure to me the + current year; so that, the moonshine assisting, I had half-an-hour’s + infinite vision of mediæval Italy. The Piazza being built on the side of a + hill—or rather, as I believe science affirms, in the cup of a + volcanic crater—the vast pavement converges downwards in slanting + radiations of stone, the spokes of a great wheel, to a point directly + before the Palazzo, which may mark the hub, though it is nothing more + ornamental than the mouth of a drain. The great monument stands on the + lower side and might seem, in spite of its goodly mass and its embattled + cornice, to be rather defiantly out-countenanced by vast private + constructions occupying the opposite eminence. This might be, without the + extraordinary dignity of the architectural gesture with which the huge + high-shouldered pile asserts itself. + </p> + <p> + On the firm edge of the palace, from bracketed base to grey-capped summit + against the sky, where grows a tall slim tower which soars and soars till + it has given notice of the city’s greatness over the blue mountains that + mark the horizon. It rises as slender and straight as a pennoned lance + planted on the steel-shod toe of a mounted knight, and keeps all to itself + in the blue air, far above the changing fashions of the market, the proud + consciousness or rare arrogance once built into it. This beautiful tower, + the finest thing in Siena and, in its rigid fashion, as permanently fine + thus as a really handsome nose on a face of no matter what accumulated + age, figures there still as a Declaration of Independence beside which + such an affair as ours, thrown off at Philadelphia, appears to have scarce + done more than helplessly give way to time. Our Independence has become a + dependence on a thousand such dreadful things as the incorrupt declaration + of Siena strikes us as looking for ever straight over the level of. As it + stood silvered by the moonlight, while my greeting lasted, it seemed to + speak, all as from soul to soul, very much indeed as some ancient worthy + of a lower order, buttonholing one on the coveted chance and at the quiet + hour, might have done, of a state of things long and vulgarly superseded, + but to the pride and power, the once prodigious vitality, of which who + could expect any one effect to testify more incomparably, more + indestructibly, quite, as it were, more immortally? The gigantic houses + enclosing the rest of the Piazza took up the tale and mingled with it + their burden. “We are very old and a trifle weary, but we were built + strong and piled high, and we shall last for many an age. The present is + cold and heedless, but we keep ourselves in heart by brooding over our + store of memories and traditions. We are haunted houses in every creaking + timber and aching stone.” Such were the gossiping connections I + established with Siena before I went to bed. + </p> + <p> + Since that night I have had a week’s daylight knowledge of the surface of + the subject at least, and don’t know how I can better present it than + simply as another and a vivider page of the lesson that the ever-hungry + artist has only to <i>trust</i> old Italy for her to feed him at every + single step from her hand—and if not with one sort of sweetly-stale + grain from that wondrous mill of history which during so many ages ground + finer than any other on earth, why then always with something else. Siena + has at any rate “preserved appearances”—kept the greatest number of + them, that is, unaltered for the eye—about as consistently as one + can imagine the thing done. Other places perhaps may treat you to as + drowsy an odour of antiquity, but few exhale it from so large an area. + Lying massed within her walls on a dozen clustered hill-tops, she shows + you at every turn in how much greater a way she once lived; and if so much + of the grand manner is extinct, the receptacle of the ashes still solidly + rounds itself. This heavy general stress of all her emphasis on the past + is what she constantly keeps in your eyes and your ears, and if you be but + a casual observer and admirer the generalised response is mainly what you + give her. The casual observer, however beguiled, is mostly not very + learned, not over-equipped in advance with data; he hasn’t specialised, + his notions are necessarily vague, the chords of his imagination, for all + his good-will, are inevitably muffled and weak. But such as it is, his + received, his welcome impression serves his turn so far as the life of + sensibility goes, and reminds him from time to time that even the lore of + German doctors is but the shadow of satisfied curiosity. I have been + living at the inn, walking about the streets, sitting in the Piazza; these + are the simple terms of my experience. But streets and inns in Italy are + the vehicles of half one’s knowledge; if one has no fancy for their + lessons one may burn one’s note-book. In Siena everything is Sienese. The + inn has an English sign over the door—a little battered plate with a + rusty representation of the lion and the unicorn; but advance hopefully + into the mouldy stone alley which serves as vestibule and you will find + local colour enough. The landlord, I was told, had been servant in an + English family, and I was curious to see how he met the probable argument + of the casual Anglo-Saxon after the latter’s first twelve hours in his + establishment. As he failed to appear I asked the waiter if he, weren’t at + home. “Oh,” said the latter, “he’s a <i>piccolo grasso vecchiotto</i> who + doesn’t like to move.” I’m afraid this little fat old man has simply a bad + conscience. It’s no small burden for one who likes the Italians—as + who doesn’t, under this restriction?—to have so much indifference + even to rudimentary purifying processes to dispose of. What is the real + philosophy of dirty habits, and are foul surfaces merely superficial? If + unclean manners have in truth the moral meaning which I suspect in them we + must love Italy better than consistency. This a number of us are prepared + to do, but while we are making the sacrifice it is as well we should be + aware. + </p> + <p> + We may plead moreover for these impecunious heirs of the past that even if + it were easy to be clean in the midst of their mouldering heritage it + would be difficult to appear so. At the risk of seeming to flaunt the + silly superstition of restless renovation for the sake of renovation, + which is but the challenge of the infinitely precious principle of + duration, one is still moved to say that the prime result of one’s + contemplative strolls in the dusky alleys of such a place is an ineffable + sense of disrepair. Everything is cracking, peeling, fading, crumbling, + rotting. No young Sienese eyes rest upon anything youthful; they open into + a world battered and befouled with long use. Everything has passed its + meridian except the brilliant façade of the cathedral, which is being + diligently retouched and restored, and a few private palaces whose broad + fronts seem to have been lately furbished and polished. Siena was long ago + mellowed to the pictorial tone; the operation of time is now to deposit + shabbiness upon shabbiness. But it’s for the most part a patient, sturdy, + sympathetic shabbiness, which soothes rather than irritates the nerves, + and has in many cases doubtless as long a career to run as most of our + pert and shallow freshnesses. It projects at all events a deeper shadow + into the constant twilight of the narrow streets—that vague historic + dusk, as I may call it, in which one walks and wonders. These streets are + hardly more than sinuous flagged alleys, into which the huge black houses, + between their almost meeting cornices, suffer a meagre light to filter + down over rough-hewn stone, past windows often of graceful Gothic form, + and great pendent iron rings and twisted sockets for torches. Scattered + over their many-headed hill, they suffer the roadway often to incline to + the perpendicular, becoming so impracticable for vehicles that the sound + of wheels is only a trifle less anomalous than it would be in Venice. But + all day long there comes up to my window an incessant shuffling of feet + and clangour of voices. The weather is very warm for the season, all the + world is out of doors, and the Tuscan tongue (which in Siena is reputed to + have a classic purity) wags in every imaginable key. It doesn’t rest even + at night, and I am often an uninvited guest at concerts and <i>conversazioni</i> + at two o’clock in the morning. The concerts are sometimes charming. I not + only don’t curse my wakefulness, but go to my window to listen. Three men + come carolling by, trolling and quavering with voices of delightful + sweetness, or a lonely troubadour in his shirt-sleeves draws such artful + love-notes from his clear, fresh tenor, that I seem for the moment to be + behind the scenes at the opera, watching some Rubini or Mario go “on” and + waiting for the round of applause. In the intervals a couple of friends or + enemies stop—Italians always make their points in conversation by + pulling up, letting you walk on a few paces, to turn and find them + standing with finger on nose and engaging your interrogative eye—they + pause, by a happy instinct, directly under my window, and dispute their + point or tell their story or make their confidence. One scarce is sure + which it may be; everything has such an explosive promptness, such a + redundancy of inflection and action. But everything for that matter takes + on such dramatic life as our lame colloquies never know—so that + almost any uttered communications here become an acted play, improvised, + mimicked, proportioned and rounded, carried bravely to its <i>dénoûment</i>. + The speaker seems actually to establish his stage and face his + foot-lights, to create by a gesture a little scenic circumscription about + him; he rushes to and fro and shouts and stamps and postures, he ranges + through every phase of his inspiration. I noted the other evening a + striking instance of the spontaneity of the Italian gesture, in the person + of a small Sienese of I hardly know what exact age—the age of + inarticulate sounds and the experimental use of a spoon. It was a Sunday + evening, and this little man had accompanied his parents to the café. The + Caffè Greco at Siena is a most delightful institution; you get a capital + <i>demi-tasse</i> for three sous, and an excellent ice for eight, and + while you consume these easy luxuries you may buy from a little hunchback + the local weekly periodical, the <i>Vita Nuova</i>, for three centimes + (the two centimes left from your sou, if you are under the spell of this + magical frugality, will do to give the waiter). My young friend was + sitting on his father’s knee and helping himself to the half of a + strawberry-ice with which his mamma had presented him. He had so many + misadventures with his spoon that this lady at length confiscated it, + there being nothing left of the ice but a little crimson liquid which he + might dispose of by the common instinct of childhood. But he was no + friend, it appeared, to such freedoms; he was a perfect little gentleman + and he resented it being expected of him that he should drink down his + remnant. He protested therefore, and it was the manner of his protest that + struck me. He didn’t cry audibly, though he made a very wry face. It was + no stupid squall, and yet he was too young to speak. It was a penetrating + concord of inarticulately pleading, accusing sounds, accompanied by + gestures of the most exquisite propriety. These were perfectly mature; he + did everything that a man of forty would have done if he had been pouring + out a flood of sonorous eloquence. He shrugged his shoulders and wrinkled + his eyebrows, tossed out his hands and folded his arms, obtruded his chin + and bobbed about his head—and at last, I am happy to say, recovered + his spoon. If I had had a solid little silver one I would have presented + it to him as a testimonial to a perfect, though as yet unconscious, + artist. + </p> + <p> + My actual tribute to him, however, has diverted me from what I had in mind—a + much weightier matter—the great private palaces which are the + massive majestic syllables, sentences, periods, of the strange message the + place addresses to us. They are extraordinarily spacious and numerous, and + one wonders what part they can play in the meagre economy of the actual + city. The Siena of to-day is a mere shrunken semblance of the rabid little + republic which in the thirteenth century waged triumphant war with + Florence, cultivated the arts with splendour, planned a cathedral (though + it had ultimately to curtail the design) of proportions almost unequalled, + and contained a population of two hundred thousand souls. Many of these + dusky piles still bear the names of the old mediaeval magnates the vague + mild occupancy of whose descendants has the effect of armour of proof worn + over “pot” hats and tweed jackets and trousers. Half-a-dozen of them are + as high as the Strozzi and Riccardi palaces in Florence; they couldn’t + well be higher. The very essence of the romantic and the scenic is in the + way these colossal dwellings are packed together in their steep streets, + in the depths of their little enclosed, agglomerated city. When we, in our + day and country, raise a structure of half the mass and dignity, we leave + a great space about it in the manner of a pause after a showy speech. But + when a Sienese countess, as things are here, is doing her hair near the + window, she is a wonderfully near neighbour to the cavalier opposite, who + is being shaved by his valet. Possibly the countess doesn’t object to a + certain chosen publicity at her toilet; what does an Italian gentleman + assure me but that the aristocracy make very free with each other? Some of + the palaces are shown, but only when the occupants are at home, and now + they are in <i>villeggiatura</i>. Their villeggiatura lasts eight months + of the year, the waiter at the inn informs me, and they spend little more + than the carnival in the city. The gossip of an inn-waiter ought perhaps + to be beneath the dignity of even such thin history as this; but I confess + that when, as a story-seeker always and ever, I have come in from my + strolls with an irritated sense of the dumbness of stones and mortar, it + has been to listen with avidity, over my dinner, to the proffered + confidences of the worthy man who stands by with a napkin. His talk is + really very fine, and he prides himself greatly on his cultivated tone, to + which he calls my attention. He has very little good to say about the + Sienese nobility. They are “proprio d’origine egoista”—whatever that + may be—and there are many who can’t write their names. This may be + calumny; but I doubt whether the most blameless of them all could have + spoken more delicately of a lady of peculiar personal appearance who had + been dining near me. “She’s too fat,” I grossly said on her leaving the + room. The waiter shook his head with a little sniff: “È troppo materiale.” + This lady and her companion were the party whom, thinking I might relish a + little company—I had been dining alone for a week—he gleefully + announced to me as newly arrived Americans. They were Americans, I found, + who wore, pinned to their heads in permanence, the black lace veil or + mantilla, conveyed their beans to their mouth with a knife, and spoke a + strange raucous Spanish. They were in fine compatriots from Montevideo. + </p> + <p> + {Illustration: THE RED PALACE, SIENA.} + </p> + <p> + The genius of old Siena, however, would make little of any stress of such + distinctions; one representative of a far-off social platitude being about + as much in order as another as he stands before the great loggia of the + Casino di Nobili, the club of the best society. The nobility, which is + very numerous and very rich, is still, says the apparently competent + native I began by quoting, perfectly feudal and uplifted and separate. + Morally and intellectually, behind the walls of its palaces, the + fourteenth century, it’s thrilling to think, hasn’t ceased to hang on. + There is no bourgeoisie to speak of; immediately after the aristocracy + come the poor people, who are very poor indeed. My friend’s account of + these matters made me wish more than ever, as a lover of the preserved + social specimen, of type at almost any price, that one weren’t, a helpless + victim of the historic sense, reduced simply to staring at black stones + and peeping up stately staircases; and that when one had examined the + street-face of the palace, Murray in hand, one might walk up to the great + drawing-room, make one’s bow to the master and mistress, the old abbe and + the young count, and invite them to favour one with a sketch of their + social philosophy or a few first-hand family anecdotes. + </p> + <p> + The dusky labyrinth of the streets, we must in default of such initiations + content ourselves with noting, is interrupted by two great candid spaces: + the fan-shaped piazza, of which I just now said a word, and the smaller + square in which the cathedral erects its walls of many-coloured marble. Of + course since paying the great piazza my compliments by moonlight I have + strolled through it often at sunnier and shadier hours. The market is held + there, and wherever Italians buy and sell, wherever they count and chaffer—as + indeed you hear them do right and left, at almost any moment, as you take + your way among them—the pulse of life beats fast. It has been doing + so on the spot just named, I suppose, for the last five hundred years, and + during that time the cost of eggs and earthen pots has been gradually but + inexorably increasing. The buyers nevertheless wrestle over their + purchases as lustily as so many fourteenth-century burghers suddenly + waking up in horror to current prices. You have but to walk aside, + however, into the Palazzo Pubblico really to feel yourself a thrifty old + medievalist. The state affairs of the Republic were formerly transacted + here, but it now gives shelter to modern law-courts and other prosy + business. I was marched through a number of vaulted halls and chambers, + which, in the intervals of the administrative sessions held in them, are + peopled only by the great mouldering archaic frescoes—anything but + inanimate these even in their present ruin—that cover the walls and + ceiling. The chief painters of the Sienese school lent a hand in producing + the works I name, and you may complete there the connoisseurship in which, + possibly, you will have embarked at the Academy. I say “possibly” to be + very judicial, my own observation having led me no great length. I have + rather than otherwise cherished the thought that the Sienese school + suffers one’s eagerness peacefully to slumber—benignantly abstains + in fact from whipping up a languid curiosity and a tepid faith. “A + formidable rival to the Florentine,” says some book—I forget which—into + which I recently glanced. Not a bit of it thereupon boldly say I; the + Florentines may rest on their laurels and the lounger on his lounge. The + early painters of the two groups have indeed much in common; but the + Florentines had the good fortune to see their efforts gathered up and + applied by a few pre-eminent spirits, such as never came to the rescue of + the groping Sienese. Fra Angelico and Ghirlandaio said all their feebler + <i>confrères</i> dreamt of and a great deal more beside, but the + inspiration of Simone Memmi and Ambrogio Lorenzetti and Sano di Pietro has + a painful air of never efflorescing into a maximum. Sodoma and Beccafumi + are to my taste a rather abortive maximum. But one should speak of them + all gently—and I do, from my soul; for their labour, by their + lights, has wrought a precious heritage of still-living colour and rich + figure-peopled shadow for the echoing chambers of their old civic + fortress. The faded frescoes cover the walls like quaintly-storied + tapestries; in one way or another they cast their spell. If one owes a + large debt of pleasure to pictorial art one comes to think tenderly and + easily of its whole evolution, as of the conscious experience of a single + mysterious, striving spirit, and one shrinks from saying rude things about + any particular phase of it, just as one would from referring without + precautions to some error or lapse in the life of a person one esteemed. + You don’t care to remind a grizzled veteran of his defeats, and why should + we linger in Siena to talk about Beccafumi? I by no means go so far as to + say, with an amateur with whom I have just been discussing the matter, + that “Sodoma is a precious poor painter and Beccafumi no painter at all”; + but, opportunity being limited, I am willing to let the remark about + Beccafumi pass for true. With regard to Sodoma, I remember seeing four + years ago in the choir of the Cathedral of Pisa a certain small dusky + specimen of the painter—an Abraham and Isaac, if I am not mistaken—which + was charged with a gloomy grace. One rarely meets him in general + collections, and I had never done so till the other day. He was not + prolific, apparently; he had however his own elegance, and his rarity is a + part of it. + </p> + <p> + Here in Siena are a couple of dozen scattered frescoes and three or four + canvases; his masterpiece, among others, an harmonious Descent from the + Cross. I wouldn’t give a fig for the equilibrium of the figures or the + ladders; but while it lasts the scene is all intensely solemn and graceful + and sweet—too sweet for so bitter a subject. Sodoma’s women are + strangely sweet; an imaginative sense of morbid appealing attitude—as + notably in the sentimental, the pathetic, but the none the less pleasant, + “Swooning of St. Catherine,” the great Sienese heroine, at San Domenico—seems + to me the author’s finest accomplishment. His frescoes have all the same + almost appealing evasion of difficulty, and a kind of mild melancholy + which I am inclined to think the sincerest part of them, for it strikes me + as practically the artist’s depressed suspicion of his own want of force. + Once he determined, however, that if he couldn’t be strong he would make + capital of his weakness, and painted the Christ bound to the Column, of + the Academy. Here he got much nearer and I have no doubt mixed his colours + with his tears; but the result can’t be better described than by saying + that it is, pictorially, the first of the modern Christs. Unfortunately it + hasn’t been the last. + </p> + <p> + {Illustration: SAN DOMINICO, SIENA} + </p> + <p> + The main strength of Sienese art went possibly into the erection of the + Cathedral, and yet even here the strength is not of the greatest strain. + If, however, there are more interesting temples in Italy, there are few + more richly and variously scenic and splendid, the comparative meagreness + of the architectural idea being overlaid by a marvellous wealth of + ingenious detail. Opposite the church—with the dull old archbishop’s + palace on one side and a dismantled residence of the late Grand Duke of + Tuscany on the other—is an ancient hospital with a big stone bench + running all along its front. Here I have sat a while every morning for a + week, like a philosophic convalescent, watching the florid façade of the + cathedral glitter against the deep blue sky. It has been lavishly restored + of late years, and the fresh white marble of the densely clustered + pinnacles and statues and beasts and flowers flashes in the sunshine like + a mosaic of jewels. There is more of this goldsmith’s work in stone than I + can remember or describe; it is piled up over three great doors with + immense margins of exquisite decorative sculpture—still in the + ancient cream-coloured marble—and beneath three sharp pediments + embossed with images relieved against red marble and tipped with golden + mosaics. It is in the highest degree fantastic and luxuriant—it is + on the whole very lovely. As a triumph of the many-hued it prepares you + for the interior, where the same parti-coloured splendour is endlessly at + play—a confident complication of harmonies and contrasts and of the + minor structural refinements and braveries. The internal surface is mainly + wrought in alternate courses of black and white marble; but as the latter + has been dimmed by the centuries to a fine mild brown the place is all a + concert of relieved and dispersed glooms. Save for Pinturicchio’s + brilliant frescoes in the Sacristy there are no pictures to speak of; but + the pavement is covered with many elaborate designs in black and white + mosaic after cartoons by Beccafumi. The patient skill of these + compositions makes them a rare piece of decoration; yet even here the + friend whom I lately quoted rejects this over-ripe fruit of the Sienese + school. The designs are nonsensical, he declares, and all his admiration + is for the cunning artisans who have imitated the hatchings and shadings + and hair-strokes of the pencil by the finest curves of inserted black + stone. But the true romance of handiwork at Siena is to be seen in the + wondrous stalls of the choir, under the coloured light of the great + wheel-window. Wood-carving has ever been a cherished craft of the place, + and the best masters of the art during the fifteenth century lavished + themselves on this prodigious task. It is the frost-work on one’s + window-panes interpreted in polished oak. It would be hard to find, + doubtless, a more moving illustration of the peculiar patience, the sacred + candour, of the great time. Into such artistry as this the author seems to + put more of his personal substance than into any other; he has to wrestle + not only with his subject, but with his material. He is richly fortunate + when his subject is charming—when his devices, inventions and + fantasies spring lightly to his hand; for in the material itself, after + age and use have ripened and polished and darkened it to the richness of + ebony and to a greater warmth there is something surpassingly delectable + and venerable. Wander behind the altar at Siena when the chanting is over + and the incense has faded, and look well at the stalls of the Barili. + </p> + <h3> + 1873. + </h3> + <h3> + II + </h3> + <p> + I leave the impression noted in the foregoing pages to tell its own small + story, but have it on my conscience to wonder, in this connection, quite + candidly and publicly and by way of due penance, at the scantness of such + first-fruits of my sensibility. I was to see Siena repeatedly in the years + to follow, I was to know her better, and I would say that I was to do her + an ampler justice didn’t that remark seem to reflect a little on my + earlier poor judgment. This judgment strikes me to-day as having fallen + short—true as it may be that I find ever a value, or at least an + interest, even in the moods and humours and lapses of any brooding, musing + or fantasticating observer to whom the finer sense of things is <i>on the + whole</i> not closed. If he has on a given occasion nodded or stumbled or + strayed, this fact by itself speaks to me of him—speaks to me, that + is, of his faculty and his idiosyncrasies, and I care nothing for the + application of his faculty unless it be, first of all, in itself + interesting. Which may serve as my reply to any objection here breaking + out—on the ground that if a spectator’s languors are evidence, of a + sort, about that personage, they are scarce evident about the case before + him, at least if the case be important. I let my perhaps rather weak + expression of the sense of Siena stand, at any rate—for the sake of + what I myself read into it; but I should like to amplify it by other + memories, and would do so eagerly if I might here enjoy the space. The + difficulty for these rectifications is that if the early vision has failed + of competence or of full felicity, if initiation has thus been slow, so, + with renewals and extensions, so, with the larger experience, one + hindrance is exchanged for another. There is quite such a possibility as + having lived into a relation too much to be able to make a statement of + it. + </p> + <p> + I remember on one occasion arriving very late of a summer night, after an + almost unbroken run from London, and the note of that approach—I was + the only person alighting at the station below the great hill of the + little fortress city, under whose at once frowning and gaping gate I must + have passed, in the warm darkness and the absolute stillness, very much + after the felt fashion of a person of importance about to be enormously + incarcerated—gives me, for preservation thus belated, the pitch, as + I may call it, at various times, though always at one season, of an almost + systematised esthetic use of the place. It wasn’t to be denied that the + immensely better “accommodations” instituted by the multiplying, though + alas more bustling, years had to be recognised as supplying a basis, + comparatively prosaic if one would, to that luxury. No sooner have I + written which words, however, than I find myself adding that one + “wouldn’t,” that one doesn’t—doesn’t, that is, consent now to regard + the then “new” hotel (pretty old indeed by this time) as anything but an + aid to a free play of perception. The strong and rank old Arme + d’Inghilterra, in the darker street, has passed away; but its ancient + rival the Aquila Nera put forth claims to modernisation, and the Grand + Hotel, the still fresher flower of modernity near the gate by which you + enter from the station, takes on to my present remembrance a mellowness as + of all sorts of comfort, cleanliness and kindness. The particular facts, + those of the visit I began here by alluding to and those of still others, + at all events, inveterately made in June or early in July, enter together + in a fusion as of hot golden-brown objects seen through the practicable + crevices of shutters drawn upon high, cool, darkened rooms where the + scheme of the scene involved longish days of quiet work, with late + afternoon emergence and contemplation waiting on the better or the worse + conscience. I thus associate the compact world of the admirable hill-top, + the world of a predominant golden-brown, with a general invocation of + sensibility and fancy, and think of myself as going forth into the + lingering light of summer evenings all attuned to intensity of the idea of + compositional beauty, or in other words, freely speaking, to the question + of colour, to intensity of picture. To communicate with Siena in this + charming way was thus, I admit, to have no great margin for the + prosecution of inquiries, but I am not sure that it wasn’t, little by + little, to feel the whole combination of elements better than by a more + exemplary method, and this from beginning to end of the scale. + </p> + <p> + More of the elements indeed, for memory, hang about the days that were + ushered in by that straight flight from the north than about any other + series—if partly, doubtless, but because of my having then stayed + longest. I specify it at all events for fond reminiscence as the year, the + only year, at which I was present at the Palio, the earlier one, the + series of furious horse-races between elected representatives of different + quarters of the town taking place toward the end of June, as the second + and still more characteristic exhibition of the same sort is appointed to + the month of August; a spectacle that I am far from speaking of as the + finest flower of my old and perhaps even a little faded cluster of + impressions, but which smudges that special sojourn as with the big thumb—mark + of a slightly soiled and decidedly ensanguined hand. For really, after + all, the great loud gaudy romp or heated frolic, simulating ferocity if + not achieving it, that is the annual pride of the town, was not + intrinsically, to my-view, extraordinarily impressive—in spite of + its bristling with all due testimony to the passionate Italian clutch of + any pretext for costume and attitude and utterance, for mumming and + masquerading and raucously representing; the vast cheap vividness rather + somehow refines itself, and the swarm and hubbub of the immense square + melt, to the uplifted sense of a very high-placed balcony of the + overhanging Chigi palace, where everything was superseded but the intenser + passage, across the ages, of the great Renaissance tradition of + architecture and the infinite sweetness of the waning golden day. The + Palio, indubitably, was <i>criard</i>—and the more so for quite + monopolising, at Siena, the note of crudity; and much of it demanded + doubtless of one’s patience a due respect for the long local continuity of + such things; it drops into its humoured position, however, in any + retrospective command of the many brave aspects of the prodigious place. + Not that I am pretending here, even for rectification, to take these at + all in turn; I only go on a little with my rueful glance at the marked + gaps left in my original report of sympathies entertained. + </p> + <p> + I bow my head for instance to the mystery of my not having mentioned that + the coolest and freshest flower of the day was ever that of one’s constant + renewal of a charmed homage to Pinturicchio, coolest and freshest and + signally youngest and most matutinal (as distinguished from merely + primitive or crepuscular) of painters, in the library or sacristy of the + Cathedral. Did I <i>always</i> find time before work to spend half-an-hour + of immersion, under that splendid roof, in the clearest and tenderest, the + very cleanest and “straightest,” as it masters our envious credulity, of + all storied fresco-worlds? This wondrous apartment, a monument in itself + to the ancient pride and power of the Church, and which contains an + unsurpassed treasure of gloriously illuminated missals, psalters and other + vast parchment folios, almost each of whose successive leaves gives the + impression of rubies, sapphires and emeralds set in gold and practically + embedded in the page, offers thus to view, after a fashion splendidly + sustained, a pictorial record of the career of Pope Pius II, Aeneas + Sylvius of the Siena Piccolomini (who gave him for an immediate successor + a second of their name), most profanely literary of Pontiffs and last of + would-be Crusaders, whose adventures and achievements under Pinturicchio’s + brush smooth themselves out for us very much to the tune of the “stories” + told by some fine old man of the world, at the restful end of his life, to + the cluster of his grandchildren. The end of AEneas Sylvius was not + restful; he died at Ancona in troublous times, preaching war, and + attempting to make it, against the then terrific Turk; but over no great + worldly personal legend, among those of men of arduous affairs, arches a + fairer, lighter or more pacific memorial vault than the shining Libreria + of Siena. I seem to remember having it and its unfrequented enclosing + precinct so often all to myself that I must indeed mostly have resorted to + it for a prompt benediction on the day. Like no other strong solicitation, + among artistic appeals to which one may compare it up and down the whole + wonderful country, is the felt neighbouring presence of the overwrought + Cathedral in its little proud possessive town: you may so often feel by + the week at a time that it stands there really for your own personal + enjoyment, your romantic convenience, your small wanton aesthetic use. In + such a light shines for me, at all events, under such an accumulation and + complication of tone flushes and darkens and richly recedes for me, across + the years, the treasure-house of many-coloured marbles in the untrodden, + the drowsy, empty Sienese square. One could positively do, in the free + exercise of any responsible fancy or luxurious taste, what one would with + it. + </p> + <p> + But that proposition holds true, after all, for almost any mild pastime of + the incurable student of loose meanings and stray relics and odd + references and dim analogies in an Italian hill-city bronzed and seasoned + by the ages. I ought perhaps, for justification of the right to talk, to + have plunged into the Siena archives of which, on one occasion, a kindly + custodian gave me, in rather dusty and stuffy conditions, as the incident + vaguely comes back to me, a glimpse that was like a moment’s stand at the + mouth of a deep, dark mine. I didn’t descend into the pit; I did, instead + of this, a much idler and easier thing: I simply went every afternoon, my + stint of work over, I like to recall, for a musing stroll upon the Lizza—the + Lizza which had its own unpretentious but quite insidious art of meeting + the lover of old stories halfway. The great and subtle thing, if you are + not a strenuous specialist, in places of a heavily charged historic + consciousness, is to profit by the sense of that consciousness—or in + other words to cultivate a relation with the oracle—after the + fashion that suits yourself; so that if the general after-taste of + experience, experience at large, the fine distilled essence of the matter, + seems to breathe, in such a case, from the very stones and to make a thick + strong liquor of the very air, you may thus gather as you pass what is + most to your purpose; which is more the indestructible mixture of lived + things, with its concentrated lingering odour, than any interminable list + of numbered chapters and verses. Chapters and verses, literally scanned, + refuse coincidence, mostly, with the divisional proprieties of your own + pile of manuscript—which is but another way of saying, in short, + that if the Lizza is a mere fortified promontory of the great Sienese + hill, serving at once as a stronghold for the present military garrison + and as a planted and benched and band-standed walk and recreation-ground + for the citizens, so I could never, toward close of day, either have + enough of it or yet feel the vaguest saunterings there to be vain. They + were vague with the qualification always of that finer massing, as one + wandered off, of the bronzed and seasoned element, the huge rock pedestal, + the bravery of walls and gates and towers and palaces and loudly asserted + dominion; and then of that pervaded or mildly infested air in which one + feels the experience of the ages, of which I just spoke, to be exquisitely + in solution; and lastly of the wide, strange, sad, beautiful horizon, a + rim of far mountains that always pictured, for the leaner on old rubbed + and smoothed parapets at the sunset hour, a country not exactly blighted + or deserted, but that had had its life, on an immense scale, and had gone, + with all its memories and relics, into rather austere, in fact into almost + grim and misanthropic, retirement. This was a manner and a mood, at any + rate, in all the land, that favoured in the late afternoons the divinest + landscape blues and purples—not to speak of its favouring still more + my practical contention that the whole guarded headland in question, with + the immense ramparts of golden brown and red that dropped into vineyards + and orchards and cornfields and all the rustic elegance of the Tuscan <i>podere</i>, + was knitting for me a chain of unforgettable hours; to the justice of + which claim let these divagations testify. + </p> + <p> + It wasn’t, however, that one mightn’t without disloyalty to that scheme of + profit seek impressions further afield—though indeed I may best say + of such a matter as the long pilgrimage to the pictured convent of Monte + Oliveto that it but played on the same fine chords as the overhanging, the + far-gazing Lizza. What it came to was that one simply put to the friendly + test, as it were, the mood and manner of the country. This remembrance is + precious, but the demonstration of that sense as of a great heaving region + stilled by some final shock and returning thoughtfully, in fact + tragically, on itself, couldn’t have been more pointed. The long-drawn + rural road I refer to, stretching over hill and dale and to which I + devoted the whole of the longest day of the year—I was in a small + single-horse conveyance, of which I had already made appreciative use, and + with a driver as disposed as myself ever to sacrifice speed to + contemplation—is doubtless familiar now with the rush of the + motor-car; the thought of whose free dealings with the solitude of Monte + Oliveto makes me a little ruefully reconsider, I confess, the spirit in + which I have elsewhere in these pages, on behalf of the lust, the + landscape lust, of the eyes, acknowledged our general increasing debt to + that vehicle. For that we met nothing whatever, as I seem at this distance + of time to recall, while we gently trotted and trotted through the + splendid summer hours and a dry desolation that yet somehow smiled and + smiled, was part of the charm and the intimacy of the whole impression—the + impression that culminated at last, before the great cloistered square, + lonely, bleak and stricken, in the almost aching vision, more frequent in + the Italy of to-day than anywhere in the world, of the uncalculated waste + of a myriad forms of piety, forces of labour, beautiful fruits of genius. + However, one gaped above all things for the impression, and what one + mainly asked was that it should be strong of its kind. That was the case, + I think I couldn’t but feel, at every moment of the couple of hours I + spent in the vast, cold, empty shell, out of which the Benedictine + brotherhood sheltered there for ages had lately been turned by the strong + arm of a secular State. There was but one good brother left, a very lean + and tough survivor, a dusky, elderly, friendly Abbate, of an indescribable + type and a perfect manner, of whom I think I felt immediately thereafter + that I should have liked to say much, but as to whom I must have yielded + to the fact that ingenious and vivid commemoration was even then in store + for him. Literary portraiture had marked him for its own, and in the short + story of <i>Un Saint</i>, one of the most finished of contemporary French + <i>nouvelles</i>, the art and the sympathy of Monsieur Paul Bourget + preserve his interesting image. He figures in the beautiful tale, the + Abbate of the desolate cloister and of those comparatively quiet years, as + a clean, clear type of sainthood; a circumstance this in itself to cause a + fond analyst of other than “Latin” race (model and painter in this case + having their Latinism so strongly in common) almost endlessly to meditate. + Oh, the unutterable differences in any scheme or estimate of physiognomic + values, in any range of sensibility to expressional association, among + observers of different, of inevitably more or less opposed, traditional + and “racial” points of view! One had heard convinced Latins—or at + least I had!—speak of situations of trust and intimacy in which they + couldn’t have endured near them a Protestant or, as who should say for + instance, an Anglo-Saxon; but I was to remember my own private attempt to + measure such a change of sensibility as might have permitted the prolonged + close approach of the dear dingy, half-starved, very possibly all heroic, + and quite ideally urbane Abbate. The depth upon depth of things, the cloud + upon cloud of associations, on one side and the other, that would have had + to change first! + </p> + <p> + To which I may add nevertheless that since one ever supremely invoked + intensity of impression and abundance of character, I feasted my fill of + it at Monte Oliveto, and that for that matter this would have constituted + my sole refreshment in the vast icy void of the blighted refectory if I + hadn’t bethought myself of bringing with me a scrap of food, too scantly + apportioned, I recollect—very scantly indeed, since my <i>cocchiere</i> + was to share with me—by my purveyor at Siena. Our tragic—even + if so tenderly tragic—entertainer had nothing to give us; but the + immemorial cold of the enormous monastic interior in which we smilingly + fasted would doubtless not have had for me without that such a wealth of + reference. I was to have “liked” the whole adventure, so I must somehow + have liked that; by which remark I am recalled to the special treasure of + the desecrated temple, those extraordinarily strong and brave frescoes of + Luca Signorelli and Sodoma that adorn, in admirable condition, several + stretches of cloister wall. These creations in a manner took care of + themselves; aided by the blue of the sky above the cloister-court they + glowed, they insistently lived; I remember the frigid prowl through all + the rest of the bareness, including that of the big dishonoured church and + that even of the Abbate’s abysmally resigned testimony to his mere human + and personal situation; and then, with such a force of contrast and effect + of relief, the great sheltered sun-flares and colour-patches of scenic + composition and design where a couple of hands centuries ago turned to + dust had so wrought the defiant miracle of life and beauty that the effect + is of a garden blooming among ruins. Discredited somehow, since they all + would, the destroyers themselves, the ancient piety, the general spirit + and intention, but still bright and assured and sublime—practically, + enviably immortal—the other, the still subtler, the all aesthetic + good faith. + </p> + <h3> + 1909. + </h3> + <p> + <a name="link2H_4_0018" id="link2H_4_0018"> + <!-- H2 anchor --> </a> + </p> + <div style="height: 4em;"> + <br /><br /><br /><br /> + </div> + <h2> + THE AUTUMN IN FLORENCE + </h2> + <p> + Florence too has its “season,” not less than Rome, and I have been + rejoicing for the past six weeks in the fact that this comparatively + crowded parenthesis hasn’t yet been opened. Coming here in the first days + of October I found the summer still in almost unmenaced possession, and + ever since, till within a day or two, the weight of its hand has been + sensible. Properly enough, as the city of flowers, Florence mingles the + elements most artfully in the spring—during the divine crescendo of + March and April, the weeks when six months of steady shiver have still not + shaken New York and Boston free of the long Polar reach. But the very + quality of the decline of the year as we at present here feel it suits + peculiarly the mood in which an undiscourageable gatherer of the sense of + things, or taster at least of “charm,” moves through these many-memoried + streets and galleries and churches. Old things, old places, old people, or + at least old races, ever strike us as giving out their secrets most freely + in such moist, grey, melancholy days as have formed the complexion of the + past fortnight. With Christmas arrives the opera, the only opera worth + speaking of—which indeed often means in Florence the only opera + worth talking through; the gaiety, the gossip, the reminders in fine of + the cosmopolite and watering-place character to which the city of the + Medici long ago began to bend her antique temper. Meanwhile it is pleasant + enough for the tasters of charm, as I say, and for the makers of invidious + distinctions, that the Americans haven’t all arrived, however many may be + on their way, and that the weather has a monotonous overcast softness in + which, apparently, aimless contemplation grows less and less ashamed. + There is no crush along the Cascine, as on the sunny days of winter, and + the Arno, wandering away toward the mountains in the haze, seems as shy of + being looked at as a good picture in a bad light. No light, to my eyes, + nevertheless, could be better than this, which reaches us, all strained + and filtered and refined, exquisitely coloured and even a bit + conspicuously sophisticated, through the heavy air of the past that hangs + about the place for ever. + </p> + <p> + I first knew Florence early enough, I am happy to say, to have heard the + change for the worse, the taint of the modern order, bitterly lamented by + old haunters, admirers, lovers—those qualified to present a picture + of the conditions prevailing under the good old Grand-Dukes, the two last + of their line in especial, that, for its blest reflection of sweetness and + mildness and cheapness and ease, of every immediate boon in life to be + enjoyed quite for nothing, could but draw tears from belated listeners. + Some of these survivors from the golden age—just the beauty of which + indeed was in the gold, of sorts, that it poured into your lap, and not in + the least in its own importunity on that head—have needfully + lingered on, have seen the ancient walls pulled down and the compact and + belted mass of which the Piazza della Signoria was the immemorial centre + expand, under the treatment of enterprising syndics, into an ungirdled + organism of the type, as they viciously say, of Chicago; one of those + places of which, as their grace of a circumference is nowhere, the dignity + of a centre can no longer be predicated. Florence loses itself to-day in + dusty boulevards and smart <i>beaux quartiers</i>, such as Napoleon III + and Baron Haussmann were to set the fashion of to a too mediæval Europe—with + the effect of some precious page of antique text swallowed up in a + marginal commentary that smacks of the style of the newspaper. So much for + what has happened on this side of that line of demarcation which, by an + odd law, makes us, with our preference for what we are pleased to call the + picturesque, object to such occurrences even <i>as</i> occurrences. The + real truth is that objections are too vain, and that he would be too rude + a critic here, just now, who shouldn’t be in the humour to take the thick + with the thin and to try at least to read something of the old soul into + the new forms. + </p> + <p> + There is something to be said moreover for your liking a city (once it’s a + question of your actively circulating) to pretend to comfort you more by + its extent than by its limits; in addition to which Florence was + anciently, was in her palmy days peculiarly, a daughter of change and + movement and variety, of shifting moods, policies and régimes—just + as the Florentine character, as we have it to-day, is a character that + takes all things easily for having seen so many come and go. It saw the + national capital, a few years since, arrive and sit down by the Arno, and + took no further thought than sufficed for the day; then it saw, the odd + visitor depart and whistled her cheerfully on her way to Rome. The new + boulevards of the Sindaco Peruzzi come, it may be said, but they don’t go; + which, after all, it isn’t from the æsthetic point of view strictly + necessary they should. A part of the essential amiability of Florence, of + her genius for making you take to your favour on easy terms everything + that in any way belongs to her, is that she has already flung an element + of her grace over all their undried mortar and plaster. Such modern + arrangements as the Piazza d’ Azeglio and the <i>viale</i> or Avenue of + the Princess Margaret please not a little, I think—for what they + are!—and do so even in a degree, by some fine local privilege just + because they are Florentine. The afternoon lights rest on them as if to + thank them for not being worse, and their vistas are liberal where they + look toward the hills. They carry you close to these admirable elevations, + which hang over Florence on all sides, and if in the foreground your sense + is a trifle perplexed by the white pavements dotted here and there with a + policeman or a nursemaid, you have only to reach beyond and see Fiesole + turn to violet, on its ample eminence, from the effect of the opposite + sunset. + </p> + <p> + Facing again then to Florence proper you have local colour enough and to + spare—which you enjoy the more, doubtless, from standing off to get + your light and your point of view. The elder streets abutting on all this + newness bore away into the heart of the city in narrow, dusky perspectives + that quite refine, in certain places, by an art of their own, on the + romantic appeal. There are temporal and other accidents thanks to which, + as you pause to look down them and to penetrate the deepening shadows that + accompany their retreat, they resemble little corridors leading out from + the past, mystical like the ladder in Jacob’s dream; so that when you see + a single figure advance and draw nearer you are half afraid to wait till + it arrives—it must be too much of the nature of a ghost, a messenger + from an underworld. However this may be, a place paved with such great + mosaics of slabs and lined with palaces of so massive a tradition, + structures which, in their large dependence on pure proportion for + interest and beauty, reproduce more than other modern styles the simple + nobleness of Greek architecture, must ever have placed dignity first in + the scale of invoked effect and laid up no great treasure of that ragged + picturesqueness—the picturesqueness of large poverty—on which + we feast our idle eyes at Rome and Naples. Except in the unfinished fronts + of the churches, which, however, unfortunately, are mere ugly blankness, + one finds less of the poetry of ancient over-use, or in other words less + romantic southern shabbiness, than in most Italian cities. At two or three + points, none the less, this sinister grace exists in perfection—just + such perfection as so often proves that what is literally hideous may be + constructively delightful and what is intrinsically tragic play on the + finest chords of appreciation. On the north side of the Arno, between + Ponte Vecchio and Ponte Santa Trinita, is a row of immemorial houses that + back on the river, in whose yellow flood they bathe their sore old feet. + Anything more battered and befouled, more cracked and disjointed, dirtier, + drearier, poorer, it would be impossible to conceive. They look as if + fifty years ago the liquid mud had risen over their chimneys and then + subsided again and left them coated for ever with its unsightly slime. And + yet forsooth, because the river is yellow, and the light is yellow, and + here and there, elsewhere, some mellow mouldering surface, some hint of + colour, some accident of atmosphere, takes up the foolish tale and repeats + the note—because, in short, it is Florence, it is Italy, and the + fond appraiser, the infatuated alien, may have had in his eyes, at birth + and afterwards, the micaceous sparkle of brown-stone fronts no more + interesting than so much sand-paper, these miserable dwellings, instead of + suggesting mental invocations to an enterprising board of health, simply + create their own standard of felicity and shamelessly live in it. Lately, + during the misty autumn nights, the moon has shone on them faintly and + refined their shabbiness away into something ineffably strange and + spectral. The turbid stream sweeps along without a sound, and the pale + tenements hang above it like a vague miasmatic exhalation. The dimmest + back-scene at the opera, when the tenor is singing his sweetest, seems + hardly to belong to a world more detached from responsibility. + </p> + <p> + {Illustration: ON THE ARNO, FLORENCE.} + </p> + <p> + What it is that infuses so rich an interest into the general charm is + difficult to say in a few words; yet as we wander hither and thither in + quest of sacred canvas and immortal bronze and stone we still feel the + genius of the place hang about. Two industrious English ladies, the Misses + Horner, have lately published a couple of volumes of “Walks” by the + Arno-side, and their work is a long enumeration of great artistic deeds. + These things remain for the most part in sound preservation, and, as the + weeks go by and you spend a constant portion of your days among them the + sense of one of the happiest periods of human Taste—to put it only + at that—settles upon your spirit. It was not long; it lasted, in its + splendour, for less than a century; but it has stored away in the palaces + and churches of Florence a heritage of beauty that these three enjoying + centuries since haven’t yet exhausted. This forms a clear intellectual + atmosphere into which you may turn aside from the modern world and fill + your lungs as with the breath of a forgotten creed. The memorials of the + past here address us moreover with a friendliness, win us by we scarcely + know what sociability, what equal amenity, that we scarce find matched in + other great esthetically endowed communities and periods. Venice, with her + old palaces cracking under the weight of their treasures, is, in her + influence, insupportably sad; Athens, with her maimed marbles and + dishonoured memories, transmutes the consciousness of sensitive observers, + I am told, into a chronic heartache; but in one’s impression of old + Florence the abiding felicity, the sense of saving sanity, of something + sound and human, predominates, offering you a medium still conceivable for + life. The reason of this is partly, no doubt, the “sympathetic” nature, + the temperate joy, of Florentine art in general—putting the sole + Dante, greatest of literary artists, aside; partly the tenderness of time, + in its lapse, which, save in a few cases, has been as sparing of injury as + if it knew that when it should have dimmed and corroded these charming + things it would have nothing so sweet again for its tooth to feed on. If + the beautiful Ghirlandaios and Lippis are fading, this generation will + never know it. The large Fra Angelico in the Academy is as clear and keen + as if the good old monk stood there wiping his brushes; the colours seem + to <i>sing</i>, as it were, like new-fledged birds in June. Nothing is + more characteristic of early Tuscan art than the high-reliefs of Luca + della Robbia; yet there isn’t one of them that, except for the unique + mixture of freshness with its wisdom, of candour with its expertness, + mightn’t have been modelled yesterday. + </p> + <p> + But perhaps the best image of the absence of stale melancholy or wasted + splendour, of the positive presence of what I have called temperate joy, + in the Florentine impression and genius, is the bell-tower of Giotto, + which rises beside the cathedral. No beholder of it will have forgotten + how straight and slender it stands there, how strangely rich in the common + street, plated with coloured marble patterns, and yet so far from simple + or severe in design that we easily wonder how its author, the painter of + exclusively and portentously grave little pictures, should have fashioned + a building which in the way of elaborate elegance, of the true play of + taste, leaves a jealous modern criticism nothing to miss. Nothing can be + imagined at once more lightly and more pointedly fanciful; it might have + been handed over to the city, as it stands, by some Oriental genie tired + of too much detail. Yet for all that suggestion it seems of no particular + time—not grey and hoary like a Gothic steeple, not cracked and + despoiled like a Greek temple; its marbles shining so little less freshly + than when they were laid together, and the sunset lighting up its cornice + with such a friendly radiance, that you come at last to regard it simply + as the graceful, indestructible soul of the place made visible. The + Cathedral, externally, for all its solemn hugeness, strikes the same note + of would-be reasoned elegance and cheer; it has conventional grandeur, of + course, but a grandeur so frank and ingenuous even in its <i>parti-pris</i>. + It has seen so much, and outlived so much, and served so many sad + purposes, and yet remains in aspect so full of the fine Tuscan geniality, + the feeling for life, one may almost say the feeling for amusement, that + inspired it. Its vast many-coloured marble walls become at any rate, with + this, the friendliest note of all Florence; there is an unfailing charm in + walking past them while they lift their great acres of geometrical mosaic + higher in the air than you have time or other occasion to look. You greet + them from the deep street as you greet the side of a mountain when you + move in the gorge—not twisting back your head to keep looking at the + top, but content with the minor accidents, the nestling hollows and soft + cloud-shadows, the general protection of the valley. + </p> + <p> + Florence is richer in pictures than we really know till we have begun to + look for them in outlying corners. Then, here and there, one comes upon + lurking values and hidden gems that it quite seems one might as a good New + Yorker quietly “bag” for the so aspiring Museum of that city without their + being missed. The Pitti Palace is of course a collection of masterpieces; + they jostle each other in their splendour, they perhaps even, in their + merciless multitude, rather fatigue our admiration. The Uffizi is almost + as fine a show, and together with that long serpentine artery which + crosses the Arno and connects them, making you ask yourself, whichever way + you take it, what goal can be grand enough to crown such a journey, they + form the great central treasure-chamber of the town. But I have been + neglecting them of late for love of the Academy, where there are fewer + copyists and tourists, above all fewer pictorial lions, those whose roar + is heard from afar and who strike us as expecting overmuch to have it + their own way in the jungle. The pictures at the Academy are all, rather, + doves—the whole impression is less pompously tropical. Selection + still leaves one too much to say, but I noted here, on my last occasion, + an enchanting Botticelli so obscurely hung, in one of the smaller rooms, + that I scarce knew whether most to enjoy or to resent its relegation. + Placed, in a mean black frame, where you wouldn’t have looked for a + masterpiece, it yet gave out to a good glass every characteristic of one. + Representing as it does the walk of Tobias with the angel, there are + really parts of it that an angel might have painted; but I doubt whether + it is observed by half-a-dozen persons a year. That was my excuse for my + wanting to know, on the spot, though doubtless all sophistically, what + dishonour, could the transfer be artfully accomplished, a strong American + light and a brave gilded frame would, comparatively speaking, do it. There + and then it would, shine with the intense authority that we claim for the + fairest things—would exhale its wondrous beauty as a sovereign + example. What it comes to is that this master is the most interesting of a + great band—the only Florentine save Leonardo and Michael in whom the + impulse was original and the invention rare. His imagination is of things + strange, subtle and complicated—things it at first strikes us that + we moderns have reason to know, and that it has taken us all the ages to + learn; so that we permit ourselves to wonder how a “primitive” could come + by them. We soon enough reflect, however, that we ourselves have come by + them almost only <i>through</i> him, exquisite spirit that he was, and + that when we enjoy, or at least when we encounter, in our William + Morrises, in our Rossettis and Burne-Joneses, the note of the haunted or + over-charged consciousness, we are but treated, with other matters, to + repeated doses of diluted Botticelli. He practically set with his own hand + almost all the copies to almost all our so-called pre-Raphaelites, earlier + and later, near and remote. + </p> + <p> + Let us at the same time, none the less, never fail of response to the + great Florentine geniality at large. Fra Angelico, Filippo Lippi, + Ghirlandaio, were not “subtly” imaginative, were not even riotously so; + but what other three were ever more gladly observant, more vividly and + richly true? If there should some time be a weeding out of the world’s + possessions the best works of the early Florentines will certainly be + counted among the flowers. With the ripest performances of the Venetians—by + which I don’t mean the over-ripe—we can but take them for the most + valuable things in the history of art. Heaven forbid we should be narrowed + down to a cruel choice; but if it came to a question of keeping or losing + between half-a-dozen Raphaels and half-a-dozen things it would be a joy to + pick out at the Academy, I fear that, for myself, the memory of the + Transfiguration, or indeed of the other Roman relics of the painter, + wouldn’t save the Raphaels. And yet this was so far from the opinion of a + patient artist whom I saw the other day copying the finest of Ghirlandaios—a + beautiful Adoration of the Kings at the Hospital of the Innocenti. Here + was another sample of the buried art-wealth of Florence. It hangs in an + obscure chapel, far aloft, behind an altar, and though now and then a + stray tourist wanders in and puzzles a while over the vaguely-glowing + forms, the picture is never really seen and enjoyed. I found an aged + Frenchman of modest mien perched on a little platform beneath it, behind a + great hedge of altar-candlesticks, with an admirable copy all completed. + The difficulties of his task had been well-nigh insuperable, and his + performance seemed to me a real feat of magic. He could scarcely move or + turn, and could find room for his canvas but by rolling it together and + painting a small piece at a time, so that he never enjoyed a view of his + <i>ensemble</i>. The original is gorgeous with colour and bewildering with + decorative detail, but not a gleam of the painter’s crimson was wanting, + not a curl in his gold arabesques. It seemed to me that if I had copied a + Ghirlandaio in such conditions I would at least maintain for my own credit + that he was the first painter in the world. “Very good of its kind,” said + the weary old man with a shrug of reply for my raptures; “but oh, how far + short of Raphael!” However that may be, if the reader chances to observe + this consummate copy in the so commendable Museum devoted in Paris to such + works, let him stop before it with a due reverence; it is one of the + patient things of art. Seeing it wrought there, in its dusky nook, under + such scant convenience, I found no bar in the painter’s foreignness to a + thrilled sense that the old art-life of Florence isn’t yet extinct. It + still at least works spells and almost miracles. + </p> + <h3> + 1873. + </h3> + <p> + <a name="link2H_4_0019" id="link2H_4_0019"> + <!-- H2 anchor --> </a> + </p> + <div style="height: 4em;"> + <br /><br /><br /><br /> + </div> + <h2> + FLORENTINE NOTES + </h2> + <h3> + I + </h3> + <p> + Yesterday that languid organism known as the Florentine Carnival put on a + momentary semblance of vigour, and decreed a general <i>corso</i> through + the town. The spectacle was not brilliant, but it suggested some natural + reflections. I encountered the line of carriages in the square before + Santa Croce, of which they were making the circuit. They rolled solemnly + by, with their inmates frowning forth at each other in apparent wrath at + not finding each other more worth while. There were no masks, no costumes, + no decorations, no throwing of flowers or sweetmeats. It was as if each + carriageful had privately and not very heroically resolved not to be at + costs, and was rather discomfited at finding that it was getting no better + entertainment than it gave. The middle of the piazza was filled with + little tables, with shouting mountebanks, mostly disguised in battered + bonnets and crinolines, offering chances in raffles for plucked fowls and + kerosene lamps. I have never thought the huge marble statue of Dante, + which overlooks the scene, a work of the last refinement; but, as it stood + there on its high pedestal, chin in hand, frowning down on all this cheap + foolery, it seemed to have a great moral intention. The carriages followed + a prescribed course—through Via Ghibellina, Via del Proconsolo, past + the Badia and the Bargello, beneath the great tessellated cliffs of the + Cathedral, through Via Tornabuoni and out into ten minutes’ sunshine + beside the Arno. Much of all this is the gravest and stateliest part of + Florence, a quarter of supreme dignity, and there was an almost ludicrous + incongruity in seeing Pleasure leading her train through these dusky + historic streets. It was most uncomfortably cold, and in the absence of + masks many a fair nose was fantastically tipped with purple. But as the + carriages crept solemnly along they seemed to keep a funeral march—to + follow an antique custom, an exploded faith, to its tomb. The Carnival is + dead, and these good people who had come abroad to make merry were funeral + mutes and grave-diggers. Last winter in Rome it showed but a galvanised + life, yet compared with this humble exhibition it was operatic. At Rome + indeed it was too operatic. The knights on horseback there were a bevy of + circus-riders, and I’m sure half the mad revellers repaired every night to + the Capitol for their twelve sous a day. + </p> + <p> + I have just been reading over the Letters of the President de Brosses. A + hundred years ago, in Venice, the Carnival lasted six months; and at Rome + for many weeks each year one was free, under cover of a mask, to + perpetrate the most fantastic follies and cultivate the most remunerative + vices. It’s very well to read the President’s notes, which have indeed a + singular interest; but they make us ask ourselves why we should expect the + Italians to persist in manners and practices which we ourselves, if we had + responsibilities in the matter, should find intolerable. The Florentines + at any rate spend no more money nor faith on the carnivalesque. And yet + this truth has a qualification; for what struck me in the whole spectacle + yesterday, and prompted these observations, was not at all the more or + less of costume of the occupants of the carriages, but the obstinate + survival of the merrymaking instinct in the people at large. There could + be no better example of it than that so dim a shadow of entertainment + should keep all Florence standing and strolling, densely packed for hours, + in the cold streets. There was nothing to see that mightn’t be seen on the + Cascine any fine day in the year—nothing but a name, a tradition, a + pretext for sweet staring idleness. The faculty of making much of common + things and converting small occasions into great pleasures is, to a son of + communities strenuous as ours are strenuous, the most salient + characteristic of the so-called Latin civilisations. It charms him and + vexes him, according to his mood; and for the most part it represents a + moral gulf between his own temperamental and indeed spiritual sense of + race, and that of Frenchmen and Italians, far wider than the watery + leagues that a steamer may annihilate. But I think his mood is wisest when + he accepts the “foreign” easy surrender to <i>all</i> the senses as the + sign of an unconscious philosophy of life, instilled by the experience of + centuries—the philosophy of people who have lived long and much, who + have discovered no short cuts to happiness and no effective circumvention + of effort, and so have come to regard the average lot as a ponderous fact + that absolutely calls for a certain amount of sitting on the lighter tray + of the scales. Florence yesterday then took its holiday in a natural, + placid fashion that seemed to make its own temper an affair quite + independent of the splendour of the compensation decreed on a higher line + to the weariness of its legs. That the <i>corso</i> was stupid or lively + was the shame or the glory of the powers “above”—the fates, the + gods, the <i>forestieri</i>, the town-councilmen, the rich or the stingy. + Common Florence, on the narrow footways, pressed against the houses, + obeyed a natural need in looking about complacently, patiently, gently, + and never pushing, nor trampling, nor swearing, nor staggering. This + liberal margin for festivals in Italy gives the masses a more than + man-of-the-world urbanity in taking their pleasure. + </p> + <p> + Meanwhile it occurs to me that by a remote New England fireside an + unsophisticated young person of either sex is reading in an old volume of + travels or an old romantic tale some account of these anniversaries and + appointed revels as old Catholic lands offer them to view. Across the page + swims a vision of sculptured palace-fronts draped in crimson and gold and + shining in a southern sun; of a motley train of maskers sweeping on in + voluptuous confusion and pelting each other with nosegays and + love-letters. Into the quiet room, quenching the rhythm of the Connecticut + clock, floats an uproar of delighted voices, a medley of stirring foreign + sounds, an echo of far-heard music of a strangely alien cadence. But the + dusk is falling, and the unsophisticated young person closes the book + wearily and wanders to the window. The dusk is falling on the beaten snow. + Down the road is a white wooden meeting-house, looking grey among the + drifts. The young person surveys the prospect a while, and then wanders + back and stares at the fire. The Carnival of Venice, of Florence, of Rome; + colour and costume, romance and rapture! The young person gazes in the + firelight at the flickering chiaroscuro of the future, discerns at last + the glowing phantasm of opportunity, and determines with a wild heart-beat + to go and see it all—twenty years hence! + </p> + <h3> + II + </h3> + <p> + A couple of days since, driving to Fiesole, we came back by the castle of + Vincigliata. The afternoon was lovely; and, though there is as yet + (February 10th) no visible revival of vegetation, the air was full of a + vague vernal perfume, and the warm colours of the hills and the yellow + western sunlight flooding the plain seemed to contain the promise of + Nature’s return to grace. It’s true that above the distant pale blue gorge + of Vallombrosa the mountain-line was tipped with snow; but the liberated + soul of Spring was nevertheless at large. The view from Fiesole seems + vaster and richer with each visit. The hollow in which Florence lies, and + which from below seems deep and contracted, opens out into an immense and + generous valley and leads away the eye into a hundred gradations of + distance. The place itself showed, amid its chequered fields and gardens, + with as many towers and spires as a chess-board half cleared. The domes + and towers were washed over with a faint blue mist. The scattered columns + of smoke, interfused with the sinking sunlight, hung over them like + streamers and pennons of silver gauze; and the Arno, twisting and curling + and glittering here and there, was a serpent cross-striped with silver. + </p> + <p> + Vincigliata is a product of the millions, the leisure and the + eccentricity, I suppose people say, of an English gentleman—Mr. + Temple Leader, whose name should be commemorated. You reach the castle + from Fiesole by a narrow road, returning toward Florence by a romantic + twist through the hills and passing nothing on its way save thin + plantations of cypress and cedar. Upward of twenty years ago, I believe, + this gentleman took a fancy to the crumbling shell of a mediæval fortress + on a breezy hill-top overlooking the Val d’ Arno and forthwith bought it + and began to “restore” it. I know nothing of what the original ruin may + have cost; but in the dusky courts and chambers of the present elaborate + structure this impassioned archæologist must have buried a fortune. He + has, however, the compensation of feeling that he has erected a monument + which, if it is never to stand a feudal siege, may encounter at least some + critical over-hauling. It is a disinterested work of art and really a + triumph of æsthetic culture. The author has reproduced with minute + accuracy a sturdy home-fortress of the fourteenth century, and has kept + throughout such rigid terms with his model that the result is literally + uninhabitable to degenerate moderns. It is simply a massive facsimile, an + elegant museum of archaic images, mainly but most amusingly counterfeit, + perched on a spur of the Apennines. The place is most politely shown. + There is a charming cloister, painted with extremely clever “quaint” + frescoes, celebrating the deeds of the founders of the castle—a + cloister that is everything delightful a cloister should be except truly + venerable and employable. There is a beautiful castle court, with the + embattled tower climbing into the blue far above it, and a spacious loggia + with rugged medallions and mild-hued Luca della Robbias fastened unevenly + into the walls. But the apartments are the great success, and each of them + as good a “reconstruction” as a tale of Walter Scott; or, to speak + frankly, a much better one. They are all low-beamed and vaulted, + stone-paved, decorated in grave colours and lighted, from narrow, deeply + recessed windows, through small leaden-ringed plates of opaque glass. + </p> + <p> + The details are infinitely ingenious and elaborately grim, and the indoor + atmosphere of mediaevalism most forcibly revived. No compromising fact of + domiciliary darkness and cold is spared us, no producing condition of + mediaeval manners not glanced at. There are oaken benches round the room, + of about six inches in depth, and gaunt fauteuils of wrought leather, + illustrating the suppressed transitions which, as George Eliot says, unite + all contrasts—offering a visible link between the modern conceptions + of torture and of luxury. There are fireplaces nowhere but in the kitchen, + where a couple of sentry-boxes are inserted on either side of the great + hooded chimney-piece, into which people might creep and take their turn at + being toasted and smoked. One may doubt whether this dearth of the + hearthstone could have raged on such a scale, but it’s a happy stroke in + the representation of an Italian dwelling of any period. It shows how the + graceful fiction that Italy is all “meridional” flourished for some time + before being refuted by grumbling tourists. And yet amid this cold comfort + you feel the incongruous presence of a constant intuitive regard for + beauty. The shapely spring of the vaulted ceilings; the richly figured + walls, coarse and hard in substance as they are; the charming shapes of + the great platters and flagons in the deep recesses of the quaintly carved + black dressers; the wandering hand of ornament, as it were, playing here + and there for its own diversion in unlighted corners—such things + redress, to our fond credulity, with all sorts of grace, the balance of + the picture. + </p> + <p> + And yet, somehow, with what dim, unillumined vision one fancies even such + inmates as those conscious of finer needs than the mere supply of blows + and beef and beer would meet passing their heavy eyes over such slender + household beguilements! These crepuscular chambers at Vincigliata are a + mystery and a challenge; they seem the mere propounding of an answerless + riddle. You long, as you wander through them, turning up your coat-collar + and wondering whether ghosts can catch bronchitis, to answer it with some + positive notion of what people so encaged and situated “did,” how they + looked and talked and carried themselves, how they took their pains and + pleasures, how they counted off the hours. Deadly ennui seems to ooze out + of the stones and hang in clouds in the brown corners. No wonder men + relished a fight and panted for a fray. “Skull-smashers” were sweet, ears + ringing with pain and ribs cracking in a tussle were soothing music, + compared with the cruel quietude of the dim-windowed castle. When they + came back they could only have slept a good deal and eased their + dislocated bones on those meagre oaken ledges. Then they woke up and + turned about to the table and ate their portion of roasted sheep. They + shouted at each other across the board and flung the wooden plates at the + servingmen. They jostled and hustled and hooted and bragged; and then, + after gorging and boozing and easing their doublets, they squared their + elbows one by one on the greasy table and buried their scarred foreheads + and dreamed of a good gallop after flying foes. And the women? They must + have been strangely simple—simpler far than any moral archraeologist + can show us in a learned restoration. Of course, their simplicity had its + graces and devices; but one thinks with a sigh that, as the poor things + turned away with patient looks from the viewless windows to the same, same + looming figures on the dusky walls, they hadn’t even the consolation of + knowing that just this attitude and movement, set off by their peaked + coifs, their falling sleeves and heavily-twisted trains, would sow the + seed of yearning envy—of sorts—on the part of later + generations. + </p> + <p> + There are moods in which one feels the impulse to enter a tacit protest + against too gross an appetite for pure aesthetics in this starving and + sinning world. One turns half away, musingly, from certain beautiful + useless things. But the healthier state of mind surely is to lay no tax on + any really intelligent manifestation of the curious, and exquisite. + Intelligence hangs together essentially, all along the line; it only needs + time to make, as we say, its connections. The massive <i>pastiche</i> of + Vincigliata has no superficial use; but, even if it were less complete, + less successful, less brilliant, I should feel a reflective kindness for + it. So disinterested and expensive a toy is its own justification; it + belongs to the heroics of dilettantism. + </p> + <h3> + III + </h3> + <p> + One grows to feel the collection of pictures at the Pitti Palace splendid + rather than interesting. After walking through it once or twice you catch + the key in which it is pitched—you know what you are likely not to + find on closer examination; none of the works of the uncompromising + period, nothing from the half-groping geniuses of the early time, those + whose colouring was sometimes harsh and their outlines sometimes angular. + Vague to me the principle on which the pictures were originally gathered + and of the aesthetic creed of the princes who chiefly selected them. A + princely creed I should roughly call it—the creed of people who + believed in things presenting a fine face to society; who esteemed showy + results rather than curious processes, and would have hardly cared more to + admit into their collection a work by one of the laborious precursors of + the full efflorescence than to see a bucket and broom left standing in a + state saloon. The gallery contains in literal fact some eight or ten + paintings of the early Tuscan School—notably two admirable specimens + of Filippo Lippi and one of the frequent circular pictures of the great + Botticelli—a Madonna, chilled with tragic prescience, laying a pale + cheek against that of a blighted Infant. Such a melancholy mother as this + of Botticelli would have strangled her baby in its cradle to rescue it + from the future. But of Botticelli there is much to say. One of the + Filippo Lippis is perhaps his masterpiece—a Madonna in a small + rose-garden (such a “flowery close” as Mr. William Morris loves to haunt), + leaning over an Infant who kicks his little human heels on the grass while + half-a-dozen curly-pated angels gather about him, looking back over their + shoulders with the candour of children in <i>tableaux vivants</i>, and one + of them drops an armful of gathered roses one by one upon the baby. The + delightful earthly innocence of these winged youngsters is quite + inexpressible. Their heads are twisted about toward the spectator as if + they were playing at leap-frog and were expecting a companion to come and + take a jump. Never did “young” art, never did subjective freshness, + attempt with greater success to represent those phases. But these three + fine works are hung over the tops of doors in a dark back room—the + bucket and broom are thrust behind a curtain. It seems to me, + nevertheless, that a fine Filippo Lippi is good enough company for an + Allori or a Cigoli, and that that too deeply sentient Virgin of Botticelli + might happily balance the flower-like irresponsibility of Raphael’s + “Madonna of the Chair.” + </p> + <p> + Taking the Pitti collection, however, simply for what it pretends to be, + it gives us the very flower of the sumptuous, the courtly, the + grand-ducal. It is chiefly official art, as one may say, but it presents + the fine side of the type—the brilliancy, the facility, the + amplitude, the sovereignty of good taste. I agree on the whole with a + nameless companion and with what he lately remarked about his own humour + on these matters; that, having been on his first acquaintance with + pictures nothing if not critical, and held the lesson incomplete and the + opportunity slighted if he left a gallery without a headache, he had come, + as he grew older, to regard them more as the grandest of all pleasantries + and less as the most strenuous of all lessons, and to remind himself that, + after all, it is the privilege of art to make us friendly to the human + mind and not to make us suspicious of it. We do in fact as we grow older + unstring the critical bow a little and strike a truce with invidious + comparisons. We work off the juvenile impulse to heated partisanship and + discover that one spontaneous producer isn’t different enough from another + to keep the all-knowing Fates from smiling over our loves and our + aversions. We perceive a certain human solidarity in all cultivated + effort, and are conscious of a growing accommodation of judgment—an + easier disposition, the fruit of experience, to take the joke for what it + is worth as it passes. We have in short less of a quarrel with the masters + we don’t delight in, and less of an impulse to pin all our faith on those + in whom, in more zealous days, we fancied that we made our peculiar + meanings. The meanings no longer seem quite so peculiar. Since then we + have arrived at a few in the depths of our own genius that are not + sensibly less striking. + </p> + <p> + And yet it must be added that all this depends vastly on one’s mood—as + a traveller’s impressions do, generally, to a degree which those who give + them to the world would do well more explicitly to declare. We have our + hours of expansion and those of contraction, and yet while we follow the + traveller’s trade we go about gazing and judging with unadjusted + confidence. We can’t suspend judgment; we must take our notes, and the + notes are florid or crabbed, as the case may be. A short time ago I spent + a week in an ancient city on a hill-top, in the humour, for which I was + not to blame, which produces crabbed notes. I knew it at the time, but + couldn’t help it. I went through all the motions of liberal appreciation; + I uncapped in all the churches and on the massive ramparts stared all the + views fairly out of countenance; but my imagination, which I suppose at + bottom had very good reasons of its own and knew perfectly what it was + about, refused to project into the dark old town and upon the yellow hills + that sympathetic glow which forms half the substance of our genial + impressions. So it is that in museums and palaces we are alternate + radicals and conservatives. On some days we ask but to be somewhat + sensibly affected; on others, Ruskin-haunted, to be spiritually steadied. + After a long absence from the Pitti Palace I went back there the other + morning and transferred myself from chair to chair in the great + golden-roofed saloons—the chairs are all gilded and covered with + faded silk—in the humour to be diverted at any price. I needn’t + mention the things that diverted me; I yawn now when I think of some of + them. But an artist, for instance, to whom my kindlier judgment has made + permanent concessions is that charming Andrea del Sarto. When I first knew + him, in my cold youth, I used to say without mincing that I didn’t like + him. <i>Cet âge est sans pitié</i>. The fine sympathetic, melancholy, + pleasing painter! He has a dozen faults, and if you insist pedantically on + your rights the conclusive word you use about him will be the word weak. + But if you are a generous soul you will utter it low—low as the mild + grave tone of his own sought harmonies. He is monotonous, narrow, + incomplete; he has but a dozen different figures and but two or three ways + of distributing them; he seems able to utter but half his thought, and his + canvases lack apparently some final return on the whole matter—some + process which his impulse failed him before he could bestow. And yet in + spite of these limitations his genius is both itself of the great pattern + and lighted by the air of a great period. Three gifts he had largely: an + instinctive, unaffected, unerring grace; a large and rich, and yet a sort + of withdrawn and indifferent sobriety; and best of all, as well as rarest + of all, an indescribable property of relatedness as to the moral world. + Whether he was aware of the connection or not, or in what measure, I + cannot say; but he gives, so to speak, the taste of it. Before his + handsome vague-browed Madonnas; the mild, robust young saints who kneel in + his foregrounds and look round at you with a conscious anxiety which seems + to say that, though in the picture, they are not of it, but of your own + sentient life of commingled love and weariness; the stately apostles, with + comely heads and harmonious draperies, who gaze up at the high-seated + Virgin like early astronomers at a newly seen star—there comes to + you the brush of the dark wing of an inward life. A shadow falls for the + moment, and in it you feel the chill of moral suffering. Did the Lippis + suffer, father or son? Did Raphael suffer? Did Titian? Did Rubens suffer? + Perish the thought—it wouldn’t be fair to <i>us</i> that they should + have had everything. And I note in our poor second-rate Andrea an element + of interest lacking to a number of stronger talents. + </p> + <p> + Interspersed with him at the Pitti hang the stronger and the weaker in + splendid abundance. Raphael is there, strong in portraiture—easy, + various, bountiful genius that he was—and (strong here isn’t the + word, but) happy beyond the common dream in his beautiful “Madonna of the + Chair.” The general instinct of posterity seems to have been to treat this + lovely picture as a semi-sacred, an almost miraculous, manifestation. + People stand in a worshipful silence before it, as they would before a + taper-studded shrine. If we suspend in imagination on the right of it the + solid, realistic, unidealised portrait of Leo the Tenth (which hangs in + another room) and transport to the left the fresco of the School of Athens + from the Vatican, and then reflect that these were three separate fancies + of a single youthful, amiable genius we recognise that such a producing + consciousness must have been a “treat.” My companion already quoted has a + phrase that he “doesn’t care for Raphael,” but confesses, when pressed, + that he was a most remarkable young man. Titian has a dozen portraits of + unequal interest. I never particularly noticed till lately—it is + very ill hung—that portentous image of the Emperor Charles the + Fifth. He was a burlier, more imposing personage than his usual legend + figures, and in his great puffed sleeves and gold chains and full-skirted + over-dress he seems to tell of a tread that might sometimes have been + inconveniently resonant. But the <i>purpose</i> to have his way and work + his will is there—the great stomach for divine right, the old + monarchical temperament. The great Titian, in portraiture, however, + remains that formidable young man in black, with the small compact head, + the delicate nose and the irascible blue eye. Who was he? What was he? “<i>Ritratto + virile</i>” is all the catalogue is able to call the picture. “Virile!” + Rather! you vulgarly exclaim. You may weave what romance you please about + it, but a romance your dream must be. Handsome, clever, defiant, + passionate, dangerous, it was not his own fault if he hadn’t adventures + and to spare. He was a gentleman and a warrior, and his adventures + balanced between camp and court. I imagine him the young orphan of a noble + house, about to come into mortgaged estates. One wouldn’t have cared to be + his guardian, bound to paternal admonitions once a month over his + precocious transactions with the Jews or his scandalous abduction from her + convent of such and such a noble maiden. + </p> + <p> + The Pitti Gallery contains none of Titian’s golden-toned groups; but it + boasts a lovely composition by Paul Veronese, the dealer in silver hues—a + Baptism of Christ. W—— named it to me the other day as the + picture he most enjoyed, and surely painting seems here to have proposed + to itself to discredit and annihilate—and even on the occasion of + such a subject—everything but the loveliness of life. The picture + bedims and enfeebles its neighbours. We ask ourselves whether painting as + such can go further. It is simply that here at last the art stands + complete. The early Tuscans, as well as Leonardo, as Raphael, as Michael, + saw the great spectacle that surrounded them in beautiful sharp-edged + elements and parts. The great Venetians felt its indissoluble unity and + recognised that form and colour and earth and air were equal members of + every possible subject; and beneath their magical touch the hard outlines + melted together and the blank intervals bloomed with meaning. In this + beautiful Paul Veronese of the Pitti everything is part of the charm—the + atmosphere as well as the figures, the look of radiant morning in the + white-streaked sky as well as the living human limbs, the cloth of + Venetian purple about the loins of the Christ as well as the noble + humility of his attitude. The relation to Nature of the other Italian + schools differs from that of the Venetian as courtship—even ardent + courtship—differs from marriage. + </p> + <h3> + IV + </h3> + <p> + I went the other day to the secularised Convent of San Marco, paid my + franc at the profane little wicket which creaks away at the door—no + less than six custodians, apparently, are needed to turn it, as if it may + have a recusant conscience—passed along the bright, still cloister + and paid my respects to Fra Angelico’s Crucifixion, in that dusky chamber + in the basement. I looked long; one can hardly do otherwise. The fresco + deals with the pathetic on the grand scale, and after taking in its beauty + you feel as little at liberty to go away abruptly as you would to leave + church during the sermon. You may be as little of a formal Christian as + Fra Angelico was much of one; you yet feel admonished by spiritual decency + to let so yearning a view of the Christian story work its utmost will on + you. The three crosses rise high against a strange completely crimson sky, + which deepens mysteriously the tragic expression of the scene, though I + remain perforce vague as to whether this lurid background be a fine + intended piece of symbolism or an effective accident of time. In the first + case the extravagance quite triumphs. Between the crosses, under no great + rigour of composition, are scattered the most exemplary saints—kneeling, + praying, weeping, pitying, worshipping. The swoon of the Madonna is + depicted at the left, and this gives the holy presences, in respect to the + case, the strangest historical or actual air. Everything is so real that + you feel a vague impatience and almost ask yourself how it was that amid + the army of his consecrated servants our Lord was permitted to suffer. On + reflection you see that the painter’s design, so far as coherent, has been + simply to offer an immense representation of Pity, and all with such + concentrated truth that his colours here seem dissolved in tears that drop + and drop, however softly, through all time. Of this single yearning + consciousness the figures are admirably expressive. No later painter + learned to render with deeper force than Fra Angelico the one state of the + spirit he could conceive—a passionate pious tenderness. Immured in + his quiet convent, he apparently never received an intelligible impression + of evil; and his conception of human life was a perpetual sense of + sacredly loving and being loved. But how, immured in his quiet convent, + away from the streets and the studios, did he become that genuine, + finished, perfectly professional painter? No one is less of a mere mawkish + amateur. His range was broad, from this really heroic fresco to the little + trumpeting seraphs, in their opaline robes, enamelled, as it were, on the + gold margins of his pictures. + </p> + <p> + I sat out the sermon and departed, I hope, with the gentle preacher’s + blessing. I went into the smaller refectory, near by, to refresh my memory + of the beautiful Last Supper of Domenico Ghirlandaio. It would be putting + things coarsely to say that I adjourned thus from a sernlon to a comedy, + though Ghirlandaio’s theme, as contrasted with the blessed Angelico’s, was + the dramatic spectacular side of human life. How keenly he observed it and + how richly he rendered it, the world about him of colour and costume, of + handsome heads and pictorial groupings! In his admirable school there is + no painter one enjoys—<i>pace</i> Ruskin—more sociably and + irresponsibly. Lippo Lippi is simpler, quainter, more frankly expressive; + but we retain before him a remnant of the sympathetic discomfort provoked + by the masters whose conceptions were still a trifle too large for their + means. The pictorial vision in their minds seems to stretch and strain + their undeveloped skill almost to a sense of pain. In Ghirlandaio the + skill and the imagination are equal, and he gives us a delightful + impression of enjoying his own resources. Of all the painters of his time + he affects us least as positively not of ours. He enjoyed a crimson mantle + spreading and tumbling in curious folds and embroidered with needlework of + gold, just as he enjoyed a handsome well-rounded head, with vigorous dusky + locks, profiled in courteous adoration. He enjoyed in short the various + reality of things, and had the good fortune to live in an age when reality + flowered into a thousand amusing graces—to speak only of those. He + was not especially addicted to giving spiritual hints; and yet how hard + and meagre they seem, the professed and finished realists of our own day, + with the spiritual <i>bonhomie</i> or candour that makes half + Ghirlandaio’s richness left out! The Last Supper at San Marco is an + excellent example of the natural reverence of an artist of that time with + whom reverence was not, as one may say, a specialty. The main idea with + him has been the variety, the material bravery and positively social charm + of the scene, which finds expression, with irrepressible generosity, in + the accessories of the background. Instinctively he imagines an opulent + garden—imagines it with a good faith which quite tides him over the + reflection that Christ and his disciples were poor men and unused to sit + at meat in palaces. Great full-fruited orange-trees peep over the wall + before which the table is spread, strange birds fly through the air, while + a peacock perches on the edge of the partition and looks down on the + sacred repast. It is striking that, without any at all intense religious + purpose, the figures, in their varied naturalness, have a dignity and + sweetness of attitude that admits of numberless reverential constructions. + I should call all this the happy tact of a robust faith. + </p> + <p> + On the staircase leading up to the little painted cells of the Beato + Angelico, however, I suddenly faltered and paused. Somehow I had grown + averse to the intenser zeal of the Monk of Fiesole. I wanted no more of + him that day. I wanted no more macerated friars and spear-gashed sides. + Ghirlandaio’s elegant way of telling his story had put me in the humour + for something more largely intelligent, more profanely pleasing. I + departed, walked across the square, and found it in the Academy, standing + in a particular spot and looking up at a particular high-hung picture. It + is difficult to speak adequately, perhaps even intelligibly, of Sandro + Botticelli. An accomplished critic—Mr. Pater, in his <i>Studies on + the History of the Renaissance</i>—has lately paid him the tribute + of an exquisite, a supreme, curiosity. He was rarity and distinction + incarnate, and of all the multitudinous masters of his group incomparably + the most interesting, the one who detains and perplexes and fascinates us + most. Exquisitely fine his imagination—infinitely audacious and + adventurous his fancy. Alone among the painters of his time he strikes us + as having invention. The glow and thrill of expanding observation—this + was the feeling that sent his comrades to their easels; but Botticelli’s + moved him to reactions and emotions of which they knew nothing, caused his + faculty to sport and wander and explore on its own account. These impulses + have fruits often so ingenious and so lovely that it would be easy to talk + nonsense about them. I hope it is not nonsense, however, to say that the + picture to which I just alluded (the “Coronation of the Virgin,” with a + group of life-sized saints below and a garland of miniature angels above) + is one of the supremely beautiful productions of the human mind. It is + hung so high that you need a good glass to see it; to say nothing of the + unprecedented delicacy of the work. The lower half is of moderate + interest; but the dance of hand-clasped angels round the heavenly couple + above has a beauty newly exhaled from the deepest sources of inspiration. + Their perfect little hands are locked with ineffable elegance; their + blowing robes are tossed into folds of which each line is a study; their + charming feet have the relief of the most delicate sculpture. But, as I + have already noted, of Botticelli there is much, too much to say—besides + which Mr. Pater has said all. Only add thus to his inimitable grace of + design that the exquisite pictorial force driving him goes a-Maying not on + wanton errands of its own, but on those of some mystic superstition which + trembles for ever in his heart. + </p> + <p> + {Illustration: THE GREAT EAVES, FLORENCE} + </p> + <h3> + V + </h3> + <p> + The more I look at the old Florentine domestic architecture the more I + like it—that of the great examples at least; and if I ever am able + to build myself a lordly pleasure-house I don’t see how in conscience I + can build it different from these. They are sombre and frowning, and look + a trifle more as if they were meant to keep people out than to let them + in; but what equally “important” type—if there be an equally + important—is more expressive of domiciliary dignity and security and + yet attests them with a finer æesthetic economy? They are impressively + “handsome,” and yet contrive to be so by the simplest means. I don’t say + at the smallest pecuniary cost—that’s another matter. There is money + buried in the thick walls and diffused through the echoing excess of + space. The merchant nobles of the fifteenth century had deep and full + pockets, I suppose, though the present bearers of their names are glad to + let out their palaces in suites of apartments which are occupied by the + commercial aristocracy of another republic. One is told of fine old + mouldering chambers of which possession is to be enjoyed for a sum not + worth mentioning. I am afraid that behind these so gravely harmonious + fronts there is a good deal of dusky discomfort, and I speak now simply of + the large serious faces themselves as you can see them from the street; + see them ranged cheek to cheek, in the grey historic light of Via dei + Bardi, Via Maggio, Via degli Albizzi. The force of character, the familiar + severity and majesty, depend on a few simple features: on the great + iron-caged windows of the rough-hewn basement; on the noble stretch of + space between the summit of one high, round-topped window and the bottom + of that above; on the high-hung sculptured shield at the angle of the + house; on the flat far-projecting roof; and, finally, on the magnificent + tallness of the whole building, which so dwarfs our modern attempts at + size. The finest of these Florentine palaces are, I imagine, the tallest + habitations in Europe that are frankly and amply habitations—not + mere shafts for machinery of the American grain-elevator pattern. Some of + the creations of M. Haussmann in Paris may climb very nearly as high; but + there is all the difference in the world between the impressiveness of a + building which takes breath, as it were, some six or seven times, from + storey to storey, and of one that erects itself to an equal height in + three long-drawn pulsations. When a house is ten windows wide and the + drawing-room floor is as high as a chapel it can afford but three floors. + The spaciousness of some of those ancient drawing-rooms is that of a + Russian steppe. The “family circle,” gathered anywhere within speaking + distance, must resemble a group of pilgrims encamped in the desert on a + little oasis of carpet. Madame Gryzanowska, living at the top of a house + in that dusky, tortuous old Borgo Pinti, initiated me the other evening + most good-naturedly, lamp in hand, into the far-spreading mysteries of her + apartment. Such quarters seem a translation into space of the + old-fashioned idea of leisure. Leisure and “room” have been passing out of + our manners together, but here and there, being of stouter structure, the + latter lingers and survives. + </p> + <p> + Here and there, indeed, in this blessed Italy, reluctantly modern in spite + alike of boasts and lamentations, it seems to have been preserved for + curiosity’s and fancy’s sake, with a vague, sweet odour of the embalmer’s + spices about it. I went the other morning to the Corsini Palace. The + proprietors obviously are great people. One of the ornaments of Rome is + their great white-faced palace in the dark Trastevere and its voluminous + gallery, none the less delectable for the poorness of the pictures. Here + they have a palace on the Arno, with another large, handsome, respectable + and mainly uninteresting collection. It contains indeed three or four fine + examples of early Florentines. It was not especially for the pictures that + I went, however; and certainly not for the pictures that I stayed. I was + under the same spell as the inveterate companion with whom I walked the + other day through the beautiful private apartments of the Pitti Palace and + who said: “I suppose I care for nature, and I know there have been times + when I have thought it the greatest pleasure in life to lie under a tree + and gaze away at blue hills. But just now I had rather lie on that faded + sea-green satin sofa and gaze down through the open door at that + retreating vista of gilded, deserted, haunted chambers. In other words I + prefer a good ‘interior’ to a good landscape. The impression has a greater + intensity—the thing itself a more complex animation. I like fine old + rooms that have been occupied in a fine old way. I like the musty + upholstery, the antiquated knick-knacks, the view out of the tall + deep-embrasured windows at garden cypresses rocking against a grey sky. If + you don’t know why, I’m afraid I can’t tell you.” It seemed to me at the + Palazzo Corsini that I did know why. In places that have been lived in so + long and so much and in such a fine old way, as my friend said—that + is under social conditions so multifold and to a comparatively starved and + democratic sense so curious—the past seems to have left a sensible + deposit, an aroma, an atmosphere. This ghostly presence tells you no + secrets, but it prompts you to try and guess a few. What has been done and + said here through so many years, what has been ventured or suffered, what + has been dreamed or despaired of? Guess the riddle if you can, or if you + think it worth your ingenuity. The rooms at Palazzo Corsini suggest + indeed, and seem to recall, but a monotony of peace and plenty. One of + them imaged such a noble perfection of a home-scene that I dawdled there + until the old custodian came shuffling back to see whether possibly I was + trying to conceal a Caravaggio about my person: a great crimson-draped + drawing-room of the amplest and yet most charming proportions; walls hung + with large dark pictures, a great concave ceiling frescoed and moulded + with dusky richness, and half-a-dozen south windows looking out on the + Arno, whose swift yellow tide sends up the light in a cheerful flicker. I + fear that in my appreciation of the particular effect so achieved I + uttered a monstrous folly—some momentary willingness to be maimed or + crippled all my days if I might pass them in such a place. In fact half + the pleasure of inhabiting this spacious saloon would be that of using + one’s legs, of strolling up and down past the windows, one by one, and + making desultory journeys from station to station and corner to corner. + Near by is a colossal ball-room, domed and pilastered like a Renaissance + cathedral, and super-abundantly decorated with marble effigies, all yellow + and grey with the years. + </p> + <h3> + VI + </h3> + <p> + In the Carthusian Monastery outside the Roman Gate, mutilated and profaned + though it is, one may still snuff up a strong if stale redolence of old + Catholicism and old Italy. The road to it is ugly, being encumbered with + vulgar waggons and fringed with tenements suggestive of an Irish-American + suburb. Your interest begins as you come in sight of the convent perched + on its little mountain and lifting against the sky, around the bell-tower + of its gorgeous chapel, a coronet of clustered cells. You make your way + into the lower gate, through a clamouring press of deformed beggars who + thrust at you their stumps of limbs, and you climb the steep hillside + through a shabby plantation which it is proper to fancy was better tended + in the monkish time. The monks are not totally abolished, the government + having the grace to await the natural extinction of the half-dozen old + brothers who remain, and who shuffle doggedly about the cloisters, + looking, with their white robes and their pale blank old faces, quite + anticipatory ghosts of their future selves. A prosaic, profane old man in + a coat and trousers serves you, however, as custodian. The melancholy + friars have not even the privilege of doing you the honours of their + dishonour. One must imagine the pathetic effect of their former silent + pointings to this and that conventual treasure under stress of the feeling + that such pointings were narrowly numbered. The convent is vast and + irregular—it bristles with those picture-making arts and accidents + which one notes as one lingers and passes, but which in Italy the + overburdened memory learns to resolve into broadly general images. I + rather deplore its position at the gates of a bustling city—it ought + rather to be lodged in some lonely fold of the Apennines. And yet to look + out from the shady porch of one of the quiet cells upon the teeming vale + of the Arno and the clustered towers of Florence must have deepened the + sense of monastic quietude. + </p> + <p> + The chapel, or rather the church, which is of great proportions and + designed by Andrea Orcagna, the primitive painter, refines upon the + consecrated type or even quite glorifies it. The massive cincture of black + sculptured stalls, the dusky Gothic roof, the high-hung, deep-toned + pictures and the superb pavement of verd-antique and dark red marble, + polished into glassy lights, must throw the white-robed figures of the + gathered friars into the highest romantic relief. All this luxury of + worship has nowhere such value as in the chapels of monasteries, where we + find it contrasted with the otherwise so ascetic economy of the + worshippers. The paintings and gildings of their church, the gem-bright + marbles and fantastic carvings, are really but the monastic tribute to + sensuous delight—an imperious need for which the fond imagination of + Rome has officiously opened the door. One smiles when one thinks how + largely a fine starved sense for the forbidden things of earth, if it + makes the most of its opportunities, may gratify this need under cover of + devotion. Nothing is too base, too hard, too sordid for real humility, but + nothing too elegant, too amiable, too caressing, caressed, caressable, for + the exaltation of faith. The meaner the convent cell the richer the + convent chapel. Out of poverty and solitude, inanition and cold, your + honest friar may rise at his will into a Mahomet’s Paradise of luxurious + analogies. + </p> + <p> + There are further various dusky subterranean oratories where a number of + bad pictures contend faintly with the friendly gloom. Two or three of + these funereal vaults, however, deserve mention. In one of them, side by + side, sculptured by Donatello in low relief, lie the white marble effigies + of the three members of the Accaiuoli family who founded the convent in + the thirteenth century. In another, on his back, on the pavement, rests a + grim old bishop of the same stout race by the same honest craftsman. + Terribly grim he is, and scowling as if in his stony sleep he still + dreamed of his hates and his hard ambitions. Last and best, in another low + chapel, with the trodden pavement for its bed, shines dimly a grand image + of a later bishop—Leonardo Buonafede, who, dying in 1545, owes his + monument to Francesco di San Gallo. I have seen little from this artist’s + hand, but it was clearly of the cunningest. His model here was a very + sturdy old prelate, though I should say a very genial old man. The + sculptor has respected his monumental ugliness, but has suffused it with a + singular homely charm—a look of confessed physical comfort in the + privilege of paradise. All these figures have an inimitable reality, and + their lifelike marble seems such an incorruptible incarnation of the + genius of the place that you begin to think of it as even more reckless + than cruel on the part of the present public powers to have begun to pull + the establishment down, morally speaking, about their ears. They are lying + quiet yet a while; but when the last old friar dies and the convent + formally lapses, won’t they rise on their stiff old legs and hobble out to + the gates and thunder forth anathemas before which even a future and more + enterprising régime may be disposed to pause? + </p> + <p> + Out of the great central cloister open the snug little detached dwellings + of the absent fathers. When I said just now that the Certosa in Val d’Ema + gives you a glimpse of old Italy I was thinking of this great pillared + quadrangle, lying half in sun and half in shade, of its tangled + garden-growth in the centre, surrounding the ancient customary well, and + of the intense blue sky bending above it, to say nothing of the + indispensable old white-robed monk who pokes about among the lettuce and + parsley. We have seen such places before; we have visited them in that + divinatory glance which strays away into space for a moment over the top + of a suggestive book. I don’t quite know whether it’s more or less as + one’s fancy would have it that the monkish cells are no cells at all, but + very tidy little <i>appartements complets</i>, consisting of a couple of + chambers, a sitting-room and a spacious loggia, projecting out into space + from the cliff-like wall of the monastery and sweeping from pole to pole + the loveliest view in the world. It’s poor work, however, taking notes on + views, and I will let this one pass. The little chambers are terribly cold + and musty now. Their odour and atmosphere are such as one used, as a + child, to imagine those of the school-room during Saturday and Sunday. + </p> + <h3> + VII + </h3> + <p> + In the Roman streets, wherever you turn, the facade of a church in more or + less degenerate flamboyance is the principal feature of the scene; and if, + in the absence of purer motives, you are weary of aesthetic trudging over + the corrugated surface of the Seven Hills, a system of pavement in which + small cobble-stones anomalously endowed with angles and edges are alone + employed, you may turn aside at your pleasure and take a reviving sniff at + the pungency of incense. In Florence, one soon observes, the churches are + relatively few and the dusky house-fronts more rarely interrupted by + specimens of that extraordinary architecture which in Rome passes for + sacred. In Florence, in other words, ecclesiasticism is less cheap a + commodity and not dispensed in the same abundance at the street-corners. + Heaven forbid, at the same time, that I should undervalue the Roman + churches, which are for the most part treasure-houses of history, of + curiosity, of promiscuous and associational interest. It is a fact, + nevertheless, that, after St. Peter’s, I know but one really beautiful + church by the Tiber, the enchanting basilica of St. Mary Major. Many have + structural character, some a great <i>allure</i>, but as a rule they all + lack the dignity of the best of the Florentine temples. Here, the list + being immeasurably shorter and the seed less scattered, the principal + churches are all beautiful. And yet I went into the Annunziata the other + day and sat there for half-an-hour because, forsooth, the gildings and the + marbles and the frescoed dome and the great rococo shrine near the door, + with its little black jewelled fetish, reminded me so poignantly of Rome. + Such is the city properly styled eternal—since it is eternal, at + least, as regards the consciousness of the individual. One loves it in its + sophistications—though for that matter isn’t it all rich and + precious sophistication?—better than other places in their purity. + </p> + <p> + Coming out of the Annunziata you look past the bronze statue of the Grand + Duke Ferdinand I (whom Mr. Browning’s heroine used to watch for—in + the poem of “The Statue and the Bust”—from the red palace near by), + and down a street vista of enchanting picturesqueness. The street is + narrow and dusky and filled with misty shadows, and at its opposite end + rises the vast bright-coloured side of the Cathedral. It stands up in very + much the same mountainous fashion as the far-shining mass of the bigger + prodigy at Milan, of which your first glimpse as you leave your hotel is + generally through another such dark avenue; only that, if we talk of + mountains, the white walls of Milan must be likened to snow and ice from + their base, while those of the Duomo of Florence may be the image of some + mighty hillside enamelled with blooming flowers. The big bleak interior + here has a naked majesty which, though it may fail of its effect at first, + becomes after a while extraordinarily touching. Originally disconcerting, + it soon inspired me with a passion. Externally, at any rate, it is one of + the loveliest works of man’s hands, and an overwhelming proof into the + bargain that when elegance belittles grandeur you have simply had a + bungling artist. + </p> + <p> + Santa Croce within not only triumphs here, but would triumph anywhere. “A + trifle naked if you like,” said my irrepressible companion, “but that’s + what I call architecture, just as I don’t call bronze or marble clothes + (save under urgent stress of portraiture) statuary.” And indeed we are far + enough away from the clustering odds and ends borrowed from every art and + every province without which the ritually builded thing doesn’t trust its + spell to work in Rome. The vastness, the lightness, the open spring of the + arches at Santa Croce, the beautiful shape of the high and narrow choir, + the impression made as of mass without weight and the gravity yet reigning + without gloom—these are my frequent delight, and the interest grows + with acquaintance. The place is the great Florentine Valhalla, the final + home or memorial harbour of the native illustrious dead, but that + consideration of it would take me far. It must be confessed moreover that, + between his coarsely-imagined statue out in front and his horrible + monument in one of the aisles, the author of <i>The Divine Comedy</i>, for + instance, is just hereabouts rather an extravagant figure. “Ungrateful + Florence,” declaims Byron. Ungrateful indeed—would she were more so! + the susceptible spirit of the great exile may be still aware enough to + exclaim; in common, that is, with most of the other immortals sacrificed + on so very large a scale to current Florentine “plastic” facility. In + explanation of which remark, however, I must confine myself to noting + that, as almost all the old monuments at Santa Croce are small, + comparatively small, and interesting and exquisite, so the modern, well + nigh without exception, are disproportionately vast and pompous, or in + other words distressingly vague and vain. The aptitude of hand, the + compositional assurance, with which such things are nevertheless turned + out, constitutes an anomaly replete with suggestion for an observer of the + present state of the arts on the soil and in the air that once befriended + them, taking them all together, as even the soil and the air of Greece + scarce availed to do. But on this head, I repeat, there would be too much + to say; and I find myself checked by the same warning at the threshold of + the church in Florence really interesting beyond Santa Croce, beyond all + others. Such, of course, easily, is Santa Maria Novella, where the chapels + are lined and plated with wonderful figured and peopled fresco-work even + as most of those in Rome with precious inanimate substances. These + overscored retreats of devotion, as dusky, some of them, as eremitic caves + swarming with importunate visions, have kept me divided all winter between + the love of Ghirlandaio and the fear of those seeds of catarrh to which + their mortal chill seems propitious till far on into the spring. So I + pause here just on the praise of that delightful painter—as to the + spirit of whose work the reflections I have already made are but confirmed + by these examples. In the choir at Santa Maria Novella, where the incense + swings and the great chants resound, between the gorgeous coloured window + and the florid grand altar, he still “goes in,” with all his might, for + the wicked, the amusing world, the world of faces and forms and + characters, of every sort of curious human and rare material thing. + </p> + <p> + {Illustration: BOBOLI GARDEN, FLORENCE.} + </p> + <h3> + VIII + </h3> + <p> + I had always felt the Boboli Gardens charming enough for me to “haunt” + them; and yet such is the interest of Florence in every quarter that it + took another <i>corso</i> of the same cheap pattern as the last to cause + me yesterday to flee the crowded streets, passing under that archway of + the Pitti Palace which might almost be the gate of an Etruscan city, so + that I might spend the afternoon among the mouldy statues that compose + with their screens of cypress, looking down at our clustered towers and + our background of pale blue hills vaguely freckled with white villas. + These pleasure-grounds of the austere Pitti pile, with its inconsequent + charm of being so rough-hewn and yet somehow so elegantly balanced, plead + with a voice all their own the general cause of the ample enclosed, + planted, cultivated private preserve—preserve of tranquillity and + beauty and immunity—in the heart of a city; a cause, I allow, for + that matter, easy to plead anywhere, once the pretext is found, the large, + quiet, distributed town-garden, with the vague hum of big grudging + boundaries all about it, but with everything worse excluded, being of + course the most insolently-pleasant thing in the world. In addition to + which, when the garden is in the Italian manner, with flowers rather + remarkably omitted, as too flimsy and easy and cheap, and without lawns + that are too smart, paths that are too often swept and shrubs that are too + closely trimmed, though with a fanciful formalism giving style to its + shabbiness, and here and there a dusky ilex-walk, and here and there a + dried-up fountain, and everywhere a piece of mildewed sculpture staring at + you from a green alcove, and just in the right place, above all, a grassy + amphitheatre curtained behind with black cypresses and sloping downward in + mossy marble steps—when, I say, the place possesses these + attractions, and you lounge there of a soft Sunday afternoon, the racier + spectacle of the streets having made your fellow-loungers few and left you + to the deep stillness and the shady vistas that lead you wonder where, + left you to the insidious irresistible mixture of nature and art, nothing + too much of either, only a supreme happy resultant, a divine <i>tertium + quid</i>: under these conditions, it need scarce be said the revelation + invoked descends upon you. + </p> + <p> + The Boboli Gardens are not large—you wonder how compact little + Florence finds room for them within her walls. But they are scattered, to + their extreme, their all-romantic advantage and felicity, over a group of + steep undulations between the rugged and terraced palace and a + still-surviving stretch of city wall, where the unevenness of the ground + much adds to their apparent size. You may cultivate in them the fancy of + their solemn and haunted character, of something faint and dim and even, + if you like, tragic, in their prescribed, their functional smile; as if + they borrowed from the huge monument that overhangs them certain of its + ponderous memories and regrets. This course is open to you, I mention, but + it isn’t enjoined, and will doubtless indeed not come up for you at all if + it isn’t your habit, cherished beyond any other, to spin your impressions + to the last tenuity of fineness. Now that I bethink myself I must always + have happened to wander here on grey and melancholy days. It remains none + the less true that the place contains, thank goodness—or at least + thank the grave, the infinitely-distinguished traditional <i>taste</i> of + Florence—no cheerful, trivial object, neither parterres, nor + pagodas, nor peacocks, nor swans. They have their famous amphitheatre + already referred to, with its degrees or stone benches of a thoroughly + aged and mottled complexion and its circular wall of evergreens behind, in + which small cracked images and vases, things that, according to + association, and with the law of the same quite indefinable, may make as + much on one occasion for exquisite dignity as they may make on another for + (to express it kindly) nothing at all. Something was once done in this + charmed and forsaken circle—done or meant to be done; what was it, + dumb statues, who saw it with your blank eyes? Opposite stands the huge + flat-roofed palace, putting forward two great rectangular arms and + looking, with its closed windows and its foundations of almost unreduced + rock, like some ghost of a sample of a ruder Babylon. In the wide + court-like space between the wings is a fine old white marble fountain + that never plays. Its dusty idleness completes the general air of + abandonment. Chancing on such a cluster of objects in Italy—glancing + at them in a certain light and a certain mood—I get (perhaps on too + easy terms, you may think) a sense of <i>history</i> that takes away my + breath. Generations of Medici have stood at these closed windows, + embroidered and brocaded according to their period, and held <i>fetes + champetres</i> and floral games on the greensward, beneath the mouldering + hemicycle. And the Medici were great people! But what remains of it all + now is a mere tone in the air, a faint sigh in the breeze, a vague + expression in things, a passive—or call it rather, perhaps, to be + fair, a shyly, pathetically responsive—accessibility to the yearning + guess. Call it much or call it little, the ineffaceability of this deep + stain of experience, it is the interest of old places and the bribe to the + brooding analyst. Time has devoured the doers and their doings, but there + still hangs about some effect of their passage. We can “layout” parks on + virgin soil, and cause them to bristle with the most expensive + importations, but we unfortunately can’t scatter abroad again this seed of + the eventual human soul of a place—that comes but in its time and + takes too long to grow. There is nothing like it when it <i>has</i> come. + </p> + <p> + <a name="link2H_4_0020" id="link2H_4_0020"> + <!-- H2 anchor --> </a> + </p> + <div style="height: 4em;"> + <br /><br /><br /><br /> + </div> + <h2> + TUSCAN CITIES + </h2> + <p> + The cities I refer to are Leghorn, Pisa, Lucca and Pistoia, among which I + have been spending the last few days. The most striking fact as to + Leghorn, it must be conceded at the outset, is that, being in Tuscany, it + should be so scantily Tuscan. The traveller curious in local colour must + content himself with the deep blue expanse of the Mediterranean. The + streets, away from the docks, are modern, genteel and rectangular; + Liverpool might acknowledge them if it weren’t for their clean-coloured, + sun-bleached stucco. They are the offspring of the new industry which is + death to the old idleness. Of interesting architecture, fruit of the old + idleness or at least of the old leisure, Leghorn is singularly destitute. + It has neither a church worth one’s attention, nor a municipal palace, nor + a museum, and it may claim the distinction, unique in Italy, of being the + city of no pictures. In a shabby corner near the docks stands a statue of + one of the elder Grand Dukes of Tuscany, appealing to posterity on grounds + now vague—chiefly that of having placed certain Moors under tribute. + Four colossal negroes, in very bad bronze, are chained to the base of the + monument, which forms with their assistance a sufficiently fantastic + group; but to patronise the arts is not the line of the Livornese, and for + want of the slender annuity which would keep its precinct sacred this + curious memorial is buried in dockyard rubbish. I must add that on the + other hand there is a very well-conditioned and, in attitude and gesture, + extremely natural and familiar statue of Cavour in one of the city + squares, and in another a couple of effigies of recent Grand Dukes, + represented, that is dressed, or rather undressed, in the character of + heroes of Plutarch. Leghorn is a city of magnificent spaces, and it was so + long a journey from the sidewalk to the pedestal of these images that I + never took the time to go and read the inscriptions. And in truth, + vaguely, I bore the originals a grudge, and wished to know as little about + them as possible; for it seemed to me that as <i>patres patrae</i>, in + their degree, they might have decreed that the great blank, ochre-faced + piazza should be a trifle less ugly. There is a distinct amenity, however, + in any experience of Italy almost anywhere, and I shall probably in the + future not be above sparing a light regret to several of the hours of + which the one I speak of was composed. I shall remember a large cool + bourgeois villa in the garden of a noiseless suburb—a middle-aged + Villa Franco (I owe it as a genial pleasant <i>pension</i> the tribute of + recognition), roomy and stony, as an Italian villa should be. I shall + remember that, as I sat in the garden, and, looking up from my book, saw + through a gap in the shrubbery the red house-tiles against the deep blue + sky and the grey underside of the ilex-leaves turned up by the + Mediterranean breeze, it was all still quite Tuscany, if Tuscany in the + minor key. + </p> + <p> + If you should naturally desire, in such conditions, a higher intensity, + you have but to proceed, by a very short journey, to Pisa—where, for + that matter, you will seem to yourself to have hung about a good deal + already, and from an early age. Few of us can have had a childhood so + unblessed by contact with the arts as that one of its occasional + diversions shan’t have been a puzzled scrutiny of some alabaster model of + the Leaning Tower under a glass cover in a back-parlour. Pisa and its + monuments have, in other words, been industriously vulgarised, but it is + astonishing how well they have survived the process. The charm of the + place is in fact of a high order and but partially foreshadowed by the + famous crookedness of its campanile. I felt it irresistibly and yet almost + inexpressibly the other afternoon, as I made my way to the classic corner + of the city through the warm drowsy air which nervous people come to + inhale as a sedative. I was with an invalid companion who had had no sleep + to speak of for a fortnight. “Ah! stop the carriage,” she sighed, or + yawned, as I could feel, deliciously, “in the shadow of this old + slumbering palazzo, and let me sit here and close my eyes, and taste for + an hour of oblivion.” Once strolling over the grass, however, out of which + the quartette of marble monuments rises, we awaked responsively enough to + the present hour. Most people remember the happy remark of tasteful, + old-fashioned Forsyth (who touched a hundred other points in his “Italy” + scarce less happily) as to the fact that the four famous objects are + “fortunate alike in their society and their solitude.” It must be admitted + that they are more fortunate in their society than we felt ourselves to be + in ours; for the scene presented the animated appearance for which, on any + fine spring day, all the choicest haunts of ancient quietude in Italy are + becoming yearly more remarkable. There were clamorous beggars at all the + sculptured portals, and bait for beggars, in abundance, trailing in and + out of them under convoy of loquacious ciceroni. I forget just how I + apportioned the responsibility, of intrusion, for it was not long before + fellow-tourists and fellow-countrymen became a vague, deadened, muffled + presence, that of the dentist’s last words when he is giving you ether. + They suffered mystic disintegration in the dense, bright, tranquil air, so + charged with its own messages. The Cathedral and its companions are + fortunate indeed in everything—fortunate in the spacious angle of + the grey old city-wall which folds about them in their sculptured elegance + like a strong protecting arm; fortunate in the broad greensward which + stretches from the marble base of Cathedral and cemetery to the rugged + foot of the rampart; fortunate in the little vagabonds who dot the grass, + plucking daisies and exchanging Italian cries; fortunate in the pale-gold + tone to which time and the soft sea-damp have mellowed and darkened their + marble plates; fortunate, above all, in an indescribable grace of + grouping, half hazard, half design, which insures them, in one’s memory of + things admired, very much the same isolated corner that they occupy in the + charming city. + </p> + <p> + Of the smaller cathedrals of Italy I know none I prefer to that of Pisa; + none that, on a moderate scale, produces more the impression of a great + church. It has without so modest a measurability, represents so clean and + compact a mass, that you are startled when you cross the threshold at the + apparent space it encloses. An architect of genius, for all that he works + with colossal blocks and cumbrous pillars, is certainly the most cunning + of conjurors. The front of the Duomo is a small pyramidal screen, covered + with delicate carvings and chasings, distributed over a series of short + columns upholding narrow arches. It might be a sought imitation of + goldsmith’s work in stone, and the area covered is apparently so small + that extreme fineness has been prescribed. How it is therefore that on the + inner side of this façade the wall should appear to rise to a splendid + height and to support one end of a ceiling as remote in its gilded + grandeur, one could almost fancy, as that of St. Peter’s; how it is that + the nave should stretch away in such solemn vastness, the shallow + transepts emphasise the grand impression and the apse of the choir hollow + itself out like a dusky cavern fretted with golden stalactites, is all + matter for exposition by a keener architectural analyst than I. To sit + somewhere against a pillar where the vista is large and the incidents + cluster richly, and vaguely revolve these mysteries without answering + them, is the best of one’s usual enjoyment of a great church. It takes no + deep sounding to conclude indeed that a gigantic Byzantine Christ in + mosaic, on the concave roof of the choir, contributes largely to the + particular impression here as of very old and choice and original and + individual things. It has even more of stiff solemnity than is common to + works of its school, and prompts to more wonder than ever on the nature of + the human mind at a time when such unlovely shapes could satisfy its + conception of holiness. Truly pathetic is the fate of these huge mosaic + idols, thanks to the change that has overtaken our manner of acceptance of + them. Strong the contrast between the original sublimity of their + pretensions and the way in which they flatter that free sense of the + grotesque which the modern imagination has smuggled even into the + appreciation of religious forms. They were meant to yield scarcely to the + Deity itself in grandeur, but the only part they play now is to stare + helplessly at our critical, our aesthetic patronage of them. The spiritual + refinement marking the hither end of a progress had n’t, however, to wait + for us to signalise it; it found expression three centuries ago in the + beautiful specimen of the painter Sodoma on the wall of the choir. This + latter, a small Sacrifice of Isaac, is one of the best examples of its + exquisite author, and perhaps, as chance has it, the most perfect + opposition that could be found in the way of the range of taste to the + effect of the great mosaic. There are many painters more powerful than + Sodoma—painters who, like the author of the mosaic, attempted and + compassed grandeur; but none has a more persuasive grace, none more than + he was to sift and chasten a conception till it should affect one with the + sweetness of a perfectly distilled perfume. + </p> + <p> + Of the patient successive efforts of painting to arrive at the supreme + refinement of such a work as the Sodoma the Campo Santo hard by offers a + most interesting memorial. It presents a long, blank marble wall to the + relative profaneness of the Cathedral close, but within it is a perfect + treasure-house of art. This quadrangular defence surrounds an open court + where weeds and wild roses are tangled together and a sunny stillness + seems to rest consentingly, as if Nature had been won to consciousness of + the precious relics committed to her. Something in the quality of the + place recalls the collegiate cloisters of Oxford, but it must be added + that this is the handsomest compliment to that seat of learning. The open + arches of the quadrangles of Magdalen and Christ Church are not of mellow + Carrara marble, nor do they offer to sight columns, slim and elegant, that + seem to frame the unglazed windows of a cathedral. To be buried in the + Campo Santo of Pisa, I may however further qualify, you need only be, or + to have more or less anciently been, illustrious, and there is a liberal + allowance both as to the character and degree of your fame. The most + obtrusive object in one of the long vistas is a most complicated monument + to Madame Catalani, the singer, recently erected by her possibly + too-appreciative heirs. The wide pavement is a mosaic of sepulchral slabs, + and the walls, below the base of the paling frescoes, are incrusted with + inscriptions and encumbered with urns and antique sarcophagi. The place is + at once a cemetery and a museum, and its especial charm is its strange + mixture of the active and the passive, of art and rest, of life and death. + Originally its walls were one vast continuity of closely pressed frescoes; + but now the great capricious scars and stains have come to outnumber the + pictures, and the cemetery has grown to be a burial-place of pulverised + masterpieces as well as of finished lives. The fragments of painting that + remain are fortunately the best; for one is safe in believing that a host + of undimmed neighbours would distract but little from the two great works + of Orcagna. Most people know the “Triumph of Death” and the “Last + Judgment” from descriptions and engravings; but to measure the possible + good faith of imitative art one must stand there and see the painter’s + howling potentates dragged into hell in all the vividness of his bright + hard colouring; see his feudal courtiers, on their palfreys, hold their + noses at what they are so fast coming to; see his great Christ, in + judgment, refuse forgiveness with a gesture commanding enough, really + inhuman enough, to make virtue merciless for ever. The charge that Michael + Angelo borrowed his cursing Saviour from this great figure of Orcagna is + more valid than most accusations of plagiarism; but of the two figures one + at least could be spared. For direct, triumphant expressiveness these two + superb frescoes have probably never been surpassed. The painter aims at no + very delicate meanings, but he drives certain gross ones home so + effectively that for a parallel to his process one must look to the art of + the actor, the emphasising “point”—making mime. Some of his female figures + are superb—they represent creatures of a formidable temperament. + </p> + <p> + There are charming women, however, on the other side of the cloister—in + the beautiful frescoes of Benozzo Gozzoli. If Orcagna’s work was appointed + to survive the ravage of time it is a happy chance that it should be + balanced by a group of performances of such a different temper. The + contrast is the more striking that in subject the inspiration of both + painters is strictly, even though superficially, theological. But Benozzo + cares, in his theology, for nothing but the story, the scene and the drama—the + chance to pile up palaces and spires in his backgrounds against pale blue + skies cross-barred with pearly, fleecy clouds, and to scatter sculptured + arches and shady trellises over the front, with every incident of human + life going forward lightly and gracefully beneath them. Lightness and + grace are the painter’s great qualities, marking the hithermost limit of + unconscious elegance, after which “style” and science and the wisdom of + the serpent set in. His charm is natural fineness; a little more and we + should have refinement—which is a very different thing. Like all <i>les + délicats</i> of this world, as M. Renan calls them, Benozzo has suffered + greatly. The space on the walls he originally covered with his Old + Testament stories is immense; but his exquisite handiwork has peeled off + by the acre, as one may almost say, and the latter compartments of the + series are swallowed up in huge white scars, out of which a helpless head + or hand peeps forth like those of creatures sinking into a quicksand. As + for Pisa at large, although it is not exactly what one would call a + mouldering city—for it has a certain well-aired cleanness and + brightness, even in its supreme tranquillity—it affects the + imagination very much in the same way as the Campo Santo. And, in truth, a + city so ancient and deeply historic as Pisa is at every step but the + burial-ground of a larger life than its present one. The wide empty + streets, the goodly Tuscan palaces—which look as if about all of + them there were a genteel private understanding, independent of placards, + that they are to be let extremely cheap—the delicious relaxing air, + the full-flowing yellow river, the lounging Pisani, smelling, + metaphorically, their poppy-flowers, seemed to me all so many admonitions + to resignation and oblivion. And this is what I mean by saying that the + charm of Pisa (apart from its cluster of monuments) is a charm of a high + order. The architecture has but a modest dignity; the lions are few; there + are no fixed points for stopping and gaping. And yet the impression is + profound; the charm is a moral charm. If I were ever to be incurably + disappointed in life, if I had lost my health, my money, or my friends, if + I were resigned forevermore to pitching my expectations in a minor key, I + should go and invoke the Pisan peace. Its quietude would seem something + more than a stillness—a hush. Pisa may be a dull place to live in, + but it’s an ideal place to wait for death. + </p> + <p> + Nothing could be more charming than the country between Pisa and Lucca—unless + possibly the country between Lucca and Pistoia. If Pisa is dead Tuscany, + Lucca is Tuscany still living and enjoying, desiring and intending. The + town is a charming mixture of antique “character” and modern + inconsequence; and! not only the town, but the country—the blooming + romantic country which you admire from the famous promenade on the + city-wall. The wall is of superbly solid and intensely “toned” brickwork + and of extraordinary breadth, and its summit, planted with goodly trees + and swelling here and there into bastions and outworks and little open + gardens, surrounds the city with a circular lounging-place of a splendid + dignity. This well-kept, shady, ivy-grown rampart reminded me of certain + mossy corners of England; but it looks away to a prospect of more than + English loveliness—a broad green plain where the summer yields a + double crop of grain, and a circle of bright blue mountains speckled with + high-hung convents and profiled castles and nestling villas, and traversed + by valleys of a deeper and duskier blue. In one of the deepest and + shadiest of these recesses one of the most “sympathetic” of small + watering-places is hidden away yet a while longer from easy invasion—the + Baths to which Lucca has lent its name. Lucca is pre-eminently a city of + churches; ecclesiastical architecture being indeed the only one of the + arts to which it seems to have given attention. There are curious bits of + domestic architecture, but no great palaces, and no importunate frequency + of pictures. The Cathedral, however, sums up the merits of its companions + and is a singularly noble and interesting church. Its peculiar boast is a + wonderful inlaid front, on which horses and hounds and hunted beasts are + lavishly figured in black marble over a white ground. What I chiefly + appreciated in the grey solemnity of the nave and transepts was the superb + effect of certain second-storey Gothic arches—those which rest on + the pavement being Lombard. These arches are delicate and slender, like + those of the cloister at Pisa, and they play their part in the dusky upper + air with real sublimity. + </p> + <p> + At Pistoia there is of course a Cathedral, and there is nothing unexpected + in its being, externally at least, highly impressive; in its having a + grand campanile at its door, a gaudy baptistery, in alternate layers of + black and white marble, across the way, and a stately civic palace on + either side. But even had I the space to do otherwise I should prefer to + speak less of the particular objects of interest in the place than of the + pleasure I found it to lounge away in the empty streets the quiet hours of + a warm afternoon. To say where I lingered longest would be to tell of a + little square before the hospital, out of which you look up at the + beautiful frieze in coloured earthernware by the brothers Della Robbia, + which runs across the front of the building. It represents the seven + orthodox offices of charity and, with its brilliant blues and yellows and + its tender expressiveness, brightens up amazingly, to the sense and soul, + this little grey corner of the mediaeval city. Pi stoia is still + mediaeval. How grass-grown it seemed, how drowsy, how full of idle vistas + and melancholy nooks! If nothing was supremely wonderful, everything was + delicious. + </p> + <p> + {Illustration: THE HOSPITAL, PISTOIA.} + </p> + <h3> + 1874. + </h3> + <p> + <a name="link2H_4_0021" id="link2H_4_0021"> + <!-- H2 anchor --> </a> + </p> + <div style="height: 4em;"> + <br /><br /><br /><br /> + </div> + <h2> + OTHER TUSCAN CITIES + </h2> + <h3> + I + </h3> + <p> + I had scanted charming Pisa even as I had scanted great Siena in my + original small report of it, my scarce more than stammering notes of years + before; but even if there had been meagreness of mere gaping vision—which + there in fact hadn’t been—as well as insufficiency of public + tribute, the indignity would soon have ceased to weigh on my conscience. + For to this affection I was to return again still oftener than to the + strong call of Siena my eventual frequentations of Pisa, all merely + impressionistic and amateurish as they might be—and I pretended, up + and down the length of the land, to none other—leave me at the + hither end of time with little more than a confused consciousness of + exquisite <i>quality</i> on the part of the small sweet scrap of a place + of ancient glory; a consciousness so pleadingly content to be general and + vague that I shrink from pulling it to pieces. The Republic of Pisa fought + with the Republic of Florence, through the ages so ferociously and all but + invincibly that what is so pale and languid in her to-day may well be the + aspect of any civil or, still more, military creature bled and bled and + bled at the “critical” time of its life. She has verily a just languor and + is touchingly anæmic; the past history, or at any rate the present perfect + acceptedness, of which condition hangs about her with the last grace of + weakness, making her state in this particular the very secret of her + irresistible appeal. I was to find the appeal, again and again, one of the + sweetest, tenderest, even if not one of the fullest and richest + impressions possible; and if I went back whenever I could it was very much + as one doesn’t indecently neglect a gentle invalid friend. The couch of + the invalid friend, beautifully, appealingly resigned, has been wheeled, + say, for the case, into the warm still garden, and your visit but consists + of your sitting beside it with kind, discreet, testifying silences. Such + is the figurative form under which the once rugged enemy of Florence, + stretched at her length by the rarely troubled Arno, to-day presents + herself; and I find my analogy complete even to my sense of the mere mild + <i>séance</i>, the inevitably tacit communion or rather blank interchange, + between motionless cripple and hardly more incurable admirer. + </p> + <p> + The terms of my enjoyment of Pisa scarce departed from that ideal—slow + contemplative perambulations, rather late in the day and after work done + mostly in the particular decent inn-room that was repeatedly my portion; + where the sunny flicker of the river played up from below to the very + ceiling, which, by the same sign, anciently and curiously raftered and + hanging over my table at a great height, had been colour-pencilled into + ornament as fine (for all practical purposes) as the page of a missal. I + add to this, for remembrance, an inveteracy of evening idleness and of + reiterated ices in front of one of the quiet cafés—quiet as + everything at Pisa is quiet, or will certainly but in these latest days + have ceased to be; one in especial so beautifully, so mysteriously void of + bustle that almost always the neighbouring presence and admirable chatter + of some group of the local University students would fall upon my ear, by + the half-hour at a time, not less as a privilege, frankly, than as a + clear-cut image of the young Italian mind and life, by which I lost + nothing. I use such terms as “admirable” and “privilege,” in this last + most casual of connections—which was moreover no connection at all + but what my attention made it—simply as an acknowledgment of the + interest that might play there through some inevitable thoughts. These + were, for that matter, intensely in keeping with the ancient scene and + air: they dealt with the exquisite difference between that tone and type + of ingenuous adolescence—in the mere relation of charmed <i>audition</i>—and + other forms of juvenility of whose mental and material accent one had + elsewhere met the assault. Civilised, charmingly civilised, were my + loquacious neighbours—as how had n’t they to be, one asked one’s + self, through the use of a medium of speech that is in itself a sovereign + saturation? <i>There</i> was the beautiful congruity of the happily-caught + impression; the fact of my young men’s general Tuscanism of tongue, which + related them so on the spot to the whole historic consensus of things. It + wasn’t dialect—as it of course easily might have been elsewhere, at + Milan, at Turin, at Bologna, at Naples; it was the clear Italian in which + all the rest of the surrounding story was told, all the rest of the result + of time recorded; and it made them delightful, prattling, unconscious men + of the particular little constituted and bequeathed world which everything + else that was charged with old meanings and old beauty referred to—all + the more that their talk was never by any chance of romping games or deeds + of violence, but kept flowering, charmingly and incredibly, into eager + ideas and literary opinions and philosophic discussions and, upon my + honour, vital questions. + </p> + <p> + They have taken me too far, for so light a reminiscence; but I claim for + the loose web of my impressions at no point a heavier texture. Which comes + back to what I was a moment ago saying—that just in proportion as + you “feel” the morbid charm of Pisa you press on it gently, and this + somehow even under stress of whatever respectful attention. I found this + last impulse, at all events, so far as I was concerned, quite contentedly + spend itself in a renewed sense of the simple large pacified felicity of + such an afternoon aspect as that of the Lung’ Arno, taken up or down its + course; whether to within sight of small Santa Maria della Spina, the + tiny, the delicate, the exquisite Gothic chapel perched where the quay + drops straight, or, in the other direction, toward the melting perspective + of the narrow local pleasure-ground, the rather thin and careless bosky + grace of which recedes, beside the stream whose very turbidity pleases, to + a middle distance of hot and tangled and exuberant rural industry and a + proper blue horizon of Carrara mountains. The Pisan Lung’ Arno is shorter + and less featured and framed than the Florentine, but it has the fine + accent of a marked curve and is quite as bravely Tuscan; witness the type + of river-fronting palace which, in half-a-dozen massive specimens, the + last word of the anciently “handsome,” are of the essence of the + physiognomy of the place. In the glow of which retrospective admission I + ask myself how I came, under my first flush, reflected in other pages, to + fail of justice to so much proud domestic architecture—in the very + teeth moreover of the fact that I was for ever paying my compliments, in a + wistful, wondering way, to the fine Palazzo Lanfranchi, occupied in 1822 + by the migratory Byron, and whither Leigh Hunt, as commemorated in the + latter’s Autobiography, came out to join him in an odd journalistic + scheme. + </p> + <p> + Of course, however, I need scarcely add, the centre of my daily revolution—quite + thereby on the circumference—was the great Company of Four in their + sequestered corner; objects of regularly recurrent pious pilgrimage, if + for no other purpose than to see whether each would each time again so + inimitably carry itself as one of a group of wonderfully-worked old + ivories. Their charm of relation to each other and to everything else that + concerns them, that of the quartette of monuments, is more or less + inexpressible all round; but not the least of it, ever, is in their + beautiful secret for taking at different hours and seasons, in different + states of the light, the sky, the wind, the weather—in different + states, even, it used verily to seem to me, of an admirer’s imagination or + temper or nerves—different complexional appearances, different + shades and pallors, different glows and chills. I have seen them look + almost viciously black, and I have seen them as clear and fair as pale + gold. And these things, for the most part, off on the large grassy carpet + spread for them, and with the elbow of the old city-wall, not elsewhere + erect, respectfully but protectingly crooked about, to the tune of a usual + unanimity save perhaps in the case of the Leaning Tower—so abnormal + a member of any respectable family this structure at best that I always + somehow fancied its three companions, the Cathedral, the Baptistery and + the Campo Santo, capable of quiet common understandings, for the major or + the minor effect, into which their odd fellow, no hint thrown out to him, + was left to enter as he might. If one haunted the place, one ended by + yielding to the conceit that, beautifully though the others of the group + may be said to behave about him, one sometimes caught them in the act of + tacitly combining to ignore him—as if he had, after so long, begun + to give on their nerves. Or is that absurdity but my shamefaced form of + admission that, for all the wonder of him, he finally gave on mine? + Frankly—I would put it at such moments—he becomes at last an + optical bore or <i>betise</i>. + </p> + <p> + {Illustration: THE LOGGIA, LUCCA.} + </p> + <h3> + II + </h3> + <p> + To Lucca I was not to return often—I was to return only once; when + that compact and admirable little city, the very model of a small <i>pays + de Cocagne</i>, overflowing with everything that makes for ease, for + plenty, for beauty, for interest and good example, renewed for me, in the + highest degree, its genial and robust appearance. The perfection of this + renewal must indeed have been, at bottom, the ground of my rather hanging + back from possible excess of acquaintance—with the instinct that so + right and rich and rounded a little impression had better be left than + endangered. I remember positively saying to myself the second time that no + brown-and-gold Tuscan city, even, could <i>be</i> as happy as Lucca looked—save + always, exactly, Lucca; so that, on the chance of any shade of human + illusion in the case, I wouldn’t, as a brooding analyst, go within fifty + miles of it again. Just so, I fear I must confess, it was this mere + face-value of the place that, when I went back, formed my sufficiency; I + spent all my scant time—or the greater part, for I took a day to + drive over to the Bagni—just gaping at its visible attitude. This + may be described as that of simply sitting there, through the centuries, + at the receipt of perfect felicity; on its splendid solid seat of russet + masonry, that is—for its great republican ramparts of long ago still + lock it tight—with its wide garden-land, its ancient appanage or + hereditary domain, teeming and blooming with everything that is good and + pleasant for man, all about, and with a ring of graceful and noble, yet + comparatively unbeneficed uplands and mountains watching it, for very + envy, across the plain, as a circle of bigger boys, in the playground, may + watch a privileged or pampered smaller one munch a particularly fine + apple. Half smothered thus in oil and wine and corn and all the fruits of + the earth, Lucca seems fairly to laugh for good-humour, and it’s as if one + can’t say more for her than that, thanks to her putting forward for you a + temperament somehow still richer than her heritage, you forgive her at + every turn her fortune. She smiles up at you her greeting as you dip into + her wide lap, out of which you may select almost any rare morsel whatever. + Looking back at my own choice indeed I see it must have suffered a certain + embarrassment—that of the sense of too many things; for I scarce + remember choosing at all, any more than I recall having had to go hungry. + I turned into all the churches—taking care, however, to pause before + one of them, though before which I now irrecoverably forget, for + verification of Ruskin’s so characteristically magnified rapture over the + high and rather narrow and obscure hunting-frieze on its front—and + in the Cathedral paid my respects at every turn to the greatest of + Lucchesi, Matteo Civitale, wisest, sanest, homeliest, kindest of <i>quattro-cento</i> + sculptors, to whose works the Duomo serves almost as a museum. But my + nearest approach to anything so invidious as a discrimination or a + preference, under the spell of so felt an equilibrium, must have been the + act of engaging a carriage for the Baths. + </p> + <p> + That inconsequence once perpetrated, let me add, the impression was as + right as any other—the impression of the drive through the huge + general tangled and fruited <i>podere</i> of the countryside; that of the + pair of jogging hours that bring the visitor to where the wideish gate of + the valley of the Serchio opens. The question after this became quite + other; the narrowing, though always more or less smiling gorge that draws + you on and on is a different, a distinct proposition altogether, with its + own individual grace of appeal and association. It is the association, + exactly, that would even now, on this page, beckon me forward, or perhaps + I should rather say backward—weren’t more than a glance at it out of + the question—to a view of that easier and not so inordinately remote + past when “people spent the summer” in these perhaps slightly stuffy + shades. I speak of that age, I think of it at least, as easier than ours, + in spite of the fact that even as I made my pilgrimage the mark of modern + change, the railway in construction, had begun to be distinct, though the + automobile was still pretty far in the future. The relations and + proportions of everything are of course now altered—I indeed, I + confess, wince at the vision of the cloud of motor-dust that must in the + fine season hang over the whole connection. That represents greater + promptness of approach to the bosky depths of Ponte-a-Serraglio and the + Bagni Caldi, but it throws back the other time, that of the old jogging + relation, of the Tuscan grand-ducal “season” and the small cosmopolite + sociability, into quite Arcadian air and the comparatively primitive + scale. The “easier” Italy of our infatuated precursors there wears its + glamour of facility not through any question of “the development of + communications,” but through the very absence of the dream of that boon, + thanks to which every one (among the infatuated) lived on terms of so much + closer intercourse with the general object of their passion. After we had + crossed the Serchio that beautiful day we passed into the charming, the + amiably tortuous, the thickly umbrageous, valley of the Lima, and then it + was that I seemed fairly to remount the stream of time; figuring to myself + wistfully, at the small scattered centres of entertainment—modest + inns, pensions and other places of convenience clustered where the + friendly torrent is bridged or the forested slopes adjust themselves—what + the summer days and the summer rambles and the summer dreams must have + been, in the blest place, when “people” (by which I mean the contingent of + beguiled barbarians) didn’t know better, as we say, than to content + themselves with such a mild substitute, such a soft, sweet and essentially + elegant apology, for adventure. One wanted not simply to hang about a + little, but really to live back, as surely one might, have done by staying + on, into the so romantically strong, if mechanically weak, Italy of the + associations of one’s youth. It was a pang to have to revert to the + present even in the form of Lucca—which says everything. + </p> + <h3> + III + </h3> + <p> + If undeveloped communications were to become enough for me at those + retrospective moments, I might have felt myself supplied to my taste, let + me go on to say, at the hour of my making, with great resolution, an + attempt on high-seated and quite grandly out-of-the-way Volterra: a + reminiscence associated with quite a different year and, I should perhaps + sooner have bethought myself, with my fond experience of Pisa—inasmuch + as it was during a pause under that bland and motionless wing that I seem + to have had to organise in the darkness of a summer dawn my approach to + the old Etruscan stronghold. The railway then existed, but I rose in the + dim small hours to take my train; moreover, so far as that might too much + savour of an incongruous facility, the fault was in due course quite + adequately repaired by an apparent repudiation of any awareness of such + false notes on the part of the town. I may not invite the reader to + penetrate with me by so much as a step the boundless backward reach of + history to which the more massive of the Etruscan gates of Volterra, the + Porta all’ Arco, forms the solidest of thresholds; since I perforce take + no step myself, and am even exceptionally condemned here to impressionism + unashamed. My errand was to spend a Sunday with an Italian friend, a + native in fact of the place, master of a house there in which he offered + me hospitality; who, also arriving from Florence the night before, had + obligingly come on with me from Pisa, and whose consciousness of a due + urbanity, already rather overstrained, and still well before noon, by the + accumulation of our matutinal vicissitudes and other grounds for patience, + met all ruefully at the station the supreme shock of an apparently great + desolate world of volcanic hills, of blank, though “engineered,” + undulations, as the emergence of a road testified, unmitigated by the + smallest sign of a wheeled vehicle. The station, in other words, looked + out at that time (and I daresay the case hasn’t strikingly altered) on a + mere bare huge hill-country, by some remote mighty shoulder of which the + goal of our pilgrimage, so questionably “served” by the railway, was + hidden from view. Served as well by a belated omnibus, a four-in-hand of + lame and lamentable quality, the place, I hasten to add, eventually put + forth some show of being; after a complete practical recognition of which, + let me at once further mention, all the other, the positive and sublime, + connections of Volterra established themselves for me without my lifting a + finger. + </p> + <p> + The small shrunken, but still lordly prehistoric city is perched, when + once you have rather painfully zigzagged to within sight of it, very much + as an eagle’s eyrie, oversweeping the land and the sea; and to that type + of position, the ideal of the airy peak of vantage, with all accessories + and minor features a drop, a slide and a giddiness, its individual items + and elements strike you at first as instinctively conforming. This + impression was doubtless after a little modified for me; there were + levels, there were small stony practicable streets, there were walks and + strolls, outside the gates and roundabout the cyclopean wall, to the far + end of downward-tending protrusions and promontories, natural buttresses + and pleasant terrene headlands, friendly suburban spots (one would call + them if the word had less detestable references) where games of bowls and + overtrellised wine-tables could put in their note; in spite of which + however my friend’s little house of hospitality, clean and charming and + oh, so immemorially Tuscan, was as perpendicular and ladder-like as so + compact a residence could be; it kept up for me beautifully—as + regards posture and air, though humanly and socially it rather cooed like + a dovecote—the illusion of the vertiginously “balanced” eagle’s + nest. The air, in truth, all the rest of that splendid day, must have been + the key to the promptly-produced intensity of one’s relation to every + aspect of the charming episode; the light, cool, keen air of those + delightful high places, in Italy, that tonically correct the ardours of + July, and which at our actual altitude could but affect me as the very + breath of the grand local legend. I might have “had” the little house, our + particular eagle’s nest, for the summer, and even on such touching terms; + and I well remember the force of the temptation to take it, if only other + complications had permitted; to spend the series of weeks with that + admirable <i>interesting</i> freshness in my lungs: interesting, I + especially note, as the strong appropriate medium in which a continuity + with the irrecoverable but still effective past had been so robustly + preserved. I couldn’t yield, alas, to the conceived felicity, which had + half-a-dozen appealing aspects; I could only, while thus feeling how the + atmospheric medium itself made for a positively initiative exhilaration, + enjoy my illusion till the morrow. The exhilaration therefore supplies to + memory the whole light in which, for the too brief time, I went about + “seeing” Volterra; so that my glance at the seated splendour reduces + itself, as I have said, to the merest impressionism; nothing more was to + be looked for, on the stretched surface of consciousness, from one breezy + wash of the brush. I find there the clean strong image simplified to the + three or four unforgettable particulars of the vast rake of the view; with + the Maremma, of evil fame, more or less immediately below, but with those + islands of the sea, Corsica and Elba, the names of which are sharply + associational beyond any others, dressing the far horizon in the grand + manner, and the Ligurian coast-line melting northward into beauty and + history galore; with colossal uncemented blocks of Etruscan gates and + walls plunging you—and by their very interest—into a sweet + surrender of any privilege of appreciation more crushing than your general + synthetic stare; and with the rich and perfectly arranged museum, an + unsurpassed exhibition of monumental treasure from Etruscan tombs, + funereal urns mainly, reliquaries of an infinite power to move and charm + us still, contributing to this same so designed, but somehow at the same + time so inspired, collapse of the historic imagination under too heavy a + pressure, or abeyance of “private judgment” in too unequal a relation. + </p> + <h3> + IV + </h3> + <p> + I remember recovering private judgment indeed in the course of two or + three days following the excursion I have just noted; which must have + shaped themselves in some sort of consonance with the idea that as we were + hereabouts in the very middle of dim Etruria a common self-respect + prescribed our somehow profiting by the fact. This kindled in us the + spirit of exploration, but with results of which I here attempt to record, + so utterly does the whole impression swoon away, for present memory, into + vagueness, confusion and intolerable heat, Our self-respect was of the + common order, but the blaze of the July sun was, even for Tuscany, of the + uncommon; so that the project of a trudging quest for Etruscan tombs in + shadeless wastes yielded to its own temerity. There comes back to me + nevertheless at the same time, from the mild misadventure, and quite as + through this positive humility of failure, the sense of a supremely + intimate revelation of Italy in undress, so to speak (the state, it + seemed, in which one would most fondly, most ideally, enjoy her); Italy no + longer in winter starch and sobriety, with winter manners and winter + prices and winter excuses, all addressed to the <i>forestieri</i> and the + philistines; but lolling at her length, with her graces all relaxed, and + thereby only the more natural; the brilliant performer, in short, <i>en + famille</i>, the curtain down and her salary stopped for the season—thanks + to which she is by so much more the easy genius and the good creature as + she is by so much less the advertised <i>prima donna</i>. She received us + nowhere more sympathetically, that is with less ceremony or + self-consciousness, I seem to recall, than at Montepulciano, for instance—where + it was indeed that the recovery of private judgment I just referred to + couldn’t help taking place. What we were doing, or what we expected to do, + at Montepulciano I keep no other trace of than is bound up in a present + quite tender consciousness that I wouldn’t for the world not have been + there. I think my reason must have been largely just in the beauty of the + name (for could any beauty be greater?), reinforced no doubt by the fame + of the local vintage and the sense of how we should quaff it on the spot. + Perhaps we quaffed it too constantly; since the romantic picture reduces + itself for me but to two definite appearances; that of the more priggish + discrimination so far reasserting itself as to advise me that + Montepulciano was dirty, even remarkably dirty; and that of her being not + much else besides but perched and brown and queer and crooked, and noble + withal (which is what almost any Tuscan city more easily than not acquits + herself of; all the while she may on such occasions figure, when one looks + off from her to the end of dark street-vistas or catches glimpses through + high arcades, some big battered, blistered, overladen, overmasted ship, + swimming in a violet sea). + </p> + <p> + If I have lost the sense of what we were doing, that could at all suffer + commemoration, at Montepulciano, so I sit helpless before the memory of + small stewing Torrita, which we must somehow have expected to yield, under + our confidence, a view of shy charms, but which did n’t yield, to my + recollection, even anything that could fairly be called a breakfast or a + dinner. There may have been in the neighbourhood a rumour of Etruscan + tombs; the neighbourhood, however, was vast, and that possibility not to + be verified, in the conditions, save after due refreshment. Then it was, + doubtless, that the question of refreshment so beckoned us, by a direct + appeal, straight across country, from Perugia, that, casting consistency, + if not to the winds, since alas there were none, but to the lifeless air, + we made the sweltering best of our way (and it took, for the distance, a + terrible time) to the Grand Hotel of that city. This course shines for me, + in the retrospect, with a light even more shameless than that in which my + rueful conscience then saw it; since we thus exchanged again, at a stroke, + the tousled <i>bonne fille</i> of our vacational Tuscany for the formal + and figged-out presence of Italy on her good behaviour. We had never seen + her conform more to all the proprieties, we felt, than under this aspect + of lavish hospitality to that now apparently quite inveterate swarm of + pampered <i>forestieri</i>, English and Americans in especial, who, having + had Roman palaces and villas deliciously to linger in, break the northward + journey, when once they decide to take it, in the Umbrian paradise. They + were, goodness knows, within their rights, and we profited, as anyone may + easily and cannily profit at that time, by the sophistications paraded for + them; only I feel, as I pleasantly recover it all, that though we had + arrived perhaps at the most poetical of watering-places we had lost our + finer clue. (The difference from other days was immense, all the span of + evolution from the ancient malodorous inn which somehow did n’t matter, to + that new type of polyglot caravanserai which everywhere insists on + mattering—mattering, even in places where other interests abound, so + much more than anything else.) That clue, the finer as I say, I would fain + at any rate to-day pick up for its close attachment to another Tuscan city + or two—for a felt pull from strange little San Gimignano delle belle + Torre in especial; by which I mean from the memory of a summer Sunday + spent there during a stay at Siena. But I have already superabounded, for + mere love of my general present rubric—the real thickness of + experience having a good deal evaporated, so that the Tiny Town of the + Many Towers hangs before me, not to say, rather, far behind me, after the + manner of an object directly meeting the wrong or diminishing lens of + one’s telescope. + </p> + <p> + It did everything, on the occasion of that pilgrimage, that it was + expected to do, presenting itself more or less in the guise of some rare + silvery shell, washed up by the sea of time, cracked and battered and + dishonoured, with its mutilated marks of adjustment to the extinct type of + creature it once harboured figuring against the sky as maimed + gesticulating arms flourished in protest against fate. If the centuries, + however, had pretty well cleaned out, vulgarly speaking, this amazing + little fortress-town, it wasn’t that a mere aching void was bequeathed us, + I recognise as I consult a somewhat faded impression; the whole scene and + occasion come back to me as the exhibition, on the contrary, of a stage + rather crowded and agitated, of no small quantity of sound and fury, of + concussions, discussions, vociferations, hurryings to and fro, that could + scarce have reached a higher pitch in the old days of the siege and the + sortie. San Gimignano affected me, to a certainty, as not dead, I mean, + but as inspired with that strange and slightly sinister new life that is + now, in case after case, up and down the peninsula, and even in presence + of the dryest and most scattered bones, producing the miracle of + resurrection. The effect is often—and I find it strikingly involved + in this particular reminiscence—that of the buried hero himself + positively waking up to show you his bones for a fee, and almost capering + about in his appeal to your attention. What has become of the soul of San + Gimignano who shall say?—but, of a genial modern Sunday, it is as if + the heroic skeleton, risen from the dust, were in high activity, officious + for your entertainment and your detention, clattering and changing plates + at the informal friendly inn, personally conducting you to a sight of the + admirable Santa Fina of Ghirlandaio, as I believe is supposed, in a dim + chapel of the Collegiata church; the poor young saint, on her low bed, in + a state of ecstatic vision (the angelic apparition is given), acconpanied + by a few figures and accessories of the most beautiful and touching truth. + This image is what has most vividly remained with me, of the day I thus so + ineffectually recover; the precious ill-set gem or domestic treasure of + Santa Fina, and then the wonderful drive, at eventide, back to Siena: the + progress through the darkening land that was like a dense fragrant garden, + all fireflies and warm emanations and dimly-seen motionless festoons, + extravagant vines and elegant branches intertwisted for miles, with + couples and companies of young countryfolk almost as fondly united and + raising their voices to the night as if superfluously to sing out at you + that they were happy, and above all were Tuscan. On reflection, and to be + just, I connect the slightly incongruous loudness that hung about me under + the Beautiful Towers with the really too coarse competition for my favour + among the young vetturini who lay in wait for my approach, and with an eye + to my subsequent departure, on my quitting, at some unremembered spot, the + morning train from Siena, from which point there was then still a drive. + That onset was of a fine mediaeval violence, but the subsiding echoes of + it alone must have afterwards borne me company; mingled, at the worst, + with certain reverberations of the animated rather than concentrated + presence of sundry young sketchers and copyists of my own nationality, + which element in the picture conveyed beyond anything else how thoroughly + it was all to sit again henceforth in the eye of day. My final vision + perhaps was of a sacred reliquary not so much rudely as familiarly and + “humorously” torn open. The note had, with all its references, its own + interest; but I never went again. + </p> + <p> + {Illustration: TOWERS OF SAN GIMIGNANO.} + </p> + <p> + <a name="link2H_4_0022" id="link2H_4_0022"> + <!-- H2 anchor --> </a> + </p> + <div style="height: 4em;"> + <br /><br /><br /><br /> + </div> + <h2> + RAVENNA + </h2> + <p> + I write these lines on a cold Swiss mountain-top, shut in by an intense + white mist from any glimpse of the underworld of lovely Italy; but as I + jotted down the other day in the ancient capital of Honorius and Theodoric + the few notes of which they are composed, I let the original date stand + for local colour’s sake. Its mere look, as I transcribe it, emits a + grateful glow in the midst of the Alpine rawness, and gives a depressed + imagination something tangible to grasp while awaiting the return of fine + weather. For Ravenna was glowing, less than a week since, as I edged along + the narrow strip of shadow binding one side of the empty, white streets. + After a long, chill spring the summer this year descended upon Italy with + a sudden jump and an ominous hot breath. I stole away from Florence in the + night, and even on top of the Apennines, under the dull starlight and in + the rushing train, one could but sit and pant perspiringly. + </p> + <p> + At Bologna I found a festa, or rather two festas, a civil and a religious, + going on in mutual mistrust and disparagement. The civil, that of the + Statuto, was the one fully national Italian holiday as by law established—the + day that signalises everywhere over the land at once its achieved and + hard-won unification; the religious was a jubilee of certain local + churches. The latter is observed by the Bolognese parishes in couples, and + comes round for each couple but once in ten years—an arrangement by + which the faithful at large insure themselves a liberal recurrence of + expensive processions. It was n’t my business to distinguish the sheep + from the goats, the pious from the profane, the prayers from the scoffers; + it was enough that, melting together under the scorching sun, they filled + the admirably solid city with a flood of spectacular life. The combination + at one point was really dramatic. While a long procession of priests and + young virgins in white veils, bearing tapers, marshalled itself in one of + the streets, a review of the King’s troops went forward outside the town. + On its return a large detachment of cavalry passed across the space where + the incense was burning, the pictured banners swaying and the litany being + droned, and checked the advance of the little ecclesiastical troop. The + long vista of the street, between the porticoes, was festooned with + garlands and scarlet and tinsel; the robes and crosses and canopies of the + priests, the clouds of perfumed smoke and the white veils of the maidens, + were resolved by the hot bright air into a gorgeous medley of colour, + across which the mounted soldiers rattled and flashed as if it had been a + conquering army trampling on an embassy of propitiation. It was, to tell + the truth, the first time an’ Italian festa had really exhibited to my + eyes the genial glow and the romantic particulars promised by song and + story; and I confess that those eyes found more pleasure in it than they + were to find an hour later in the picturesque on canvas as one observes it + in the Pinacoteca. I found myself scowling most unmercifully at Guido and + Domenichino. + </p> + <p> + For Ravenna, however, I had nothing but smiles—grave, reflective, + philosophic smiles, I hasten to add, such as accord with the historic + dignity, not to say the mortal sunny sadness, of the place. I arrived + there in the evening, before, even at drowsy Ravenna, the festa of the + Statuto had altogether put itself to bed. I immediately strolled forth + from the inn, and found it sitting up a while longer on the piazza, + chiefly at the cafe door, listening to the band of the garrison by the + light of a dozen or so of feeble tapers, fastened along the front of the + palace of the Government. Before long, however, it had dispersed and + departed, and I was left alone with the grey illumination and with an + affable citizen whose testimony as to the manners and customs of Ravenna I + had aspired to obtain. I had, borrowing confidence from prompt + observation, suggested deferentially that it was n’t the liveliest place + in the world, and my friend admitted that it was in fact not a seat of + ardent life. But had I seen the Corso? Without seeing the Corso one did + n’t exhaust the possibilities. The Corso of Ravenna, of a hot summer + night, had an air of surprising seclusion and repose. Here and there in an + upper closed window glimmered a light; my companion’s footsteps and my own + were the only sounds; not a creature was within sight. The suffocating air + helped me to believe for a moment that I walked in the Italy of Boccaccio, + hand-in-hand with the plague, through a city which had lost half its + population by pestilence and the other half by flight. I turned back into + my inn profoundly satisfied. This at last was the old-world dulness of a + prime distillation; this at last was antiquity, history, repose. + </p> + <p> + The impression was largely confirmed and enriched on the following day; + but it was obliged at an early stage of my visit to give precedence to + another—the lively perception, namely, of the thinness of my + saturation with Gibbon and the other sources of legend. At Ravenna the + waiter at the café and the coachman who drives you to the Pine-Forest + allude to Galla Placidia and Justinian as to any attractive topic of the + hour; wherever you turn you encounter some fond appeal to your historic + presence of mind. For myself I could only attune my spirit vaguely to so + ponderous a challenge, could only feel I was breathing an air of + prodigious records and relics. I conned my guide-book and looked up at the + great mosaics, and then fumbled at poor Murray again for some intenser + light on the court of Justinian; but I can imagine that to a visitor more + intimate with the originals of the various great almond-eyed mosaic + portraits in the vaults of the churches these extremely curious works of + art may have a really formidable interest. I found in the place at large, + by daylight, the look of a vast straggling depopulated village. The + streets with hardly an exception are grass-grown, and though I walked + about all day I failed to encounter a single wheeled vehicle. I remember + no shop but the little establishment of an urbane photographer, whose + views of the Pineta, the great legendary pine-forest just without the + town, gave me an irresistible desire to seek that refuge. There was no + architecture to speak of; and though there are a great many large + domiciles with aristocratic names they stand cracking and baking in the + sun in no very comfortable fashion. The houses have for the most part an + all but rustic rudeness; they are low and featureless and shabby, as well + as interspersed with high garden walls over which the long arms of tangled + vines hang motionless into the stagnant streets. Here and there in all + this dreariness, in some particularly silent and grassy corner, rises an + old brick church with a front more or less spoiled, by cheap + modernisation, and a strange cylindrical campanile pierced with small + arched windows and extremely suggestive of the fifth century. These + churches constitute the palpable interest of Ravenna, and their own + principal interest, after thirteen centuries of well-intentioned + spoliation, resides in their unequalled collection of early Christian + mosaics. It is an interest simple, as who should say, almost to harshness, + and leads one’s attention along a straight and narrow way. There are older + churches in Rome, and churches which, looked at as museums, are more + variously and richly informing; but in Rome you stumble at every step on + some curious pagan memorial, often beautiful enough to make your thoughts + wander far from the strange stiff primitive Christian forms. + </p> + <p> + Ravenna, on the other hand, began with the Church, and all her monuments + and relics are harmoniously rigid. By the middle of the first century she + possessed an exemplary saint, Apollinaris, a disciple of Peter, to whom + her two finest places of worship are dedicated. It was to one of these, + jocosely entitled the “new,” that I first directed my steps. I lingered + outside a while and looked at the great red, barrel-shaped bell-towers, so + rusty, so crumbling, so archaic, and yet so resolute to ring in another + century or two, and then went in to the coolness, the shining marble + columns, the queer old sculptured slabs and sarcophagi and the long + mosaics that scintillated, under the roof, along the wall of the nave. San + Apollinare Nuovo, like most of its companions, is a magazine of early + Christian odds and ends; fragments of yellow marble incrusted with quaint + sculptured emblems of primitive dogma; great rough troughs, containing the + bones of old bishops; episcopal chairs with the marble worn narrow by + centuries of pressure from the solid episcopal person; slabs from the + fronts of old pulpits, covered with carven hierogylphics of an almost + Egyptian abstruseness—lambs and stags and fishes and beasts of + theological affinities even less apparent. Upon all these strange things + the strange figures in the great mosaic panorama look down, with coloured + cheeks and staring eyes, lifelike enough to speak to you and answer your + wonderment and tell you in bad Latin of the decadence that it was in such + and such a fashion they believed and worshipped. First, on each side, near + the door, are houses and ships and various old landmarks of Ravenna; then + begins a long procession, on one side, of twenty-two white-robed virgins + and three obsequious magi, terminating in a throne bearing the Madonna and + Child, surrounded by four angels; on the other side, of an equal number of + male saints (twenty-five, that is) holding crowns in their hands and + leading to a Saviour enthroned between angels of singular expressiveness. + What it is these long slim seraphs express I cannot quite say, but they + have an odd, knowing, sidelong look out of the narrow ovals of their eyes + which, though not without sweetness, would certainly make me murmur a + defensive prayer or so were I to find myself alone in the church towards + dusk. All this work is of the latter part of the sixth century and + brilliantly preserved. The gold backgrounds twinkle as if they had been + inserted yesterday, and here and there a figure is executed almost too + much in the modern manner to be interesting; for the charm of mosaic work + is, to my sense, confined altogether to the infancy of the art. The great + Christ, in the series of which I speak, is quite an elaborate picture, and + yet he retains enough of the orthodox stiffness to make him impressive in + the simpler, elder sense. He is clad in a purple robe, even as an emperor, + his hair and beard are artfully curled, his eyebrows arched, his + complexion brilliant, his whole aspect such a one as the popular mind may + have attributed to Honorius or Valentinian. It is all very Byzantine, and + yet I found in it much of that interest which is inseparable, to a facile + imagination, from all early representations of our Lord. Practically they + are no more authentic than the more or less plausible inventions of Ary + Scheffer and Holman Hunt; in spite of which they borrow a certain value, + factitious perhaps but irresistible, from the mere fact that they are + twelve or thirteen centuries less distant from the original. It is + something that this was the way the people in the sixth century imagined + Jesus to have looked; the image has suffered by so many the fewer + accretions. The great purple-robed monarch on the wall of Ravenna is at + least a very potent and positive Christ, and the only objection I have to + make to him is that though in this character he must have had a full + apportionment of divine foreknowledge he betrays no apprehension of Dr. + Channing and M. Renan. If one’s preference lies, for distinctness’ sake, + between the old plainness and the modern fantasy, one must admit that the + plainness has here a very grand outline. + </p> + <p> + {Illustration: SANT APOLLINAR NUOVO, RAVENNA.} + </p> + <p> + I spent the rest of the morning in charmed transition between the hot + yellow streets and the cool grey interiors of the churches. The greyness + everywhere was lighted up by the scintillation, on vault and entablature, + of mosaics more or less archaic, but always brilliant and elaborate, and + everywhere too by the same deep amaze of the fact that, while centuries + had worn themselves away and empires risen and fallen, these little cubes + of coloured glass had stuck in their allotted places and kept their + freshness. I have no space for a list of the various shrines so + distinguished, and, to tell the truth, my memory of them has already + become a very generalised and undiscriminated record. The total aspect of + the place, its sepulchral stillness, its absorbing perfume of evanescence + and decay and mortality, confounds the distinctions and blurs the details. + The Cathedral, which is vast and high, has been excessively modernised, + and was being still more so by a lavish application of tinsel and + cotton-velvet in preparation for the centenary feast of St. Apollinaris, + which befalls next month. Things on this occasion are to be done + handsomely, and a fair Ravennese informed me that a single family had + contributed three thousand francs towards a month’s vesper-music. It + seemed to me hereupon that I should like in the August twilight to wander + into the quiet nave of San Apollinare, and look up at the great mosaics + through the resonance of some fine chanting. I remember distinctly enough, + however, the tall basilica of San Vitale, of octagonal shape, like an + exchange or custom-house—modelled, I believe, upon St. Sophia at + Constantinople. It has a great span of height and a great solemnity, as + well as a choir densely pictured over on arch and apse with mosaics of the + time of Justinian. These are regular pictures, full of movement, gesture + and perspective, and just enough sobered in hue by time to bring home + their remoteness. In the middle of the church, under the great dome, sat + an artist whom I envied, making at an effective angle a study of the choir + and its broken lights, its decorated altar and its incrusted twinkling + walls. The picture, when finished, will hang, I suppose, on the library + wall of some person of taste; but even if it is much better than is + probable—I did n’t look at it—all his taste won’t tell the + owner, unless he has been there, in just what a soundless, mouldering, + out-of-the-way corner of old Italy it was painted. An even better place + for an artist fond of dusky architectural nooks, except that here the dusk + is excessive and he would hardly be able to tell his green from his red, + is the extraordinary little church of the Santi Nazaro e Celso, otherwise + known as the mausoleum of Galla Placidia. This is perhaps on the whole the + spot in Ravenna where the impression is of most sovereign authority and + most thrilling force. It consists of a narrow low-browed cave, shaped like + a Latin cross, every inch of which except the floor is covered with dense + symbolic mosaics. Before you and on each side, through the thick brown + light, loom three enormous barbaric sarcophagi, containing the remains of + potentates of the Lower Empire. It is as if history had burrowed under + ground to escape from research and you had fairly run it to earth. On the + right lie the ashes of the Emperor Honorius, and in the middle those of + his sister, Galla Placidia, a lady who, I believe, had great adventures. + On the other side rest the bones of Constantius III. The place might be a + small natural grotto lined with glimmering mineral substances, and there + is something quite tremendous in being shut up so closely with these three + imperial ghosts. The shadow of the great Roman name broods upon the huge + sepulchres and abides for ever within the narrow walls. + </p> + <p> + But still other memories hang about than those of primitive bishops and + degenerate emperors. Byron lived here and Dante died here, and the tomb of + the one poet and the dwelling of the other are among the advertised + appeals. The grave of Dante, it must be said, is anything but Dantesque, + and the whole precinct is disposed with that odd vulgarity of taste which + distinguishes most modern Italian tributes to greatness. The author of <i>The + Divine Comedy</i> commemorated in stucco, even in a slumbering corner of + Ravenna, is not “sympathetic.” Fortunately of all poets he least needs a + monument, as he was pre-eminently an architect in diction and built + himself his temple of fame in verses more solid than Cyclopean blocks. If + Dante’s tomb is not Dantesque, so neither is Byron’s house Byronic, being + a homely, shabby, two-storied dwelling, directly on the street, with as + little as possible of isolation and mystery. In Byron’s time it was an + inn, and it is rather a curious reflection that “Cain” and the “Vision of + Judgment” should have been written at an hotel. The fact supplies a + commanding precedent for self-abstraction to tourists at once sentimental + and literary. I must declare indeed that my acquaintance with Ravenna + considerably increased my esteem for Byron and helped to renew my faith in + the sincerity of his inspiration. A man so much <i>de son temps</i> as the + author of the above-named and other pieces can have spent two long years + in this stagnant city only by the help of taking a great deal of + disinterested pleasure in his own genius. He had indeed a notable pastime—the + various churches are adorned with monuments of ancestral Guicciolis—but + it is none the less obvious that Ravenna, fifty years ago, would have been + an intolerably dull residence to a foreigner of distinction unequipped + with intellectual resources. The hour one spends with Byron’s memory then + is almost compassionate. After all, one says to one’s self as one turns + away from the grandiloquent little slab in front of his house and looks + down the deadly provincial vista of the empty, sunny street, the author of + so many superb stanzas asked less from the world than he gave it. One of + his diversions was to ride in the Pineta, which, beginning a couple of + miles from the city, extends some twenty-five miles along the sands of the + Adriatic. I drove out to it for Byron’s sake, and Dante’s, and + Boccaccio’s, all of whom have interwoven it with their fictions, and for + that of a possible whiff of coolness from the sea. Between the city and + the forest, in the midst of malarious rice-swamps, stands the finest of + the Ravennese churches, the stately temple of San Apollinare in Classe. + The Emperor Augustus constructed hereabouts a harbour for fleets, which + the ages have choked up, and which survives only in the title of this + ancient church. Its extreme loneliness makes it doubly impressive. They + opened the great doors for me, and let a shaft of heated air go wander up + the beautiful nave between the twenty-four lustrous, pearly columns of + cipollino marble, and mount the wide staircase of the choir and spend + itself beneath the mosaics of the vault. I passed a memorable half-hour + sitting in this wave of tempered light, looking down the cool grey avenue + of the nave, out of the open door, at the vivid green swamps, and + listening to the melancholy stillness. I rambled for an hour in the Wood + of Associations, between the tall smooth, silvery stems of the pines, and + beside a creek which led me to the outer edge of the wood and a view of + white sails, gleaming and gliding behind the sand-hills. It was + infinitely, it was nobly “quaint,” but, as the trees stand at wide + intervals and bear far aloft in the blue air but a little parasol of + foliage, I suppose that, of a glaring summer day, the forest itself was + only the more characteristic of its clime and country for being perfectly + shadeless. + </p> + <p> + {Illustration: RAVENNA PINETA.} + </p> + <h3> + 1873. + </h3> + <p> + <a name="link2H_4_0023" id="link2H_4_0023"> + <!-- H2 anchor --> </a> + </p> + <div style="height: 4em;"> + <br /><br /><br /><br /> + </div> + <h2> + THE SAINT’S AFTERNOON AND OTHERS + </h2> + <p> + Before and above all was the sense that, with the narrow limits of past + adventure, I had never yet had such an impression of what the summer could + be in the south or the south in the summer; but I promptly found it, for + the occasion, a good fortune that my terms of comparison were restricted. + It was really something, at a time when the stride of the traveller had + become as long as it was easy, when the seven-league boots positively + hung, for frequent use, in the closet of the most sedentary, to have kept + one’s self so innocent of strange horizons that the Bay of Naples in June + might still seem quite final. That picture struck me—a particular + corner of it at least, and for many reasons—as the last word; and it + is this last word that comes back to me, after a short interval, in a + green, grey northern nook, and offers me again its warm, bright golden + meaning before it also inevitably catches the chill. Too precious, surely, + for us not to suffer it to help us as it may is the faculty of putting + together again in an order the sharp minutes and hours that the wave of + time has been as ready to pass over as the salt sea to wipe out the + letters and words your stick has traced in the sand. Let me, at any rate, + recover a sufficient number of such signs to make a sort of sense. + </p> + <h3> + I + </h3> + <p> + Far aloft on the great rock was pitched, as the first note, and indeed the + highest, of the wondrous concert, the amazing creation of the friend who + had offered me hospitality, and whom, more almost than I had ever envied + anyone anything, I envied the privilege of being able to reward a heated, + artless pilgrim with a revelation of effects so incalculable. There was + none but the loosest prefigurement as the creaking and puffing little + boat, which had conveyed me only from Sorrento, drew closer beneath the + prodigious island—beautiful, horrible and haunted—that does + most, of all the happy elements and accidents, towards making the Bay of + Naples, for the study of composition, a lesson in the grand style. There + was only, above and below, through the blue of the air and sea, a great + confused shining of hot cliffs and crags and buttresses, a loss, from + nearness, of the splendid couchant outline and the more comprehensive + mass, and an opportunity—oh, not lost, I assure you—to sit and + meditate, even moralise, on the empty deck, while a happy brotherhood of + American and German tourists, including, of course, many sisters, + scrambled down into little waiting, rocking tubs and, after a few strokes, + popped systematically into the small orifice of the Blue Grotto. There was + an appreciable moment when they were all lost to view in that receptacle, + the daily “psychological” moment during which it must so often befall the + recalcitrant observer on the deserted deck to find himself aware of how + delightful it might be if none of them should come out again. The charm, + the fascination of the idea is not a little—though also not wholly—in + the fact that, as the wave rises over the aperture, there is the most + encouraging appearance that they perfectly may not. There it is. There is + no more of them. It is a case to which nature has, by the neatest stroke + and with the best taste in the world, just quietly attended. + </p> + <p> + Beautiful, horrible, haunted: that is the essence of what, about itself, + Capri says to you—dip again into your Tacitus and see why; and yet, + while you roast a little under the awning and in the vaster shadow, it is + not because the trail of Tiberius is ineffaceable that you are most + uneasy. The trail of Germanicus in Italy to-day ramifies further and bites + perhaps even deeper; a proof of which is, precisely, that his eclipse in + the Blue Grotto is inexorably brief, that here he is popping out again, + bobbing enthusiastically back and scrambling triumphantly back. The + spirit, in truth, of his effective appropriation of Capri has a + broad-faced candour against which there is no standing up, supremely + expressive as it is of the well-known “love that kills,” of Germanicus’s + fatal susceptibility. If I were to let myself, however, incline to <i>that</i> + aspect of the serious case of Capri I should embark on strange depths. The + straightness and simplicity, the classic, synthetic directness of the + German passion for Italy, make this passion probably the sentiment in the + world that is in the act of supplying enjoyment in the largest, sweetest + mouthfuls; and there is something unsurpassably marked in the way that on + this irresistible shore it has seated itself to ruminate and digest. It + keeps the record in its own loud accents; it breaks out in the folds of + the hills and on the crests of the crags into every manner of symptom and + warning. Huge advertisements and portents stare across the bay; the + acclivities bristle with breweries and “restorations” and with great ugly + Gothic names. I hasten, of course, to add that some such general + consciousness as this may well oppress, under any sky, at the century’s + end, the brooding tourist who makes himself a prey by staying anywhere, + when the gong sounds, “behind.” It is behind, in the track and the + reaction, that he least makes out the end of it all, perceives that to + visit anyone’s country for anyone’s sake is more and more to find some one + quite other in possession. No one, least of all the brooder himself, is in + his own. + </p> + <h3> + II + </h3> + <p> + I certainly, at any rate, felt the force of this truth when, on scaling + the general rock with the eye of apprehension, I made out at a point much + nearer its summit than its base the gleam of a dizzily-perched white + sea-gazing front which I knew for my particular landmark and which + promised so much that it would have been welcome to keep even no more than + half. Let me instantly say that it kept still more than it promised, and + by no means least in the way of leaving far below it the worst of the + outbreak of restorations and breweries. There is a road at present to the + upper village, with which till recently communication was all by rude + steps cut in the rock and diminutive donkeys scrambling on the flints; one + of those fine flights of construction which the great road-making “Latin + races” take, wherever they prevail, without advertisement or bombast; and + even while I followed along the face of the cliff its climbing + consolidated ledge, I asked myself how I could think so well of it without + consistently thinking better still of the temples of beer so obviously + destined to enrich its terminus. The perfect answer to that was of course + that the brooding tourist is never bound to be consistent. What happier + law for him than this very one, precisely, when on at last alighting, high + up in the blue air, to stare and gasp and almost disbelieve, he embraced + little by little the beautiful truth particularly, on this occasion, + reserved for himself, and took in the stupendous picture? For here above + all had the thought and the hand come from far away—even from <i>ultima + Thule</i>, and yet were in possession triumphant and acclaimed. Well, all + one could say was that the way they had felt their opportunity, the divine + conditions of the place, spoke of the advantage of some such intellectual + perspective as a remote original standpoint alone perhaps can give. If + what had finally, with infinite patience, passion, labour, taste, got + itself done there, was like some supreme reward of an old dream of Italy, + something perfect after long delays, was it not verily in <i>ultima Thule</i> + that the vow would have been piously enough made and the germ tenderly + enough nursed? For a certain art of asking of Italy all she can give, you + must doubtless either be a rare <i>raffine</i> or a rare genius, a + sophisticated Norseman or just a Gabriele d’ Annunzio. + </p> + <p> + All she can give appeared to me, assuredly, for that day and the + following, gathered up and enrolled there: in the wondrous cluster and + dispersal of chambers, corners, courts, galleries, arbours, arcades, long + white ambulatories and vertiginous points of view. The greatest charm of + all perhaps was that, thanks to the particular conditions, she seemed to + abound, to overflow, in directions in which I had never yet enjoyed the + chance to find her so free. The indispensable thing was therefore, in + observation, in reflection, to press the opportunity hard, to recognise + that as the abundance was splendid, so, by the same stroke, it was + immensely suggestive. It dropped into one’s lap, naturally, at the end of + an hour or two, the little white flower of its formula: the brooding + tourist, in other words, could only continue to brood till he had made out + in a measure, as I may say, what was so wonderfully the matter with him. + He was simply then in the presence, more than ever yet, of the possible + poetry of the personal and social life of the south, and the fun would + depend much—as occasions are fleeting—on his arriving in time, + in the interest of that imagination which is his only field of sport, at + adequate new notations of it. The sense of all this, his obscure and + special fun in the general bravery, mixed, on the morrow, with the long, + human hum of the bright, hot day and filled up the golden cup with + questions and answers. The feast of St. Antony, the patron of the upper + town, was the one thing in the air, and of the private beauty of the + place, there on the narrow shelf, in the shining, shaded loggias and above + the blue gulfs, all comers were to be made free. + </p> + <h3> + III + </h3> + <p> + The church-feast of its saint is of course for Anacapri, as for any + self-respecting Italian town, the great day of the year, and the smaller + the small “country,” in native parlance, as well as the simpler, + accordingly, the life, the less the chance for leakage, on other pretexts, + of the stored wine of loyalty. This pure fluid, it was easy to feel + overnight, had not sensibly lowered its level; so that nothing indeed, + when the hour came, could well exceed the outpouring. All up and down the + Sorrentine promontory the early summer happens to be the time of the + saints, and I had just been witness there of a week on every day of which + one might have travelled, through kicked-up clouds and other + demonstrations, to a different hot holiday. There had been no bland + evening that, somewhere or other, in the hills or by the sea, the white + dust and the red glow didn’t rise to the dim stars. Dust, perspiration, + illumination, conversation—these were the regular elements. “They’re + very civilised,” a friend who knows them as well as they can be known had + said to me of the people in general; “plenty of fireworks and plenty of + talk—that’s all they ever want.” That they were “civilised”—on + the side on which they were most to show—was therefore to be the + word of the whole business, and nothing could have, in fact, had more + interest than the meaning that for the thirty-six hours I read into it. + </p> + <p> + Seen from below and diminished by distance, Anacapri makes scarce a sign, + and the road that leads to it is not traceable over the rock; but it sits + at its ease on its high, wide table, of which it covers—and with + picturesque southern culture as well—as much as it finds convenient. + As much of it as possible was squeezed all the morning, for St. Antony, + into the piazzetta before the church, and as much more into that edifice + as the robust odour mainly prevailing there allowed room for. It was the + odour that was in prime occupation, and one could only wonder how so many + men, women and children could cram themselves into so much smell. It was + surely the smell, thick and resisting, that was least successfully to be + elbowed. Meanwhile the good saint, before he could move into the air, had, + among the tapers and the tinsel, the opera-music and the pulpit poundings, + bravely to snuff it up. The shade outside was hot, and the sun was hot; + but we waited as densely for him to come out, or rather to come “on,” as + the pit at the opera waits for the great tenor. There were people from + below and people from the mainland and people from Pomerania and a brass + band from Naples. There were other figures at the end of longer strings—strings + that, some of them indeed, had pretty well given way and were now but + little snippets trailing in the dust. Oh, the queer sense of the good old + Capri of artistic legend, of which the name itself was, in the more + benighted years—years of the contadina and the pifferaro—a + bright evocation! Oh, the echo, on the spot, of each romantic tale! Oh, + the loafing painters, so bad and so happy, the conscious models, the vague + personalities! The “beautiful Capri girl” was of course not missed, though + not perhaps so beautiful as in her ancient glamour, which none the less + didn’t at all exclude the probable presence—with <i>his</i> + legendary light quite undimmed—of the English lord in disguise who + will at no distant date marry her. The whole thing was there; one held it + in one’s hand. + </p> + <p> + The saint comes out at last, borne aloft in long procession and under a + high canopy: a rejoicing, staring, smiling saint, openly delighted with + the one happy hour in the year on which he may take his own walk. Frocked + and tonsured, but not at all macerated, he holds in his hand a small wax + puppet of an infant Jesus and shows him to all their friends, to whom he + nods and bows: to whom, in the dazzle of the sun he literally seems to + grin and wink, while his litter sways and his banners flap and every one + gaily greets him. The ribbons and draperies flutter, and the white veils + of the marching maidens, the music blares and the guns go off and the + chants resound, and it is all as holy and merry and noisy as possible. The + procession—down to the delightful little tinselled and bare-bodied + babies, miniature St. Antonys irrespective of sex, led or carried by proud + papas or brown grandsires—includes so much of the population that + you marvel there is such a muster to look on—like the charades given + in a family in which every one wants to act. But it is all indeed in a + manner one house, the little high-niched island community, and nobody + therefore, even in the presence of the head of it, puts on an air of + solemnity. Singular and suggestive before everything else is the absence + of any approach to our notion of the posture of respect, and this among + people whose manners in general struck one as so good and, in particular, + as so cultivated. The office of the saint—of which the festa is but + the annual reaffirmation—involves not the faintest attribute of + remoteness or mystery. + </p> + <p> + While, with my friend, I waited for him, we went for coolness into the + second church of the place, a considerable and bedizened structure, with + the rare curiosity of a wondrous pictured pavement of majolica, the garden + of Eden done in large coloured tiles or squares, with every beast, bird + and river, and a brave <i>diminuendo</i>, in especial, from portal to + altar, of perspective, so that the animals and objects of the foreground + are big and those of the successive distances differ with much propriety. + Here in the sacred shade the old women were knitting, gossipping, yawning, + shuffling about; here the children were romping and “larking”; here, in a + manner, were the open parlour, the nursery, the kindergarten and the <i>conversazione</i> + of the poor. This is everywhere the case by the southern sea. I remember + near Sorrento a wayside chapel that seemed the scene of every function of + domestic life, including cookery and others. The odd thing is that it all + appears to interfere so little with that special civilised note—the + note of manners—which is so constantly touched. It is barbarous to + expectorate in the temple of your faith, but that doubtless is an extreme + case. Is civilisation really measured by the number of things people do + respect? There would seem to be much evidence against it. The oldest + societies, the societies with most traditions, are naturally not the least + ironic, the least <i>blasees</i>, and the African tribes who take so many + things into account that they fear to quit their huts at night are not the + fine flower. + </p> + <h3> + IV + </h3> + <p> + Where, on the other hand, it was impossible not to feel to the full all + the charming <i>riguardi</i>—to use their own good word—in + which our friends <i>could</i> abound, was, that afternoon, in the + extraordinary temple of art and hospitality that had been benignantly + opened to me. Hither, from three o’clock to seven, all the world, from the + small in particular to the smaller and the smallest, might freely flock, + and here, from the first hour to the last, the huge straw-bellied flasks + of purple wine were tilted for all the thirsty. They were many, the + thirsty, they were three hundred, they were unending; but the draughts + they drank were neither countable nor counted. This boon was dispensed in + a long, pillared portico, where everything was white and light save the + blue of the great bay as it played up from far below or as you took it in, + between shining columns, with your elbows on the parapet. Sorrento and + Vesuvius were over against you; Naples furthest off, melted, in the middle + of the picture, into shimmering vagueness and innocence; and the long arm + of Posilippo and the presence of the other islands, Procida, the stricken + Ischia, made themselves felt to the left. The grand air of it all was in + one’s very nostrils and seemed to come from sources too numerous and too + complex to name. It was antiquity in solution, with every brown, mild + figure, every note of the old speech, every tilt of the great flask, every + shadow cast by every classic fragment, adding its touch to the impression. + What was the secret of the surprising amenity?—to the essence of + which one got no nearer than simply by feeling afresh the old story of the + deep interfusion of the present with the past. You had felt that often + before, and all that could, at the most, help you now was that, more than + ever yet, the present appeared to become again really classic, to sigh + with strange elusive sounds of Virgil and Theocritus. Heaven only knows + how little they would in truth have had to say to it, but we yield to + these visions as we must, and when the imagination fairly turns in its + pain almost any soft name is good enough to soothe it. + </p> + <p> + It threw such difficulties but a step back to say that the secret of the + amenity was “style”; for what in the world was the secret of style, which + you might have followed up and down the abysmal old Italy for so many a + year only to be still vainly calling for it? Everything, at any rate, that + happy afternoon, in that place of poetry, was bathed and blessed with it. + The castle of Barbarossa had been on the height behind; the villa of black + Tiberius had overhung the immensity from the right; the white arcades and + the cool chambers offered to every step some sweet old “piece” of the + past, some rounded porphyry pillar supporting a bust, some shaft of pale + alabaster upholding a trellis, some mutilated marble image, some bronze + that had roughly resisted. Our host, if we came to that, had the secret; + but he could only express it in grand practical ways. One of them was + precisely this wonderful “afternoon tea,” in which tea only—<i>that</i>, + good as it is, has never the note of style—was not to be found. The + beauty and the poetry, at all events, were clear enough, and the + extraordinary uplifted distinction; but where, in all this, it may be + asked, was the element of “horror” that I have spoken of as sensible?—what + obsession that was not charming could find a place in that splendid light, + out of which the long summer squeezes every secret and shadow? I’m afraid + I’m driven to plead that these evils were exactly in one’s imagination, a + predestined victim always of the cruel, the fatal historic sense. To make + so much distinction, how much history had been needed!—so that the + whole air still throbbed and ached with it, as with an accumulation of + ghosts to whom the very climate was pitiless, condemning them to blanch + for ever in the general glare and grandeur, offering them no dusky + northern nook, no place at the friendly fireside, no shelter of legend or + song. + </p> + <h3> + V + </h3> + <p> + My friend had, among many original relics, in one of his white galleries—and + how he understood the effect and the “value” of whiteness!—two or + three reproductions of the finest bronzes of the Naples museum, the work + of a small band of brothers whom he had found himself justified in + trusting to deal with their problem honourably and to bring forth + something as different as possible from the usual compromise of commerce. + They had brought forth, in especial, for him, a copy of the young resting, + slightly-panting Mercury which it was a pure delight to live with, and + they had come over from Naples on St. Antony’s eve, as they had done the + year before, to report themselves to their patron, to keep up good + relations, to drink Capri wine and to join in the tarantella. They arrived + late, while we were at supper; they received their welcome and their + billet, and I am not sure it was not the conversation and the beautiful + manners of these obscure young men that most fixed in my mind for the time + the sense of the side of life that, all around, was to come out strongest. + It would be artless, no doubt, to represent them as high types of + innocence or even of energy—at the same time that, weighing them + against <i>some</i> ruder folk of our own race, we might perhaps have made + bold to place their share even of these qualities in the scale. It was an + impression indeed never infrequent in Italy, of which I might, in these + days, first have felt the force during a stay, just earlier, with a friend + at Sorrento—a friend who had good-naturedly “had in,” on his + wondrous terrace, after dinner, for the pleasure of the gaping alien, the + usual local quartette, violins, guitar and flute, the musical barber, the + musical tailor, sadler, joiner, humblest sons of the people and exponents + of Neapolitan song. Neapolitan song, as we know, has been blown well about + the world, and it is late in the day to arrive with a ravished ear for it. + That, however, was scarcely at all, for me, the question: the question, on + the Sorrento terrace, so high up in the cool Capri night, was of the + present outlook, in the world, for the races with whom it has been a + tradition, in intercourse, positively to please. + </p> + <p> + The personal civilisation, for intercourse, of the musical barber and + tailor, of the pleasant young craftsmen of my other friend’s company, was + something that could be trusted to make the brooding tourist brood afresh—to + say more to him in fact, all the rest of the second occasion, than + everything else put together. The happy address, the charming expression, + the indistinctive discretion, the complete eclipse, in short, of vulgarity + and brutality—these things easily became among these people the + supremely suggestive note, begetting a hundred hopes and fears as to the + place that, with the present general turn of affairs about the globe, is + being kept for them. They are perhaps what the races politically feeble + have still most to contribute—but what appears to be the happy + prospect for the races politically feeble? And so the afternoon waned, + among the mellow marbles and the pleasant folk—-the purple wine + flowed, the golden light faded, song and dance grew free and circulation + slightly embarrassed. But the great impression remained and finally was + exquisite. It was all purple wine, all art and song, and nobody a grain + the worse. It was fireworks and conversation—the former, in the + piazzetta, were to come later; it was civilisation and amenity. I took in + the greater picture, but I lost nothing else; and I talked with the + contadini about antique sculpture. No, nobody was a grain the worse; and I + had plenty to think of. So it was I was quickened to remember that we + others, we of my own country, as a race politically <i>not</i> weak, had—by + what I had somewhere just heard—opened “three hundred ‘saloons’” at + Manila. + </p> + <h3> + VI + </h3> + <p> + The “other” afternoons I here pass on to—and I may include in them, + for that matter, various mornings scarce less charmingly sacred to memory—were + occasions of another and a later year; a brief but all felicitous + impression of Naples itself, and of the approach to it from Rome, as well + as of the return to Rome by a different wonderful way, which I feel I + shall be wise never to attempt to “improve on.” Let me muster assurance to + confess that this comparatively recent and superlatively rich reminiscence + gives me for its first train of ineffable images those of a motor-run + that, beginning betimes of a splendid June day, and seeing me, with my + genial companions, blissfully out of Porta San Paolo, hung over us thus + its benediction till the splendour had faded in the lamplit rest of the + Chiaja. “We’ll go by the mountains,” my friend, of the chariot of fire, + had said, “and we’ll come back, after three days, by the sea”; which + handsome promise flowered into such flawless performance that I could but + feel it to have closed and rounded for me, beyond any further rehandling, + the long-drawn rather indeed than thick-studded chaplet of my visitations + of Naples—from the first, seasoned with the highest sensibility of + youth, forty years ago, to this last the other day. I find myself noting + with interest—and just to be able to emphasise it is what inspires + me with these remarks—that, in spite of the milder and smoother and + perhaps, pictorially speaking, considerably emptier, Neapolitan face of + things, things in general, of our later time, I recognised in my final + impression a grateful, a beguiling serenity. The place is at the best wild + and weird and sinister, and yet seemed on this occasion to be seated more + at her ease in her immense natural dignity. My disposition to feel that, I + hasten to add, was doubtless my own secret; my three beautiful days, at + any rate, filled themselves with the splendid harmony, several of the + minor notes of which ask for a place, such as it may be, just here. + </p> + <p> + Wondrously, it was a clean and cool and, as who should say, quiet and + amply interspaced Naples—in tune with itself, no harsh jangle of <i>forestieri</i> + vulgarising the concert. I seemed in fact, under the blaze of summer, the + only stranger—though the blaze of summer itself was, for that + matter, everywhere but a higher pitch of light and colour and tradition, + and a lower pitch of everything else; even, it struck me, of sound and + fury. The appeal in short was genial, and, faring out to Pompeii of a + Sunday afternoon, I enjoyed there, for the only time I can recall, the + sweet chance of a late hour or two, the hour of the lengthening shadows, + absolutely alone. The impression remains ineffaceable—it was to + supersede half-a-dozen other mixed memories, the sense that had remained + with me, from far back, of a pilgrimage always here beset with traps and + shocks and vulgar importunities, achieved under fatal discouragements. + Even Pompeii, in fine, haunt of <i>all</i> the cockneys of creation, + burned itself, in the warm still eventide, as clear as glass, or as the + glow of a pale topaz, and the particular cockney who roamed without a plan + and at his ease, but with his feet on Roman slabs, his hands on Roman + stones, his eyes on the Roman void, his consciousness really at last of + some good to him, could open himself as never before to the fond luxurious + fallacy of a close communion, a direct revelation. With which there were + other moments for him not less the fruit of the slow unfolding of time; + the clearest of these again being those enjoyed on the terrace of a small + island-villa—the island a rock and the villa a wondrous little + rock-garden, unless a better term would be perhaps rock-salon, just off + the extreme point of Posilippo and where, thanks to a friendliest + hospitality, he was to hang ecstatic, through another sublime afternoon, + on the wave of a magical wand. Here, as happened, were charming wise, + original people even down to delightful amphibious American children, + enamelled by the sun of the Bay as for figures of miniature Tritons and + Nereids on a Renaissance plaque; and above all, on the part of the general + prospect, a demonstration of the grand style of composition and effect + that one was never to wish to see bettered. The way in which the Italian + scene on such occasions as this seems to purify itself to the transcendent + and perfect <i>idea</i> alone—idea of beauty, of dignity, of + comprehensive grace, with all accidents merged, all defects disowned, all + experience outlived, and to gather itself up into the mere mute eloquence + of what has just incalculably <i>been</i>, remains for ever the secret and + the lesson of the subtlest daughter of History. All one could do, at the + heart of the overarching crystal, and in presence of the relegated City, + the far-trailing Mount, the grand Sorrentine headland, the islands + incomparably stationed and related, was to wonder what may well become of + the so many other elements of any poor human and social complexus, what + might become of any successfully working or only struggling and + floundering civilisation at all, when high Natural Elegance proceeds to + take such exclusive charge and recklessly assume, as it were, <i>all</i> + the responsibilities. + </p> + <h3> + VII + </h3> + <p> + This indeed had been quite the thing I was asking myself all the wondrous + way down from Rome, and was to ask myself afresh, on the return, largely + within sight of the sea, as our earlier course had kept to the ineffably + romantic inland valleys, the great decorated blue vistas in which the + breasts of the mountains shine vaguely with strange high-lying city and + castle and church and convent, even as shoulders of no diviner line might + be hung about with dim old jewels. It was odd, at the end of time, long + after those initiations, of comparative youth, that had then struck one as + extending the very field itself of felt charm, as exhausting the + possibilities of fond surrender, it was odd to have positively a new basis + of enjoyment, a new gate of triumphant passage, thrust into one’s + consciousness and opening to one’s use; just as I confess I have to brace + myself a little to call by such fine names our latest, our ugliest and + most monstrous aid to motion. It is true of the monster, as we have known + him up to now, that one can neither quite praise him nor quite blame him + without a blush—he reflects so the nature of the company he’s + condemned to keep. His splendid easy power addressed to noble aims makes + him assuredly on occasion a purely beneficent creature. I parenthesise at + any rate that I know him in no other light—counting out of course + the acquaintance that consists of a dismayed arrest in the road, with back + flattened against wall or hedge, for the dusty, smoky, stenchy shock of + his passage. To no end is his easy power more blest than to that of + ministering to the ramifications, as it were, of curiosity, or to that, in + other words, of achieving for us, among the kingdoms of the earth, the + grander and more genial, the comprehensive and <i>complete</i> + introduction. Much as was ever to be said for our old forms of pilgrimage—and + I am convinced that they are far from wholly superseded—they left, + they had to leave, dreadful gaps in our yearning, dreadful lapses in our + knowledge, dreadful failures in our energy; there were always things off + and beyond, goals of delight and dreams of desire, that dropped as a + matter of course into the unattainable, and over to which our + wonder-working agent now flings the firm straight bridge. Curiosity has + lost, under this amazing extension, its salutary renouncements perhaps; + contemplation has become one with action and satisfaction one with desire—speaking + always in the spirit of the inordinate lover of an enlightened use of our + eyes. That may represent, for all I know, an insolence of advantage on + which there will be eventual heavy charges, as yet obscure and + incalculable, to pay, and I glance at the possibility only to avoid all + thought of the lesson of the long run, and to insist that I utter this + dithyramb but in the immediate flush and fever of the short. For such a + beat of time as our fine courteous and contemplative advance upon Naples, + and for such another as our retreat northward under the same fine law of + observation and homage, the bribed consciousness could only decline to + question its security. The sword of Damocles suspended over that + presumption, the skeleton at the banquet of extravagant ease, would have + been that even at our actual inordinate rate—leaving quite apart + “improvements” to come—such savings of trouble begin to use up the + world; some hard grain of difficulty being always a necessary part of the + composition of pleasure. The hard grain in our old comparatively + pedestrian mixture, before this business of our learning not so much even + to fly (which might indeed involve trouble) as to be mechanically and + prodigiously flown, quite another matter, was the element of uncertainty, + effort and patience; the handful of silver nails which, I admit, drove + many an impression home. The seated motorist misses the silver nails, I + fully acknowledge, save in so far as his aesthetic (let alone his moral) + conscience may supply him with some artful subjective substitute; in which + case the thing becomes a precious secret of his own. + </p> + <p> + However, I wander wild—by which I mean I look too far ahead; my + intention having been only to let my sense of the merciless June beauty of + Naples Bay at the sunset hour and on the island terrace associate itself + with the whole inexpressible taste of our two motor-days’ feast of + scenery. That queer question of the exquisite grand manner as the most + emphasised <i>all</i> of things—of what it may, seated so + predominant in nature, insidiously, through the centuries, let generations + and populations “in for,” hadn’t in the least waited for the special + emphasis I speak of to hang about me. I must have found myself more or + less consciously entertaining it by the way—since how couldn’t it be + of the very essence of the truth, constantly and intensely before us, that + Italy is really so much the most beautiful country in the world, taking + all things together, that others must stand off and be hushed while she + speaks? Seen thus in great comprehensive iridescent stretches, it is the + incomparable wrought <i>fusion</i>, fusion of human history and mortal + passion with the elements of earth and air, of colour, composition and + form, that constitutes her appeal and gives it the supreme heroic grace. + The chariot of fire favours fusion rather than promotes analysis, and + leaves much of that first June picture for me, doubtless, a great accepted + blur of violet and silver. The various hours and successive aspects, the + different strong passages of our reverse process, on the other hand, still + figure for me even as some series of sublime landscape-frescoes—if + the great Claude, say, had ever used that medium—in the immense + gallery of a palace; the homeward run by Capua, Terracina, Gaeta and its + storied headland fortress, across the deep, strong, indescribable Pontine + Marshes, white-cattled, strangely pastoral, sleeping in the afternoon + glow, yet stirred by the near sea-breath. Thick somehow to the imagination + as some full-bodied sweetness of syrup is thick to the palate the + atmosphere of that region—thick with the sense of history and the + very taste of time; as if the haunt and home (which indeed it is) of some + great fair bovine aristocracy attended and guarded by halberdiers in the + form of the mounted and long-lanced herdsmen, admirably congruous with the + whole picture at every point, and never more so than in their manner of + gaily taking up, as with bell-voices of golden bronze, the offered wayside + greeting. + </p> + <p> + {Illustration: TERRACINA} + </p> + <p> + There had been this morning among the impressions of our first hour an + unforgettable specimen of that general type—the image of one of + those human figures on which our perception of the romantic so often + pounces in Italy as on the genius of the scene personified; with this + advantage, that as the scene there has, at its best, an unsurpassable + distinction, so the physiognomic representative, standing for it all, and + with an animation, a complexion, an expression, a fineness and fulness of + humanity that appear to have gathered it in and to sum it up, becomes + beautiful by the same simple process, very much, that makes the heir to a + great capitalist rich. Our early start, our roundabout descent from + Posilippo by shining Baire for avoidance of the city, had been an hour of + enchantment beyond any notation I can here recover; all lustre and azure, + yet all composition and classicism, the prospect developed and spread, + till after extraordinary upper reaches of radiance and horizons of pearl + we came at the turn of a descent upon a stalwart young gamekeeper, or + perhaps substantial young farmer, who, well-appointed and blooming, had + unslung his gun and, resting on it beside a hedge, just lived for us, in + the rare felicity of his whole look, during that moment and while, in + recognition, or almost, as we felt, in homage, we instinctively checked + our speed. He pointed, as it were, the lesson, giving the supreme right + accent or final exquisite turn to the immense magnificent phrase; which + from those moments on, and on and on, resembled doubtless nothing so much + as a page written, by a consummate verbal economist and master of style, + in the noblest of all tongues. Our splendid human plant by the wayside had + flowered thus into style—and there wasn’t to be, all day, a lapse of + eloquence, a wasted word or a cadence missed. + </p> + <p> + These things are personal memories, however, with the logic of certain + insistences of that sort often difficult to seize. Why should I have kept + so sacredly uneffaced, for instance, our small afternoon wait at tea-time + or, as we made it, coffee-time, in the little brown piazzetta of Velletri, + just short of the final push on through the flushed Castelli Romani and + the drop and home-stretch across the darkening Campagna? We had been + dropped into the very lap of the ancient civic family, after the + inveterate fashion of one’s sense of such stations in small Italian towns. + There was a narrow raised terrace, with steps, in front of the best of the + two or three local cafes, and in the soft enclosed, the warm waning light + of June various benign contemplative worthies sat at disburdened tables + and, while they smoked long black weeds, enjoyed us under those probable + workings of subtlety with which we invest so many quite unimaginably blank + (I dare say) Italian simplicities. The charm was, as always in Italy, in + the tone and the air and the happy hazard of things, which made any + positive pretension or claimed importance a comparatively trifling + question. We slid, in the steep little place, more or less down hill; we + wished, stomachically, we had rather addressed ourselves to a tea-basket; + we suffered importunity from unchidden infants who swarmed about our + chairs and romped about our feet; we stayed no long time, and “went to + see” nothing; yet we communicated to intensity, we lay at our ease in the + bosom of the past, we practised intimacy, in short, an intimacy so much + greater than the mere accidental and ostensible: the difficulty for the + right and grateful expression of which makes the old, the familiar tax on + the luxury of loving Italy. + </p> + <h3> + 1900-1909. + </h3> + <div style="height: 6em;"> + <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /> + </div> + + + + + + + +<pre> + + + + + +End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Italian Hours, by Henry James + +*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ITALIAN HOURS *** + +***** This file should be named 6354-h.htm or 6354-h.zip ***** +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: + http://www.gutenberg.org/6/3/5/6354/ + +Produced by Richard Farris and the online team at +Distributed Proofreaders + +HTML file produced by David Widger + + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + +Title: Italian Hours + +Author: Henry James + + +Release Date: August, 2004 [EBook #6354] +This file was first posted on November 29, 2002] +Last Updated: April 10, 2013 + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ASCII + +*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ITALIAN HOURS *** + + + + +Produced by Richard Farris and the online team at +Distributed Proofreaders + + + + + + + + +ITALIAN HOURS + +By Henry James + + +Published November 1909 + + + + +PREFACE + +The chapters of which this volume is composed have with few exceptions +already been collected, and were then associated with others +commemorative of other impressions of (no very extensive) excursions and +wanderings. The notes on various visits to Italy are here for the first +time exclusively placed together, and as they largely refer to quite +other days than these--the date affixed to each paper sufficiently +indicating this--I have introduced a few passages that speak for a later +and in some cases a frequently repeated vision of the places and scenes +in question. I have not hesitated to amend my text, expressively, +wherever it seemed urgently to ask for this, though I have not pretended +to add the element of information or the weight of curious and critical +insistence to a brief record of light inquiries and conclusions. +The fond appeal of the observer concerned is all to aspects and +appearances--above all to the interesting face of things as it mainly +_used_ to be. + +H. J. + + + + + +CONTENTS + + VENICE + THE GRAND CANAL + VENICE: AN EARLY IMPRESSION + TWO OLD HOUSES AND THREE YOUNG WOMEN + CASA AL VISI + FROM CHAMBERY TO MILAN + THE OLD SAINT-GOTHARD + ITALY REVISITED + A ROMAN HOLIDAY + ROMAN RIDES + ROMAN NEIGHBOURHOODS + THE AFTER-SEASON IN ROME + FROM A ROMAN NOTE-BOOK + A FEW OTHER ROMAN NEIGHBOURHOODS + A CHAIN OF CITIES + SIENA EARLY AND LATE + THE AUTUMN IN FLORENCE + FLORENTINE NOTES + TUSCAN CITIES + OTHER TUSCAN CITIES + RAVENNA + THE SAINT'S AFTERNOON AND OTHERS + + + + + + ILLUSTRATIONS + + THE HARBOUR, GENOA (Frontispiece) + FLAGS AT ST. MARK'S, VENICE + A NARROW CANAL, VENICE + PALAZZO MOCENIGO, VENICE + THE AMPHITHEATRE, VERONA + CASA ALVISI, VENICE + THE SIMPLON GATE, MILAN + THE CLOCK TOWER, BERNE + UNDER THE ARCADES, TURIN + ROMAN GATEWAY, RIMINI + SANTA MARIA NOVELLA, FLORENCE + THE FACADE OF ST. JOHN LATERAN, ROME + THE COLONNADE OF ST. PETER'S, ROME + CASTEL GANDOLFO + ENTRANCE TO THE VATICAN, ROME + VILLA D' ESTE, TIVOLI + SUBIACO + ASSISI + PERUGIA + ETRUSCAN GATEWAY, PERUGIA + A STREET, CORTONA + THE RED PALACE, SIENA + SAN DOMENICO, SIENA + ON THE ARNO, FLORENCE + THE GREAT EAVES, FLORENCE + BOBOLI GARDENS, FLORENCE + THE HOSPITAL, PISTOIA + THE LOGGIA, LUCCA + TOWERS OF SAN GIMIGNANO + SAN APOLLINARE NUOVO, RAVENNA + RAVENNA PINETA + TERRACINA + + + + + +VENICE + + +It is a great pleasure to write the word; but I am not sure there is not +a certain impudence in pretending to add anything to it. Venice has been +painted and described many thousands of times, and of all the cities of +the world is the easiest to visit without going there. Open the +first book and you will find a rhapsody about it; step into the first +picture-dealer's and you will find three or four high-coloured "views" +of it. There is notoriously nothing more to be said on the subject. +Every one has been there, and every one has brought back a collection of +photographs. There is as little mystery about the Grand Canal as about +our local thoroughfare, and the name of St. Mark is as familiar as +the postman's ring. It is not forbidden, however, to speak of familiar +things, and I hold that for the true Venice-lover Venice is always in +order. There is nothing new to be said about her certainly, but the +old is better than any novelty. It would be a sad day indeed when +there should be something new to say. I write these lines with the +full consciousness of having no information whatever to offer. I do not +pretend to enlighten the reader; I pretend only to give a fillip to his +memory; and I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in +love with his theme. + + +I + +Mr. Ruskin has given it up, that is very true; but only after extracting +half a lifetime of pleasure and an immeasurable quantity of fame from +it. We all may do the same, after it has served our turn, which it +probably will not cease to do for many a year to come. Meantime it is +Mr. Ruskin who beyond anyone helps us to enjoy. He has indeed lately +produced several aids to depression in the shape of certain little +humorous--ill-humorous--pamphlets (the series of _St. Mark's Rest_) +which embody his latest reflections on the subject of our city and +describe the latest atrocities perpetrated there. These latter are +numerous and deeply to be deplored; but to admit that they have spoiled +Venice would be to admit that Venice may be spoiled--an admission +pregnant, as it seems to us, with disloyalty. Fortunately one reacts +against the Ruskinian contagion, and one hour of the lagoon is worth a +hundred pages of demoralised prose. This queer late-coming prose of +Mr. Ruskin (including the revised and condensed issue of the _Stones of +Venice_, only one little volume of which has been published, or perhaps +ever will be) is all to be read, though much of it appears addressed to +children of tender age. It is pitched in the nursery-key, and might +be supposed to emanate from an angry governess. It is, however, +all suggestive, and much of it is delightfully just. There is an +inconceivable want of form in it, though the author has spent his life +in laying down the principles of form and scolding people for departing +from them; but it throbs and flashes with the love of his subject--a +love disconcerted and abjured, but which has still much of the force of +inspiration. Among the many strange things that have befallen Venice, +she has had the good fortune to become the object of a passion to a man +of splendid genius, who has made her his own and in doing so has made +her the world's. There is no better reading at Venice therefore, as I +say, than Ruskin, for every true Venice-lover can separate the wheat +from the chaff. The narrow theological spirit, the moralism _a tout +propos_, the queer provincialities and pruderies, are mere wild weeds in +a mountain of flowers. One may doubtless be very happy in Venice without +reading at all--without criticising or analysing or thinking a strenuous +thought. It is a city in which, I suspect, there is very little +strenuous thinking, and yet it is a city in which there must be almost +as much happiness as misery. The misery of Venice stands there for all +the world to see; it is part of the spectacle--a thoroughgoing devotee +of local colour might consistently say it is part of the pleasure. The +Venetian people have little to call their own--little more than the bare +privilege of leading their lives in the most beautiful of towns. Their +habitations are decayed; their taxes heavy; their pockets light; their +opportunities few. One receives an impression, however, that life +presents itself to them with attractions not accounted for in this +meagre train of advantages, and that they are on better terms with +it than many people who have made a better bargain. They lie in the +sunshine; they dabble in the sea; they wear bright rags; they fall into +attitudes and harmonies; they assist at an eternal _conversazione_. It +is not easy to say that one would have them other than they are, and it +certainly would make an immense difference should they be better fed. +The number of persons in Venice who evidently never have enough to eat +is painfully large; but it would be more painful if we did not equally +perceive that the rich Venetian temperament may bloom upon a dog's +allowance. Nature has been kind to it, and sunshine and leisure +and conversation and beautiful views form the greater part of its +sustenance. It takes a great deal to make a successful American, but +to make a happy Venetian takes only a handful of quick sensibility. +The Italian people have at once the good and the evil fortune to be +conscious of few wants; so that if the civilisation of a society is +measured by the number of its needs, as seems to be the common opinion +to-day, it is to be feared that the children of the lagoon would make +but a poor figure in a set of comparative tables. Not their misery, +doubtless, but the way they elude their misery, is what pleases the +sentimental tourist, who is gratified by the sight of a beautiful race +that lives by the aid of its imagination. The way to enjoy Venice is +to follow the example of these people and make the most of simple +pleasures. Almost all the pleasures of the place are simple; this may be +maintained even under the imputation of ingenious paradox. There is no +simpler pleasure than looking at a fine Titian, unless it be looking at +a fine Tintoret or strolling into St. Mark's,--abominable the way one +falls into the habit,--and resting one's light-wearied eyes upon the +windowless gloom; or than floating in a gondola or than hanging over +a balcony or than taking one's coffee at Florian's. It is of such +superficial pastimes that a Venetian day is composed, and the pleasure +of the matter is in the emotions to which they minister. These are +fortunately of the finest--otherwise Venice would be insufferably dull. +Reading Ruskin is good; reading the old records is perhaps better; but +the best thing of all is simply staying on. The only way to care for +Venice as she deserves it is to give her a chance to touch you often--to +linger and remain and return. + + +II + +The danger is that you will not linger enough--a danger of which the +author of these lines had known something. It is possible to dislike +Venice, and to entertain the sentiment in a responsible and intelligent +manner. There are travellers who think the place odious, and those who +are not of this opinion often find themselves wishing that the others +were only more numerous. The sentimental tourist's sole quarrel with his +Venice is that he has too many competitors there. He likes to be +alone; to be original; to have (to himself, at least) the air of making +discoveries. The Venice of to-day is a vast museum where the little +wicket that admits you is perpetually turning and creaking, and you +march through the institution with a herd of fellow-gazers. There is +nothing left to discover or describe, and originality of attitude is +completely impossible. This is often very annoying; you can only turn +your back on your impertinent playfellow and curse his want of delicacy. +But this is not the fault of Venice; it is the fault of the rest of the +world. The fault of Venice is that, though she is easy to admire, she is +not so easy to live with as you count living in other places. After you +have stayed a week and the bloom of novelty has rubbed off you wonder if +you can accommodate yourself to the peculiar conditions. Your old habits +become impracticable and you find yourself obliged to form new ones of +an undesirable and unprofitable character. You are tired of your gondola +(or you think you are) and you have seen all the principal pictures +and heard the names of the palaces announced a dozen times by your +gondolier, who brings them out almost as impressively as if he were +an English butler bawling titles into a drawing-room. You have walked +several hundred times round the Piazza and bought several bushels of +photographs. You have visited the antiquity mongers whose horrible +sign-boards dishonour some of the grandest vistas in the Grand Canal; +you have tried the opera and found it very bad; you have bathed at +the Lido and found the water flat. You have begun to have a +shipboard-feeling--to regard the Piazza as an enormous saloon and +the Riva degli Schiavoni as a promenade-deck. You are obstructed and +encaged; your desire for space is unsatisfied; you miss your usual +exercise. You try to take a walk and you fail, and meantime, as I say, +you have come to regard your gondola as a sort of magnified baby's +cradle. You have no desire to be rocked to sleep, though you are +sufficiently kept awake by the irritation produced, as you gaze across +the shallow lagoon, by the attitude of the perpetual gondolier, with his +turned-out toes, his protruded chin, his absurdly unscientific stroke. +The canals have a horrible smell, and the everlasting Piazza, where you +have looked repeatedly at every article in every shop-window and found +them all rubbish, where the young Venetians who sell bead bracelets and +"panoramas" are perpetually thrusting their wares at you, where the same +tightly-buttoned officers are for ever sucking the same black weeds, at +the same empty tables, in front of the same cafes--the Piazza, as I say, +has resolved itself into a magnificent tread-mill. This is the state +of mind of those shallow inquirers who find Venice all very well for +a week; and if in such a state of mind you take your departure you act +with fatal rashness. The loss is your own, moreover; it is not--with +all deference to your personal attractions--that of your companions who +remain behind; for though there are some disagreeable things in Venice +there is nothing so disagreeable as the visitors. The conditions are +peculiar, but your intolerance of them evaporates before it has had time +to become a prejudice. When you have called for the bill to go, pay it +and remain, and you will find on the morrow that you are deeply attached +to Venice. It is by living there from day to day that you feel the +fulness of her charm; that you invite her exquisite influence to sink +into your spirit. The creature varies like a nervous woman, whom you +know only when you know all the aspects of her beauty. She has high +spirits or low, she is pale or red, grey or pink, cold or warm, fresh or +wan, according to the weather or the hour. She is always interesting +and almost always sad; but she has a thousand occasional graces and is +always liable to happy accidents. You become extraordinarily fond of +these things; you count upon them; they make part of your life. Tenderly +fond you become; there is something indefinable in those depths of +personal acquaintance that gradually establish themselves. The place +seems to personify itself, to become human and sentient and conscious of +your affection. You desire to embrace it, to caress it, to possess it; +and finally a soft sense of possession grows up and your visit becomes a +perpetual love-affair. It is very true that if you go, as the author +of these lines on a certain occasion went, about the middle of March, a +certain amount of disappointment is possible. He had paid no visit for +several years, and in the interval the beautiful and helpless city had +suffered an increase of injury. The barbarians are in full possession +and you tremble for what they may do. You are reminded from the moment +of your arrival that Venice scarcely exists any more as a city at all; +that she exists only as a battered peep-show and bazaar. There was a +horde of savage Germans encamped in the Piazza, and they filled +the Ducal Palace and the Academy with their uproar. The English and +Americans came a little later. They came in good time, with a great many +French, who were discreet enough to make very long repasts at the Caffe +Quadri, during which they were out of the way. The months of April and +May of the year 1881 were not, as a general thing, a favourable season +for visiting the Ducal Palace and the Academy. The _valet-de-place_ +had marked them for his own and held triumphant possession of them. He +celebrates his triumphs in a terrible brassy voice, which resounds all +over the place, and has, whatever language he be speaking, the accent +of some other idiom. During all the spring months in Venice these gentry +abound in the great resorts, and they lead their helpless captives +through churches and galleries in dense irresponsible groups. They +infest the Piazza; they pursue you along the Riva; they hang about +the bridges and the doors of the cafes. In saying just now that I was +disappointed at first, I had chiefly in mind the impression that assails +me to-day in the whole precinct of St. Mark's. The condition of +this ancient sanctuary is surely a great scandal. The pedlars and +commissioners ply their trade--often a very unclean one--at the very +door of the temple; they follow you across the threshold, into the +sacred dusk, and pull your sleeve, and hiss into your ear, scuffling +with each other for customers. There is a great deal of dishonour about +St. Mark's altogether, and if Venice, as I say, has become a great +bazaar, this exquisite edifice is now the biggest booth. + + +III + +It is treated as a booth in all ways, and if it had not somehow a great +spirit of solemnity within it the traveller would soon have little +warrant for regarding it as a religious affair. The restoration of the +outer walls, which has lately been so much attacked and defended, is +certainly a great shock. Of the necessity of the work only an expert +is, I suppose, in a position to judge; but there is no doubt that, if +a necessity it be, it is one that is deeply to be regretted. To no +more distressing necessity have people of taste lately had to resign +themselves. Wherever the hand of the restorer has been laid all +semblance of beauty has vanished; which is a sad fact, considering that +the external loveliness of St. Mark's has been for ages less impressive +only than that of the still comparatively uninjured interior. I know not +what is the measure of necessity in such a case, and it appears indeed +to be a very delicate question. To-day, at any rate, that admirable +harmony of faded mosaic and marble which, to the eye of the traveller +emerging from the narrow streets that lead to the Piazza, filled all the +further end of it with a sort of dazzling silver presence--to-day this +lovely vision is in a way to be completely reformed and indeed well-nigh +abolished. The old softness and mellowness of colour--the work of the +quiet centuries and of the breath of the salt sea--is giving way to +large crude patches of new material which have the effect of a monstrous +malady rather than of a restoration to health. They look like blotches +of red and white paint and dishonourable smears of chalk on the cheeks +of a noble matron. The face toward the Piazzetta is in especial the +newest-looking thing conceivable--as new as a new pair of boots or +as the morning's paper. We do not profess, however, to undertake a +scientific quarrel with these changes; we admit that our complaint is +a purely sentimental one. The march of industry in united Italy must +doubtless be looked at as a whole, and one must endeavour to believe +that it is through innumerable lapses of taste that this deeply +interesting country is groping her way to her place among the nations. +For the present, it is not to be denied, certain odd phases of the +process are more visible than the result, to arrive at which it seems +necessary that, as she was of old a passionate votary of the beautiful, +she should to-day burn everything that she has adored. It is doubtless +too soon to judge her, and there are moments when one is willing to +forgive her even the restoration of St. Mark's. Inside as well there has +been a considerable attempt to make the place more tidy; but the general +effect, as yet, has not seriously suffered. What I chiefly remember is +the straightening out of that dark and rugged old pavement--those deep +undulations of primitive mosaic in which the fond spectator was thought +to perceive an intended resemblance to the waves of the ocean. Whether +intended or not the analogy was an image the more in a treasure-house +of images; but from a considerable portion of the church it has now +disappeared. Throughout the greater part indeed the pavement remains as +recent generations have known it--dark, rich, cracked, uneven, spotted +with porphyry and time-blackened malachite, polished by the knees of +innumerable worshippers; but in other large stretches the idea imitated +by the restorers is that of the ocean in a dead calm, and the model they +have taken the floor of a London club-house or of a New York hotel. +I think no Venetian and scarcely any Italian cares much for such +differences; and when, a year ago, people in England were writing to the +_Times_ about the whole business and holding meetings to protest against +it the dear children of the lagoon--so far as they heard or heeded the +rumour--thought them partly busy-bodies and partly asses. Busy-bodies +they doubtless were, but they took a good deal of disinterested trouble. +It never occurs to the Venetian mind of to-day that such trouble may be +worth taking; the Venetian mind vainly endeavours to conceive a state of +existence in which personal questions are so insipid that people have +to look for grievances in the wrongs of brick and marble. I must not, +however, speak of St. Mark's as if I had the pretension of giving a +description of it or as if the reader desired one. The reader has been +too well served already. It is surely the best-described building in the +world. Open the _Stones of Venice_, open Theophile Gautier's _Italia_, +and you will see. These writers take it very seriously, and it is only +because there is another way of taking it that I venture to speak of +it; the way that offers itself after you have been in Venice a couple of +months, and the light is hot in the great Square, and you pass in under +the pictured porticoes with a feeling of habit and friendliness and a +desire for something cool and dark. There are moments, after all, when +the church is comparatively quiet and empty, and when you may sit there +with an easy consciousness of its beauty. From the moment, of course, +that you go into any Italian church for any purpose but to say your +prayers or look at the ladies, you rank yourself among the trooping +barbarians I just spoke of; you treat the place as an orifice in the +peep-show. Still, it is almost a spiritual function--or, at the worst, +an amorous one--to feed one's eyes on the molten colour that drops from +the hollow vaults and thickens the air with its richness. It is all so +quiet and sad and faded and yet all so brilliant and living. The strange +figures in the mosaic pictures, bending with the curve of niche and +vault, stare down through the glowing dimness; the burnished gold that +stands behind them catches the light on its little uneven cubes. St. +Mark's owes nothing of its character to the beauty of proportion or +perspective; there is nothing grandly balanced or far-arching; there +are no long lines nor triumphs of the perpendicular. The church arches +indeed, but arches like a dusky cavern. Beauty of surface, of tone, +of detail, of things near enough to touch and kneel upon and lean +against--it is from this the effect proceeds. In this sort of beauty the +place is incredibly rich, and you may go there every day and find afresh +some lurking pictorial nook. It is a treasury of bits, as the painters +say; and there are usually three or four of the fraternity with their +easels set up in uncertain equilibrium on the undulating floor. It is +not easy to catch the real complexion of St. Mark's, and these laudable +attempts at portraiture are apt to look either lurid or livid. But if +you cannot paint the old loose-looking marble slabs, the great panels +of basalt and jasper, the crucifixes of which the lonely anguish looks +deeper in the vertical light, the tabernacles whose open doors disclose +a dark Byzantine image spotted with dull, crooked gems--if you cannot +paint these things you can at least grow fond of them. You grow fond +even of the old benches of red marble, partly worn away by the breeches +of many generations and attached to the base of those wide pilasters of +which the precious plating, delightful in its faded brownness, with a +faint grey bloom upon it, bulges and yawns a little with honourable age. + +{Illustration: FLAGS AT ST. MARK'S VENICE} + + +IV + +Even at first, when the vexatious sense of the city of the Doges reduced +to earning its living as a curiosity-shop was in its keenness, there was +a great deal of entertainment to be got from lodging on Riva Schiavoni +and looking out at the far-shimmering lagoon. There was entertainment +indeed in simply getting into the place and observing the queer +incidents of a Venetian installation. A great many persons contribute +indirectly to this undertaking, and it is surprising how they spring +out at you during your novitiate to remind you that they are bound up +in some mysterious manner with the constitution of your little +establishment. It was an interesting problem for instance to trace the +subtle connection existing between the niece of the landlady and the +occupancy of the fourth floor. Superficially it was none too visible, as +the young lady in question was a dancer at the Fenice theatre--or when +that was closed at the Rossini--and might have been supposed absorbed by +her professional duties. It proved necessary, however, that she should +hover about the premises in a velvet jacket and a pair of black kid +gloves with one little white button; as also, that she should apply a +thick coating of powder to her face, which had a charming oval and a +sweet weak expression, like that of most of the Venetian maidens, +who, as a general thing--it was not a peculiarity of the land-lady's +niece--are fond of besmearing themselves with flour. You soon recognise +that it is not only the many-twinkling lagoon you behold from a +habitation on the Riva; you see a little of everything Venetian. +Straight across, before my windows, rose the great pink mass of San +Giorgio Maggiore, which has for an ugly Palladian church a success +beyond all reason. It is a success of position, of colour, of the +immense detached Campanile, tipped with a tall gold angel. I know not +whether it is because San Giorgio is so grandly conspicuous, with a +great deal of worn, faded-looking brickwork; but for many persons the +whole place has a kind of suffusion of rosiness. Asked what may be the +leading colour in the Venetian concert, we should inveterately say Pink, +and yet without remembering after all that this elegant hue occurs +very often. It is a faint, shimmering, airy, watery pink; the bright +sea-light seems to flush with it and the pale whiteish-green of lagoon +and canal to drink it in. There is indeed a great deal of very evident +brickwork, which is never fresh or loud in colour, but always burnt out, +as it were, always exquisitely mild. + +Certain little mental pictures rise before the collector of memories at +the simple mention, written or spoken, of the places he has loved. When +I hear, when I see, the magical name I have written above these pages, +it is not of the great Square that I think, with its strange basilica +and its high arcades, nor of the wide mouth of the Grand Canal, with the +stately steps and the well-poised dome of the Salute; it is not of +the low lagoon, nor the sweet Piazzetta, nor the dark chambers of St. +Mark's. I simply see a narrow canal in the heart of the city--a patch +of green water and a surface of pink wall. The gondola moves slowly; it +gives a great smooth swerve, passes under a bridge, and the gondolier's +cry, carried over the quiet water, makes a kind of splash in the +stillness. A girl crosses the little bridge, which has an arch like +a camel's back, with an old shawl on her head, which makes her +characteristic and charming; you see her against the sky as you float +beneath. The pink of the old wall seems to fill the whole place; it +sinks even into the opaque water. Behind the wall is a garden, out +of which the long arm of a white June rose--the roses of Venice are +splendid--has flung itself by way of spontaneous ornament. On the other +side of this small water-way is a great shabby facade of Gothic windows +and balconies--balconies on which dirty clothes are hung and under +which a cavernous-looking doorway opens from a low flight of slimy +water-steps. It is very hot and still, the canal has a queer smell, and +the whole place is enchanting. + +{Illustration: A NARROW CANAL, VENICE} + +It is poor work, however, talking about the colour of things in Venice. +The fond spectator is perpetually looking at it from his window, when he +is not floating about with that delightful sense of being for the moment +a part of it, which any gentleman in a gondola is free to entertain. +Venetian windows and balconies are a dreadful lure, and while you rest +your elbows on these cushioned ledges the precious hours fly away. But +in truth Venice isn't in fair weather a place for concentration of mind. +The effort required for sitting down to a writing-table is heroic, +and the brightest page of MS. looks dull beside the brilliancy of your +_milieu_. All nature beckons you forth and murmurs to you sophistically +that such hours should be devoted to collecting impressions. Afterwards, +in ugly places, at unprivileged times, you can convert your impressions +into prose. Fortunately for the present proser the weather wasn't always +fine; the first month was wet and windy, and it was better to judge +of the matter from an open casement than to respond to the advances +of persuasive gondoliers. Even then however there was a constant +entertainment in the view. It was all cold colour, and the steel-grey +floor of the lagoon was stroked the wrong way by the wind. Then there +were charming cool intervals, when the churches, the houses, the +anchored fishing-boats, the whole gently-curving line of the Riva, +seemed to be washed with a pearly white. Later it all turned warm--warm +to the eye as well as to other senses. After the middle of May the whole +place was in a glow. The sea took on a thousand shades, but they were +only infinite variations of blue, and those rosy walls I just spoke of +began to flush in the thick sunshine. Every patch of colour, every yard +of weather-stained stucco, every glimpse of nestling garden or daub of +sky above a _calle_, began to shine and sparkle--began, as the painters +say, to "compose." The lagoon was streaked with odd currents, which +played across it like huge smooth finger-marks. The gondolas multiplied +and spotted it allover; every gondola and gondolier looking, at a +distance, precisely like every other. + +There is something strange and fascinating in this mysterious +impersonality of the gondola. It has an identity when you are in it, +but, thanks to their all being of the same size, shape and colour, and +of the same deportment and gait, it has none, or as little as possible, +as you see it pass before you. From my windows on the Riva there was +always the same silhouette--the long, black, slender skiff, lifting its +head and throwing it back a little, moving yet seeming not to move, with +the grotesquely-graceful figure on the poop. This figure inclines, +as may be, more to the graceful or to the grotesque--standing in the +"second position" of the dancing-master, but indulging from the waist +upward in a freedom of movement which that functionary would deprecate. +One may say as a general thing that there is something rather awkward in +the movement even of the most graceful gondolier, and something graceful +in the movement of the most awkward. In the graceful men of course the +grace predominates, and nothing can be finer than the large, firm way +in which, from their point of vantage, they throw themselves over +their tremendous oar. It has the boldness of a plunging bird and +the regularity of a pendulum. Sometimes, as you see this movement in +profile, in a gondola that passes you--see, as you recline on your own +low cushions, the arching body of the gondolier lifted up against the +sky--it has a kind of nobleness which suggests an image on a Greek +frieze. The gondolier at Venice is your very good friend--if you choose +him happily--and on the quality of the personage depends a good deal +that of your impressions. He is a part of your daily life, your double, +your shadow, your complement. Most people, I think, either like their +gondolier or hate him; and if they like him, like him very much. In this +case they take an interest in him after his departure; wish him to be +sure of employment, speak of him as the gem of gondoliers and tell their +friends to be certain to "secure" him. There is usually no difficulty in +securing him; there is nothing elusive or reluctant about a gondolier. +Nothing would induce me not to believe them for the most part excellent +fellows, and the sentimental tourist must always have a kindness for +them. More than the rest of the population, of course, they are the +children of Venice; they are associated with its idiosyncrasy, with its +essence, with its silence, with its melancholy. + +When I say they are associated with its silence I should immediately add +that they are associated also with its sound. Among themselves they are +an extraordinarily talkative company. They chatter at the _traghetti_, +where they always have some sharp point under discussion; they bawl +across the canals; they bespeak your commands as you approach; they defy +each other from afar. If you happen to have a _traghetto_ under your +window, you are well aware that they are a vocal race. I should go even +further than I went just now, and say that the voice of the gondolier is +in fact for audibility the dominant or rather the only note of Venice. +There is scarcely another heard sound, and that indeed is part of the +interest of the place. There is no noise there save distinctly human +noise; no rumbling, no vague uproar, nor rattle of wheels and hoofs. It +is all articulate and vocal and personal. One may say indeed that Venice +is emphatically the city of conversation; people talk all over the place +because there is nothing to interfere with its being caught by the ear. +Among the populace it is a general family party. The still water carries +the voice, and good Venetians exchange confidences at a distance of half +a mile. It saves a world of trouble, and they don't like trouble. Their +delightful garrulous language helps them to make Venetian life a +long _conversazione_. This language, with its soft elisions, its +odd transpositions, its kindly contempt for consonants and other +disagreeables, has in it something peculiarly human and accommodating. +If your gondolier had no other merit he would have the merit that he +speaks Venetian. This may rank as a merit even--some people perhaps +would say especially--when you don't understand what he says. But he +adds to it other graces which make him an agreeable feature in your +life. The price he sets on his services is touchingly small, and he +has a happy art of being obsequious without being, or at least without +seeming, abject. For occasional liberalities he evinces an almost +lyrical gratitude. In short he has delightfully good manners, a merit +which he shares for the most part with the Venetians at large. One +grows very fond of these people, and the reason of one's fondness is the +frankness and sweetness of their address. That of the Italian family +at large has much to recommend it; but in the Venetian manner there is +something peculiarly ingratiating. One feels that the race is old, that +it has a long and rich civilisation in its blood, and that if it hasn't +been blessed by fortune it has at least been polished by time. It hasn't +a genius for stiff morality, and indeed makes few pretensions in that +direction. It scruples but scantly to represent the false as the +true, and has been accused of cultivating the occasion to grasp and +to overreach, and of steering a crooked course--not to your and my +advantage--amid the sanctities of property. It has been accused further +of loving if not too well at least too often, of being in fine as little +austere as possible. I am not sure it is very brave, nor struck with its +being very industrious. But it has an unfailing sense of the amenities +of life; the poorest Venetian is a natural man of the world. He is +better company than persons of his class are apt to be among the nations +of industry and virtue--where people are also sometimes perceived to lie +and steal and otherwise misconduct themselves. He has a great desire to +please and to be pleased. + + +V + +In that matter at least the cold-blooded stranger begins at last to +imitate him; begins to lead a life that shall be before all things easy; +unless indeed he allow himself, like Mr. Ruskin, to be put out of humour +by Titian and Tiepolo. The hours he spends among the pictures are his +best hours in Venice, and I am ashamed to have written so much of +common things when I might have been making festoons of the names of +the masters. Only, when we have covered our page with such festoons +what more is left to say? When one has said Carpaccio and Bellini, the +Tintoret and the Veronese, one has struck a note that must be left to +resound at will. Everything has been said about the mighty painters, and +it is of little importance that a pilgrim the more has found them to +his taste. "Went this morning to the Academy; was very much pleased with +Titian's 'Assumption.'" That honest phrase has doubtless been written +in many a traveller's diary, and was not indiscreet on the part of +its author. But it appeals little to the general reader, and we must +moreover notoriously not expose our deepest feelings. Since I have +mentioned Titian's "Assumption" I must say that there are some people +who have been less pleased with it than the observer we have just +imagined. It is one of the possible disappointments of Venice, and you +may if you like take advantage of your privilege of not caring for it. +It imparts a look of great richness to the side of the beautiful room of +the Academy on which it hangs; but the same room contains two or three +works less known to fame which are equally capable of inspiring a +passion. "The 'Annunciation' struck me as coarse and superficial": that +note was once made in a simple-minded tourist's book. At Venice, strange +to say, Titian is altogether a disappointment; the city of his adoption +is far from containing the best of him. Madrid, Paris, London, Florence, +Dresden, Munich--these are the homes of his greatness. + +There are other painters who have but a single home, and the greatest of +these is the Tintoret. Close beside him sit Carpaccio and Bellini, who +make with him the dazzling Venetian trio. The Veronese may be seen and +measured in other places; he is most splendid in Venice, but he shines +in Paris and in Dresden. You may walk out of the noon-day dusk of +Trafalgar Square in November, and in one of the chambers of the National +Gallery see the family of Darius rustling and pleading and weeping +at the feet of Alexander. Alexander is a beautiful young Venetian in +crimson pantaloons, and the picture sends a glow into the cold London +twilight. You may sit before it for an hour and dream you are floating +to the water-gate of the Ducal Palace, where a certain old beggar who +has one of the handsomest heads in the world--he has sat to a hundred +painters for Doges and for personages more sacred--has a prescriptive +right to pretend to pull your gondola to the steps and to hold out a +greasy immemorial cap. But you must go to Venice in very fact to see +the other masters, who form part of your life while you are there, who +illuminate your view of the universe. It is difficult to express one's +relation to them; the whole Venetian art-world is so near, so familiar, +so much an extension and adjunct of the spreading actual, that it seems +almost invidious to say one owes more to one of them than to the other. +Nowhere, not even in Holland, where the correspondence between the +real aspects and the little polished canvases is so constant and so +exquisite, do art and life seem so interfused and, as it were, so +consanguineous. All the splendour of light and colour, all the Venetian +air and the Venetian history are on the walls and ceilings of the +palaces; and all the genius of the masters, all the images and visions +they have left upon canvas, seem to tremble in the sunbeams and dance +upon the waves. That is the perpetual interest of the place--that you +live in a certain sort of knowledge as in a rosy cloud. You don't go +into the churches and galleries by way of a change from the streets; +you go into them because they offer you an exquisite reproduction of +the things that surround you. All Venice was both model and painter, +and life was so pictorial that art couldn't help becoming so. With +all diminutions life is pictorial still, and this fact gives an +extraordinary freshness to one's perception of the great Venetian works. +You judge of them not as a connoisseur, but as a man of the world, and +you enjoy them because they are so social and so true. Perhaps of all +works of art that are equally great they demand least reflection on the +part of the spectator--they make least of a mystery of being enjoyed. +Reflection only confirms your admiration, yet is almost ashamed to show +its head. These things speak so frankly and benignantly to the sense +that even when they arrive at the highest style--as in the Tintoret's +"Presentation of the little Virgin at the Temple"--they are still more +familiar. + +But it is hard, as I say, to express all this, and it is painful as well +to attempt it--painful because in the memory of vanished hours so filled +with beauty the consciousness of present loss oppresses. Exquisite +hours, enveloped in light and silence, to have known them once is to +have always a terrible standard of enjoyment. Certain lovely mornings +of May and June come back with an ineffaceable fairness. Venice isn't +smothered in flowers at this season, in the manner of Florence and Rome; +but the sea and sky themselves seem to blossom and rustle. The gondola +waits at the wave-washed steps, and if you are wise you will take your +place beside a discriminating companion. Such a companion in Venice +should of course be of the sex that discriminates most finely. An +intelligent woman who knows her Venice seems doubly intelligent, and it +makes no woman's perceptions less keen to be aware that she can't help +looking graceful as she is borne over the waves. The handsome Pasquale, +with uplifted oar, awaits your command, knowing, in a general way, +from observation of your habits, that your intention is to go to see +a picture or two. It perhaps doesn't immensely matter what picture +you choose: the whole affair is so charming. It is charming to wander +through the light and shade of intricate canals, with perpetual +architecture above you and perpetual fluidity beneath. It is charming +to disembark at the polished steps of a little empty _campo_--a sunny +shabby square with an old well in the middle, an old church on one +side and tall Venetian windows looking down. Sometimes the windows are +tenantless; sometimes a lady in a faded dressing-gown leans vaguely on +the sill. There is always an old man holding out his hat for +coppers; there are always three or four small boys dodging possible +umbrella-pokes while they precede you, in the manner of custodians, to +the door of the church. + + +VI + +The churches of Venice are rich in pictures, and many a masterpiece +lurks in the unaccommodating gloom of side-chapels and sacristies. Many +a noble work is perched behind the dusty candles and muslin roses of a +scantily-visited altar; some of them indeed, hidden behind the altar, +suffer in a darkness that can never be explored. The facilities offered +you for approaching the picture in such cases are a mockery of your +irritated wish. You stand at tip-toe on a three-legged stool, you climb +a rickety ladder, you almost mount upon the shoulders of the _custode_. +You do everything but see the picture. You see just enough to be sure +it's beautiful. You catch a glimpse of a divine head, of a fig tree +against a mellow sky, but the rest is impenetrable mystery. You +renounce all hope, for instance, of approaching the magnificent Cima da +Conegliano in San Giovanni in Bragora; and bethinking yourself of the +immaculate purity that shines in the spirit of this master, you renounce +it with chagrin and pain. Behind the high altar in that church hangs +a Baptism of Christ by Cima which I believe has been more or less +repainted. You make the thing out in spots, you see it has a fullness +of perfection. But you turn away from it with a stiff neck and promise +yourself consolation in the Academy and at the Madonna dell' Orto, +where two noble works by the same hand--pictures as clear as a summer +twilight--present themselves in better circumstances. It may be said +as a general thing that you never see the Tintoret. You admire him, +you adore him, you think him the greatest of painters, but in the great +majority of cases your eyes fail to deal with him. This is partly +his own fault; so many of his works have turned to blackness and are +positively rotting in their frames. At the Scuola di San Rocco, where +there are acres of him, there is scarcely anything at all adequately +visible save the immense "Crucifixion" in the upper story. It is true +that in looking at this huge composition you look at many pictures; it +has not only a multitude of figures but a wealth of episodes; and you +pass from one of these to the other as if you were "doing" a gallery. +Surely no single picture in the world contains more of human life; there +is everything in it, including the most exquisite beauty. It is one of +the greatest things of art; it is always interesting. There are works of +the artist which contain touches more exquisite, revelations of beauty +more radiant, but there is no other vision of so intense a reality, an +execution so splendid. The interest, the impressiveness, of that whole +corner of Venice, however melancholy the effect of its gorgeous and +ill-lighted chambers, gives a strange importance to a visit to the +Scuola. Nothing that all travellers go to see appears to suffer less +from the incursions of travellers. It is one of the loneliest booths +of the bazaar, and the author of these lines has always had the good +fortune, which he wishes to every other traveller, of having it to +himself. I think most visitors find the place rather alarming and +wicked-looking. They walk about a while among the fitful figures that +gleam here and there out of the great tapestry (as it were) with which +the painter has hung all the walls, and then, depressed and bewildered +by the portentous solemnity of these objects, by strange glimpses of +unnatural scenes, by the echo of their lonely footsteps on the vast +stone floors, they take a hasty departure, finding themselves again, +with a sense of release from danger, a sense that the _genius loci_ was +a sort of mad white-washer who worked with a bad mixture, in the bright +light of the _campo_, among the beggars, the orange-vendors and the +passing gondolas. Solemn indeed is the place, solemn and strangely +suggestive, for the simple reason that we shall scarcely find four walls +elsewhere that inclose within a like area an equal quantity of genius. +The air is thick with it and dense and difficult to breathe; for it was +genius that was not happy, inasmuch as it, lacked the art to fix itself +for ever. It is not immortality that we breathe at the Scuola di San +Rocco, but conscious, reluctant mortality. + +Fortunately, however, we can turn to the Ducal Palace, where everything +is so brilliant and splendid that the poor dusky Tintoret is lifted in +spite of himself into the concert. This deeply original building is of +course the loveliest thing in Venice, and a morning's stroll there is a +wonderful illumination. Cunningly select your hour--half the enjoyment +of Venice is a question of dodging--and enter at about one o'clock, when +the tourists have flocked off to lunch and the echoes of the charming +chambers have gone to sleep among the sunbeams. There is no brighter +place in Venice--by which I mean that on the whole there is none half so +bright. The reflected sunshine plays up through the great windows from +the glittering lagoon and shimmers and twinkles over gilded walls and +ceilings. All the history of Venice, all its splendid stately past, +glows around you in a strong sealight. Everyone here is magnificent, but +the great Veronese is the most magnificent of all. He swims before you +in a silver cloud; he thrones in an eternal morning. The deep blue sky +burns behind him, streaked across with milky bars; the white colonnades +sustain the richest canopies, under which the first gentlemen and ladies +in the world both render homage and receive it. Their glorious garments +rustle in the air of the sea and their sun-lighted faces are the very +complexion of Venice. The mixture of pride and piety, of politics and +religion, of art and patriotism, gives a splendid dignity to every +scene. Never was a painter more nobly joyous, never did an artist take a +greater delight in life, seeing it all as a kind of breezy festival and +feeling it through the medium of perpetual success. He revels in the +gold-framed ovals of the ceilings, multiplies himself there with the +fluttering movement of an embroidered banner that tosses itself into the +blue. He was the happiest of painters and produced the happiest picture +in the world. "The Rape of Europa" surely deserves this title; it is +impossible to look at it without aching with envy. Nowhere else in art +is such a temperament revealed; never did inclination and opportunity +combine to express such enjoyment. The mixture of flowers and gems and +brocade, of blooming flesh and shining sea and waving groves, of youth, +health, movement, desire--all this is the brightest vision that ever +descended upon the soul of a painter. Happy the artist who could +entertain such a vision; happy the artist who could paint it as the +masterpiece I here recall is painted. + +The Tintoret's visions were not so bright as that; but he had several +that were radiant enough. In the room that contains the work just cited +are several smaller canvases by the greatly more complex genius of the +Scuola di San Rocco, which are almost simple in their loveliness, almost +happy in their simplicity. They have kept their brightness through the +centuries, and they shine with their neighbours in those golden rooms. +There is a piece of painting in one of them which is one of the sweetest +things in Venice and which reminds one afresh of those wild flowers of +execution that bloom so profusely and so unheeded in the dark corners +of all of the Tintoret's work. "Pallas chasing away Mars" is, I believe, +the name that is given to the picture; and it represents in fact a young +woman of noble appearance administering a gentle push to a fine young +man in armour, as if to tell him to keep his distance. It is of the +gentleness of this push that I speak, the charming way in which she puts +out her arm, with a single bracelet on it, and rests her young hand, its +rosy fingers parted, on his dark breastplate. She bends her enchanting +head with the effort--a head which has all the strange fairness that the +Tintoret always sees in women--and the soft, living, flesh-like glow +of all these members, over which the brush has scarcely paused in its +course, is as pretty an example of genius as all Venice can show. +But why speak of the Tintoret when I can say nothing of the great +"Paradise," which unfolds its somewhat smoky splendour and the wonder of +its multitudinous circles in one of the other chambers? If it were not +one of the first pictures in the world it would be about the biggest, +and we must confess that the spectator gets from it at first chiefly +an impression of quantity. Then he sees that this quantity is really +wealth; that the dim confusion of faces is a magnificent composition, +and that some of the details of this composition are extremely +beautiful. It is impossible however in a retrospect of Venice to specify +one's happiest hours, though as one looks backward certain ineffaceable +moments start here and there into vividness. How is it possible to +forget one's visits to the sacristy of the Frari, however frequent +they may have been, and the great work of John Bellini which forms the +treasure of that apartment? + + +VII + +Nothing in Venice is more perfect than this, and we know of no work of +art more complete. The picture is in three compartments; the Virgin sits +in the central division with her child; two venerable saints, standing +close together, occupy each of the others. It is impossible to imagine +anything more finished or more ripe. It is one of those things that sum +up the genius of a painter, the experience of a life, the teaching of +a school. It seems painted with molten gems, which have only been +clarified by time, and is as solemn as it is gorgeous and as simple as +it is deep. Giovanni Bellini is more or less everywhere in Venice, and, +wherever he is, almost certain to be first--first, I mean, in his own +line: paints little else than the Madonna and the saints; he has not +Carpaccio's care for human life at large, nor the Tintoret's nor the +of the Veronese. Some of his greater pictures, however, where several +figures are clustered together, have a richness of sanctity that is +almost profane. There is one of them on the dark side of the room at the +Academy that contains Titian's "Assumption," which if we could only see +it--its position is an inconceivable scandal--would evidently be one of +the mightiest of so-called sacred pictures. So too is the Madonna of San +Zaccaria, hung in a cold, dim, dreary place, ever so much too high, but +so mild and serene, and so grandly disposed and accompanied, that the +proper attitude for even the most critical amateur, as he looks at it, +strikes one as the bended knee. There is another noble John Bellini, +one of the very few in which there is no Virgin, at San Giovanni +Crisostomo--a St. Jerome, in a red dress, sitting aloft upon the rocks +and with a landscape of extraordinary purity behind him. The absence of +the peculiarly erect Madonna makes it an interesting surprise among the +works of the painter and gives it a somewhat less strenuous air. But it +has brilliant beauty and the St. Jerome is a delightful old personage. + +The same church contains another great picture for which the haunter +of these places must find a shrine apart in his memory; one of the most +interesting things he will have seen, if not the most brilliant. Nothing +appeals more to him than three figures of Venetian ladies which occupy +the foreground of a smallish canvas of Sebastian del Piombo, placed +above the high altar of San Giovanni Crisostomo. Sebastian was a +Venetian by birth, but few of his productions are to be seen in his +native place; few indeed are to be seen anywhere. The picture represents +the patron-saint of the church, accompanied by other saints and by the +worldly votaries I have mentioned. These ladies stand together on the +left, holding in their hands little white caskets; two of them are in +profile, but the foremost turns her face to the spectator. This face and +figure are almost unique among the beautiful things of Venice, and they +leave the susceptible observer with the impression of having made, +or rather having missed, a strange, a dangerous, but a most valuable, +acquaintance. The lady, who is superbly handsome, is the typical +Venetian of the sixteenth century, and she remains for the mind the +perfect flower of that society. Never was there a greater air of +breeding, a deeper expression of tranquil superiority. She walks a +goddess--as if she trod without sinking the waves of the Adriatic. It +is impossible to conceive a more perfect expression of the aristocratic +spirit either in its pride or in its benignity. This magnificent +creature is so strong and secure that she is gentle, and so quiet that +in comparison all minor assumptions of calmness suggest only a vulgar +alarm. But for all this there are depths of possible disorder in her +light-coloured eye. + +I had meant however to say nothing about her, for it's not right to +speak of Sebastian when one hasn't found room for Carpaccio. These +visions come to one, and one can neither hold them nor brush them aside. +Memories of Carpaccio, the magnificent, the delightful--it's not for +want of such visitations, but only for want of space, that I haven't +said of him what I would. There is little enough need of it for +Carpaccio's sake, his fame being brighter to-day--thanks to the generous +lamp Mr. Ruskin has held up to it--than it has ever been. Yet there is +something ridiculous in talking of Venice without making him almost the +refrain. He and the Tintoret are the two great realists, and it is hard +to say which is the more human, the more various. The Tintoret had +the mightier temperament, but Carpaccio, who had the advantage of more +newness and more responsibility, sailed nearer to perfection. Here and +there he quite touches it, as in the enchanting picture, at the Academy, +of St. Ursula asleep in her little white bed, in her high clean room, +where the angel visits her at dawn; or in the noble St. Jerome in his +study at S. Giorgio Schiavoni. This latter work is a pearl of sentiment, +and I may add without being fantastic a ruby of colour. It unites the +most masterly finish with a kind of universal largeness of feeling, and +he who has it well in his memory will never hear the name of Carpaccio +without a throb of almost personal affection. Such indeed is the feeling +that descends upon you in that wonderful little chapel of St. George +of the Slaves, where this most personal and sociable of artists has +expressed all the sweetness of his imagination. The place is small +and incommodious, the pictures are out of sight and ill-lighted, the +custodian is rapacious, the visitors are mutually intolerable, but +the shabby little chapel is a palace of art. Mr. Ruskin has written a +pamphlet about it which is a real aid to enjoyment, though I can't but +think the generous artist, with his keen senses and his just feeling, +would have suffered to hear his eulogist declare that one of his +other productions--in the Museo Civico of Palazzo Correr, a delightful +portrait of two Venetian ladies with pet animals--is the "finest picture +in the world." It has no need of that to be thought admirable; and what +more can a painter desire? + + +VIII + +May in Venice is better than April, but June is best of all. Then the +days are hot, but not too hot, and the nights are more beautiful than +the days. Then Venice is rosier than ever in the morning and more golden +than ever as the day descends. She seems to expand and evaporate, to +multiply all her reflections and iridescences. Then the life of her +people and the strangeness of her constitution become a perpetual +comedy, or at least a perpetual drama. Then the gondola is your sole +habitation, and you spend days between sea and sky. You go to the Lido, +though the Lido has been spoiled. When I first saw it, in 1869, it was +a very natural place, and there was but a rough lane across the little +island from the landing-place to the beach. There was a bathing-place in +those days, and a restaurant, which was very bad, but where in the warm +evenings your dinner didn't much matter as you sat letting it cool on +the wooden terrace that stretched out into the sea. To-day the Lido is +a part of united Italy and has been made the victim of villainous +improvements. A little cockney village has sprung up on its rural bosom +and a third-rate boulevard leads from Santa Elisabetta to the Adriatic. +There are bitumen walks and gas-lamps, lodging-houses, shops and a +_teatro diurno_. The bathing-establishment is bigger than before, +and the restaurant as well; but it is a compensation perhaps that +the cuisine is no better. Such as it is, however, you won't scorn +occasionally to partake of it on the breezy platform under which bathers +dart and splash, and which looks out to where the fishing-boats, with +sails of orange and crimson, wander along the darkening horizon. The +beach at the Lido is still lonely and beautiful, and you can easily walk +away from the cockney village. The return to Venice in the sunset is +classical and indispensable, and those who at that glowing hour have +floated toward the towers that rise out of the lagoon will not easily +part with the impression. But you indulge in larger excursions--you go +to Burano and Torcello, to Malamocco and Chioggia. Torcello, like the +Lido, has been improved; the deeply interesting little cathedral of the +eighth century, which stood there on the edge of the sea, as touching +in its ruin, with its grassy threshold and its primitive mosaics, as the +bleached bones of a human skeleton washed ashore by the tide, has now +been restored and made cheerful, and the charm of the place, its strange +and suggestive desolation, has well-nigh departed. + +It will still serve you as a pretext, however, for a day on the lagoon, +especially as you will disembark at Burano and admire the wonderful +fisher-folk, whose good looks--and bad manners, I am sorry to say--can +scarcely be exaggerated. Burano is celebrated for the beauty of its +women and the rapacity of its children, and it is a fact that though +some of the ladies are rather bold about it every one of them shows +you a handsome face. The children assail you for coppers, and in their +desire to be satisfied pursue your gondola into the sea. Chioggia is +a larger Burano, and you carry away from either place a half-sad, +half-cynical, but altogether pictorial impression; the impression of +bright-coloured hovels, of bathing in stagnant canals, of young girls +with faces of a delicate shape and a susceptible expression, with +splendid heads of hair and complexions smeared with powder, faded yellow +shawls that hang like old Greek draperies, and little wooden shoes +that click as they go up and down the steps of the convex bridges; of +brown-cheeked matrons with lustrous tresses and high tempers, massive +throats encased with gold beads, and eyes that meet your own with a +certain traditional defiance. The men throughout the islands of +Venice are almost as handsome as the women; I have never seen so many +good-looking rascals. At Burano and Chioggia they sit mending their +nets, or lounge at the street corners, where conversation is always +high-pitched, or clamour to you to take a boat; and everywhere they +decorate the scene with their splendid colour--cheeks and throats as +richly brown as the sails of their fishing-smacks--their sea-faded +tatters which are always a "costume," their soft Venetian jargon, and +the gallantry with which they wear their hats, an article that nowhere +sits so well as on a mass of dense Venetian curls. If you are happy you +will find yourself, after a June day in Venice (about ten o'clock), on +a balcony that overhangs the Grand Canal, with your elbows on the broad +ledge, a cigarette in your teeth and a little good company beside you. +The gondolas pass beneath, the watery surface gleams here and there from +their lamps, some of which are coloured lanterns that move mysteriously +in the darkness. There are some evenings in June when there are too many +gondolas, too many lanterns, too many serenades in front of the hotels. +The serenading in particular is overdone; but on such a balcony as I +speak of you needn't suffer from it, for in the apartment behind +you--an accessible refuge--there is more good company, there are more +cigarettes. If you are wise you will step back there presently. + +1882. + + + + + +THE GRAND CANAL + + +The honour of representing the plan and the place at their best might +perhaps appear, in the City of St. Mark, properly to belong to the +splendid square which bears the patron's name and which is the centre +of Venetian life so far (this is pretty well all the way indeed) as +Venetian life is a matter of strolling and chaffering, of gossiping and +gaping, of circulating without a purpose, and of staring--too often with +a foolish one--through the shop-windows of dealers whose hospitality +makes their doorsteps dramatic, at the very vulgarest rubbish in all the +modern market. If the Grand Canal, however, is not quite technically a +"street," the perverted Piazza is perhaps even less normal; and I hasten +to add that I am glad not to find myself studying my subject under the +international arcades, or yet (I will go the length of saying) in the +solemn presence of the church. For indeed in that case I foresee I +should become still more confoundingly conscious of the stumbling-block +that inevitably, even with his first few words, crops up in the path +of the lover of Venice who rashly addresses himself to expression. +"Venetian life" is a mere literary convention, though it be an +indispensable figure. The words have played an effective part in the +literature of sensibility; they constituted thirty years ago the title +of Mr. Howells's delightful volume of impressions; but in using +them to-day one owes some frank amends to one's own lucidity. Let me +carefully premise therefore that so often as they shall again drop +from my pen, so often shall I beg to be regarded as systematically +superficial. + +Venetian life, in the large old sense, has long since come to an end, +and the essential present character of the most melancholy of cities +resides simply in its being the most beautiful of tombs. Nowhere else +has the past been laid to rest with such tenderness, such a sadness of +resignation and remembrance. Nowhere else is the present so alien, so +discontinuous, so like a crowd in a cemetery without garlands for +the graves. It has no flowers in its hands, but, as a compensation +perhaps--and the thing is doubtless more to the point--it has money +and little red books. The everlasting shuffle of these irresponsible +visitors in the Piazza is contemporary Venetian life. Everything else is +only a reverberation of that. The vast mausoleum has a turnstile at the +door, and a functionary in a shabby uniform lets you in, as per tariff, +to see how dead it is. From this _constatation_, this cold curiosity, +proceed all the industry, the prosperity, the vitality of the place. The +shopkeepers and gondoliers, the beggars and the models, depend upon +it for a living; they are the custodians and the ushers of the great +museum--they are even themselves to a certain extent the objects of +exhibition. It is in the wide vestibule of the square that the polygot +pilgrims gather most densely; Piazza San Marco is the lobby of the opera +in the intervals of the performance. The present fortune of Venice, the +lamentable difference, is most easily measured there, and that is why, +in the effort to resist our pessimism, we must turn away both from the +purchasers and from the vendors of _ricordi_. The _ricordi_ that we +prefer are gathered best where the gondola glides--best of all on the +noble waterway that begins in its glory at the Salute and ends in +its abasement at the railway station. It is, however, the cockneyfied +Piazzetta (forgive me, shade of St. Theodore--has not a brand new cafe +begun to glare there, electrically, this very year?) that introduces us +most directly to the great picture by which the Grand Canal works its +first spell, and to which a thousand artists, not always with a talent +apiece, have paid their tribute. We pass into the Piazzetta to look down +the great throat, as it were, of Venice, and the vision must console us +for turning our back on St. Mark's. + +We have been treated to it again and again, of course, even if we have +never stirred from home; but that is only a reason the more for catching +at any freshness that may be left in the world of photography. It is in +Venice above all that we hear the small buzz of this vulgarising voice +of the familiar; yet perhaps it is in Venice too that the picturesque +fact has best mastered the pious secret of how to wait for us. Even +the classic Salute waits like some great lady on the threshold of her +saloon. She is more ample and serene, more seated at her door, than all +the copyists have told us, with her domes and scrolls, her scolloped +buttresses and statues forming a pompous crown, and her wide steps +disposed on the ground like the train of a robe. This fine air of the +woman of the world is carried out by the well-bred assurance with which +she looks in the direction of her old-fashioned Byzantine neighbour; +and the juxtaposition of two churches so distinguished and so different, +each splendid in its sort, is a sufficient mark of the scale and range +of Venice. However, we ourselves are looking away from St. Mark's--we +must blind our eyes to that dazzle; without it indeed there are +brightnesses and fascinations enough. We see them in abundance even +while we look away from the shady steps of the Salute. These steps are +cool in the morning, yet I don't know that I can justify my excessive +fondness for them any better than I can explain a hundred of the other +vague infatuations with which Venice sophisticates the spirit. Under +such an influence fortunately one need n't explain--it keeps account +of nothing but perceptions and affections. It is from the Salute steps +perhaps, of a summer morning, that this view of the open mouth of +the city is most brilliantly amusing. The whole thing composes as if +composition were the chief end of human institutions. The charming +architectural promontory of the Dogana stretches out the most graceful +of arms, balancing in its hand the gilded globe on which revolves the +delightful satirical figure of a little weathercock of a woman. This +Fortune, this Navigation, or whatever she is called--she surely needs no +name--catches the wind in the bit of drapery of which she has divested +her rotary bronze loveliness. On the other side of the Canal twinkles +and glitters the long row of the happy palaces which are mainly +expensive hotels. There is a little of everything everywhere, in +the bright Venetian air, but to these houses belongs especially the +appearance of sitting, across the water, at the receipt of custom, +of watching in their hypocritical loveliness for the stranger and the +victim. I call them happy, because even their sordid uses and their +vulgar signs melt somehow, with their vague sea-stained pinks and drabs, +into that strange gaiety of light and colour which is made up of the +reflection of superannuated things. The atmosphere plays over them like +a laugh, they are of the essence of the sad old joke. They are almost +as charming from other places as they are from their own balconies, +and share fully in that universal privilege of Venetian objects which +consists of being both the picture and the point of view. + +This double character, which is particularly strong in the Grand Canal, +adds a difficulty to any control of one's notes. The Grand Canal may +be practically, as in impression, the cushioned balcony of a high and +well-loved palace--the memory of irresistible evenings, of the +sociable elbow, of endless lingering and looking; or it may evoke the +restlessness of a fresh curiosity, of methodical inquiry, in a gondola +piled with references. There are no references, I ought to mention, in +the present remarks, which sacrifice to accident, not to completeness. +A rhapsody of Venice is always in order, but I think the catalogues +are finished. I should not attempt to write here the names of all the +palaces, even if the number of those I find myself able to remember in +the immense array were less insignificant. There are many I delight in +that I don't know, or at least don't keep, apart. Then there are the bad +reasons for preference that are better than the good, and all the sweet +bribery of association and recollection. These things, as one stands on +the Salute steps, are so many delicate fingers to pick straight out +of the row a dear little featureless house which, with its pale green +shutters, looks straight across at the great door and through the +very keyhole, as it were, of the church, and which I needn't call by +a name--a pleasant American name--that every one in Venice, these many +years, has had on grateful lips. It is the very friendliest house in all +the wide world, and it has, as it deserves to have, the most beautiful +position. It is a real _porto di mare_, as the gondoliers say--a port +within a port; it sees everything that comes and goes, and takes it all +in with practised eyes. Not a tint or a hint of the immense iridescence +is lost upon it, and there are days of exquisite colour on which it may +fancy itself the heart of the wonderful prism. We wave to it from the +Salute steps, which we must decidedly leave if we wish to get on, a +grateful hand across the water, and turn into the big white church of +Longhena--an empty shaft beneath a perfunctory dome--where an American +family and a German party, huddled in a corner upon a pair of benches, +are gazing, with a conscientiousness worthy of a better cause, at +nothing in particular. + +For there is nothing particular in this cold and conventional temple to +gaze at save the great Tintoretto of the sacristy, to which we quickly +pay our respects, and which we are glad to have for ten minutes to +ourselves. The picture, though full of beauty, is not the finest of the +master's; but it serves again as well as another to transport--there +is no other word--those of his lovers for whom, in far-away days when +Venice was an early rapture, this strange and mystifying painter was +almost the supreme revelation. The plastic arts may have less to say +to us than in the hungry years of youth, and the celebrated picture in +general be more of a blank; but more than the others any fine Tintoret +still carries us back, calling up not only the rich particular vision +but the freshness of the old wonder. Many things come and go, but this +great artist remains for us in Venice a part of the company of the mind. +The others are there in their obvious glory, but he is the only one for +whom the imagination, in our expressive modern phrase, sits up. "The +Marriage in Cana," at the Salute, has all his characteristic and +fascinating unexpectedness--the sacrifice of the figure of our Lord, +who is reduced to the mere final point of a clever perspective, and the +free, joyous presentation of all the other elements of the feast. +Why, in spite of this queer one-sidedness, does the picture give us no +impression of a lack of what the critics call reverence? For no other +reason that I can think of than because it happens to be the work of its +author, in whose very mistakes there is a singular wisdom. Mr. Ruskin +has spoken with sufficient eloquence of the serious loveliness of the +row of heads of the women on the right, who talk to each other as they +sit at the foreshortened banquet. There could be no better example +of the roving independence of the painter's vision, a real spirit of +adventure for which his subject was always a cluster of accidents; not +an obvious order, but a sort of peopled and agitated chapter of life, +in which the figures are submissive pictorial notes. These notes are all +there in their beauty and heterogeneity, and if the abundance is of a +kind to make the principle of selection seem in comparison timid, +yet the sense of "composition" in the spectator--if it happen to +exist--reaches out to the painter in peculiar sympathy. Dull must be the +spirit of the worker tormented in any field of art with that particular +question who is not moved to recognise in the eternal problem the high +fellowship of Tintoretto. + +If the long reach from this point to the deplorable iron bridge which +discharges the pedestrian at the Academy--or, more comprehensively, to +the painted and gilded Gothic of the noble Palazzo Foscari--is too much +of a curve to be seen at any one point as a whole, it represents the +better the arched neck, as it were, of the undulating serpent of which +the Canalazzo has the likeness. We pass a dozen historic houses, we note +in our passage a hundred component "bits," with the baffled sketcher's +sense, and with what would doubtless be, save for our intensely Venetian +fatalism, the baffled sketcher's temper. It is the early palaces, of +course, and also, to be fair, some of the late, if we could take them +one by one, that give the Canal the best of its grand air. The fairest +are often cheek-by-jowl with the foulest, and there are few, alas, so +fair as to have been completely protected by their beauty. The ages and +the generations have worked their will on them, and the wind and the +weather have had much to say; but disfigured and dishonoured as they +are, with the bruises of their marbles and the patience of their ruin, +there is nothing like them in the world, and the long succession of +their faded, conscious faces makes of the quiet waterway they overhang +a _promenade historique_ of which the lesson, however often we read it, +gives, in the depth of its interest, an incomparable dignity to Venice. +We read it in the Romanesque arches, crooked to-day in their very +curves, of the early middle-age, in the exquisite individual Gothic of +the splendid time, and in the cornices and columns of a decadence almost +as proud. These things at present are almost equally touching in their +good faith; they have each in their degree so effectually parted with +their pride. They have lived on as they could and lasted as they might, +and we hold them to no account of their infirmities, for even those of +them whose blank eyes to-day meet criticism with most submission are far +less vulgar than the uses we have mainly managed to put them to. We have +botched them and patched them and covered them with sordid signs; we +have restored and improved them with a merciless taste, and the best of +them we have made over to the pedlars. Some of the most striking objects +in the finest vistas at present are the huge advertisements of the +curiosity-shops. + +The antiquity-mongers in Venice have all the courage of their opinion, +and it is easy to see how well they know they can confound you with an +unanswerable question. What is the whole place but a curiosity-shop, and +what are you here for yourself but to pick up odds and ends? "We pick +them up _for_ you," say these honest Jews, whose prices are marked +in dollars, "and who shall blame us if, the flowers being pretty well +plucked, we add an artificial rose or two to the composition of the +bouquet?" They take care, in a word, that there be plenty of relics, and +their establishments are huge and active. They administer the antidote +to pedantry, and you can complain of them only if you never cross their +thresholds. If you take this step you are lost, for you have parted with +the correctness of your attitude. Venice becomes frankly from such a +moment the big depressing dazzling joke in which after all our sense +of her contradictions sinks to rest--the grimace of an over-strained +philosophy. It's rather a comfort, for the curiosity-shops are amusing. +You have bad moments indeed as you stand in their halls of humbug and, +in the intervals of haggling, hear through the high windows the soft +splash of the sea on the old water-steps, for you think with anger of +the noble homes that are laid waste in such scenes, of the delicate +lives that must have been, that might still be, led there. You +reconstruct the admirable house according to your own needs; leaning on +a back balcony, you drop your eyes into one of the little green gardens +with which, for the most part, such establishments are exasperatingly +blessed, and end by feeling it a shame that you yourself are not in +possession. (I take for granted, of course, that as you go and come you +are, in imagination, perpetually lodging yourself and setting up your +gods; for if this innocent pastime, this borrowing of the mind, be not +your favourite sport there is a flaw in the appeal that Venice makes +to you.) There may be happy cases in which your envy is tempered, or +perhaps I should rather say intensified, by real participation. If you +have had the good fortune to enjoy the hospitality of an old Venetian +home and to lead your life a little in the painted chambers that still +echo with one of the historic names, you have entered by the shortest +step into the inner spirit of the place. If it did n't savour of +treachery to private kindness I should like to speak frankly of one of +these delightful, even though alienated, structures, to refer to it as +a splendid example of the old palatial type. But I can only do so in +passing, with a hundred precautions, and, lifting the curtain at the +edge, drop a commemorative word on the success with which, in this +particularly happy instance, the cosmopolite habit, the modern sympathy, +the intelligent, flexible attitude, the latest fruit of time, adjust +themselves to the great gilded, relinquished shell and try to fill it +out. A Venetian palace that has not too grossly suffered and that is not +overwhelming by its mass makes almost any life graceful that may be +led in it. With cultivated and generous contemporary ways it reveals a +pre-established harmony. As you live in it day after day its beauty and +its interest sink more deeply into your spirit; it has its moods and +its hours and its mystic voices and its shifting expressions. If in +the absence of its masters you have happened to have it to yourself +for twenty-four hours you will never forget the charm of its haunted +stillness, late on the summer afternoon for instance, when the call of +playing children comes in behind from the campo, nor the way the old +ghosts seemed to pass on tip-toe on the marble floors. It gives you +practically the essence of the matter that we are considering, for +beneath the high balconies Venice comes and goes, and the particular +stretch you command contains all the characteristics. Everything has its +turn, from the heavy barges of merchandise, pushed by long poles and the +patient shoulder, to the floating pavilions of the great serenades, and +you may study at your leisure the admirable Venetian arts of managing a +boat and organising a spectacle. Of the beautiful free stroke with which +the gondola, especially when there are two oars, is impelled, you never, +in the Venetian scene, grow weary; it is always in the picture, and the +large profiled action that lets the standing rowers throw themselves +forward to a constant recovery has the double value of being, at the +fag-end of greatness, the only energetic note. The people from the +hotels are always afloat, and, at the hotel pace, the solitary gondolier +(like the solitary horseman of the old-fashioned novel) is, I confess, +a somewhat melancholy figure. Perched on his poop without a mate, he +re-enacts perpetually, in high relief, with his toes turned out, the +comedy of his odd and charming movement. He always has a little the +look of an absent-minded nursery-maid pushing her small charges in a +perambulator. + +But why should I risk too free a comparison, where this picturesque and +amiable class are concerned? I delight in their sun-burnt complexions +and their childish dialect; I know them only by their merits, and I am +grossly prejudiced in their favour. They are interesting and touching, +and alike in their virtues and their defects human nature is simplified +as with a big effective brush. Affecting above all is their dependence +on the stranger, the whimsical stranger who swims out of their ken, yet +whom Providence sometimes restores. The best of them at any rate are +in their line great artists. On the swarming feast-days, on the strange +feast-night of the Redentore, their steering is a miracle of ease. The +master-hands, the celebrities and winners of prizes--you may see them +on the private gondolas in spotless white, with brilliant sashes and +ribbons, and often with very handsome persons--take the right of way +with a pardonable insolence. They penetrate the crush of boats with +an authority of their own. The crush of boats, the universal sociable +bumping and squeezing, is great when, on the summer nights, the ladies +shriek with alarm, the city pays the fiddlers, and the illuminated +barges, scattering music and song, lead a long train down the Canal. The +barges used to be rowed in rhythmic strokes, but now they are towed by +the steamer. The coloured lamps, the vocalists before the hotels, are +not to my sense the greatest seduction of Venice; but it would be +an uncandid sketch of the Canalazzo that shouldn't touch them with +indulgence. Taking one nuisance with another, they are probably the +prettiest in the world, and if they have in general more magic for the +new arrival than for the old Venice-lover, they in any case, at their +best, keep up the immemorial tradition. The Venetians have had from the +beginning of time the pride of their processions and spectacles, and +it's a wonder how with empty pockets they still make a clever show. The +Carnival is dead, but these are the scraps of its inheritance. Vauxhall +on the water is of course more Vauxhall than ever, with the good fortune +of home-made music and of a mirror that reduplicates and multiplies. +The feast of the Redeemer--the great popular feast of the year--is a +wonderful Venetian Vauxhall. All Venice on this occasion takes to the +boats for the night and loads them with lamps and provisions. Wedged +together in a mass it sups and sings; every boat is a floating arbour, +a private _cafe-concert_. Of all Christian commemorations it is the most +ingenuously and harmlessly pagan. Toward morning the passengers repair +to the Lido, where, as the sun rises, they plunge, still sociably, into +the sea. The night of the Redentore has been described, but it would be +interesting to have an account, from the domestic point of view, of its +usual morrow. It is mainly an affair of the Giudecca, however, which is +bridged over from the Zattere to the great church. The pontoons are laid +together during the day--it is all done with extraordinary celerity and +art--and the bridge is prolonged across the Canalazzo (to Santa Maria +Zobenigo), which is my only warrant for glancing at the occasion. We +glance at it from our palace windows; lengthening our necks a little, as +we look up toward the Salute, we see all Venice, on the July afternoon, +so serried as to move slowly, pour across the temporary footway. It is +a flock of very good children, and the bridged Canal is their toy. All +Venice on such occasions is gentle and friendly; not even all Venice +pushes anyone into the water. + +But from the same high windows we catch without any stretching of the +neck a still more indispensable note in the picture, a famous pretender +eating the bread of bitterness. This repast is served in the open air, +on a neat little terrace, by attendants in livery, and there is no +indiscretion in our seeing that the pretender dines. Ever since the +table d'hote in "Candide" Venice has been the refuge of monarchs in want +of thrones--she would n't know herself without her _rois en exil._ The +exile is agreeable and soothing, the gondola lets them down gently. Its +movement is an anodyne, its silence a philtre, and little by little it +rocks all ambitions to sleep. The proscript has plenty of leisure to +write his proclamations and even his memoirs, and I believe he has +organs in which they are published; but the only noise he makes in the +world is the harmless splash of his oars. He comes and goes along the +Canalazzo, and he might be much worse employed. He is but one of the +interesting objects it presents, however, and I am by no means sure +that he is the most striking. He has a rival, if not in the iron +bridge, which, alas, is within our range, at least--to take an immediate +example--in the Montecuculi Palace. Far-descended and weary, but +beautiful in its crooked old age, with its lovely proportions, its +delicate round arches, its carvings and its disks of marble, is the +haunted Montecuculi. Those who have a kindness for Venetian gossip like +to remember that it was once for a few months the property of Robert +Browning, who, however, never lived in it, and who died in the splendid +Rezzonico, the residence of his son and a wonderful cosmopolite +"document," which, as it presents itself, in an admirable position, but +a short way farther down the Canal, we can almost see, in spite of the +curve, from the window at which we stand. This great seventeenth century +pile, throwing itself upon the water with a peculiar florid assurance, +a certain upward toss of its cornice which gives it the air of a rearing +sea-horse, decorates immensely--and within, as well as without--the wide +angle that it commands. + +There is a more formal greatness in the high square Gothic Foscari, +just below it, one of the noblest creations of the fifteenth century, +a masterpiece of symmetry and majesty. Dedicated to-day to official +uses--it is the property of the State--it looks conscious of the +consideration it enjoys, and is one of the few great houses within our +range whose old age strikes us as robust and painless. It is visibly +"kept up"; perhaps it is kept up too much; perhaps I am wrong in +thinking so well of it. These doubts and fears course rapidly through my +mind--I am easily their victim when it is a question of architecture--as +they are apt to do to-day, in Italy, almost anywhere, in the presence +of the beautiful, of the desecrated or the neglected. We feel at such +moments as if the eye of Mr. Ruskin were upon us; we grow nervous and +lose our confidence. This makes me inevitably, in talking of Venice, +seek a pusillanimous safety in the trivial and the obvious. I am on +firm ground in rejoicing in the little garden directly opposite our +windows--it is another proof that they really show us everything--and in +feeling that the gardens of Venice would deserve a page to themselves. +They are infinitely more numerous than the arriving stranger can +suppose; they nestle with a charm all their own in the complications of +most back-views. Some of them are exquisite, many are large, and even +the scrappiest have an artful understanding, in the interest of colour, +with the waterways that edge their foundations. On the small canals, +in the hunt for amusement, they are the prettiest surprises of all. +The tangle of plants and flowers crowds over the battered walls, the +greenness makes an arrangement with the rosy sordid brick. Of all the +reflected and liquefied things in Venice, and the number of these is +countless, I think the lapping water loves them most. They are numerous +on the Canalazzo, but wherever they occur they give a brush to the +picture and in particular, it is easy to guess, give a sweetness to the +house. Then the elements are complete--the trio of air and water and of +things that grow. Venice without them would be too much a matter of the +tides and the stones. Even the little trellises of the _traghetti_ count +charmingly as reminders, amid so much artifice, of the woodland nature +of man. The vine-leaves, trained on horizontal poles, make a roof +of chequered shade for the gondoliers and ferrymen, who doze there +according to opportunity, or chatter or hail the approaching "fare." +There is no "hum" in Venice, so that their voices travel far; they +enter your windows and mingle even with your dreams. I beg the reader +to believe that if I had time to go into everything, I would go into the +_traghetti_, which have their manners and their morals, and which +used to have their piety. This piety was always a _madonnina_, the +protectress of the passage--a quaint figure of the Virgin with the red +spark of a lamp at her feet. The lamps appear for the most part to have +gone out, and the images doubtless have been sold for _bric-a-brac_. +The ferrymen, for aught I know, are converted to Nihilism--a faith +consistent happily with a good stroke of business. One of the figures +has been left, however--the Madonnetta which gives its name to a +_traghetto_ near the Rialto. But this sweet survivor is a carven stone +inserted ages ago in the corner of an old palace and doubtless difficult +of removal. _Pazienza_, the day will come when so marketable a relic +will also be extracted from its socket and purchased by the devouring +American. I leave that expression, on second thought, standing; but I +repent of it when I remember that it is a devouring American--a lady +long resident in Venice and whose kindnesses all Venetians, as well as +her country-people, know, who has rekindled some of the extinguished +tapers, setting up especially the big brave Gothic shrine, of painted +and gilded wood, which, on the top of its stout _palo_, sheds its +influence on the place of passage opposite the Salute. + +If I may not go into those of the palaces this devious discourse has +left behind, much less may I enter the great galleries of the Academy, +which rears its blank wall, surmounted by the lion of St. Mark, well +within sight of the windows at which we are still lingering. This +wondrous temple of Venetian art--for all it promises little from +without--overhangs, in a manner, the Grand Canal, but if we were so much +as to cross its threshold we should wander beyond recall. It contains, +in some of the most magnificent halls--where the ceilings have all +the glory with which the imagination of Venice alone could over-arch a +room--some of the noblest pictures in the world; and whether or not +we go back to them on any particular occasion for another look, it is +always a comfort to know that they are there, as the sense of them on +the spot is a part of the furniture of the mind--the sense of them close +at hand, behind every wall and under every cover, like the inevitable +reverse of a medal, of the side exposed to the air that reflects, +intensifies, completes the scene. In other words, as it was the +inevitable destiny of Venice to be painted, and painted with passion, so +the wide world of picture becomes, as we live there, and however much we +go about our affairs, the constant habitation of our thoughts. The truth +is, we are in it so uninterruptedly, at home and abroad, that there +is scarcely a pressure upon us to seek it in one place more than in +another. Choose your standpoint at random and trust the picture to come +to you. This is manifestly why I have not, I find myself conscious, said +more about the features of the Canalazzo which occupy the reach between +the Salute and the position we have so obstinately taken up. It is +still there before us, however, and the delightful little Palazzo Dario, +intimately familiar to English and American travellers, picks itself out +in the foreshortened brightness. The Dario is covered with the loveliest +little marble plates and sculptured circles; it is made up of exquisite +pieces--as if there had been only enough to make it small--so that it +looks, in its extreme antiquity, a good deal like a house of cards that +hold together by a tenure it would be fatal to touch. An old Venetian +house dies hard indeed, and I should add that this delicate thing, +with submission in every feature, continues to resist the contact of +generations of lodgers. It is let out in floors (it used to be let as +a whole) and in how many eager hands--for it is in great +requisition--under how many fleeting dispensations have we not known and +loved it? People are always writing in advance to secure it, as they +are to secure the Jenkins's gondolier, and as the gondola passes we +see strange faces at the windows--though it's ten to one we recognise +them--and the millionth artist coming forth with his traps at the +water-gate. The poor little patient Dario is one of the most flourishing +booths at the fair. + +The faces in the window look out at the great Sansovino--the splendid +pile that is now occupied by the Prefect. I feel decidedly that I +don't object as I ought to the palaces of the sixteenth and seventeenth +centuries. Their pretensions impose upon me, and the imagination peoples +them more freely than it can people the interiors of the prime. Was not +moreover this masterpiece of Sansovino once occupied by the Venetian +post-office, and thereby intimately connected with an ineffaceable first +impression of the author of these remarks? He had arrived, wondering, +palpitating, twenty-three years ago, after nightfall, and, the first +thing on the morrow, had repaired to the post-office for his letters. +They had been waiting a long time and were full of delayed interest, and +he returned with them to the gondola and floated slowly down the Canal. +The mixture, the rapture, the wonderful temple of the _poste restante_, +the beautiful strangeness, all humanised by good news--the memory of +this abides with him still, so that there always proceeds from the +splendid waterfront I speak of a certain secret appeal, something that +seems to have been uttered first in the sonorous chambers of youth. Of +course this association falls to the ground--or rather splashes into the +water--if I am the victim of a confusion. _Was_ the edifice in question +twenty-three years ago the post-office, which has occupied since, for +many a day, very much humbler quarters? I am afraid to take the proper +steps for finding out, lest I should learn that during these years I +have misdirected my emotion. A better reason for the sentiment, at any +rate, is that such a great house has surely, in the high beauty of its +tiers, a refinement of its own. They make one think of colosseums and +aqueducts and bridges, and they constitute doubtless, in Venice, the +most pardonable specimen of the imitative. I have even a timid kindness +for the huge Pesaro, far down the Canal, whose main reproach, more even +than the coarseness of its forms, is its swaggering size, its want +of consideration for the general picture, which the early examples so +reverently respect. The Pesaro is as far out of the frame as a modern +hotel, and the Cornaro, close to it, oversteps almost equally the +modesty of art. One more thing they and their kindred do, I must add, +for which, unfortunately, we can patronise them less. They make even the +most elaborate material civilisation of the present day seem woefully +shrunken and _bourgeois_, for they simply--I allude to the biggest +palaces--can't be lived in as they were intended to be. The modern +tenant may take in all the magazines, but he bends not the bow of +Achilles. He occupies the place, but he doesn't fill it, and he has +guests from the neighbouring inns with ulsters and Baedekers. We are +far at the Pesaro, by the way, from our attaching window, and we take +advantage of it to go in rather a melancholy mood to the end. The long +straight vista from the Foscari to the Rialto, the great middle stretch +of the Canal, contains, as the phrase is, a hundred objects of interest, +but it contains most the bright oddity of its general Deluge air. In all +these centuries it has never got over its resemblance to a flooded city; +for some reason or other it is the only part of Venice in which the +houses look as if the waters had overtaken them. Everywhere else they +reckon with them--have chosen them; here alone the lapping seaway seems +to confess itself an accident. + +{Illustration: PALAZZO MONCENIGO, VENICE} + +There are persons who hold this long, gay, shabby, spotty perspective, +in which, with its immense field of confused reflection, the houses have +infinite variety, the dullest expanse in Venice. It was not dull, we +imagine, for Lord Byron, who lived in the midmost of the three Mocenigo +palaces, where the writing-table is still shown at which he gave the +rein to his passions. For other observers it is sufficiently enlivened +by so delightful a creation as the Palazzo Loredan, once a masterpiece +and at present the Municipio, not to speak of a variety of other +immemorial bits whose beauty still has a degree of freshness. Some of +the most touching relics of early Venice are here--for it was here she +precariously clustered--peeping out of a submersion more pitiless than +the sea. As we approach the Rialto indeed the picture falls off and a +comparative commonness suffuses it. There is a wide paved walk on either +side of the Canal, on which the waterman--and who in Venice is not a +waterman?--is prone to seek repose. I speak of the summer days--it is +the summer Venice that is the visible Venice. The big tarry barges are +drawn up at the _fondamenta_, and the bare-legged boatmen, in faded blue +cotton, lie asleep on the hot stones. If there were no colour anywhere +else there would be enough in their tanned personalities. Half the low +doorways open into the warm interior of waterside drinking-shops, and +here and there, on the quay, beneath the bush that overhangs the door, +there are rickety tables and chairs. Where in Venice is there not the +amusement of character and of detail? The tone in this part is very +vivid, and is largely that of the brown plebeian faces looking out of +the patchy miscellaneous houses--the faces of fat undressed women and of +other simple folk who are not aware that they enjoy, from balconies once +doubtless patrician, a view the knowing ones of the earth come thousands +of miles to envy them. The effect is enhanced by the tattered clothes +hung to dry in the windows, by the sun-faded rags that flutter from the +polished balustrades--these are ivory-smooth with time; and the whole +scene profits by the general law that renders decadence and ruin +in Venice more brilliant than any prosperity. Decay is in this +extraordinary place golden in tint and misery _couleur de rose_. The +gondolas of the correct people are unmitigated sable, but the poor +market-boats from the islands are kaleidoscopic. + +The Bridge of the Rialto is a name to conjure with, but, honestly +speaking, it is scarcely the gem of the composition. There are of course +two ways of taking it--from the water or from the upper passage, where +its small shops and booths abound in Venetian character; but it mainly +counts as a feature of the Canal when seen from the gondola or even from +the awful _vaporetto_. The great curve of its single arch is much to +be commended, especially when, coming from the direction of the +railway-station, you see it frame with its sharp compass-line the +perfect picture, the reach of the Canal on the other side. But the backs +of the little shops make from the water a graceless collective hump, and +the inside view is the diverting one. The big arch of the bridge--like +the arches of all the bridges--is the waterman's friend in wet weather. +The gondolas, when it rains, huddle beside the peopled barges, and +the young ladies from the hotels, vaguely fidgeting, complain of the +communication of insect life. Here indeed is a little of everything, and +the jewellers of this celebrated precinct--they have their immemorial +row--make almost as fine a show as the fruiterers. It is a universal +market, and a fine place to study Venetian types. The produce of +the islands is discharged there, and the fishmongers announce their +presence. All one's senses indeed are vigorously attacked; the whole +place is violently hot and bright, all odorous and noisy. The churning +of the screw of the _vaporetto_ mingles with the other sounds--not +indeed that this offensive note is confined to one part of the Canal. +But Just here the little piers of the resented steamer are particularly +near together, and it seems somehow to be always kicking up the water. +As we go further down we see it stopping exactly beneath the glorious +windows of the Ca'd'Oro. It has chosen its position well, and who +shall gainsay it for having put itself under the protection of the +most romantic facade in Europe? The companionship of these objects is +a symbol; it expresses supremely the present and the future of Venice. +Perfect, in its prime, was the marble Ca'd'Oro, with the noble recesses +of its _loggie_, but even then it probably never "met a want," like the +successful _vaporetto_. If, however, we are not to go into the Museo +Civico--the old Museo Correr, which rears a staring renovated front +far down on the left, near the station, so also we must keep out of the +great vexed question of steam on the Canalazzo, just as a while since we +prudently kept out of the Accademia. These are expensive and complicated +excursions. It is obvious that if the _vaporetti_ have contributed to +the ruin of the gondoliers, already hard pressed by fate, and to that of +the palaces, whose foundations their waves undermine, and that if +they have robbed the Grand Canal of the supreme distinction of its +tranquillity, so on the other hand they have placed "rapid transit," in +the New York phrase, in everybody's reach, and enabled everybody--save +indeed those who wouldn't for the world--to rush about Venice as +furiously as people rush about New York. The suitability of this +consummation needn't be pointed out. + +Even we ourselves, in the irresistible contagion, are going so fast now +that we have only time to note in how clever and costly a fashion the +Museo Civico, the old Fondaco dei Turchi, has been reconstructed and +restored. It is a glare of white marble without, and a series of showy +majestic halls within, where a thousand curious mementos and relics of +old Venice are gathered and classified. Of its miscellaneous treasures +I fear I may perhaps frivolously prefer the series of its remarkable +living Longhis, an illustration of manners more copious than the +celebrated Carpaccio, the two ladies with their little animals and their +long sticks. Wonderful indeed today are the museums of Italy, where +the renovations and the _belle ordonnance_ speak of funds apparently +unlimited, in spite of the fact that the numerous custodians +frankly look starved. What is the pecuniary source of all this civic +magnificence--it is shown in a hundred other ways--and how do the +Italian cities manage to acquit themselves of expenses that would be +formidable to communities richer and doubtless less aesthetic? Who pays +the bills for the expressive statues alone, the general exuberance +of sculpture, with which every _piazzetta_ of almost every village +is patriotically decorated? Let us not seek an answer to the puzzling +question, but observe instead that we are passing the mouth of the +populous Canareggio, next widest of the waterways, where the race of +Shylock abides, and at the corner of which the big colourless church of +San Geremia stands gracefully enough on guard. The Canareggio, with its +wide lateral footways and humpbacked bridges, makes on the feast of St. +John an admirable noisy, tawdry theatre for one of the prettiest and the +most infantile of the Venetian processions. + +The rest of the course is a reduced magnificence, in spite of +interesting bits, of the battered pomp of the Pesaro and the Cornaro, +of the recurrent memories of royalty in exile which cluster about the +Palazzo Vendramin Calergi, once the residence of the Comte de Chambord +and still that of his half-brother, in spite too of the big Papadopoli +gardens, opposite the station, the largest private grounds in Venice, +but of which Venice in general mainly gets the benefit in the usual form +of irrepressible greenery climbing over walls and nodding at water. The +rococo church of the Scalzi is here, all marble and malachite, all a +cold, hard glitter and a costly, curly ugliness, and here too, opposite, +on the top of its high steps, is San Simeone Profeta, I won't say +immortalised, but unblushingly misrepresented, by the perfidious +Canaletto. I shall not stay to unravel the mystery of this prosaic +painter's malpractices; he falsified without fancy, and as he apparently +transposed at will the objects he reproduced, one is never sure of the +particular view that may have constituted his subject. It would look +exactly like such and such a place if almost everything were not +different. San Simeone Profeta appears to hang there upon the wall; but +it is on the wrong side of the Canal and the other elements quite fail +to correspond. One's confusion is the greater because one doesn't +know that everything may not really have changed, even beyond all +probability--though it's only in America that churches cross the street +or the river--and the mixture of the recognisable and the different +makes the ambiguity maddening, all the more that the painter is almost +as attaching as he is bad. Thanks at any rate to the white church, domed +and porticoed, on the top of its steps, the traveller emerging for +the first time upon the terrace of the railway-station seems to have a +Canaletto before him. He speedily discovers indeed even in the presence +of this scene of the final accents of the Canalazzo--there is a charm in +the old pink warehouses on the hot _fondamenta_--that he has something +much better. He looks up and down at the gathered gondolas; he has his +surprise after all, his little first Venetian thrill; and as the terrace +of the station ushers in these things we shall say no harm of it, though +it is not lovely. It is the beginning of his experience, but it is the +end of the Grand Canal. + +1892. + + + + + +VENICE: AN EARLY IMPRESSION + + +There would be much to say about that golden chain of historic cities +which stretches from Milan to Venice, in which the very names--Brescia, +Verona, Mantua, Padua--are an ornament to one's phrase; but I should +have to draw upon recollections now three years old and to make my short +story a long one. Of Verona and Venice only have I recent impressions, +and even to these must I do hasty justice. I came into Venice, just as +I had done before, toward the end of a summer's day, when the shadows +begin to lengthen and the light to glow, and found that the attendant +sensations bore repetition remarkably well. There was the same last +intolerable delay at Mestre, just before your first glimpse of the +lagoon confirms the already distinct sea-smell which has added speed to +the precursive flight of your imagination; then the liquid level, +edged afar off by its band of undiscriminated domes and spires, soon +distinguished and proclaimed, however, as excited and contentious heads +multiply at the windows of the train; then your long rumble on the +immense white railway-bridge, which, in spite of the invidious contrast +drawn, and very properly, by Mr. Ruskin between the old and the new +approach, does truly, in a manner, shine across the green lap of the +lagoon like a mighty causeway of marble; then the plunge into the +station, which would be exactly similar to every other plunge save for +one little fact--that the keynote of the great medley of voices borne +back from the exit is not "Cab, sir!" but "Barca, signore!" + +I do not mean, however, to follow the traveller through every phase of +his initiation, at the risk of stamping poor Venice beyond repair as the +supreme bugbear of literature; though for my own part I hold that to +a fine healthy romantic appetite the subject can't be too diffusely +treated. Meeting in the Piazza on the evening of my arrival a young +American painter who told me that he had been spending the summer just +where I found him, I could have assaulted him for very envy. He was +painting forsooth the interior of St. Mark's. To be a young American +painter unperplexed by the mocking, elusive soul of things and satisfied +with their wholesome light-bathed surface and shape; keen of eye; fond +of colour, of sea and sky and anything that may chance between them; of +old lace and old brocade and old furniture (even when made to order); of +time-mellowed harmonies on nameless canvases and happy contours in cheap +old engravings; to spend one's mornings in still, productive analysis +of the clustered shadows of the Basilica, one's afternoons anywhere, in +church or campo, on canal or lagoon, and one's evenings in star-light +gossip at Florian's, feeling the sea-breeze throb languidly between the +two great pillars of the Piazzetta and over the low black domes of the +church--this, I consider, is to be as happy as is consistent with the +preservation of reason. + +The mere use of one's eyes in Venice is happiness enough, and generous +observers find it hard to keep an account of their profits in this line. +Everything the attention touches holds it, keeps playing with it--thanks +to some inscrutable flattery of the atmosphere. Your brown-skinned, +white-shirted gondolier, twisting himself in the light, seems to you, +as you lie at contemplation beneath your awning, a perpetual symbol of +Venetian "effect." The light here is in fact a mighty magician and, with +all respect to Titian, Veronese and Tintoret, the greatest artist +of them all. You should see in places the material with which it +deals--slimy brick, marble battered and befouled, rags, dirt, decay. +Sea and sky seem to meet half-way, to blend their tones into a soft +iridescence, a lustrous compound of wave and cloud and a hundred +nameless local reflections, and then to fling the clear tissue against +every object of vision. You may see these elements at work everywhere, +but to see them in their intensity you should choose the finest day +in the month and have yourself rowed far away across the lagoon to +Torcello. Without making this excursion you can hardly pretend to +know Venice or to sympathise with that longing for pure radiance which +animated her great colourists. It is a perfect bath of light, and I +couldn't get rid of a fancy that we were cleaving the upper atmosphere +on some hurrying cloud-skiff. At Torcello there is nothing but the light +to see--nothing at least but a sort of blooming sand-bar intersected +by a single narrow creek which does duty as a canal and occupied by a +meagre cluster of huts, the dwellings apparently of market-gardeners +and fishermen, and by a ruinous church of the eleventh century. It is +impossible to imagine a more penetrating case of unheeded collapse. +Torcello was the mother-city of Venice, and she lies there now, a mere +mouldering vestige, like a group of weather-bleached parental bones left +impiously unburied. I stopped my gondola at the mouth of the shallow +inlet and walked along the grass beside a hedge to the low-browed, +crumbling cathedral. The charm of certain vacant grassy spaces, in +Italy, overfrowned by masses of brickwork that are honeycombed by the +suns of centuries, is something that I hereby renounce once for all the +attempt to express; but you may be sure that whenever I mention such a +spot enchantment lurks in it. + +A delicious stillness covered the little campo at Torcello; I remember +none so subtly audible save that of the Roman Campagna. There was +no life but the visible tremor of the brilliant air and the cries of +half-a-dozen young children who dogged our steps and clamoured for +coppers. These children, by the way, were the handsomest little brats in +the world, and, each was furnished with a pair of eyes that could only +have signified the protest of nature against the meanness of fortune. +They were very nearly as naked as savages, and their little bellies +protruded like those of infant cannibals in the illustrations of books +of travel; but as they scampered and sprawled in the soft, thick grass, +grinning like suddenly-translated cherubs and showing their hungry +little teeth, they suggested forcibly that the best assurance of +happiness in this world is to be found in the maximum of innocence and +the minimum of wealth. One small urchin--framed, if ever a child was, to +be the joy of an aristocratic mamma--was the most expressively beautiful +creature I had ever looked upon. He had a smile to make Correggio sigh +in his grave; and yet here he was running wild among the sea-stunted +bushes, on the lonely margin of a decaying world, in prelude to how +blank or to how dark a destiny? Verily nature is still at odds with +propriety; though indeed if they ever really pull together I fear nature +will quite lose her distinction. An infant citizen of our own republic, +straight-haired, pale-eyed and freckled, duly darned and catechised, +marching into a New England schoolhouse, is an object often seen and +soon forgotten; but I think I shall always remember with infinite tender +conjecture, as the years roll by, this little unlettered Eros of the +Adriatic strand. Yet all youthful things at Torcello were not cheerful, +for the poor lad who brought us the key of the cathedral was shaking +with an ague, and his melancholy presence seemed to point the moral of +forsaken nave and choir. The church, admirably primitive and curious, +reminded me of the two or three oldest churches of Rome--St. Clement +and St. Agnes. The interior is rich in grimly mystical mosaics of the +twelfth century and the patchwork of precious fragments in the pavement +not inferior to that of St. Mark's. But the terribly distinct Apostles +are ranged against their dead gold backgrounds as stiffly as grenadiers +presenting arms--intensely personal sentinels of a personal Deity. Their +stony stare seems to wait for ever vainly for some visible revival +of primitive orthodoxy, and one may well wonder whether it finds much +beguilement in idly-gazing troops of Western heretics--passionless even +in their heresy. + +I had been curious to see whether in the galleries and temples of Venice +I should be disposed to transpose my old estimates--to burn what I had +adored and adore what I had burned. It is a sad truth that one can stand +in the Ducal Palace for the first time but once, with the deliciously +ponderous sense of that particular half-hour's being an era in one's +mental history; but I had the satisfaction of finding at least--a great +comfort in a short stay--that none of my early memories were likely to +change places and that I could take up my admirations where I had left +them. I still found Carpaccio delightful, Veronese magnificent, Titian +supremely beautiful and Tintoret scarce to be appraised. I repaired +immediately to the little church of San Cassano, which contains the +smaller of Tintoret's two great Crucifixions; and when I had looked +at it a while I drew a long breath and felt I could now face any other +picture in Venice with proper self-possession. It seemed to me I had +advanced to the uttermost limit of painting; that beyond this another +art--inspired poetry--begins, and that Bellini, Veronese, Giorgione, and +Titian, all joining hands and straining every muscle of their genius, +reach forward not so far but that they leave a visible space in which +Tintoret alone is master. I well remember the exaltations to which +he lifted me when first I learned to know him; but the glow of that +comparatively youthful amazement is dead, and with it, I fear, +that confident vivacity of phrase of which, in trying to utter my +impressions, I felt less the magniloquence than the impotence. In +his power there are many weak spots, mysterious lapses and fitful +intermissions; but when the list of his faults is complete he still +remains to me the most _interesting_ of painters. His reputation rests +chiefly on a more superficial sort of merit--his energy, his unsurpassed +productivity, his being, as Theophile Gautier says, _le roi des +fougueux_. These qualities are immense, but the great source of his +impressiveness is that his indefatigable hand never drew a line that was +not, as one may say, a moral line. No painter ever had such breadth and +such depth; and even Titian, beside him, scarce figures as more than a +great decorative artist. Mr. Ruskin, whose eloquence in dealing with the +great Venetians sometimes outruns his discretion, is fond of speaking +even of Veronese as a painter of deep spiritual intentions. This, it +seems to me, is pushing matters too far, and the author of "The Rape +of Europa" is, pictorially speaking, no greater casuist than any other +genius of supreme good taste. Titian was assuredly a mighty poet, but +Tintoret--well, Tintoret was almost a prophet. Before his greatest works +you are conscious of a sudden evaporation of old doubts and dilemmas, +and the eternal problem of the conflict between idealism and realism +dies the most natural of deaths. In his genius the problem is +practically solved; the alternatives are so harmoniously interfused that +I defy the keenest critic to say where one begins and the other ends. +The homeliest prose melts into the most ethereal poetry--the literal and +the imaginative fairly confound their identity. + +This, however, is vague praise. Tintoret's great merit, to my mind, was +his unequalled distinctness of vision. When once he had conceived the +germ of a scene it defined itself to his imagination with an intensity, +an amplitude, an individuality of expression, which makes one's +observation of his pictures seem less an operation of the mind than +a kind of supplementary experience of life. Veronese and Titian are +content with a much looser specification, as their treatment of any +subject that the author of the Crucifixion at San Cassano has also +treated abundantly proves. There are few more suggestive contrasts than +that between the absence of a total character at all commensurate with +its scattered variety and brilliancy in Veronese's "Marriage of Cana," +at the Louvre, and the poignant, almost startling, completeness of +Tintoret's illustration of the theme at the Salute church. To compare +his "Presentation of the Virgin," at the Madonna dell' Orto, with +Titian's at the Academy, or his "Annunciation" with Titian's close at +hand, is to measure the essential difference between observation and +imagination. One has certainly not said all that there is to say for +Titian when one has called him an observer. _Il y mettait du sien_, +and I use the term to designate roughly the artist whose apprehension, +infinitely deep and strong when applied to the single figure or +to easily balanced groups, spends itself vainly on great dramatic +combinations--or rather leaves them ungauged. It was the whole scene +that Tintoret seemed to have beheld in a flash of inspiration intense +enough to stamp it ineffaceably on his perception; and it was the whole +scene, complete, peculiar, individual, unprecedented, that he committed +to canvas with all the vehemence of his talent. Compare his "Last +Supper," at San Giorgio--its long, diagonally placed table, its dusky +spaciousness, its scattered lamp-light and halo-light, its startled, +gesticulating figures, its richly realistic foreground--with the +customary formal, almost mathematical rendering of the subject, in which +impressiveness seems to have been sought in elimination rather than +comprehension. You get from Tintoret's work the impression that he +_felt_, pictorially, the great, beautiful, terrible spectacle of human +life very much as Shakespeare felt it poetically--with a heart that +never ceased to beat a passionate accompaniment to every stroke of +his brush. Thanks to this fact his works are signally grave, and their +almost universal and rapidly increasing decay doesn't relieve their +gloom. Nothing indeed can well be sadder than the great collection of +Tintorets at San Rocco. Incurable blackness is settling fast upon all of +them, and they frown at you across the sombre splendour of their great +chambers like gaunt twilight phantoms of pictures. To our children's +children Tintoret, as things are going, can be hardly more than a name; +and such of them as shall miss the tragic beauty, already so dimmed +and stained, of the great "Bearing of the Cross" in that temple of his +spirit will live and die without knowing the largest eloquence of art. +If you wish to add the last touch of solemnity to the place recall +as vividly as possible while you linger at San Rocco the painter's +singularly interesting portrait of himself, at the Louvre. The old +man looks out of the canvas from beneath a brow as sad as a sunless +twilight, with just such a stoical hopelessness as you might fancy him +to wear if he stood at your side gazing at his rotting canvases. It +isn't whimsical to read it as the face of a man who felt that he had +given the world more than the world was likely to repay. Indeed before +every picture of Tintoret you may remember this tremendous portrait with +profit. On one side the power, the passion, the illusion of his art; on +the other the mortal fatigue of his spirit. The world's knowledge of +him is so small that the portrait throws a doubly precious light on his +personality; and when we wonder vainly what manner of man he was, and +what were his purpose, his faith and his method, we may find forcible +assurance there that they were at any rate his life--one of the most +intellectually passionate ever led. + +Verona, which was my last Italian stopping-place, is in any conditions +a delightfully interesting city; but the kindness of my own memory of it +is deepened by a subsequent ten days' experience of Germany. I rose one +morning at Verona, and went to bed at night at Botzen! The statement +needs no comment, and the two places, though but fifty miles apart, are +as painfully dissimilar as their names. I had prepared myself for your +delectation with a copious tirade on German manners, German scenery, +German art and the German stage--on the lights and shadows of Innsbrueck, +Munich, Nueremberg and Heidelberg; but just as I was about to put pen +to paper I glanced into a little volume on these very topics lately +published by that famous novelist and moralist, M. Ernest Feydeau, +the fruit of a summer's observation at Homburg. This work produced a +reaction; and if I chose to follow M. Feydeau's own example when he +wishes to qualify his approbation I might call his treatise by any vile +name known to the speech of man. But I content myself with pronouncing +it superficial. I then reflect that my own opportunities for seeing and +judging were extremely limited, and I suppress my tirade, lest some more +enlightened critic should come and hang me with the same rope. Its sum +and substance was to have been that--superficially--Germany is ugly; +that Munich is a nightmare, Heidelberg a disappointment (in spite of its +charming castle) and even Nueremberg not a joy for ever. But comparisons +are odious, and if Munich is ugly Verona is beautiful enough. You may +laugh at my logic, but will probably assent to my meaning. I carried +away from Verona a precious mental picture upon which I cast an +introspective glance whenever between Botzen and Strassburg the +oppression of external circumstance became painful. It was a lovely +August afternoon in the Roman arena--a ruin in which repair and +restoration have been so watchfully and plausibly practised that it +seems all of one harmonious antiquity. The vast stony oval rose high +against the sky in a single clear, continuous line, broken here and +there only by strolling and reclining loungers. The massive tiers +inclined in solid monotony to the central circle, in which a small +open-air theatre was in active operation. A small quarter of the great +slope of masonry facing the stage was roped off into an auditorium, in +which the narrow level space between the foot-lights and the lowest +step figured as the pit. Foot-lights are a figure of speech, for the +performance was going on in the broad glow of the afternoon, with +a delightful and apparently by no means misplaced confidence in the +good-will of the spectators. What the piece was that was deemed so +superbly able to shift for itself I know not--very possibly the same +drama that I remember seeing advertised during my former visit to +Verona; nothing less than _La Tremenda Giustizia di Dio_. If titles +are worth anything this product of the melodramatist's art might surely +stand upon its own legs. Along the tiers above the little group of +regular spectators was gathered a free-list of unauthorised observers, +who, although beyond ear-shot, must have been enabled by the generous +breadth of Italian gesture to follow the tangled thread of the piece. +It was all deliciously Italian--the mixture of old life and new, the +mountebank's booth (it was hardly more) grafted on the antique circus, +the dominant presence of a mighty architecture, the loungers and idlers +beneath the kindly sky and upon the sun-warmed stones. I never felt more +keenly the difference between the background to life in very old and +very new civilisations. There are other things in Verona to make it +a liberal education to be born there, though that it is one for +the contemporary Veronese I don't pretend to say. The Tombs of the +Scaligers, with their soaring pinnacles, their high-poised canopies, +their exquisite refinement and concentration of the Gothic idea, I can't +profess, even after much worshipful gazing, to have fully comprehended +and enjoyed. They seemed to me full of deep architectural meanings, such +as must drop gently into the mind one by one, after infinite tranquil +contemplation. But even to the hurried and preoccupied traveller the +solemn little chapel-yard in the city's heart, in which they stand +girdled by their great swaying curtain of linked and twisted iron, is +one of the most impressive spots in Italy. Nowhere else is such a wealth +of artistic achievement crowded into so narrow a space; nowhere else are +the daily comings and goings of men blessed by the presence of _manlier_ +art. Verona is rich furthermore in beautiful churches--several with +beautiful names: San Fermo, Santa Anastasia, San Zenone. This last is a +structure of high antiquity and of the most impressive loveliness. The +nave terminates in a double choir, that is a sub-choir or crypt into +which you descend and where you wander among primitive columns whose +variously grotesque capitals rise hardly higher than your head, and an +upper choral plane reached by broad stairways of the bravest effect. I +shall never forget the impression of majestic chastity that I received +from the great nave of the building on my former visit. I then decided +to my satisfaction that every church is from the devotional point of +view a solecism that has not something of a similar absolute felicity +of proportion; for strictly formal beauty seems best to express our +conception of spiritual beauty. The nobly serious character of San +Zenone is deepened by its single picture--a masterpiece of the most +serious of painters, the severe and exquisite Mantegna. + +{Illustration: THE AMPHITHEATRE, VERONA} + +1872 + + + + + +TWO OLD HOUSES AND THREE YOUNG WOMEN + + +There are times and places that come back yet again, but that, when the +brooding tourist puts out his hand to them, meet it a little slowly, or +even seem to recede a step, as if in slight fear of some liberty he may +take. Surely they should know by this time that he is capable of taking +none. He has his own way--he makes it all right. It now becomes just +a part of the charming solicitation that it presents precisely a +problem--that of giving the particular thing as much as possible without +at the same time giving it, as we say, away. There are considerations, +proprieties, a necessary indirectness--he must use, in short, a little +art. No necessity, however, more than this, makes him warm to his work, +and thus it is that, after all, he hangs his three pictures. + + +I + +The evening that was to give me the first of them was by no means the +first occasion of my asking myself if that inveterate "style" of which +we talk so much be absolutely conditioned--in dear old Venice and +elsewhere--on decrepitude. Is it the style that has brought about the +decrepitude, or the decrepitude that has, as it were, intensified +and consecrated the style? There is an ambiguity about it all that +constantly haunts and beguiles. Dear old Venice has lost her complexion, +her figure, her reputation, her self-respect; and yet, with it all, has +so puzzlingly not lost a shred of her distinction. Perhaps indeed the +case is simpler than it seems, for the poetry of misfortune is familiar +to us all, whereas, in spite of a stroke here and there of some happy +justice that charms, we scarce find ourselves anywhere arrested by the +poetry of a run of luck. The misfortune of Venice being, accordingly, at +every point, what we most touch, feel and see, we end by assuming it to +be of the essence of her dignity; a consequence, we become aware, by the +way, sufficiently discouraging to the general application or pretension +of style, and all the more that, to make the final felicity deep, the +original greatness must have been something tremendous. If it be the +ruins that are noble we have known plenty that were not, and moreover +there are degrees and varieties: certain monuments, solid survivals, +hold up their heads and decline to ask for a grain of your pity. Well, +one knows of course when to keep one's pity to oneself; yet one clings, +even in the face of the colder stare, to one's prized Venetian privilege +of making the sense of doom and decay a part of every impression. +Cheerful work, it may be said of course; and it is doubtless only in +Venice that you gain more by such a trick than you lose. What was most +beautiful is gone; what was next most beautiful is, thank goodness, +going--that, I think, is the monstrous description of the better part +of your thought. Is it really your fault if the place makes you want so +desperately to read history into everything? + +You do that wherever you turn and wherever you look, and you do it, +I should say, most of all at night. It comes to you there with longer +knowledge, and with all deference to what flushes and shimmers, that the +night is the real time. It perhaps even wouldn't take much to make you +award the palm to the nights of winter. This is certainly true for the +form of progression that is most characteristic, for every question +of departure and arrival by gondola. The little closed cabin of +this perfect vehicle, the movement, the darkness and the plash, the +indistinguishable swerves and twists, all the things you don't see and +all the things you do feel--each dim recognition and obscure arrest is +a possible throb of your sense of being floated to your doom, even when +the truth is simply and sociably that you are going out to tea. Nowhere +else is anything as innocent so mysterious, nor anything as mysterious +so pleasantly deterrent to protest. These are the moments when you are +most daringly Venetian, most content to leave cheap trippers and other +aliens the high light of the mid-lagoon and the pursuit of pink and +gold. The splendid day is good enough for _them_; what is best for you +is to stop at last, as you are now stopping, among clustered _pali_ and +softly-shifting poops and prows, at a great flight of water-steps that +play their admirable part in the general effect of a great entrance. +The high doors stand open from them to the paved chamber of a basement +tremendously tall and not vulgarly lighted, from which, in turn, mounts +the slow stone staircase that draws you further on. The great point is, +that if you are worthy of this impression at all, there isn't a single +item of it of which the association isn't noble. Hold to it fast that +there is no other such dignity of arrival as arrival by water. Hold to +it that to float and slacken and gently bump, to creep out of the low, +dark _felze_ and make the few guided movements and find the strong +crooked and offered arm, and then, beneath lighted palace-windows, pass +up the few damp steps on the precautionary carpet--hold to it that these +things constitute a preparation of which the only defect is that it may +sometimes perhaps really prepare too much. It's so stately that what +can come after?--it's so good in itself that what, upstairs, as we +comparative vulgarians say, can be better? Hold to it, at any rate, that +if a lady, in especial, scrambles out of a carriage, tumbles out of a +cab, flops out of a tram-car, and hurtles, projectile-like, out of +a "lightning-elevator," she alights from the Venetian conveyance as +Cleopatra may have stepped from her barge. Upstairs--whatever may be +yet in store for her--her entrance shall still advantageously enjoy +the support most opposed to the "momentum" acquired. The beauty of +the matter has been in the absence of all momentum--elsewhere so +scientifically applied to us, from behind, by the terrible life of our +day--and in the fact that, as the elements of slowness, the felicities +of deliberation, doubtless thus all hang together, the last of +calculable dangers is to enter a great Venetian room with a rush. + +Not the least happy note, therefore, of the picture I am trying to frame +is that there was absolutely no rushing; not only in the sense of a +scramble over marble floors, but, by reason of something dissuasive and +distributive in the very air of the place, a suggestion, under the +fine old ceilings and among types of face and figure abounding in the +unexpected, that here were many things to consider. Perhaps the simplest +rendering of a scene into the depths of which there are good grounds of +discretion for not sinking would be just this emphasis on the value of +the unexpected for such occasions--with due qualification, naturally, of +its degree. Unexpectedness pure and simple, it is needless to say, may +easily endanger any social gathering, and I hasten to add moreover +that the figures and faces I speak of were probably not in the least +unexpected to each other. The stage they occupied was a stage of +variety--Venice has ever been a garden of strange social flowers. It +is only as reflected in the consciousness of the visitor from +afar--brooding tourist even call him, or sharp-eyed bird on the +branch--that I attempt to give you the little drama; beginning with the +felicity that most appealed to him, the visible, unmistakable fact that +he was the only representative of his class. The whole of the rest of +the business was but what he saw and felt and fancied--what he was +to remember and what he was to forget. Through it all, I may say +distinctly, he clung to his great Venetian clue--the explanation of +everything by the historic idea. It was a high historic house, with such +a quantity of recorded past twinkling in the multitudinous candles that +one grasped at the idea of something waning and displaced, and might +even fondly and secretly nurse the conceit that what one was having was +just the very last. Wasn't it certainly, for instance, no mere illusion +that there is no appreciable future left for such manners--an urbanity +so comprehensive, a form so transmitted, as those of such a hostess and +such a host? The future is for a different conception of the graceful +altogether--so far as it's for a conception of the graceful at all. Into +that computation I shall not attempt to enter; but these representative +products of an antique culture, at least, and one of which the secret +seems more likely than not to be lost, were not common, nor indeed +was any one else--in the circle to which the picture most insisted on +restricting itself. + +Neither, on the other hand, was anyone either very beautiful or very +fresh: which was again, exactly, a precious "value" on an occasion +that was to shine most, to the imagination, by the complexity of its +references. Such old, old women with such old, old jewels; such ugly, +ugly ones with such handsome, becoming names; such battered, fatigued +gentlemen with such inscrutable decorations; such an absence of youth, +for the most part, in either sex--of the pink and white, the "bud" of +new worlds; such a general personal air, in fine, of being the worse for +a good deal of wear in various old ones. It was not a society--that was +clear--in which little girls and boys set the tune; and there was that +about it all that might well have cast a shadow on the path of even the +most successful little girl. Yet also--let me not be rudely inexact--it +was in honour of youth and freshness that we had all been convened. The +_fiancailles_ of the last--unless it were the last but one--unmarried +daughter of the house had just been brought to a proper climax; the +contract had been signed, the betrothal rounded off--I'm not sure that +the civil marriage hadn't, that day, taken place. The occasion then had +in fact the most charming of heroines and the most ingenuous of heroes, +a young man, the latter, all happily suffused with a fair Austrian +blush. The young lady had had, besides other more or less shining recent +ancestors, a very famous paternal grandmother, who had played a great +part in the political history of her time and whose portrait, in the +taste and dress of 1830, was conspicuous in one of the rooms. The +grand-daughter of this celebrity, of royal race, was strikingly like her +and, by a fortunate stroke, had been habited, combed, curled in a +manner exactly to reproduce the portrait. These things were charming and +amusing, as indeed were several other things besides. The great Venetian +beauty of our period was there, and nature had equipped the great +Venetian beauty for her part with the properest sense of the suitable, +or in any case with a splendid generosity--since on the ideally suitable +_character_ of so brave a human symbol who shall have the last word? +This responsible agent was at all events the beauty in the world about +whom probably, most, the absence of question (an absence never wholly +propitious) would a little smugly and monotonously flourish: the one +thing wanting to the interest she inspired was thus the possibility +of ever discussing it. There were plenty of suggestive subjects round +about, on the other hand, as to which the exchange of ideas would by no +means necessarily have dropped. You profit to the full at such times by +all the old voices, echoes, images--by that element of the history of +Venice which represents all Europe as having at one time and another +revelled or rested, asked for pleasure or for patience there; which +gives you the place supremely as the refuge of endless strange secrets, +broken fortunes and wounded hearts. + + +II + +There had been, on lines of further or different speculation, a +young Englishman to luncheon, and the young Englishman had proved +"sympathetic"; so that when it was a question afterwards of some of the +more hidden treasures, the browner depths of the old churches, the case +became one for mutual guidance and gratitude--for a small afternoon tour +and the wait of a pair of friends in the warm little _campi_, at locked +doors for which the nearest urchin had scurried off to fetch the keeper +of the key. There are few brown depths to-day into which the light of +the hotels doesn't shine, and few hidden treasures about which +pages enough, doubtless, haven't already been printed: my business, +accordingly, let me hasten to say, is not now with the fond renewal of +any discovery--at least in the order of impressions most usual. +Your discovery may be, for that matter, renewed every week; the only +essential is the good luck--which a fair amount of practice has taught +you to count upon-of not finding, for the particular occasion, other +discoverers in the field. Then, in the quiet corner, with the closed +door--then in the presence of the picture and of your companion's +sensible emotion--not only the original happy moment, but everything +else, is renewed. Yet once again it can all come back. The old custode, +shuffling about in the dimness, jerks away, to make sure of his tip, the +old curtain that isn't much more modern than the wonderful work itself. +He does his best to create light where light can never be; but you have +your practised groping gaze, and in guiding the young eyes of your less +confident associate, moreover, you feel you possess the treasure. These +are the refined pleasures that Venice has still to give, these odd happy +passages of communication and response. + + +But the point of my reminiscence is that there were other communications +that day, as there were certainly other responses. I have forgotten +exactly what it was we were looking for--without much success--when we +met the three Sisters. Nothing requires more care, as a long knowledge +of Venice works in, than not to lose the useful faculty of getting lost. +I had so successfully done my best to preserve it that I could at that +moment conscientiously profess an absence of any suspicion of where we +might be. It proved enough that, wherever we were, we were where the +three sisters found us. This was on a little bridge near a big campo, +and a part of the charm of the matter was the theory that it was very +much out of the way. They took us promptly in hand--they were +only walking over to San Marco to match some coloured wool for the +manufacture of such belated cushions as still bloom with purple and +green in the long leisures of old palaces; and that mild errand could +easily open a parenthesis. The obscure church we had feebly imagined +we were looking for proved, if I am not mistaken, that of the sisters' +parish; as to which I have but a confused recollection of a large grey +void and of admiring for the first time a fine work of art of which I +have now quite lost the identity. This was the effect of the charming +beneficence of the three sisters, who presently were to give our +adventure a turn in the emotion of which everything that had preceded +seemed as nothing. It actually strikes me even as a little dim to have +been told by them, as we all fared together, that a certain low, wide +house, in a small square as to which I found myself without particular +association, had been in the far-off time the residence of George Sand. +And yet this was a fact that, though I could then only feel it must +be for another day, would in a different connection have set me richly +reconstructing. + +Madame Sand's famous Venetian year has been of late immensely in the +air--a tub of soiled linen which the muse of history, rolling her +sleeves well up, has not even yet quite ceased energetically and +publicly to wash. The house in question must have been the house +to which the wonderful lady betook herself when, in 1834, after the +dramatic exit of Alfred de Musset, she enjoyed that remarkable period +of rest and refreshment with the so long silent, the but recently +rediscovered, reported, extinguished, Doctor Pagello. As an old +Sandist--not exactly indeed of the _premiere heure_, but of the fine +high noon and golden afternoon of the great career--I had been, though I +confess too inactively, curious as to a few points in the topography of +the eminent adventure to which I here allude; but had never got beyond +the little public fact, in itself always a bit of a thrill to the +Sandist, that the present Hotel Danieli had been the scene of its first +remarkable stages. I am not sure indeed that the curiosity I speak +of has not at last, in my breast, yielded to another form of +wonderment--truly to the rather rueful question of why we have so +continued to concern ourselves, and why the fond observer of the +footprints of genius is likely so to continue, with a body of +discussion, neither in itself and in its day, nor in its preserved and +attested records, at all positively edifying. The answer to such an +inquiry would doubtless reward patience, but I fear we can now glance at +its possibilities only long enough to say that interesting persons--so +they be of a sufficiently approved and established interest--render +in some degree interesting whatever happens to them, and give it an +importance even when very little else (as in the case I refer to) may +have operated to give it a dignity. Which is where I leave the issue of +further identifications. + +For the three sisters, in the kindest way in the world, had asked us if +we already knew their sequestered home and whether, in case we didn't, +we should be at all amused to see it. My own acquaintance with them, +though not of recent origin, had hitherto lacked this enhancement, at +which we both now grasped with the full instinct, indescribable enough, +of what it was likely to give. But how, for that matter, either, can I +find the right expression of what was to remain with us of this episode? +It is the fault of the sad-eyed old witch of Venice that she so easily +puts more into things that can pass under the common names that do for +them elsewhere. Too much for a rough sketch was to be seen and felt +in the home of the three sisters, and in the delightful and slightly +pathetic deviation of their doing us so simply and freely the honours +of it. What was most immediately marked was their resigned cosmopolite +state, the effacement of old conventional lines by foreign contact and +example; by the action, too, of causes full of a special interest, +but not to be emphasised perhaps--granted indeed they be named at +all--without a certain sadness of sympathy. If "style," in Venice, sits +among ruins, let us always lighten our tread when we pay her a visit. + +Our steps were in fact, I am happy to think, almost soft enough for a +death-chamber as we stood in the big, vague _sala_ of the three sisters, +spectators of their simplified state and their beautiful blighted rooms, +the memories, the portraits, the shrunken relics of nine Doges. If I +wanted a first chapter it was here made to my hand; the painter of life +and manners, as he glanced about, could only sigh--as he so frequently +has to--over the vision of so much more truth than he can use. What on +earth is the need to "invent," in the midst of tragedy and comedy that +never cease? Why, with the subject itself, all round, so inimitable, +condemn the picture to the silliness of trying not to be aware of it? +The charming lonely girls, carrying so simply their great name and +fallen fortunes, the despoiled _decaduta_ house, the unfailing Italian +grace, the space so out of scale with actual needs, the absence of +books, the presence of ennui, the sense of the length of the hours and +the shortness of everything else--all this was a matter not only for a +second chapter and a third, but for a whole volume, a _denoument_ and a +sequel. + +This time, unmistakably, it _was_ the last--Wordsworth's stately +"shade of that which once was great"; and it was _almost_ as if our +distinguished young friends had consented to pass away slowly in order +to treat us to the vision. Ends are only ends in truth, for the painter +of pictures, when they are more or less conscious and prolonged. One +of the sisters had been to London, whence she had brought back the +impression of having seen at the British Museum a room exclusively +filled with books and documents devoted to the commemoration of her +family. She must also then have encountered at the National Gallery +the exquisite specimen of an early Venetian master in which one of her +ancestors, then head of the State, kneels with so sweet a dignity before +the Virgin and Child. She was perhaps old enough, none the less, to have +seen this precious work taken down from the wall of the room in which +we sat and--on terms so far too easy--carried away for ever; and not +too young, at all events, to have been present, now and then, when her +candid elders, enlightened too late as to what their sacrifice might +really have done for them, looked at each other with the pale hush of +the irreparable. We let ourselves note that these were matters to put a +great deal of old, old history into sweet young Venetian faces. + + +III + +In Italy, if we come to that, this particular appearance is far from +being only in the streets, where we are apt most to observe it--in +countenances caught as we pass and in the objects marked by the +guide-books with their respective stellar allowances. It is behind +the walls of the houses that old, old history is thick and that the +multiplied stars of Baedeker might often best find their application. +The feast of St. John the Baptist is the feast of the year in Florence, +and it seemed to me on that night that I could have scattered about me a +handful of these signs. I had the pleasure of spending a couple of hours +on a signal high terrace that overlooks the Arno, as well as in the +galleries that open out to it, where I met more than ever the pleasant +curious question of the disparity between the old conditions and the new +manners. Make our manners, we moderns, as good as we can, there is still +no getting over it that they are not good enough for many of the great +places. This was one of those scenes, and its greatness came out to the +full into the hot Florentine evening, in which the pink and golden +fires of the pyrotechnics arranged on Ponte Carraja--the occasion of our +assembly--lighted up the large issue. The "good people" beneath were a +huge, hot, gentle, happy family; the fireworks on the bridge, kindling +river as well as sky, were delicate and charming; the terrace connected +the two wings that give bravery to the front of the palace, and the +close-hung pictures in the rooms, open in a long series, offered to a +lover of quiet perambulation an alternative hard to resist. + +Wherever he stood--on the broad loggia, in the cluster of company, among +bland ejaculations and liquefied ices, or in the presence of the mixed +masters that led him from wall to wall--such a seeker for the spirit of +each occasion could only turn it over that in the first place this was +an intenser, finer little Florence than ever, and that in the second +the testimony was again wonderful to former fashions and ideas. What +did they do, in the other time, the time of so much smaller a society, +smaller and fewer fortunes, more taste perhaps as to some particulars, +but fewer tastes, at any rate, and fewer habits and wants--what did they +do with chambers so multitudinous and so vast? Put their "state" at its +highest--and we know of many ways in which it must have broken down--how +did they live in them without the aid of variety? How did they, in +minor communities in which every one knew every one, and every one's +impression and effect had been long, as we say, discounted, find +representation and emulation sufficiently amusing? Much of the charm of +thinking of it, however, is doubtless that we are not able to say. +This leaves us with the conviction that does them most honour: the old +generations built and arranged greatly for the simple reason that they +liked it, and they could bore themselves--to say nothing of each other, +when it came to that--better in noble conditions than in mean ones. + +It was not, I must add, of the far-away Florentine age that I most +thought, but of periods more recent and of which the sound and beautiful +house more directly spoke. If one had always been homesick for the +Arno-side of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, here was a +chance, and a better one than ever, to taste again of the cup. Many of +the pictures--there was a charming quarter of an hour when I had them +to myself--were bad enough to have passed for good in those delightful +years. Shades of Grand-Dukes encompassed me--Dukes of the pleasant later +sort who weren't really grand. There was still the sense of having come +too late--yet not too late, after all, for this glimpse and this dream. +My business was to people the place--its own business had never been to +save us the trouble of understanding it. And then the deepest spell of +all was perhaps that just here I was supremely out of the way of the so +terribly actual Florentine question. This, as all the world knows, is +a battle-ground, to-day, in many journals, with all Italy practically +pulling on one side and all England, America and Germany pulling on the +other: I speak of course of the more or less articulate opinion. The +"improvement," the rectification of Florence is in the air, and the +problem of the particular ways in which, given such desperately delicate +cases, these matters should be understood. The little treasure-city is, +if there ever was one, a delicate case--more delicate perhaps than any +other in the world save that of our taking on ourselves to persuade +the Italians that they mayn't do as they like with their own. They so +absolutely may that I profess I see no happy issue from the fight. It +will take more tact than our combined tactful genius may at all probably +muster to convince them that their own is, by an ingenious logic, much +rather _ours_. It will take more subtlety still to muster for them that +dazzling show of examples from which they may learn that what in general +is "ours" shall appear to them as a rule a sacrifice to beauty and a +triumph of taste. The situation, to the truly analytic mind, offers in +short, to perfection, all the elements of despair; and I am afraid that +if I hung back, at the Corsini palace, to woo illusions and invoke +the irrelevant, it was because I could think, in the conditions, of no +better way to meet the acute responsibility of the critic than just to +shirk it. + +{1899.} + + + + + +CASA ALVISI + + +Invited to "introduce" certain pages of cordial and faithful +reminiscence from another hand, {1} + +{1} "Browning in Venice," being Recollections of the late Katharine +De Kay Bronson, with a Prefatory Note by H. J. (_Cornhill Magazine_, +February, 1902).} + +in which a frankly predominant presence seems to live again, I undertook +that office with an interest inevitably somewhat sad--so passed and gone +to-day is so much of the life suggested. Those who fortunately knew Mrs. +Bronson will read into her notes still more of it--more of her subject, +more of herself too, and of many things--than she gives, and some may +well even feel tempted to do for her what she has done here for +her distinguished friend. In Venice, during a long period, for many +pilgrims, Mrs. Arthur Bronson, originally of New York, was, so far as +society, hospitality, a charming personal welcome were concerned, almost +in sole possession; she had become there, with time, quite the prime +representative of those private amenities which the Anglo-Saxon abroad +is apt to miss just in proportion as the place visited is publicly +wonderful, and in which he therefore finds a value twice as great as at +home. Mrs. Bronson really earned in this way the gratitude of mingled +generations and races. She sat for twenty years at the wide mouth, as +it were, of the Grand Canal, holding out her hand, with endless +good-nature, patience, charity, to all decently accredited petitioners, +the incessant troop of those either bewilderedly making or fondly +renewing acquaintance with the dazzling city. + +{Illustration: CASA ALVISI, VENICE} + +Casa Alvisi is directly opposite the high, broad-based florid church +of S. Maria della Salute--so directly that from the balcony over the +water-entrance your eye, crossing the canal, seems to find the key-hole +of the great door right in a line with it; and there was something in +this position that for the time made all Venice-lovers think of the +genial _padrona_ as thus levying in the most convenient way the toll of +curiosity and sympathy. Every one passed, every one was seen to pass, +and few were those not seen to stop and to return. The most generous of +hostesses died a year ago at Florence; her house knows her no more--it +had ceased to do so for some time before her death; and the long, +pleased procession--the charmed arrivals, the happy sojourns at anchor, +the reluctant departures that made Ca' Alvisi, as was currently said, +a social _porto di mare_--is, for remembrance and regret, already a +possession of ghosts; so that, on the spot, at present, the attention +ruefully averts itself from the dear little old faded but once +familiarly bright facade, overtaken at last by the comparatively vulgar +uses that are doing their best to "paint out" in Venice, right and +left, by staring signs and other vulgarities, the immemorial note of +distinction. The house, in a city of palaces, was small, but the tenant +clung to her perfect, her inclusive position--the one right place that +gave her a better command, as it were, than a better house obtained by +a harder compromise; not being fond, moreover, of spacious halls and +massive treasures, but of compact and familiar rooms, in which her +remarkable accumulation of minute and delicate Venetian objects could +show. She adored--in the way of the Venetian, to which all her taste +addressed itself--the small, the domestic and the exquisite; so that she +would have given a Tintoretto or two, I think, without difficulty, for +a cabinet of tiny gilded glasses or a dinner-service of the right old +silver. + +The general receptacle of these multiplied treasures played at any rate, +through the years, the part of a friendly private-box at the constant +operatic show, a box at the best point of the best tier, with the +cushioned ledge of its front raking the whole scene and with its +withdrawing rooms behind for more detached conversation; for easy--when +not indeed slightly difficult--polyglot talk, artful _bibite_, artful +cigarettes too, straight from the hand of the hostess, who could do all +that belonged to a hostess, place people in relation and keep them so, +take up and put down the topic, cause delicate tobacco and little +gilded glasses to circulate, without ever leaving her sofa-cushions or +intermitting her good-nature. She exercised in these conditions, with +never a block, as we say in London, in the traffic, with never an +admission, an acceptance of the least social complication, her positive +genius for easy interest, easy sympathy, easy friendship. It was as if, +at last, she had taken the human race at large, quite irrespective of +geography, for her neighbours, with neighbourly relations as a matter +of course. These things, on her part, had at all events the greater +appearance of ease from their having found to their purpose--and as if +the very air of Venice produced them--a cluster of forms so light and +immediate, so pre-established by picturesque custom. The old bright +tradition, the wonderful Venetian legend had appealed to her from the +first, closing round her house and her well-plashed water-steps, where +the waiting gondolas were thick, quite as if, actually, the ghost of +the defunct Carnival--since I have spoken of ghosts--still played some +haunting part. + +Let me add, at the same time, that Mrs. Bronson's social facility, which +was really her great refuge from importunity, a defence with serious +thought and serious feeling quietly cherished behind it, had its +discriminations as well as its inveteracies, and that the most marked +of all these, perhaps, was her attachment to Robert Browning. Nothing in +all her beneficent life had probably made her happier than to have found +herself able to minister, each year, with the returning autumn, to his +pleasure and comfort. Attached to Ca' Alvisi, on the land side, is a +somewhat melancholy old section of a Giustiniani palace, which she had +annexed to her own premises mainly for the purpose of placing it, in +comfortable guise, at the service of her friends. She liked, as she +professed, when they were the real thing, to have them under her hand; +and here succeeded each other, through the years, the company of the +privileged and the more closely domesticated, who liked, harmlessly, to +distinguish between themselves and outsiders. Among visitors partaking +of this pleasant provision Mr. Browning was of course easily first. But +I must leave her own pen to show him as her best years knew him. +The point was, meanwhile, that if her charity was great even for the +outsider, this was by reason of the inner essence of it--her perfect +tenderness for Venice, which she always recognised as a link. That was +the true principle of fusion, the key to communication. She communicated +in proportion--little or much, measuring it as she felt people more +responsive or less so; and she expressed herself, or in other words her +full affection for the place, only to those who had most of the same +sentiment. The rich and interesting form in which she found it in +Browning may well be imagined--together with the quite independent +quantity of the genial at large that she also found; but I am not sure +that his favour was not primarily based on his paid tribute of such +things as "Two in a Gondola" and "A Toccata of Galuppi." He had more +ineffaceably than anyone recorded his initiation from of old. + +She was thus, all round, supremely faithful; yet it was perhaps after +all with the very small folk, those to the manner born, that she made +the easiest terms. She loved, she had from the first enthusiastically +adopted, the engaging Venetian people, whose virtues she found touching +and their infirmities but such as appeal mainly to the sense of humour +and the love of anecdote; and she befriended and admired, she studied +and spoiled them. There must have been a multitude of whom it would +scarce be too much to say that her long residence among them was their +settled golden age. When I consider that they have lost her now I fairly +wonder to what shifts they have been put and how long they may not have +to wait for such another messenger of Providence. She cultivated their +dialect, she renewed their boats, she piously relighted--at the top of +the tide-washed _pali_ of traghetto or lagoon--the neglected lamp of the +tutelary Madonnetta; she took cognisance of the wives, the children, the +accidents, the troubles, as to which she became, perceptibly, the most +prompt, the established remedy. On lines where the amusement was happily +less one-sided she put together in dialect many short comedies, dramatic +proverbs, which, with one of her drawing-rooms permanently arranged as +a charming diminutive theatre, she caused to be performed by the +young persons of her circle--often, when the case lent itself, by the +wonderful small offspring of humbler friends, children of the Venetian +lower class, whose aptitude, teachability, drollery, were her constant +delight. It was certainly true that an impression of Venice as humanly +sweet might easily found itself on the frankness and quickness and +amiability of these little people. They were at least so much to +the good; for the philosophy of their patroness was as Venetian as +everything else; helping her to accept experience without bitterness +and to remain fresh, even in the fatigue which finally overtook her, for +pleasant surprises and proved sincerities. She was herself sincere to +the last for the place of her predilection; inasmuch as though she had +arranged herself, in the later time--and largely for the love of "Pippa +Passes"--an alternative refuge at Asolo, she absented herself from +Venice with continuity only under coercion of illness. + +At Asolo, periodically, the link with Browning was more confirmed than +weakened, and there, in old Venetian territory, and with the invasion +of visitors comparatively checked, her preferentially small house became +again a setting for the pleasure of talk and the sense of Italy. It +contained again its own small treasures, all in the pleasant key of the +homelier Venetian spirit. The plain beneath it stretched away like a +purple sea from the lower cliffs of the hills, and the white _campanili_ +of the villages, as one was perpetually saying, showed on the expanse +like scattered sails of ships. The rumbling carriage, the old-time, +rattling, red-velveted carriage of provincial, rural Italy, delightful +and quaint, did the office of the gondola; to Bassano, to Treviso, +to high-walled Castelfranco, all pink and gold, the home of the great +Giorgione. Here also memories cluster; but it is in Venice again that +her vanished presence is most felt, for there, in the real, or certainly +the finer, the more sifted Cosmopolis, it falls into its place among +the others evoked, those of the past seekers of poetry and dispensers +of romance. It is a fact that almost every one interesting, appealing, +melancholy, memorable, odd, seems at one time or another, after many +days and much life, to have gravitated to Venice by a happy instinct, +settling in it and treating it, cherishing it, as a sort of repository +of consolations; all of which to-day, for the conscious mind, is mixed +with its air and constitutes its unwritten history. The deposed, the +defeated, the disenchanted, the wounded, or even only the bored, have +seemed to find there something that no other place could give. But +such people came for themselves, as we seem to see them--only with +the egotism of their grievances and the vanity of their hopes. Mrs. +Bronson's case was beautifully different--she had come altogether for +others. + + + + + +FROM CHAMBERY TO MILAN + + +Your truly sentimental tourist will never take it from any occasion that +there is absolutely nothing for him, and it was at Chambery--but four +hours from Geneva--that I accepted the situation and decided there +might be mysterious delights in entering Italy by a whizz through an +eight-mile tunnel, even as a bullet through the bore of a gun. I found +my reward in the Savoyard landscape, which greets you betimes with the +smile of anticipation. If it is not so Italian as Italy it is at least +more Italian than anything _but_ Italy--more Italian, too, I should +think, than can seem natural and proper to the swarming red-legged +soldiery who so publicly proclaim it of the empire of M. Thiers. The +light and the complexion of things had to my eyes not a little of that +mollified depth last loved by them rather further on. It was simply +perhaps that the weather was hot and the mountains drowsing in that +iridescent haze that I have seen nearer home than at Chambery. But the +vegetation, assuredly, had an all but Transalpine twist and curl, and +the classic wayside tangle of corn and vines left nothing to be desired +in the line of careless grace. Chambery as a town, however, constitutes +no foretaste of the monumental cities. There is shabbiness and +shabbiness, the fond critic of such things will tell you; and that of +the ancient capital of Savoy lacks style. I found a better pastime, +however, than strolling through the dark dull streets in quest of +effects that were not forthcoming. The first urchin you meet will +show you the way to Les Charmettes and the Maison Jean-Jacques. A +very pleasant way it becomes as soon as it leaves the town--a winding, +climbing by-road, bordered with such a tall and sturdy hedge as to +give it the air of an English lane--if you can fancy an English lane +introducing you to the haunts of a Madame de Warens. + +The house that formerly sheltered this lady's singular menage stands on +a hillside above the road, which a rapid path connects with the little +grass-grown terrace before it. It is a small shabby, homely dwelling, +with a certain reputable solidity, however, and more of internal +spaciousness than of outside promise. The place is shown by an elderly +competent dame who points out the very few surviving objects which you +may touch with the reflection--complacent in whatsoever degree suits +you--that they have known the familiarity of Rousseau's hand. It was +presumably a meagrely-appointed house, and I wondered that on such +scanty features so much expression should linger. But the structure has +an ancient ponderosity, and the dust of the eighteenth century seems +to lie on its worm-eaten floors, to cling to the faded old _papiers a +ramages_ on the walls and to lodge in the crevices of the brown wooden +ceilings. Madame de Warens's bed remains, with the narrow couch of +Jean-Jacques as well, his little warped and cracked yellow spinet, and +a battered, turnip-shaped silver timepiece, engraved with its master's +name--its primitive tick as extinct as his passionate heart-beats. It +cost me, I confess, a somewhat pitying acceleration of my own to see +this intimately personal relic of the _genius loci_--for it had dwelt; +in his waistcoat-pocket, than which there is hardly a material point +in space nearer to a man's consciousness--tossed so the dog's-eared +visitors' record or _livre de cuisine_ recently denounced by Madame +George Sand. In fact the place generally, in so far as some faint +ghostly presence of its famous inmates seems to linger there, is by no +means exhilarating. Coppet and Ferney tell, if not of pure happiness, at +least of prosperity and, honour, wealth and success. But Les Charmettes +is haunted by ghosts unclean and forlorn. The place tells of poverty, +perversity, distress. A good deal of clever modern talent in France has +been employed in touching up the episode of which it was the scene and +tricking it out in idyllic love-knots. But as I stood on the charming +terrace I have mentioned--a little jewel of a terrace, with grassy flags +and a mossy parapet, and an admirable view of great swelling violet +hills--stood there reminded how much sweeter Nature is than man, the +story looked rather wan and unlovely beneath these literary decorations, +and I could pay it no livelier homage than is implied in perfect pity. +Hero and heroine have become too much creatures of history to take up +attitudes as part of any poetry. But, not to moralise too sternly for +a tourist between trains, I should add that, as an illustration, to be +inserted mentally in the text of the "Confessions," a glimpse of Les +Charmettes is pleasant enough. It completes the rare charm of good +autobiography to behold with one's eyes the faded and battered +background of the story; and Rousseau's narrative is so incomparably +vivid and forcible that the sordid little house at Chambery seems of +a hardly deeper shade of reality than so many other passages of his +projected truth. + +If I spent an hour at Les Charmettes, fumbling thus helplessly with +the past, I recognised on the morrow how strongly the Mont Cenis Tunnel +smells of the time to come. As I passed along the Saint-Gothard highway +a couple of months since, I perceived, half up the Swiss ascent, a group +of navvies at work in a gorge beneath the road. They had laid bare a +broad surface of granite and had punched in the centre of it a round +black cavity, of about the dimensions, as it seemed to me, of a +soup-plate. This was to attain its perfect development some eight years +hence. The Mont Cenis may therefore be held to have set a fashion which +will be followed till the highest Himalaya is but the ornamental apex or +snow-capped gable-tip of some resounding fuliginous corridor. The tunnel +differs but in length from other tunnels; you spend half an hour in it. +But you whirl out into the blest peninsula, and as you look back seem to +see the mighty mass shrug its shoulders over the line, the mere turn +of a dreaming giant in his sleep. The tunnel is certainly not a poetic +object, out there is no perfection without its beauty; and as you +measure the long rugged outline of the pyramid of which it forms the +base you accept it as the perfection of a short cut. Twenty-four hours +from Paris to Turin is speed for the times--speed which may content us, +at any rate, until expansive Berlin has succeeded in placing itself at +thirty-six from Milan. + +To enter Turin then of a lovely August afternoon was to find a city of +arcades, of pink and yellow stucco, of innumerable cafes, of blue-legged +officers, of ladies draped in the North-Italian mantilla. An old friend +of Italy coming back to her finds an easy waking for dormant memories. +Every object is a reminder and every reminder a thrill. Half an hour +after my arrival, as I stood at my window, which overhung the great +square, I found the scene, within and without, a rough epitome of every +pleasure and every impression I had formerly gathered from Italy: the +balcony and the Venetian-blind, the cool floor of speckled concrete, the +lavish delusions of frescoed wall and ceiling, the broad divan framed +for the noonday siesta, the massive medieval Castello in mid-piazza, +with its shabby rear and its pompous Palladian front, the brick +campaniles beyond, the milder, yellower light, the range of colour, the +suggestion of sound. Later, beneath the arcades, I found many an +old acquaintance: beautiful officers, resplendent, slow-strolling, +contemplative of female beauty; civil and peaceful dandies, hardly less +gorgeous, with that religious faith in moustache and shirt-front which +distinguishes the _belle jeunesse of Italy_; ladies with heads artfully +shawled in Spanish-looking lace, but with too little art--or too much +nature at least--in the region of the bodice; well-conditioned young +_abbati_ with neatly drawn stockings. These indeed are not objects of +first-rate interest, and with such Turin is rather meagrely furnished. +It has no architecture, no churches, no monuments, no romantic +street-scenery. It has the great votive temple of the Superga, which +stands on a high hilltop above the city, gazing across at Monte Rosa and +lifting its own fine dome against the sky with no contemptible art. But +when you have seen the Superga from the quay beside the Po, a skein of a +few yellow threads in August, despite its frequent habit of rising high +and running wild, and said to yourself that in architecture position +is half the battle, you have nothing left to visit but the Museum of +pictures. The Turin Gallery, which is large and well arranged, is the +fortunate owner of three or four masterpieces: a couple of magnificent +Vandycks and a couple of Paul Veroneses; the latter a Queen of Sheba +and a Feast of the House of Levi--the usual splendid combination of +brocades, grandees and marble colonnades dividing those skies _de +turquoise malade_ to which Theophile Gautier is fond of alluding. The +Veroneses are fine, but with Venice in prospect the traveller feels at +liberty to keep his best attention in reserve. If, however, he has the +proper relish for Vandyck, let him linger long and fondly here; for +that admiration will never be more potently stirred than by the adorable +group of the three little royal highnesses, sons and the daughter +of Charles I. All the purity of childhood is here, and all its soft +solidity of structure, rounded tenderly beneath the spangled satin and +contrasted charmingly with the pompous rigidity. Clad respectively in +crimson, white and blue, these small scions stand up in their ruffs and +fardingales in dimpled serenity, squaring their infantine stomachers at +the spectator with an innocence, a dignity, a delightful grotesqueness, +which make the picture a thing of close truth as well as of fine +decorum. You might kiss their hands, but you certainly would think twice +before pinching their cheeks--provocative as they are of this tribute of +admiration--and would altogether lack presumption to lift them off +the ground or the higher level or dais on which they stand so sturdily +planted by right of birth. There is something inimitable in the paternal +gallantry with which the painter has touched off the young lady. She was +a princess, yet she was a baby, and he has contrived, we let ourselves +fancy, to interweave an intimation that she was a creature whom, in her +teens, the lucklessly smitten--even as he was prematurely--must vainly +sigh for. Though the work is a masterpiece of execution its merits under +this head may be emulated, at a distance; the lovely modulations of +colour in the three contrasted and harmonised little satin petticoats, +the solidity of the little heads, in spite of all their prettiness, the +happy, unexaggerated squareness and maturity of _pose_, are, severally, +points to study, to imitate, and to reproduce with profit. But the taste +of such a consummate thing is its great secret as well as its great +merit--a taste which seems one of the lost instincts of mankind. Go and +enjoy this supreme expression of Vandyck's fine sense, and admit that +never was a politer production. + +Milan speaks to us of a burden of felt life of which Turin is innocent, +but in its general aspect still lingers a northern reserve which makes +the place rather perhaps the last of the prose capitals than the first +of the poetic. The long Austrian occupation perhaps did something +to Germanise its physiognomy; though indeed this is an indifferent +explanation when one remembers how well, temperamentally speaking, Italy +held her own in Venetia. Milan, at any rate, if not bristling with the +aesthetic impulse, opens to us frankly enough the thick volume of her +past. Of that volume the Cathedral is the fairest and fullest page--a +structure not supremely interesting, not logical, not even, to some +minds, commandingly beautiful, but grandly curious and superbly rich. I +hope, for my own part, never to grow too particular to admire it. If +it had no other distinction it would still have that of impressive, +immeasurable achievement. As I strolled beside its vast indented base +one evening, and felt it, above me, rear its grey mysteries into the +starlight while the restless human tide on which I floated rose no +higher than the first few layers of street-soiled marble, I was tempted +to believe that beauty in great architecture is almost a secondary +merit, and that the main point is mass--such mass as may make it a +supreme embodiment of vigorous effort. Viewed in this way a great +building is the greatest conceivable work of art. More than any other +it represents difficulties mastered, resources combined, labour, courage +and patience. And there are people who tell us that art has nothing to +do with morality! Little enough, doubtless, when it is concerned, +even ever so little, in painting the roof of Milan Cathedral within +to represent carved stone-work. Of this famous roof every one has +heard--how good it is, how bad, how perfect a delusion, how transparent +an artifice. It is the first thing your cicerone shows you on entering +the church. The occasionally accommodating art-lover may accept it +philosophically, I think; for the interior, though admirably effective +as a whole, has no great sublimity, nor even purity, of pitch. It +is splendidly vast and dim; the altarlamps twinkle afar through the +incense-thickened air like foglights at sea, and the great columns rise +straight to the roof, which hardly curves to meet them, with the girth +and altitude of oaks of a thousand years; but there is little refinement +of design--few of those felicities of proportion which the eye caresses, +when it finds them, very much as the memory retains and repeats some +happy lines of poetry or some haunting musical phrase. Consistently +brave, none the less, is the result produced, and nothing braver than a +certain exhibition that I privately enjoyed of the relics of St. +Charles Borromeus. This holy man lies at his eternal rest in a small but +gorgeous sepulchral chapel, beneath the boundless pavement and before +the high altar; and for the modest sum of five francs you may have his +shrivelled mortality unveiled and gaze at it with whatever reserves +occur to you. The Catholic Church never renounces a chance of the +sublime for fear of a chance of the ridiculous--especially when the +chance of the sublime may be the very excellent chance of five francs. +The performance in question, of which the good San Carlo paid in the +first instance the cost, was impressive certainly, but as a monstrous +matter or a grim comedy may still be. The little sacristan, having +secured his audience, whipped on a white tunic over his frock, lighted a +couple of extra candles and proceeded to remove from above the altar, +by means of a crank, a sort of sliding shutter, just as you may see +a shop-boy do of a morning at his master's window. In this case too a +large sheet of plate-glass was uncovered, and to form an idea of the +_etalage_ you must imagine that a jeweller, for reasons of his own, has +struck an unnatural partnership with an undertaker. The black mummified +corpse of the saint is stretched out in a glass coffin, clad in his +mouldering canonicals, mitred, crosiered and gloved, glittering with +votive jewels. It is an extraordinary mixture of death and life; the +desiccated clay, the ashen rags, the hideous little black mask and +skull, and the living, glowing, twinkling splendour of diamonds, +emeralds and sapphires. The collection is really fine, and many great +historic names are attached to the different offerings. Whatever may be +the better opinion as to the future of the Church, I can't help thinking +she will make a figure in the world so long as she retains this +great fund of precious "properties," this prodigious capital +decoratively invested and scintillating throughout Christendom at +effectively-scattered points. You see I am forced to agree after all, in +spite of the sliding shutter and the profane swagger of the sacristan, +that a certain pastoral majesty saved the situation, or at least made +irony gape. Yet it was from a natural desire to breathe a sweeter air +that I immediately afterwards undertook the interminable climb to the +roof of the cathedral. This is another world of wonders, and one which +enjoys due renown, every square inch of wall on the winding stairways +being bescribbled with a traveller's name. There is a great glare from +the far-stretching slopes of marble, a confusion (like the masts of a +navy or the spears of an army) of image-capped pinnacles, biting the +impalpable blue, and, better than either, the goodliest view of level +Lombardy sleeping in its rich transalpine light and resembling, with its +white-walled dwellings and the spires on its horizon, a vast green sea +spotted with ships. After two months of Switzerland the Lombard plain is +a rich rest to the eye, and the yellow, liquid, free-flowing light--as +if on favoured Italy the vessels of heaven were more widely opened--had +for mine a charm which made me think of a great opaque mountain as a +blasphemous invasion of the atmospheric spaces. + +{Illustration: THE SIMPLON GATE, MILAN} + +I have mentioned the cathedral first, but the prime treasure of Milan at +the present hour is the beautiful, tragical Leonardo. The cathedral is +good for another thousand years, but we ask whether our children will +find in the most majestic and most luckless of frescoes much more than +the shadow of a shadow. Its fame has been for a century or two that, as +one may say, of an illustrious invalid whom people visit to see how +he lasts, with leave-taking sighs and almost death-bed or tiptoe +precautions. The picture needs not another scar or stain, now, to be the +saddest work of art in the world; and battered, defaced, ruined as it +is, it remains one of the greatest. We may really compare its anguish +of decay to the slow conscious ebb of life in a human organism. The +production of the prodigy was a breath from the infinite, and the +painter's conception not immeasurably less complex than the scheme, say, +of his own mortal constitution. There has been much talk lately of the +irony of fate, but I suspect fate was never more ironical than when she +led the most scientific, the most calculating of all painters to spend +fifteen long years in building his goodly house upon the sand. And yet, +after all, may not the playing of that trick represent but a deeper +wisdom, since if the thing enjoyed the immortal health and bloom of a +first-rate Titian we should have lost one of the most pertinent lessons +in the history of art? We know it as hearsay, but here is the plain +proof, that there is no limit to the amount of "stuff" an artist may put +into his work. Every painter ought once in his life to stand before the +Cenacolo and decipher its moral. Mix with your colours and mess on your +palette every particle of the very substance of your soul, and this lest +perchance your "prepared surface" shall play you a trick! Then, and then +only, it will fight to the last--it will resist even in death. Raphael +was a happier genius; you look at his lovely "Marriage of the Virgin" at +the Brera, beautiful as some first deep smile of conscious inspiration, +but to feel that he foresaw no complaint against fate, and that he knew +the world he wanted to know and charmed it into never giving him away. +But I have left no space to speak of the Brera, nor of that paradise +of book-worms with an eye for their background--if such creatures +exist--the Ambrosian Library; nor of that mighty basilica of St. +Ambrose, with its spacious atrium and its crudely solemn mosaics, in +which it is surely your own fault if you don't forget Dr. Strauss and M. +Renan and worship as grimly as a Christian of the ninth century. + +It is part of the sordid prose of the Mont Cenis road that, unlike those +fine old unimproved passes, the Simplon, the Spluegen and--yet awhile +longer--the Saint-Gothard, it denies you a glimpse of that paradise +adorned by the four lakes even as that of uncommented Scripture by +the rivers of Eden. I made, however, an excursion to the Lake of Como, +which, though brief, lasted long enough to suggest to me that I too was +a hero of romance with leisure for a love-affair, and not a hurrying +tourist with a Bradshaw in his pocket. The Lake of Como has figured +largely in novels of "immoral" tendency--being commonly the spot to +which inflamed young gentlemen invite the wives of other gentlemen to +fly with them and ignore the restrictions of public opinion. But even +the Lake of Como has been revised and improved; the fondest prejudices +yield to time; it gives one somehow a sense of an aspiringly high tone. +I should pay a poor compliment at least to the swarming inmates of the +hotels which now alternate attractively by the water-side with villas +old and new were I to read the appearances more cynically. But if it is +lost to florid fiction it still presents its blue bosom to most other +refined uses, and the unsophisticated tourist, the American at least, +may do any amount of private romancing there. The pretty hotel at +Cadenabbia offers him, for instance, in the most elegant and assured +form, the so often precarious adventure of what he calls at home summer +board. It is all so unreal, so fictitious, so elegant and idle, so +framed to undermine a rigid sense of the chief end of man not being to +float for ever in an ornamental boat, beneath an awning tasselled like +a circus-horse, impelled by an affable Giovanni or Antonio from one +stately stretch of lake-laved villa steps to another, that departure +seems as harsh and unnatural as the dream-dispelling note of some +punctual voice at your bedside on a dusky winter morning. Yet I +wondered, for my own part, where I had seen it all before--the +pink-walled villas gleaming through their shrubberies of orange and +oleander, the mountains shimmering in the hazy light like so many +breasts of doves, the constant presence of the melodious Italian voice. +Where indeed but at the Opera when the manager has been more than +usually regardless of expense? Here in the foreground was the palace of +the nefarious barytone, with its banqueting-hall opening as freely on +the stage as a railway buffet on the platform; beyond, the delightful +back scene, with its operatic gamut of colouring; in the middle the +scarlet-sashed _barcaiuoli_, grouped like a chorus, hat in hand, +awaiting the conductor's signal. It was better even than being in a +novel--this being, this fairly wallowing, in a libretto. + + + + + +THE OLD SAINT-GOTHARD LEAVES FROM A NOTE-BOOK + + +Berne, _September_, 1873.--In Berne again, some eleven weeks after +having left it in July. I have never been in Switzerland so late, and +I came hither innocently supposing the last Cook's tourist to have paid +out his last coupon and departed. But I was lucky, it seems, to discover +an empty cot in an attic and a very tight place at a table d'hote. +People are all flocking out of Switzerland, as in July they were +flocking in, and the main channels of egress are terribly choked. I +have been here several days, watching them come and go; it is like +the march-past of an army. It gives one, for an occasional change +from darker thoughts, a lively impression of the numbers of people now +living, and above all now moving, at extreme ease in the world. Here +is little Switzerland disgorging its tens of thousands of honest folk, +chiefly English, and rarely, to judge by their faces and talk, children +of light in any eminent degree; for whom snow-peaks and glaciers +and passes and lakes and chalets and sunsets and a _cafe complet_, +"including honey," as the coupon says, have become prime necessities +for six weeks every year. It's not so long ago that lords and +nabobs monopolised these pleasures; but nowadays in a month's tour in +Switzerland is no more a _jeu de prince_ than a Sunday excursion. To +watch this huge Anglo-Saxon wave ebbing through Berne suggests, no doubt +most fallaciously, that the common lot of mankind isn't after all so +very hard and that the masses have reached a high standard of comfort. +The view of the Oberland chain, as you see it from the garden of the +hotel, really butters one's bread most handsomely; and here are I don't +know how many hundred Cook's tourists a day looking at it through the +smoke of their pipes. Is it really the "masses," however, that I see +every day at the table d'hote? They have rather too few h's to the +dozen, but their good-nature is great. Some people complain that they +"vulgarise" Switzerland; but as far as I am concerned I freely give +it up to them and offer them a personal welcome and take a peculiar +satisfaction in seeing them here. Switzerland is a "show country"--I am +more and more struck with the bearings of that truth; and its use in the +world is to reassure persons of a benevolent imagination when they +begin to wish for the drudging millions a greater supply of elevating +amusement. Here is amusement for a thousand years, and as elevating +certainly as mountains three miles high can make it. I expect to live +to see the summit of Monte Rosa heated by steam-tubes and adorned with a +hotel setting three tables d'hote a day. + +{Illustration: THE CLOCK TOWER, BERNE} + +I have been walking about the arcades, which used to bestow a grateful +shade in July, but which seem rather dusky and chilly in these +shortening autumn days. I am struck with the way the English always +speak of them--with a shudder, as gloomy, as dirty, as evil-smelling, +as suffocating, as freezing, as anything and everything but admirably +picturesque. I take us Americans for the only people who, in travelling, +judge things on the first impulse--when we do judge them at all--not +from the standpoint of simple comfort. Most of us, strolling forth into +these bustling basements, are, I imagine, too much amused, too much +diverted from the sense of an alienable right to public ease, to be +conscious of heat or cold, of thick air, or even of the universal smell +of strong _charcuterie_. If the visible romantic were banished from the +face of the earth I am sure the idea of it would still survive in some +typical American heart.... + +_Lucerne, September_.--Berne, I find, has been filling with tourists at +the expense of Lucerne, which I have been having almost to myself. There +are six people at the table d'hote; the excellent dinner denotes on the +part of the _chef_ the easy leisure in which true artists love to work. +The waiters have nothing to do but lounge about the hall and chink in +their pockets the fees of the past season. The day has been lovely +in itself, and pervaded, to my sense, by the gentle glow of a natural +satisfaction at my finding myself again on the threshold of Italy. I am +lodged _en prince_, in a room with a balcony hanging over the lake--a +balcony on which I spent a long time this morning at dawn, thanking the +mountain-tops, from the depths of a landscape-lover's heart, for their +promise of superbly fair weather. There were a great many mountain-tops +to thank, for the crags and peaks and pinnacles tumbled away through the +morning mist in an endless confusion of grandeur. I have been all day +in better humour with Lucerne than ever before--a forecast reflection of +Italian moods. If Switzerland, as I wrote the other day, is so furiously +a show-place, Lucerne is certainly one of the biggest booths at the +fair. The little quay, under the trees, squeezed in between the decks +of the steamboats and the doors of the hotels, is a terrible medley +of Saxon dialects--a jumble of pilgrims in all the phases of devotion, +equipped with book and staff, alpenstock and Baedeker. There are so +many hotels and trinket-shops, so many omnibuses and steamers, so many +Saint-Gothard _vetturini_, so many ragged urchins poking photographs, +minerals and Lucernese English at you, that you feel as if lake and +mountains themselves, in all their loveliness, were but a part of the +"enterprise" of landlords and pedlars, and half expect to see the Righi +and Pilatus and the fine weather figure as items on your hotel-bill +between the _bougie_ and the _siphon_. Nature herself assists you +to this conceit; there is something so operatic and suggestive of +footlights and scene-shifters in the view on which Lucerne looks out. +You are one of five thousand--fifty thousand--"accommodated" spectators; +you have taken your season-ticket and there is a responsible impresario +somewhere behind the scenes. There is such a luxury of beauty in the +prospect--such a redundancy of composition and effect--so many more +peaks and pinnacles than are needed to make one heart happy or regale +the vision of one quiet observer, that you finally accept the little +Babel on the quay and the looming masses in the clouds as equal parts of +a perfect system, and feel as if the mountains had been waiting so many +ages for the hotels to come and balance the colossal group, that +they show a right, after all, to have them big and numerous. +The scene-shifters have been at work all day long, composing and +discomposing the beautiful background of the prospect--massing the +clouds and scattering the light, effacing and reviving, making play +with their wonderful machinery of mist and haze. The mountains rise, one +behind the other, in an enchanting gradation of distances and of melting +blues and greys; you think each successive tone the loveliest and +haziest possible till you see another loom dimly behind it. I couldn't +enjoy even _The Swiss Times_, over my breakfast, till I had marched +forth to the office of the Saint-Gothard service of coaches and demanded +the banquette for to-morrow. The one place at the disposal of the office +was taken, but I might possibly _m'entendre_ with the conductor for his +own seat--the conductor being generally visible, in the intervals of +business, at the post-office. To the post-office, after breakfast, I +repaired, over the fine new bridge which now spans the green Reuss and +gives such a woeful air of country-cousinship to the crooked old wooden +structure which did sole service when I was here four years ago. The +old bridge is covered with a running hood of shingles and adorned with +a series of very quaint and vivid little paintings of the "Dance of +Death," quite in the Holbein manner; the new sends up a painful glare +from its white limestone, and is ornamented with candelabra in a +meretricious imitation of platinum. As an almost professional cherisher +of the quaint I ought to have chosen to return at least by the dark and +narrow way; but mark how luxury unmans us. I was already demoralised. +I crossed the threshold of the timbered portal, took a few steps, and +retreated. It _smelt badly!_ So I marched back, counting the lamps in +their fine falsity. But the other, the crooked and covered way, smelt +very badly indeed; and no good American is without a fund of accumulated +sensibility to the odour of stale timber. + +Meanwhile I had spent an hour in the great yard of the postoffice, +waiting for my conductor to turn up and seeing the yellow malles-postes +pushed to and fro. At last, being told my man was at my service, I was +brought to speech of a huge, jovial, bearded, delightful Italian, clad +in the blue coat and waistcoat, with close, round silver buttons, which +are a heritage of the old postilions. No, it was not he; it was a friend +of his; and finally the friend was produced, _en costume de ville_, but +equally jovial, and Italian enough--a brave Lucernese, who had spent half +of his life between Bellinzona and Camerlata. For ten francs this worthy +man's perch behind the luggage was made mine as far as Bellinzona, and +we separated with reciprocal wishes for good weather on the morrow. +To-morrow is so manifestly determined to be as fine as any other 30th +of September since the weather became on this planet a topic of +conversation that I have had nothing to do but stroll about Lucerne, +staring, loafing and vaguely intent on regarding the fact that, whatever +happens, my place is paid to Milan. I loafed into the immense new Hotel +National and read the _New York Tribune_ on a blue satin divan; after +which I was rather surprised, on coming out, to find myself staring at +a green Swiss lake and not at the Broadway omnibuses. The Hotel +National is adorned with a perfectly appointed Broadway bar--one of the +"prohibited" ones seeking hospitality in foreign lands after the manner +of an old-fashioned French or Italian refugee. + +_Milan, October_.--My journey hither was such a pleasant piece of +traveller's luck that I feel a delicacy for taking it to pieces to see +what it was made of. Do what we will, however, there remains in all +deeply agreeable impressions a charming something we can't analyse. I +found it agreeable even, given the rest of my case, to turn out of +bed, at Lucerne, by four o'clock, into the chilly autumn darkness. The +thick-starred sky was cloudless, and there was as yet no flush of dawn; +but the lake was wrapped in a ghostly white mist which crept halfway up +the mountains and made them look as if they too had been lying down +for the night and were casting away the vaporous tissues of their +bedclothes. Into this fantastic fog the little steamer went creaking +away, and I hung about the deck with the two or three travellers who +had known better than to believe it would save them francs or midnight +sighs--over those debts you "pay with your person"--to go and wait for +the diligence at the Poste at Fliielen, or yet at the Guillaume +Tell. The dawn came sailing up over the mountain-tops, flushed but +unperturbed, and blew out the little stars and then the big ones, as a +thrifty matron after a party blows out her candles and lamps; the mist +went melting and wandering away into the duskier hollows and recesses of +the mountains, and the summits defined their profiles against the cool +soft light. + +At Flueelen, before the landing, the big yellow coaches were actively +making themselves bigger, and piling up boxes and bags on their roofs +in a way to turn nervous people's thoughts to the sharp corners of the +downward twists of the great road. I climbed into my own banquette, and +stood eating peaches--half-a-dozen women were hawking them about under +the horses' legs--with an air of security that might have been offensive +to the people scrambling and protesting below between coupe and +interieur. They were all English and all had false alarms about the +claim of somebody else to their place, the place for which they produced +their ticket, with a declaration in three or four different tongues of +the inalienable right to it given them by the expenditure of British +gold. They were all serenely confuted by the stout, purple-faced, +many-buttoned conductors, patted on the backs, assured that their +bath-tubs had every advantage of position on the top, and stowed away +according to their dues. When once one has fairly started on a journey +and has but to go and go by the impetus received, it is surprising what +entertainment one finds in very small things. We surrender to the gaping +traveller's mood, which surely isn't the unwisest the heart knows. I +don't envy people, at any rate, who have outlived or outworn the simple +sweetness of feeling settled to go somewhere with bag and umbrella. If +we are settled on the top of a coach, and the "somewhere" contains an +element of the new and strange, the case is at its best. In this matter +wise people are content to become children again. We don't turn about on +our knees to look out of the omnibus-window, but we indulge in very much +the same round-eyed contemplation of accessible objects. Responsibility +is left at home or at the worst packed away in the valise, relegated +to quite another part of the diligence with the clean shirts and the +writing-case. I sucked in the gladness of gaping, for this occasion, +with the somewhat acrid juice of my indifferent peaches; it made me +think them very good. This was the first of a series of kindly services +it rendered me. It made me agree next, as we started, that the gentleman +at the booking-office at Lucerne had but played a harmless joke when he +told me the regular seat in the banquette was taken. No one appeared +to claim it; so the conductor and I reversed positions, and I found him +quite as conversible as the usual Anglo-Saxon. + +He was trolling snatches of melody and showing his great yellow teeth in +a jovial grin all the way to Bellinzona--and this in face of the sombre +fact that the Saint-Gothard tunnel is scraping away into the +mountain, all the while, under his nose, and numbering the days of the +many-buttoned brotherhood. But he hopes, for long service's sake, to be +taken into the employ of the railway; _he_ at least is no cherisher of +quaintness and has no romantic perversity. I found the railway coming +on, however, in a manner very shocking to mine. About an hour short of +Andermatt they have pierced a huge black cavity in the mountain, around +which has grown up a swarming, digging, hammering, smoke-compelling +colony. There are great barracks, with tall chimneys, down in the gorge +that bristled the other day but with natural graces, and a wonderful +increase of wine-shops in the little village of Goeschenen above. Along +the breast of the mountain, beside the road, come wandering several +miles of very handsome iron pipes, of a stupendous girth--a conduit for +the water-power with which some of the machinery is worked. It lies at +its mighty length among the rocks like an immense black serpent, +and serves, as a mere detail, to give one the measure of the central +enterprise. When at the end of our long day's journey, well down in warm +Italy, we came upon the other aperture of the tunnel, I could but uncap +with a grim reverence. Truly Nature is great, but she seems to me to +stand in very much the shoes of my poor friend the conductor. She is +being superseded at her strongest points, successively, and nothing +remains but for her to take humble service with her master. If she can +hear herself think amid that din of blasting and hammering she must be +reckoning up the years to elapse before the cleverest of Ober-Ingenieurs +decides that mountains are mere obstructive matter and has the Jungfrau +melted down and the residuum carried away in balloons and dumped upon +another planet. + +The Devil's Bridge, with the same failing apparently as the good Homer, +was decidedly nodding. The volume of water in the torrent was shrunken, +and I missed the thunderous uproar and far-leaping spray that have kept +up a miniature tempest in the neighbourhood on my other passages. +It suddenly occurs to me that the fault is not in the good Homer's +inspiration, but simply in the big black pipes above-mentioned. They +dip into the rushing stream higher up, presumably, and pervert its +fine frenzy to their prosaic uses. There could hardly be a more vivid +reminder of the standing quarrel between use and beauty, and of the +hard time poor beauty is having. I looked wistfully, as we rattled into +dreary Andermatt, at the great white zigzags of the Oberalp road which +climbed away to the left. Even on one's way to Italy one may spare a +throb of desire for the beautiful vision of the castled Grisons. Dear +to me the memory of my day's drive last summer through that long blue +avenue of mountains, to queer little mouldering Ilanz, visited before +supper in the ghostly dusk. At Andermatt a sign over a little black +doorway flanked by two dung-hills seemed to me tolerably comical: +_Mineraux_, _Quadrupedes_, _Oiseaux_, _OEufs_, _Tableaux Antiques_. We +bundled in to dinner and the American gentleman in the banquette made +the acquaintance of the Irish lady in the coupe, who talked of the +weather as _foine_ and wore a Persian scarf twisted about her head. At +the other end of the table sat an Englishman, out of the interieur, who +bore an extraordinary resemblance to the portraits of Edward VI's and +Mary's reigns. He walking, a convincing Holbein. The impression was +of value to a cherisher of quaintness, and he must have wondered--not +knowing me for such a character--why I stared at him. It wasn't him I +was staring at, but some handsome Seymour or Dudley or Digby with a ruff +and a round cap and plume. + +From Andermatt, through its high, cold, sunny valley, we passed into +rugged little Hospenthal, and then up the last stages of the ascent. +From here the road was all new to me. Among the summits of the various +Alpine passes there is little to choose. You wind and double slowly into +keener cold and deeper stillness; you put on your overcoat and turn up +the collar; you count the nestling snow-patches and then you cease to +count them; you pause, as you trudge before the lumbering coach, and +listen to the last-heard cow-bell tinkling away below you in kindlier +herbage. The sky was tremendously blue, and the little stunted bushes +on the snow-streaked slopes were all dyed with autumnal purples and +crimsons. It was a great display of colour. Purple and crimson too, +though not so fine, were the faces thrust out at us from the greasy +little double casements of a barrack beside the road, where the horses +paused before the last pull. There was one little girl in particular, +beginning to _lisser_ her hair, as civilisation approached, in a manner +not to be described, with her poor little blue-black hands. At the +summit are the two usual grim little stone taverns, the steel-blue tarn, +the snow-white peaks, the pause in the cold sunshine. Then we begin to +rattle down with two horses. In five minutes we are swinging along the +famous zigzags. Engineer, driver, horses--it's very handsomely done by +all of them. The road curves and curls and twists and plunges like the +tail of a kite; sitting perched in the banquette, you see it making +below you and in mid-air certain bold gyrations which bring you as near +as possible, short of the actual experience, to the philosophy of that +immortal Irishman who wished that his fall from the house-top would only +last. But the zigzags last no more than Paddy's fall, and in due time we +were all coming to our senses over _cafe au lait_ in the little inn +at Faido. After Faido the valley, plunging deeper, began to take thick +afternoon shadows from the hills, and at Airolo we were fairly in the +twilight. But the pink and yellow houses shimmered through the gentle +gloom, and Italy began in broken syllables to whisper that she was at +hand. For the rest of the way to Bellinzona her voice was muffled in the +grey of evening, and I was half vexed to lose the charming sight of the +changing vegetation. But only half vexed, for the moon was climbing all +the while nearer the edge of the crags that overshadowed us, and a thin +magical light came trickling down into the winding, murmuring gorges. It +was a most enchanting business. The chestnut-trees loomed up with double +their daylight stature; the vines began to swing their low festoons like +nets to trip up the fairies. At last the ruined towers of Bellinzona +stood gleaming in the moonshine, and we rattled into the great +post-yard. It was eleven o'clock and I had risen at four; moonshine +apart I wasn't sorry. + +All that was very well; but the drive next day from Bellinzona to Como +is to my mind what gives its supreme beauty to this great pass. One +can't describe the beauty of the Italian lakes, nor would one try if +one could; the floweriest rhetoric can recall it only as a picture on +a fireboard recalls a Claude. But it lay spread before me for a whole +perfect day: in the long gleam of the Major, from whose head the +diligence swerves away and begins to climb the bosky hills that divide +it from Lugano; in the shimmering, melting azure of the southern slopes +and masses; in the luxurious tangle of nature and the familiar amenity +of man; in the lawn-like inclinations, where the great grouped chestnuts +make so cool a shadow in so warm a light; in the rusty vineyards, the +littered cornfields and the tawdry wayside shrines. But most of all it's +the deep yellow light that enchants you and tells you where you are. +See it come filtering down through a vine-covered trellis on the red +handkerchief with which a ragged contadina has bound her hair, and all +the magic of Italy, to the eye, makes an aureole about the poor girl's +head. Look at a brown-breasted reaper eating his chunk of black bread +under a spreading chestnut; nowhere is shadow so charming, nowhere is +colour so charged, nowhere has accident such grace. The whole drive +to Lugano was one long loveliness, and the town itself is admirably +Italian. There was a great unlading of the coach, during which I +wandered under certain brown old arcades and bought for six sous, from +a young woman in a gold necklace, a hatful of peaches and figs. When +I came back I found the young man holding open the door of the second +diligence, which had lately come up, and beckoning to me with a +despairing smile. The young man, I must note, was the most amiable of +Ticinese; though he wore no buttons he was attached to the diligence +in some amateurish capacity, and had an eye to the mail-bags and other +valuables in the boot. I grumbled at Berne over the want of soft curves +in the Swiss temperament; but the children of the tangled Tessin are +cast in the Italian mould. My friend had as many quips and cranks as a +Neapolitan; we walked together for an hour under the chestnuts, while +the coach was plodding up from Bellinzona, and he never stopped singing +till we reached a little wine-house where he got his mouth full of bread +and cheese. I looked into his open door, a la Sterne, and saw the young +woman sitting rigid and grim, staring over his head and with a great +pile of bread and butter in her lap. He had only informed her most +politely that she was to be transferred to another diligence and must do +him the favour to descend; but she evidently knew of but one way for +a respectable young insulary of her sex to receive the politeness of a +foreign adventurer guilty of an eye betraying latent pleasantry. Heaven +only knew what he was saying! I told her, and she gathered up her +parcels and emerged. A part of the day's great pleasure perhaps was my +grave sense of being an instrument in the hands of the powers toward the +safe consignment of this young woman and her boxes. When once you have +really bent to the helpless you are caught; there is no such steel trap, +and it holds you fast. My rather grim Abigail was a neophyte in foreign +travel, though doubtless cunning enough at her trade, which I inferred +to be that of making up those prodigious chignons worn mainly by +English ladies. Her mistress had gone on a mule over the mountains to +Cadenabbia, and she herself was coming up with the wardrobe, two +big boxes and a bath-tub. I had played my part, under the powers, +at Bellinzona, and had interposed between the poor girl's frightened +English and the dreadful Ticinese French of the functionaries in the +post-yard. At the custom-house on the Italian frontier I was of peculiar +service; there was a kind of fateful fascination in it. The wardrobe +was voluminous; I exchanged a paternal glance with my charge as +the _douanier_ plunged his brown fists into it. Who was the lady at +Cadenabbia? What was she to me or I to her? She wouldn't know, when she +rustled down to dinner next day, that it was I who had guided the frail +skiff of her public basis of vanity to port. So unseen but not unfelt do +we cross each other's orbits. The skiff however may have foundered that +evening in sight of land. I disengaged the young woman from among her +fellow-travellers and placed her boxes on a hand-cart in the picturesque +streets of Como, within a stone's throw of that lovely striped and toned +cathedral which has the facade of cameo medallions. I could only make +the _facchino_ swear to take her to the steamboat. He too was a jovial +dog, but I hope he was polite with precautions. + +1873. + + + + + +ITALY REVISITED + + +I + +I waited in Paris until after the elections for the new Chamber (they +took place on the 14th of October); as only after one had learned that +the famous attempt of Marshal MacMahon and his ministers to drive the +French nation to the polls like a flock of huddling sheep, each with the +white ticket of an official candidate round his neck, had not achieved +the success which the energy of the process might have promised--only +then it was possible to draw a long breath and deprive the republican +party of such support as might have been conveyed in one's sympathetic +presence. Seriously speaking too, the weather had been enchanting--there +were Italian fancies to be gathered without leaving the banks of the +Seine. Day after day the air was filled with golden light, and even +those chalkish vistas of the Parisian _beaux quartiers_ assumed the +iridescent tints of autumn. Autumn weather in Europe is often such +a very sorry affair that a fair-minded American will have it on his +conscience to call attention to a rainless and radiant October. + +The echoes of the electoral strife kept me company for a while after +starting upon that abbreviated journey to Turin which, as you leave +Paris at night, in a train unprovided with encouragements to slumber, is +a singular mixture of the odious and the charming. The charming indeed +I think prevails; for the dark half of the journey is the least +interesting. The morning light ushers you into the romantic gorges +of the Jura, and after a big bowl of _cafe au lait_ at Culoz you may +compose yourself comfortably for the climax of your spectacle. The day +before leaving Paris I met a French friend who had just returned from a +visit to a Tuscan country-seat where he had been watching the vintage. +"Italy," he said, "is more lovely than words can tell, and France, +steeped in this electoral turmoil, seems no better than a bear-garden." +The part of the bear-garden through which you travel as you approach the +Mont Cenis seemed to me that day very beautiful. The autumn colouring, +thanks to the absence of rain, had been vivid and crisp, and the +vines that swung their low garlands between the mulberries round about +Chambery looked like long festoons of coral and amber. The frontier +station of Modane, on the further side of the Mont Cenis Tunnel, is +a very ill-regulated place; but even the most irritable of tourists, +meeting it on his way southward, will be disposed to consider it +good-naturedly. There is far too much bustling and scrambling, and the +facilities afforded you for the obligatory process of ripping open +your luggage before the officers of the Italian custom-house are +much scantier than should be; but for myself there is something that +deprecates irritation in the shabby green and grey uniforms of all the +Italian officials who stand loafing about and watching the northern +invaders scramble back into marching order. Wearing an administrative +uniform doesn't necessarily spoil a man's temper, as in France one is +sometimes led to believe; for these excellent under-paid Italians carry +theirs as lightly as possible, and their answers to your inquiries don't +in the least bristle with rapiers, buttons and cockades. After leaving +Modane you slide straight downhill into the Italy of your desire; from +which point the road edges, after the grand manner, along those +It precipices that stand shoulder to shoulder, in a prodigious +perpendicular file, till they finally admit you to a distant glimpse he +ancient capital of Piedmont. + +Turin is no city of a name to conjure with, and I pay an extravagant +tribute to subjective emotion in speaking of it as ancient, if the place +is less bravely peninsular than Florence and Rome, at least it is more +in the scenic tradition than New York Paris; and while I paced the great +arcades and looked at the fourth-rate shop windows I didn't scruple to +cultivate a shameless optimism. Relatively speaking, Turin touches +a chord; but there is after all no reason in a large collection of +shabbily-stuccoed houses, disposed in a rigidly rectangular manner, for +passing a day of deep, still gaiety. The only reason, I am afraid, is +the old superstition of Italy--that property in the very look of the +written word, the evocation of a myriad images, that makes any lover of +the arts take Italian satisfactions on easier terms than any others. The +written word stands for something that eternally tricks us; we juggle +to our credulity even with such inferior apparatus as is offered to +our hand at Turin. I roamed all the morning under the tall porticoes, +thinking it sufficient joy to take note of the soft, warm air, of that +local colour of things that is at once so broken and so harmonious, and +of the comings and goings, the physiognomy and manners, of the excellent +Turinese. I had opened the old book again; the old charm was in the +style; I was in a more delightful world. I saw nothing surpassingly +beautiful or curious; but your true taster of the most seasoned of +dishes finds well-nigh the whole mixture in any mouthful. Above all on +the threshold of Italy he knows again the solid and perfectly definable +pleasure of finding himself among the traditions of the grand style in +architecture. It must be said that we have still to go there to +recover the sense of the domiciliary mass. In northern cities there are +beautiful houses, picturesque and curious houses; sculptured gables that +hang over the street, charming bay-windows, hooded doorways, elegant +proportions, a profusion of delicate ornament; but a good specimen of +an old Italian palazzo has a nobleness that is all its own. We laugh +at Italian "palaces," at their peeling paint, their nudity, their +dreariness; but they have the great palatial quality--elevation and +extent. They make of smaller things the apparent abode of pigmies; they +round their great arches and interspace their huge windows with a proud +indifference to the cost of materials. These grand proportions--the +colossal basements, the doorways that seem meant for cathedrals, the far +away cornices--impart by contrast a humble and _bourgeois_ expression +to interiors founded on the sacrifice of the whole to the part, and +in which the air of grandeur depends largely on the help of the +upholsterer. At Turin my first feeling was really one of renewed shame +for our meaner architectural manners. If the Italians at bottom despise +the rest of mankind and regard them as barbarians, disinherited of the +tradition of form, the idea proceeds largely, no doubt, from our +living in comparative mole-hills. They alone were really to build their +civilisation. + +{Illustration: UNDER THE ARCADES, TURIN.} + +An impression which on coming back to Italy I find even stronger than +when it was first received is that of the contrast between the fecundity +of the great artistic period and the vulgarity there of the genius of +to-day. The first few hours spent on Italian soil are sufficient to +renew it, and the question I allude to is, historically speaking, one of +the oddest. That the people who but three hundred years ago had the best +taste in the world should now have the worst; that having produced the +noblest, loveliest, costliest works, they should now be given up to the +manufacture of objects at once ugly and paltry; that the race of which +Michael Angelo and Raphael, Leonardo and Titian were characteristic +should have no other title to distinction than third-rate _genre_ +pictures and catchpenny statues--all this is a frequent perplexity to +the observer of actual Italian life. The flower of "great" art in these +latter years ceased to bloom very powerfully anywhere; but nowhere +does it seem so drooping and withered as in the shadow of the immortal +embodiments of the old Italian genius. You go into a church or a gallery +and feast your fancy upon a splendid picture or an exquisite piece of +sculpture, and on issuing from the door that has admitted you to the +beautiful past are confronted with something that has the effect of a +very bad joke. The aspect of your lodging--the carpets, the curtains, +the upholstery in general, with their crude and violent colouring and +their vulgar material--the trumpery things in the shops, the extreme +bad taste of the dress of the women, the cheapness and baseness of every +attempt at decoration in the cafes and railway-stations, the hopeless +frivolity of everything that pretends to be a work of art--all this +modern crudity runs riot over the relics of the great period. + +We can do a thing for the first time but once; it is but once for all +that we can have a pleasure in its freshness. This is a law not on the +whole, I think, to be regretted, for we sometimes learn to know things +better by not enjoying them too much. It is certain, however, at the +same time, that a visitor who has worked off the immediate ferment for +this inexhaustibly interesting country has by no means entirely drained +the cup. After thinking of Italy as historical and artistic it will +do him no great harm to think of her for a while as panting both for +a future and for a balance at the bank; aspirations supposedly much +at variance with the Byronic, the Ruskinian, the artistic, poetic, +aesthetic manner of considering our eternally attaching peninsula. +He may grant--I don't say it is absolutely necessary--that its actual +aspects and economics are ugly, prosaic, provokingly out of relation +to the diary and the album; it is nevertheless true that, at the point +things have come to, modern Italy in a manner imposes herself. I hadn't +been many hours in the country before that truth assailed me; and I may +add that, the first irritation past, I found myself able to accept it. +For, if we think, nothing is more easy to understand than an honest ire +on the part of the young Italy of to-day at being looked at by all the +world as a kind of soluble pigment. Young Italy, preoccupied with its +economical and political future, must be heartily tired of being admired +for its eyelashes and its pose. In one of Thackeray's novels occurs +a mention of a young artist who sent to the Royal Academy a picture +representing "A Contadino dancing with a Trasteverina at the door of a +Locanda, to the music of a Pifferaro." It is in this attitude and with +these conventional accessories that the world has hitherto seen fit to +represent young Italy, and one doesn't wonder that if the youth has +any spirit he should at last begin to resent our insufferable aesthetic +patronage. He has established a line of tram-cars in Rome, from +the Porta del Popolo to the Ponte Molle, and it is on one of these +democratic vehicles that I seem to see him taking his triumphant course +down the vista of the future. I won't pretend to rejoice with him any +more than I really do; I won't pretend, as the sentimental tourists say +about it all, as if it were the setting of an intaglio or the border of +a Roman scarf, to "like" it. Like it or not, as we may, it is evidently +destined to be; I see a new Italy in the future which in many important +respects will equal, if not surpass, the most enterprising sections of +our native land. Perhaps by that time Chicago and San Francisco will +have acquired a pose, and their sons and daughters will dance at the +doors of _locande_. + +However this may be, the accomplished schism between the old order and +the new is the promptest moral of a fresh visit to this ever-suggestive +part of the world. The old has become more and more a museum, preserved +and perpetuated in the midst of the new, but without any further +relation to it--it must be admitted indeed that such a relation is +considerable--than that of the stock on his shelves to the shopkeeper, +or of the Siren of the South to the showman who stands before his booth. +More than once, as we move about nowadays in the Italian cities, +there seems to pass before our eyes a vision of the coming years. It +represents to our satisfaction an Italy united and prosperous, +but altogether scientific and commercial. The Italy indeed that we +sentimentalise and romance about was an ardently mercantile country; +though I suppose it loved not its ledgers less, but its frescoes +and altar-pieces more. Scattered through this paradise regained of +trade--this country of a thousand ports--we see a large number of +beautiful buildings in which an endless series of dusky pictures are +darkening, dampening, fading, failing, through the years. By the doors +of the beautiful buildings are little turnstiles at which there sit +a great many uniformed men to whom the visitor pays a tenpenny fee. +Inside, in the vaulted and frescoed chambers, the art of Italy lies +buried as in a thousand mausoleums. It is well taken care of; it is +constantly copied; sometimes it is "restored"--as in the case of that +beautiful boy-figure of Andrea del Sarto at Florence, which may be seen +at the gallery of the Uffizi with its honourable duskiness quite peeled +off and heaven knows what raw, bleeding cuticle laid bare. One evening +lately, near the same Florence, in the soft twilight, I took a stroll +among those encircling hills on which the massive villas are mingled +with the vaporous olives. Presently I arrived where three roads met at a +wayside shrine, in which, before some pious daub of an old-time Madonna, +a little votive lamp glimmered through the evening air. The hour, +the atmosphere, the place, the twinkling taper, the sentiment of the +observer, the thought that some one had been rescued here from an +assassin or from some other peril and had set up a little grateful altar +in consequence, against the yellow-plastered wall of a tangled _podere_; +all this led me to approach the shrine with a reverent, an emotional +step. I drew near it, but after a few steps I paused. I became aware of +an incongruous odour; it seemed to me that the evening air was charged +with a perfume which, although to a certain extent familiar, had not +hitherto associated itself with rustic frescoes and wayside altars. I +wondered, I gently sniffed, and the question so put left me no doubt. +The odour was that of petroleum; the votive taper was nourished with +the essence of Pennsylvania. I confess that I burst out laughing, and a +picturesque contadino, wending his homeward way in the dusk, stared at +me as if I were an iconoclast. He noticed the petroleum only, I imagine, +to snuff it fondly up; but to me the thing served as a symbol of the +Italy of the future. There is a horse-car from the Porta del Popolo to +the Ponte Molle, and the Tuscan shrines are fed with kerosene. + + +II + +If it's very well meanwhile to come to Turin first it's better still to +go to Genoa afterwards. Genoa is the tightest topographic tangle in the +world, which even a second visit helps you little to straighten out. In +the wonderful crooked, twisting, climbing, soaring, burrowing Genoese +alleys the traveller is really up to his neck in the old Italian +sketchability. The pride of the place, I believe, is a port of great +capacity, and the bequest of the late Duke of Galliera, who left four +millions of dollars for the purpose of improving and enlarging it, will +doubtless do much toward converting it into one of the great commercial +stations of Europe. But as, after leaving my hotel the afternoon I +arrived, I wandered for a long time at hazard through the tortuous +by-ways of the city, I said to myself, not without an accent of private +triumph, that here at last was something it would be almost impossible +to modernise. I had found my hotel, in the first place, extremely +entertaining--the Croce di Malta, as it is called, established in a +gigantic palace on the edge of the swarming and not over-clean harbour. +It was the biggest house I had ever entered--the basement alone would +have contained a dozen American caravansaries. I met an American +gentleman in the vestibule who (as he had indeed a perfect right to be) +was annoyed by its troublesome dimensions--one was a quarter of an hour +ascending out of the basement--and desired to know if it were a "fair +sample" of the Genoese inns. It appeared an excellent specimen of +Genoese architecture generally; so far as I observed there were few +houses perceptibly smaller than this Titanic tavern. I lunched in a +dusky ballroom whose ceiling was vaulted, frescoed and gilded with the +fatal facility of a couple of centuries ago, and which looked out upon +another ancient housefront, equally huge and equally battered, separated +from it only by a little wedge of dusky space--one of the principal +streets, I believe, of Genoa--whence out of dim abysses the population +sent up to the windows (I had to crane out very far to see it) a +perpetual clattering, shuffling, chaffering sound. Issuing forth +presently into this crevice of a street I found myself up to my neck +in that element of the rich and strange--as to visible and reproducible +"effect," I mean--for the love of which one revisits Italy. It offered +itself indeed in a variety of colours, some of which were not remarkable +for their freshness or purity. But their combined charm was not to be +resisted, and the picture glowed with the rankly human side of southern +lowlife. + +Genoa, as I have hinted, is the crookedest and most incoherent of +cities; tossed about on the sides and crests of a dozen hills, it is +seamed with gullies and ravines that bristle with those innumerable +palaces for which we have heard from our earliest years that the place +is celebrated. These great structures, with their mottled and faded +complexions, lift their big ornamental cornices to a tremendous height +in the air, where, in a certain indescribably forlorn and desolate +fashion, overtopping each other, they seem to reflect the twinkle and +glitter of the warm Mediterranean. Down about the basements, in the +close crepuscular alleys, the people are for ever moving to and fro or +standing in their cavernous doorways and their dusky, crowded shops, +calling, chattering, laughing, lamenting, living their lives in the +conversational Italian fashion. I had for a long time had no such +vision of possible social pressure. I hadn't for a long time seen people +elbowing each other so closely or swarming so thickly out of populous +hives. A traveller is often moved to ask himself whether it has been +worth while to leave his home--whatever his home may have been--only to +encounter new forms of human suffering, only to be reminded that toil +and privation, hunger and sorrow and sordid effort, are the portion of +the mass of mankind. To travel is, as it were, to go to the play, to +attend a spectacle; and there is something heartless in stepping forth +into foreign streets to feast on "character" when character consists +simply of the slightly different costume in which labour and want +present themselves. These reflections were forced upon me as I strolled +as through a twilight patched with colour and charged with stale smells; +but after a time they ceased to bear me company. The reason of this, I +think, is because--at least to foreign eyes--the sum of Italian misery +is, on the whole, less than the sum of the Italian knowledge of life. +That people should thank you, with a smile of striking sweetness, for +the gift of twopence, is a proof, certainly, of extreme and constant +destitution; but (keeping in mind the sweetness) it also attests an +enviable ability not to be depressed by circumstances. I know that this +may possibly be great nonsense; that half the time we are acclaiming +the fine quality of the Italian smile the creature so constituted for +physiognomic radiance may be in a sullen frenzy of impatience and pain. +Our observation in any foreign land is extremely superficial, and our +remarks are happily not addressed to the inhabitants themselves, who +would be sure to exclaim upon the impudence of the fancy-picture. + +The other day I visited a very picturesque old city upon a mountain-top, +where, in the course of my wanderings, I arrived at an old disused gate +in the ancient town-wall. The gate hadn't been absolutely forfeited; +but the recent completion of a modern road down the mountain led most +vehicles away to another egress. The grass-grown pavement, which wound +into the plain by a hundred graceful twists and plunges, was now given +up to ragged contadini and their donkeys, and to such wayfarers as were +not alarmed at the disrepair into which it had fallen. I stood in the +shadow of the tall old gateway admiring the scene, looking to right and +left at the wonderful walls of the little town, perched on the edge of +a shaggy precipice; at the circling mountains over against them; at the +road dipping downward among the chestnuts and olives. There was no one +within sight but a young man who slowly trudged upward with his coat +slung over his shoulder and his hat upon his ear in the manner of a +cavalier in an opera. Like an operatic performer too he sang as he came; +the spectacle, generally, was operatic, and as his vocal flourishes +reached my ear I said to myself that in Italy accident was always +romantic and that such a figure had been exactly what was wanted to set +off the landscape. It suggested in a high degree that knowledge of life +for which I just now commended the Italians. I was turning back under +the old gateway when the young man overtook me and, suspending his song, +asked me if I could favour him with a match to light the hoarded remnant +of a cigar. This request led, as I took my way again to the inn, to my +falling into talk with him. He was a native of the ancient city, and +answered freely all my inquiries as to its manners and customs and +its note of public opinion. But the point of my anecdote is that he +presently acknowledged himself a brooding young radical and communist, +filled with hatred of the present Italian government, raging with +discontent and crude political passion, professing a ridiculous hope +that Italy would soon have, as France had had, her "'89," and declaring +that he for his part would willingly lend a hand to chop off the +heads of the king and the royal family. He was an unhappy, underfed, +unemployed young man, who took a hard, grim view of everything and was +operatic only quite in spite of himself. This made it very absurd of me +to have looked at him simply as a graceful ornament to the prospect, +an harmonious little figure in the middle distance. "Damn the prospect, +damn the middle distance!" would have been all _his_ philosophy. Yet but +for the accident of my having gossipped with him I should have made him +do service, in memory, as an example of sensuous optimism! + +I am bound to say however that I believe a great deal of the sensuous +optimism observable in the Genoese alleys and beneath the low, crowded +arcades along the port was very real. Here every one was magnificently +sunburnt, and there were plenty of those queer types, mahogany-coloured, +bare-chested mariners with earrings and crimson girdles, that seem to +people a southern seaport with the chorus of "Masaniello." But it is not +fair to speak as if at Genoa there were nothing but low-life to be seen, +for the place is the residence of some of the grandest people in the +world. Nor are all the palaces ranged upon dusky alleys; the handsomest +and most impressive form a splendid series on each side of a couple +of very proper streets, in which there is plenty of room for a +coach-and-four to approach the big doorways. Many of these doorways +are open, revealing great marble staircases with couchant lions for +balustrades and ceremonious courts surrounded by walls of sun-softened +yellow. One of the great piles in the array is coloured a goodly red and +contains in particular the grand people I just now spoke of. They +live indeed on the third floor; but here they have suites of wonderful +painted and gilded chambers, in which foreshortened frescoes also cover +the vaulted ceilings and florid mouldings emboss the ample walls. These +distinguished tenants bear the name of Vandyck, though they are members +of the noble family of Brignole-Sale, one of whose children--the Duchess +of Galliera--has lately given proof of nobleness in presenting the +gallery of the red palace to the city of Genoa. + + +III + +On leaving Genoa I repaired to Spezia, chiefly with a view of +accomplishing a sentimental pilgrimage, which I in fact achieved in the +most agreeable conditions. The Gulf of Spezia is now the headquarters +of the Italian fleet, and there were several big iron-plated frigates +riding at anchor in front of the town. The streets were filled with lads +in blue flannel, who were receiving instruction at a schoolship in the +harbour, and in the evening--there was a brilliant moon--the little +breakwater which stretched out into the Mediterranean offered a scene of +recreation to innumerable such persons. But this fact is from the point +of view of the cherisher of quaintness of little account, for since it +has become prosperous Spezia has grown ugly. The place is filled with +long, dull stretches of dead wall and great raw expanses of artificial +land. It wears that look of monstrous, of more than far-western newness +which distinguishes all the creations of the young Italian State. Nor +did I find any great compensation in an immense inn of recent birth, +an establishment seated on the edge of the sea in anticipation of a +_passeggiata_ which is to come that way some five years hence, the +region being in the meantime of the most primitive formation. The inn +was filled with grave English people who looked respectable and +bored, and there was of course a Church of England service in the +gaudily-frescoed parlour. Neither was it the drive to Porto Venere that +chiefly pleased me--a drive among vines and olives, over the hills +and beside the Mediterranean, to a queer little crumbling village on a +headland, as sweetly desolate and superannuated as the name it bears. +There is a ruined church near the village, which occupies the site +(according to tradition) of an ancient temple of Venus; and if Venus ever +revisits her desecrated shrines she must sometimes pause a moment in +that sunny stillness and listen to the murmur of the tideless sea at +the base of the narrow promontory. If Venus sometimes comes there Apollo +surely does as much; for close to the temple is a gateway surmounted by +an inscription in Italian and English, which admits you to a curious, +and it must be confessed rather cockneyfied, cave among the rocks. It +was here, says the inscription, that the great Byron, swimmer and poet, +"defied the waves of the Ligurian sea." The fact is interesting, though +not supremely so; for Byron was always defying something, and if a slab +had been put up wherever this performance came off these commemorative +tablets would be in many parts of Europe as thick as milestones. + +No; the great merit of Spezia, to my eye, is that I engaged a boat there +of a lovely October afternoon and had myself rowed across the gulf--it +took about an hour and a half--to the little bay of Lerici, which opens +out of it. This bay of Lerici is charming; the bosky grey-green hills +close it in, and on either side of the entrance, perched on a bold +headland, a wonderful old crumbling castle keeps ineffectual guard. The +place is classic to all English travellers, for in the middle of the +curving shore is the now desolate little villa in which Shelley spent +the last months of his short life. He was living at Lerici when he +started on that short southern cruise from which he never returned. The +house he occupied is strangely shabby and as sad as you may choose to +find it. It stands directly upon the beach, with scarred and battered +walls and a loggia of several arches opening to a little terrace with +a rugged parapet, which, when the wind blows, must be drenched with +the salt spray. The place is very lonely--all overwearied with sun and +breeze and brine--very close to nature, as it was Shelley's passion +to be. I can fancy a great lyric poet sitting on the terrace of a warm +evening and feeling very far from England in the early years of the +century. In that place, and with his genius, he would as a matter of +course have heard in the voice of nature a sweetness which only the +lyric movement could translate. It is a place where an English-speaking +pilgrim himself may very honestly think thoughts and feel moved to lyric +utterance. But I must content myself with saying in halting prose that +I remember few episodes of Italian travel more sympathetic, as they have +it here, than that perfect autumn afternoon; the half-hour's station on +the little battered terrace of the villa; the climb to the singularly +felicitous old castle that hangs above Lerici; the meditative lounge, in +the fading light, on the vine-decked platform that looked out toward the +sunset and the darkening mountains and, far below, upon the quiet sea, +beyond which the pale-faced tragic villa stared up at the brightening +moon. + + +IV + +I had never known Florence more herself, or in other words more +attaching, than I found her for a week in that brilliant October. +She sat in the sunshine beside her yellow river like the little +treasure-city she has always seemed, without commerce, without other +industry than the manufacture of mosaic paper-weights and alabaster +Cupids, without actuality or energy or earnestness or any of those +rugged virtues which in most cases are deemed indispensable for civic +cohesion; with nothing but the little unaugmented stock of her mediaeval +memories, her tender-coloured mountains, her churches and palaces, +pictures and statues. There were very few strangers; one's detested +fellow-pilgrim was infrequent; the native population itself seemed +scanty; the sound of wheels in the streets was but occasional; by eight +o'clock at night, apparently, every one had gone to bed, and the +musing wanderer, still wandering and still musing, had the place to +himself--had the thick shadow-masses of the great palaces, and the +shafts of moonlight striking the polygonal paving-stones, and the empty +bridges, and the silvered yellow of the Arno, and the stillness broken +only by a homeward step, a step accompanied by a snatch of song from a +warm Italian voice. My room at the inn looked out on the river and was +flooded all day with sunshine. There was an absurd orange-coloured +paper on the walls; the Arno, of a hue not altogether different, flowed +beneath; and on the other side of it rose a line of sallow houses, of +extreme antiquity, crumbling and mouldering, bulging and protruding over +the stream. (I seem to speak of their fronts; but what I saw was their +shabby backs, which were exposed to the cheerful flicker of the river, +while the fronts stood for ever in the deep damp shadow of a narrow +mediaeval street.) All this brightness and yellowness was a perpetual +delight; it was a part of that indefinably charming colour which +Florence always seems to wear as you look up and down at it from +the river, and from the bridges and quays. This is a kind of grave +radiance--a harmony of high tints--which I scarce know how to describe. +There are yellow walls and green blinds and red roofs, there are +intervals of brilliant brown and natural-looking blue; but the picture +is not spotty nor gaudy, thanks to the distribution of the colours in +large and comfortable masses, and to the washing-over of the scene by +some happy softness of sunshine. The river-front of Florence is in short +a delightful composition. Part of its charm comes of course from the +generous aspect of those high-based Tuscan palaces which a renewal of +acquaintance with them has again commended to me as the most dignified +dwellings in the world. Nothing can be finer than that look of giving +up the whole immense ground-floor to simple purposes of vestibule and +staircase, of court and high-arched entrance; as if this were all but +a massive pedestal for the real habitation and people weren't properly +housed unless, to begin with, they should be lifted fifty feet above +the pavement. The great blocks of the basement; the great intervals, +horizontally and vertically, from window to window (telling of the +height and breadth of the rooms within); the armorial shield hung +forward at one of the angles; the wide-brimmed roof, overshadowing +the narrow street; the rich old browns and yellows of the walls: these +definite elements put themselves together with admirable art. + +{Illustration: ROMAN GATEWAY, RIMINI.} + +Take a Tuscan pile of this type out of its oblique situation in the +town; call it no longer a palace, but a villa; set it down by a terrace +on one of the hills that encircle Florence, place a row of high-waisted +cypresses beside it, give it a grassy court-yard and a view of the +Florentine towers and the valley of the Arno, and you will think it +perhaps even more worthy of your esteem. It was a Sunday noon, and +brilliantly warm, when I again arrived; and after I had looked from my +windows a while at that quietly-basking river-front I have spoken of +I took my way across one of the bridges and then out of one of the +gates--that immensely tall Roman Gate in which the space from the top of +the arch to the cornice (except that there is scarcely a cornice, it is +all a plain massive piece of wall) is as great, or seems to be, as that +from the ground to the former point. Then I climbed a steep and winding +way--much of it a little dull if one likes, being bounded by mottled, +mossy garden-walls--to a villa on a hill-top, where I found various +things that touched me with almost too fine a point. Seeing them again, +often, for a week, both by sunlight and moonshine, I never quite learned +not to covet them; not to feel that not being a part of them was somehow +to miss an exquisite chance. What a tranquil, contented life it seemed, +with romantic beauty as a part of its daily texture!--the sunny terrace, +with its tangled _podere_ beneath it; the bright grey olives against +the bright blue sky; the long, serene, horizontal lines of other villas, +flanked by their upward cypresses, disposed upon the neighbouring hills; +the richest little city in the world in a softly-scooped hollow at one's +feet, and beyond it the most appealing of views, the most majestic, +yet the most familiar. Within the villa was a great love of art and +a painting-room full of felicitous work, so that if human life there +confessed to quietness, the quietness was mostly but that of the intent +act. A beautiful occupation in that beautiful position, what could +possibly be better? That is what I spoke just now of envying--a way +of life that doesn't wince at such refinements of peace and ease. When +labour self-charmed presents itself in a dull or an ugly place we esteem +it, we admire it, but we scarce feel it to be the ideal of good fortune. +When, however, its votaries move as figures in an ancient, noble +landscape, and their walks and contemplations are like a turning of the +leaves of history, we seem to have before us an admirable case of virtue +made easy; meaning here by virtue contentment and concentration, a real +appreciation of the rare, the exquisite though composite, medium of +life. You needn't want a rush or a crush when the scene itself, the mere +scene, shares with you such a wealth of consciousness. + +It is true indeed that I might after a certain time grow weary of a +regular afternoon stroll among the Florentine lanes; of sitting on low +parapets, in intervals of flower-topped wall, and looking across at +Fiesole or down the rich-hued valley of the Arno; of pausing at the open +gates of villas and wondering at the height of cypresses and the depth +of loggias; of walking home in the fading light and noting on a dozen +westward-looking surfaces the glow of the opposite sunset. But for a +week or so all this was delightful. The villas are innumerable, and if +you're an aching alien half the talk is about villas. This one has a +story; that one has another; they all look as if they had stories--none +in truth predominantly gay. Most of them are offered to rent (many of +them for sale) at prices unnaturally low; you may have a tower and a +garden, a chapel and an expanse of thirty windows, for five hundred +dollars a year. In imagination you hire three or four; you take +possession and settle and stay. Your sense of the fineness of the finest +is of something very grave and stately; your sense of the bravery of two +or three of the best something quite tragic and sinister. From what does +this latter impression come? You gather it as you stand there in the +early dusk, with your eyes on the long, pale-brown facade, the enormous +windows, the iron cages fastened to the lower ones. Part of the brooding +expression of these great houses comes, even when they have not fallen +into decay, from their look of having outlived their original use. Their +extraordinary largeness and massiveness are a satire on their present +fate. They weren't built with such a thickness of wall and depth of +embrasure, such a solidity of staircase and superfluity of stone, +simply to afford an economical winter residence to English and American +families. I don't know whether it was the appearance of these stony old +villas, which seemed so dumbly conscious of a change of manners, that +threw a tinge of melancholy over the general prospect; certain it is +that, having always found this note as of a myriad old sadnesses in +solution in the view of Florence, it seemed to me now particularly +strong. "Lovely, lovely, but it makes me 'blue,'" the sensitive stranger +couldn't but murmur to himself as, in the late afternoon, he looked +at the landscape from over one of the low parapets, and then, with his +hands in his pockets, turned away indoors to candles and dinner. + + +V + +Below, in the city, through all frequentation of streets and churches +and museums, it was impossible not to have a good deal of the same +feeling; but here the impression was more easy to analyse. It came from +a sense of the perfect separateness of all the great productions of +the Renaissance from the present and the future of the place, from the +actual life and manners, the native ideal. I have already spoken of +the way in which the vast aggregation of beautiful works of art in the +Italian cities strikes the visitor nowadays--so far as present Italy +is concerned--as the mere stock-in-trade of an impecunious but thrifty +people. It is this spiritual solitude, this conscious disconnection of +the great works of architecture and sculpture that deposits a certain +weight upon the heart; when we see a great tradition broken we feel +something of the pain with which we hear a stifled cry. But regret +is one thing and resentment is another. Seeing one morning, in a +shop-window, the series of _Mornings in Florence_ published a few years +since by Mr. Ruskin, I made haste to enter and purchase these amusing +little books, some passages of which I remembered formerly to have +read. I couldn't turn over many pages without observing that the +"separateness" of the new and old which I just mentioned had produced +in their author the liveliest irritation. With the more acute phases of +this condition it was difficult to sympathise, for the simple reason, it +seems to me, that it savours of arrogance to demand of any people, as +a right of one's own, that they shall be artistic. "Be artistic +yourselves!" is the very natural reply that young Italy has at hand for +English critics and censors. When a people produces beautiful statues +and pictures it gives us something more than is set down in the bond, +and we must thank it for its generosity; and when it stops producing +them or caring for them we may cease thanking, but we hardly have a +right to begin and rail. The wreck of Florence, says Mr. Ruskin, "is now +too ghastly and heart-breaking to any human soul that remembers the days +of old"; and these desperate words are an allusion to the fact that the +little square in front of the cathedral, at the foot of Giotto's Tower, +with the grand Baptistery on the other side, is now the resort of +a number of hackney-coaches and omnibuses. This fact is doubtless +lamentable, and it would be a hundred times more agreeable to see among +people who have been made the heirs of so priceless a work of art as the +sublime campanile some such feeling about it as would keep it free even +from the danger of defilement. A cab-stand is a very ugly and dirty +thing, and Giotto's Tower should have nothing in common with such +conveniences. But there is more than one way of taking such things, and +the sensitive stranger who has been walking about for a week with his +mind full of the sweetness and suggestiveness of a hundred Florentine +places may feel at last in looking into Mr. Ruskin's little tracts that, +discord for discord, there isn't much to choose between the importunity +of the author's personal ill-humour and the incongruity of horse-pails +and bundles of hay. And one may say this without being at all a partisan +of the doctrine of the inevitableness of new desecrations. For my own +part, I believe there are few things in this line that the new Italian +spirit isn't capable of, and not many indeed that we aren't destined to +see. Pictures and buildings won't be completely destroyed, because in +that case the _forestieri_, scatterers of cash, would cease to arrive +and the turn-stiles at the doors of the old palaces and convents, with +the little patented slit for absorbing your half-franc, would grow quite +rusty, would stiffen with disuse. But it's safe to say that the +new Italy growing into an old Italy again will continue to take her +elbow-room wherever she may find it. + +{Illustration: SANTA MARIA NOVELLA, FLORENCE} + +I am almost ashamed to say what I did with Mr. Ruskin's little books. I +put them into my pocket and betook myself to Santa Maria Novella. There +I sat down and, after I had looked about for a while at the beautiful +church, drew them forth one by one and read the greater part of them. +Occupying one's self with light literature in a great religious edifice +is perhaps as bad a piece of profanation as any of those rude dealings +which Mr. Ruskin justly deplores; but a traveller has to make the most +of odd moments, and I was waiting for a friend in whose company I was +to go and look at Giotto's beautiful frescoes in the cloister of the +church. My friend was a long time coming, so that I had an hour with Mr. +Ruskin, whom I called just now a light _litterateur_ because in these +little Mornings in Florence he is for ever making his readers laugh. +I remembered of course where I was, and in spite of my latent hilarity +felt I had rarely got such a snubbing. I had really been enjoying the +good old city of Florence, but I now learned from Mr. Ruskin that this +was a scandalous waste of charity. I should have gone about with an +imprecation on my lips, I should have worn a face three yards long. I +had taken great pleasure in certain frescoes by Ghirlandaio in the choir +of that very church; but it appeared from one of the little books that +these frescoes were as naught. I had much admired Santa Croce and had +thought the Duomo a very noble affair; but I had now the most positive +assurance I knew nothing about them. After a while, if it was only +ill-humour that was needed for doing honour to the city of the Medici, +I felt that I had risen to a proper level; only now it was Mr. Ruskin +himself I had lost patience with, not the stupid Brunelleschi, not the +vulgar Ghirlandaio. Indeed I lost patience altogether, and asked myself +by what right this informal votary of form pretended to run riot through +a poor charmed _flaneur's_ quiet contemplations, his attachment to the +noblest of pleasures, his enjoyment of the loveliest of cities. The +little books seemed invidious and insane, and it was only when I +remembered that I had been under no obligation to buy them that I +checked myself in repenting of having done so. + +Then at last my friend arrived and we passed together out of the church, +and, through the first cloister beside it, into a smaller enclosure +where we stood a while to look at the tomb of the Marchesa +Strozzi-Ridolfi, upon which the great Giotto has painted four superb +little pictures. It was easy to see the pictures were superb; but I drew +forth one of my little books again, for I had observed that Mr. Ruskin +spoke of them. Hereupon I recovered my tolerance; for what could be +better in this case, I asked myself, than Mr. Ruskin's remarks? They +are in fact excellent and charming--full of appreciation of the deep +and simple beauty of the great painter's work. I read them aloud to my +companion; but my companion was rather, as the phrase is, "put off" +by them. One of the frescoes--it is a picture of the birth of the +Virgin--contains a figure coming through a door. "Of ornament," I quote, +"there is only the entirely simple outline of the vase which the servant +carries; of colour two or three masses of sober red and pure white, +with brown and grey. That is all," Mr. Ruskin continues. "And if you are +pleased with this you can see Florence. But if not, by all means amuse +yourself there, if you find it amusing, as long as you like; you +can never see it." _You can never see it._ This seemed to my friend +insufferable, and I had to shuffle away the book again, so that we might +look at the fresco with the unruffled geniality it deserves. We agreed +afterwards, when in a more convenient place I read aloud a good many +more passages from the precious tracts, that there are a great many +ways of seeing Florence, as there are of seeing most beautiful and +interesting things, and that it is very dry and pedantic to say that +the happy vision depends upon our squaring our toes with a certain +particular chalk-mark. We see Florence wherever and whenever we enjoy +it, and for enjoying it we find a great many more pretexts than Mr. +Ruskin seems inclined to allow. My friend and I convinced ourselves +also, however, that the little books were an excellent purchase, on +account of the great charm and felicity of much of their incidental +criticism; to say nothing, as I hinted just now, of their being +extremely amusing. Nothing in fact is more comical than the familiar +asperity of the author's style and the pedagogic fashion in which he +pushes and pulls his unhappy pupils about, jerking their heads toward +this, rapping their knuckles for that, sending them to stand in +corners and giving them Scripture texts to copy. But it is neither the +felicities nor the aberrations of detail, in Mr. Ruskin's writings, that +are the main affair for most readers; it is the general tone that, as +I have said, puts them off or draws them on. For many persons he will +never bear the test of being read in this rich old Italy, where art, so +long as it really lived at all, was spontaneous, joyous, irresponsible. +If the reader is in daily contact with those beautiful Florentine +works which do still, in away, force themselves into notice through the +vulgarity and cruelty of modern profanation, it will seem to him that +this commentator's comment is pitched in the strangest falsetto key. +"One may read a hundred pages of this sort of thing," said my friend, +"without ever dreaming that he is talking about _art_. You can say +nothing worse about him than that." Which is perfectly true. Art is the +one corner of human life in which we may take our ease. To justify our +presence there the only thing demanded of us is that we shall have felt +the representational impulse. In other connections our impulses are +conditioned and embarrassed; we are allowed to have only so many as +are consistent with those of our neighbours; with their convenience +and well-being, with their convictions and prejudices, their rules and +regulations. Art means an escape from all this. Wherever her shining +standard floats the need for apology and compromise is over; there it +is enough simply that we please or are pleased. There the tree is judged +only by its fruits. If these are sweet the tree is justified--and not +less so the consumer. + +One may read a great many pages of Mr. Ruskin without getting a hint of +this delightful truth; a hint of the not unimportant fact that art after +all is made for us and not we for art. This idea that the value of +a work is in the amount of illusion it yields is conspicuous by its +absence. And as for Mr. Ruskin's world's being a place--his world of +art--where we may take life easily, woe to the luckless mortal who +enters it with any such disposition. Instead of a garden of delight, he +finds a sort of assize court in perpetual session. Instead of a place +in which human responsibilities are lightened and suspended, he finds a +region governed by a kind of Draconic legislation. His responsibilities +indeed are tenfold increased; the gulf between truth and error is for +ever yawning at his feet; the pains and penalties of this same error are +advertised, in apocalyptic terminology, upon a thousand sign-posts; and +the rash intruder soon begins to look back with infinite longing to the +lost paradise of the artless. There can be no greater want of tact in +dealing with those things with which men attempt to ornament life than +to be perpetually talking about "error." A truce to all rigidities is +the law of the place; the only thing absolute there is that some force +and some charm have worked. The grim old bearer of the scales excuses +herself; she feels this not to be her province. Differences here are not +iniquity and righteousness; they are simply variations of temperament, +kinds of curiosity. We are not under theological government. + + +VI + +It was very charming, in the bright, warm days, to wander from one +corner of Florence to another, paying one's respects again to remembered +masterpieces. It was pleasant also to find that memory had played no +tricks and that the rarest things of an earlier year were as rare as +ever. To enumerate these felicities would take a great deal of space; +for I never had been more struck with the mere quantity of brilliant +Florentine work. Even giving up the Duomo and Santa Croce to Mr. Ruskin +as very ill-arranged edifices, the list of the Florentine treasures is +almost inexhaustible. Those long outer galleries of the Uffizi had +never beguiled me more; sometimes there were not more than two or +three figures standing there, Baedeker in hand, to break the charming +perspective. One side of this upstairs portico, it will be remembered, +is entirely composed of glass; a continuity of old-fashioned windows, +draped with white curtains of rather primitive fashion, which hang there +till they acquire a perceptible tone. The light, passing through +them, is softly filtered and diffused; it rests mildly upon the +old marbles--chiefly antique Roman busts--which stand in the narrow +intervals of the casements. It is projected upon the numerous pictures +that cover the opposite wall and that are not by any means, as a general +thing, the gems of the great collection; it imparts a faded brightness +to the old ornamental arabesques upon the painted wooden ceiling, and it +makes a great soft shining upon the marble floor, in which, as you look +up and down, you see the strolling tourists and the motionless copyists +almost reflected. I don't know why I should find all this very pleasant, +but in fact, I have seldom gone into the Uffizi without walking the +length of this third-story cloister, between the (for the most part) +third-rate canvases and panels and the faded cotton curtains. Why is +it that in Italy we see a charm in things in regard to which in other +countries we always take vulgarity for granted? If in the city of +New York a great museum of the arts were to be provided, by way of +decoration, with a species of verandah enclosed on one side by a series +of small-paned windows draped in dirty linen, and furnished on the other +with an array of pictorial feebleness, the place being surmounted by +a thinly-painted wooden roof, strongly suggestive of summer heat, +of winter cold, of frequent leakage, those amateurs who had had the +advantage of foreign travel would be at small pains to conceal their +contempt. Contemptible or respectable, to the judicial mind, this quaint +old loggia of the Uffizi admitted me into twenty chambers where I found +as great a number of ancient favourites. I don't know that I had a +warmer greeting for any old friend than for Andrea del Sarto, that most +touching of painters who is not one of the first. But it was on the +other side of the Arno that I found him in force, in those dusky +drawing-rooms of the Pitti Palace to which you take your way along +the tortuous tunnel that wanders through the houses of Florence and is +supported by the little goldsmiths' booths on the Ponte Vecchio. In the +rich insufficient light of these beautiful rooms, where, to look at the +pictures, you sit in damask chairs and rest your elbows on tables of +malachite, the elegant Andrea becomes deeply effective. Before long he +has drawn you close. But the great pleasure, after all, was to revisit +the earlier masters, in those specimens of them chiefly that bloom +so unfadingly on the big plain walls of the Academy. Fra Angelico and +Filippo Lippi, Botticelli and Lorenzo di Credi are the clearest, +the sweetest and best of all painters; as I sat for an hour in +their company, in the cold great hall of the institution I have +mentioned--there are shabby rafters above and an immense expanse of +brick tiles below, and many bad pictures as well as good--it seemed +to me more than ever that if one really had to choose one couldn't do +better than choose here. You may rest at your ease at the Academy, in +this big first room--at the upper end especially, on the left--because +more than many other places it savours of old Florence. More for +instance, in reality, than the Bargello, though the Bargello makes great +pretensions. Beautiful and masterful though the Bargello is, it smells +too strongly of restoration, and, much of old Italy as still lurks in +its furbished and renovated chambers, it speaks even more distinctly +of the ill-mannered young kingdom that has--as "unavoidably" as you +please--lifted down a hundred delicate works of sculpture from the +convent-walls where their pious authors placed them. If the early Tuscan +painters are exquisite I can think of no praise pure enough for the +sculptors of the same period, Donatello and Luca della Robbia, Matteo +Civitale and Mina da Fiesole, who, as I refreshed my memory of them, +seemed to me to leave absolutely nothing to be desired in the way of +straightness of inspiration and grace of invention. The Bargello is full +of early Tuscan sculpture, most of the pieces of which have come from +suppressed religious houses; and even if the visitor be an ardent +liberal he is uncomfortably conscious of the rather brutal process by +which it has been collected. One can hardly envy young Italy the number +of odious things she has had to do. + +The railway journey from Florence to Rome has been altered both for the +better and for the worse; for the better in that it has been shortened +by a couple of hours; for the worse inasmuch as when about half the +distance has been traversed the train deflects to the west and leaves +the beautiful old cities of Assisi, Perugia, Terni, Narni, unvisited. +Of old it was possible to call at these places, in a manner, from the +window of the train; even if you didn't stop, as you probably couldn't, +every time you passed, the immensely interesting way in which, like a +loosened belt on an aged and shrunken person, their ample walls held +them easily together was something well worth noting. Now, however, +for compensation, the express train to Rome stops at Orvieto, and in +consequence... In consequence what? What is the result of the stop of +an express train at Orvieto? As I glibly wrote that sentence I suddenly +paused, aware of the queer stuff I was uttering. That an express train +would graze the base of the horrid purple mountain from the apex of +which this dark old Catholic city uplifts the glittering front of +its cathedral--that might have been foretold by a keen observer of +contemporary manners. But that it would really have the grossness to +hang about is a fact over which, as he records it, an inveterate, a +perverse cherisher of the sense of the past order, the order still +largely prevailing at the time of his first visit to Italy, may well +make what is vulgarly called an ado. The train does stop at Orvieto, +not very long, it is true, but long enough to let you out. The same +phenomenon takes place on the following day, when, having visited the +city, you get in again. I availed myself without scruple of both of +these occasions, having formerly neglected to drive to the place in a +post-chaise. But frankly, the railway-station being in the plain and the +town on the summit of an extraordinary hill, you have time to forget +the puffing indiscretion while you wind upwards to the city-gate. The +position of Orvieto is superb--worthy of the "middle distance" of an +eighteenth-century landscape. But, as every one knows, the splendid +Cathedral is the proper attraction of the spot, which, indeed, save +for this fine monument and for its craggy and crumbling ramparts, is a +meanly arranged and, as Italian cities go, not particularly impressive +little town. I spent a beautiful Sunday there and took in the charming +church. I gave it my best attention, though on the whole I fear I found +it inferior to its fame. A high concert of colour, however, is the +densely carved front, richly covered with radiant mosaics. The old white +marble of the sculptured portions is as softly yellow as ancient ivory; +the large exceedingly bright pictures above them flashed and twinkled +in the glorious weather. Very striking and interesting the theological +frescoes of Luca Signorelli, though I have seen compositions of this +general order that appealed to me more. Characteristically fresh, +finally, the clear-faced saints and seraphs, in robes of pink and azure, +whom Fra Angelico has painted upon the ceiling of the great chapel, +along with a noble sitting figure--more expressive of movement than most +of the creations of this pictorial peace-maker--of Christ in judgment. +Yet the interest of the cathedral of Orvieto is mainly not the visible +result, but the historical process that lies behind it; those three +hundred years of the applied devotion of a people of which an American +scholar has written an admirable account.{1} + +1877. + +{1} Charles Eliot Norton, _Notes of Travel and Study in Italy_. + + + + + +A ROMAN HOLIDAY + + +It is certainly sweet to be merry at the right moment; but the right +moment hardly seems to me the ten days of the Roman Carnival. It was +my rather cynical suspicion perhaps that they wouldn't keep to my +imagination the brilliant promise of legend; but I have been justified +by the event and have been decidedly less conscious of the festal +influences of the season than of the inalienable gravity of the place. +There was a time when the Carnival was a serious matter--that is a +heartily joyous one; but, thanks to the seven-league boots the kingdom +of Italy has lately donned for the march of progress in quite other +directions, the fashion of public revelry has fallen woefully out of +step. The state of mind and manners under which the Carnival was kept in +generous good faith I doubt if an American can exactly conceive: he can +only say to himself that for a month in the year there must have been +things--things considerably of humiliation--it was comfortable to +forget. But now that Italy is made the Carnival is unmade; and we are +not especially tempted to envy the attitude of a population who have +lost their relish for play and not yet acquired to any striking extent +an enthusiasm for work. The spectacle on the Corso has seemed to me, on +the whole, an illustration of that great breach with the past of which +Catholic Christendom felt the somewhat muffled shock in September, 1870. +A traveller acquainted with the fully papal Rome, coming back any time +during the past winter, must have immediately noticed that something +momentous had happened--something hostile to the elements of picture +and colour and "style." My first warning was that ten minutes after +my arrival I found myself face to face with a newspaper stand. The +impossibility in the other days of having anything in the journalistic +line but the _Osservatore Romano_ and the _Voce della Verita_ used to +seem to me much connected with the extraordinary leisure of thought and +stillness of mind to which the place admitted you. But now the slender +piping of the Voice of Truth is stifled by the raucous note of eventide +vendors of the _Capitale_, the _Liberta_ and the _Fanfulla_; and Rome +reading unexpurgated news is another Rome indeed. For every subscriber +to the _Liberta_ there may well be an antique masker and reveller less. +As striking a sign of the new regime is the extraordinary increase of +population. The Corso was always a well-filled street, but now it's +a perpetual crush. I never cease to wonder where the new-comers are +lodged, and how such spotless flowers of fashion as the gentlemen who +stare at the carriages can bloom in the atmosphere of those _camere +mobiliate_ of which I have had glimpses. This, however, is their own +question, and bravely enough they meet it. They proclaimed somehow, to +the first freshness of my wonder, as I say, that by force of numbers +Rome had been secularised. An Italian dandy is a figure visually +to reckon with, but these goodly throngs of them scarce offered +compensation for the absent monsignori, treading the streets in their +purple stockings and followed by the solemn servants who returned on +their behalf the bows of the meaner sort; for the mourning gear of the +cardinals' coaches that formerly glittered with scarlet and swung with +the weight of the footmen clinging behind; for the certainty that you'll +not, by the best of traveller's luck, meet the Pope sitting deep in the +shadow of his great chariot with uplifted fingers like some inaccessible +idol in his shrine. You may meet the King indeed, who is as ugly, as +imposingly ugly, as some idols, though not so inaccessible. The other +day as I passed the Quirinal he drove up in a low carriage with a single +attendant; and a group of men and women who had been waiting near +the gate rushed at him with a number of folded papers. The carriage +slackened pace and he pocketed their offerings with a business-like +air--hat of a good-natured man accepting handbills at a street-corner. +Here was a monarch at his palace gate receiving petitions from his +subjects--being adjured to right their wrongs. The scene ought to have +thrilled me, but somehow it had no more intensity than a woodcut in an +illustrated newspaper. Homely I should call it at most; admirably so, +certainly, for there were lately few sovereigns standing, I believe, +with whom their people enjoyed these filial hand-to-hand relations. The +King this year, however, has had as little to do with the Carnival as +the Pope, and the innkeepers and Americans have marked it for their own. + +It was advertised to begin at half-past two o'clock of a certain +Saturday, and punctually at the stroke of the hour, from my room across +a wide court, I heard a sudden multiplication of sounds and confusion +of tongues in the Corso. I was writing to a friend for whom I cared +more than for any mere romp; but as the minutes elapsed and the hubbub +deepened curiosity got the better of affection, and I remembered that I +was really within eye-shot of an affair the fame of which had ministered +to the daydreams of my infancy. I used to have a scrap-book with a +coloured print of the starting of the bedizened wild horses, and the use +of a library rich in keepsakes and annuals with a frontispiece commonly +of a masked lady in a balcony, the heroine of a delightful tale further +on. Agitated by these tender memories I descended into the street; but +I confess I looked in vain for a masked lady who might serve as a +frontispiece, in vain for any object whatever that might adorn a tale. +Masked and muffled ladies there were in abundance; but their masks were +of ugly wire, perfectly resembling the little covers placed upon strong +cheese in German hotels, and their drapery was a shabby water-proof +with the hood pulled over their chignons. They were armed with great tin +scoops or funnels, with which they solemnly shovelled lime and flour +out of bushel-baskets and down on the heads of the people in the street. +They were packed into balconies all the way along the straight vista of +the Corso, in which their calcareous shower maintained a dense, gritty, +unpalatable fog. The crowd was compact in the street, and the Americans +in it were tossing back confetti out of great satchels hung round their +necks. It was quite the "you're another" sort of repartee, and less +seasoned than I had hoped with the airy mockery tradition hangs about +this festival. The scene was striking, in a word; but somehow not as +I had dreamed of its being. I stood regardful, I suppose, but with a +peculiarly tempting blankness of visage, for in a moment I received +half a bushel of flour on my too-philosophic head. Decidedly it was an +ignoble form of humour. I shook my ears like an emergent diver, and had +a sudden vision of how still and sunny and solemn, how peculiarly and +undisturbedly themselves, how secure from any intrusion less sympathetic +than one's own, certain outlying parts of Rome must just then be. The +Carnival had received its deathblow in my imagination; and it has been +ever since but a thin and dusky ghost of pleasure that has flitted at +intervals in and out of my consciousness. + +I turned my back accordingly on the Corso and wandered away to the +grass-grown quarters delightfully free even from the possibility of +a fellow-countryman. And so having set myself an example I have been +keeping Carnival by strolling perversely along the silent circumference +of Rome. I have doubtless lost a great deal. The Princess Margaret has +occupied a balcony opposite the open space which leads into Via Condotti +and, I believe, like the discreet princess she is, has dealt in no +missiles but bonbons, bouquets and white doves. I would have waited +half an hour any day to see the Princess Margaret hold a dove on her +forefinger; but I never chanced to notice any preparation for that +effect. And yet do what you will you can't really elude the Carnival. As +the days elapse it filters down into the manners of the common people, +and before the week is over the very beggars at the church-doors seem to +have gone to the expense of a domino. When you meet these specimens of +dingy drollery capering about in dusky back-streets at all hours of +the day and night, meet them flitting out of black doorways between the +greasy groups that cluster about Roman thresholds, you feel that a love +of "pranks," the more vivid the better, must from far back have +been implanted in the Roman temperament with a strong hand. An +unsophisticated American is wonderstruck at the number of persons, of +every age and various conditions, whom it costs nothing in the nature of +an ingenuous blush to walk up and down the streets in the costume of a +theatrical supernumerary. Fathers of families do it at the head of an +admiring progeniture; aunts and uncles and grandmothers do it; all +the family does it, with varying splendour but with the same good +conscience. "A pack of babies!" the doubtless too self-conscious alien +pronounces it for its pains, and tries to imagine himself strutting +along Broadway in a battered tin helmet and a pair of yellow tights. Our +vices are certainly different; it takes those of the innocent sort to be +so ridiculous. A self-consciousness lapsing so easily, in fine, strikes +me as so near a relation to amenity, urbanity and general gracefulness +that, for myself, I should be sorry to lay a tax on it, lest these other +commodities should also cease to come to market. + +I was rewarded, when I had turned away with my ears full of flour, by +a glimpse of an intenser life than the dingy foolery of the Corso. +I walked down by the back streets to the steps mounting to the +Capitol--that long inclined plane, rather, broken at every two paces, +which is the unfailing disappointment, I believe, of tourists primed for +retrospective raptures. Certainly the Capitol seen from this side isn't +commanding. The hill is so low, the ascent so narrow, Michael Angelo's +architecture in the quadrangle at the top so meagre, the whole place +somehow so much more of a mole-hill than a mountain, that for the first +ten minutes of your standing there Roman history seems suddenly to have +sunk through a trap-door. It emerges however on the other side, in the +Forum; and here meanwhile, if you get no sense of the sublime, you get +gradually a sense of exquisite composition. Nowhere in Rome is more +colour, more charm, more sport for the eye. The mild incline, during +the winter months, is always covered with lounging sun-seekers, and +especially with those more constantly obvious members of the Roman +population--beggars, soldiers, monks and tourists. The beggars and +peasants lie kicking their heels along that grandest of loafing-places +the great steps of the Ara Coeli. The dwarfish look of the Capitol is +intensified, I think, by the neighbourhood of this huge blank staircase, +mouldering away in disuse, the weeds thick in its crevices, and climbing +to the rudely solemn facade of the church. The sunshine glares on this +great unfinished wall only to light up its featureless despair, its +expression of conscious, irremediable incompleteness. Sometimes, massing +its rusty screen against the deep blue sky, with the little cross and +the sculptured porch casting a clear-cut shadow on the bricks, it seems +to have even more than a Roman desolation, it confusedly suggests Spain +and Africa--lands with no latent _risorgimenti_, with absolutely +nothing but a fatal past. The legendary wolf of Rome has lately been +accommodated with a little artificial grotto, among the cacti and the +palms, in the fantastic triangular garden squeezed between the steps of +the church and the ascent to the Capitol, where she holds a perpetual +levee and "draws" apparently as powerfully as the Pope himself. Above, +in the piazzetta before the stuccoed palace which rises so jauntily on a +basement of thrice its magnitude, are more loungers and knitters in the +sun, seated round the massively inscribed base of the statue of Marcus +Aurelius. Hawthorne has perfectly expressed the attitude of this +admirable figure in saying that it extends its arm with "a command which +is in itself a benediction." I doubt if any statue of king or captain +in the public places of the world has more to commend it to the general +heart. Irrecoverable simplicity--residing so in irrecoverable Style--has +no sturdier representative. Here is an impression that the sculptors of +the last three hundred years have been laboriously trying to reproduce; +but contrasted with this mild old monarch their prancing horsemen +suggest a succession of riding-masters taking out young ladies' +schools. The admirably human character of the figure survives the rusty +decomposition of the bronze and the slight "debasement" of the art; and +one may call it singular that in the capital of Christendom the portrait +most suggestive of a Christian conscience is that of a pagan emperor. + +You recover in some degree your stifled hopes of sublimity as you +pass beyond the palace and take your choice of either curving slope to +descend into the Forum. Then you see that the little stuccoed edifice +is but a modern excrescence on the mighty cliff of a primitive +construction, whose great squares of porous tufa, as they underlie each +other, seem to resolve themselves back into the colossal cohesion of +unhewn rock. There are prodigious strangenesses in the union of +this airy and comparatively fresh-faced superstructure and these +deep-plunging, hoary foundations; and few things in Rome are more +entertaining to the eye than to measure the long plumb-line which drops +from the inhabited windows of the palace, with their little over-peeping +balconies, their muslin curtains and their bird-cages, down to the +rugged constructional work of the Republic. In the Forum proper the +sublime is eclipsed again, though the late extension of the excavations +gives a chance for it. + +Nothing in Rome helps your fancy to a more vigorous backward flight than +to lounge on a sunny day over the railing which guards the great central +researches. It "says" more things to you than you can repeat to see the +past, the ancient world, as you stand there, bodily turned up with the +spade and transformed from an immaterial, inaccessible fact of time into +a matter of soils and surfaces. The pleasure is the same--in kind--as +what you enjoy of Pompeii, and the pain the same. It wasn't here, +however, that I found my compensation for forfeiting the spectacle on +the Corso, but in a little church at the end of the narrow byway which +diverges up the Palatine from just beside the Arch of Titus. This byway +leads you between high walls, then takes a bend and introduces you to a +long row of rusty, dusty little pictures of the stations of the cross. +Beyond these stands a small church with a front so modest that you +hardly recognise it till you see the leather curtain. I never see a +leather curtain without lifting it; it is sure to cover a constituted +_scene_ of some sort--good, bad or indifferent. The scene this time was +meagre--whitewash and tarnished candlesticks and mouldy muslin flowers +being its principal features. I shouldn't have remained if I hadn't +been struck with the attitude of the single worshipper--a young priest +kneeling before one of the sidealtars, who, as I entered, lifted his +head and gave me a sidelong look so charged with the languor of devotion +that he immediately became an object of interest. He was visiting each +of the altars in turn and kissing the balustrade beneath them. He was +alone in the church, and indeed in the whole region. There were no +beggars even at the door; they were plying their trade on the skirts +of the Carnival. In the entirely deserted place he alone knelt for +religion, and as I sat respectfully by it seemed to me I could hear in +the perfect silence the far-away uproar of the maskers. It was my +late impression of these frivolous people, I suppose, joined with the +extraordinary gravity of the young priest's face--his pious fatigue, +his droning prayer and his isolation--that gave me just then and there a +supreme vision of the religious passion, its privations and resignations +and exhaustions and its terribly small share of amusement. He was +young and strong and evidently of not too refined a fibre to enjoy the +Carnival; but, planted there with his face pale with fasting and his +knees stiff with praying, he seemed so stern a satire on it and on +the crazy thousands who were preferring it to _his_ way, that I half +expected to see some heavenly portent out of a monastic legend come down +and confirm his choice. Yet I confess that though I wasn't enamoured of +the Carnival myself, his seemed a grim preference and this forswearing +of the world a terrible game--a gaining one only if your zeal never +falters; a hard fight when it does. In such an hour, to a stout young +fellow like the hero of my anecdote, the smell of incense must seem +horribly stale and the muslin flowers and gilt candlesticks to figure no +great bribe. And it wouldn't have helped him much to think that not so +very far away, just beyond the Forum, in the Corso, there was sport for +the million, and for nothing. I doubt on the other hand whether my young +priest had thought of this. He had made himself a temple out of the very +elements of his innocence, and his prayers followed each other too +fast for the tempter to slip in a whisper. And so, as I say, I found a +solider fact of human nature than the love of _coriandoli_. + +One of course never passes the Colosseum without paying it one's +respects--without going in under one of the hundred portals and crossing +the long oval and sitting down a while, generally at the foot of the +cross in the centre. I always feel, as I do so, as if I were seated in +the depths of some Alpine valley. The upper portions of the side toward +the Esquiline look as remote and lonely as an Alpine ridge, and you +raise your eyes to their rugged sky-line, drinking in the sun and +silvered by the blue air, with much the same feeling with which you +would take in a grey cliff on which an eagle might lodge. This roughly +mountainous quality of the great ruin is its chief interest; beauty +of detail has pretty well vanished, especially since the high-growing +wild-flowers have been plucked away by the new government, whose +functionaries, surely, at certain points of their task, must have felt +as if they shared the dreadful trade of those who gather samphire. +Even if you are on your way to the Lateran you won't grudge the twenty +minutes it will take you, on leaving the Colosseum, to turn away under +the Arch of Constantine, whose noble battered bas-reliefs, with the +chain of tragic statues--fettered, drooping barbarians--round its +summit, I assume you to have profoundly admired, toward the piazzetta of +the church of San Giovanni e Paolo, on the slope of Caelian. No spot in +Rome can show a cluster of more charming accidents. The ancient brick +apse of the church peeps down into the trees of the little wooded walk +before the neighbouring church of San Gregorio, intensely venerable +beneath its excessive modernisation; and a series of heavy brick +buttresses, flying across to an opposite wall, overarches the short, +steep, paved passage which leads into the small square. This is flanked +on one side by the long mediaeval portico of the church of the two +saints, sustained by eight time-blackened columns of granite and marble. +On another rise the great scarce-windowed walls of a Passionist convent, +and on the third the portals of a grand villa, whose tall porter, +with his cockade and silver-topped staff, standing sublime behind his +grating, seems a kind of mundane St. Peter, I suppose, to the beggars +who sit at the church door or lie in the sun along the farther slope +which leads to the gate of the convent. The place always seems to me the +perfection of an out-of-the-way corner--a place you would think twice +before telling people about, lest you should find them there the next +time you were to go. It is such a group of objects, singly and in their +happy combination, as one must come to Rome to find at one's house +door; but what makes it peculiarly a picture is the beautiful dark +red campanile of the church, which stands embedded in the mass of +the convent. It begins, as so many things in Rome begin, with a stout +foundation of antique travertine, and rises high, in delicately quaint +mediaeval brickwork--little tiers and apertures sustained on miniature +columns and adorned with small cracked slabs of green and yellow marble, +inserted almost at random. When there are three or four brown-breasted +contadini sleeping in the sun before the convent doors, and a departing +monk leading his shadow down over them, I think you will not find +anything in Rome more _sketchable_. + +If you stop, however, to observe everything worthy of your water-colours +you will never reach St. John Lateran. My business was much less with +the interior of that vast and empty, that cold clean temple, which I +have never found peculiarly interesting, than with certain charming +features of its surrounding precinct--the crooked old court beside it, +which admits you to the Baptistery and to a delightful rear-view of +the queer architectural odds and ends that may in Rome compose a florid +ecclesiastical facade. There are more of these, a stranger jumble +of chance detail, of lurking recesses and wanton projections and +inexplicable windows, than I have memory or phrase for; but the gem +of the collection is the oddly perched peaked turret, with its yellow +travertine welded upon the rusty brickwork, which was not meant to be +suspected, and the brickwork retreating beneath and leaving it in the +odd position of a tower _under_ which you may see the sky. As to the +great front of the church overlooking the Porta San Giovanni, you are +not admitted behind the scenes; the term is quite in keeping, for the +architecture has a vastly theatrical air. It is extremely imposing--that +of St. Peter's alone is more so; and when from far off on the Campagna +you see the colossal images of the mitred saints along the top standing +distinct against the sky, you forget their coarse construction and their +inflated draperies. The view from the great space which stretches from +the church steps to the city wall is the very prince of views. Just +beside you, beyond the great alcove of mosaic, is the Scala Santa, the +marble staircase which (says the legend) Christ descended under the +weight of Pilate's judgment, and which all Christians must for ever +ascend on their knees; before you is the city gate which opens upon the +Via Appia Nuova, the long gaunt file of arches of the Claudian aqueduct, +their jagged ridge stretching away like the vertebral column of some +monstrous mouldering skeleton, and upon the blooming brown and purple +flats and dells of the Campagna and the glowing blue of the Alban +Mountains, spotted with their white, high-nestling towns; while to your +left is the great grassy space, lined with dwarfish mulberry-trees, +which stretches across to the damp little sister-basilica of Santa Croce +in Gerusalemme. During a former visit to Rome I lost my heart to this +idle tract,{1} + +{1} Utterly overbuilt and gone--1909. + +and wasted much time in sitting on the steps of the church and watching +certain white-cowled friars who were sure to be passing there for the +delight of my eyes. There are fewer friars now, and there are a great +many of the king's recruits, who inhabit the ex-conventual barracks +adjoining Santa Croce and are led forward to practise their goose-step +on the sunny turf. Here too the poor old cardinals who are no longer +to be seen on the Pincio descend from their mourning-coaches and +relax their venerable knees. These members alone still testify to the +traditional splendour of the princes of the Church; for as they advance +the lifted black petticoat reveals a flash of scarlet stockings and +makes you groan at the victory of civilisation over colour. + +{Illustration: THE FACADE OF ST. JOHN LATERAN, ROME.} + +If St. John Lateran disappoints you internally, you have an easy +compensation in pacing the long lane which connects it with Santa +Maria Maggiore and entering the singularly perfect nave of that most +delightful of churches. The first day of my stay in Rome under the +old dispensation I spent in wandering at random through the city, +with accident for my _valet-de-place_. It served me to perfection and +introduced me to the best things; among others to an immediate happy +relation with Santa Maria Maggiore. First impressions, memorable +impressions, are generally irrecoverable; they often leave one the +wiser, but they rarely return in the same form. I remember, of my coming +uninformed and unprepared into the place of worship and of curiosity +that I have named, only that I sat for half an hour on the edge of the +base of one of the marble columns of the beautiful nave and enjoyed a +perfect revel of--what shall I call it?--taste, intelligence, fancy, +perceptive emotion? The place proved so endlessly suggestive that +perception became a throbbing confusion of images, and I departed with +a sense of knowing a good deal that is not set down in Murray. I have +seated myself more than once again at the base of the same column; +but you live your life only once, the parts as well as the whole. The +obvious charm of the church is the elegant grandeur of the nave--its +perfect shapeliness and its rich simplicity, its long double row of +white marble columns and its high flat roof, embossed with intricate +gildings and mouldings. It opens into a choir of an extraordinary +splendour of effect, which I recommend you to look out for of a fine +afternoon. At such a time the glowing western light, entering the high +windows of the tribune, kindles the scattered masses of colour into +sombre bright-ness, scintillates on the great solemn mosaic of the +vault, touches the porphyry columns of the superb baldachino with ruby +lights, and buries its shining shafts in the deep-toned shadows that +hang about frescoes and sculptures and mouldings. The deeper charm even +than in such things, however, is the social or historic note or tone or +atmosphere of the church--I fumble, you see, for my right expression; +the sense it gives you, in common with most of the Roman churches, and +more than any of them, of having been prayed in for several centuries by +an endlessly curious and complex society. It takes no great attention to +let it come to you that the authority of Italian Catholicism has lapsed +not a little in these days; not less also perhaps than to feel that, as +they stand, these deserted temples were the fruit of a society leavened +through and through by ecclesiastical manners, and that they formed for +ages the constant background of the human drama. They are, as one +may say, the _churchiest_ churches in Europe--the fullest of gathered +memories, of the experience of their office. There's not a figure one +has read of in old-world annals that isn't to be imagined on proper +occasion kneeling before the lamp-decked Confession beneath the altar of +Santa Maria Maggiore. One sees after all, however, even among the +most palpable realities, very much what the play of one's imagination +projects there; and I present my remarks simply as a reminder that one's +constant excursions into these places are not the least interesting +episodes of one's walks in Rome. + +I had meant to give a simple illustration of the church-habit, so to +speak, but I have given it at such a length as leaves scant space to +touch on the innumerable topics brushed by the pen that begins to take +Roman notes. It is by the aimless _flanerie_ which leaves you free to +follow capriciously every hint of entertainment that you get to know +Rome. The greater part of the life about you goes on in the streets; +and for an observer fresh from a country in which town scenery is at the +least monotonous incident and character and picture seem to abound. I +become conscious with compunction, let me hasten to add, that I have +launched myself thus on the subject of Roman churches and Roman walks +without so much as a preliminary allusion to St. Peter's. One is apt to +proceed thither on rainy days with intentions of exercise--to put the +case only at that--and to carry these out body and mind. Taken as a walk +not less than as a church, St. Peter's of course reigns alone. Even +for the profane "constitutional" it serves where the Boulevards, where +Piccadilly and Broadway, fall short, and if it didn't offer to our use +the grandest area in the world it would still offer the most diverting. +Few great works of art last longer to the curiosity, to the perpetually +transcended attention. You think you have taken the whole thing in, but +it expands, it rises sublime again, and leaves your measure itself poor. +You never let the ponderous leather curtain bang down behind you--your +weak lift of a scant edge of whose padded vastness resembles the +liberty taken in folding back the parchment corner of some mighty folio +page--without feeling all former visits to have been but missed attempts +at apprehension and the actual to achieve your first real possession. +The conventional question is ever as to whether one hasn't been +"disappointed in the size," but a few honest folk here and there, I +hope, will never cease to say no. The place struck me from the first as +the hugest thing conceivable--a real exaltation of one's idea of space; +so that one's entrance, even from the great empty square which either +glares beneath the deep blue sky or makes of the cool far-cast shadow of +the immense front something that resembles a big slate-coloured country +on a map, seems not so much a going in somewhere as a going out. The +mere man of pleasure in quest of new sensations might well not know +where to better his encounter there of the sublime shock that brings +him, within the threshold, to an immediate gasping pause. There are +days when the vast nave looks mysteriously vaster than on others and +the gorgeous baldachino a longer journey beyond the far-spreading +tessellated plain of the pavement, and when the light has yet a quality +which lets things loom their largest, while the scattered figures--I +mean the human, for there are plenty of others--mark happily the scale +of items and parts. Then you have only to stroll and stroll and gaze and +gaze; to watch the glorious altar-canopy lift its bronze architecture, +its colossal embroidered contortions, like a temple within a temple, and +feel yourself, at the bottom of the abysmal shaft of the dome, dwindle +to a crawling dot. + +Much of the constituted beauty resides in the fact that it is all +general beauty, that you are appealed to by no specific details, or that +these at least, practically never importunate, are as taken for granted +as the lieutenants and captains are taken for granted in a great +standing army--among whom indeed individual aspects may figure here +the rather shifting range of decorative dignity in which details, when +observed, often prove poor (though never not massive and substantially +precious) and sometimes prove ridiculous. The sculptures, with the sole +exception of Michael Angelo's ineffable "Pieta," which lurks obscurely +in a side-chapel--this indeed to my sense the rarest artistic +_combination_ of the greatest things the hand of man has produced--are +either bad or indifferent; and the universal incrustation of marble, +though sumptuous enough, has a less brilliant effect than much later +work of the same sort, that for instance of St. Paul's without the +Walls. The supreme beauty is the splendidly sustained simplicity of the +whole. The thing represents a prodigious imagination extraordinarily +strained, yet strained, at its happiest pitch, without breaking. Its +happiest pitch I say, because this is the only creation of its strenuous +author in presence of which you are in presence of serenity. You +may invoke the idea of ease at St. Peter's without a sense of +sacrilege--which you can hardly do, if you are at all spiritually +nervous, in Westminster Abbey or Notre Dame. The vast enclosed clearness +has much to do with the idea. There are no shadows to speak of, no +marked effects of shade; only effects of light innumerably--points at +which this element seems to mass itself in airy density and scatter +itself in enchanting gradations and cadences. It performs the office of +gloom or of mystery in Gothic churches; hangs like a rolling mist along +the gilded vault of the nave, melts into bright interfusion the mosaic +scintillations of the dome, clings and clusters and lingers, animates +the whole huge and otherwise empty shell. A good Catholic, I suppose, is +the same Catholic anywhere, before the grandest as well as the humblest +altars; but to a visitor not formally enrolled St. Peter's speaks less +of aspiration than of full and convenient assurance. The soul infinitely +expands there, if one will, but all on its quite human level. It marvels +at the reach of our dreams and the immensity of our resources. To be so +impressed and put in our place, we say, is to be sufficiently "saved"; +we can't be more than the heaven itself; and what specifically celestial +beauty such a show or such a substitute may lack it makes up for in +certainty and tangibility. And yet if one's hours on the scene are not +actually spent in praying, the spirit seeks it again as for the finer +comfort, for the blessing, exactly, of its example, its protection and +its exclusion. When you are weary of the swarming democracy of your +fellow-tourists, of the unremunerative aspects of human nature on Corso +and Pincio, of the oppressively frequent combination of coronets on +carriage panels and stupid faces in carriages, of addled brains and +lacquered boots, of ruin and dirt and decay, of priests and beggars and +takers of advantage, of the myriad tokens of a halting civilisation, the +image of the great temple depresses the balance of your doubts, seems to +rise above even the highest tide of vulgarity and make you still believe +in the heroic will and the heroic act. It's a relief, in other words, to +feel that there's nothing but a cab-fare between your pessimism and one +of the greatest of human achievements. + +{Illustration: THE COLONNADE OF ST. PETER, ROME.} + +This might serve as a Lenten peroration to these remarks of mine which +have strayed so woefully from their jovial text, save that I ought +fairly to confess that my last impression of the Carnival was altogether +Carnivalesque.. The merry-making of Shrove Tuesday had life and +felicity; the dead letter of tradition broke out into nature and grace. +I pocketed my scepticism and spent a long afternoon on the Corso. Almost +every one was a masker, but you had no need to conform; the pelting rain +of confetti effectually disguised you. I can't say I found it all +very exhilarating; but here and there I noticed a brighter episode--a +capering clown inflamed with contagious jollity, some finer humourist +forming a circle every thirty yards to crow at his indefatigable +sallies. One clever performer so especially pleased me that I should +have been glad to catch a glimpse of the natural man. You imagined for +him that he was taking a prodigious intellectual holiday and that +his gaiety was in inverse ratio to his daily mood. Dressed as a needy +scholar, in an ancient evening-coat and with a rusty black hat and +gloves fantastically patched, he carried a little volume carefully +under his arm. His humours were in excellent taste, his whole manner the +perfection of genteel comedy. The crowd seemed to relish him vastly, +and he at once commanded a glee-fully attentive audience. Many of his +sallies I lost; those I caught were excellent. His trick was often +to begin by taking some one urbanely and caressingly by the chin and +complimenting him on the _intelligenza della sua fisionomia_. I kept +near him as long as I could; for he struck me as a real ironic artist, +cherishing a disinterested, and yet at the same time a motived and +a moral, passion for the grotesque. I should have liked, however--if +indeed I shouldn't have feared--to see him the next morning, or when he +unmasked that night over his hard-earned supper in a smoky _trattoria_. +As the evening went on the crowd thickened and became a motley press of +shouting, pushing, scrambling, everything but squabbling, revellers. The +rain of missiles ceased at dusk, but the universal deposit of chalk and +flour was trampled into a cloud made lurid by flaring pyramids of the +gas-lamps that replaced for the occasion the stingy Roman luminaries. +Early in the evening came off the classic exhibition of the +_moccoletti_, which I but half saw, like a languid reporter resigned +beforehand to be cashiered for want of enterprise. From the mouth of +a side-street, over a thousand heads, I caught a huge slow-moving +illuminated car, from which blue-lights and rockets and Roman candles +were in course of discharge, meeting all in a dim fuliginous glare +far above the house-tops. It was like a glimpse of some public orgy in +ancient Babylon. In the small hours of the morning, walking homeward +from a private entertainment, I found Ash Wednesday still kept at bay. +The Corso, flaring with light, smelt like a circus. Every one was taking +friendly liberties with every one else and using up the dregs of his +festive energy in convulsive hootings and gymnastics. Here and there +certain indefatigable spirits, clad all in red after the manner of +devils and leaping furiously about with torches, were supposed to +affright you. But they shared the universal geniality and bequeathed +me no midnight fears as a pretext for keeping Lent, the _carnevale dei +preti_, as I read in that profanely radical sheet the _Capitale_. Of +this too I have been having glimpses. Going lately into Santa Francesca +Romana, the picturesque church near the Temple of Peace, I found a feast +for the eyes--a dim crimson-toned light through curtained windows, +a great festoon of tapers round the altar, a bulging girdle of lamps +before the sunken shrine beneath, and a dozen white-robed Dominicans +scattered in the happiest composition on the pavement. It was better +than the _moccoletti_. + +1873. + + + + + +ROMAN RIDES + + +I shall always remember the first I took: out of the Porta del Popolo, +to where the Ponte Molle, whose single arch sustains a weight of +historic tradition, compels the sallow Tiber to flow between its four +great-mannered ecclesiastical statues, over the crest of the hill and +along the old posting-road to Florence. It was mild midwinter, the +season peculiarly of colour on the Roman Campagna; and the light was +full of that mellow purple glow, that tempered intensity, which haunts +the after-visions of those who have known Rome like the memory of some +supremely irresponsible pleasure. An hour away I pulled up and at the +edge of a meadow gazed away for some time into remoter distances. Then +and there, it seemed to me, I measured the deep delight of knowing +the Campagna. But I saw more things in it than I can easily tell. The +country rolled away around me into slopes and dells of long-drawn +grace, chequered with purple and blue and blooming brown. The lights and +shadows were at play on the Sabine Mountains--an alternation of tones +so exquisite as to be conveyed only by some fantastic comparison to +sapphire and amber. In the foreground a contadino in his cloak and +peaked hat jogged solitary on his ass; and here and there in the +distance, among blue undulations, some white village, some grey tower, +helped deliciously to make the picture the typical "Italian landscape" +of old-fashioned art. It was so bright and yet so sad, so still and yet +so charged, to the supersensuous ear, with the murmur of an extinguished +life, that you could only say it was intensely and adorably strange, +could only impute to the whole overarched scene an unsurpassed +secret for bringing tears of appreciation to no matter how +ignorant--archaeologically ignorant--eyes. To ride once, in these +conditions, is of course to ride again and to allot to the Campagna a +generous share of the time one spends in Rome. + +It is a pleasure that doubles one's horizon, and one can scarcely say +whether it enlarges or limits one's impression of the city proper. It +certainly makes St. Peter's seem a trifle smaller and blunts the edge of +one's curiosity in the Forum. It must be the effect of the experience, +at all extended, that when you think of Rome afterwards you will think +still respectfully and regretfully enough of the Vatican and the Pincio, +the streets and the picture-making street life; but will even more +wonder, with an irrepressible contraction of the heart, when again you +shall feel yourself bounding over the flower-smothered turf, or pass +from one framed picture to another beside the open arches of the +crumbling aqueducts. You look back at the City so often from some grassy +hill-top--hugely compact within its walls, with St. Peter's overtopping +all things and yet seeming small, and the vast girdle of marsh and +meadow receding on all sides to the mountains and the sea--that you come +to remember it at last as hardly more than a respectable parenthesis in +a great sweep of generalisation. Within the walls, on the other hand, +you think of your intended ride as the most romantic of all your +possibilities; of the Campagna generally as an illimitable experience. +One's rides certainly give Rome an inordinate scope for the +reflective--by which I suppose I mean after all the aesthetic and the +"esoteric"--life. To dwell in a city which, much as you grumble at +it, is after all very fairly a modern city; with crowds and shops and +theatres and cafes and balls and receptions and dinner-parties, and all +the modern confusion of social pleasures and pains; to have at your +door the good and evil of it all; and yet to be able in half an hour to +gallop away and leave it a hundred miles, a hundred years, behind, and +to look at the tufted broom glowing on a lonely tower-top in the still +blue air, and the pale pink asphodels trembling none the less for the +stillness, and the shaggy-legged shepherds leaning on their sticks in +motionless brotherhood with the heaps of ruin, and the scrambling goats +and staggering little kids treading out wild desert smells from the +top of hollow-sounding mounds; and then to come back through one of the +great gates and a couple of hours later find yourself in the "world," +dressed, introduced, entertained, inquiring, talking about "Middlemarch" +to a young English lady or listening to Neapolitan songs from a +gentleman in a very low-cut shirt--all this is to lead in a manner a +double life and to gather from the hurrying hours more impressions than +a mind of modest capacity quite knows how to dispose of. + +I touched lately upon this theme with a friend who, I fancied, would +understand me, and who immediately assured me that he had just spent a +day that this mingled diversity of sensation made to the days one spends +elsewhere what an uncommonly good novel may be to the daily paper. +"There was an air of idleness about it, if you will," he said, "and it +was certainly pleasant enough to have been wrong. Perhaps, being after +all unused to long stretches of dissipation, this was why I had a +half-feeling that I was reading an odd chapter in the history of a +person very much more of a _heros de roman_ than myself." Then he +proceeded to relate how he had taken a long ride with a lady whom he +extremely admired. "We turned off from the Tor di Quinto Road to that +castellated farm-house you know of--once a Ghibelline fortress--whither +Claude Lorraine used to come to paint pictures of which the surrounding +landscape is still so artistically, so compositionally, suggestive. We +went into the inner court, a cloister almost, with the carven capitals +of its loggia columns, and looked at a handsome child swinging shyly +against the half-opened door of a room whose impenetrable shadow, behind +her, made her, as it were, a sketch in bituminous water-colours. We +talked with the farmer, a handsome, pale, fever-tainted fellow with a +well-to-do air that didn't in the least deter his affability from a turn +compatible with the acceptance of small coin; and then we galloped away +and away over the meadows which stretch with hardly a break to Veii. The +day was strangely delicious, with a cool grey sky and just a touch of +moisture in the air stirred by our rapid motion. The Campagna, in the +colourless even light, was more solemn and romantic than ever; and a +ragged shepherd, driving a meagre straggling flock, whom we stopped to +ask our way of, was a perfect type of pastoral, weather-beaten misery. +He was precisely the shepherd for the foreground of a scratchy etching. +There were faint odours of spring in the air, and the grass here and +there was streaked with great patches of daisies; but it was spring +with a foreknowledge of autumn, a day to be enjoyed with a substrain of +sadness, the foreboding of regret, a day somehow to make one feel as if +one had seen and felt a great deal--quite, as I say, like a _heros +de roman_. Touching such characters, it was the illustrious Pelham, +I think, who, on being asked if he rode, replied that he left those +violent exercises to the ladies. But under such a sky, in such an +air, over acres of daisied turf, a long, long gallop is certainly +a supersubtle joy. The elastic bound of your horse is the poetry +of motion; and if you are so happy as to add to it not the prose of +companionship riding comes almost to affect you as a spiritual exercise. +My gallop, at any rate," said my friend, "threw me into a mood which +gave an extraordinary zest to the rest of the day." He was to go to a +dinner-party at a villa on the edge of Rome, and Madam X--, who was also +going, called for him in her carriage. "It was a long drive," he went +on, "through the Forum, past the Colosseum. She told me a long story +about a most interesting person. Toward the end my eyes caught through +the carriage window a slab of rugged sculptures. We were passing under +the Arch of Constantine. In the hall pavement of the villa is a rare +antique mosaic--one of the largest and most perfect; the ladies on their +way to the drawing-room trail over it the flounces of Worth. We drove +home late, and there's my day." + +On your exit from most of the gates of Rome you have generally +half-an-hour's progress through winding lanes, many of which are hardly +less charming than the open meadows. On foot the walls and high hedges +would vex you and spoil your walk; but in the saddle you generally +overtop them, to an endless peopling of the minor vision. Yet a Roman +wall in the springtime is for that matter almost as interesting as +anything it conceals. Crumbling grain by grain, coloured and mottled +to a hundred tones by sun and storm, with its rugged structure of brick +extruding through its coarse complexion of peeling stucco, its creeping +lacework of wandering ivy starred with miniature violets, and its wild +fringe of stouter flowers against the sky--it is as little as possible a +blank partition; it is practically a luxury of landscape. At the moment +at which I write, in mid-April, all the ledges and cornices are wreathed +with flaming poppies, nodding there as if they knew so well what faded +greys and yellows are an offset to their scarlet. But the best point in +a dilapidated enclosing surface of vineyard or villa is of course the +gateway, lifting its great arch of cheap rococo scroll-work, its balls +and shields and mossy dish-covers--as they always perversely figure +to me--and flanked with its dusky cypresses. I never pass one without +taking out my mental sketch-book and jotting it down as a vignette in +the insubstantial record of my ride. They are as sad and dreary as if +they led to the moated grange where Mariana waited in desperation for +something to happen; and it's easy to take the usual inscription over +the porch as a recommendation to those who enter to renounce all hope of +anything but a glass of more or less agreeably acrid _vino romano_. For +what you chiefly see over the walls and at the end of the straight short +avenue of rusty cypresses are the appurtenances of a _vigna_--a couple +of acres of little upright sticks blackening in the sun, and a vast +sallow-faced, scantily windowed mansion, whose expression denotes +little of the life of the mind beyond what goes to the driving of a hard +bargain over the tasted hogsheads. If Mariana is there she certainly has +no pile of old magazines to beguile her leisure. The life of the mind, +if the term be in any application here not ridiculous, appears to any +asker of curious questions, as he wanders about Rome, the very thinnest +deposit of the past. Within the rococo gateway, which itself has a +vaguely esthetic self-consciousness, at the end of the cypress walk, +you will probably see a mythological group in rusty marble--a Cupid and +Psyche, a Venus and Paris, an Apollo and Daphne--the relic of an age +when a Roman proprietor thought it fine to patronise the arts. But I +imagine you are safe in supposing it to constitute the only allusion +savouring of culture that has been made on the premises for three or +four generations. + +There is a franker cheerfulness--though certainly a proper amount of +that forlornness which lurks about every object to which the Campagna +forms a background--in the primitive little taverns where, on the +homeward stretch, in the waning light, you are often glad to rein up and +demand a bottle of their best. Their best and their worst are indeed +the same, though with a shifting price, and plain _vino bianco_ or _vino +rosso_ (rarely both) is the sole article of refreshment in which they +deal. There is a ragged bush over the door, and within, under a dusky +vault, on crooked cobble-stones, sit half-a-dozen contadini in their +indigo jackets and goatskin breeches and with their elbows on the table. +There is generally a rabble of infantile beggars at the door, pretty +enough in their dusty rags, with their fine eyes and intense Italian +smile, to make you forget your private vow of doing your individual best +I to make these people, whom you like so much, unlearn their old vices. +Was Porta Pia bombarded three years ago that Peppino should still grow +up to whine for a copper? But the Italian shells had no direct message +for Peppino's stomach--and you are going to a dinner-party at a villa. +So Peppino "points" an instant for the copper in the dust and grows up a +Roman beggar. The whole little place represents the most primitive form +of hostelry; but along any of the roads leading out of the city you may +find establishments of a higher type, with Garibaldi, superbly mounted +and foreshortened, painted on the wall, or a lady in a low-necked dress +opening a fictive lattice with irresistible hospitality, and a yard with +the classic vine-wreathed arbour casting thin shadows upon benches and +tables draped and cushioned with the white dust from which the highways +from the gates borrow most of their local colour. None the less, I +say, you avoid the highroads, and, if you are a person of taste, don't +grumble at the occasional need of following the walls of the city. City +walls, to a properly constituted American, can never be an object of +indifference; and it is emphatically "no end of a sensation" to pace in +the shadow of this massive cincture of Rome. I have found myself, as I +skirted its base, talking of trivial things, but never without a sudden +reflection on the deplorable impermanence of first impressions. A +twelvemonth ago the raw plank fences of a Boston suburb, inscribed with +the virtues of healing drugs, bristled along my horizon: now I glance +with idle eyes at a compacted antiquity in which a more learned sense +may read portentous dates and signs--Servius, Aurelius, Honorius. But +even to idle eyes the prodigious, the continuous thing bristles with +eloquent passages. In some places, where the huge brickwork is black +with time and certain strange square towers look down at you with still +blue eyes, the Roman sky peering through lidless loopholes, and there is +nothing but white dust in the road and solitude in the air, I might take +myself for a wandering Tartar touching on the confines of the Celestial +Empire. The wall of China must have very much such a gaunt robustness. +The colour of the Roman ramparts is everywhere fine, and their rugged +patchwork has been subdued by time and weather into a mellow harmony +that the brush only asks to catch up. On the northern side of the city, +behind the Vatican, St. Peter's and the Trastevere, I have seen them +glowing in the late afternoon with the tones of ancient bronze and rusty +gold. Here at various points they are embossed with the Papal insignia, +the tiara with its flying bands and crossed keys; to the high style +of which the grace that attaches to almost any lost cause--even if not +quite the "tender" grace of a day that is dead--considerably adds a +style. With the dome of St. Peter's resting on their cornice and the +hugely clustered architecture of the Vatican rising from them as from a +terrace, they seem indeed the valid bulwark of an ecclesiastical city. +Vain bulwark, alas! sighs the sentimental tourist, fresh from the meagre +entertainment of this latter Holy Week. But he may find monumental +consolation in this neighbourhood at a source where, as I pass, I never +fail to apply for it. At half-an-hour's walk beyond Porta San Pancrazio, +beneath the wall of the Villa Doria, is a delightfully pompous +ecclesiastical gateway of the seventeenth century, erected by Paul V to +commemorate his restoration of the aqueducts through which the stream +bearing his name flows towards the fine florid portico protecting its +clear-sheeted outgush on the crest of the Janiculan. It arches across +the road in the most ornamental manner of the period, and one can hardly +pause before it without seeming to assist at a ten minutes' revival of +old Italy--without feeling as if one were in a cocked hat and sword and +were coming up to Rome, in another mood than Luther's, with a letter of +recommendation to the mistress of a cardinal. + +The Campagna differs greatly on the two sides of the Tiber; and it is +hard to say which, for the rider, has the greater charm. The half-dozen +rides you may take from Porta San Giovanni possess the perfection of +traditional Roman interest and lead you through a far-strewn wilderness +of ruins--a scattered maze of tombs and towers and nameless fragments of +antique masonry. The landscape here has two great features; close before +you on one side is the long, gentle swell of the Alban Hills, deeply, +fantastically blue in most weathers, and marbled with the vague white +masses of their scattered towns and villas. It would be difficult to +draw the hard figure to a softer curve than that with which the heights +sweep from Albano to the plain; this a perfect example of the classic +beauty of line in the Italian landscape--that beauty which, when it +fills the background of a picture, makes us look in the foreground for +a broken column couched upon flowers and a shepherd piping to dancing +nymphs. At your side, constantly, you have the broken line of the +Claudian Aqueduct, carrying its broad arches far away into the plain. +The meadows along which it lies are not the smoothest in the world for +a gallop, but there is no pleasure greater than to wander near it. It +stands knee-deep in the flower-strewn grass, and its rugged piers are +hung with ivy as the columns of a church are draped for a festa. Every +archway is a picture, massively framed, of the distance beyond--of the +snow-tipped Sabines and lonely Soracte. As the spring advances the whole +Campagna smiles and waves with flowers; but I think they are nowhere +more rank and lovely than in the shifting shadow of the aqueducts, where +they muffle the feet of the columns and smother the half-dozen brooks +which wander in and out like silver meshes between the legs of a file +of giants. They make a niche for themselves too in every crevice and +tremble on the vault of the empty conduits. The ivy hereabouts in the +springtime is peculiarly brilliant and delicate; and though it cloaks +and muffles these Roman fragments far less closely than the castles +and abbeys of England it hangs with the light elegance of all Italian +vegetation. It is partly doubtless because their mighty outlines are +still unsoftened that the aqueducts are so impressive. They seem +the very source of the solitude in which they stand; they look like +architectural spectres and loom through the light mists of their grassy +desert, as you recede along the line, with the same insubstantial +vastness as if they rose out of Egyptian sands. It is a great +neighbourhood of ruins, many of which, it must be confessed, you have +applauded in many an album. But station a peasant with sheepskin +coat and bandaged legs in the shadow of a tomb or tower best known to +drawing-room art, and scatter a dozen goats on the mound above him, and +the picture has a charm which has not yet been sketched away. + +The other quarter of the Campagna has wider fields and smoother turf and +perhaps a greater number of delightful rides; the earth is sounder, and +there are fewer pitfalls and ditches. The land for the most part lies +higher and catches more wind, and the grass is here and there for great +stretches as smooth and level as a carpet. You have no Alban Mountains +before you, but you have in the distance the waving ridge of the nearer +Apennines, and west of them, along the course of the Tiber, the long +seaward level of deep-coloured fields, deepening as they recede to the +blue and purple of the sea itself. Beyond them, of a very clear day, +you may see the glitter of the Mediterranean. These are the occasions +perhaps to remember most fondly, for they lead you to enchanting nooks, +and the landscape has details of the highest refinement. Indeed when my +sense reverts to the lingering impressions of so blest a time, it seems +a fool's errand to have attempted to express them, and a waste of words +to do more than recommend the reader to go citywards at twilight of the +end of March, making for Porta Cavalleggieri, and note what he sees. At +this hour the Campagna is to the last point its melancholy self, and +I remember roadside "effects" of a strange and intense suggestiveness. +Certain mean, mouldering villas behind grass-grown courts have an +indefinably sinister look; there was one in especial of which it was +impossible not to argue that a despairing creature must have once +committed suicide there, behind bolted door and barred window, and that +no one has since had the pluck to go in and see why he never came out. +Every wayside mark of manners, of history, every stamp of the past in +the country about Rome, touches my sense to a thrill, and I may thus +exaggerate the appeal of very common things. This is the more likely +because the appeal seems ever to rise out of heaven knows what depths +of ancient trouble. To delight in the aspects of _sentient_ ruin might +appear a heartless pastime, and the pleasure, I confess, shows the note +of perversity. The sombre and the hard are as common an influence from +southern things as the soft and the bright, I think; sadness rarely +fails to assault a northern observer when he misses what he takes for +comfort. Beauty is no compensation for the loss, only making it more +poignant. Enough beauty of climate hangs over these Roman cottages and +farm-houses--beauty of light, of atmosphere and of vegetation; but their +charm for the maker-out of the stories in things is the way the golden +air shows off their desolation. Man lives more with Nature in Italy than +in New or than in Old England; she does more work for him and gives +him more holidays than in our short-summered climes, and his home is +therefore much more bare of devices for helping him to do without her, +forget her and forgive her. These reflections are perhaps the source of +the character you find in a moss-coated stone stairway climbing outside +of a wall; in a queer inner court, befouled with rubbish and drearily +bare of convenience; in an ancient quaintly carven well, worked with +infinite labour from an overhanging window; in an arbour of time-twisted +vines under which you may sit with your feet in the dirt and remember +as a dim fable that there are races for which the type of domestic +allurement is the parlour hearth-rug. For reasons apparent or otherwise +these things amuse me beyond expression, and I am never weary of staring +into gateways, of lingering by dreary, shabby, half-barbaric farm-yards, +of feasting a foolish gaze on sun-cracked plaster and unctuous indoor +shadows. I mustn't forget, however, that it's not for wayside effects +that one rides away behind St. Peter's, but for the strong sense +of wandering over boundless space, of seeing great classic lines of +landscape, of watching them dispose themselves into pictures so full of +"style" that you can think of no painter who deserves to have you admit +that they suggest him--hardly knowing whether it is better pleasure +to gallop far and drink deep of air and grassy distance and the whole +delicious opportunity, or to walk and pause and linger, and try and +grasp some ineffaceable memory of sky and colour and outline. Your +pace can hardly help falling into a contemplative measure at the time, +everywhere so wonderful, but in Rome so persuasively divine, when the +winter begins palpably to soften and quicken. Far out on the Campagna, +early in February, you feel the first vague earthly emanations, which +in a few weeks come wandering into the heart of the city and throbbing +through the close, dark streets. Springtime in Rome is an immensely +poetic affair; but you must stand often far out in the ancient waste, +between grass and sky, to measure its deep, full, steadily accelerated +rhythm. The winter has an incontestable beauty, and is pre-eminently the +time of colour--the time when it is no affectation, but homely verity, +to talk about the "purple" tone of the atmosphere. As February comes and +goes your purple is streaked with green and the rich, dark bloom of the +distance begins to lose its intensity. But your loss is made up by other +gains; none more precious than that inestimable gain to the ear--the +disembodied voice of the lark. It comes with the early flowers, the +white narcissus and the cyclamen, the half-buried violets and the pale +anemones, and makes the whole atmosphere ring like a vault of tinkling +glass. You never see the source of the sound, and are utterly unable to +localise his note, which seems to come from everywhere at once, to be +some hundred-throated voice of the air. Sometimes you fancy you just +catch him, a mere vague spot against the blue, an intenser throb in the +universal pulsation of light. As the weeks go on the flowers multiply +and the deep blues and purples of the hills, turning to azure and +violet, creep higher toward the narrowing snow-line of the Sabines. The +temperature rises, the first hour of your ride you feel the heat, but +you beguile it with brushing the hawthorn-blossoms as you pass along the +hedges, and catching at the wild rose and honeysuckle; and when you get +into the meadows there is stir enough in the air to lighten the dead +weight of the sun. The Roman air, however, is not a tonic medicine, and +it seldom suffers exercise to be all exhilarating. It has always +seemed to me indeed part of the charm of the latter that your keenest +consciousness is haunted with a vague languor. Occasionally when the +sirocco blows that sensation becomes strange and exquisite. Then, under +the grey sky, before the dim distances which the south-wind mostly +brings with it, you seem to ride forth into a world from which all +hope has departed and in which, in spite of the flowers that make your +horse's footfalls soundless, nothing is left save some queer probability +that your imagination is unable to measure, but from which it hardly +shrinks. This quality in the Roman element may now and then "relax" +you almost to ecstasy; but a season of sirocco would be an overdose of +morbid pleasure. You may at any rate best feel the peculiar beauty of +the Campagna on those mild days of winter when the mere quality and +temper of the sunshine suffice to move the landscape to joy, and you +pause on the brown grass in the sunny stillness and, by listening long +enough, almost fancy you hear the shrill of the midsummer cricket. It +is detail and ornament that vary from month to month, from week to +week even, and make your returns to the same places a constant feast +of unexpectedness; but the great essential features of the prospect +preserve throughout the year the same impressive serenity. Soracte, be +it January or May, rises from its blue horizon like an island from the +sea and with an elegance of contour which no mood of the year can deepen +or diminish. You know it well; you have seen it often in the mellow +backgrounds of Claude; and it has such an irresistibly classic, academic +air that while you look at it you begin to take your saddle for a +faded old arm-chair in a palace gallery. A month's rides in different +directions will show you a dozen prime Claudes. After I had seen them +all I went piously to the Doria gallery to refresh my memory of its +two famous specimens and to enjoy to the utmost their delightful air of +reference to something that had become a part of my personal experience. +Delightful it certainly is to feel the common element in one's own +sensibility and those of a genius whom that element has helped to do +great things. Claude must have haunted the very places of one's personal +preference and adjusted their divine undulations to his splendid scheme +of romance, his view of the poetry of life. He was familiar with aspects +in which there wasn't a single uncompromising line. I saw a few days ago +a small finished sketch from his hand, in the possession of an American +artist, which was almost startling in its clear reflection of forms +unaltered by the two centuries that have dimmed and cracked the paint +and canvas. + +This unbroken continuity of the impressions I have tried to indicate is +an excellent example of the intellectual background of all enjoyment in +Rome. It effectually prevents pleasure from becoming vulgar, for your +sensation rarely begins and ends with itself; it reverberates--it +recalls, commemorates, resuscitates something else. At least half the +merit of everything you enjoy must be that it suits you absolutely; but +the larger half here is generally that it has suited some one else and +that you can never flatter yourself you have discovered it. It has been +addressed to some use a million miles out of your range, and has had +great adventures before ever condescending to please you. It was in +admission of this truth that my discriminating friend who showed me the +Claudes found it impossible to designate a certain delightful region +which you enter at the end of an hour's riding from Porta Cavalleggieri +as anything but Arcadia. The exquisite correspondence of the term in +this case altogether revived its faded bloom; here veritably the oaten +pipe must have stirred the windless air and the satyrs have laughed +among the brookside reeds. Three or four long grassy dells stretch away +in a chain between low hills over which delicate trees are so discreetly +scattered that each one is a resting place for a shepherd. The elements +of the scene are simple enough, but the composition has extraordinary +refinement. By one of those happy chances which keep observation in +Italy always in her best humour a shepherd had thrown himself down under +one of the trees in the very attitude of Meliboeus. He had been washing +his feet, I suppose, in the neighbouring brook, and had found it +pleasant afterwards to roll his short breeches well up on his thighs. +Lying thus in the shade, on his elbow, with his naked legs stretched out +on the turf and his soft peaked hat over his long hair crushed back +like the veritable bonnet of Arcady, he was exactly the figure of the +background of this happy valley. The poor fellow, lying there in +rustic weariness and ignorance, little fancied that he was a symbol of +old-world meanings to new-world eyes. + +Such eyes may find as great a store of picturesque meanings in the +cork-woods of Monte Mario, tenderly loved of all equestrians. These are +less severely pastoral than our Arcadia, and you might more properly +lodge there a damosel of Ariosto than a nymph of Theocritus. Among them +is strewn a lovely wilderness of flowers and shrubs, and the whole place +has such a charming woodland air, that, casting about me the other day +for a compliment, I declared that it reminded me of New Hampshire. My +compliment had a double edge, and I had no sooner uttered it than I +smiled--or sighed--to perceive in all the undiscriminated botany about +me the wealth of detail, the idle elegance and grace of Italy alone, the +natural stamp of the land which has the singular privilege of making one +love her unsanctified beauty all but as well as those features of one's +own country toward which nature's small allowance doubles that of one's +own affection. For this effect of casting a spell no rides have more +value than those you take in Villa Doria or Villa Borghese; or don't +take, possibly, if you prefer to reserve these particular regions--the +latter in especial--for your walking hours. People do ride, however, +in both villas, which deserve honourable mention in this regard. Villa +Doria, with its noble site, its splendid views, its great groups of +stone-pines, so clustered and yet so individual, its lawns and flowers +and fountains, its altogether princely disposition, is a place where one +may pace, well mounted, of a brilliant day, with an agreeable sense of +its being rather a more elegant pastime to balance in one's stirrups +than to trudge on even the smoothest gravel. But at Villa Borghese +the walkers have the best of it; for they are free of those adorable +outlying corners and bosky byways which the rumble of barouches never +reaches. In March the place becomes a perfect epitome of the spring. +You cease to care much for the melancholy greenness of the disfeatured +statues which has been your chief winter's intimation of verdure; and +before you are quite conscious of the tender streaks and patches in the +great quaint grassy arena round which the Propaganda students, in their +long skirts, wander slowly, like dusky seraphs revolving the gossip of +Paradise, you spy the brave little violets uncapping their azure brows +beneath the high-stemmed pines. One's walks here would take us too far, +and one's pauses detain us too long, when in the quiet parts under +the wall one comes across a group of charming small school-boys in +full-dress suits and white cravats, shouting over their play in clear +Italian, while a grave young priest, beneath a tree, watches them over +the top of his book. It sounds like nothing, but the force behind it and +the frame round it, the setting, the air, the chord struck, make it a +hundred wonderful things. + +1873. + + + + + +ROMAN NEIGHBOURHOODS + + +I made a note after my first stroll at Albano to the effect that I had +been talking of the "picturesque" all my life, but that now for a change +I beheld it. I had been looking all winter across the Campagna at the +free-flowing outline of the Alban Mount, with its half-dozen towns +shining on its purple side even as vague sun-spots in the shadow of +a cloud, and thinking it simply an agreeable incident in the varied +background of Rome. But now that during the last few days I have been +treating it as a foreground, have been suffering St. Peter's to play +the part of a small mountain on the horizon, with the Campagna swimming +mistily through the ambiguous lights and shadows of the interval, I find +the interest as great as in the best of the by-play of Rome. The walk +I speak of was just out of the village, to the south, toward the +neighbouring town of L'Ariccia, neighbouring these twenty years, since +the Pope (the late Pope, I was on the point of calling him) threw his +superb viaduct across the deep ravine which divides it from Albano. At +the risk of seeming to fantasticate I confess that the Pope's having +built the viaduct--in this very recent antiquity--made me linger there +in a pensive posture and marvel at the march of history and at Pius the +Ninth's beginning already to profit by the sentimental allowances we +make to vanished powers. An ardent _nero_ then would have had his own +way with me and obtained a frank admission that the Pope was indeed a +father to his people. Far down into the charming valley which slopes out +of the ancestral woods of the Chigis into the level Campagna winds the +steep stone-paved road at the bottom of which, in the good old days, +tourists in no great hurry saw the mules and oxen tackled to their +carriage for the opposite ascent. And indeed even an impatient tourist +might have been content to lounge back in his jolting chaise and look +out at the mouldy foundations of the little city plunging into the +verdurous flank of the gorge. Questioned, as a cherisher of quaintness, +as to the best "bit" hereabouts, I should certainly name the way in +which the crumbling black houses of these ponderous villages plant their +weary feet on the flowery edges of all the steepest chasms. Before you +enter one of them you invariably find yourself lingering outside its +pretentious old gateway to see it clutched and stitched to the stony +hillside by this rank embroidery of the wildest and bravest things that +grow. Just at this moment nothing is prettier than the contrast between +their dusky ruggedness and the tender, the yellow and pink and violet +fringe of that mantle. All this you may observe from the viaduct at +the Ariccia; but you must wander below to feel the full force of the +eloquence of our imaginary _papalino_. The pillars and arches of +pale grey peperino arise in huge tiers with a magnificent spring and +solidity. The older Romans built no better; and the work has a deceptive +air of being one of their sturdy bequests which help one to drop +another sigh over the antecedents the Italians of to-day are so eager to +repudiate. Will those _they_ give their descendants be as good? + +At the Ariccia, in any case, I found a little square with a couple of +mossy fountains, occupied on one side by a vast dusky-faced Palazzo +Chigi and on the other by a goodly church with an imposing dome. +The dome, within, covers the whole edifice and is adorned with some +extremely elegant stucco-work of the seventeenth century. It gave a +great value to this fine old decoration that preparations were going +forward for a local festival and that the village carpenter was hanging +certain mouldy strips of crimson damask against the piers of the vaults. +The damask might have been of the seventeenth century too, and a group +of peasant-women were seeing it unfurled with evident awe. I regarded +it myself with interest--it seemed so the tattered remnant of a fashion +that had gone out for ever. I thought again of the poor disinherited +Pope, wondering whether, when such venerable frippery will no longer +bear the carpenter's nails, any more will be provided. It was hard to +fancy anything but shreds and patches in that musty tabernacle. Wherever +you go in Italy you receive some such intimation as this of the shrunken +proportions of Catholicism, and every church I have glanced into on my +walks hereabouts has given me an almost pitying sense of it. One finds +one's self at last--without fatuity, I hope--feeling sorry for the +solitude of the remaining faithful. It's as if the churches had been +made so for the world, in its social sense, and the world had so +irrevocably moved away. They are in size out of all modern proportion to +the local needs, and the only thing at all alive in the melancholy waste +they collectively form is the smell of stale incense. There are pictures +on all the altars by respectable third-rate painters; pictures which I +suppose once were ordered and paid for and criticised by worshippers who +united taste with piety. At Genzano, beyond the Ariccia, rises on the +grey village street a pompous Renaissance temple whose imposing nave +and aisles would contain the population of a capital. But where is the +_taste_ of the Ariccia and Genzano? Where are the choice spirits for +whom Antonio Raggi modelled the garlands of his dome and a hundred +clever craftsmen imitated Guido and Caravaggio? Here and there, from the +pavement, as you pass, a dusky crone interlards her devotions with more +profane importunities, or a grizzled peasant on rusty-jointed knees, +tilted forward with his elbows on a bench, reveals the dimensions of +the patch in his blue breeches. But where is the connecting link between +Guido and Caravaggio and those poor souls for whom an undoubted original +is only a something behind a row of candlesticks, of no very clear +meaning save that you must bow to it? You find a vague memory of it at +best in the useless grandeurs about you, and you seem to be looking at a +structure of which the stubborn earth-scented foundations alone remain, +with the carved and painted shell that bends above them, while the +central substance has utterly crumbled away. + +I shall seem to have adopted a more meditative pace than befits a brisk +constitutional if I say that I also fell a-thinking before the shabby +facade of the old Chigi Palace. But it seemed somehow in its grey +forlornness to respond to the sadly superannuated expression of the +opposite church; and indeed in any condition what self-respecting +cherisher of quaintness can forbear to do a little romancing in the +shadow of a provincial palazzo? On the face of the matter, I know, +there is often no very salient peg to hang a romance on. A sort of dusky +blankness invests the establishment, which has often a rather imbecile +old age. But a hundred brooding secrets lurk in this inexpressive mask, +and the Chigi Palace did duty for me in the suggestive twilight as +the most haunted of houses. Its basement walls sloped outward like the +beginning of a pyramid, and its lower windows were covered with massive +iron cages. Within the doorway, across the court, I saw the pale glimmer +of flowers on a terrace, and I made much, for the effect of the roof, of +a great covered loggia or belvedere with a dozen window-panes missing +or mended with paper. Nothing gives one a stronger impression of old +manners than an ancestral palace towering in this haughty fashion over +a shabby little town; you hardly stretch a point when you call it an +impression of feudalism. The scene may pass for feudal to American eyes, +for which a hundred windows on a facade mean nothing more exclusive than +a hotel kept (at the most invidious) on the European plan. The mouldy +grey houses on the steep crooked street, with their black cavernous +archways pervaded by bad smells, by the braying of asses and by human +intonations hardly more musical, the haggard and tattered peasantry +staring at you with hungry-heavy eyes, the brutish-looking monks +(there are still enough to point a moral), the soldiers, the mounted +constables, the dirt, the dreariness, the misery, and the dark +over-grown palace frowning over it all from barred window and guarded +gateway--what more than all this do we dimly descry in a mental image of +the dark ages? For all his desire to keep the peace with the vivid image +of things if it be only vivid enough, the votary of this ideal may well +occasionally turn over such values with the wonder of what one takes +them as paying for. They pay sometimes for such sorry "facts of life." +At Genzano, out of the very midst of the village squalor, rises the +Palazzo Cesarini, separated from its gardens by a dirty lane. Between +peasant and prince, the contact is unbroken, and one would suppose +Italian good-nature sorely taxed by their mutual allowances; that the +prince in especial must cultivate a firm impervious shell. There are +no comfortable townsfolk about him to remind him of the blessings of a +happy mediocrity of fortune. When he looks out of his window he sees a +battered old peasant against a sunny wall sawing off his dinner from a +hunch of black bread. + +I must confess, however, that "feudal" as it amused me to find the +little piazza of the Ariccia, it appeared to threaten in no manner an +exasperated rising. On the contrary, the afternoon being cool, many of +the villagers were contentedly muffled in those ancient cloaks, lined +with green baize, which, when tossed over the shoulder and surmounted +with a peaked hat, form one of the few lingering remnants of "costume" +in Italy; others were tossing wooden balls light-heartedly enough on the +grass outside the town. The egress on this side is under a great stone +archway thrown out from the palace and surmounted with the family arms. +Nothing could better confirm your theory that the townsfolk are groaning +serfs. The road leads away through the woods, like many of the roads +hereabouts, among trees less remarkable for their size than for their +picturesque contortions and posturings. The woods, at the moment at +which I write, are full of the raw green light of early spring, a _jour_ +vastly becoming to the various complexions of the wild flowers that +cover the waysides. I have never seen these untended parterres in such +lovely exuberance; the sturdiest pedestrian becomes a lingering idler if +he allows them to catch his eye. The pale purple cyclamen, with its hood +thrown back, stands up in masses as dense as tulip-beds; and here and +there in the duskier places great sheets of forget-me-not seem to exhale +a faint blue mist. These are the commonest plants; there are dozens +more I know no name for--a rich profusion in especial of a beautiful +five-petalled flower whose white texture is pencilled with hair-strokes +certain fair copyists I know of would have to hold their breath to +imitate. An Italian oak has neither the girth nor the height of its +English brothers, but it contrives in proportion to be perhaps even +more effective. It crooks its back and twists its arms and clinches its +hundred fists with the queerest extravagance, and wrinkles its bark +into strange rugosities from which its first scattered sprouts of yellow +green seem to break out like a morbid fungus. But the tree which has the +greatest charm to northern eyes is the cold grey-green ilex, whose clear +crepuscular shade drops against a Roman sun a veil impenetrable, yet not +oppressive. The ilex has even less colour than the cypress, but it is +much less funereal, and a landscape in which it is frequent may still +be said to smile faintly, though by no means to laugh. It abounds in +old Italian gardens, where the boughs are trimmed and interlocked into +vaulted corridors in which, from point to point, as in the niches of +some dimly frescoed hall, you see mildewed busts stare at you with a +solemnity which the even grey light makes strangely intense. A +humbler relative of the ilex, though it does better things than help +broken-nosed emperors to look dignified, is the olive, which covers many +of the neighbouring hillsides with its little smoky puffs of foliage. A +stroke of composition I never weary of is that long blue stretch of the +Campagna which makes a high horizon and rests on this vaporous base of +olive-tops. A reporter intent upon a simile might liken it to the ocean +seen above the smoke of watch-fires kindled on the strand. + +To do perfect justice to the wood-walk away from the Ariccia I ought +to touch upon the birds that were singing vespers as I passed. But the +reader would find my rhapsody as poor entertainment as the programme of +a concert he had been unable to attend. I have no more learning about +bird-music than would help me to guess that a dull dissyllabic refrain +in the heart of the wood came from the cuckoo; and when at moments I +heard a twitter of fuller tone, with a more suggestive modulation, +I could only _hope_ it was the nightingale. I have listened for the +nightingale more than once in places so charming that his song would +have seemed but the articulate expression of their beauty, and have +never heard much beyond a provoking snatch or two--a prelude that came +to nothing. In spite of a natural grudge, however, I generously believe +him a great artist or at least a great genius--a creature who despises +any prompting short of absolute inspiration. For the rich, the +multitudinous melody around me seemed but the offering to my ear of the +prodigal spirit of tradition. The wood was ringing with sound because it +was twilight, spring and Italy. It was also because of these good things +and various others besides that I relished so keenly my visit to the +Capuchin convent upon which I emerged after half-an-hour in the wood. +It stands above the town on the slope of the Alban Mount, and its wild +garden climbs away behind it and extends its melancholy influence. +Before it is a small stiff avenue of trimmed live-oaks which conducts +you to a grotesque little shrine beneath the staircase ascending to the +church. Just here, if you are apt to grow timorous at twilight, you may +take a very pretty fright; for as you draw near you catch behind the +grating of the shrine the startling semblance of a gaunt and livid monk. +A sickly lamplight plays down upon his face, and he stares at you from +cavernous eyes with a dreadful air of death in life. Horror of horrors, +you murmur, is this a Capuchin penance? You discover of course in a +moment that it is only a Capuchin joke, that the monk is a pious dummy +and his spectral visage a matter of the paint-brush. You resent his +intrusion on the surrounding loveliness; and as you proceed to demand +entertainment at their convent you pronounce the Capuchins very foolish +fellows. This declaration, as I made it, was supported by the conduct of +the simple brother who opened the door of the cloister in obedience to +my knock and, on learning my errand, demurred about admitting me at +so late an hour. If I would return on the morrow morning he'd be most +happy. He broke into a blank grin when I assured him that this was the +very hour of my desire and that the garish morning light would do no +justice to the view. These were mysteries beyond his ken, and it was +only his good-nature (of which he had plenty) and not his imagination +that was moved. So that when, passing through the narrow cloister and +out upon the grassy terrace, I saw another cowled brother standing with +folded hands profiled against the sky, in admirable harmony with the +scene, I questioned his knowing the uses for which he is still most +precious. This, however, was surely too much to ask of him, and it was +cause enough for gratitude that, though he was there before me, he was +not a fellow-tourist with an opera-glass slung over his shoulder. There +was support to my idea of the convent in the expiring light, for the +scene was in its way unsurpassable. Directly below the terrace lay the +deep-set circle of the Alban Lake, shining softly through the light +mists of evening. This beautiful pool--it is hardly more--occupies the +crater of a prehistoric volcano, a perfect cup, shaped and smelted by +furnace-fires. The rim of the cup, rising high and densely wooded round +the placid stone-blue water, has a sort of natural artificiality. The +sweep and contour of the long circle are admirable; never was a lake so +charmingly lodged. It is said to be of extraordinary depth; and though +stone-blue water seems at first a very innocent substitute for boiling +lava, it has a sinister look which betrays its dangerous antecedents. +The winds never reach it and its surface is never ruffled; but its +deep-bosomed placidity seems to cover guilty secrets, and you fancy it +in communication with the capricious and treacherous forces of nature. +Its very colour is of a joyless beauty, a blue as cold and opaque as a +solidified sheet of lava. Streaked and wrinkled by a mysterious motion +of its own, it affects the very type of a legendary pool, and I could +easily have believed that I had only to sit long enough into the evening +to see the ghosts of classic nymphs and naiads cleave its sullen flood +and beckon me with irresistible arms. Is it because its shores are +haunted with these vague Pagan influences that two convents have risen +there to purge the atmosphere? From the Capuchin terrace you look +across at the grey Franciscan monastery of Palazzuola, which is not less +romantic certainly than the most obstinate myth it may have exorcised. +The Capuchin garden is a wild tangle of great trees and shrubs and +clinging, trembling vines which in these hard days are left to take care +of themselves; a weedy garden, if there ever was one, but none the less +charming for that, in the deepening dusk, with its steep grassy vistas +struggling away into impenetrable shadow. I braved the shadow for the +sake of climbing upon certain little flat-roofed crumbling pavilions +that rise from the corners of the further wall and give you a wider and +lovelier view of lake and hills and sky. + +I have perhaps justified to the reader the mild proposition with which I +started--convinced him, that is, that Albano is worth a walk. It may be +a different walk each day, moreover, and not resemble its predecessors +save by its keeping in the shade. "Galleries" the roads are prettily +called, and with the justice that they are vaulted and draped overhead +and hung with an immense succession of pictures. As you follow the few +miles from Genzano to Frascati you have perpetual views of the Campagna +framed by clusters of trees; the vast iridescent expanse of which +completes the charm and comfort of your verdurous dusk. I compared it +just now to the sea, and with a good deal of truth, for it has the same +incalculable lights and shades, the same confusion of glitter and gloom. +But I have seen it at moments--chiefly in the misty twilight--when it +resembled less the waste of waters than something more portentous, the +land itself in fatal dissolution. I could believe the fields to be dimly +surging and tossing and melting away into quicksands, and that one's +very last chance of an impression was taking place. A view, however, +which has the merit of being really as interesting as it seems, is that +of the Lake of Nemi; which the enterprising traveller hastens to compare +with its sister sheet of Albano. Comparison in this case is particularly +odious, for in order to prefer one lake to the other you have to +discover faults where there are none. Nemi is a smaller circle, but lies +in a deeper cup, and if with no grey Franciscan pile to guard its woody +shores, at least, in the same position, the little high-perched black +town to which it gives its name and which looks across at Genzano on the +opposite shore as Palazzuola regards Castel Gandolfo. The walk from the +Ariccia to Genzano is charming, most of all when it reaches a certain +grassy piazza from which three public avenues stretch away under a +double row of stunted and twisted elms. The Duke Cesarini has a villa at +Genzano--I mentioned it just now--whose gardens overhang the lake; but +he has also a porter in a faded rakish-looking livery who shakes his +head at your proffered franc unless you can reinforce it with a permit +countersigned at Rome. For this annoying complication of dignities he is +justly to be denounced; but I forgive him for the sake of that ancestor +who in the seventeenth century planted this shady walk. Never was a +prettier approach to a town than by these low-roofed light-chequered +corridors. Their only defect is that they prepare you for a town of +rather more rustic coquetry than Genzano exhibits. It has quite the +usual allowance, the common cynicism, of accepted decay, and looks +dismally as if its best families had all fallen into penury together and +lost the means of keeping anything better than donkeys in their great +dark, vaulted basements and mending their broken window-panes with +anything better than paper. It was on the occasion of this drear Genzano +that I had a difference of opinion with a friend who maintained that +there was nothing in the same line so pretty in Europe as a pretty New +England village. The proposition seemed to a cherisher of quaintness on +the face of it inacceptable; but calmly considered it has a measure of +truth. I am not fond of chalk-white painted planks, certainly; I vastly +prefer the dusky tones of ancient stucco and peperino; but I succumb +on occasion to the charms of a vine-shaded porch, of tulips and dahlias +glowing in the shade of high-arching elms, of heavy-scented lilacs +bending over a white paling to brush your cheek. + +"I prefer Siena to Lowell," said my friend; "but I prefer Farmington to +such a thing as this." In fact an Italian village is simply a miniature +Italian city, and its various parts imply a town of fifty times the +size. At Genzano are neither dahlias nor lilacs, and no odours but +foul ones. Flowers and other graces are all confined to the high-walled +precincts of Duke Cesarini, to which you must obtain admission twenty +miles away. The houses on the other hand would generally lodge a New +England cottage, porch and garden and high-arching elms included, in +one of their cavernous basements. These vast grey dwellings are all of +a fashion denoting more generous social needs than any they serve +nowadays. They speak of better days and of a fabulous time when Italy +was either not shabby or could at least "carry off" her shabbiness. For +what follies are they doing penance? Through what melancholy stages have +their fortunes ebbed? You ask these questions as you choose the shady +side of the long blank street and watch the hot sun glare upon the +dust-coloured walls and pause before the fetid gloom of open doors. + +I should like to spare a word for mouldy little Nemi, perched upon a +cliff high above the lake, at the opposite side; but after all, when I +had climbed up into it from the water-side, passing beneath a great arch +which I suppose once topped a gateway, and counted its twenty or thirty +apparent inhabitants peeping at me from black doorways, and looked at +the old round tower at whose base the village clusters, and declared +that it was all queer, queer, desperately queer, I had said all that is +worth saying about it. Nemi has a much better appreciation of its +lovely position than Genzano, where your only view of the lake is from a +dunghill behind one of the houses. At the foot of the round tower is +an overhanging terrace, from which you may feast your eyes on the only +freshness they find in these dusky human hives--the blooming seam, as +one may call it, of strong wild flowers which binds the crumbling walls +to the face of the cliff. Of Rocca di Papa I must say as little, It +consorted generally with the bravery of its name; but the only object +I made a note of as I passed through it on my way to Monte Cavo, which +rises directly above it, was a little black house with a tablet in its +face setting forth that Massimo d' Azeglio had dwelt there. The story +of his sojourn is not the least attaching episode in his delightful +_Ricordi_. From the summit of Monte Cavo is a prodigious view, which you +may enjoy with whatever good-nature is left you by the reflection that +the modern Passionist convent occupying this admirable site was erected +by the Cardinal of York (grandson of James II) on the demolished ruins +of an immemorial temple of Jupiter: the last foolish act of a foolish +race. For me I confess this folly spoiled the convent, and the convent +all but spoiled the view; for I kept thinking how fine it would have +been to emerge upon the old pillars and sculptures from the lava +pavement of the Via Triumphalis, which wanders grass-grown and untrodden +through the woods. A convent, however, which nothing spoils is that of +Palazzuola, to which I paid my respects on this same occasion. It rises +on a lower spur of Monte Cavo, on the edge, as we have seen, of the +Alban Lake, and though it occupies a classic site, that of early Alba +Longa, it displaced nothing more precious than memories and legends so +dim that the antiquarians are still quarrelling about them. It has a +meagre little church and the usual sham Perugino with a couple of tinsel +crowns for the Madonna and the Infant inserted into the canvas; and it +has also a musty old room hung about with faded portraits and charts and +queer ecclesiastical knick-knacks, which borrowed a mysterious +interest from the sudden assurance of the simple Franciscan brother who +accompanied me that it was the room of the Son of the King of Portugal. +But my peculiar pleasure was the little thick-shaded garden which +adjoins the convent and commands from its massive artificial foundations +an enchanting view of the lake. Part of it is laid out in cabbages and +lettuce, over which a rubicund brother, with his frock tucked up, was +bending with a solicitude which he interrupted to remove his skullcap +and greet me with the unsophisticated sweet-humoured smile that every +now and then in Italy does so much to make you forget the ambiguities of +monachism. The rest is occupied by cypresses and other funereal +umbrage, making a dank circle round an old cracked fountain black with +water-moss. The parapet of the terrace is furnished with good stone +seats where you may lean on your elbows to gaze away a sunny half-hour +and, feeling the general charm of the scene, declare that the best +mission of such a country in the world has been simply to produce, in +the way of prospect and picture, these masterpieces of mildness. Mild +here as a dream the whole attained effect, mild as resignation, mild +as one's thoughts of another life. Such a session wasn't surely an +experience of the irritable flesh; it was the deep degustation, on a +summer's day, of something immortally expressed by a man of genius. + +{Illustration: CASTEL GANDOLFO.} + +From Albano you may take your way through several ancient little cities +to Frascati, a rival centre of _villeggiatura_, the road following the +hillside for a long morning's walk and passing through alternations +of denser and clearer shade--the dark vaulted alleys of ilex and the +brilliant corridors of fresh-sprouting oak. The Campagna is beneath you +continually, with the sea beyond Ostia receiving the silver arrows of +the sun upon its chased and burnished shield, and mighty Rome, to the +north, lying at no great length in the idle immensity around it. +The highway passes below Castel Gandolfo, which stands perched on an +eminence behind a couple of gateways surmounted with the Papal tiara and +twisted cordon; and I have more than once chosen the roundabout road for +the sake of passing beneath these pompous insignia. Castel Gandolfo is +indeed an ecclesiastical village and under the peculiar protection of +the Popes, whose huge summer-palace rises in the midst of it like a +rural Vatican. In speaking of the road to Frascati I necessarily revert +to my first impressions, gathered on the occasion of the feast of the +Annunziata, which falls on the 25th of March and is celebrated by +a peasants' fair. As Murray strongly recommends you to visit this +spectacle, at which you are promised a brilliant exhibition of all +the costumes of modern Latium, I took an early train to Frascati and +measured, in company with a prodigious stream of humble pedestrians, the +half-hour's interval to Grotta Ferrata, where the fair is held. The road +winds along the hillside, among the silver-sprinkled olives and through +a charming wood where the ivy seemed tacked upon the oaks by women's +fingers and the birds were singing to the late anemones. It was +covered with a very jolly crowd of vulgar pleasure-takers, and the only +creatures not in a state of manifest hilarity were the pitiful +little overladen, overbeaten donkeys (who surely deserve a chapter to +themselves in any description of these neighbourhoods) and the horrible +beggars who were thrusting their sores and stumps at you from under +every tree. Every one was shouting, singing, scrambling, making light of +dust and distance and filling the air with that childlike jollity which +the blessed Italian temperament never goes roundabout to conceal. There +is no crowd surely at once so jovial and so gentle as an Italian crowd, +and I doubt if in any other country the tightly packed third-class +car in which I went out from Rome would have introduced me to so much +smiling and so little swearing. Grotta Ferrata is a very dirty little +village, with a number of raw new houses baking on the hot hillside and +nothing to charm the fond gazer but its situation and its old fortified +abbey. After pushing about among the shabby little booths and declining +a number of fabulous bargains in tinware, shoes and pork, I was glad +to retire to a comparatively uninvaded corner of the abbey and +divert myself with the view. This grey ecclesiastical stronghold is +a thoroughly scenic affair, hanging over the hillside on plunging +foundations which bury themselves among the dense olives. It has massive +round towers at the corners and a grass-grown moat, enclosing a church +and a monastery. The fore-court, within the abbatial gateway, now serves +as the public square of the village and in fair-time of course witnesses +the best of the fun. The best of the fun was to be found in certain +great vaults and cellars of the abbey, where wine was in free flow +from gigantic hogsheads. At the exit of these trickling grottos shady +trellises of bamboo and gathered twigs had been improvised, and under +them a grand guzzling proceeded. All of which was so in the fine old +style that I was roughly reminded of the wedding-feast of Gamacho. The +banquet was far less substantial of course, but it had a note as of +immemorial manners that couldn't fail to suggest romantic analogies to a +pilgrim from the land of no cooks. There was a feast of reason close +at hand, however, and I was careful to visit the famous frescoes of +Domenichino in the adjoining church. It sounds rather brutal perhaps to +say that, when I came back into the clamorous little piazza, the sight +of the peasants swilling down their sour wine appealed to me more than +the masterpieces--Murray calls them so--of the famous Bolognese. It +amounts after all to saying that I prefer Teniers to Domenichino; which +I am willing to let pass for the truth. The scene under the rickety +trellises was the more suggestive of Teniers that there were no costumes +to make it too Italian. Murray's attractive statement on this point was, +like many of his statements, much truer twenty years ago than to-day. +Costume is gone or fast going; I saw among the women not a single +crimson bodice and not a couple of classic head-cloths. The poorer sort, +dressed in vulgar rags of no fashion and colour, and the smarter ones +in calico gowns and printed shawls of the vilest modern fabric, had +honoured their dusky tresses but with rich applications of grease. The +men are still in jackets and breeches, and, with their slouched and +pointed hats and open-breasted shirts and rattling leather leggings, +may remind one sufficiently of the Italian peasant as he figured in the +woodcuts familiar to our infancy. After coming out of the church I found +a delightful nook--a queer little terrace before a more retired and +tranquil drinking-shop--where I called for a bottle of wine to help me +to guess why I "drew the line" at Domenichino. + +This little terrace was a capricious excrescence at the end of +the piazza, itself simply a greater terrace; and one reached it, +picturesquely, by ascending a short inclined plane of grass-grown +cobble-stones and passing across a little dusky kitchen through whose +narrow windows the light of the mighty landscape beyond touched up old +earthen pots. The terrace was oblong and so narrow that it held but a +single small table, placed lengthwise; yet nothing could be pleasanter +than to place one's bottle on the polished parapet. Here you seemed +by the time you had emptied it to be swinging forward into +immensity--hanging poised above the Campagna. A beautiful gorge with +a twinkling stream wandered down the hill far below you, beyond which +Marino and Castel Gandolfo peeped above the trees. In front you could +count the towers of Rome and the tombs of the Appian Way. I don't know +that I came to any very distinct conclusion about Domenichino; but it +was perhaps because the view was perfection that he struck me as more +than ever mediocrity. And yet I don't think it was one's bottle of wine, +either, that made one after all maudlin about him; it was the sense of +the foolishly usurped in his tenure of fame, of the derisive in his ever +having been put forward. To say so indeed savours of flogging a dead +horse, but it is surely an unkind stroke of fate for him that Murray +assures ten thousand Britons every winter in the most emphatic manner +that his Communion of St. Jerome is the second finest picture in the +world. If this were so one would certainly here in Rome, where such +institutions are convenient, retire into the very nearest convent; with +such a world one would have a standing quarrel. And yet this sport +of destiny is an interesting case, in default of being an interesting +painter, and I would take a moderate walk, in most moods, to see one of +his pictures. He is so supremely good an example of effort detached from +inspiration and school-merit divorced from spontaneity, that one of his +fine frigid performances ought to hang in a conspicuous place in every +academy of design. Few things of the sort contain more urgent lessons +or point a more precious moral; and I would have the head-master in the +drawing-school take each ingenuous pupil by the hand and lead him up +to the Triumph of David or the Chase of Diana or the red-nosed Persian +Sibyl and make him some such little speech as the following: "This great +picture, my son, was hung here to show you how you must _never_ paint; +to give you a perfect specimen of what in its boundless generosity the +providence of nature created for our fuller knowledge--an artist whose +development was a negation. The great thing in art is charm, and the +great thing in charm is spontaneity. Domenichino, having talent, is here +and there an excellent model--he was devoted, conscientious, observant, +industrious; but now that we've seen pretty well what can simply be +learned do its best, these things help him little with us, because his +imagination was cold. It loved nothing, it lost itself in nothing, its +efforts never gave it the heartache. It went about trying this and +that, concocting cold pictures after cold receipts, dealing in the +second-hand, in the ready-made, and putting into its performances +a little of everything but itself. When you see so many things in a +composition you might suppose that among them all some charm might be +born; yet they're really but the hundred mouths through which you may +hear the unhappy thing murmur 'I'm dead!' It's by the simplest thing it +has that a picture lives--by its temper. Look at all the great talents, +Domenichino as well as at Titian; but think less of dogma than of plain +nature, and I can almost promise you that yours will remain true." This +is very little to what the aesthetic sage I have imagined _might_ say; +and we are after all unwilling to let our last verdict be an unkind one +on any great bequest of human effort. The faded frescoes in the chapel +at Grotta Ferrata leave us a memory the more of man's effort to dream +beautifully; and they thus mingle harmoniously enough with our multifold +impressions of Italy, where dreams and realities have both kept such +pace and so strangely diverged. It was absurd--that was the truth--to +be critical at all among the appealing old Italianisms round me and to +treat the poor exploded Bolognese more harshly than, when I walked +back to Frascati, I treated the charming old water-works of the Villa +Aldobrandini. I confound these various products of antiquated art in a +genial absolution, and should like especially to tell how fine it was to +watch this prodigious fountain come tumbling down its channel of mouldy +rock-work, through its magnificent vista of ilex, to the fantastic old +hemicycle where a dozen tritons and naiads sit posturing to receive it. +The sky above the ilexes was incredibly blue and the ilexes themselves +incredibly black; and to see the young white moon peeping above the +trees you could easily have fancied it was midnight. I should like +furthermore to expatiate on Villa Mondragone, the most grandly +impressive hereabouts, of all such domestic monuments. The Casino in the +midst is as big as the Vatican, which it strikingly resembles, and +it stands perched on a terrace as vast as the parvise of St. Peter's, +looking straight away over black cypress-tops into the shining vastness +of the Campagna. Everything somehow seemed immense and solemn; there +was nothing small but certain little nestling blue shadows on the Sabine +Mountains, to which the terrace seems to carry you wonderfully near. +The place been for some time lost to private uses, since it figures +fantastically in a novel of George Sand--_La Daniella_--and now, in +quite another way, as a Jesuit college for boys. The afternoon was +perfect, and as it waned it filled the dark alleys with a wonderful +golden haze. Into this came leaping and shouting a herd of little +collegians with a couple of long-skirted Jesuits striding at their +heels. We all know--I make the point for my antithesis--the monstrous +practices of these people; yet as I watched the group I verily believe +I declared that if I had a little son he should go to Mondragone and +receive their crooked teachings for the sake of the other memories, the +avenues of cypress and ilex, the view of the Campagna, the atmosphere +of antiquity. But doubtless when a sense of "mere character," shameless +incomparable character, has brought one to this it is time one should +pause. + + + + + +THE AFTER-SEASON IN ROME + + +One may at the blest end of May say without injustice to anybody that +the state of mind of many a _forestiero_ in Rome is one of intense +impatience for the moment when all other _forestieri_ shall have +taken themselves off. One may confess to this state of mind and be no +misanthrope. The place has passed so completely for the winter months +into the hands of the barbarians that that estimable character the +passionate pilgrim finds it constantly harder to keep his passion clear. +He has a rueful sense of impressions perverted and adulterated; the +all-venerable visage disconcerts us by a vain eagerness to see itself +mirrored in English, American, German eyes. It isn't simply that you are +never first or never alone at the classic or historic spots where +you have dreamt of persuading the shy _genius loci_ into confidential +utterance; it isn't simply that St. Peter's, the Vatican, the Palatine, +are for ever ringing with the false note of the languages without style: +it is the general oppressive feeling that the city of the soul +has become for the time a monstrous mixture of watering-place and +curiosity-shop and that its most ardent life is that of the tourists who +haggle over false intaglios and yawn through palaces and temples. But +you are told of a happy time when these abuses begin to pass away, when +Rome becomes Rome again and you may have her all to yourself. "You may +like her more or less now," I was assured at the height of the season; +"but you must wait till the month of May, when she'll give you _all_ she +has, to love her. Then the foreigners, or the excess of them, are gone; +the galleries and ruins are empty, and the place," said my informant, +who was a happy Frenchman of the Academie de France, _"renait a +ellememe."_ Indeed I was haunted all winter by an irresistible prevision +of what Rome _must_ be in declared spring. Certain charming places +seemed to murmur: "Ah, this is nothing! Come back at the right weeks and +see the sky above us almost black with its excess of blue, and the +new grass already deep, but still vivid, and the white roses tumble in +odorous spray and the warm radiant air distil gold for the smelting-pot +that the _genius loci_ then dips his brush into before making play with +it, in his inimitable way, for the general effect of complexion." + +A month ago I spent a week in the country, and on my return, the first +time I approached the Corso, became conscious of a change. Something +delightful had happened, to which at first I couldn't give a name, but +which presently shone out as the fact that there were but half as +many people present and that these were chiefly the natural or the +naturalised. We had been docked of half our irrelevance, our motley +excess, and now physically, morally, aeesthetically there was elbow-room. +In the afternoon I went to the Pincio, and the Pincio was almost dull. +The band was playing to a dozen ladies who lay in landaus poising their +lace-fringed parasols; but they had scarce more than a light-gloved +dandy apiece hanging over their carriage doors. By the parapet to the +great terrace that sweeps the city stood but three or four interlopers +looking at the sunset and with their Baedekers only just showing in +their pockets--the sunsets not being down among the tariffed articles +in these precious volumes. I went so far as to hope for them that, +like myself, they were, under every precaution, taking some amorous +intellectual liberty with the scene. + +Practically I violate thus the instinct of monopoly, since it's a +shame not to publish that Rome in May is indeed exquisitely worth your +patience. I have just been so gratified at finding myself in undisturbed +possession for a couple of hours of the Museum of the Lateran that I can +afford to be magnanimous. It's almost as if the old all-papal paradise +had come back. The weather for a month has been perfect, the sky an +extravagance of blue, the air lively enough, the nights cool, nippingly +cool, and the whole ancient greyness lighted with an irresistible smile. +Rome, which in some moods, especially to new-comers, seems a place of +almost sinister gloom, has an occasional art, as one knows her better, +of brushing away care by the grand gesture with which some splendid +impatient mourning matron--just the Niobe of Nations, surviving, +emerging and looking about her again--might pull off and cast aside an +oppression of muffling crape. This admirable power still temperamentally +to react and take notice lurks in all her darkness and dirt and decay--a +something more careless and hopeless than our thrifty northern cheer, +and yet more genial and urbane than the Parisian spirit of _blague_. +The collective Roman nature is a healthy and hearty one, and you feel it +abroad in the streets even when the sirocco blows and the medium of life +seems to proceed more or less from the mouth of a furnace. But who shall +analyse even the simplest Roman impression? It is compounded of so +many things, it says so much, it involves so much, it so quickens the +intelligence and so flatters the heart, that before we fairly grasp +the case the imagination has marked it for her own and exposed us to a +perilous likelihood of talking nonsense about it. + +The smile of Rome, as I have called it, and its insidious message to +those who incline to ramble irresponsibly and take things as they come, +is ushered in with the first breath of spring, and then grows and grows +with the advancing season till it wraps the whole place in its tenfold +charm. As the process develops you can do few better things than +go often to Villa Borghese and sit on the grass--on a stout bit of +drapery--and watch its exquisite stages. It has a frankness and a +sweetness beyond any relenting of _our_ clumsy climates even when ours +leave off their damnable faces and begin. Nature departs from every +reserve with a confidence that leaves one at a loss where, as it were, +to look--leaves one, as I say, nothing to do but to lay one's head among +the anemones at the base of a high-stemmed pine and gaze up crestward +and sky-ward along its slanting silvery column. You may watch the whole +business from a dozen of these choice standpoints and have a different +villa for it every day in the week. The Doria, the Ludovisi, the Medici, +the Albani, the Wolkonski, the Chigi, the Mellini, the Massimo--there +are more of them, with all their sights and sounds and odours and +memories, than you have senses for. But I prefer none of them to the +Borghese, which is free to all the world at all times and yet never +crowded; for when the whirl of carriages is great in the middle regions +you may find a hundred untrodden spots and silent corners, tenanted at +the worst by a group of those long-skirted young Propagandists who +stalk about with solemn angularity, each with a book under his arm, like +silhouettes from a medieval missal, and "compose" so extremely well +with the still more processional cypresses and with stretches of +golden-russet wall overtopped by ultramarine. And yet if the Borghese is +good the Medici is strangely charming, and you may stand in the little +belvedere which rises with such surpassing oddity out of the dusky heart +of the Boschetto at the latter establishment--a miniature presentation +of the wood of the Sleeping Beauty--and look across at the Ludovisi +pines lifting their crooked parasols into a sky of what a painter would +call the most morbid blue, and declare that the place where _they_ grow +is the most delightful in the world. Villa Ludovisi has been all winter +the residence of the lady familiarly known in Roman society as "Rosina," +Victor Emmanuel's morganatic wife, the only familiarity it would +seem, that she allows, for the grounds were rigidly closed, to the +inconsolable regret of old Roman sojourners. Just as the nightingales +began to sing, however, the quasi-august _padrona_ departed, and the +public, with certain restrictions, have been admitted to hear them. +The place takes, where it lies, a princely ease, and there could be no +better example of the expansive tendencies of ancient privilege than the +fact that its whole vast extent is contained by the city walls. It has +in this respect very much the same enviable air of having got up early +that marks the great intramural demesne of Magdalen College at Oxford. +The stern old ramparts of Rome form the outer enclosure of the villa, +and hence a series of "striking scenic effects" which it would be +unscrupulous flattery to say you can imagine. The grounds are laid out +in the formal last-century manner; but nowhere do the straight black +cypresses lead off the gaze into vistas of a melancholy more charged +with associations--poetic, romantic, historic; nowhere are there +grander, smoother walls of laurel and myrtle. + +I recently spent an afternoon hour at the little Protestant cemetery +close to St. Paul's Gate, where the ancient and the modern world are +insidiously contrasted. They make between them one of the solemn places +of Rome--although indeed when funereal things are so interfused it seems +ungrateful to call them sad. Here is a mixture of tears and smiles, of +stones and flowers, of mourning cypresses and radiant sky, which gives +us the impression of our looking back at death from the brighter side +of the grave. The cemetery nestles in an angle of the city wall, and the +older graves are sheltered by a mass of ancient brickwork, through whose +narrow loopholes you peep at the wide purple of the Campagna. Shelley's +grave is here, buried in roses--a happy grave every way for the very +type and figure of the Poet. Nothing could be more impenetrably tranquil +than this little corner in the bend of the protecting rampart, where a +cluster of modern ashes is held tenderly in the rugged hand of the Past. +The past is tremendously embodied in the hoary pyramid of Caius Cestius, +which rises hard by, half within the wall and half without, cutting +solidly into the solid blue of the sky and casting its pagan shadow upon +the grass of English graves--that of Keats, among them--with an effect +of poetic justice. It is a wonderful confusion of mortality and a grim +enough admonition of our helpless promiscuity in the crucible of time. +But the most touching element of all is the appeal of the pious English +inscriptions among all these Roman memories; touching because of their +universal expression of that trouble within trouble, misfortune in +a foreign land. Something special stirs the heart through the fine +Scriptural language in which everything is recorded. The echoes of +massive Latinity with which the atmosphere is charged suggest nothing +more majestic and monumental. I may seem unduly to refine, but the +injunction to the reader in the monument to Miss Bathurst, drowned in +the Tiber in 1824, "If thou art young and lovely, build not thereon, +for she who lies beneath thy feet in death was the loveliest flower ever +cropt in its bloom," affects us irresistibly as a case for tears on the +spot. The whole elaborate inscription indeed says something over and +beyond all it does say. The English have the reputation of being the +most reticent people in the world, and as there is no smoke without fire +I suppose they have done something to deserve it; yet who can say that +one doesn't constantly meet the most startling examples of the insular +faculty to "gush"? In this instance the mother of the deceased takes +the public into her confidence with surprising frankness and omits +no detail, seizing the opportunity to mention by the way that she had +already lost her husband by a most mysterious visitation. The appeal +to one's attention and the confidence in it are withal most moving. The +whole record has an old-fashioned gentility that makes its frankness +tragic. You seem to hear the garrulity of passionate grief. + +To be choosing these positive commonplaces of the Roman tone for a theme +when there are matters of modern moment going on may seem none the +less to require an apology. But I make no claim to your special +correspondent's faculty for getting an "inside" view of things, and I +have hardly more than a pictorial impression of the Pope's illness and +of the discussion of the Law of the Convents. Indeed I am afraid +to speak of the Pope's illness at all, lest I should say something +egregiously heartless about it, recalling too forcibly that unnatural +husband who was heard to wish that his wife would "either" get well--! +He had his reasons, and Roman tourists have theirs in the shape of a +vague longing for something spectacular at St. Peter's. If it takes the +sacrifice of somebody to produce it let somebody then be sacrificed. +Meanwhile we have been having a glimpse of the spectacular side of the +Religious Corporations Bill. Hearing one morning a great hubbub in the +Corso I stepped forth upon my balcony. A couple of hundred men were +strolling slowly down the street with their hands in their pockets, +shouting in unison "Abbasso il ministero!" and huzzaing in chorus. Just +beneath my window they stopped and began to murmur "Al Quirinale, al +Quirinale!" The crowd surged a moment gently and then drifted to the +Quirinal, where it scuffled harmlessly with half-a-dozen of the king's +soldiers. It ought to have been impressive, for what was it, strictly, +unless the seeds of revolution? But its carriage was too gentle and +its cries too musical to send the most timorous tourist to packing +his trunk. As I began with saying: in Rome, in May, everything has an +amiable side, even popular uprisings. + + + + + +FROM A ROMAN NOTE-BOOK + + +December 28, 1872.--In Rome again for the last three days--that second +visit which, when the first isn't followed by a fatal illness in +Florence, the story goes that one is doomed to pay. I didn't drink of +the Fountain of Trevi on the eve of departure the other time; but I feel +as if I had drunk of the Tiber itself. Nevertheless as I drove from +the station in the evening I wondered what I should think of it at this +first glimpse hadn't I already known it. All manner of evil perhaps. +Paris, as I passed along the Boulevards three evenings before to take +the train, was swarming and glittering as befits a great capital. Here, +in the black, narrow, crooked, empty streets, I saw nothing I would +fain regard as eternal. But there were new gas-lamps round the spouting +Triton in Piazza Barberini and a newspaper stall on the corner of the +Condotti and the Corso--salient signs of the emancipated state. An hour +later I walked up to Via Gregoriana by Piazza di Spagna. It was all +silent and deserted, and the great flight of steps looked surprisingly +small. Everything seemed meagre, dusky, provincial. Could Rome after all +really _be_ a world-city? That queer old rococo garden gateway at +the top of the Gregoriana stirred a dormant memory; it awoke into a +consciousness of the delicious mildness of the air, and very soon, in +a little crimson drawing-room, I was reconciled and re-initiated.... +Everything is dear (in the way of lodgings), but it hardly matters, as +everything is taken and some one else paying for it. I must make up my +mind to a bare perch. But it seems poorly perverse here to aspire to +an "interior" or to be conscious of the economic side of life. The +aeesthetic is so intense that you feel you should live on the taste +of it, should extract the nutritive essence of the atmosphere. For +positively it's _such_ an atmosphere! The weather is perfect, the sky as +blue as the most exploded tradition fames it, the whole air glowing +and throbbing with lovely colour.... The glitter of Paris is now all +gaslight. And oh the monotonous miles of rain-washed asphalte! + +_December 30th_.--I have had nothing to do with the "ceremonies." In +fact I believe there have hardly been any--no midnight mass at the +Sistine chapel, no silver trumpets at St. Peter's. Everything is +remorselessly clipped and curtailed--the Vatican in deepest mourning. +But I saw it in its superbest scarlet in '69.... I went yesterday with +L. to the Colonna gardens--an adventure that would have reconverted me +to Rome if the thing weren't already done. It's a rare old place--rising +in mouldy bosky terraces and mossy stairways and winding walks from the +back of the palace to the top of the Quirinal. It's the grand style +of gardening, and resembles the present natural manner as a chapter of +Johnsonian rhetoric resembles a piece of clever contemporary journalism. +But it's a better style in horticulture than in literature; I prefer +one of the long-drawn blue-green Colonna vistas, with a maimed and +mossy-coated garden goddess at the end, to the finest possible quotation +from a last-century classic. Perhaps the best thing there is the +old orangery with its trees in fantastic terra-cotta tubs. The late +afternoon light was gilding the monstrous jars and suspending golden +chequers among the golden-fruited leaves. Or perhaps the best thing is +the broad terrace with its mossy balustrade and its benches; also its +view of the great naked Torre di Nerone (I think), which might look +stupid if the rosy brickwork didn't take such a colour in the blue +air. Delightful, at any rate, to stroll and talk there in the afternoon +sunshine. + +_January 2nd,_ 1873.--Two or three drives with A.--one to St. Paul's +without the Walls and back by a couple of old churches on the Aventine. +I was freshly struck with the rare distinction of the little Protestant +cemetery at the Gate, lying in the shadow of the black sepulchral +Pyramid and the thick-growing black cypresses. Bathed in the clear Roman +light the place is heartbreaking for what it asks you--in such a world +as _this_--to renounce. If it should "make one in love with death to lie +there," that's only if death should be conscious. As the case stands, +the weight of a tremendous past presses upon the flowery sod, and the +sleeper's mortality feels the contact of all the mortality with which +the brilliant air is tainted.... The restored Basilica is incredibly +splendid. It seems a last pompous effort of formal Catholicism, and +there are few more striking emblems of later Rome--the Rome foredoomed +to see Victor Emmanuel in the Quirinal, the Rome of abortive councils +and unheeded anathemas. It rises there, gorgeous and useless, on its +miasmatic site, with an air of conscious bravado--a florid advertisement +of the superabundance of faith. Within it's magnificent, and its +magnificence has no shabby spots--a rare thing in Rome. Marble and +mosaic, alabaster and malachite, lapis and porphyry, incrust it from +pavement to cornice and flash back their polished lights at each other +with such a splendour of effect that you seem to stand at the heart of +some immense prismatic crystal. One has to come to Italy to know marbles +and love them. I remember the fascination of the first great show of +them I met in Venice--at the Scalzi and Gesuiti. Colour has in no other +form so cool and unfading a purity and lustre. Softness of tone and +hardness of substance--isn't that the sum of the artist's desire? G., +with his beautiful caressing, open-lipped Roman utterance, so easy to +understand and, to my ear, so finely suggestive of genuine Latin, not +our horrible Anglo-Saxon and Protestant kind, urged upon us the charms +of a return by the Aventine and the sight of a couple of old churches. +The best is Santa Sabina, a very fine old structure of the fifth +century, mouldering in its dusky solitude and consuming its own +antiquity. What a massive heritage Christianity and Catholicism are +leaving here! What a substantial fact, in all its decay, this memorial +Christian temple outliving its uses among the sunny gardens and +vineyards! It has a noble nave, filled with a stale smell which +(like that of the onion) brought tears to my eyes, and bordered with +twenty-four fluted marble columns of Pagan origin. The crudely primitive +little mosaics along the entablature are extremely curious. A Dominican +monk, still young, who showed us the church, seemed a creature generated +from its musty shadows I odours. His physiognomy was wonderfully _de +l'emploi_, and his voice, most agreeable, had the strangest jaded +humility. His lugubrious salute and sanctimonious impersonal +appropriation of my departing franc would have been a master-touch on +the stage. While we were still in the church a bell rang that he had to +go and answer, and as he came back and approached us along the nave he +made with his white gown and hood and his cadaverous face, against the +dark church background, one of those pictures which, thank the Muses, +have not yet been reformed out of Italy. It was the exact illustration, +for insertion in a text, of heaven knows how many old romantic and +conventional literary Italianisms--plays, poems, mysteries of Udolpho. +We got back into the carriage and talked of profane things and went home +to dinner--drifting recklessly, it seemed to me, from aesthetic luxury +to social. + +On the 31st we went to the musical vesper-service at the Gesu--hitherto +done so splendidly before the Pope and the cardinals. The manner of it +was eloquent of change--no Pope, no cardinals, and indifferent music; +but a great _mise-en-scene_ nevertheless. The church is gorgeous; late +Renaissance, of great proportions, and full, like so many others, but in +a pre-eminent degree, of seventeenth and eighteenth century Romanism. +It doesn't impress the imagination, but richly feeds the curiosity, +by which I mean one's sense of the curious; suggests no legends, but +innumerable anecdotes a la Stendhal. There is a vast dome, filled with a +florid concave fresco of tumbling foreshortened angels, and all over +the ceilings and cornices a wonderful outlay of dusky gildings +and mouldings. There are various Bernini saints and seraphs in +stucco-sculpture, astride of the tablets and door-tops, backing against +their rusty machinery of coppery _nimbi_ and egg-shaped cloudlets. +Marble, damask and tapers in gorgeous profusion. The high altar a great +screen of twinkling chandeliers. The choir perched in a little loft high +up in the right transept, like a balcony in a side-scene at the opera, +and indulging in surprising roulades and flourishes.... Near me sat a +handsome, opulent-looking nun--possibly an abbess or prioress of noble +lineage. Can a holy woman of such a complexion listen to a fine operatic +barytone in a sumptuous temple and receive none but ascetic impressions? +What a cross-fire of influences does Catholicism provide! + +_January 4th._--A drive with A. out of Porta San Giovanni and along Via +Appia Nuova. More and more beautiful as you get well away from the walls +and the great view opens out before you--the rolling green-brown dells +and flats of the Campagna, the long, disjointed arcade of the aqueducts, +the deep-shadowed blue of the Alban Hills, touched into pale lights by +their scattered towns. We stopped at the ruined basilica of San Stefano, +an affair of the fifth century, rather meaningless without a learned +companion. But the perfect little sepulchral chambers of the Pancratii, +disinterred beneath the church, tell their own tale--in their hardly +dimmed frescoes, their beautiful sculptured coffin and great sepulchral +slab. Better still the tomb of the Valerii adjoining it--a single +chamber with an arched roof, covered with stucco mouldings perfectly +intact, exquisite figures and arabesques as sharp and delicate as if the +plasterer's scaffold had just been taken from under them. Strange enough +to think of these things--so many of them as there are--surviving their +immemorial eclipse in this perfect shape and coming up like long-lost +divers on the sea of time. + +_January 16th._--A delightful walk last Sunday with F. to Monte Mario. +We drove to Porta Angelica, the little gate hidden behind the right wing +of Bernini's colonnade, and strolled thence up the winding road to the +Villa Mellini, where one of the greasy peasants huddled under the wall +in the sun admits you for half franc into the finest old ilex-walk in +Italy. It is all vaulted grey-green shade with blue Campagna stretches +in the interstices. The day was perfect; the still sunshine, as we sat +at the twisted base of the old trees, seemed to have the drowsy hum of +mid-summer--with that charm of Italian vegetation that comes to us as +its confession of having scenically served, to weariness at last, for +some pastoral these many centuries a classic. In a certain cheapness +and thinness of substance--as compared with the English stoutness, never +left athirst--it reminds me of our own, and it is relatively dry enough +and pale enough to explain the contempt of many unimaginative Britons. +But it has an idle abundance and wantonness, a romantic shabbiness +and dishevelment. At the Villa Mellini is the famous lonely pine which +"tells" so in the landscape from other points, bought off from the axe +by (I believe) Sir George Beaumont, commemorated in a like connection in +Wordsworth's great sonnet. He at least was not an unimaginative Briton. +As you stand under it, its far-away shallow dome, supported on a single +column almost white enough to be marble, seems to dwell in the dizziest +depths of the blue. Its pale grey-blue boughs and its silvery stem make +a wonderful harmony with the ambient air. The Villa Mellini is full +of the elder Italy of one's imagination--the Italy of Boccaccio and +Ariosto. There are twenty places where the Florentine story-tellers +might have sat round on the grass. Outside the villa walls, beneath the +over-crowding orange-boughs, straggled old Italy as well--but not in +Boccaccio's velvet: a row of ragged and livid contadini, some simply +stupid in their squalor, but some downright brigands of romance, or of +reality, with matted locks and terribly sullen eyes. + +A couple of days later I walked for old acquaintance' sake over to San +Onofrio on the Janiculan. The approach is one of the dirtiest adventures +in Rome, and though the view is fine from the little terrace, the church +and convent are of a meagre and musty pattern. Yet here--almost like +pearls in a dunghill--are hidden mementos of two of the most exquisite +of Italian minds. Torquato Tasso spent the last months of his life here, +and you may visit his room and various warped and faded relics. The most +interesting is a cast of his face taken after death--looking, like all +such casts, almost more than mortally gallant and distinguished. But +who should look all ideally so if not he? In a little shabby, chilly +corridor adjoining is a fresco of Leonardo, a Virgin and Child with +the _donatorio_. It is very small, simple and faded, but it has all the +artist's magic, that mocking, illusive refinement and hint of a vague +_arriere-pensee_ which mark every stroke of Leonardo's brush. Is it the +perfection of irony or the perfection of tenderness? What does he mean, +what does he affirm, what does he deny? Magic wouldn't be magic, nor the +author of such things stand so absolutely alone, if we were ready with +an explanation. As I glanced from the picture to the poor stupid little +red-faced brother at my side I wondered if the thing mightn't pass for +an elegant epigram on monasticism. Certainly, at any rate, there is more +intellect in it than under all the monkish tonsures it has seen coming +and going these three hundred years. + +_January 21st._--The last three or four days I have regularly spent a +couple of hours from noon baking myself in the sun of the Pincio to get +rid of a cold. The weather perfect and the crowd (especially to-day) +amazing. Such a staring, lounging, dandified, amiable crowd! Who does +the vulgar stay-at-home work of Rome? All the grandees and half the +foreigners are there in their carriages, the _bourgeoisie_ on foot +staring at them and the beggars lining all the approaches. The great +difference between public places in America and Europe is in the number +of unoccupied people of every age and condition sitting about early and +late on benches and gazing at you, from your hat to your boots, as you +pass. Europe is certainly the continent of the practised stare. The +ladies on the Pincio have to run the gauntlet; but they seem to do so +complacently enough. The European woman is brought up to the sense +of having a definite part in the way of manners or manner to play in +public. To lie back in a barouche alone, balancing a parasol and seeming +to ignore the extremely immediate gaze of two serried ranks of male +creatures on each side of her path, save here and there to recognise +one of them with an imperceptible nod, is one of her daily duties. +The number of young men here who, like the coenobites of old, lead the +purely contemplative life is enormous. They muster in especial force +on the Pincio, but the Corso all day is thronged with them. They are +well-dressed, good-humoured, good-looking, polite; but they seem never +to do a harder stroke of work than to stroll from the Piazza Colonna to +the Hotel de Rome or _vice versa_. Some of them don't even stroll, but +stand leaning by the hour against the doorways, sucking the knobs of +their canes, feeling their back hair and settling their shirt-cuffs. At +my cafe in the morning several stroll in already (at nine o'clock) in +light, in "evening" gloves. But they order nothing, turn on their heels, +glance at the mirrors and stroll out again. When it rains they herd +under the _portes-cocheres_ and in the smaller cafes.... Yesterday +Prince Humbert's little _primogenito_ was on the Pincio in an open +landau with his governess. He's a sturdy blond little man and the image +of the King. They had stopped to listen to the music, and the crowd was +planted about the carriage-wheels, staring and criticising under the +child's snub little nose. It appeared bold cynical curiosity, without +the slightest manifestation of "loyalty," and it gave me a singular +sense of the vulgarisation of Rome under the new regime. When the Pope +drove abroad it was a solemn spectacle; even if you neither kneeled nor +uncovered you were irresistibly impressed. But the Pope never stopped to +listen to opera tunes, and he had no little popelings, under the charge +of superior nurse-maids, whom you might take liberties with. The family +at the Quirinal make something of a merit, I believe, of their +modest and inexpensive way of life. The merit is great; yet, +representationally, what a change for the worse from an order which +proclaimed stateliness a part of its essence! The divinity that doth +hedge a king must be pretty well on the wane. But how many more fine old +traditions will the extremely sentimental traveller miss in the Italians +over whom that little jostled prince in the landau will have come +into his kinghood? ... The Pincio continues to beguile; it's a great +resource. I am for ever being reminded of the "aesthetic luxury," as I +called it above, of living in Rome. To be able to choose of an afternoon +for a lounge (respectfully speaking) between St. Peter's and the high +precinct you approach by the gate just beyond Villa Medici--counting +nothing else--is a proof that if in Rome you may suffer from ennui, at +least your ennui has a throbbing soul in it. It is something to say for +the Pincio that you don't always choose St. Peter's. Sometimes I lose +patience with its parade of eternal idleness, but at others this very +idleness is balm to one's conscience. Life on just these terms seems so +easy, so monotonously sweet, that you feel it would be unwise, would be +really unsafe, to change. The Roman air is charged with an elixir, the +Roman cup seasoned with some insidious drop, of which the action is +fatally, yet none the less agreeably, "lowering." + +_January 26th._--With S. to the Villa Medici--perhaps on the whole +the most enchanting place in Rome. The part of the garden called the +Boschetto has an incredible, impossible charm; an upper terrace, behind +locked gates, covered with a little dusky forest of evergreen oaks. +Such a dim light as of a fabled, haunted place, such a soft suffusion +of tender grey-green tones, such a company of gnarled and twisted little +miniature trunks--dwarfs playing with each other at being giants--and +such a shower of golden sparkles drifting in from the vivid west! At +the end of the wood is a steep, circular mound, up which the short trees +scramble amain, with a long mossy staircase climbing up to a belvedere. +This staircase, rising suddenly out of the leafy dusk to you don't see +where, is delightfully fantastic. You expect to see an old woman in a +crimson petticoat and with a distaff come hobbling down and turn into +a fairy and offer you three wishes. I should name for my own first wish +that one didn't have to be a Frenchman to come and live and dream and +work at the Academie de France. Can there be for a while a happier +destiny than that of a young artist conscious of talent and of no errand +but to educate, polish and perfect it, transplanted to these sacred +shades? One has fancied Plato's Academy--his gleaming colonnades, his +blooming gardens and Athenian sky; but was it as good as this one, where +Monsieur Hebert does the Platonic? The blessing in Rome is not that this +or that or the other isolated object is so very unsurpassable; but that +the general air so contributes to interest, to impressions that are not +as any other impressions anywhere in the world. And from this general +air the Villa Medici has distilled an essence of its own--walled it in +and made it delightfully private. The great facade on the gardens +is like an enormous rococo clock-face all incrusted with images and +arabesques and tablets. What mornings and afternoons one might +spend there, brush in hand, unpreoccupied, untormented, pensioned, +satisfied--either persuading one's self that one would be "doing +something" in consequence or not caring if one shouldn't be. + +_At a later date--middle of March_.--A ride with S. W. out of the Porta +Pia to the meadows beyond the Ponte Nomentana--close to the site of +Phaon's villa where Nero in hiding had himself stabbed. It all spoke as +things here only speak, touching more chords than one can _now_ really +know or say. For these are predestined memories and the stuff that +regrets are made of; the mild divine efflorescence of spring, the +wonderful landscape, the talk suspended for another gallop.... +Returning, we dismounted at the gate of the Villa Medici and walked +through the twilight of the vaguely perfumed, bird-haunted alleys to +H.'s studio, hidden in the wood like a cottage in a fairy tale. I spent +there a charming half-hour in the fading light, looking at the pictures +while my companion discoursed of her errand. The studio is small and +more like a little salon; the painting refined, imaginative, somewhat +morbid, full of consummate French ability. A portrait, idealised and +etherealised, but a likeness of Mme. de---(from last year's Salon) +in white satin, quantities of lace, a coronet, diamonds and pearls; a +striking combination of brilliant silvery tones. A "Femme Sauvage," +a naked dusky girl in a wood, with a wonderfully clever pair of shy, +passionate eyes. The author is different enough from any of the numerous +American artists. They may be producers, but he's a product as well--a +product of influences of a sort of which we have as yet no +general command. One of them is his charmed lapse of life in that +unprofessional-looking little studio, with his enchanted wood on one +side and the plunging wall of Rome on the other. + +_January 30th._--A drive the other day with a friend to Villa Madama, +on the side of Monte Mario; a place like a page out of one of Browning's +richest evocations of this clime and civilisation. Wondrous in its +haunting melancholy, it might have inspired half "The Ring and the Book" +at a stroke. What a grim commentary on history such a scene--what an +irony of the past! The road up to it through the outer enclosure is +almost impassable with mud and stones. At the end, on a terrace, rises +the once elegant Casino, with hardly a whole pane of glass in its +facade, reduced to its sallow stucco and degraded ornaments. The front +away from Rome has in the basement a great loggia, now walled in from +the weather, preceded by a grassy be littered platform with an immense +sweeping view of the Campagna; the sad-looking, more than sad-looking, +evil-looking, Tiber beneath (the colour of gold, the sentimentalists +say, the colour of mustard, the realists); a great vague stretch beyond, +of various complexions and uses; and on the horizon the ever-iridescent +mountains. The place has become the shabbiest farm-house, with muddy +water in the old _pieces d'eau_ and dunghills on the old parterres. +The "feature" is the contents of the loggia: a vaulted roof and walls +decorated by Giulio Romano; exquisite stucco-work and still brilliant +frescoes; arabesques and figurini, nymphs and fauns, animals and +flowers--gracefully lavish designs of every sort. Much of the +colour--especially the blues--still almost vivid, and all the work +wonderfully ingenious, elegant and charming. Apartments so decorated can +have been meant only for the recreation of people greater than any +we know, people for whom life was impudent ease and success. Margaret +Farnese was the lady of the house, but where she trailed her cloth of +gold the chickens now scamper between your legs over rotten straw. It is +all inexpressibly dreary. A stupid peasant scratching his head, a +couple of critical Americans picking their steps, the walls tattered and +befouled breast-high, dampness and decay striking in on your heart, and +the scene overbowed by these heavenly frescoes, moulering there in their +airy artistry! It's poignant; it provokes tears; it tells so of the +waste of effort. Something human seems to pant beneath the grey pall +of time and to implore you to rescue it, to pity it, to stand by it +somehow. But you leave it to its lingering death without compunction, +almost with pleasure; for the place seems vaguely crime-haunted--paying +at least the penalty of some hard immorality. The end of a Renaissance +pleasure-house. Endless for the didactic observer the moral, abysmal for +the storyseeker the tale. + +_February 12th_.--Yesterday to the Villa Albani. Over-formal and (as my +companion says) too much like a tea-garden; but with beautiful stairs +and splendid geometrical lines of immense box-hedge, intersected +with high pedestals supporting little antique busts. The light to-day +magnificent; the Alban Hills of an intenser broken purple than I had +yet seen them--their white towns blooming upon it like vague projected +lights. It was like a piece of very modern painting, and a good example +of how Nature has at times a sort of mannerism which ought to make +us careful how we condemn out of hand the more refined and affected +artists. The collection of marbles in the Casino (Winckelmann's) +admirable and to be seen again. The famous Antinous crowned with lotus +a strangely beautiful and impressive thing. The "Greek manner," on the +showing of something now and again encountered here, moves one to feel +that even for purely romantic and imaginative effects it surpasses any +since invented. If there be not imagination, even in our comparatively +modern sense of the word, in the baleful beauty of that perfect young +profile there is none in "Hamlet" or in "Lycidas." There is five hundred +times as much as in "The Transfiguration." With this at any rate to +point to it's not for sculpture not professedly to produce any emotion +producible by painting. There are numbers of small and delicate +fragments of bas-reliefs of exquisite grace, and a huge piece (two +combatants--one, on horseback, beating down another--murder made eternal +and beautiful) attributed to the Parthenon and certainly as grandly +impressive as anything in the Elgin marbles. S. W. suggested again the +Roman villas as a "subject." Excellent if one could find a feast of +facts a la Stendhal. A lot of vague ecstatic descriptions and anecdotes +wouldn't at all pay. There have been too many already. Enough facts are +recorded, I suppose; one should discover them and soak in them for +a twelvemonth. And yet a Roman villa, in spite of statues, ideas and +atmosphere, affects me as of a scanter human and social _portee_, a +shorter, thinner reverberation, than an old English country-house, +round which experience seems piled so thick. But this perhaps is either +hair-splitting or "racial" prejudice. + +{Illustration: ENTRANCE TO THE VATICAN, ROME} + +_March 9th._--The Vatican is still deadly cold; a couple of hours there +yesterday with R. W. E. Yet he, illustrious and enviable man, fresh from +the East, had no overcoat and wanted none. Perfect bliss, I think, would +be to live in Rome without thinking of overcoats. The Vatican seems +very familiar, but strangely smaller than of old. I never lost the sense +before of confusing vastness. _Sancta simplicitas!_ All my old friends +however stand there in undimmed radiance, keeping most of them their +old pledges. I am perhaps more struck now with the enormous amount of +padding--the number of third-rate, fourth-rate things that weary the eye +desirous to approach freshly the twenty and thirty best. In spite of the +padding there are dozens of treasures that one passes regretfully; but +the impression of the whole place is the great thing--the feeling that +through these solemn vistas flows the source of an incalculable part of +our present conception of Beauty. + +_April 10th._--Last night, in the rain, to the Teatro Valle to see a +comedy of Goldoni in Venetian dialect--"I Quattro Rustighi." I could but +half follow it; enough, however, to be sure that, for all its humanity +of irony, it wasn't so good as Moliere. The acting was capital--broad, +free and natural; the play of talk easier even than life itself; but, +like all the Italian acting I have seen, it was wanting in _finesse_, +that shade of the shade by which, and by which alone, one really knows +art. I contrasted the affair with the evening in December last that I +walked over (also in the rain) to the Odeon and saw the "Plaideurs" and +the "Malade lmaginaire." There, too, was hardly more than a handful of +spectators; but what rich, ripe, fully representational and above +all intellectual comedy, and what polished, educated playing! These +Venetians in particular, however, have a marvellous _entrain_ of their +own; they seem even less than the French to recite. In some of the +women--ugly, with red hands and shabby dresses--an extraordinary gift of +natural utterance, of seeming to invent joyously as they go. + +_Later_.--Last evening in H.'s box at the Apollo to hear Ernesto Rossi +in "Othello." He shares supremacy with Salvini in Italian tragedy. +Beautiful great theatre with boxes you can walk about in; brilliant +audience. The Princess Margaret was there--I have never been to +the theatre that she was not--and a number of other princesses in +neighbouring boxes. G. G. came in and instructed us that they were the +M., the L., the P., &c. Rossi is both very bad and very fine; bad where +anything like taste and discretion is required, but "all there," and +more than there, in violent passion. The last act reduced too much, +however, to mere exhibitional sensibility. The interesting thing to me +was to observe the Italian conception of the part--to see how crude +it was, how little it expressed the hero's moral side, his depth, +his dignity--anything more than his being a creature terrible in mere +tantrums. The great point was his seizing Iago's head and whacking it +half-a-dozen times on the floor, and then flinging him twenty yards +away. It was wonderfully done, but in the doing of it and in the evident +relish for it in the house there was I scarce knew what force of easy +and thereby rather cheap expression. + +_April 27th_.--A morning with L. B. at Villa Ludovisi, which we agreed +that we shouldn't soon forget. The villa now belongs to the King, who +has lodged his morganatic wife there. There is nothing so blissfully +_right_ in Rome, nothing more consummately consecrated to style. The +grounds and gardens are immense, and the great rusty-red city wall +stretches away behind them and makes the burden of the seven hills +seem vast without making _them_ seem small. There is everything--dusky +avenues trimmed by the clippings of centuries, groves and dells and +glades and glowing pastures and reedy fountains and great flowering +meadows studded with enormous slanting pines. The day was delicious, +the trees all one melody, the whole place a revelation of what Italy +and hereditary pomp can do together. Nothing could be more in the +grand manner than this garden view of the city ramparts, lifting +their fantastic battlements above the trees and flowers. They are all +tapestried with vines and made to serve as sunny fruit-walls--grim old +defence as they once were; now giving nothing but a splendid buttressed +privacy. The sculptures in the little Casino are few, but there are two +great ones--the beautiful sitting Mars and the head of the great Juno, +the latter thrust into a corner behind a shutter. These things it's +almost impossible to praise; we can only mark them well and keep them +clear, as we insist on silence to hear great music.... If I don't praise +Guercino's Aurora in the greater Casino, it's for another reason; this +is certainly a very muddy masterpiece. It figures on the ceiling of +a small low hall; the painting is coarse and the ceiling too near. +Besides, it's unfair to pass straight from the Greek mythology to the +Bolognese. We were left to roam at will through the house; the custode +shut us in and went to walk in the park. The apartments were all open, +and I had an opportunity to reconstruct, from its _milieu_ at least, the +character of a morganatic queen. I saw nothing to indicate that it +was not amiable; but I should have thought more highly of the lady's +discrimination if she had had the Juno removed from behind her shutter. +In such a house, girdled about with such a park, me thinks I could be +amiable--and perhaps discriminating too. The Ludovisi Casino is small, +but the perfection of the life of ease might surely be led there. There +are English houses enough in wondrous parks, but they expose you to too +many small needs and observances--to say nothing of a red-faced butler +dropping his h's. You are oppressed with the detail of accommodation. +Here the billiard-table is old-fashioned, perhaps a trifle crooked; but +you have Guercino above your head, and Guercino, after all, is almost +as good as Guido. The rooms, I noticed, all pleased by their shape, by +a lovely proportion, by a mass of delicate ornamentation on the high +concave ceilings. One might live over again in them some deliciously +benighted life of a forgotten type--with graceful old _sale_, and +immensely thick walls, and a winding stone staircase, and a view from +the loggia at the top; a view of twisted parasol-pines balanced, high +above a wooden horizon, against a sky of faded sapphire. + +_May 17th._--It was wonderful yesterday at St. John Lateran. The spring +now has turned to perfect summer; there are cascades of verdure over +all the walls; the early flowers are a fading memory, and the new grass +knee-deep in the Villa Borghese. The winter aspect of the region about +the Lateran is one of the best things in Rome; the sunshine is nowhere +so golden and the lean shadows nowhere so purple as on the long grassy +walk to Santa Croce. But yesterday I seemed to see nothing but green +and blue. The expanse before Santa Croce was vivid green; the Campagna +rolled away in great green billows, which seemed to break high about the +gaunt aqueducts; and the Alban Hills, which in January and February +keep shifting and melting along the whole scale of azure, were almost +monotonously fresh, and had lost some of their finer modelling. But the +sky was ultramarine and everything radiant with light and warmth--warmth +which a soft steady breeze kept from excess. I strolled some time about +the church, which has a grand air enough, though I don't seize the point +of view of Miss----, who told me the other day how vastly finer she +thought it than St. Peter's. But on Miss----'s lips this seemed a very +pretty paradox. The choir and transepts have a sombre splendour, and +I like the old vaulted passage with its slabs and monuments behind +the choir. The charm of charms at St. John Lateran is the admirable +twelfth-century cloister, which was never more charming than yesterday. +The shrubs and flowers about the ancient well were blooming away in the +intense light, and the twisted pillars and chiselled capitals of the +perfect little colonnade seemed to enclose them like the sculptured rim +of a precious vase. Standing out among the flowers you may look up and +see a section of the summit of the great facade of the church. The robed +and mitred apostles, bleached and rain-washed by the ages, rose into the +blue air like huge snow figures. I spent at the incorporated museum a +subsequent hour of fond vague attention, having it quite to myself. +It is rather scantily stocked, but the great cool halls open out +impressively one after the other, and the wide spaces between the +statues seem to suggest at first that each is a masterpiece. I was in +the loving mood of one's last days in Rome, and when I had nothing else +to admire I admired the magnificent thickness of the embrasures of the +doors and windows. If there were no objects of interest at all in the +Lateran the palace would be worth walking through every now and then, +to keep up one's idea of solid architecture. I went over to the +Scala Santa, where was no one but a very shabby priest sitting like a +ticket-taker at the door. But he let me pass, and I ascended one of the +profane lateral stairways and treated myself to a glimpse of the Sanctum +Sanctorum. Its threshold is crossed but once or twice a year, I believe, +by three or four of the most exalted divines, but you may look into it +freely enough through a couple of gilded lattices. It is very sombre +and splendid, and conveys the impression of a very holy place. And yet +somehow it suggested irreverent thoughts; it had to my fancy--perhaps on +account of the lattice--an Oriental, a Mahometan note. I expected every +moment to see a sultana appear in a silver veil and silken trousers and +sit down on the crimson carpet. + +Farewell, packing, the sharp pang of going. One would like to be able +after five months in Rome to sum up for tribute and homage, one's +experience, one's gains, the whole adventure of one's sensibility. But +one has really vibrated too much--the addition of so many items isn't +easy. What is simply clear is the sense of an acquired passion for the +place and of an incalculable number of gathered impressions. Many +of these have been intense and momentous, but one has trodden on the +other--there are always the big fish that swallow up the little--and +one can hardly say what has become of them. They store themselves +noiselessly away, I suppose, in the dim but safe places of memory and +"taste," and we live in a quiet faith that they will emerge into vivid +relief if life or art should demand them. As for the passion we needn't +perhaps trouble ourselves about that. Fifty swallowed palmfuls of the +Fountain of Trevi couldn't make us more ardently sure that we shall at +any cost come back. + +1873. + + + + + +A FEW OTHER ROMAN NEIGHBOURHOODS + + +If I find my old notes, in all these Roman connections, inevitably +bristle with the spirit of the postscript, so I give way to this +prompting to the extent of my scant space and with the sense of +other occasions awaiting me on which I shall have to do no less. The +impression of Rome was repeatedly to renew itself for the author of +these now rather antique and artless accents; was to overlay itself +again and again with almost heavy thicknesses of experience, the last of +which is, as I write, quite fresh to memory; and he has thus felt almost +ashamed to drop his subject (though it be one that tends so easily to +turn to the infinite) as if the law of change had in all the years had +nothing to say to his case. It's of course but of his case alone that he +speaks--wondering little what he may make of it for the profit of others +by an attempt, however brief, to point the moral of the matter, or in +other words compare the musing _mature_ visitor's "feeling about Rome" +with that of the extremely agitated, even if though extremely inexpert, +consciousness reflected in the previous pages. The actual, the current +Rome affects him as a world governed by new conditions altogether and +ruefully pleading that sorry fact in the ear of the antique wanderer +wherever he may yet mournfully turn for some re-capture of what he +misses. The city of his first unpremeditated rapture shines to memory, +on the other hand, in the manner of a lost paradise the rustle of whose +gardens is still just audible enough in the air to make him wonder if +some sudden turn, some recovered vista, mayn't lead him back to the +thing itself. My genial, my helpful tag, at this point, would doubtless +properly resolve itself, for the reader, into a clue toward some such +successful ingenuity of quest; a remark I make, I may add, even while +reflecting that the Paradise isn't apparently at all "lost" to visitors +not of my generation. It is the seekers of _that_ remote and romantic +tradition who have seen it, from one period of ten, or even of five, +years to another, systematically and remorselessly built out from their +view. Their helpless plaint, their sense of the generally irrecoverable +and unspeakable, is not, however, what I desire here most to express; +I should like, on the contrary, with ampler opportunity, positively to +enumerate the cases, the cases of contact, impression, experience, +in which the cold ashes of a long-chilled passion may fairly feel +themselves made to glow again. No one who has ever loved Rome as Rome +could be loved in youth and before her poised basketful of the finer +appeals to fond fancy was actually upset, wants to stop loving her; +so that our bleeding and wounded, though perhaps not wholly moribund, +loyalty attends us as a hovering admonitory, anticipatory ghost, one +of those magnanimous life-companions who before complete extinction +designate to the other member of the union their approved successor. So +it is at any rate that I conceive the pilgrim old enough to have become +aware in all these later years of what he misses to be counselled and +pacified in the interest of recognitions that shall a little make up for +it. + +It was this wisdom I was putting into practice, no doubt, for instance, +when I lately resigned myself to motoring of a splendid June day "out +to" Subiaco; as a substitute for a resignation that had anciently taken, +alas, but the form of my never getting there at all. Everything that +day, moreover, seemed right, surely; everything on certain other days +that were like it through their large indebtedness, at this, that and +the other point, to the last new thing, seemed so right that they come +back to me now, after a moderate interval, in the full light of +that unchallenged felicity. I couldn't at all gloriously recall, for +instance, as I floated to Subiaco on vast brave wings, how on the +occasion of my first visit to Rome, thirty-eight years before, I had +devoted certain evenings, evenings of artless "preparation" in my room +at the inn, to the perusal of Alphonse Dantier's admirable _Monasteres +Benedictins d'ltalie_, taking piously for granted that I should get +myself somehow conveyed to Monte Cassino and to Subiaco at least: such +an affront to the passion of curiosity, the generally infatuated +state then kindled, would any suspicion of my foredoomed, my all +but interminable, privation during visits to come have seemed to me. +Fortune, in the event, had never favoured my going, but I was to give +myself up at last to the sense of her quite taking me by the hand, and +that is how I now think of our splendid June day at Subiaco. The note +of the wondrous place itself is conventional "wild" Italy raised to the +highest intensity, the ideally, the sublimely conventional and wild, +complete and supreme in itself, without a disparity or a flaw; which +character of perfect picturesque orthodoxy seemed more particularly +to begin for me, I remember, as we passed, on our way, through that +indescribable and indestructible Tivoli, where the jumble of the +elements of the familiarly and exploitedly, the all too notoriously +fair and queer, was more violent and vociferous than ever--so the whole +spectacle there seemed at once to rejoice in cockneyfication and to +resist it. There at least I had old memories to renew--including that +in especial, from a few years back, of one of the longest, hottest, +dustiest return-drives to Rome that the Campagna on a sirocco day was +ever to have treated me to. + +{Illustration: VILLA D'ESTE, TIVOLI} + +That was to be more than made up on this later occasion by an hour of +early evening, snatched on the run back to Rome, that remains with me as +one of those felicities we are wise to leave for ever, just as they are, +just, that is, where they fell, never attempting to renew or improve +them. So happy a chance was it that ensured me at the afternoon's end +a solitary stroll through the Villa d' Este, where the day's invasion, +whatever it might have been, had left no traces and where I met nobody +in the great rococo passages and chambers, and in the prodigious alleys +and on the repeated flights of tortuous steps, but the haunting Genius +of Style, into whose noble battered old face, as if it had come out +clearer in the golden twilight and on recognition of response so deeply +moved, I seemed to exhale my sympathy. This was truly, amid a conception +and order of things all mossed over from disuse, but still without +a form abandoned or a principle disowned, one of the hours that one +doesn't forget. The ruined fountains seemed strangely to _wait_, in the +stillness and under cover of the approaching dusk, not to begin ever +again to play, also, but just only to be tenderly imagined to do so; +quite as everything held its breath, at the mystic moment, for the drop +of the cruel and garish exposure, for the Spirit of the place to steal +forth and go his round. The vistas of the innumerable mighty cypresses +ranged themselves, in their files and companies, like beaten heroes +for their captain's, review; the great artificial "works" of every +description, cascades, hemicycles, all graded and grassed and +stone-seated as for floral games, mazes and bowers and alcoves and +grottos, brave indissoluble unions of the planted and the builded +symmetry, with the terraces and staircases that overhang and the arcades +and cloisters that underspread, made common cause together as for one's +taking up a little, in kindly lingering wonder, the "feeling" out of +which they have sprung. One didn't see it, under the actual influence, +one wouldn't for the world have seen it, as that they longed to be +justified, during a few minutes in the twenty-four hours, of their +absurdity of pomp and circumstance--but only that they asked for +company, once in a way, as they were so splendidly formed to give it, +and that the best company, in a changed world, at the end of time, +what could they hope it to be but just the lone, the dawdling person of +taste, the visitor with a flicker of fancy, not to speak of a pang of +pity, to spare for them? It was in the flicker of fancy, no doubt, that +as I hung about the great top-most terrace in especial, and then again +took my way through the high gaunt corridors and the square and bare +alcoved and recessed saloons, all overscored with such a dim waste +of those painted, those delicate and capricious decorations which the +loggie of the Vatican promptly borrowed from the ruins of the Palatine, +or from whatever other revealed and inspiring ancientries, and which +make ghostly confession here of that descent, I gave the rein to my +sense of the sinister too, of that vague after-taste as of evil things +that lurks so often, for a suspicious sensibility, wherever the terrible +game of the life of the Renaissance was played as the Italians played +it; wherever the huge tessellated chessboard seems to stretch about us; +swept bare, almost always violently swept bare, of its chiselled and +shifting figures, of every value and degree, but with this echoing +desolation itself representing the long gasp, as it were, of +overstrained time, the great after-hush that follows on things too +wonderful or dreadful. + +I am putting here, however, my cart before my horse, for the hour just +glanced at was but a final tag to a day of much brighter curiosity, +and which seemed to take its baptism, as we passed through prodigious +perched and huddled, adorably scattered and animated and even crowded +Tivoli, from the universal happy spray of the drumming Anio waterfalls, +all set in their permanent rainbows and Sibylline temples and classic +allusions and Byronic quotations; a wondrous romantic jumble of such +things and quite others--heterogeneous inns and clamorous _guingettes_ +and factories grabbing at the torrent, to say nothing of innumerable +guides and donkeys and white-tied, swallow-tailed waiters dashing out +of grottos and from under cataracts, and of the air, on the part of +the whole population, of standing about, in the most characteristic +_contadino_ manner, to pounce on you and take you somewhere, snatch you +from somebody else, shout something at you, the aqueous and other uproar +permitting, and then charge you for it, your innocence aiding. I'm +afraid our run the rest of the way to Subiaco remains with me but as +an after-sense of that exhilaration, in spite of our rising admirably +higher, all the while, and plunging constantly deeper into splendid +solitary gravities, supreme romantic solemnities and sublimities, of +landscape. The Benedictine convent, which clings to certain more or less +vertiginous ledges and slopes of a vast precipitous gorge, constitutes, +with the whole perfection of its setting, the very ideal of the +tradition of that _extraordinary in the romantic_ handed down to us, as +the most attaching and inviting spell of Italy, by all the old academic +literature of travel and art of the Salvator Rosas and Claudes. This is +the main tribute I may pay in a few words to an impression of which a +sort of divine rightness of oddity, a pictorial felicity that was almost +not of this world, but of a higher degree of distinction altogether, +affected me as the leading note; yet about the whole exquisite +complexity of which I can't pretend to be informing. + +All the elements of the scene melted for me together; even from the +pause for luncheon on a grassy wayside knoll, over heaven knows what +admirable preparatory headlong slopes and ravines and iridescent +distances, under spreading chestnuts and in the high air that was cool +and sweet, to the final pedestrian climb of sinuous mountain-paths that +the shining limestone and the strong green of shrub and herbage made as +white as silver. There the miraculous home of St. Benedict awaited us +in the form of a builded and pictured-over maze of chapels and shrines, +cells and corridors, stupefying rock-chambers and caves, places all +at an extraordinary variety of different levels and with labyrinthine +intercommunications; there the spirit of the centuries sat like some +invisible icy presence that only permits you to stare and wonder. I +stared, I wondered, I went up and down and in and out and lost myself +in the fantastic fable of the innumerable hard facts themselves; and +whenever I could, above all, I peeped out of small windows and hung over +chance terraces for the love of the general outer picture, the splendid +fashion in which the fretted mountains of marble, as they might have +been, round about, seemed to inlay themselves, for the effect of the +"distinction" I speak of, with vegetations of dark emerald. There above +all--or at least in what such aspects did further for the prodigy of the +Convent, whatever that prodigy might for do _them_--was, to a life-long +victim of Italy, almost verily as never before, the operation of the +old love-philtre; there were the inexhaustible sources of interest and +charm. + +{Illustration: SUBIACO} + +These mystic fountains broke out for me elsewhere, again and again, I +rejoice to say--and perhaps more particularly, to be frank about it, +where the ground about them was pressed with due emphasis of appeal by +the firm wheels of the great winged car. I motored, under invitation +and protection, repeatedly back into the sense of the other years, +that sense of the "old" and comparatively idle Rome of my particular +infatuated prime which I was living to see superseded, and this even +when the fond vista bristled with innumerable "signs of the times," +unmistakable features of the new era, that, by I scarce know what +perverse law, succeeded in ministering to a happy effect. Some of these +false notes proceed simply from the immense growth of every sort of +facilitation--so that people are much more free than of old to come and +go and do, to inquire and explore, to pervade and generally "infest"; +with a consequent loss, for the fastidious individual, of his +blest earlier sense, not infrequent, of having the occasion and the +impression, as he used complacently to say, all to himself. We none of +us had anything quite all to ourselves during an afternoon at Ostia, +on a beautiful June Sunday; it was a different affair, rather, from the +long, the comparatively slow and quite unpeopled drive that I was to +remember having last taken early in the autumn thirty years before, and +which occupied the day--with the aid of a hamper from once supreme old +Spillman, the provider for picnics to a vanished world (since I suspect +the antique ideal of "a picnic in the Campagna," the fondest conception +of a happy day, has lost generally much of its glamour). Our idyllic +afternoon, at any rate, left no chord of sensibility that could possibly +have been in question untouched--not even that of tea on the shore at +Fiumincino, after we had spent an hour among the ruins of Ostia and +seen our car ferried across the Tiber, almost saffron-coloured here and +swirling towards its mouth, on a boat that was little more than a big +rustic raft and that yet bravely resisted the prodigious weight. What +shall I say, in the way of the particular, of the general felicity +before me, for the sweetness of the hour to which the incident just +named, with its strange and amusing juxtapositions of the patriarchally +primitive and the insolently supersubtle, the earliest and the latest +efforts of restless science, were almost immediately to succeed? + +We had but skirted the old gold-and-brown walls of Castel Fusano, where +the massive Chigi tower and the immemorial stone-pines and the afternoon +sky and the desolate sweetness and concentrated rarity of the picture +all kept their appointment, to fond memory, with that especial form of +Roman faith, the fine aesthetic conscience in things, that is never, +never broken. We had wound through tangled lanes and met handsome sallow +country-folk lounging at leisure, as became the Sunday, and ever so +pleasantly and garishly clothed, if not quite consistently costumed, as +just on purpose to feed our wanton optimism; and then we had addressed +ourselves with a soft superficiality to the open, the exquisite little +Ostian reliquary, an exhibition of stony vaguenesses half straightened +out. The ruins of the ancient port of Rome, the still recoverable +identity of streets and habitations and other forms of civil life, are +a not inconsiderable handful, though making of the place at best a very +small sister to Pompeii; but a soft superficiality is ever the refuge of +my shy sense before any ghost of informed reconstitution, and I plead my +surrender to it with the less shame that I believe I "enjoy" such scenes +even on such futile pretexts as much as it can be appointed them by the +invidious spirit of History to _be_ enjoyed. It may be said, of course, +that enjoyment, question-begging term at best, isn't in these austere +connections designated--but rather some principle of appreciation that +can at least give a coherent account of itself. On that basis then--as +I could, I profess, _but_ revel in the looseness of my apprehension, +so wide it seemed to fling the gates of vision and divination--I won't +pretend to dot, as it were, too many of the i's of my incompetence. +I was competent only to have been abjectly interested. On reflection, +moreover, I see that no impression of over-much company invaded +the picture till the point was exactly reached for its contributing +thoroughly to character and amusement; across at Fiumincino, which the +age of the bicycle has made, in a small way, the handy Gravesend or +Coney Island of Rome, the cafes and _birrerie_ were at high pressure, +and the bustle all motley and friendly beside the melancholy river, +where the water-side life itself had twenty quaint and vivid notes and +where a few upstanding objects, ancient or modern, looked eminent and +interesting against the delicate Roman sky that dropped down and down +to the far-spreading marshes of malaria. Besides which "company" is ever +intensely gregarious, hanging heavily together and easily outwitted; +so that we had but to proceed a scant distance further and meet the +tideless Mediterranean, where it tumbled in a trifle breezily on the +sands, to be all to ourselves with our tea-basket, quite as in the good +old fashion--only in truth with the advantage that the contemporary +tea-basket is so much improved. + +I jumble my memories as a tribute to the whole idyll--I give the golden +light in which they come back to me for what it is worth; worth, I mean, +as allowing that the possibilities of charm of the Witch of the Seven +Hills, as we used to call her in magazines, haven't all been vulgarised +away. It was precisely there, on such an occasion and in such a place, +that this might seem signally to have happened; whereas in fact the mild +suburban riot, in which the so gay but so light potations before the +array of little houses of entertainment were what struck one as really +making most for mildness, was brushed over with a fabled grace, was +harmonious, felicitous, distinguished, quite after the fashion of some +thoroughly trained chorus or phalanx of opera or ballet. Bicycles were +stacked up by the hundred; the youth of Rome are ardent cyclists, with +a great taste for flashing about in more or less denuded or costumed +athletic and romantic bands and guilds, and on our return cityward, +toward evening, along the right bank of the river, the road swarmed with +the patient wheels and bent backs of these budding _cives Romani_ quite +to the effect of its finer interest. Such at least, I felt, could only +be one's acceptance of almost any feature of a scene bathed in that +extraordinarily august air that the waning Roman day is so insidiously +capable of taking on when any other element of style happens at all to +contribute. Weren't they present, these other elements, in the great +classic lines and folds, the fine academic or historic attitudes of +the darkening land itself as it hung about the old highway, varying +its vague accidents, but achieving always perfect "composition"? I +shamelessly add that cockneyfied impression, at all events, to what I +have called my jumble; Rome, to which we all swept on together in the +wondrous glowing medium, _saved_ everything, spreading afar her wide +wing and applying after all but her supposed grand gift of the secret +of salvation. We kept on and on into the great dim rather sordidly papal +streets that approach the quarter of St. Peter's; to the accompaniment, +finally, of that markedly felt provocation of fond wonder which had +never failed to lie in wait for me under any question of a renewed +glimpse of the huge unvisited rear of the basilica. There was no renewed +glimpse just then, in the gloaming; but the region I speak of had been +for me, in fact, during the previous weeks, less unvisited than ever +before, so that I had come to count an occasional walk round and about +it as quite of the essence of the convenient small change with which the +heterogeneous City may still keep paying you. These frequentations in +the company of a sculptor friend had been incidental to our reaching +a small artistic foundry of fine metal, an odd and interesting little +establishment placed, as who should say in the case of such a mere +left-over scrap of a large loose margin, nowhere: it lurked so +unsuspectedly, that is, among the various queer things that Rome +comprehensively refers to as "behind St. Peter's." + +We had passed then, on the occasion of our several pilgrimages, in +beneath the great flying, or at least straddling buttresses to the left +of the mighty facade, where you enter that great idle precinct of fine +dense pavement and averted and sacrificed grandeur, the reverse of the +monstrous medal of the front. Here the architectural monster rears its +back and shoulders on an equal scale and this whole unregarded world +of colossal consistent symmetry and hidden high finish gives you the +measure of the vast total treasure of items and features. The outward +face of all sorts of inward majesties of utility and ornament here +above all correspondingly reproduces itself; the expanses of golden +travertine--the freshness of tone, the cleanness of surface, in the +sunny air, being extraordinary--climb and soar and spread under the +crushing weight of a scheme carried out in every ponderous particular. +Never was such a show of _wasted_ art, of pomp for pomp's sake, as +where all the chapels bulge and all the windows, each one a separate +constructional masterpiece, tower above almost grassgrown vacancy; with +the full and immediate effect, of course, of reading us a lesson on +the value of lawful pride. The pride is the pride of indifference as to +whether a greatness so founded be gaped at in all its features or not. +My friend and I were alone to gape at them most often while, for the +unfailing impression of them, on our way to watch the casting of our +figure, we extended our circuit of the place. To which I may add, as +another example of that tentative, that appealing twitch of the garment +of Roman association of which one kept renewing one's consciousness, the +half-hour at the little foundry itself was all charming--with its quite +shabby and belittered and ramshackle recall of the old Roman "art-life" +of one's early dreams. Everything was somehow in the picture, the +rickety sheds, the loose paraphernalia, the sunny, grassy yard where a +goat was browsing; then the queer interior gloom of the pits, frilled +with little overlooking scaffoldings and bridges, for the sinking +fireward of the image that was to take on hardness; and all the +pleasantness and quickness, the beguiling refinement, of the three or +four light fine "hands" of whom the staff consisted and into whose type +and tone one liked to read, with whatever harmless extravagance, so many +signs that a lively sense of stiff processes, even in humble life, could +still leave untouched the traditional rare feeling for the artistic. +How delightful such an occupation in such a general setting--those of +my friend, I at such moments irrepressibly moralised; and how one might +after such a fashion endlessly go and come and ask nothing better; or if +better, only so to the extent of another impression I was to owe to him: +that of an evening meal spread, in the warm still darkness that made no +candle flicker, on the wide high space of an old loggia that overhung, +in one quarter, the great obelisked Square preceding one of the Gates, +and in the other the Tiber and the far Trastevere and more things than +I can say--above all, as it were, the whole backward past, the mild +confused romance of the Rome one had loved and of which one was exactly +taking leave under protection of the friendly lanterned and garlanded +feast and the commanding, all-embracing roof-garden. It was indeed a +reconciling, it was an altogether penetrating, last hour. + +1909. + + + + + +A CHAIN OF CITIES + +One day in midwinter, some years since, during a journey from Rome +to Florence perforce too rapid to allow much wayside sacrifice to +curiosity, I waited for the train at Narni. There was time to stroll +far enough from the station to have a look at the famous old bridge +of Augustus, broken short off in mid-Tiber. While I stood admiring the +measure of impression was made to overflow by the gratuitous grace of a +white-cowled monk who came trudging up the road that wound to the gate +of the town. Narni stood, in its own presented felicity, on a hill a +good space away, boxed in behind its perfect grey wall, and the monk, +to oblige me, crept slowly along and disappeared within the aperture. +Everything was distinct in the clear air, and the view exactly as like +the bit of background by an Umbrian master as it ideally should have +been. The winter is bare and brown enough in southern Italy and the +earth reduced to more of a mere anatomy than among ourselves, for whom +the very _cranerie_ of its exposed state, naked and unashamed, gives it +much of the robust serenity, not of a fleshless skeleton, but of a fine +nude statue. In these regions at any rate, the tone of the air, for +the eye, during the brief desolation, has often an extraordinary charm: +nature still smiles as with the deputed and provisional charity of +colour and light, the duty of not ceasing to cheer man's heart. Her +whole behaviour, at the time, cast such a spell on the broken bridge, +the little walled town and the trudging friar, that I turned away with +the impatient vow and the fond vision of how I would take the journey +again and pause to my heart's content at Narni, at Spoleto, at Assisi, +at Perugia, at Cortona, at Arezzo. But we have generally to clip our +vows a little when we come to fulfil them; and so it befell that when my +blest springtime arrived I had to begin as resignedly as possible, yet +with comparative meagreness, at Assisi. + +{Illustration: ASSISI.} + +I suppose enjoyment would have a simple zest which it often lacks if +we always did things at the moment we want to, for it's mostly when +we can't that we're thoroughly sure we _would_, and we can answer too +little for moods in the future conditional. Winter at least seemed to me +to have put something into these seats of antiquity that the May sun +had more or less melted away--a desirable strength of tone, a depth +upon depth of queerness and quaintness. Assisi had been in the January +twilight, after my mere snatch at Narni, a vignette out of some brown +old missal. But you'll have to be a fearless explorer now to find of a +fine spring day any such cluster of curious objects as doesn't seem made +to match before anything else Mr. Baedeker's polyglot estimate of its +chief recommendations. This great man was at Assisi in force, and a +brand-new inn for his accommodation has just been opened cheek by +jowl with the church of St. Francis. I don't know that even the dire +discomfort of this harbourage makes it seem less impertinent; but I +confess I sought its protection, and the great view seemed hardly less +beautiful from my window than from the gallery of the convent. This +view embraces the whole wide reach of Umbria, which becomes as twilight +deepens a purple counterfeit of the misty sea. The visitor's first +errand is with the church; and it's fair furthermore to admit that when +he has crossed that threshold the position and quality of his hotel +cease for the time to be matters of moment. This two-fold temple of St. +Francis is one of the very sacred places of Italy, and it would be +hard to breathe anywhere an air more heavy with holiness. Such seems +especially the case if you happen thus to have come from Rome, where +everything ecclesiastical is, in aspect, so very much of this world--so +florid, so elegant, so full of accommodations and excrescences. The mere +site here makes for authority, and they were brave builders who laid the +foundation-stones. The thing rises straight from a steep mountain-side +and plunges forward on its great substructure of arches even as a +crowned headland may frown over the main. Before it stretches a long, +grassy piazza, at the end of which you look up a small grey street, to +see it first climb a little way the rest of the hill and then pause +and leave a broad green slope, crested, high in the air, with a ruined +castle. When I say before it I mean before the upper church; for by +way of doing something supremely handsome and impressive the sturdy +architects of the thirteenth century piled temple upon temple and +bequeathed a double version of their idea. One may imagine them to have +intended perhaps an architectural image of the relation between heart +and head. Entering the lower church at the bottom of the great flight +of steps which leads from the upper door, you seem to push at least into +the very heart of Catholicism. + +For the first minutes after leaving the clearer gloom you catch nothing +but a vista of low black columns closed by the great fantastic cage +surrounding the altar, which is thus placed, by your impression, in +a sort of gorgeous cavern. Gradually you distinguish details, become +accustomed to the penetrating chill, and even manage to make out a +few frescoes; but the general effect remains splendidly sombre and +subterranean. The vaulted roof is very low and the pillars dwarfish, +though immense in girth, as befits pillars supporting substantially a +cathedral. The tone of the place is a triumph of mystery, the richest +harmony of lurking shadows and dusky corners, all relieved by scattered +images and scintillations. There was little light but what came through +the windows of the choir over which the red curtains had been dropped +and were beginning to glow with the downward sun. The choir was guarded +by a screen behind which a dozen venerable voices droned vespers; but +over the top of the screen came the heavy radiance and played among the +ornaments of the high fence round the shrine, casting the shadow of the +whole elaborate mass forward into the obscured nave. The darkness of +vaults and side-chapels is overwrought with vague frescoes, most of them +by Giotto and his school, out of which confused richness the terribly +distinct little faces characteristic of these artists stare at you with +a solemn formalism. Some are faded and injured, and many so ill-lighted +and ill-placed that you can only glance at them with decent conjecture; +the great group, however--four paintings by Giotto on the ceiling above +the altar--may be examined with some success. Like everything of that +grim and beautiful master they deserve examination; but with the effect +ever of carrying one's appreciation in and in, as it were, rather than +of carrying it out and out, off and off, as happens for us with those +artists who have been helped by the process of "evolution" to grow +wings. This one, "going in" for emphasis at any price, stamps hard, as +who should say, on the very spot of his idea--thanks to which fact +he has a concentration that has never been surpassed. He was in other +words, in proportion to his means, a genius supremely expressive; he +makes the very shade of an intended meaning or a represented attitude so +unmistakable that his figures affect us at moments as creatures all +too suddenly, too alarmingly, too menacingly met. Meagre, primitive, +undeveloped, he yet is immeasurably strong; he even suggests that if he +had lived the due span of years later Michael Angelo might have found +a rival. Not that he is given, however, to complicated postures or +superhuman flights. The something strange that troubles and haunts us in +his work springs rather from a kind of fierce familiarity. + +It is part of the wealth of the lower church that it contains an +admirable primitive fresco by an artist of genius rarely encountered, +Pietro Cavallini, pupil of Giotto. This represents the Crucifixion; the +three crosses rising into a sky spotted with the winged heads of angels +while a dense crowd presses below. You will nowhere see anything more +direfully lugubrious, or more approaching for direct force, though not +of course for amplitude of style, Tintoretto's great renderings of the +scene in Venice. The abject anguish of the crucified and the straddling +authority and brutality of the mounted guards in the foreground are +contrasted in a fashion worthy of a great dramatist. But the most +poignant touch is the tragic grimaces of the little angelic heads that +fall like hailstones through the dark air. It is genuine realistic +weeping, the act of irrepressible "crying," that the painter has +depicted, and the effect is pitiful at the same time as grotesque. There +are many more frescoes besides; all the chapels on one side are +lined with them, but these are chiefly interesting in their general +impressiveness--as they people the dim recesses with startling +presences, with apparitions out of scale. Before leaving the place I +lingered long near the door, for I was sure I shouldn't soon again enjoy +such a feast of scenic composition. The opposite end glowed with subdued +colour; the middle portion was vague and thick and brown, with two or +three scattered worshippers looming through the obscurity; while, all +the way down, the polished pavement, its uneven slabs glittering dimly +in the obstructed light, was of the very essence of expensive picture. +It is certainly desirable, if one takes the lower church of St. Francis +to represent the human heart, that one should find a few bright places +there. But if the general effect is of brightness terrorised and +smothered, is the symbol less valid? For the contracted, prejudiced, +passionate heart let it stand. + +One thing at all events we can say, that we should rejoice to boast as +capacious, symmetrical and well-ordered a head as the upper sanctuary. +Thanks to these merits, in spite of a brave array of Giottesque work +which has the advantage of being easily seen, it lacks the great +character of its counterpart. The frescoes, which are admirable, +represent certain leading events in the life of St. Francis, and +suddenly remind you, by one of those anomalies that are half the secret +of the consummate _mise-en-scene_ of Catholicism, that the apostle of +beggary, the saint whose only tenement in life was the ragged robe which +barely covered him, is the hero of this massive structure. Church upon +church, nothing less will adequately shroud his consecrated clay. The +great reality of Giotto's designs adds to the helpless wonderment with +which we feel the passionate pluck of the Hero, the sense of being +separated from it by an impassable gulf, the reflection on all that has +come and gone to make morality at that vertiginous pitch impossible. +There are no such high places of humility left to climb to. An observant +friend who has lived long in Italy lately declared to me, however, that +she detested the name of this moralist, deeming him chief propagator of +the Italian vice most trying to the would-be lover of the people, the +want of personal self-respect. There is a solidarity in the use of soap, +and every cringing beggar, idler, liar and pilferer flourished for her +under the shadow of the great Francisan indifference to it. She was +possibly right; at Rome, at Naples, I might have admitted she was right; +but at Assisi, face to face with Giotto's vivid chronicle, we admire too +much in its main subject the exquisite play of that subject's genius--we +don't remit to him, and this for very envy, a single throb of his +consciousness. It took in, that human, that divine embrace, everything +_but_ soap. + +I should find it hard to give an orderly account of my next adventures +or impressions at Assisi, which could n't well be anything more than +mere romantic _flanerie_. One may easily plead as the final result of +a meditation at the shrine of St. Francis a great and even an amused +charity. This state of mind led me slowly up and down for a couple of +hours through the steep little streets, and at last stretched itself +on the grass with me in the shadow of the great ruined castle that +decorates so grandly the eminence above the town. I remember edging +along the sunless side of the small mouldy houses and pausing very often +to look at nothing in particular. It was all very hot, very hushed, very +resignedly but very persistently old. A wheeled vehicle in such a place +is an event, and the _forestiero's_ interrogative tread in the blank +sonorous lanes has the privilege of bringing the inhabitants to their +doorways. Some of the better houses, however, achieve a sombre stillness +that protests against the least curiosity as to what may happen in any +such century as this. You wonder, as you pass, what lingering old-world +social types vegetate there, but you won't find out; albeit that in one +very silent little street I had a glimpse of an open door which I have +not forgotten. A long-haired peddler who must have been a Jew, and who +yet carried without prejudice a burden of mass-books and rosaries, was +offering his wares to a stout old priest. The priest had opened the +door rather stingily and appeared half-heartedly to dismiss him. But +the peddler held up something I couldn't see; the priest wavered with a +timorous concession to profane curiosity and then furtively pulled the +agent of sophistication, or whatever it might be, into the house. I +should have liked to enter with that worthy. + +I saw later some gentlemen of Assisi who also seemed bored enough to +have found entertainment in his tray. They were at the door of the cafe +on the Piazza, and were so thankful to me for asking them the way to the +cathedral that, answering all in chorus, they lighted up with smiles as +sympathetic as if I had done them a favour. Of that type were my mild, +my delicate adventures. The Piazza has a fine old portico of an ancient +Temple of Minerva--six fluted columns and a pediment, of beautiful +proportions, but sadly battered and decayed. Goethe, I believe, found it +much more interesting than the mighty mediaeval church, and Goethe, as a +cicerone, doubtless could have persuaded one that it was so; but in the +humble society of Murray we shall most of us find a richer sense in the +later monument. I found quaint old meanings enough in the dark yellow +facade of the small cathedral as I sat on a stone bench by the oblong +green stretched before it. This is a pleasing piece of Italian Gothic +and, like several of its companions at Assisi, has an elegant wheel +window and a number of grotesque little carvings of creatures human +and bestial. If with Goethe I were to balance anything against the +attractions of the double church I should choose the ruined castle +on the hill above the town. I had been having glimpses of it all the +afternoon at the end of steep street-vistas, and promising myself +half-an-hour beside its grey walls at sunset. The sun was very late +setting, and my half-hour became a long lounge in the lee of an abutment +which arrested the gentle uproar of the wind. The castle is a splendid +piece of ruin, perched on the summit of the mountain to whose slope +Assisi clings and dropping a pair of stony arms to enclose the little +town in its embrace. The city wall, in other words, straggles up the +steep green hill and meets the crumbling skeleton of the fortress. On +the side off from the town the mountain plunges into a deep ravine, the +opposite face of which is formed by the powerful undraped shoulder of +Monte Subasio, a fierce reflector of the sun. Gorge and mountain are +wild enough, but their frown expires in the teeming softness of the +great vale of Umbria. To lie aloft there on the grass, with silver-grey +ramparts at one's back and the warm rushing wind in one's ears, and +watch the beautiful plain mellow into the tones of twilight, was as +exquisite a form of repose as ever fell to a tired tourist's lot. + +{Illustration: PERUGIA.} + +Perugia too has an ancient stronghold, which one must speak of in +earnest as that unconscious humorist the classic American traveller +is supposed invariably to speak of the Colosseum: it will be a very +handsome building when it's finished. Even Perugia is going the way of +all Italy--straightening out her streets, preparing her ruins, laying +her venerable ghosts. The castle is being completely _remis a neuf_--a +Massachusetts schoolhouse could n't cultivate a "smarter" ideal. There +are shops in the basement and fresh putty on all the windows; so +that the only thing proper to a castle it has kept is its magnificent +position and range, which you may enjoy from the broad platform where +the Perugini assemble at eventide. Perugia is chiefly known to fame as +the city of Raphael's master; but it has a still higher claim to renown +and ought to figure in the gazetteer of fond memory as the little City +of the infinite View. The small dusky, crooked place tries by a hundred +prompt pretensions, immediate contortions, rich mantling flushes and +other ingenuities, to waylay your attention and keep it at home; but +your consciousness, alert and uneasy from the first moment, is all +abroad even when your back is turned to the vast alternative or when +fifty house-walls conceal it, and you are for ever rushing up by-streets +and peeping round corners in the hope of another glimpse or reach of it. +As it stretches away before you in that eminent indifference to limits +which is at the same time at every step an eminent homage to style, it +is altogether too free and fair for compasses and terms. You can only +say, and rest upon it, that you prefer it to any other visible fruit of +position or claimed empire of the eye that you are anywhere likely to +enjoy. + +For it is such a wondrous mixture of blooming plain and gleaming river +and wavily-multitudinous mountain vaguely dotted with pale grey cities, +that, placed as you are, roughly speaking, in the centre of Italy, you +all but span the divine peninsula from sea to sea. Up the long vista +of the Tiber you look--almost to Rome; past Assisi, Spello, Foligno, +Spoleto, all perched on their respective heights and shining through the +violet haze. To the north, to the east, to the west, you see a hundred +variations of the prospect, of which I have kept no record. Two +notes only I have made: one--though who hasn't made it over and over +again?--on the exquisite elegance of mountain forms in this endless play +of the excrescence, it being exactly as if there were variation of sex +in the upheaved mass, with the effect here mainly of contour and curve +and complexion determined in the feminine sense. It further came home to +me that the command of such an outlook on the world goes far, surely, to +give authority and centrality and experience, those of the great seats +of dominion, even to so scant a cluster of attesting objects as here. It +must deepen the civic consciousness and take off the edge of ennui. +It performs this kindly office, at any rate, for the traveller who +may overstay his curiosity as to Perugino and the Etruscan relics. It +continually solicits his wonder and praise--it reinforces the historic +page. I spent a week in the place, and when it was gone I had had enough +of Perugino, but had n't had enough of the View. + +I should perhaps do the reader a service by telling him just how a week +at Perugia may be spent. His first care must be to ignore the very dream +of haste, walking everywhere very slowly and very much at random, and +to impute an esoteric sense to almost anything his eye may happen to +encounter. Almost everything in fact lends itself to the historic, +the romantic, the aesthetic fallacy--almost everything has an antique +queerness and richness that ekes out the reduced state; that of a grim +and battered old adventuress, the heroine of many shames and scandals, +surviving to an extraordinary age and a considerable penury, but with +ancient gifts of princes and other forms of the wages of sin to show, +and the most beautiful garden of all the world to sit and doze and count +her beads in and remember. He must hang a great deal about the huge +Palazzo Pubblico, which indeed is very well worth any acquaintance you +may scrape with it. It masses itself gloomily above the narrow street to +an immense elevation, and leads up the eye along a cliff-like surface +of rugged wall, mottled with old scars and new repairs, to the loggia +dizzily perched on its cornice. He must repeat his visit to the Etruscan +Gate, by whose immemorial composition he must indeed linger long to +resolve it back into the elements originally attending it. He must uncap +to the irrecoverable, the inimitable style of the statue of Pope Julius +III before the cathedral, remembering that Hawthorne fabled his Miriam, +in an air of romance from which we are well-nigh as far to-day as from +the building of Etruscan gates, to have given rendezvous to Kenyon at +its base. Its material is a vivid green bronze, and the mantle and tiara +are covered with a delicate embroidery worthy of a silver-smith. + +Then our leisurely friend must bestow on Perugino's frescoes in +the Exchange, and on his pictures in the University, all the placid +contemplation they deserve. He must go to the theatre every evening, +in an orchestra-chair at twenty-two soldi, and enjoy the curious +didacticism of "Amore senza Stima," "Severita e Debolezza," "La Societa +Equivoca," and other popular specimens of contemporaneous Italian +comedy--unless indeed the last-named be not the edifying title applied, +for peninsular use, to "Le Demi-Monde" of the younger Dumas. I shall +be very much surprised if, at the end of a week of this varied +entertainment, he hasn't learnt how to live, not exactly in, but with, +Perugia. His strolls will abound in small accidents and mercies of +vision, but of which a dozen pencil-strokes would be a better memento +than this poor word-sketching. From the hill on which the town is +planted radiate a dozen ravines, down whose sides the houses slide and +scramble with an alarming indifference to the cohesion of their little +rugged blocks of flinty red stone. You ramble really nowhither without +emerging on some small court or terrace that throws your view across a +gulf of tangled gardens or vineyards and over to a cluster of serried +black dwellings which have to hollow in their backs to keep their +balance on the opposite ledge. On archways and street-staircases and +dark alleys that bore through a density of massive basements, and curve +and climb and plunge as they go, all to the truest mediaeval tune, +you may feast your fill. These are the local, the architectural, +the compositional commonplaces.. Some of the little streets in +out-of-the-way corners are so rugged and brown and silent that you may +imagine them passages long since hewn by the pick-axe in a deserted +stone-quarry. The battered black houses, of the colour of buried +things--things buried, that is, in accumulations of time, closer packed, +even as such are, than spadefuls of earth--resemble exposed sections of +natural rock; none the less so when, beyond some narrow gap, you catch +the blue and silver of the sublime circle of landscape. + +{Illustration: ETRUSCAN GATEWAY, PERUGIA.} + +But I ought n't to talk of mouldy alleys, or yet of azure distances, +as if they formed the main appeal to taste in this accomplished little +city. In the Sala del Cambio, where in ancient days the money-changers +rattled their embossed coin and figured up their profits, you may enjoy +one of the serenest aesthetic pleasures that the golden age of art +anywhere offers us. Bank parlours, I believe, are always handsomely +appointed, but are even those of Messrs. Rothschild such models of mural +bravery as this little counting-house of a bygone fashion? The bravery +is Perugino's own; for, invited clearly to do his best, he left it as +a lesson to the ages, covering the four low walls and the vault with +scriptural and mythological figures of extraordinary beauty. They +are ranged in artless attitudes round the upper half of the +room--the sibyls, the prophets, the philosophers, the Greek and Roman +heroes--looking down with broad serene faces, with small mild eyes and +sweet mouths that commit them to nothing in particular unless to being +comfortably and charmingly alive, at the incongruous proceedings of a +Board of Brokers. Had finance a very high tone in those days, or were +genius and faith then simply as frequent as capital and enterprise are +among ourselves? The great distinction of the Sala del Cambio is that +it has a friendly Yes for both these questions. There was a rigid +transactional probity, it seems to say; there was also a high tide of +inspiration. About the artist himself many things come up for us--more +than I can attempt in their order; for he was not, I think, to an +attentive observer, the mere smooth and entire and devout spirit we at +first are inclined to take him for. He has that about him which leads +us to wonder if he may not, after all, play a proper part enough here +as the patron of the money-changers. He is the delight of a million of +young ladies; but who knows whether we should n't find in his works, +might we "go into" them a little, a trifle more of manner than of +conviction, and of system than of deep sincerity? + +This, I allow, would put no great affront on them, and one speculates +thus partly but because it's a pleasure to hang about him on any +pretext, and partly because his immediate effect is to make us quite +inordinately embrace the pretext of his lovely soul. His portrait, +painted on the wall of the Sala (you may see it also in Rome +and Florence) might at any rate serve for the likeness of Mr. +Worldly-Wiseman in Bunyan's allegory. He was fond of his glass, I +believe, and he made his art lucrative. This tradition is not refuted +by his preserved face, and after some experience--or rather after a good +deal, since you can't have a _little_ of Perugino, who abounds wherever +old masters congregate, so that one has constantly the sense of being +"in" for all there is--you may find an echo of it in the uniform type of +his creatures, their monotonous grace, their prodigious invariability. +He may very well have wanted to produce figures of a substantial, yet at +the same time of an impeccable innocence; but we feel that he had taught +himself _how_ even beyond his own belief in them, and had arrived at +a process that acted at last mechanically. I confess at the same time +that, so interpreted, the painter affects me as hardly less interesting, +and one can't but become conscious of one's style when one's style +has become, as it were, so conscious of one's, or at least of its own, +fortune. If he was the inventor of a remarkably calculable _facture_, a +calculation that never fails is in its way a grace of the first order, +and there are things in this special appearance of perfection of +practice that make him the forerunner of a mighty and more modern race. +More than any of the early painters who strongly charm, you may take all +his measure from a single specimen. The other samples infallibly match, +reproduce unerringly the one type he had mastered, but which had the +good fortune to be adorably fair, to seem to have dawned on a vision +unsullied by the shadows of earth. Which truth, moreover, leaves +Perugino all delightful as composer and draughtsman; he has in each of +these characters a sort of spacious neatness which suggests that the +whole conception has been washed clean by some spiritual chemistry the +last thing before reaching the canvas; after which it has been applied +to that surface with a rare economy of time and means. Giotto and Fra +Angelico, beside him, are full of interesting waste and irrelevant +passion. In the sacristy of the charming church of San Pietro--a museum +of pictures and carvings--is a row of small heads of saints formerly +covering the frame of the artist's Ascension, carried off by the French. +It is almost miniature work, and here at least Perugino triumphs in +sincerity, in apparent candour, as well as in touch. Two of the holy +men are reading their breviaries, but with an air of infantine innocence +quite consistent with their holding the book upside down. + +Between Perugia and Cortona lies the large weedy water of Lake +Thrasymene, turned into a witching word for ever by Hannibal's recorded +victory over Rome. Dim as such records have become to us and remote such +realities, he is yet a passionless pilgrim who does n't, as he passes, +of a heavy summer's day, feel the air and the light and the very +faintness of the breeze all charged and haunted with them, all +interfused as with the wasted ache of experience and with the vague +historic gaze. Processions of indistinguishable ghosts bore me company +to Cortona itself, most sturdily ancient of Italian towns. It must have +been a seat of ancient knowledge even when Hannibal and Flaminius came +to the shock of battle, and have looked down afar from its grey ramparts +on the contending swarm with something of the philosophic composure +suitable to a survivor of Pelasgic and Etruscan revolutions. These grey +ramparts are in great part still visible, and form the chief attraction +of Cortona. It is perched on the very pinnacle of a mountain, and I +wound and doubled interminably over the face of the great hill, while +the jumbled roofs and towers of the arrogant little city still seemed +nearer to the sky than to the railway-station. "Rather rough," Murray +pronounces the local inn; and rough indeed it was; there was scarce a +square foot of it that you would have cared to stroke with your hand. +The landlord himself, however, was all smoothness and the best fellow in +the world; he took me up into a rickety old loggia on the tip-top of his +establishment and played showman as to half the kingdoms of the earth. +I was free to decide at the same time whether my loss or my gain was the +greater for my seeing Cortona through the medium of a festa. On the +one hand the museum was closed (and in a certain sense the smaller +and obscurer the town the more I like the museum); the churches--an +interesting note of manners and morals--were impenetrably crowded, +though, for that matter, so was the cafe, where I found neither an empty +stool nor the edge of a table. I missed a sight of the famous painted +Muse, the art-treasure of Cortona and supposedly the most precious, as +it falls little short of being the only, sample of the Greek painted +picture that has come down to us. On the other hand, I saw--but this is +what I saw. + +{Illustration: A STREET, CORTONA.} + +A part of the mountain-top is occupied by the church of St. Margaret, +and this was St. Margaret's day. The houses pause roundabout it and +leave a grassy slope, planted here and there with lean black cypresses. +The contadini from near and far had congregated in force and were +crowding into the church or winding up the slope. When I arrived they +were all kneeling or uncovered; a bedizened procession, with banners +and censers, bearing abroad, I believe, the relics of the saint, was +re-entering the church. The scene made one of those pictures that +Italy still brushes in for you with an incomparable hand and from +an inexhaustible palette when you find her in the mood. The day was +superb--the sky blazed overhead like a vault of deepest sapphire. The +grave brown peasantry, with no great accent of costume, but with +sundry small ones--decked, that is, in cheap fineries of scarlet and +yellow--made a mass of motley colour in the high wind-stirred light. +The procession halted in the pious hush, and the lovely land around and +beneath us melted away, almost to either sea, in tones of azure scarcely +less intense than the sky. Behind the church was an empty crumbling +citadel, with half-a-dozen old women keeping the gate for coppers. +Here were views and breezes and sun and shade and grassy corners to the +heart's content, together with one could n't say what huge seated mystic +melancholy presence, the after-taste of everything the still open maw +of time had consumed. I chose a spot that fairly combined all these +advantages, a spot from which I seemed to look, as who should say, +straight down the throat of the monster, no dark passage now, but with +all the glorious day playing into it, and spent a good part of my stay +at Cortona lying there at my length and observing the situation over +the top of a volume that I must have brought in my pocket just for that +especial wanton luxury of the resource provided and slighted. In the +afternoon I came down and hustled a while through the crowded little +streets, and then strolled forth under the scorching sun and made the +outer circuit of the wall. There I found tremendous uncemented blocks; +they glared and twinkled in the powerful light, and I had to put on a +blue eye-glass in order to throw into its proper perspective the vague +Etruscan past, obtruded and magnified in such masses quite as with the +effect of inadequately-withdrawn hands and feet in photographs. + +I spent the next day at Arezzo, but I confess in very much the same +uninvestigating fashion--taking in the "general impression," I dare say, +at every pore, but rather systematically leaving the dust of the ages +unfingered on the stored records: I should doubtless, in the poor time +at my command, have fingered it to so little purpose. The seeker for +the story of things has moreover, if he be worth his salt, a hundred +insidious arts; and in that case indeed--by which I mean when his +sensibility has come duly to adjust itself--the story assaults him but +from too many sides. He even feels at moments that he must sneak along +on tiptoe in order not to have too much of it. Besides which the case +all depends on the kind of use, the range of application, his tangled +consciousness, or his intelligible genius, say, may come to recognize +for it. At Arezzo, however this might be, one was far from Rome, one +was well within genial Tuscany, and the historic, the romantic decoction +seemed to reach one's lips in less stiff doses. There at once was the +"general impression"--the exquisite sense of the scarce expressible +Tuscan quality, which makes immediately, for the whole pitch of one's +perception, a grateful, a not at all strenuous difference, attaches to +almost any coherent group of objects, to any happy aspect of the scene, +for a main note, some mild recall, through pleasant friendly colour, +through settled ample form, through something homely and economic too at +the very heart of "style," of an identity of temperament and habit with +those of the divine little Florence that one originally knew. Adorable +Italy in which, for the constant renewal of interest, of attention, of +affection, these refinements of variety, these so harmoniously-grouped +and individually-seasoned fruits of the great garden of history, keep +presenting themselves! It seemed to fall in with the cheerful Tuscan +mildness for instance--sticking as I do to that ineffectual expression +of the Tuscan charm, of the yellow-brown Tuscan dignity at large--that +the ruined castle on the hill (with which agreeable feature Arezzo is no +less furnished than Assisi and Cortona) had been converted into a great +blooming, and I hope all profitable, podere or market-garden. I lounged +away the half-hours there under a spell as potent as the "wildest" +forecast of propriety--propriety to all the particular conditions--could +have figured it. I had seen Santa Maria della Pieve and its campanile +of quaint colonnades, the stately, dusky cathedral--grass-plotted and +residenced about almost after the fashion of an English "close"--and +John of Pisa's elaborate marble shrine; I had seen the museum and its +Etruscan vases and majolica platters. These were very well, but the old +pacified citadel somehow, through a day of soft saturation, placed me +most in relation. Beautiful hills surrounded it, cypresses cast straight +shadows at its corners, while in the middle grew a wondrous Italian +tangle of wheat and corn, vines and figs, peaches and cabbages, memories +and images, anything and everything. + +1873. + + + + + +SIENA EARLY AND LATE + + +I + + +Florence being oppressively hot and delivered over to the mosquitoes, +the occasion seemed to favour that visit to Siena which I had more than +once planned and missed. I arrived late in the evening, by the light +of a magnificent moon, and while a couple of benignantly-mumbling old +crones were making up my bed at the inn strolled forth in quest of a +first impression. Five minutes brought me to where I might gather it +unhindered as it bloomed in the white moonshine. The great Piazza of +Siena is famous, and though in this day of multiplied photographs and +blunted surprises and profaned revelations none of the world's wonders +can pretend, like Wordsworth's phantom of delight, really to "startle +and waylay," yet as I stepped upon the waiting scene from under a dark +archway I was conscious of no loss of the edge of a precious presented +sensibility. The waiting scene, as I have called it, was in the shape of +a shallow horse-shoe--as the untravelled reader who has turned over his +travelled friends' portfolios will respectfully remember; or, better, of +a bow in which the high wide face of the Palazzo Pubblico forms the +cord and everything else the arc. It was void of any human presence that +could figure to me the current year; so that, the moonshine assisting, +I had half-an-hour's infinite vision of mediaeval Italy. The Piazza being +built on the side of a hill--or rather, as I believe science affirms, in +the cup of a volcanic crater--the vast pavement converges downwards in +slanting radiations of stone, the spokes of a great wheel, to a point +directly before the Palazzo, which may mark the hub, though it is +nothing more ornamental than the mouth of a drain. The great monument +stands on the lower side and might seem, in spite of its goodly mass and +its embattled cornice, to be rather defiantly out-countenanced by vast +private constructions occupying the opposite eminence. This might be, +without the extraordinary dignity of the architectural gesture with +which the huge high-shouldered pile asserts itself. + +On the firm edge of the palace, from bracketed base to grey-capped +summit against the sky, where grows a tall slim tower which soars and +soars till it has given notice of the city's greatness over the blue +mountains that mark the horizon. It rises as slender and straight as a +pennoned lance planted on the steel-shod toe of a mounted knight, and +keeps all to itself in the blue air, far above the changing fashions of +the market, the proud consciousness or rare arrogance once built into +it. This beautiful tower, the finest thing in Siena and, in its rigid +fashion, as permanently fine thus as a really handsome nose on a face of +no matter what accumulated age, figures there still as a Declaration +of Independence beside which such an affair as ours, thrown off at +Philadelphia, appears to have scarce done more than helplessly give way +to time. Our Independence has become a dependence on a thousand such +dreadful things as the incorrupt declaration of Siena strikes us as +looking for ever straight over the level of. As it stood silvered by +the moonlight, while my greeting lasted, it seemed to speak, all as from +soul to soul, very much indeed as some ancient worthy of a lower order, +buttonholing one on the coveted chance and at the quiet hour, might +have done, of a state of things long and vulgarly superseded, but to the +pride and power, the once prodigious vitality, of which who could expect +any one effect to testify more incomparably, more indestructibly, quite, +as it were, more immortally? The gigantic houses enclosing the rest of +the Piazza took up the tale and mingled with it their burden. "We are +very old and a trifle weary, but we were built strong and piled high, +and we shall last for many an age. The present is cold and heedless, but +we keep ourselves in heart by brooding over our store of memories and +traditions. We are haunted houses in every creaking timber and aching +stone." Such were the gossiping connections I established with Siena +before I went to bed. + +Since that night I have had a week's daylight knowledge of the surface +of the subject at least, and don't know how I can better present it than +simply as another and a vivider page of the lesson that the ever-hungry +artist has only to _trust_ old Italy for her to feed him at every single +step from her hand--and if not with one sort of sweetly-stale grain from +that wondrous mill of history which during so many ages ground finer +than any other on earth, why then always with something else. Siena has +at any rate "preserved appearances"--kept the greatest number of them, +that is, unaltered for the eye--about as consistently as one can imagine +the thing done. Other places perhaps may treat you to as drowsy an odour +of antiquity, but few exhale it from so large an area. Lying massed +within her walls on a dozen clustered hill-tops, she shows you at every +turn in how much greater a way she once lived; and if so much of the +grand manner is extinct, the receptacle of the ashes still solidly +rounds itself. This heavy general stress of all her emphasis on the past +is what she constantly keeps in your eyes and your ears, and if you be +but a casual observer and admirer the generalised response is mainly +what you give her. The casual observer, however beguiled, is mostly +not very learned, not over-equipped in advance with data; he hasn't +specialised, his notions are necessarily vague, the chords of his +imagination, for all his good-will, are inevitably muffled and weak. But +such as it is, his received, his welcome impression serves his turn so +far as the life of sensibility goes, and reminds him from time to time +that even the lore of German doctors is but the shadow of satisfied +curiosity. I have been living at the inn, walking about the streets, +sitting in the Piazza; these are the simple terms of my experience. But +streets and inns in Italy are the vehicles of half one's knowledge; +if one has no fancy for their lessons one may burn one's note-book. +In Siena everything is Sienese. The inn has an English sign over the +door--a little battered plate with a rusty representation of the lion +and the unicorn; but advance hopefully into the mouldy stone alley which +serves as vestibule and you will find local colour enough. The landlord, +I was told, had been servant in an English family, and I was curious to +see how he met the probable argument of the casual Anglo-Saxon after the +latter's first twelve hours in his establishment. As he failed to appear +I asked the waiter if he, weren't at home. "Oh," said the latter, "he's +a _piccolo grasso vecchiotto_ who doesn't like to move." I'm afraid this +little fat old man has simply a bad conscience. It's no small burden for +one who likes the Italians--as who doesn't, under this restriction?--to +have so much indifference even to rudimentary purifying processes to +dispose of. What is the real philosophy of dirty habits, and are foul +surfaces merely superficial? If unclean manners have in truth the +moral meaning which I suspect in them we must love Italy better than +consistency. This a number of us are prepared to do, but while we are +making the sacrifice it is as well we should be aware. + +We may plead moreover for these impecunious heirs of the past that even +if it were easy to be clean in the midst of their mouldering heritage +it would be difficult to appear so. At the risk of seeming to flaunt the +silly superstition of restless renovation for the sake of renovation, +which is but the challenge of the infinitely precious principle of +duration, one is still moved to say that the prime result of one's +contemplative strolls in the dusky alleys of such a place is an +ineffable sense of disrepair. Everything is cracking, peeling, fading, +crumbling, rotting. No young Sienese eyes rest upon anything youthful; +they open into a world battered and befouled with long use. Everything +has passed its meridian except the brilliant facade of the cathedral, +which is being diligently retouched and restored, and a few private +palaces whose broad fronts seem to have been lately furbished and +polished. Siena was long ago mellowed to the pictorial tone; the +operation of time is now to deposit shabbiness upon shabbiness. But +it's for the most part a patient, sturdy, sympathetic shabbiness, +which soothes rather than irritates the nerves, and has in many cases +doubtless as long a career to run as most of our pert and shallow +freshnesses. It projects at all events a deeper shadow into the constant +twilight of the narrow streets--that vague historic dusk, as I may call +it, in which one walks and wonders. These streets are hardly more than +sinuous flagged alleys, into which the huge black houses, between their +almost meeting cornices, suffer a meagre light to filter down over +rough-hewn stone, past windows often of graceful Gothic form, and great +pendent iron rings and twisted sockets for torches. Scattered over +their many-headed hill, they suffer the roadway often to incline to the +perpendicular, becoming so impracticable for vehicles that the sound of +wheels is only a trifle less anomalous than it would be in Venice. But +all day long there comes up to my window an incessant shuffling of feet +and clangour of voices. The weather is very warm for the season, all the +world is out of doors, and the Tuscan tongue (which in Siena is reputed +to have a classic purity) wags in every imaginable key. It doesn't +rest even at night, and I am often an uninvited guest at concerts +and _conversazioni_ at two o'clock in the morning. The concerts are +sometimes charming. I not only don't curse my wakefulness, but go to my +window to listen. Three men come carolling by, trolling and quavering +with voices of delightful sweetness, or a lonely troubadour in his +shirt-sleeves draws such artful love-notes from his clear, fresh +tenor, that I seem for the moment to be behind the scenes at the opera, +watching some Rubini or Mario go "on" and waiting for the round of +applause. In the intervals a couple of friends or enemies stop--Italians +always make their points in conversation by pulling up, letting you walk +on a few paces, to turn and find them standing with finger on nose +and engaging your interrogative eye--they pause, by a happy instinct, +directly under my window, and dispute their point or tell their story +or make their confidence. One scarce is sure which it may be; everything +has such an explosive promptness, such a redundancy of inflection and +action. But everything for that matter takes on such dramatic life +as our lame colloquies never know--so that almost any uttered +communications here become an acted play, improvised, mimicked, +proportioned and rounded, carried bravely to its _denoument_. The +speaker seems actually to establish his stage and face his foot-lights, +to create by a gesture a little scenic circumscription about him; he +rushes to and fro and shouts and stamps and postures, he ranges through +every phase of his inspiration. I noted the other evening a striking +instance of the spontaneity of the Italian gesture, in the person of a +small Sienese of I hardly know what exact age--the age of inarticulate +sounds and the experimental use of a spoon. It was a Sunday evening, and +this little man had accompanied his parents to the cafe. The Caffe +Greco at Siena is a most delightful institution; you get a capital +_demi-tasse_ for three sous, and an excellent ice for eight, and while +you consume these easy luxuries you may buy from a little hunchback the +local weekly periodical, the _Vita Nuova_, for three centimes (the two +centimes left from your sou, if you are under the spell of this magical +frugality, will do to give the waiter). My young friend was sitting on +his father's knee and helping himself to the half of a strawberry-ice +with which his mamma had presented him. He had so many misadventures +with his spoon that this lady at length confiscated it, there being +nothing left of the ice but a little crimson liquid which he might +dispose of by the common instinct of childhood. But he was no friend, +it appeared, to such freedoms; he was a perfect little gentleman and he +resented it being expected of him that he should drink down his remnant. +He protested therefore, and it was the manner of his protest that struck +me. He didn't cry audibly, though he made a very wry face. It was no +stupid squall, and yet he was too young to speak. It was a penetrating +concord of inarticulately pleading, accusing sounds, accompanied by +gestures of the most exquisite propriety. These were perfectly mature; +he did everything that a man of forty would have done if he had been +pouring out a flood of sonorous eloquence. He shrugged his shoulders +and wrinkled his eyebrows, tossed out his hands and folded his arms, +obtruded his chin and bobbed about his head--and at last, I am happy to +say, recovered his spoon. If I had had a solid little silver one I would +have presented it to him as a testimonial to a perfect, though as yet +unconscious, artist. + +My actual tribute to him, however, has diverted me from what I had in +mind--a much weightier matter--the great private palaces which are the +massive majestic syllables, sentences, periods, of the strange message +the place addresses to us. They are extraordinarily spacious and +numerous, and one wonders what part they can play in the meagre economy +of the actual city. The Siena of to-day is a mere shrunken semblance +of the rabid little republic which in the thirteenth century waged +triumphant war with Florence, cultivated the arts with splendour, +planned a cathedral (though it had ultimately to curtail the design) of +proportions almost unequalled, and contained a population of two hundred +thousand souls. Many of these dusky piles still bear the names of the +old mediaeval magnates the vague mild occupancy of whose descendants has +the effect of armour of proof worn over "pot" hats and tweed jackets and +trousers. Half-a-dozen of them are as high as the Strozzi and Riccardi +palaces in Florence; they couldn't well be higher. The very essence of +the romantic and the scenic is in the way these colossal dwellings are +packed together in their steep streets, in the depths of their little +enclosed, agglomerated city. When we, in our day and country, raise a +structure of half the mass and dignity, we leave a great space about +it in the manner of a pause after a showy speech. But when a Sienese +countess, as things are here, is doing her hair near the window, she +is a wonderfully near neighbour to the cavalier opposite, who is being +shaved by his valet. Possibly the countess doesn't object to a certain +chosen publicity at her toilet; what does an Italian gentleman assure +me but that the aristocracy make very free with each other? Some of the +palaces are shown, but only when the occupants are at home, and now they +are in _villeggiatura_. Their villeggiatura lasts eight months of the +year, the waiter at the inn informs me, and they spend little more than +the carnival in the city. The gossip of an inn-waiter ought perhaps to +be beneath the dignity of even such thin history as this; but I confess +that when, as a story-seeker always and ever, I have come in from my +strolls with an irritated sense of the dumbness of stones and mortar, +it has been to listen with avidity, over my dinner, to the proffered +confidences of the worthy man who stands by with a napkin. His talk is +really very fine, and he prides himself greatly on his cultivated tone, +to which he calls my attention. He has very little good to say about the +Sienese nobility. They are "proprio d'origine egoista"--whatever that +may be--and there are many who can't write their names. This may be +calumny; but I doubt whether the most blameless of them all could have +spoken more delicately of a lady of peculiar personal appearance who had +been dining near me. "She's too fat," I grossly said on her leaving +the room. The waiter shook his head with a little sniff: "E troppo +materiale." This lady and her companion were the party whom, thinking +I might relish a little company--I had been dining alone for a week--he +gleefully announced to me as newly arrived Americans. They were +Americans, I found, who wore, pinned to their heads in permanence, the +black lace veil or mantilla, conveyed their beans to their mouth with +a knife, and spoke a strange raucous Spanish. They were in fine +compatriots from Montevideo. + +{Illustration: THE RED PALACE, SIENA.} + +The genius of old Siena, however, would make little of any stress of +such distinctions; one representative of a far-off social platitude +being about as much in order as another as he stands before the great +loggia of the Casino di Nobili, the club of the best society. The +nobility, which is very numerous and very rich, is still, says the +apparently competent native I began by quoting, perfectly feudal and +uplifted and separate. Morally and intellectually, behind the walls of +its palaces, the fourteenth century, it's thrilling to think, hasn't +ceased to hang on. There is no bourgeoisie to speak of; immediately +after the aristocracy come the poor people, who are very poor indeed. +My friend's account of these matters made me wish more than ever, as +a lover of the preserved social specimen, of type at almost any price, +that one weren't, a helpless victim of the historic sense, reduced +simply to staring at black stones and peeping up stately staircases; +and that when one had examined the street-face of the palace, Murray in +hand, one might walk up to the great drawing-room, make one's bow to the +master and mistress, the old abbe and the young count, and invite +them to favour one with a sketch of their social philosophy or a few +first-hand family anecdotes. + +The dusky labyrinth of the streets, we must in default of such +initiations content ourselves with noting, is interrupted by two great +candid spaces: the fan-shaped piazza, of which I just now said a word, +and the smaller square in which the cathedral erects its walls of +many-coloured marble. Of course since paying the great piazza my +compliments by moonlight I have strolled through it often at sunnier and +shadier hours. The market is held there, and wherever Italians buy and +sell, wherever they count and chaffer--as indeed you hear them do right +and left, at almost any moment, as you take your way among them--the +pulse of life beats fast. It has been doing so on the spot just named, I +suppose, for the last five hundred years, and during that time the cost +of eggs and earthen pots has been gradually but inexorably increasing. +The buyers nevertheless wrestle over their purchases as lustily as so +many fourteenth-century burghers suddenly waking up in horror to current +prices. You have but to walk aside, however, into the Palazzo Pubblico +really to feel yourself a thrifty old medievalist. The state affairs of +the Republic were formerly transacted here, but it now gives shelter +to modern law-courts and other prosy business. I was marched through +a number of vaulted halls and chambers, which, in the intervals of the +administrative sessions held in them, are peopled only by the great +mouldering archaic frescoes--anything but inanimate these even in their +present ruin--that cover the walls and ceiling. The chief painters of +the Sienese school lent a hand in producing the works I name, and you +may complete there the connoisseurship in which, possibly, you will have +embarked at the Academy. I say "possibly" to be very judicial, my own +observation having led me no great length. I have rather than otherwise +cherished the thought that the Sienese school suffers one's eagerness +peacefully to slumber--benignantly abstains in fact from whipping up +a languid curiosity and a tepid faith. "A formidable rival to the +Florentine," says some book--I forget which--into which I recently +glanced. Not a bit of it thereupon boldly say I; the Florentines may +rest on their laurels and the lounger on his lounge. The early painters +of the two groups have indeed much in common; but the Florentines had +the good fortune to see their efforts gathered up and applied by a few +pre-eminent spirits, such as never came to the rescue of the groping +Sienese. Fra Angelico and Ghirlandaio said all their feebler _confreres_ +dreamt of and a great deal more beside, but the inspiration of Simone +Memmi and Ambrogio Lorenzetti and Sano di Pietro has a painful air of +never efflorescing into a maximum. Sodoma and Beccafumi are to my taste +a rather abortive maximum. But one should speak of them all gently--and +I do, from my soul; for their labour, by their lights, has wrought a +precious heritage of still-living colour and rich figure-peopled shadow +for the echoing chambers of their old civic fortress. The faded frescoes +cover the walls like quaintly-storied tapestries; in one way or another +they cast their spell. If one owes a large debt of pleasure to pictorial +art one comes to think tenderly and easily of its whole evolution, as +of the conscious experience of a single mysterious, striving spirit, and +one shrinks from saying rude things about any particular phase of it, +just as one would from referring without precautions to some error or +lapse in the life of a person one esteemed. You don't care to remind a +grizzled veteran of his defeats, and why should we linger in Siena to +talk about Beccafumi? I by no means go so far as to say, with an amateur +with whom I have just been discussing the matter, that "Sodoma is a +precious poor painter and Beccafumi no painter at all"; but, opportunity +being limited, I am willing to let the remark about Beccafumi pass for +true. With regard to Sodoma, I remember seeing four years ago in the +choir of the Cathedral of Pisa a certain small dusky specimen of the +painter--an Abraham and Isaac, if I am not mistaken--which was charged +with a gloomy grace. One rarely meets him in general collections, and I +had never done so till the other day. He was not prolific, apparently; +he had however his own elegance, and his rarity is a part of it. + +Here in Siena are a couple of dozen scattered frescoes and three or four +canvases; his masterpiece, among others, an harmonious Descent from the +Cross. I wouldn't give a fig for the equilibrium of the figures or +the ladders; but while it lasts the scene is all intensely solemn and +graceful and sweet--too sweet for so bitter a subject. Sodoma's +women are strangely sweet; an imaginative sense of morbid appealing +attitude--as notably in the sentimental, the pathetic, but the none the +less pleasant, "Swooning of St. Catherine," the great Sienese heroine, +at San Domenico--seems to me the author's finest accomplishment. His +frescoes have all the same almost appealing evasion of difficulty, and a +kind of mild melancholy which I am inclined to think the sincerest +part of them, for it strikes me as practically the artist's depressed +suspicion of his own want of force. Once he determined, however, that if +he couldn't be strong he would make capital of his weakness, and painted +the Christ bound to the Column, of the Academy. Here he got much nearer +and I have no doubt mixed his colours with his tears; but the result +can't be better described than by saying that it is, pictorially, the +first of the modern Christs. Unfortunately it hasn't been the last. + +{Illustration: SAN DOMINICO, SIENA} + +The main strength of Sienese art went possibly into the erection of the +Cathedral, and yet even here the strength is not of the greatest strain. +If, however, there are more interesting temples in Italy, there are +few more richly and variously scenic and splendid, the comparative +meagreness of the architectural idea being overlaid by a marvellous +wealth of ingenious detail. Opposite the church--with the dull old +archbishop's palace on one side and a dismantled residence of the late +Grand Duke of Tuscany on the other--is an ancient hospital with a big +stone bench running all along its front. Here I have sat a while every +morning for a week, like a philosophic convalescent, watching the florid +facade of the cathedral glitter against the deep blue sky. It has been +lavishly restored of late years, and the fresh white marble of the +densely clustered pinnacles and statues and beasts and flowers +flashes in the sunshine like a mosaic of jewels. There is more of this +goldsmith's work in stone than I can remember or describe; it is piled +up over three great doors with immense margins of exquisite decorative +sculpture--still in the ancient cream-coloured marble--and beneath three +sharp pediments embossed with images relieved against red marble and +tipped with golden mosaics. It is in the highest degree fantastic and +luxuriant--it is on the whole very lovely. As a triumph of the many-hued +it prepares you for the interior, where the same parti-coloured +splendour is endlessly at play--a confident complication of harmonies +and contrasts and of the minor structural refinements and braveries. +The internal surface is mainly wrought in alternate courses of black and +white marble; but as the latter has been dimmed by the centuries to a +fine mild brown the place is all a concert of relieved and dispersed +glooms. Save for Pinturicchio's brilliant frescoes in the Sacristy +there are no pictures to speak of; but the pavement is covered with many +elaborate designs in black and white mosaic after cartoons by Beccafumi. +The patient skill of these compositions makes them a rare piece of +decoration; yet even here the friend whom I lately quoted rejects this +over-ripe fruit of the Sienese school. The designs are nonsensical, he +declares, and all his admiration is for the cunning artisans who have +imitated the hatchings and shadings and hair-strokes of the pencil +by the finest curves of inserted black stone. But the true romance of +handiwork at Siena is to be seen in the wondrous stalls of the choir, +under the coloured light of the great wheel-window. Wood-carving has +ever been a cherished craft of the place, and the best masters of the +art during the fifteenth century lavished themselves on this prodigious +task. It is the frost-work on one's window-panes interpreted in polished +oak. It would be hard to find, doubtless, a more moving illustration of +the peculiar patience, the sacred candour, of the great time. Into such +artistry as this the author seems to put more of his personal substance +than into any other; he has to wrestle not only with his subject, +but with his material. He is richly fortunate when his subject is +charming--when his devices, inventions and fantasies spring lightly to +his hand; for in the material itself, after age and use have ripened +and polished and darkened it to the richness of ebony and to a greater +warmth there is something surpassingly delectable and venerable. Wander +behind the altar at Siena when the chanting is over and the incense has +faded, and look well at the stalls of the Barili. + +1873. + + +II + + +I leave the impression noted in the foregoing pages to tell its own +small story, but have it on my conscience to wonder, in this connection, +quite candidly and publicly and by way of due penance, at the scantness +of such first-fruits of my sensibility. I was to see Siena repeatedly +in the years to follow, I was to know her better, and I would say that +I was to do her an ampler justice didn't that remark seem to reflect a +little on my earlier poor judgment. This judgment strikes me to-day as +having fallen short--true as it may be that I find ever a value, or +at least an interest, even in the moods and humours and lapses of any +brooding, musing or fantasticating observer to whom the finer sense +of things is _on the whole_ not closed. If he has on a given occasion +nodded or stumbled or strayed, this fact by itself speaks to me of +him--speaks to me, that is, of his faculty and his idiosyncrasies, and +I care nothing for the application of his faculty unless it be, first of +all, in itself interesting. Which may serve as my reply to any objection +here breaking out--on the ground that if a spectator's languors are +evidence, of a sort, about that personage, they are scarce evident about +the case before him, at least if the case be important. I let my perhaps +rather weak expression of the sense of Siena stand, at any rate--for the +sake of what I myself read into it; but I should like to amplify it by +other memories, and would do so eagerly if I might here enjoy the space. +The difficulty for these rectifications is that if the early vision has +failed of competence or of full felicity, if initiation has thus been +slow, so, with renewals and extensions, so, with the larger experience, +one hindrance is exchanged for another. There is quite such a +possibility as having lived into a relation too much to be able to make +a statement of it. + +I remember on one occasion arriving very late of a summer night, after +an almost unbroken run from London, and the note of that approach--I +was the only person alighting at the station below the great hill of +the little fortress city, under whose at once frowning and gaping gate I +must have passed, in the warm darkness and the absolute stillness, +very much after the felt fashion of a person of importance about to be +enormously incarcerated--gives me, for preservation thus belated, the +pitch, as I may call it, at various times, though always at one season, +of an almost systematised esthetic use of the place. It wasn't to be +denied that the immensely better "accommodations" instituted by the +multiplying, though alas more bustling, years had to be recognised as +supplying a basis, comparatively prosaic if one would, to that luxury. +No sooner have I written which words, however, than I find myself adding +that one "wouldn't," that one doesn't--doesn't, that is, consent now to +regard the then "new" hotel (pretty old indeed by this time) as anything +but an aid to a free play of perception. The strong and rank old Arme +d'Inghilterra, in the darker street, has passed away; but its ancient +rival the Aquila Nera put forth claims to modernisation, and the Grand +Hotel, the still fresher flower of modernity near the gate by which you +enter from the station, takes on to my present remembrance a mellowness +as of all sorts of comfort, cleanliness and kindness. The particular +facts, those of the visit I began here by alluding to and those of still +others, at all events, inveterately made in June or early in July, enter +together in a fusion as of hot golden-brown objects seen through the +practicable crevices of shutters drawn upon high, cool, darkened rooms +where the scheme of the scene involved longish days of quiet work, with +late afternoon emergence and contemplation waiting on the better or the +worse conscience. I thus associate the compact world of the admirable +hill-top, the world of a predominant golden-brown, with a general +invocation of sensibility and fancy, and think of myself as going forth +into the lingering light of summer evenings all attuned to intensity of +the idea of compositional beauty, or in other words, freely speaking, +to the question of colour, to intensity of picture. To communicate with +Siena in this charming way was thus, I admit, to have no great margin +for the prosecution of inquiries, but I am not sure that it wasn't, +little by little, to feel the whole combination of elements better than +by a more exemplary method, and this from beginning to end of the scale. + +More of the elements indeed, for memory, hang about the days that were +ushered in by that straight flight from the north than about any other +series--if partly, doubtless, but because of my having then stayed +longest. I specify it at all events for fond reminiscence as the year, +the only year, at which I was present at the Palio, the earlier one, +the series of furious horse-races between elected representatives of +different quarters of the town taking place toward the end of June, as +the second and still more characteristic exhibition of the same sort +is appointed to the month of August; a spectacle that I am far from +speaking of as the finest flower of my old and perhaps even a little +faded cluster of impressions, but which smudges that special sojourn as +with the big thumb--mark of a slightly soiled and decidedly ensanguined +hand. For really, after all, the great loud gaudy romp or heated frolic, +simulating ferocity if not achieving it, that is the annual pride of the +town, was not intrinsically, to my-view, extraordinarily impressive--in +spite of its bristling with all due testimony to the passionate Italian +clutch of any pretext for costume and attitude and utterance, for +mumming and masquerading and raucously representing; the vast cheap +vividness rather somehow refines itself, and the swarm and hubbub of the +immense square melt, to the uplifted sense of a very high-placed balcony +of the overhanging Chigi palace, where everything was superseded but the +intenser passage, across the ages, of the great Renaissance tradition +of architecture and the infinite sweetness of the waning golden day. +The Palio, indubitably, was _criard_--and the more so for quite +monopolising, at Siena, the note of crudity; and much of it demanded +doubtless of one's patience a due respect for the long local continuity +of such things; it drops into its humoured position, however, in any +retrospective command of the many brave aspects of the prodigious place. +Not that I am pretending here, even for rectification, to take these at +all in turn; I only go on a little with my rueful glance at the marked +gaps left in my original report of sympathies entertained. + +I bow my head for instance to the mystery of my not having mentioned +that the coolest and freshest flower of the day was ever that of one's +constant renewal of a charmed homage to Pinturicchio, coolest and +freshest and signally youngest and most matutinal (as distinguished from +merely primitive or crepuscular) of painters, in the library or +sacristy of the Cathedral. Did I _always_ find time before work to spend +half-an-hour of immersion, under that splendid roof, in the clearest +and tenderest, the very cleanest and "straightest," as it masters +our envious credulity, of all storied fresco-worlds? This wondrous +apartment, a monument in itself to the ancient pride and power of +the Church, and which contains an unsurpassed treasure of gloriously +illuminated missals, psalters and other vast parchment folios, almost +each of whose successive leaves gives the impression of rubies, +sapphires and emeralds set in gold and practically embedded in the page, +offers thus to view, after a fashion splendidly sustained, a pictorial +record of the career of Pope Pius II, Aeneas Sylvius of the Siena +Piccolomini (who gave him for an immediate successor a second of +their name), most profanely literary of Pontiffs and last of would-be +Crusaders, whose adventures and achievements under Pinturicchio's brush +smooth themselves out for us very much to the tune of the "stories" told +by some fine old man of the world, at the restful end of his life, to +the cluster of his grandchildren. The end of AEneas Sylvius was not +restful; he died at Ancona in troublous times, preaching war, and +attempting to make it, against the then terrific Turk; but over no great +worldly personal legend, among those of men of arduous affairs, arches a +fairer, lighter or more pacific memorial vault than the shining Libreria +of Siena. I seem to remember having it and its unfrequented enclosing +precinct so often all to myself that I must indeed mostly have resorted +to it for a prompt benediction on the day. Like no other strong +solicitation, among artistic appeals to which one may compare it up and +down the whole wonderful country, is the felt neighbouring presence of +the overwrought Cathedral in its little proud possessive town: you may +so often feel by the week at a time that it stands there really for your +own personal enjoyment, your romantic convenience, your small wanton +aesthetic use. In such a light shines for me, at all events, under such +an accumulation and complication of tone flushes and darkens and richly +recedes for me, across the years, the treasure-house of many-coloured +marbles in the untrodden, the drowsy, empty Sienese square. One +could positively do, in the free exercise of any responsible fancy or +luxurious taste, what one would with it. + +But that proposition holds true, after all, for almost any mild pastime +of the incurable student of loose meanings and stray relics and odd +references and dim analogies in an Italian hill-city bronzed and +seasoned by the ages. I ought perhaps, for justification of the right to +talk, to have plunged into the Siena archives of which, on one occasion, +a kindly custodian gave me, in rather dusty and stuffy conditions, +as the incident vaguely comes back to me, a glimpse that was like a +moment's stand at the mouth of a deep, dark mine. I didn't descend into +the pit; I did, instead of this, a much idler and easier thing: I simply +went every afternoon, my stint of work over, I like to recall, for a +musing stroll upon the Lizza--the Lizza which had its own unpretentious +but quite insidious art of meeting the lover of old stories halfway. The +great and subtle thing, if you are not a strenuous specialist, in places +of a heavily charged historic consciousness, is to profit by the sense +of that consciousness--or in other words to cultivate a relation with +the oracle--after the fashion that suits yourself; so that if the +general after-taste of experience, experience at large, the fine +distilled essence of the matter, seems to breathe, in such a case, from +the very stones and to make a thick strong liquor of the very air, you +may thus gather as you pass what is most to your purpose; which is +more the indestructible mixture of lived things, with its concentrated +lingering odour, than any interminable list of numbered chapters and +verses. Chapters and verses, literally scanned, refuse coincidence, +mostly, with the divisional proprieties of your own pile of +manuscript--which is but another way of saying, in short, that if the +Lizza is a mere fortified promontory of the great Sienese hill, serving +at once as a stronghold for the present military garrison and as a +planted and benched and band-standed walk and recreation-ground for the +citizens, so I could never, toward close of day, either have enough of +it or yet feel the vaguest saunterings there to be vain. They were vague +with the qualification always of that finer massing, as one wandered +off, of the bronzed and seasoned element, the huge rock pedestal, the +bravery of walls and gates and towers and palaces and loudly asserted +dominion; and then of that pervaded or mildly infested air in which +one feels the experience of the ages, of which I just spoke, to be +exquisitely in solution; and lastly of the wide, strange, sad, beautiful +horizon, a rim of far mountains that always pictured, for the leaner +on old rubbed and smoothed parapets at the sunset hour, a country not +exactly blighted or deserted, but that had had its life, on an immense +scale, and had gone, with all its memories and relics, into rather +austere, in fact into almost grim and misanthropic, retirement. This was +a manner and a mood, at any rate, in all the land, that favoured in the +late afternoons the divinest landscape blues and purples--not to speak +of its favouring still more my practical contention that the whole +guarded headland in question, with the immense ramparts of golden brown +and red that dropped into vineyards and orchards and cornfields and all +the rustic elegance of the Tuscan _podere_, was knitting for me a +chain of unforgettable hours; to the justice of which claim let these +divagations testify. + +It wasn't, however, that one mightn't without disloyalty to that scheme +of profit seek impressions further afield--though indeed I may best say +of such a matter as the long pilgrimage to the pictured convent of Monte +Oliveto that it but played on the same fine chords as the overhanging, +the far-gazing Lizza. What it came to was that one simply put to the +friendly test, as it were, the mood and manner of the country. This +remembrance is precious, but the demonstration of that sense as of +a great heaving region stilled by some final shock and returning +thoughtfully, in fact tragically, on itself, couldn't have been more +pointed. The long-drawn rural road I refer to, stretching over hill and +dale and to which I devoted the whole of the longest day of the year--I +was in a small single-horse conveyance, of which I had already made +appreciative use, and with a driver as disposed as myself ever to +sacrifice speed to contemplation--is doubtless familiar now with the +rush of the motor-car; the thought of whose free dealings with the +solitude of Monte Oliveto makes me a little ruefully reconsider, I +confess, the spirit in which I have elsewhere in these pages, on behalf +of the lust, the landscape lust, of the eyes, acknowledged our general +increasing debt to that vehicle. For that we met nothing whatever, as +I seem at this distance of time to recall, while we gently trotted and +trotted through the splendid summer hours and a dry desolation that yet +somehow smiled and smiled, was part of the charm and the intimacy of +the whole impression--the impression that culminated at last, before +the great cloistered square, lonely, bleak and stricken, in the almost +aching vision, more frequent in the Italy of to-day than anywhere in the +world, of the uncalculated waste of a myriad forms of piety, forces of +labour, beautiful fruits of genius. However, one gaped above all things +for the impression, and what one mainly asked was that it should be +strong of its kind. That was the case, I think I couldn't but feel, at +every moment of the couple of hours I spent in the vast, cold, empty +shell, out of which the Benedictine brotherhood sheltered there for ages +had lately been turned by the strong arm of a secular State. There was +but one good brother left, a very lean and tough survivor, a dusky, +elderly, friendly Abbate, of an indescribable type and a perfect manner, +of whom I think I felt immediately thereafter that I should have +liked to say much, but as to whom I must have yielded to the fact +that ingenious and vivid commemoration was even then in store for him. +Literary portraiture had marked him for its own, and in the short +story of _Un Saint_, one of the most finished of contemporary French +_nouvelles_, the art and the sympathy of Monsieur Paul Bourget preserve +his interesting image. He figures in the beautiful tale, the Abbate +of the desolate cloister and of those comparatively quiet years, as a +clean, clear type of sainthood; a circumstance this in itself to cause a +fond analyst of other than "Latin" race (model and painter in this +case having their Latinism so strongly in common) almost endlessly to +meditate. Oh, the unutterable differences in any scheme or estimate +of physiognomic values, in any range of sensibility to expressional +association, among observers of different, of inevitably more or +less opposed, traditional and "racial" points of view! One had heard +convinced Latins--or at least I had!--speak of situations of trust and +intimacy in which they couldn't have endured near them a Protestant or, +as who should say for instance, an Anglo-Saxon; but I was to remember +my own private attempt to measure such a change of sensibility as +might have permitted the prolonged close approach of the dear dingy, +half-starved, very possibly all heroic, and quite ideally urbane Abbate. +The depth upon depth of things, the cloud upon cloud of associations, on +one side and the other, that would have had to change first! + +To which I may add nevertheless that since one ever supremely invoked +intensity of impression and abundance of character, I feasted my fill +of it at Monte Oliveto, and that for that matter this would have +constituted my sole refreshment in the vast icy void of the blighted +refectory if I hadn't bethought myself of bringing with me a scrap of +food, too scantly apportioned, I recollect--very scantly indeed, since +my _cocchiere_ was to share with me--by my purveyor at Siena. Our +tragic--even if so tenderly tragic--entertainer had nothing to give us; +but the immemorial cold of the enormous monastic interior in which we +smilingly fasted would doubtless not have had for me without that such +a wealth of reference. I was to have "liked" the whole adventure, so +I must somehow have liked that; by which remark I am recalled to the +special treasure of the desecrated temple, those extraordinarily +strong and brave frescoes of Luca Signorelli and Sodoma that adorn, in +admirable condition, several stretches of cloister wall. These creations +in a manner took care of themselves; aided by the blue of the sky above +the cloister-court they glowed, they insistently lived; I remember the +frigid prowl through all the rest of the bareness, including that of the +big dishonoured church and that even of the Abbate's abysmally resigned +testimony to his mere human and personal situation; and then, with such +a force of contrast and effect of relief, the great sheltered sun-flares +and colour-patches of scenic composition and design where a couple of +hands centuries ago turned to dust had so wrought the defiant miracle +of life and beauty that the effect is of a garden blooming among ruins. +Discredited somehow, since they all would, the destroyers themselves, +the ancient piety, the general spirit and intention, but still bright +and assured and sublime--practically, enviably immortal--the other, the +still subtler, the all aesthetic good faith. + +1909. + + + + + +THE AUTUMN IN FLORENCE + + +Florence too has its "season," not less than Rome, and I have been +rejoicing for the past six weeks in the fact that this comparatively +crowded parenthesis hasn't yet been opened. Coming here in the first +days of October I found the summer still in almost unmenaced possession, +and ever since, till within a day or two, the weight of its hand has +been sensible. Properly enough, as the city of flowers, Florence mingles +the elements most artfully in the spring--during the divine crescendo of +March and April, the weeks when six months of steady shiver have still +not shaken New York and Boston free of the long Polar reach. But the +very quality of the decline of the year as we at present here feel it +suits peculiarly the mood in which an undiscourageable gatherer of the +sense of things, or taster at least of "charm," moves through these +many-memoried streets and galleries and churches. Old things, old +places, old people, or at least old races, ever strike us as giving out +their secrets most freely in such moist, grey, melancholy days as have +formed the complexion of the past fortnight. With Christmas arrives the +opera, the only opera worth speaking of--which indeed often means in +Florence the only opera worth talking through; the gaiety, the gossip, +the reminders in fine of the cosmopolite and watering-place character to +which the city of the Medici long ago began to bend her antique temper. +Meanwhile it is pleasant enough for the tasters of charm, as I say, and +for the makers of invidious distinctions, that the Americans haven't all +arrived, however many may be on their way, and that the weather has a +monotonous overcast softness in which, apparently, aimless contemplation +grows less and less ashamed. There is no crush along the Cascine, as +on the sunny days of winter, and the Arno, wandering away toward the +mountains in the haze, seems as shy of being looked at as a good picture +in a bad light. No light, to my eyes, nevertheless, could be better +than this, which reaches us, all strained and filtered and refined, +exquisitely coloured and even a bit conspicuously sophisticated, through +the heavy air of the past that hangs about the place for ever. + +I first knew Florence early enough, I am happy to say, to have heard the +change for the worse, the taint of the modern order, bitterly lamented +by old haunters, admirers, lovers--those qualified to present a picture +of the conditions prevailing under the good old Grand-Dukes, the two +last of their line in especial, that, for its blest reflection of +sweetness and mildness and cheapness and ease, of every immediate boon +in life to be enjoyed quite for nothing, could but draw tears from +belated listeners. Some of these survivors from the golden age--just the +beauty of which indeed was in the gold, of sorts, that it poured into +your lap, and not in the least in its own importunity on that head--have +needfully lingered on, have seen the ancient walls pulled down and +the compact and belted mass of which the Piazza della Signoria was the +immemorial centre expand, under the treatment of enterprising syndics, +into an ungirdled organism of the type, as they viciously say, of +Chicago; one of those places of which, as their grace of a circumference +is nowhere, the dignity of a centre can no longer be predicated. +Florence loses itself to-day in dusty boulevards and smart _beaux +quartiers_, such as Napoleon III and Baron Haussmann were to set the +fashion of to a too mediaeval Europe--with the effect of some precious +page of antique text swallowed up in a marginal commentary that smacks +of the style of the newspaper. So much for what has happened on this +side of that line of demarcation which, by an odd law, makes us, with +our preference for what we are pleased to call the picturesque, object +to such occurrences even _as_ occurrences. The real truth is that +objections are too vain, and that he would be too rude a critic here, +just now, who shouldn't be in the humour to take the thick with the +thin and to try at least to read something of the old soul into the new +forms. + +There is something to be said moreover for your liking a city (once it's +a question of your actively circulating) to pretend to comfort you more +by its extent than by its limits; in addition to which Florence was +anciently, was in her palmy days peculiarly, a daughter of change and +movement and variety, of shifting moods, policies and regimes--just +as the Florentine character, as we have it to-day, is a character that +takes all things easily for having seen so many come and go. It saw the +national capital, a few years since, arrive and sit down by the Arno, +and took no further thought than sufficed for the day; then it saw, the +odd visitor depart and whistled her cheerfully on her way to Rome. The +new boulevards of the Sindaco Peruzzi come, it may be said, but they +don't go; which, after all, it isn't from the aesthetic point of view +strictly necessary they should. A part of the essential amiability of +Florence, of her genius for making you take to your favour on easy terms +everything that in any way belongs to her, is that she has already flung +an element of her grace over all their undried mortar and plaster. Such +modern arrangements as the Piazza d' Azeglio and the _viale_ or Avenue +of the Princess Margaret please not a little, I think--for what they +are!--and do so even in a degree, by some fine local privilege just +because they are Florentine. The afternoon lights rest on them as if to +thank them for not being worse, and their vistas are liberal where +they look toward the hills. They carry you close to these admirable +elevations, which hang over Florence on all sides, and if in the +foreground your sense is a trifle perplexed by the white pavements +dotted here and there with a policeman or a nursemaid, you have only to +reach beyond and see Fiesole turn to violet, on its ample eminence, from +the effect of the opposite sunset. + +Facing again then to Florence proper you have local colour enough and +to spare--which you enjoy the more, doubtless, from standing off to get +your light and your point of view. The elder streets abutting on all +this newness bore away into the heart of the city in narrow, dusky +perspectives that quite refine, in certain places, by an art of their +own, on the romantic appeal. There are temporal and other accidents +thanks to which, as you pause to look down them and to penetrate the +deepening shadows that accompany their retreat, they resemble little +corridors leading out from the past, mystical like the ladder in Jacob's +dream; so that when you see a single figure advance and draw nearer +you are half afraid to wait till it arrives--it must be too much of the +nature of a ghost, a messenger from an underworld. However this may be, +a place paved with such great mosaics of slabs and lined with palaces of +so massive a tradition, structures which, in their large dependence +on pure proportion for interest and beauty, reproduce more than other +modern styles the simple nobleness of Greek architecture, must ever have +placed dignity first in the scale of invoked effect and laid up no great +treasure of that ragged picturesqueness--the picturesqueness of large +poverty--on which we feast our idle eyes at Rome and Naples. Except in +the unfinished fronts of the churches, which, however, unfortunately, +are mere ugly blankness, one finds less of the poetry of ancient +over-use, or in other words less romantic southern shabbiness, than +in most Italian cities. At two or three points, none the less, this +sinister grace exists in perfection--just such perfection as so often +proves that what is literally hideous may be constructively delightful +and what is intrinsically tragic play on the finest chords of +appreciation. On the north side of the Arno, between Ponte Vecchio and +Ponte Santa Trinita, is a row of immemorial houses that back on the +river, in whose yellow flood they bathe their sore old feet. Anything +more battered and befouled, more cracked and disjointed, dirtier, +drearier, poorer, it would be impossible to conceive. They look as if +fifty years ago the liquid mud had risen over their chimneys and then +subsided again and left them coated for ever with its unsightly slime. +And yet forsooth, because the river is yellow, and the light is yellow, +and here and there, elsewhere, some mellow mouldering surface, some hint +of colour, some accident of atmosphere, takes up the foolish tale and +repeats the note--because, in short, it is Florence, it is Italy, and +the fond appraiser, the infatuated alien, may have had in his eyes, at +birth and afterwards, the micaceous sparkle of brown-stone fronts no +more interesting than so much sand-paper, these miserable dwellings, +instead of suggesting mental invocations to an enterprising board of +health, simply create their own standard of felicity and shamelessly +live in it. Lately, during the misty autumn nights, the moon has +shone on them faintly and refined their shabbiness away into something +ineffably strange and spectral. The turbid stream sweeps along without +a sound, and the pale tenements hang above it like a vague miasmatic +exhalation. The dimmest back-scene at the opera, when the tenor is +singing his sweetest, seems hardly to belong to a world more detached +from responsibility. + +{Illustration: ON THE ARNO, FLORENCE.} + +What it is that infuses so rich an interest into the general charm is +difficult to say in a few words; yet as we wander hither and thither in +quest of sacred canvas and immortal bronze and stone we still feel the +genius of the place hang about. Two industrious English ladies, the +Misses Horner, have lately published a couple of volumes of "Walks" by +the Arno-side, and their work is a long enumeration of great artistic +deeds. These things remain for the most part in sound preservation, and, +as the weeks go by and you spend a constant portion of your days among +them the sense of one of the happiest periods of human Taste--to put it +only at that--settles upon your spirit. It was not long; it lasted, in +its splendour, for less than a century; but it has stored away in the +palaces and churches of Florence a heritage of beauty that these three +enjoying centuries since haven't yet exhausted. This forms a clear +intellectual atmosphere into which you may turn aside from the modern +world and fill your lungs as with the breath of a forgotten creed. The +memorials of the past here address us moreover with a friendliness, win +us by we scarcely know what sociability, what equal amenity, that we +scarce find matched in other great esthetically endowed communities and +periods. Venice, with her old palaces cracking under the weight of their +treasures, is, in her influence, insupportably sad; Athens, with her +maimed marbles and dishonoured memories, transmutes the consciousness of +sensitive observers, I am told, into a chronic heartache; but in one's +impression of old Florence the abiding felicity, the sense of saving +sanity, of something sound and human, predominates, offering you a +medium still conceivable for life. The reason of this is partly, no +doubt, the "sympathetic" nature, the temperate joy, of Florentine art +in general--putting the sole Dante, greatest of literary artists, aside; +partly the tenderness of time, in its lapse, which, save in a few cases, +has been as sparing of injury as if it knew that when it should have +dimmed and corroded these charming things it would have nothing so sweet +again for its tooth to feed on. If the beautiful Ghirlandaios and Lippis +are fading, this generation will never know it. The large Fra Angelico +in the Academy is as clear and keen as if the good old monk stood +there wiping his brushes; the colours seem to _sing_, as it were, like +new-fledged birds in June. Nothing is more characteristic of early +Tuscan art than the high-reliefs of Luca della Robbia; yet there isn't +one of them that, except for the unique mixture of freshness with its +wisdom, of candour with its expertness, mightn't have been modelled +yesterday. + +But perhaps the best image of the absence of stale melancholy or wasted +splendour, of the positive presence of what I have called temperate joy, +in the Florentine impression and genius, is the bell-tower of Giotto, +which rises beside the cathedral. No beholder of it will have forgotten +how straight and slender it stands there, how strangely rich in the +common street, plated with coloured marble patterns, and yet so far from +simple or severe in design that we easily wonder how its author, the +painter of exclusively and portentously grave little pictures, should +have fashioned a building which in the way of elaborate elegance, of the +true play of taste, leaves a jealous modern criticism nothing to +miss. Nothing can be imagined at once more lightly and more pointedly +fanciful; it might have been handed over to the city, as it stands, +by some Oriental genie tired of too much detail. Yet for all that +suggestion it seems of no particular time--not grey and hoary like +a Gothic steeple, not cracked and despoiled like a Greek temple; +its marbles shining so little less freshly than when they were laid +together, and the sunset lighting up its cornice with such a friendly +radiance, that you come at last to regard it simply as the graceful, +indestructible soul of the place made visible. The Cathedral, +externally, for all its solemn hugeness, strikes the same note of +would-be reasoned elegance and cheer; it has conventional grandeur, of +course, but a grandeur so frank and ingenuous even in its _parti-pris_. +It has seen so much, and outlived so much, and served so many sad +purposes, and yet remains in aspect so full of the fine Tuscan +geniality, the feeling for life, one may almost say the feeling for +amusement, that inspired it. Its vast many-coloured marble walls become +at any rate, with this, the friendliest note of all Florence; there +is an unfailing charm in walking past them while they lift their great +acres of geometrical mosaic higher in the air than you have time or +other occasion to look. You greet them from the deep street as you greet +the side of a mountain when you move in the gorge--not twisting back +your head to keep looking at the top, but content with the minor +accidents, the nestling hollows and soft cloud-shadows, the general +protection of the valley. + +Florence is richer in pictures than we really know till we have begun to +look for them in outlying corners. Then, here and there, one comes upon +lurking values and hidden gems that it quite seems one might as a good +New Yorker quietly "bag" for the so aspiring Museum of that city without +their being missed. The Pitti Palace is of course a collection of +masterpieces; they jostle each other in their splendour, they perhaps +even, in their merciless multitude, rather fatigue our admiration. The +Uffizi is almost as fine a show, and together with that long serpentine +artery which crosses the Arno and connects them, making you ask +yourself, whichever way you take it, what goal can be grand enough to +crown such a journey, they form the great central treasure-chamber +of the town. But I have been neglecting them of late for love of the +Academy, where there are fewer copyists and tourists, above all fewer +pictorial lions, those whose roar is heard from afar and who strike +us as expecting overmuch to have it their own way in the jungle. The +pictures at the Academy are all, rather, doves--the whole impression is +less pompously tropical. Selection still leaves one too much to say, but +I noted here, on my last occasion, an enchanting Botticelli so obscurely +hung, in one of the smaller rooms, that I scarce knew whether most to +enjoy or to resent its relegation. Placed, in a mean black frame, where +you wouldn't have looked for a masterpiece, it yet gave out to a good +glass every characteristic of one. Representing as it does the walk of +Tobias with the angel, there are really parts of it that an angel might +have painted; but I doubt whether it is observed by half-a-dozen persons +a year. That was my excuse for my wanting to know, on the spot, though +doubtless all sophistically, what dishonour, could the transfer be +artfully accomplished, a strong American light and a brave gilded frame +would, comparatively speaking, do it. There and then it would, shine +with the intense authority that we claim for the fairest things--would +exhale its wondrous beauty as a sovereign example. What it comes to +is that this master is the most interesting of a great band--the only +Florentine save Leonardo and Michael in whom the impulse was original +and the invention rare. His imagination is of things strange, subtle and +complicated--things it at first strikes us that we moderns have reason +to know, and that it has taken us all the ages to learn; so that we +permit ourselves to wonder how a "primitive" could come by them. We soon +enough reflect, however, that we ourselves have come by them almost only +_through_ him, exquisite spirit that he was, and that when we enjoy, or +at least when we encounter, in our William Morrises, in our +Rossettis and Burne-Joneses, the note of the haunted or over-charged +consciousness, we are but treated, with other matters, to repeated doses +of diluted Botticelli. He practically set with his own hand almost all +the copies to almost all our so-called pre-Raphaelites, earlier and +later, near and remote. + +Let us at the same time, none the less, never fail of response to +the great Florentine geniality at large. Fra Angelico, Filippo Lippi, +Ghirlandaio, were not "subtly" imaginative, were not even riotously so; +but what other three were ever more gladly observant, more vividly and +richly true? If there should some time be a weeding out of the world's +possessions the best works of the early Florentines will certainly +be counted among the flowers. With the ripest performances of the +Venetians--by which I don't mean the over-ripe--we can but take them for +the most valuable things in the history of art. Heaven forbid we should +be narrowed down to a cruel choice; but if it came to a question of +keeping or losing between half-a-dozen Raphaels and half-a-dozen things +it would be a joy to pick out at the Academy, I fear that, for myself, +the memory of the Transfiguration, or indeed of the other Roman relics +of the painter, wouldn't save the Raphaels. And yet this was so far from +the opinion of a patient artist whom I saw the other day copying the +finest of Ghirlandaios--a beautiful Adoration of the Kings at the +Hospital of the Innocenti. Here was another sample of the buried +art-wealth of Florence. It hangs in an obscure chapel, far aloft, behind +an altar, and though now and then a stray tourist wanders in and puzzles +a while over the vaguely-glowing forms, the picture is never really +seen and enjoyed. I found an aged Frenchman of modest mien perched on a +little platform beneath it, behind a great hedge of altar-candlesticks, +with an admirable copy all completed. The difficulties of his task had +been well-nigh insuperable, and his performance seemed to me a real feat +of magic. He could scarcely move or turn, and could find room for his +canvas but by rolling it together and painting a small piece at a time, +so that he never enjoyed a view of his _ensemble_. The original is +gorgeous with colour and bewildering with decorative detail, but not +a gleam of the painter's crimson was wanting, not a curl in his gold +arabesques. It seemed to me that if I had copied a Ghirlandaio in such +conditions I would at least maintain for my own credit that he was the +first painter in the world. "Very good of its kind," said the weary old +man with a shrug of reply for my raptures; "but oh, how far short of +Raphael!" However that may be, if the reader chances to observe this +consummate copy in the so commendable Museum devoted in Paris to such +works, let him stop before it with a due reverence; it is one of the +patient things of art. Seeing it wrought there, in its dusky nook, under +such scant convenience, I found no bar in the painter's foreignness to +a thrilled sense that the old art-life of Florence isn't yet extinct. It +still at least works spells and almost miracles. + +1873. + + + + + +FLORENTINE NOTES + + +I + + +Yesterday that languid organism known as the Florentine Carnival put on +a momentary semblance of vigour, and decreed a general _corso_ through +the town. The spectacle was not brilliant, but it suggested some natural +reflections. I encountered the line of carriages in the square before +Santa Croce, of which they were making the circuit. They rolled solemnly +by, with their inmates frowning forth at each other in apparent wrath +at not finding each other more worth while. There were no masks, no +costumes, no decorations, no throwing of flowers or sweetmeats. It was +as if each carriageful had privately and not very heroically resolved +not to be at costs, and was rather discomfited at finding that it was +getting no better entertainment than it gave. The middle of the piazza +was filled with little tables, with shouting mountebanks, mostly +disguised in battered bonnets and crinolines, offering chances in +raffles for plucked fowls and kerosene lamps. I have never thought the +huge marble statue of Dante, which overlooks the scene, a work of the +last refinement; but, as it stood there on its high pedestal, chin in +hand, frowning down on all this cheap foolery, it seemed to have a great +moral intention. The carriages followed a prescribed course--through Via +Ghibellina, Via del Proconsolo, past the Badia and the Bargello, beneath +the great tessellated cliffs of the Cathedral, through Via Tornabuoni +and out into ten minutes' sunshine beside the Arno. Much of all this +is the gravest and stateliest part of Florence, a quarter of supreme +dignity, and there was an almost ludicrous incongruity in seeing +Pleasure leading her train through these dusky historic streets. It was +most uncomfortably cold, and in the absence of masks many a fair +nose was fantastically tipped with purple. But as the carriages crept +solemnly along they seemed to keep a funeral march--to follow an antique +custom, an exploded faith, to its tomb. The Carnival is dead, and these +good people who had come abroad to make merry were funeral mutes and +grave-diggers. Last winter in Rome it showed but a galvanised life, yet +compared with this humble exhibition it was operatic. At Rome indeed +it was too operatic. The knights on horseback there were a bevy of +circus-riders, and I'm sure half the mad revellers repaired every night +to the Capitol for their twelve sous a day. + +I have just been reading over the Letters of the President de Brosses. +A hundred years ago, in Venice, the Carnival lasted six months; and at +Rome for many weeks each year one was free, under cover of a mask, +to perpetrate the most fantastic follies and cultivate the most +remunerative vices. It's very well to read the President's notes, which +have indeed a singular interest; but they make us ask ourselves why we +should expect the Italians to persist in manners and practices which +we ourselves, if we had responsibilities in the matter, should find +intolerable. The Florentines at any rate spend no more money nor faith +on the carnivalesque. And yet this truth has a qualification; for +what struck me in the whole spectacle yesterday, and prompted these +observations, was not at all the more or less of costume of the +occupants of the carriages, but the obstinate survival of the +merrymaking instinct in the people at large. There could be no better +example of it than that so dim a shadow of entertainment should keep all +Florence standing and strolling, densely packed for hours, in the cold +streets. There was nothing to see that mightn't be seen on the Cascine +any fine day in the year--nothing but a name, a tradition, a pretext for +sweet staring idleness. The faculty of making much of common things +and converting small occasions into great pleasures is, to a son +of communities strenuous as ours are strenuous, the most salient +characteristic of the so-called Latin civilisations. It charms him and +vexes him, according to his mood; and for the most part it represents a +moral gulf between his own temperamental and indeed spiritual sense +of race, and that of Frenchmen and Italians, far wider than the watery +leagues that a steamer may annihilate. But I think his mood is wisest +when he accepts the "foreign" easy surrender to _all_ the senses as the +sign of an unconscious philosophy of life, instilled by the experience +of centuries--the philosophy of people who have lived long and much, +who have discovered no short cuts to happiness and no effective +circumvention of effort, and so have come to regard the average lot as a +ponderous fact that absolutely calls for a certain amount of sitting on +the lighter tray of the scales. Florence yesterday then took its holiday +in a natural, placid fashion that seemed to make its own temper an +affair quite independent of the splendour of the compensation decreed on +a higher line to the weariness of its legs. That the _corso_ was stupid +or lively was the shame or the glory of the powers "above"--the fates, +the gods, the _forestieri_, the town-councilmen, the rich or the stingy. +Common Florence, on the narrow footways, pressed against the houses, +obeyed a natural need in looking about complacently, patiently, gently, +and never pushing, nor trampling, nor swearing, nor staggering. This +liberal margin for festivals in Italy gives the masses a more than +man-of-the-world urbanity in taking their pleasure. + +Meanwhile it occurs to me that by a remote New England fireside an +unsophisticated young person of either sex is reading in an old volume +of travels or an old romantic tale some account of these anniversaries +and appointed revels as old Catholic lands offer them to view. Across +the page swims a vision of sculptured palace-fronts draped in crimson +and gold and shining in a southern sun; of a motley train of maskers +sweeping on in voluptuous confusion and pelting each other with nosegays +and love-letters. Into the quiet room, quenching the rhythm of the +Connecticut clock, floats an uproar of delighted voices, a medley of +stirring foreign sounds, an echo of far-heard music of a strangely alien +cadence. But the dusk is falling, and the unsophisticated young person +closes the book wearily and wanders to the window. The dusk is falling +on the beaten snow. Down the road is a white wooden meeting-house, +looking grey among the drifts. The young person surveys the prospect +a while, and then wanders back and stares at the fire. The Carnival of +Venice, of Florence, of Rome; colour and costume, romance and rapture! +The young person gazes in the firelight at the flickering chiaroscuro +of the future, discerns at last the glowing phantasm of opportunity, +and determines with a wild heart-beat to go and see it all--twenty years +hence! + + +II + + +A couple of days since, driving to Fiesole, we came back by the castle +of Vincigliata. The afternoon was lovely; and, though there is as yet +(February 10th) no visible revival of vegetation, the air was full of a +vague vernal perfume, and the warm colours of the hills and the yellow +western sunlight flooding the plain seemed to contain the promise of +Nature's return to grace. It's true that above the distant pale blue +gorge of Vallombrosa the mountain-line was tipped with snow; but the +liberated soul of Spring was nevertheless at large. The view from +Fiesole seems vaster and richer with each visit. The hollow in which +Florence lies, and which from below seems deep and contracted, opens +out into an immense and generous valley and leads away the eye into +a hundred gradations of distance. The place itself showed, amid its +chequered fields and gardens, with as many towers and spires as a +chess-board half cleared. The domes and towers were washed over with +a faint blue mist. The scattered columns of smoke, interfused with the +sinking sunlight, hung over them like streamers and pennons of silver +gauze; and the Arno, twisting and curling and glittering here and there, +was a serpent cross-striped with silver. + +Vincigliata is a product of the millions, the leisure and the +eccentricity, I suppose people say, of an English gentleman--Mr. Temple +Leader, whose name should be commemorated. You reach the castle from +Fiesole by a narrow road, returning toward Florence by a romantic twist +through the hills and passing nothing on its way save thin plantations +of cypress and cedar. Upward of twenty years ago, I believe, this +gentleman took a fancy to the crumbling shell of a mediaeval fortress on +a breezy hill-top overlooking the Val d' Arno and forthwith bought it +and began to "restore" it. I know nothing of what the original ruin may +have cost; but in the dusky courts and chambers of the present elaborate +structure this impassioned archaeologist must have buried a fortune. He +has, however, the compensation of feeling that he has erected a monument +which, if it is never to stand a feudal siege, may encounter at least +some critical over-hauling. It is a disinterested work of art and really +a triumph of aesthetic culture. The author has reproduced with minute +accuracy a sturdy home-fortress of the fourteenth century, and has kept +throughout such rigid terms with his model that the result is literally +uninhabitable to degenerate moderns. It is simply a massive facsimile, +an elegant museum of archaic images, mainly but most amusingly +counterfeit, perched on a spur of the Apennines. The place is most +politely shown. There is a charming cloister, painted with extremely +clever "quaint" frescoes, celebrating the deeds of the founders of the +castle--a cloister that is everything delightful a cloister should +be except truly venerable and employable. There is a beautiful castle +court, with the embattled tower climbing into the blue far above it, +and a spacious loggia with rugged medallions and mild-hued Luca della +Robbias fastened unevenly into the walls. But the apartments are the +great success, and each of them as good a "reconstruction" as a tale +of Walter Scott; or, to speak frankly, a much better one. They are all +low-beamed and vaulted, stone-paved, decorated in grave colours +and lighted, from narrow, deeply recessed windows, through small +leaden-ringed plates of opaque glass. + +The details are infinitely ingenious and elaborately grim, and the +indoor atmosphere of mediaevalism most forcibly revived. No compromising +fact of domiciliary darkness and cold is spared us, no producing +condition of mediaeval manners not glanced at. There are oaken benches +round the room, of about six inches in depth, and gaunt fauteuils of +wrought leather, illustrating the suppressed transitions which, as +George Eliot says, unite all contrasts--offering a visible link between +the modern conceptions of torture and of luxury. There are fireplaces +nowhere but in the kitchen, where a couple of sentry-boxes are inserted +on either side of the great hooded chimney-piece, into which people +might creep and take their turn at being toasted and smoked. One may +doubt whether this dearth of the hearthstone could have raged on such +a scale, but it's a happy stroke in the representation of an Italian +dwelling of any period. It shows how the graceful fiction that Italy +is all "meridional" flourished for some time before being refuted +by grumbling tourists. And yet amid this cold comfort you feel the +incongruous presence of a constant intuitive regard for beauty. The +shapely spring of the vaulted ceilings; the richly figured walls, coarse +and hard in substance as they are; the charming shapes of the great +platters and flagons in the deep recesses of the quaintly carved black +dressers; the wandering hand of ornament, as it were, playing here and +there for its own diversion in unlighted corners--such things redress, +to our fond credulity, with all sorts of grace, the balance of the +picture. + +And yet, somehow, with what dim, unillumined vision one fancies even +such inmates as those conscious of finer needs than the mere supply of +blows and beef and beer would meet passing their heavy eyes over +such slender household beguilements! These crepuscular chambers +at Vincigliata are a mystery and a challenge; they seem the mere +propounding of an answerless riddle. You long, as you wander through +them, turning up your coat-collar and wondering whether ghosts can catch +bronchitis, to answer it with some positive notion of what people so +encaged and situated "did," how they looked and talked and carried +themselves, how they took their pains and pleasures, how they counted +off the hours. Deadly ennui seems to ooze out of the stones and hang in +clouds in the brown corners. No wonder men relished a fight and panted +for a fray. "Skull-smashers" were sweet, ears ringing with pain and +ribs cracking in a tussle were soothing music, compared with the cruel +quietude of the dim-windowed castle. When they came back they could only +have slept a good deal and eased their dislocated bones on those meagre +oaken ledges. Then they woke up and turned about to the table and ate +their portion of roasted sheep. They shouted at each other across the +board and flung the wooden plates at the servingmen. They jostled and +hustled and hooted and bragged; and then, after gorging and boozing +and easing their doublets, they squared their elbows one by one on the +greasy table and buried their scarred foreheads and dreamed of a good +gallop after flying foes. And the women? They must have been strangely +simple--simpler far than any moral archraeologist can show us in a +learned restoration. Of course, their simplicity had its graces and +devices; but one thinks with a sigh that, as the poor things turned away +with patient looks from the viewless windows to the same, same looming +figures on the dusky walls, they hadn't even the consolation of knowing +that just this attitude and movement, set off by their peaked coifs, +their falling sleeves and heavily-twisted trains, would sow the seed of +yearning envy--of sorts--on the part of later generations. + +There are moods in which one feels the impulse to enter a tacit protest +against too gross an appetite for pure aesthetics in this starving and +sinning world. One turns half away, musingly, from certain beautiful +useless things. But the healthier state of mind surely is to lay no tax +on any really intelligent manifestation of the curious, and exquisite. +Intelligence hangs together essentially, all along the line; it only +needs time to make, as we say, its connections. The massive _pastiche_ +of Vincigliata has no superficial use; but, even if it were less +complete, less successful, less brilliant, I should feel a reflective +kindness for it. So disinterested and expensive a toy is its own +justification; it belongs to the heroics of dilettantism. + + +III + + +One grows to feel the collection of pictures at the Pitti Palace +splendid rather than interesting. After walking through it once or twice +you catch the key in which it is pitched--you know what you are +likely not to find on closer examination; none of the works of the +uncompromising period, nothing from the half-groping geniuses of the +early time, those whose colouring was sometimes harsh and their outlines +sometimes angular. Vague to me the principle on which the pictures +were originally gathered and of the aesthetic creed of the princes who +chiefly selected them. A princely creed I should roughly call it--the +creed of people who believed in things presenting a fine face to +society; who esteemed showy results rather than curious processes, and +would have hardly cared more to admit into their collection a work by +one of the laborious precursors of the full efflorescence than to see a +bucket and broom left standing in a state saloon. The gallery contains +in literal fact some eight or ten paintings of the early Tuscan +School--notably two admirable specimens of Filippo Lippi and one of the +frequent circular pictures of the great Botticelli--a Madonna, chilled +with tragic prescience, laying a pale cheek against that of a blighted +Infant. Such a melancholy mother as this of Botticelli would have +strangled her baby in its cradle to rescue it from the future. But of +Botticelli there is much to say. One of the Filippo Lippis is perhaps +his masterpiece--a Madonna in a small rose-garden (such a "flowery +close" as Mr. William Morris loves to haunt), leaning over an Infant who +kicks his little human heels on the grass while half-a-dozen curly-pated +angels gather about him, looking back over their shoulders with the +candour of children in _tableaux vivants_, and one of them drops an +armful of gathered roses one by one upon the baby. The delightful +earthly innocence of these winged youngsters is quite inexpressible. +Their heads are twisted about toward the spectator as if they were +playing at leap-frog and were expecting a companion to come and take +a jump. Never did "young" art, never did subjective freshness, attempt +with greater success to represent those phases. But these three fine +works are hung over the tops of doors in a dark back room--the bucket +and broom are thrust behind a curtain. It seems to me, nevertheless, +that a fine Filippo Lippi is good enough company for an Allori or a +Cigoli, and that that too deeply sentient Virgin of Botticelli might +happily balance the flower-like irresponsibility of Raphael's "Madonna +of the Chair." + +Taking the Pitti collection, however, simply for what it pretends to +be, it gives us the very flower of the sumptuous, the courtly, the +grand-ducal. It is chiefly official art, as one may say, but it presents +the fine side of the type--the brilliancy, the facility, the amplitude, +the sovereignty of good taste. I agree on the whole with a nameless +companion and with what he lately remarked about his own humour on +these matters; that, having been on his first acquaintance with +pictures nothing if not critical, and held the lesson incomplete and +the opportunity slighted if he left a gallery without a headache, he +had come, as he grew older, to regard them more as the grandest of +all pleasantries and less as the most strenuous of all lessons, and to +remind himself that, after all, it is the privilege of art to make us +friendly to the human mind and not to make us suspicious of it. We do +in fact as we grow older unstring the critical bow a little and strike +a truce with invidious comparisons. We work off the juvenile impulse +to heated partisanship and discover that one spontaneous producer isn't +different enough from another to keep the all-knowing Fates from smiling +over our loves and our aversions. We perceive a certain human solidarity +in all cultivated effort, and are conscious of a growing accommodation +of judgment--an easier disposition, the fruit of experience, to take +the joke for what it is worth as it passes. We have in short less of a +quarrel with the masters we don't delight in, and less of an impulse +to pin all our faith on those in whom, in more zealous days, we fancied +that we made our peculiar meanings. The meanings no longer seem quite so +peculiar. Since then we have arrived at a few in the depths of our own +genius that are not sensibly less striking. + +And yet it must be added that all this depends vastly on one's mood--as +a traveller's impressions do, generally, to a degree which those who +give them to the world would do well more explicitly to declare. We have +our hours of expansion and those of contraction, and yet while we follow +the traveller's trade we go about gazing and judging with unadjusted +confidence. We can't suspend judgment; we must take our notes, and the +notes are florid or crabbed, as the case may be. A short time ago I +spent a week in an ancient city on a hill-top, in the humour, for which +I was not to blame, which produces crabbed notes. I knew it at the +time, but couldn't help it. I went through all the motions of liberal +appreciation; I uncapped in all the churches and on the massive ramparts +stared all the views fairly out of countenance; but my imagination, +which I suppose at bottom had very good reasons of its own and knew +perfectly what it was about, refused to project into the dark old town +and upon the yellow hills that sympathetic glow which forms half the +substance of our genial impressions. So it is that in museums and +palaces we are alternate radicals and conservatives. On some days we ask +but to be somewhat sensibly affected; on others, Ruskin-haunted, to be +spiritually steadied. After a long absence from the Pitti Palace I went +back there the other morning and transferred myself from chair to +chair in the great golden-roofed saloons--the chairs are all gilded and +covered with faded silk--in the humour to be diverted at any price. I +needn't mention the things that diverted me; I yawn now when I think of +some of them. But an artist, for instance, to whom my kindlier judgment +has made permanent concessions is that charming Andrea del Sarto. When +I first knew him, in my cold youth, I used to say without mincing that +I didn't like him. _Cet age est sans pitie_. The fine sympathetic, +melancholy, pleasing painter! He has a dozen faults, and if you insist +pedantically on your rights the conclusive word you use about him will +be the word weak. But if you are a generous soul you will utter it +low--low as the mild grave tone of his own sought harmonies. He is +monotonous, narrow, incomplete; he has but a dozen different figures and +but two or three ways of distributing them; he seems able to utter but +half his thought, and his canvases lack apparently some final return on +the whole matter--some process which his impulse failed him before he +could bestow. And yet in spite of these limitations his genius is both +itself of the great pattern and lighted by the air of a great period. +Three gifts he had largely: an instinctive, unaffected, unerring grace; +a large and rich, and yet a sort of withdrawn and indifferent sobriety; +and best of all, as well as rarest of all, an indescribable property +of relatedness as to the moral world. Whether he was aware of the +connection or not, or in what measure, I cannot say; but he gives, so to +speak, the taste of it. Before his handsome vague-browed Madonnas; the +mild, robust young saints who kneel in his foregrounds and look round +at you with a conscious anxiety which seems to say that, though in the +picture, they are not of it, but of your own sentient life of commingled +love and weariness; the stately apostles, with comely heads and +harmonious draperies, who gaze up at the high-seated Virgin like early +astronomers at a newly seen star--there comes to you the brush of the +dark wing of an inward life. A shadow falls for the moment, and in it +you feel the chill of moral suffering. Did the Lippis suffer, father +or son? Did Raphael suffer? Did Titian? Did Rubens suffer? Perish +the thought--it wouldn't be fair to _us_ that they should have had +everything. And I note in our poor second-rate Andrea an element of +interest lacking to a number of stronger talents. + +Interspersed with him at the Pitti hang the stronger and the weaker +in splendid abundance. Raphael is there, strong in portraiture--easy, +various, bountiful genius that he was--and (strong here isn't the word, +but) happy beyond the common dream in his beautiful "Madonna of the +Chair." The general instinct of posterity seems to have been to +treat this lovely picture as a semi-sacred, an almost miraculous, +manifestation. People stand in a worshipful silence before it, as they +would before a taper-studded shrine. If we suspend in imagination on the +right of it the solid, realistic, unidealised portrait of Leo the Tenth +(which hangs in another room) and transport to the left the fresco of +the School of Athens from the Vatican, and then reflect that these were +three separate fancies of a single youthful, amiable genius we recognise +that such a producing consciousness must have been a "treat." My +companion already quoted has a phrase that he "doesn't care for +Raphael," but confesses, when pressed, that he was a most remarkable +young man. Titian has a dozen portraits of unequal interest. I never +particularly noticed till lately--it is very ill hung--that portentous +image of the Emperor Charles the Fifth. He was a burlier, more imposing +personage than his usual legend figures, and in his great puffed sleeves +and gold chains and full-skirted over-dress he seems to tell of a +tread that might sometimes have been inconveniently resonant. But the +_purpose_ to have his way and work his will is there--the great stomach +for divine right, the old monarchical temperament. The great Titian, in +portraiture, however, remains that formidable young man in black, with +the small compact head, the delicate nose and the irascible blue eye. +Who was he? What was he? "_Ritratto virile_" is all the catalogue is +able to call the picture. "Virile!" Rather! you vulgarly exclaim. You +may weave what romance you please about it, but a romance your dream +must be. Handsome, clever, defiant, passionate, dangerous, it was not +his own fault if he hadn't adventures and to spare. He was a gentleman +and a warrior, and his adventures balanced between camp and court. +I imagine him the young orphan of a noble house, about to come into +mortgaged estates. One wouldn't have cared to be his guardian, bound to +paternal admonitions once a month over his precocious transactions with +the Jews or his scandalous abduction from her convent of such and such a +noble maiden. + +The Pitti Gallery contains none of Titian's golden-toned groups; but +it boasts a lovely composition by Paul Veronese, the dealer in silver +hues--a Baptism of Christ. W---- named it to me the other day as the +picture he most enjoyed, and surely painting seems here to have proposed +to itself to discredit and annihilate--and even on the occasion of such +a subject--everything but the loveliness of life. The picture bedims and +enfeebles its neighbours. We ask ourselves whether painting as such can +go further. It is simply that here at last the art stands complete. +The early Tuscans, as well as Leonardo, as Raphael, as Michael, saw the +great spectacle that surrounded them in beautiful sharp-edged elements +and parts. The great Venetians felt its indissoluble unity and +recognised that form and colour and earth and air were equal members +of every possible subject; and beneath their magical touch the hard +outlines melted together and the blank intervals bloomed with meaning. +In this beautiful Paul Veronese of the Pitti everything is part of +the charm--the atmosphere as well as the figures, the look of radiant +morning in the white-streaked sky as well as the living human limbs, the +cloth of Venetian purple about the loins of the Christ as well as the +noble humility of his attitude. The relation to Nature of the other +Italian schools differs from that of the Venetian as courtship--even +ardent courtship--differs from marriage. + + +IV + + +I went the other day to the secularised Convent of San Marco, paid my +franc at the profane little wicket which creaks away at the door--no +less than six custodians, apparently, are needed to turn it, as if it +may have a recusant conscience--passed along the bright, still cloister +and paid my respects to Fra Angelico's Crucifixion, in that dusky +chamber in the basement. I looked long; one can hardly do otherwise. The +fresco deals with the pathetic on the grand scale, and after taking +in its beauty you feel as little at liberty to go away abruptly as +you would to leave church during the sermon. You may be as little of +a formal Christian as Fra Angelico was much of one; you yet feel +admonished by spiritual decency to let so yearning a view of the +Christian story work its utmost will on you. The three crosses rise high +against a strange completely crimson sky, which deepens mysteriously +the tragic expression of the scene, though I remain perforce vague as to +whether this lurid background be a fine intended piece of symbolism or +an effective accident of time. In the first case the extravagance quite +triumphs. Between the crosses, under no great rigour of composition, +are scattered the most exemplary saints--kneeling, praying, weeping, +pitying, worshipping. The swoon of the Madonna is depicted at the left, +and this gives the holy presences, in respect to the case, the strangest +historical or actual air. Everything is so real that you feel a vague +impatience and almost ask yourself how it was that amid the army of his +consecrated servants our Lord was permitted to suffer. On reflection you +see that the painter's design, so far as coherent, has been simply to +offer an immense representation of Pity, and all with such concentrated +truth that his colours here seem dissolved in tears that drop and drop, +however softly, through all time. Of this single yearning consciousness +the figures are admirably expressive. No later painter learned to render +with deeper force than Fra Angelico the one state of the spirit he could +conceive--a passionate pious tenderness. Immured in his quiet convent, +he apparently never received an intelligible impression of evil; and his +conception of human life was a perpetual sense of sacredly loving +and being loved. But how, immured in his quiet convent, away from the +streets and the studios, did he become that genuine, finished, perfectly +professional painter? No one is less of a mere mawkish amateur. His +range was broad, from this really heroic fresco to the little trumpeting +seraphs, in their opaline robes, enamelled, as it were, on the gold +margins of his pictures. + +I sat out the sermon and departed, I hope, with the gentle preacher's +blessing. I went into the smaller refectory, near by, to refresh my +memory of the beautiful Last Supper of Domenico Ghirlandaio. It would be +putting things coarsely to say that I adjourned thus from a sernlon to +a comedy, though Ghirlandaio's theme, as contrasted with the blessed +Angelico's, was the dramatic spectacular side of human life. How keenly +he observed it and how richly he rendered it, the world about him of +colour and costume, of handsome heads and pictorial groupings! In his +admirable school there is no painter one enjoys--_pace_ Ruskin--more +sociably and irresponsibly. Lippo Lippi is simpler, quainter, +more frankly expressive; but we retain before him a remnant of the +sympathetic discomfort provoked by the masters whose conceptions were +still a trifle too large for their means. The pictorial vision in their +minds seems to stretch and strain their undeveloped skill almost to a +sense of pain. In Ghirlandaio the skill and the imagination are equal, +and he gives us a delightful impression of enjoying his own resources. +Of all the painters of his time he affects us least as positively not +of ours. He enjoyed a crimson mantle spreading and tumbling in curious +folds and embroidered with needlework of gold, just as he enjoyed a +handsome well-rounded head, with vigorous dusky locks, profiled in +courteous adoration. He enjoyed in short the various reality of things, +and had the good fortune to live in an age when reality flowered into a +thousand amusing graces--to speak only of those. He was not especially +addicted to giving spiritual hints; and yet how hard and meagre they +seem, the professed and finished realists of our own day, with the +spiritual _bonhomie_ or candour that makes half Ghirlandaio's richness +left out! The Last Supper at San Marco is an excellent example of the +natural reverence of an artist of that time with whom reverence was +not, as one may say, a specialty. The main idea with him has been the +variety, the material bravery and positively social charm of the +scene, which finds expression, with irrepressible generosity, in the +accessories of the background. Instinctively he imagines an opulent +garden--imagines it with a good faith which quite tides him over the +reflection that Christ and his disciples were poor men and unused to sit +at meat in palaces. Great full-fruited orange-trees peep over the wall +before which the table is spread, strange birds fly through the air, +while a peacock perches on the edge of the partition and looks down +on the sacred repast. It is striking that, without any at all intense +religious purpose, the figures, in their varied naturalness, have a +dignity and sweetness of attitude that admits of numberless reverential +constructions. I should call all this the happy tact of a robust faith. + +On the staircase leading up to the little painted cells of the Beato +Angelico, however, I suddenly faltered and paused. Somehow I had grown +averse to the intenser zeal of the Monk of Fiesole. I wanted no more of +him that day. I wanted no more macerated friars and spear-gashed sides. +Ghirlandaio's elegant way of telling his story had put me in the humour +for something more largely intelligent, more profanely pleasing. +I departed, walked across the square, and found it in the Academy, +standing in a particular spot and looking up at a particular high-hung +picture. It is difficult to speak adequately, perhaps even intelligibly, +of Sandro Botticelli. An accomplished critic--Mr. Pater, in his _Studies +on the History of the Renaissance_--has lately paid him the tribute +of an exquisite, a supreme, curiosity. He was rarity and distinction +incarnate, and of all the multitudinous masters of his group +incomparably the most interesting, the one who detains and perplexes +and fascinates us most. Exquisitely fine his imagination--infinitely +audacious and adventurous his fancy. Alone among the painters of his +time he strikes us as having invention. The glow and thrill of expanding +observation--this was the feeling that sent his comrades to their +easels; but Botticelli's moved him to reactions and emotions of which +they knew nothing, caused his faculty to sport and wander and explore +on its own account. These impulses have fruits often so ingenious and so +lovely that it would be easy to talk nonsense about them. I hope it is +not nonsense, however, to say that the picture to which I just alluded +(the "Coronation of the Virgin," with a group of life-sized saints +below and a garland of miniature angels above) is one of the supremely +beautiful productions of the human mind. It is hung so high that +you need a good glass to see it; to say nothing of the unprecedented +delicacy of the work. The lower half is of moderate interest; but the +dance of hand-clasped angels round the heavenly couple above has a +beauty newly exhaled from the deepest sources of inspiration. Their +perfect little hands are locked with ineffable elegance; their blowing +robes are tossed into folds of which each line is a study; their +charming feet have the relief of the most delicate sculpture. But, as +I have already noted, of Botticelli there is much, too much to +say--besides which Mr. Pater has said all. Only add thus to his +inimitable grace of design that the exquisite pictorial force driving +him goes a-Maying not on wanton errands of its own, but on those of some +mystic superstition which trembles for ever in his heart. + +{Illustration: THE GREAT EAVES, FLORENCE} + + +V + + +The more I look at the old Florentine domestic architecture the more I +like it--that of the great examples at least; and if I ever am able to +build myself a lordly pleasure-house I don't see how in conscience I can +build it different from these. They are sombre and frowning, and look +a trifle more as if they were meant to keep people out than to let +them in; but what equally "important" type--if there be an equally +important--is more expressive of domiciliary dignity and security and +yet attests them with a finer aeesthetic economy? They are impressively +"handsome," and yet contrive to be so by the simplest means. I don't say +at the smallest pecuniary cost--that's another matter. There is money +buried in the thick walls and diffused through the echoing excess of +space. The merchant nobles of the fifteenth century had deep and full +pockets, I suppose, though the present bearers of their names are glad +to let out their palaces in suites of apartments which are occupied by +the commercial aristocracy of another republic. One is told of fine old +mouldering chambers of which possession is to be enjoyed for a sum not +worth mentioning. I am afraid that behind these so gravely harmonious +fronts there is a good deal of dusky discomfort, and I speak now simply +of the large serious faces themselves as you can see them from the +street; see them ranged cheek to cheek, in the grey historic light of +Via dei Bardi, Via Maggio, Via degli Albizzi. The force of character, +the familiar severity and majesty, depend on a few simple features: on +the great iron-caged windows of the rough-hewn basement; on the noble +stretch of space between the summit of one high, round-topped window +and the bottom of that above; on the high-hung sculptured shield at the +angle of the house; on the flat far-projecting roof; and, finally, on +the magnificent tallness of the whole building, which so dwarfs our +modern attempts at size. The finest of these Florentine palaces are, I +imagine, the tallest habitations in Europe that are frankly and +amply habitations--not mere shafts for machinery of the American +grain-elevator pattern. Some of the creations of M. Haussmann in Paris +may climb very nearly as high; but there is all the difference in the +world between the impressiveness of a building which takes breath, as +it were, some six or seven times, from storey to storey, and of one that +erects itself to an equal height in three long-drawn pulsations. When +a house is ten windows wide and the drawing-room floor is as high as a +chapel it can afford but three floors. The spaciousness of some of those +ancient drawing-rooms is that of a Russian steppe. The "family circle," +gathered anywhere within speaking distance, must resemble a group of +pilgrims encamped in the desert on a little oasis of carpet. Madame +Gryzanowska, living at the top of a house in that dusky, tortuous old +Borgo Pinti, initiated me the other evening most good-naturedly, lamp in +hand, into the far-spreading mysteries of her apartment. Such quarters +seem a translation into space of the old-fashioned idea of leisure. +Leisure and "room" have been passing out of our manners together, but +here and there, being of stouter structure, the latter lingers and +survives. + +Here and there, indeed, in this blessed Italy, reluctantly modern in +spite alike of boasts and lamentations, it seems to have been preserved +for curiosity's and fancy's sake, with a vague, sweet odour of the +embalmer's spices about it. I went the other morning to the Corsini +Palace. The proprietors obviously are great people. One of the ornaments +of Rome is their great white-faced palace in the dark Trastevere and +its voluminous gallery, none the less delectable for the poorness of +the pictures. Here they have a palace on the Arno, with another large, +handsome, respectable and mainly uninteresting collection. It contains +indeed three or four fine examples of early Florentines. It was not +especially for the pictures that I went, however; and certainly not for +the pictures that I stayed. I was under the same spell as the inveterate +companion with whom I walked the other day through the beautiful private +apartments of the Pitti Palace and who said: "I suppose I care for +nature, and I know there have been times when I have thought it the +greatest pleasure in life to lie under a tree and gaze away at blue +hills. But just now I had rather lie on that faded sea-green satin sofa +and gaze down through the open door at that retreating vista of gilded, +deserted, haunted chambers. In other words I prefer a good 'interior' +to a good landscape. The impression has a greater intensity--the thing +itself a more complex animation. I like fine old rooms that have been +occupied in a fine old way. I like the musty upholstery, the antiquated +knick-knacks, the view out of the tall deep-embrasured windows at garden +cypresses rocking against a grey sky. If you don't know why, I'm afraid +I can't tell you." It seemed to me at the Palazzo Corsini that I did +know why. In places that have been lived in so long and so much and in +such a fine old way, as my friend said--that is under social conditions +so multifold and to a comparatively starved and democratic sense so +curious--the past seems to have left a sensible deposit, an aroma, an +atmosphere. This ghostly presence tells you no secrets, but it prompts +you to try and guess a few. What has been done and said here through so +many years, what has been ventured or suffered, what has been dreamed or +despaired of? Guess the riddle if you can, or if you think it worth +your ingenuity. The rooms at Palazzo Corsini suggest indeed, and seem +to recall, but a monotony of peace and plenty. One of them imaged such +a noble perfection of a home-scene that I dawdled there until the old +custodian came shuffling back to see whether possibly I was trying +to conceal a Caravaggio about my person: a great crimson-draped +drawing-room of the amplest and yet most charming proportions; walls +hung with large dark pictures, a great concave ceiling frescoed and +moulded with dusky richness, and half-a-dozen south windows looking out +on the Arno, whose swift yellow tide sends up the light in a cheerful +flicker. I fear that in my appreciation of the particular effect so +achieved I uttered a monstrous folly--some momentary willingness to be +maimed or crippled all my days if I might pass them in such a place. In +fact half the pleasure of inhabiting this spacious saloon would be that +of using one's legs, of strolling up and down past the windows, one by +one, and making desultory journeys from station to station and corner +to corner. Near by is a colossal ball-room, domed and pilastered like +a Renaissance cathedral, and super-abundantly decorated with marble +effigies, all yellow and grey with the years. + + +VI + + +In the Carthusian Monastery outside the Roman Gate, mutilated and +profaned though it is, one may still snuff up a strong if stale +redolence of old Catholicism and old Italy. The road to it is ugly, +being encumbered with vulgar waggons and fringed with tenements +suggestive of an Irish-American suburb. Your interest begins as you +come in sight of the convent perched on its little mountain and lifting +against the sky, around the bell-tower of its gorgeous chapel, a coronet +of clustered cells. You make your way into the lower gate, through a +clamouring press of deformed beggars who thrust at you their stumps +of limbs, and you climb the steep hillside through a shabby plantation +which it is proper to fancy was better tended in the monkish time. The +monks are not totally abolished, the government having the grace to +await the natural extinction of the half-dozen old brothers who remain, +and who shuffle doggedly about the cloisters, looking, with their white +robes and their pale blank old faces, quite anticipatory ghosts of their +future selves. A prosaic, profane old man in a coat and trousers serves +you, however, as custodian. The melancholy friars have not even the +privilege of doing you the honours of their dishonour. One must imagine +the pathetic effect of their former silent pointings to this and that +conventual treasure under stress of the feeling that such pointings were +narrowly numbered. The convent is vast and irregular--it bristles with +those picture-making arts and accidents which one notes as one lingers +and passes, but which in Italy the overburdened memory learns to resolve +into broadly general images. I rather deplore its position at the gates +of a bustling city--it ought rather to be lodged in some lonely fold of +the Apennines. And yet to look out from the shady porch of one of the +quiet cells upon the teeming vale of the Arno and the clustered towers +of Florence must have deepened the sense of monastic quietude. + +The chapel, or rather the church, which is of great proportions and +designed by Andrea Orcagna, the primitive painter, refines upon the +consecrated type or even quite glorifies it. The massive cincture +of black sculptured stalls, the dusky Gothic roof, the high-hung, +deep-toned pictures and the superb pavement of verd-antique and dark red +marble, polished into glassy lights, must throw the white-robed figures +of the gathered friars into the highest romantic relief. All this luxury +of worship has nowhere such value as in the chapels of monasteries, +where we find it contrasted with the otherwise so ascetic economy of the +worshippers. The paintings and gildings of their church, the gem-bright +marbles and fantastic carvings, are really but the monastic tribute to +sensuous delight--an imperious need for which the fond imagination of +Rome has officiously opened the door. One smiles when one thinks how +largely a fine starved sense for the forbidden things of earth, if it +makes the most of its opportunities, may gratify this need under +cover of devotion. Nothing is too base, too hard, too sordid for real +humility, but nothing too elegant, too amiable, too caressing, caressed, +caressable, for the exaltation of faith. The meaner the convent cell the +richer the convent chapel. Out of poverty and solitude, inanition and +cold, your honest friar may rise at his will into a Mahomet's Paradise +of luxurious analogies. + +There are further various dusky subterranean oratories where a number +of bad pictures contend faintly with the friendly gloom. Two or three of +these funereal vaults, however, deserve mention. In one of them, side +by side, sculptured by Donatello in low relief, lie the white marble +effigies of the three members of the Accaiuoli family who founded the +convent in the thirteenth century. In another, on his back, on the +pavement, rests a grim old bishop of the same stout race by the same +honest craftsman. Terribly grim he is, and scowling as if in his stony +sleep he still dreamed of his hates and his hard ambitions. Last and +best, in another low chapel, with the trodden pavement for its bed, +shines dimly a grand image of a later bishop--Leonardo Buonafede, who, +dying in 1545, owes his monument to Francesco di San Gallo. I have seen +little from this artist's hand, but it was clearly of the cunningest. +His model here was a very sturdy old prelate, though I should say a very +genial old man. The sculptor has respected his monumental ugliness, +but has suffused it with a singular homely charm--a look of confessed +physical comfort in the privilege of paradise. All these figures have +an inimitable reality, and their lifelike marble seems such an +incorruptible incarnation of the genius of the place that you begin to +think of it as even more reckless than cruel on the part of the present +public powers to have begun to pull the establishment down, morally +speaking, about their ears. They are lying quiet yet a while; but when +the last old friar dies and the convent formally lapses, won't they rise +on their stiff old legs and hobble out to the gates and thunder forth +anathemas before which even a future and more enterprising regime may be +disposed to pause? + +Out of the great central cloister open the snug little detached +dwellings of the absent fathers. When I said just now that the Certosa +in Val d'Ema gives you a glimpse of old Italy I was thinking of this +great pillared quadrangle, lying half in sun and half in shade, of its +tangled garden-growth in the centre, surrounding the ancient customary +well, and of the intense blue sky bending above it, to say nothing of +the indispensable old white-robed monk who pokes about among the lettuce +and parsley. We have seen such places before; we have visited them in +that divinatory glance which strays away into space for a moment over +the top of a suggestive book. I don't quite know whether it's more or +less as one's fancy would have it that the monkish cells are no cells +at all, but very tidy little _appartements complets_, consisting of a +couple of chambers, a sitting-room and a spacious loggia, projecting out +into space from the cliff-like wall of the monastery and sweeping from +pole to pole the loveliest view in the world. It's poor work, however, +taking notes on views, and I will let this one pass. The little chambers +are terribly cold and musty now. Their odour and atmosphere are such +as one used, as a child, to imagine those of the school-room during +Saturday and Sunday. + + +VII + + +In the Roman streets, wherever you turn, the facade of a church in more +or less degenerate flamboyance is the principal feature of the scene; +and if, in the absence of purer motives, you are weary of aesthetic +trudging over the corrugated surface of the Seven Hills, a system of +pavement in which small cobble-stones anomalously endowed with angles +and edges are alone employed, you may turn aside at your pleasure and +take a reviving sniff at the pungency of incense. In Florence, one soon +observes, the churches are relatively few and the dusky house-fronts +more rarely interrupted by specimens of that extraordinary architecture +which in Rome passes for sacred. In Florence, in other words, +ecclesiasticism is less cheap a commodity and not dispensed in the same +abundance at the street-corners. Heaven forbid, at the same time, that +I should undervalue the Roman churches, which are for the most +part treasure-houses of history, of curiosity, of promiscuous and +associational interest. It is a fact, nevertheless, that, after St. +Peter's, I know but one really beautiful church by the Tiber, the +enchanting basilica of St. Mary Major. Many have structural character, +some a great _allure_, but as a rule they all lack the dignity of +the best of the Florentine temples. Here, the list being immeasurably +shorter and the seed less scattered, the principal churches are all +beautiful. And yet I went into the Annunziata the other day and sat +there for half-an-hour because, forsooth, the gildings and the marbles +and the frescoed dome and the great rococo shrine near the door, with +its little black jewelled fetish, reminded me so poignantly of Rome. +Such is the city properly styled eternal--since it is eternal, at least, +as regards the consciousness of the individual. One loves it in its +sophistications--though for that matter isn't it all rich and precious +sophistication?--better than other places in their purity. + +Coming out of the Annunziata you look past the bronze statue of the +Grand Duke Ferdinand I (whom Mr. Browning's heroine used to watch +for--in the poem of "The Statue and the Bust"--from the red palace near +by), and down a street vista of enchanting picturesqueness. The street +is narrow and dusky and filled with misty shadows, and at its opposite +end rises the vast bright-coloured side of the Cathedral. It stands up +in very much the same mountainous fashion as the far-shining mass of the +bigger prodigy at Milan, of which your first glimpse as you leave your +hotel is generally through another such dark avenue; only that, if we +talk of mountains, the white walls of Milan must be likened to snow and +ice from their base, while those of the Duomo of Florence may be the +image of some mighty hillside enamelled with blooming flowers. The big +bleak interior here has a naked majesty which, though it may fail of +its effect at first, becomes after a while extraordinarily touching. +Originally disconcerting, it soon inspired me with a passion. +Externally, at any rate, it is one of the loveliest works of man's +hands, and an overwhelming proof into the bargain that when elegance +belittles grandeur you have simply had a bungling artist. + +Santa Croce within not only triumphs here, but would triumph anywhere. +"A trifle naked if you like," said my irrepressible companion, "but +that's what I call architecture, just as I don't call bronze or marble +clothes (save under urgent stress of portraiture) statuary." And indeed +we are far enough away from the clustering odds and ends borrowed from +every art and every province without which the ritually builded thing +doesn't trust its spell to work in Rome. The vastness, the lightness, +the open spring of the arches at Santa Croce, the beautiful shape of the +high and narrow choir, the impression made as of mass without weight and +the gravity yet reigning without gloom--these are my frequent delight, +and the interest grows with acquaintance. The place is the great +Florentine Valhalla, the final home or memorial harbour of the native +illustrious dead, but that consideration of it would take me far. It +must be confessed moreover that, between his coarsely-imagined statue +out in front and his horrible monument in one of the aisles, the author +of _The Divine Comedy_, for instance, is just hereabouts rather an +extravagant figure. "Ungrateful Florence," declaims Byron. Ungrateful +indeed--would she were more so! the susceptible spirit of the great +exile may be still aware enough to exclaim; in common, that is, with +most of the other immortals sacrificed on so very large a scale to +current Florentine "plastic" facility. In explanation of which remark, +however, I must confine myself to noting that, as almost all the old +monuments at Santa Croce are small, comparatively small, and interesting +and exquisite, so the modern, well nigh without exception, are +disproportionately vast and pompous, or in other words distressingly +vague and vain. The aptitude of hand, the compositional assurance, with +which such things are nevertheless turned out, constitutes an anomaly +replete with suggestion for an observer of the present state of the arts +on the soil and in the air that once befriended them, taking them all +together, as even the soil and the air of Greece scarce availed to do. +But on this head, I repeat, there would be too much to say; and I find +myself checked by the same warning at the threshold of the church in +Florence really interesting beyond Santa Croce, beyond all others. Such, +of course, easily, is Santa Maria Novella, where the chapels are lined +and plated with wonderful figured and peopled fresco-work even as most +of those in Rome with precious inanimate substances. These overscored +retreats of devotion, as dusky, some of them, as eremitic caves swarming +with importunate visions, have kept me divided all winter between the +love of Ghirlandaio and the fear of those seeds of catarrh to which +their mortal chill seems propitious till far on into the spring. So +I pause here just on the praise of that delightful painter--as to +the spirit of whose work the reflections I have already made are but +confirmed by these examples. In the choir at Santa Maria Novella, where +the incense swings and the great chants resound, between the gorgeous +coloured window and the florid grand altar, he still "goes in," with +all his might, for the wicked, the amusing world, the world of faces and +forms and characters, of every sort of curious human and rare material +thing. + +{Illustration: BOBOLI GARDEN, FLORENCE.} + + +VIII + + +I had always felt the Boboli Gardens charming enough for me to "haunt" +them; and yet such is the interest of Florence in every quarter that it +took another _corso_ of the same cheap pattern as the last to cause me +yesterday to flee the crowded streets, passing under that archway of the +Pitti Palace which might almost be the gate of an Etruscan city, so that +I might spend the afternoon among the mouldy statues that compose with +their screens of cypress, looking down at our clustered towers and our +background of pale blue hills vaguely freckled with white villas. These +pleasure-grounds of the austere Pitti pile, with its inconsequent charm +of being so rough-hewn and yet somehow so elegantly balanced, plead with +a voice all their own the general cause of the ample enclosed, planted, +cultivated private preserve--preserve of tranquillity and beauty and +immunity--in the heart of a city; a cause, I allow, for that matter, +easy to plead anywhere, once the pretext is found, the large, quiet, +distributed town-garden, with the vague hum of big grudging boundaries +all about it, but with everything worse excluded, being of course the +most insolently-pleasant thing in the world. In addition to which, when +the garden is in the Italian manner, with flowers rather remarkably +omitted, as too flimsy and easy and cheap, and without lawns that +are too smart, paths that are too often swept and shrubs that are too +closely trimmed, though with a fanciful formalism giving style to its +shabbiness, and here and there a dusky ilex-walk, and here and there a +dried-up fountain, and everywhere a piece of mildewed sculpture staring +at you from a green alcove, and just in the right place, above all, a +grassy amphitheatre curtained behind with black cypresses and sloping +downward in mossy marble steps--when, I say, the place possesses these +attractions, and you lounge there of a soft Sunday afternoon, the racier +spectacle of the streets having made your fellow-loungers few and left +you to the deep stillness and the shady vistas that lead you wonder +where, left you to the insidious irresistible mixture of nature and art, +nothing too much of either, only a supreme happy resultant, a divine +_tertium quid_: under these conditions, it need scarce be said the +revelation invoked descends upon you. + +The Boboli Gardens are not large--you wonder how compact little Florence +finds room for them within her walls. But they are scattered, to their +extreme, their all-romantic advantage and felicity, over a group +of steep undulations between the rugged and terraced palace and a +still-surviving stretch of city wall, where the unevenness of the ground +much adds to their apparent size. You may cultivate in them the fancy of +their solemn and haunted character, of something faint and dim and even, +if you like, tragic, in their prescribed, their functional smile; as if +they borrowed from the huge monument that overhangs them certain of its +ponderous memories and regrets. This course is open to you, I mention, +but it isn't enjoined, and will doubtless indeed not come up for you +at all if it isn't your habit, cherished beyond any other, to spin your +impressions to the last tenuity of fineness. Now that I bethink myself I +must always have happened to wander here on grey and melancholy days. It +remains none the less true that the place contains, thank goodness--or +at least thank the grave, the infinitely-distinguished traditional +_taste_ of Florence--no cheerful, trivial object, neither parterres, nor +pagodas, nor peacocks, nor swans. They have their famous amphitheatre +already referred to, with its degrees or stone benches of a thoroughly +aged and mottled complexion and its circular wall of evergreens behind, +in which small cracked images and vases, things that, according to +association, and with the law of the same quite indefinable, may make as +much on one occasion for exquisite dignity as they may make on another +for (to express it kindly) nothing at all. Something was once done in +this charmed and forsaken circle--done or meant to be done; what was it, +dumb statues, who saw it with your blank eyes? Opposite stands the +huge flat-roofed palace, putting forward two great rectangular arms and +looking, with its closed windows and its foundations of almost unreduced +rock, like some ghost of a sample of a ruder Babylon. In the wide +court-like space between the wings is a fine old white marble fountain +that never plays. Its dusty idleness completes the general air of +abandonment. Chancing on such a cluster of objects in Italy--glancing at +them in a certain light and a certain mood--I get (perhaps on too easy +terms, you may think) a sense of _history_ that takes away my breath. +Generations of Medici have stood at these closed windows, embroidered +and brocaded according to their period, and held _fetes champetres_ and +floral games on the greensward, beneath the mouldering hemicycle. And +the Medici were great people! But what remains of it all now is a mere +tone in the air, a faint sigh in the breeze, a vague expression in +things, a passive--or call it rather, perhaps, to be fair, a shyly, +pathetically responsive--accessibility to the yearning guess. Call +it much or call it little, the ineffaceability of this deep stain +of experience, it is the interest of old places and the bribe to the +brooding analyst. Time has devoured the doers and their doings, but +there still hangs about some effect of their passage. We can "layout" +parks on virgin soil, and cause them to bristle with the most expensive +importations, but we unfortunately can't scatter abroad again this seed +of the eventual human soul of a place--that comes but in its time and +takes too long to grow. There is nothing like it when it _has_ come. + + + + + +TUSCAN CITIES + + +The cities I refer to are Leghorn, Pisa, Lucca and Pistoia, among which +I have been spending the last few days. The most striking fact as to +Leghorn, it must be conceded at the outset, is that, being in Tuscany, +it should be so scantily Tuscan. The traveller curious in local colour +must content himself with the deep blue expanse of the Mediterranean. +The streets, away from the docks, are modern, genteel and rectangular; +Liverpool might acknowledge them if it weren't for their clean-coloured, +sun-bleached stucco. They are the offspring of the new industry which is +death to the old idleness. Of interesting architecture, fruit of the +old idleness or at least of the old leisure, Leghorn is singularly +destitute. It has neither a church worth one's attention, nor a +municipal palace, nor a museum, and it may claim the distinction, unique +in Italy, of being the city of no pictures. In a shabby corner near +the docks stands a statue of one of the elder Grand Dukes of Tuscany, +appealing to posterity on grounds now vague--chiefly that of having +placed certain Moors under tribute. Four colossal negroes, in very bad +bronze, are chained to the base of the monument, which forms with their +assistance a sufficiently fantastic group; but to patronise the arts is +not the line of the Livornese, and for want of the slender annuity +which would keep its precinct sacred this curious memorial is buried +in dockyard rubbish. I must add that on the other hand there is a very +well-conditioned and, in attitude and gesture, extremely natural and +familiar statue of Cavour in one of the city squares, and in another a +couple of effigies of recent Grand Dukes, represented, that is dressed, +or rather undressed, in the character of heroes of Plutarch. Leghorn +is a city of magnificent spaces, and it was so long a journey from the +sidewalk to the pedestal of these images that I never took the time +to go and read the inscriptions. And in truth, vaguely, I bore the +originals a grudge, and wished to know as little about them as possible; +for it seemed to me that as _patres patrae_, in their degree, they might +have decreed that the great blank, ochre-faced piazza should be a trifle +less ugly. There is a distinct amenity, however, in any experience of +Italy almost anywhere, and I shall probably in the future not be above +sparing a light regret to several of the hours of which the one I speak +of was composed. I shall remember a large cool bourgeois villa in the +garden of a noiseless suburb--a middle-aged Villa Franco (I owe it as a +genial pleasant _pension_ the tribute of recognition), roomy and stony, +as an Italian villa should be. I shall remember that, as I sat in the +garden, and, looking up from my book, saw through a gap in the shrubbery +the red house-tiles against the deep blue sky and the grey underside of +the ilex-leaves turned up by the Mediterranean breeze, it was all still +quite Tuscany, if Tuscany in the minor key. + +If you should naturally desire, in such conditions, a higher intensity, +you have but to proceed, by a very short journey, to Pisa--where, for +that matter, you will seem to yourself to have hung about a good deal +already, and from an early age. Few of us can have had a childhood +so unblessed by contact with the arts as that one of its occasional +diversions shan't have been a puzzled scrutiny of some alabaster model +of the Leaning Tower under a glass cover in a back-parlour. Pisa and its +monuments have, in other words, been industriously vulgarised, but it +is astonishing how well they have survived the process. The charm of the +place is in fact of a high order and but partially foreshadowed by the +famous crookedness of its campanile. I felt it irresistibly and yet +almost inexpressibly the other afternoon, as I made my way to the +classic corner of the city through the warm drowsy air which nervous +people come to inhale as a sedative. I was with an invalid companion who +had had no sleep to speak of for a fortnight. "Ah! stop the carriage," +she sighed, or yawned, as I could feel, deliciously, "in the shadow of +this old slumbering palazzo, and let me sit here and close my eyes, and +taste for an hour of oblivion." Once strolling over the grass, however, +out of which the quartette of marble monuments rises, we awaked +responsively enough to the present hour. Most people remember the happy +remark of tasteful, old-fashioned Forsyth (who touched a hundred other +points in his "Italy" scarce less happily) as to the fact that the +four famous objects are "fortunate alike in their society and their +solitude." It must be admitted that they are more fortunate in their +society than we felt ourselves to be in ours; for the scene presented +the animated appearance for which, on any fine spring day, all the +choicest haunts of ancient quietude in Italy are becoming yearly more +remarkable. There were clamorous beggars at all the sculptured portals, +and bait for beggars, in abundance, trailing in and out of them under +convoy of loquacious ciceroni. I forget just how I apportioned the +responsibility, of intrusion, for it was not long before fellow-tourists +and fellow-countrymen became a vague, deadened, muffled presence, that +of the dentist's last words when he is giving you ether. They suffered +mystic disintegration in the dense, bright, tranquil air, so charged +with its own messages. The Cathedral and its companions are fortunate +indeed in everything--fortunate in the spacious angle of the grey old +city-wall which folds about them in their sculptured elegance like a +strong protecting arm; fortunate in the broad greensward which stretches +from the marble base of Cathedral and cemetery to the rugged foot of the +rampart; fortunate in the little vagabonds who dot the grass, plucking +daisies and exchanging Italian cries; fortunate in the pale-gold tone to +which time and the soft sea-damp have mellowed and darkened their marble +plates; fortunate, above all, in an indescribable grace of grouping, +half hazard, half design, which insures them, in one's memory of things +admired, very much the same isolated corner that they occupy in the +charming city. + +Of the smaller cathedrals of Italy I know none I prefer to that of Pisa; +none that, on a moderate scale, produces more the impression of a great +church. It has without so modest a measurability, represents so clean +and compact a mass, that you are startled when you cross the threshold +at the apparent space it encloses. An architect of genius, for all that +he works with colossal blocks and cumbrous pillars, is certainly the +most cunning of conjurors. The front of the Duomo is a small pyramidal +screen, covered with delicate carvings and chasings, distributed over +a series of short columns upholding narrow arches. It might be a +sought imitation of goldsmith's work in stone, and the area covered is +apparently so small that extreme fineness has been prescribed. How it is +therefore that on the inner side of this facade the wall should appear +to rise to a splendid height and to support one end of a ceiling as +remote in its gilded grandeur, one could almost fancy, as that of St. +Peter's; how it is that the nave should stretch away in such solemn +vastness, the shallow transepts emphasise the grand impression and the +apse of the choir hollow itself out like a dusky cavern fretted +with golden stalactites, is all matter for exposition by a keener +architectural analyst than I. To sit somewhere against a pillar where +the vista is large and the incidents cluster richly, and vaguely revolve +these mysteries without answering them, is the best of one's usual +enjoyment of a great church. It takes no deep sounding to conclude +indeed that a gigantic Byzantine Christ in mosaic, on the concave roof +of the choir, contributes largely to the particular impression here as +of very old and choice and original and individual things. It has even +more of stiff solemnity than is common to works of its school, and +prompts to more wonder than ever on the nature of the human mind at a +time when such unlovely shapes could satisfy its conception of holiness. +Truly pathetic is the fate of these huge mosaic idols, thanks to the +change that has overtaken our manner of acceptance of them. Strong the +contrast between the original sublimity of their pretensions and the way +in which they flatter that free sense of the grotesque which the modern +imagination has smuggled even into the appreciation of religious forms. +They were meant to yield scarcely to the Deity itself in grandeur, but +the only part they play now is to stare helplessly at our critical, our +aesthetic patronage of them. The spiritual refinement marking the hither +end of a progress had n't, however, to wait for us to signalise it; it +found expression three centuries ago in the beautiful specimen of the +painter Sodoma on the wall of the choir. This latter, a small Sacrifice +of Isaac, is one of the best examples of its exquisite author, and +perhaps, as chance has it, the most perfect opposition that could +be found in the way of the range of taste to the effect of the great +mosaic. There are many painters more powerful than Sodoma--painters who, +like the author of the mosaic, attempted and compassed grandeur; but +none has a more persuasive grace, none more than he was to sift and +chasten a conception till it should affect one with the sweetness of a +perfectly distilled perfume. + +Of the patient successive efforts of painting to arrive at the supreme +refinement of such a work as the Sodoma the Campo Santo hard by offers a +most interesting memorial. It presents a long, blank marble wall to the +relative profaneness of the Cathedral close, but within it is a perfect +treasure-house of art. This quadrangular defence surrounds an open court +where weeds and wild roses are tangled together and a sunny stillness +seems to rest consentingly, as if Nature had been won to consciousness +of the precious relics committed to her. Something in the quality of the +place recalls the collegiate cloisters of Oxford, but it must be added +that this is the handsomest compliment to that seat of learning. The +open arches of the quadrangles of Magdalen and Christ Church are not +of mellow Carrara marble, nor do they offer to sight columns, slim and +elegant, that seem to frame the unglazed windows of a cathedral. To be +buried in the Campo Santo of Pisa, I may however further qualify, you +need only be, or to have more or less anciently been, illustrious, and +there is a liberal allowance both as to the character and degree of +your fame. The most obtrusive object in one of the long vistas is a most +complicated monument to Madame Catalani, the singer, recently erected +by her possibly too-appreciative heirs. The wide pavement is a mosaic of +sepulchral slabs, and the walls, below the base of the paling frescoes, +are incrusted with inscriptions and encumbered with urns and antique +sarcophagi. The place is at once a cemetery and a museum, and its +especial charm is its strange mixture of the active and the passive, +of art and rest, of life and death. Originally its walls were one vast +continuity of closely pressed frescoes; but now the great capricious +scars and stains have come to outnumber the pictures, and the cemetery +has grown to be a burial-place of pulverised masterpieces as well as of +finished lives. The fragments of painting that remain are fortunately +the best; for one is safe in believing that a host of undimmed +neighbours would distract but little from the two great works of +Orcagna. Most people know the "Triumph of Death" and the "Last Judgment" +from descriptions and engravings; but to measure the possible good faith +of imitative art one must stand there and see the painter's howling +potentates dragged into hell in all the vividness of his bright hard +colouring; see his feudal courtiers, on their palfreys, hold their noses +at what they are so fast coming to; see his great Christ, in judgment, +refuse forgiveness with a gesture commanding enough, really inhuman +enough, to make virtue merciless for ever. The charge that Michael +Angelo borrowed his cursing Saviour from this great figure of Orcagna is +more valid than most accusations of plagiarism; but of the two figures +one at least could be spared. For direct, triumphant expressiveness +these two superb frescoes have probably never been surpassed. The +painter aims at no very delicate meanings, but he drives certain gross +ones home so effectively that for a parallel to his process one must +look to the art of the actor, the emphasising "point"-making mime. +Some of his female figures are superb--they represent creatures of a +formidable temperament. + +There are charming women, however, on the other side of the cloister--in +the beautiful frescoes of Benozzo Gozzoli. If Orcagna's work was +appointed to survive the ravage of time it is a happy chance that +it should be balanced by a group of performances of such a different +temper. The contrast is the more striking that in subject the +inspiration of both painters is strictly, even though superficially, +theological. But Benozzo cares, in his theology, for nothing but the +story, the scene and the drama--the chance to pile up palaces and spires +in his backgrounds against pale blue skies cross-barred with pearly, +fleecy clouds, and to scatter sculptured arches and shady trellises over +the front, with every incident of human life going forward lightly and +gracefully beneath them. Lightness and grace are the painter's great +qualities, marking the hithermost limit of unconscious elegance, after +which "style" and science and the wisdom of the serpent set in. +His charm is natural fineness; a little more and we should have +refinement--which is a very different thing. Like all _les delicats_ of +this world, as M. Renan calls them, Benozzo has suffered greatly. The +space on the walls he originally covered with his Old Testament stories +is immense; but his exquisite handiwork has peeled off by the acre, +as one may almost say, and the latter compartments of the series are +swallowed up in huge white scars, out of which a helpless head or hand +peeps forth like those of creatures sinking into a quicksand. As +for Pisa at large, although it is not exactly what one would call +a mouldering city--for it has a certain well-aired cleanness and +brightness, even in its supreme tranquillity--it affects the imagination +very much in the same way as the Campo Santo. And, in truth, a city +so ancient and deeply historic as Pisa is at every step but the +burial-ground of a larger life than its present one. The wide empty +streets, the goodly Tuscan palaces--which look as if about all of them +there were a genteel private understanding, independent of placards, +that they are to be let extremely cheap--the delicious relaxing air, +the full-flowing yellow river, the lounging Pisani, smelling, +metaphorically, their poppy-flowers, seemed to me all so many +admonitions to resignation and oblivion. And this is what I mean by +saying that the charm of Pisa (apart from its cluster of monuments) is +a charm of a high order. The architecture has but a modest dignity; the +lions are few; there are no fixed points for stopping and gaping. And +yet the impression is profound; the charm is a moral charm. If I were +ever to be incurably disappointed in life, if I had lost my health, +my money, or my friends, if I were resigned forevermore to pitching my +expectations in a minor key, I should go and invoke the Pisan peace. Its +quietude would seem something more than a stillness--a hush. Pisa may be +a dull place to live in, but it's an ideal place to wait for death. + +Nothing could be more charming than the country between Pisa and +Lucca--unless possibly the country between Lucca and Pistoia. If Pisa is +dead Tuscany, Lucca is Tuscany still living and enjoying, desiring and +intending. The town is a charming mixture of antique "character" and +modern inconsequence; and! not only the town, but the country--the +blooming romantic country which you admire from the famous promenade +on the city-wall. The wall is of superbly solid and intensely "toned" +brickwork and of extraordinary breadth, and its summit, planted with +goodly trees and swelling here and there into bastions and outworks and +little open gardens, surrounds the city with a circular lounging-place +of a splendid dignity. This well-kept, shady, ivy-grown rampart reminded +me of certain mossy corners of England; but it looks away to a prospect +of more than English loveliness--a broad green plain where the summer +yields a double crop of grain, and a circle of bright blue mountains +speckled with high-hung convents and profiled castles and nestling +villas, and traversed by valleys of a deeper and duskier blue. In one of +the deepest and shadiest of these recesses one of the most "sympathetic" +of small watering-places is hidden away yet a while longer from +easy invasion--the Baths to which Lucca has lent its name. Lucca is +pre-eminently a city of churches; ecclesiastical architecture being +indeed the only one of the arts to which it seems to have given +attention. There are curious bits of domestic architecture, but no +great palaces, and no importunate frequency of pictures. The Cathedral, +however, sums up the merits of its companions and is a singularly noble +and interesting church. Its peculiar boast is a wonderful inlaid front, +on which horses and hounds and hunted beasts are lavishly figured in +black marble over a white ground. What I chiefly appreciated in the grey +solemnity of the nave and transepts was the superb effect of certain +second-storey Gothic arches--those which rest on the pavement being +Lombard. These arches are delicate and slender, like those of the +cloister at Pisa, and they play their part in the dusky upper air with +real sublimity. + +At Pistoia there is of course a Cathedral, and there is nothing +unexpected in its being, externally at least, highly impressive; in its +having a grand campanile at its door, a gaudy baptistery, in alternate +layers of black and white marble, across the way, and a stately civic +palace on either side. But even had I the space to do otherwise I should +prefer to speak less of the particular objects of interest in the place +than of the pleasure I found it to lounge away in the empty streets the +quiet hours of a warm afternoon. To say where I lingered longest would +be to tell of a little square before the hospital, out of which you +look up at the beautiful frieze in coloured earthernware by the brothers +Della Robbia, which runs across the front of the building. It represents +the seven orthodox offices of charity and, with its brilliant blues and +yellows and its tender expressiveness, brightens up amazingly, to the +sense and soul, this little grey corner of the mediaeval city. Pi stoia +is still mediaeval. How grass-grown it seemed, how drowsy, how full of +idle vistas and melancholy nooks! If nothing was supremely wonderful, +everything was delicious. + +{Illustration: THE HOSPITAL, PISTOIA.} + +1874. + + + + + +OTHER TUSCAN CITIES + + +I + + +I had scanted charming Pisa even as I had scanted great Siena in my +original small report of it, my scarce more than stammering notes of +years before; but even if there had been meagreness of mere gaping +vision--which there in fact hadn't been--as well as insufficiency of +public tribute, the indignity would soon have ceased to weigh on my +conscience. For to this affection I was to return again still oftener +than to the strong call of Siena my eventual frequentations of Pisa, all +merely impressionistic and amateurish as they might be--and I pretended, +up and down the length of the land, to none other--leave me at the +hither end of time with little more than a confused consciousness of +exquisite _quality_ on the part of the small sweet scrap of a place of +ancient glory; a consciousness so pleadingly content to be general and +vague that I shrink from pulling it to pieces. The Republic of Pisa +fought with the Republic of Florence, through the ages so ferociously +and all but invincibly that what is so pale and languid in her to-day +may well be the aspect of any civil or, still more, military creature +bled and bled and bled at the "critical" time of its life. She has +verily a just languor and is touchingly anaemic; the past history, or +at any rate the present perfect acceptedness, of which condition hangs +about her with the last grace of weakness, making her state in this +particular the very secret of her irresistible appeal. I was to find the +appeal, again and again, one of the sweetest, tenderest, even if not +one of the fullest and richest impressions possible; and if I went back +whenever I could it was very much as one doesn't indecently neglect a +gentle invalid friend. The couch of the invalid friend, beautifully, +appealingly resigned, has been wheeled, say, for the case, into the warm +still garden, and your visit but consists of your sitting beside it with +kind, discreet, testifying silences. Such is the figurative form under +which the once rugged enemy of Florence, stretched at her length by the +rarely troubled Arno, to-day presents herself; and I find my analogy +complete even to my sense of the mere mild _seance_, the inevitably +tacit communion or rather blank interchange, between motionless cripple +and hardly more incurable admirer. + +The terms of my enjoyment of Pisa scarce departed from that ideal--slow +contemplative perambulations, rather late in the day and after work done +mostly in the particular decent inn-room that was repeatedly my portion; +where the sunny flicker of the river played up from below to the very +ceiling, which, by the same sign, anciently and curiously raftered and +hanging over my table at a great height, had been colour-pencilled into +ornament as fine (for all practical purposes) as the page of a missal. +I add to this, for remembrance, an inveteracy of evening idleness and of +reiterated ices in front of one of the quiet cafes--quiet as everything +at Pisa is quiet, or will certainly but in these latest days have ceased +to be; one in especial so beautifully, so mysteriously void of bustle +that almost always the neighbouring presence and admirable chatter of +some group of the local University students would fall upon my ear, by +the half-hour at a time, not less as a privilege, frankly, than as a +clear-cut image of the young Italian mind and life, by which I lost +nothing. I use such terms as "admirable" and "privilege," in this last +most casual of connections--which was moreover no connection at all but +what my attention made it--simply as an acknowledgment of the interest +that might play there through some inevitable thoughts. These were, for +that matter, intensely in keeping with the ancient scene and air: +they dealt with the exquisite difference between that tone and type of +ingenuous adolescence--in the mere relation of charmed _audition_--and +other forms of juvenility of whose mental and material accent one had +elsewhere met the assault. Civilised, charmingly civilised, were my +loquacious neighbours--as how had n't they to be, one asked one's self, +through the use of a medium of speech that is in itself a sovereign +saturation? _There_ was the beautiful congruity of the happily-caught +impression; the fact of my young men's general Tuscanism of tongue, +which related them so on the spot to the whole historic consensus +of things. It wasn't dialect--as it of course easily might have been +elsewhere, at Milan, at Turin, at Bologna, at Naples; it was the clear +Italian in which all the rest of the surrounding story was told, all +the rest of the result of time recorded; and it made them delightful, +prattling, unconscious men of the particular little constituted and +bequeathed world which everything else that was charged with old +meanings and old beauty referred to--all the more that their talk was +never by any chance of romping games or deeds of violence, but kept +flowering, charmingly and incredibly, into eager ideas and literary +opinions and philosophic discussions and, upon my honour, vital +questions. + +They have taken me too far, for so light a reminiscence; but I claim +for the loose web of my impressions at no point a heavier texture. Which +comes back to what I was a moment ago saying--that just in proportion +as you "feel" the morbid charm of Pisa you press on it gently, and this +somehow even under stress of whatever respectful attention. I found +this last impulse, at all events, so far as I was concerned, quite +contentedly spend itself in a renewed sense of the simple large pacified +felicity of such an afternoon aspect as that of the Lung' Arno, taken up +or down its course; whether to within sight of small Santa Maria della +Spina, the tiny, the delicate, the exquisite Gothic chapel perched where +the quay drops straight, or, in the other direction, toward the melting +perspective of the narrow local pleasure-ground, the rather thin and +careless bosky grace of which recedes, beside the stream whose very +turbidity pleases, to a middle distance of hot and tangled and exuberant +rural industry and a proper blue horizon of Carrara mountains. The Pisan +Lung' Arno is shorter and less featured and framed than the Florentine, +but it has the fine accent of a marked curve and is quite as bravely +Tuscan; witness the type of river-fronting palace which, in half-a-dozen +massive specimens, the last word of the anciently "handsome," are of +the essence of the physiognomy of the place. In the glow of which +retrospective admission I ask myself how I came, under my first flush, +reflected in other pages, to fail of justice to so much proud domestic +architecture--in the very teeth moreover of the fact that I was for ever +paying my compliments, in a wistful, wondering way, to the fine Palazzo +Lanfranchi, occupied in 1822 by the migratory Byron, and whither Leigh +Hunt, as commemorated in the latter's Autobiography, came out to join +him in an odd journalistic scheme. + +Of course, however, I need scarcely add, the centre of my daily +revolution--quite thereby on the circumference--was the great Company of +Four in their sequestered corner; objects of regularly recurrent pious +pilgrimage, if for no other purpose than to see whether each would +each time again so inimitably carry itself as one of a group of +wonderfully-worked old ivories. Their charm of relation to each other +and to everything else that concerns them, that of the quartette of +monuments, is more or less inexpressible all round; but not the least of +it, ever, is in their beautiful secret for taking at different hours +and seasons, in different states of the light, the sky, the wind, the +weather--in different states, even, it used verily to seem to me, of +an admirer's imagination or temper or nerves--different complexional +appearances, different shades and pallors, different glows and chills. +I have seen them look almost viciously black, and I have seen them as +clear and fair as pale gold. And these things, for the most part, off on +the large grassy carpet spread for them, and with the elbow of the old +city-wall, not elsewhere erect, respectfully but protectingly crooked +about, to the tune of a usual unanimity save perhaps in the case of +the Leaning Tower--so abnormal a member of any respectable family this +structure at best that I always somehow fancied its three companions, +the Cathedral, the Baptistery and the Campo Santo, capable of quiet +common understandings, for the major or the minor effect, into which +their odd fellow, no hint thrown out to him, was left to enter as he +might. If one haunted the place, one ended by yielding to the conceit +that, beautifully though the others of the group may be said to behave +about him, one sometimes caught them in the act of tacitly combining to +ignore him--as if he had, after so long, begun to give on their nerves. +Or is that absurdity but my shamefaced form of admission that, for all +the wonder of him, he finally gave on mine? Frankly--I would put it at +such moments--he becomes at last an optical bore or _betise_. + +{Illustration: THE LOGGIA, LUCCA.} + + +II + + +To Lucca I was not to return often--I was to return only once; when that +compact and admirable little city, the very model of a small _pays de +Cocagne_, overflowing with everything that makes for ease, for plenty, +for beauty, for interest and good example, renewed for me, in the +highest degree, its genial and robust appearance. The perfection of +this renewal must indeed have been, at bottom, the ground of my rather +hanging back from possible excess of acquaintance--with the instinct +that so right and rich and rounded a little impression had better be +left than endangered. I remember positively saying to myself the second +time that no brown-and-gold Tuscan city, even, could _be_ as happy as +Lucca looked--save always, exactly, Lucca; so that, on the chance of any +shade of human illusion in the case, I wouldn't, as a brooding analyst, +go within fifty miles of it again. Just so, I fear I must confess, it +was this mere face-value of the place that, when I went back, formed my +sufficiency; I spent all my scant time--or the greater part, for I took +a day to drive over to the Bagni--just gaping at its visible attitude. +This may be described as that of simply sitting there, through the +centuries, at the receipt of perfect felicity; on its splendid solid +seat of russet masonry, that is--for its great republican ramparts of +long ago still lock it tight--with its wide garden-land, its ancient +appanage or hereditary domain, teeming and blooming with everything that +is good and pleasant for man, all about, and with a ring of graceful and +noble, yet comparatively unbeneficed uplands and mountains watching +it, for very envy, across the plain, as a circle of bigger boys, in +the playground, may watch a privileged or pampered smaller one munch a +particularly fine apple. Half smothered thus in oil and wine and +corn and all the fruits of the earth, Lucca seems fairly to laugh for +good-humour, and it's as if one can't say more for her than that, thanks +to her putting forward for you a temperament somehow still richer than +her heritage, you forgive her at every turn her fortune. She smiles up +at you her greeting as you dip into her wide lap, out of which you may +select almost any rare morsel whatever. Looking back at my own choice +indeed I see it must have suffered a certain embarrassment--that of the +sense of too many things; for I scarce remember choosing at all, any +more than I recall having had to go hungry. I turned into all the +churches--taking care, however, to pause before one of them, though +before which I now irrecoverably forget, for verification of Ruskin's so +characteristically magnified rapture over the high and rather narrow +and obscure hunting-frieze on its front--and in the Cathedral paid my +respects at every turn to the greatest of Lucchesi, Matteo Civitale, +wisest, sanest, homeliest, kindest of _quattro-cento_ sculptors, to +whose works the Duomo serves almost as a museum. But my nearest approach +to anything so invidious as a discrimination or a preference, under the +spell of so felt an equilibrium, must have been the act of engaging a +carriage for the Baths. + +That inconsequence once perpetrated, let me add, the impression was as +right as any other--the impression of the drive through the huge general +tangled and fruited _podere_ of the countryside; that of the pair of +jogging hours that bring the visitor to where the wideish gate of the +valley of the Serchio opens. The question after this became quite other; +the narrowing, though always more or less smiling gorge that draws you +on and on is a different, a distinct proposition altogether, with its +own individual grace of appeal and association. It is the association, +exactly, that would even now, on this page, beckon me forward, or +perhaps I should rather say backward--weren't more than a glance at it +out of the question--to a view of that easier and not so inordinately +remote past when "people spent the summer" in these perhaps slightly +stuffy shades. I speak of that age, I think of it at least, as easier +than ours, in spite of the fact that even as I made my pilgrimage the +mark of modern change, the railway in construction, had begun to be +distinct, though the automobile was still pretty far in the future. The +relations and proportions of everything are of course now altered--I +indeed, I confess, wince at the vision of the cloud of motor-dust that +must in the fine season hang over the whole connection. That represents +greater promptness of approach to the bosky depths of Ponte-a-Serraglio +and the Bagni Caldi, but it throws back the other time, that of the +old jogging relation, of the Tuscan grand-ducal "season" and the small +cosmopolite sociability, into quite Arcadian air and the comparatively +primitive scale. The "easier" Italy of our infatuated precursors +there wears its glamour of facility not through any question of "the +development of communications," but through the very absence of the +dream of that boon, thanks to which every one (among the infatuated) +lived on terms of so much closer intercourse with the general object of +their passion. After we had crossed the Serchio that beautiful day we +passed into the charming, the amiably tortuous, the thickly umbrageous, +valley of the Lima, and then it was that I seemed fairly to remount the +stream of time; figuring to myself wistfully, at the small scattered +centres of entertainment--modest inns, pensions and other places of +convenience clustered where the friendly torrent is bridged or the +forested slopes adjust themselves--what the summer days and the summer +rambles and the summer dreams must have been, in the blest place, when +"people" (by which I mean the contingent of beguiled barbarians) didn't +know better, as we say, than to content themselves with such a mild +substitute, such a soft, sweet and essentially elegant apology, for +adventure. One wanted not simply to hang about a little, but really to +live back, as surely one might, have done by staying on, into the so +romantically strong, if mechanically weak, Italy of the associations of +one's youth. It was a pang to have to revert to the present even in the +form of Lucca--which says everything. + + +III + + +If undeveloped communications were to become enough for me at those +retrospective moments, I might have felt myself supplied to my taste, +let me go on to say, at the hour of my making, with great resolution, +an attempt on high-seated and quite grandly out-of-the-way Volterra: +a reminiscence associated with quite a different year and, I should +perhaps sooner have bethought myself, with my fond experience of +Pisa--inasmuch as it was during a pause under that bland and motionless +wing that I seem to have had to organise in the darkness of a summer +dawn my approach to the old Etruscan stronghold. The railway then +existed, but I rose in the dim small hours to take my train; moreover, +so far as that might too much savour of an incongruous facility, +the fault was in due course quite adequately repaired by an apparent +repudiation of any awareness of such false notes on the part of the +town. I may not invite the reader to penetrate with me by so much as a +step the boundless backward reach of history to which the more massive +of the Etruscan gates of Volterra, the Porta all' Arco, forms the +solidest of thresholds; since I perforce take no step myself, and am +even exceptionally condemned here to impressionism unashamed. My errand +was to spend a Sunday with an Italian friend, a native in fact of the +place, master of a house there in which he offered me hospitality; who, +also arriving from Florence the night before, had obligingly come on +with me from Pisa, and whose consciousness of a due urbanity, already +rather overstrained, and still well before noon, by the accumulation +of our matutinal vicissitudes and other grounds for patience, met +all ruefully at the station the supreme shock of an apparently great +desolate world of volcanic hills, of blank, though "engineered," +undulations, as the emergence of a road testified, unmitigated by the +smallest sign of a wheeled vehicle. The station, in other words, looked +out at that time (and I daresay the case hasn't strikingly altered) on a +mere bare huge hill-country, by some remote mighty shoulder of which +the goal of our pilgrimage, so questionably "served" by the railway, was +hidden from view. Served as well by a belated omnibus, a four-in-hand of +lame and lamentable quality, the place, I hasten to add, eventually +put forth some show of being; after a complete practical recognition of +which, let me at once further mention, all the other, the positive and +sublime, connections of Volterra established themselves for me without +my lifting a finger. + +The small shrunken, but still lordly prehistoric city is perched, when +once you have rather painfully zigzagged to within sight of it, very +much as an eagle's eyrie, oversweeping the land and the sea; and to +that type of position, the ideal of the airy peak of vantage, with all +accessories and minor features a drop, a slide and a giddiness, its +individual items and elements strike you at first as instinctively +conforming. This impression was doubtless after a little modified for +me; there were levels, there were small stony practicable streets, there +were walks and strolls, outside the gates and roundabout the cyclopean +wall, to the far end of downward-tending protrusions and promontories, +natural buttresses and pleasant terrene headlands, friendly suburban +spots (one would call them if the word had less detestable references) +where games of bowls and overtrellised wine-tables could put in their +note; in spite of which however my friend's little house of hospitality, +clean and charming and oh, so immemorially Tuscan, was as perpendicular +and ladder-like as so compact a residence could be; it kept up for me +beautifully--as regards posture and air, though humanly and socially +it rather cooed like a dovecote--the illusion of the vertiginously +"balanced" eagle's nest. The air, in truth, all the rest of that +splendid day, must have been the key to the promptly-produced intensity +of one's relation to every aspect of the charming episode; the light, +cool, keen air of those delightful high places, in Italy, that tonically +correct the ardours of July, and which at our actual altitude could but +affect me as the very breath of the grand local legend. I might have +"had" the little house, our particular eagle's nest, for the summer, +and even on such touching terms; and I well remember the force of the +temptation to take it, if only other complications had permitted; to +spend the series of weeks with that admirable _interesting_ freshness +in my lungs: interesting, I especially note, as the strong appropriate +medium in which a continuity with the irrecoverable but still effective +past had been so robustly preserved. I couldn't yield, alas, to the +conceived felicity, which had half-a-dozen appealing aspects; I could +only, while thus feeling how the atmospheric medium itself made for a +positively initiative exhilaration, enjoy my illusion till the morrow. +The exhilaration therefore supplies to memory the whole light in which, +for the too brief time, I went about "seeing" Volterra; so that my +glance at the seated splendour reduces itself, as I have said, to +the merest impressionism; nothing more was to be looked for, on the +stretched surface of consciousness, from one breezy wash of the brush. +I find there the clean strong image simplified to the three or four +unforgettable particulars of the vast rake of the view; with the +Maremma, of evil fame, more or less immediately below, but with those +islands of the sea, Corsica and Elba, the names of which are sharply +associational beyond any others, dressing the far horizon in the grand +manner, and the Ligurian coast-line melting northward into beauty and +history galore; with colossal uncemented blocks of Etruscan gates and +walls plunging you--and by their very interest--into a sweet surrender +of any privilege of appreciation more crushing than your general +synthetic stare; and with the rich and perfectly arranged museum, an +unsurpassed exhibition of monumental treasure from Etruscan tombs, +funereal urns mainly, reliquaries of an infinite power to move and charm +us still, contributing to this same so designed, but somehow at the same +time so inspired, collapse of the historic imagination under too heavy a +pressure, or abeyance of "private judgment" in too unequal a relation. + + +IV + + +I remember recovering private judgment indeed in the course of two or +three days following the excursion I have just noted; which must have +shaped themselves in some sort of consonance with the idea that as we +were hereabouts in the very middle of dim Etruria a common self-respect +prescribed our somehow profiting by the fact. This kindled in us the +spirit of exploration, but with results of which I here attempt to +record, so utterly does the whole impression swoon away, for present +memory, into vagueness, confusion and intolerable heat, Our self-respect +was of the common order, but the blaze of the July sun was, even for +Tuscany, of the uncommon; so that the project of a trudging quest for +Etruscan tombs in shadeless wastes yielded to its own temerity. +There comes back to me nevertheless at the same time, from the mild +misadventure, and quite as through this positive humility of failure, +the sense of a supremely intimate revelation of Italy in undress, so +to speak (the state, it seemed, in which one would most fondly, most +ideally, enjoy her); Italy no longer in winter starch and sobriety, with +winter manners and winter prices and winter excuses, all addressed to +the _forestieri_ and the philistines; but lolling at her length, with +her graces all relaxed, and thereby only the more natural; the brilliant +performer, in short, _en famille_, the curtain down and her salary +stopped for the season--thanks to which she is by so much more the easy +genius and the good creature as she is by so much less the advertised +_prima donna_. She received us nowhere more sympathetically, that is +with less ceremony or self-consciousness, I seem to recall, than at +Montepulciano, for instance--where it was indeed that the recovery of +private judgment I just referred to couldn't help taking place. What we +were doing, or what we expected to do, at Montepulciano I keep no other +trace of than is bound up in a present quite tender consciousness that I +wouldn't for the world not have been there. I think my reason must have +been largely just in the beauty of the name (for could any beauty be +greater?), reinforced no doubt by the fame of the local vintage and the +sense of how we should quaff it on the spot. Perhaps we quaffed it too +constantly; since the romantic picture reduces itself for me but to two +definite appearances; that of the more priggish discrimination so far +reasserting itself as to advise me that Montepulciano was dirty, even +remarkably dirty; and that of her being not much else besides but +perched and brown and queer and crooked, and noble withal (which is what +almost any Tuscan city more easily than not acquits herself of; all the +while she may on such occasions figure, when one looks off from her to +the end of dark street-vistas or catches glimpses through high arcades, +some big battered, blistered, overladen, overmasted ship, swimming in a +violet sea). + +If I have lost the sense of what we were doing, that could at all suffer +commemoration, at Montepulciano, so I sit helpless before the memory +of small stewing Torrita, which we must somehow have expected to yield, +under our confidence, a view of shy charms, but which did n't yield, to +my recollection, even anything that could fairly be called a breakfast +or a dinner. There may have been in the neighbourhood a rumour +of Etruscan tombs; the neighbourhood, however, was vast, and that +possibility not to be verified, in the conditions, save after due +refreshment. Then it was, doubtless, that the question of refreshment so +beckoned us, by a direct appeal, straight across country, from Perugia, +that, casting consistency, if not to the winds, since alas there were +none, but to the lifeless air, we made the sweltering best of our way +(and it took, for the distance, a terrible time) to the Grand Hotel of +that city. This course shines for me, in the retrospect, with a light +even more shameless than that in which my rueful conscience then saw it; +since we thus exchanged again, at a stroke, the tousled _bonne fille_ of +our vacational Tuscany for the formal and figged-out presence of Italy +on her good behaviour. We had never seen her conform more to all the +proprieties, we felt, than under this aspect of lavish hospitality to +that now apparently quite inveterate swarm of pampered _forestieri_, +English and Americans in especial, who, having had Roman palaces and +villas deliciously to linger in, break the northward journey, when once +they decide to take it, in the Umbrian paradise. They were, goodness +knows, within their rights, and we profited, as anyone may easily and +cannily profit at that time, by the sophistications paraded for them; +only I feel, as I pleasantly recover it all, that though we had arrived +perhaps at the most poetical of watering-places we had lost our finer +clue. (The difference from other days was immense, all the span of +evolution from the ancient malodorous inn which somehow did n't matter, +to that new type of polyglot caravanserai which everywhere insists on +mattering--mattering, even in places where other interests abound, so +much more than anything else.) That clue, the finer as I say, I would +fain at any rate to-day pick up for its close attachment to another +Tuscan city or two--for a felt pull from strange little San Gimignano +delle belle Torre in especial; by which I mean from the memory of a +summer Sunday spent there during a stay at Siena. But I have already +superabounded, for mere love of my general present rubric--the real +thickness of experience having a good deal evaporated, so that the Tiny +Town of the Many Towers hangs before me, not to say, rather, far +behind me, after the manner of an object directly meeting the wrong or +diminishing lens of one's telescope. + +It did everything, on the occasion of that pilgrimage, that it was +expected to do, presenting itself more or less in the guise of some rare +silvery shell, washed up by the sea of time, cracked and battered and +dishonoured, with its mutilated marks of adjustment to the extinct +type of creature it once harboured figuring against the sky as maimed +gesticulating arms flourished in protest against fate. If the centuries, +however, had pretty well cleaned out, vulgarly speaking, this amazing +little fortress-town, it wasn't that a mere aching void was bequeathed +us, I recognise as I consult a somewhat faded impression; the whole +scene and occasion come back to me as the exhibition, on the contrary, +of a stage rather crowded and agitated, of no small quantity of sound +and fury, of concussions, discussions, vociferations, hurryings to and +fro, that could scarce have reached a higher pitch in the old days of +the siege and the sortie. San Gimignano affected me, to a certainty, +as not dead, I mean, but as inspired with that strange and slightly +sinister new life that is now, in case after case, up and down the +peninsula, and even in presence of the dryest and most scattered bones, +producing the miracle of resurrection. The effect is often--and I find +it strikingly involved in this particular reminiscence--that of the +buried hero himself positively waking up to show you his bones for a +fee, and almost capering about in his appeal to your attention. What +has become of the soul of San Gimignano who shall say?--but, of a genial +modern Sunday, it is as if the heroic skeleton, risen from the dust, +were in high activity, officious for your entertainment and your +detention, clattering and changing plates at the informal friendly inn, +personally conducting you to a sight of the admirable Santa Fina of +Ghirlandaio, as I believe is supposed, in a dim chapel of the Collegiata +church; the poor young saint, on her low bed, in a state of ecstatic +vision (the angelic apparition is given), acconpanied by a few figures +and accessories of the most beautiful and touching truth. This image +is what has most vividly remained with me, of the day I thus so +ineffectually recover; the precious ill-set gem or domestic treasure of +Santa Fina, and then the wonderful drive, at eventide, back to Siena: +the progress through the darkening land that was like a dense fragrant +garden, all fireflies and warm emanations and dimly-seen motionless +festoons, extravagant vines and elegant branches intertwisted for miles, +with couples and companies of young countryfolk almost as fondly united +and raising their voices to the night as if superfluously to sing out at +you that they were happy, and above all were Tuscan. On reflection, and +to be just, I connect the slightly incongruous loudness that hung about +me under the Beautiful Towers with the really too coarse competition for +my favour among the young vetturini who lay in wait for my approach, +and with an eye to my subsequent departure, on my quitting, at some +unremembered spot, the morning train from Siena, from which point there +was then still a drive. That onset was of a fine mediaeval violence, but +the subsiding echoes of it alone must have afterwards borne me company; +mingled, at the worst, with certain reverberations of the animated +rather than concentrated presence of sundry young sketchers and copyists +of my own nationality, which element in the picture conveyed beyond +anything else how thoroughly it was all to sit again henceforth in the +eye of day. My final vision perhaps was of a sacred reliquary not so +much rudely as familiarly and "humorously" torn open. The note had, with +all its references, its own interest; but I never went again. + +{Illustration: TOWERS OF SAN GIMIGNANO.} + + + + + +RAVENNA + + +I write these lines on a cold Swiss mountain-top, shut in by an intense +white mist from any glimpse of the underworld of lovely Italy; but as +I jotted down the other day in the ancient capital of Honorius and +Theodoric the few notes of which they are composed, I let the original +date stand for local colour's sake. Its mere look, as I transcribe it, +emits a grateful glow in the midst of the Alpine rawness, and gives a +depressed imagination something tangible to grasp while awaiting the +return of fine weather. For Ravenna was glowing, less than a week since, +as I edged along the narrow strip of shadow binding one side of the +empty, white streets. After a long, chill spring the summer this year +descended upon Italy with a sudden jump and an ominous hot breath. I +stole away from Florence in the night, and even on top of the Apennines, +under the dull starlight and in the rushing train, one could but sit and +pant perspiringly. + +At Bologna I found a festa, or rather two festas, a civil and a +religious, going on in mutual mistrust and disparagement. The civil, +that of the Statuto, was the one fully national Italian holiday as by +law established--the day that signalises everywhere over the land at +once its achieved and hard-won unification; the religious was a jubilee +of certain local churches. The latter is observed by the Bolognese +parishes in couples, and comes round for each couple but once in ten +years--an arrangement by which the faithful at large insure themselves +a liberal recurrence of expensive processions. It was n't my business +to distinguish the sheep from the goats, the pious from the profane, the +prayers from the scoffers; it was enough that, melting together under +the scorching sun, they filled the admirably solid city with a flood +of spectacular life. The combination at one point was really dramatic. +While a long procession of priests and young virgins in white veils, +bearing tapers, marshalled itself in one of the streets, a review of +the King's troops went forward outside the town. On its return a large +detachment of cavalry passed across the space where the incense was +burning, the pictured banners swaying and the litany being droned, and +checked the advance of the little ecclesiastical troop. The long vista +of the street, between the porticoes, was festooned with garlands and +scarlet and tinsel; the robes and crosses and canopies of the priests, +the clouds of perfumed smoke and the white veils of the maidens, were +resolved by the hot bright air into a gorgeous medley of colour, across +which the mounted soldiers rattled and flashed as if it had been a +conquering army trampling on an embassy of propitiation. It was, to tell +the truth, the first time an' Italian festa had really exhibited to my +eyes the genial glow and the romantic particulars promised by song and +story; and I confess that those eyes found more pleasure in it than they +were to find an hour later in the picturesque on canvas as one observes +it in the Pinacoteca. I found myself scowling most unmercifully at Guido +and Domenichino. + +For Ravenna, however, I had nothing but smiles--grave, reflective, +philosophic smiles, I hasten to add, such as accord with the historic +dignity, not to say the mortal sunny sadness, of the place. I arrived +there in the evening, before, even at drowsy Ravenna, the festa of the +Statuto had altogether put itself to bed. I immediately strolled forth +from the inn, and found it sitting up a while longer on the piazza, +chiefly at the cafe door, listening to the band of the garrison by the +light of a dozen or so of feeble tapers, fastened along the front of +the palace of the Government. Before long, however, it had dispersed and +departed, and I was left alone with the grey illumination and with an +affable citizen whose testimony as to the manners and customs of +Ravenna I had aspired to obtain. I had, borrowing confidence from prompt +observation, suggested deferentially that it was n't the liveliest place +in the world, and my friend admitted that it was in fact not a seat of +ardent life. But had I seen the Corso? Without seeing the Corso one did +n't exhaust the possibilities. The Corso of Ravenna, of a hot summer +night, had an air of surprising seclusion and repose. Here and there in +an upper closed window glimmered a light; my companion's footsteps +and my own were the only sounds; not a creature was within sight. The +suffocating air helped me to believe for a moment that I walked in the +Italy of Boccaccio, hand-in-hand with the plague, through a city which +had lost half its population by pestilence and the other half by flight. +I turned back into my inn profoundly satisfied. This at last was the +old-world dulness of a prime distillation; this at last was antiquity, +history, repose. + +The impression was largely confirmed and enriched on the following day; +but it was obliged at an early stage of my visit to give precedence to +another--the lively perception, namely, of the thinness of my saturation +with Gibbon and the other sources of legend. At Ravenna the waiter at +the cafe and the coachman who drives you to the Pine-Forest allude to +Galla Placidia and Justinian as to any attractive topic of the hour; +wherever you turn you encounter some fond appeal to your historic +presence of mind. For myself I could only attune my spirit vaguely to +so ponderous a challenge, could only feel I was breathing an air of +prodigious records and relics. I conned my guide-book and looked up +at the great mosaics, and then fumbled at poor Murray again for some +intenser light on the court of Justinian; but I can imagine that to +a visitor more intimate with the originals of the various great +almond-eyed mosaic portraits in the vaults of the churches these +extremely curious works of art may have a really formidable interest. I +found in the place at large, by daylight, the look of a vast straggling +depopulated village. The streets with hardly an exception are +grass-grown, and though I walked about all day I failed to encounter a +single wheeled vehicle. I remember no shop but the little establishment +of an urbane photographer, whose views of the Pineta, the great +legendary pine-forest just without the town, gave me an irresistible +desire to seek that refuge. There was no architecture to speak of; and +though there are a great many large domiciles with aristocratic names +they stand cracking and baking in the sun in no very comfortable +fashion. The houses have for the most part an all but rustic rudeness; +they are low and featureless and shabby, as well as interspersed +with high garden walls over which the long arms of tangled vines +hang motionless into the stagnant streets. Here and there in all this +dreariness, in some particularly silent and grassy corner, rises an old +brick church with a front more or less spoiled, by cheap modernisation, +and a strange cylindrical campanile pierced with small arched windows +and extremely suggestive of the fifth century. These churches constitute +the palpable interest of Ravenna, and their own principal interest, +after thirteen centuries of well-intentioned spoliation, resides +in their unequalled collection of early Christian mosaics. It is an +interest simple, as who should say, almost to harshness, and leads one's +attention along a straight and narrow way. There are older churches in +Rome, and churches which, looked at as museums, are more variously and +richly informing; but in Rome you stumble at every step on some curious +pagan memorial, often beautiful enough to make your thoughts wander far +from the strange stiff primitive Christian forms. + +Ravenna, on the other hand, began with the Church, and all her monuments +and relics are harmoniously rigid. By the middle of the first century +she possessed an exemplary saint, Apollinaris, a disciple of Peter, to +whom her two finest places of worship are dedicated. It was to one of +these, jocosely entitled the "new," that I first directed my steps. +I lingered outside a while and looked at the great red, barrel-shaped +bell-towers, so rusty, so crumbling, so archaic, and yet so resolute to +ring in another century or two, and then went in to the coolness, the +shining marble columns, the queer old sculptured slabs and sarcophagi +and the long mosaics that scintillated, under the roof, along the wall +of the nave. San Apollinare Nuovo, like most of its companions, is a +magazine of early Christian odds and ends; fragments of yellow marble +incrusted with quaint sculptured emblems of primitive dogma; great rough +troughs, containing the bones of old bishops; episcopal chairs with the +marble worn narrow by centuries of pressure from the solid episcopal +person; slabs from the fronts of old pulpits, covered with carven +hierogylphics of an almost Egyptian abstruseness--lambs and stags and +fishes and beasts of theological affinities even less apparent. Upon all +these strange things the strange figures in the great mosaic panorama +look down, with coloured cheeks and staring eyes, lifelike enough to +speak to you and answer your wonderment and tell you in bad Latin of +the decadence that it was in such and such a fashion they believed and +worshipped. First, on each side, near the door, are houses and ships and +various old landmarks of Ravenna; then begins a long procession, on +one side, of twenty-two white-robed virgins and three obsequious magi, +terminating in a throne bearing the Madonna and Child, surrounded +by four angels; on the other side, of an equal number of male saints +(twenty-five, that is) holding crowns in their hands and leading to a +Saviour enthroned between angels of singular expressiveness. What it +is these long slim seraphs express I cannot quite say, but they have an +odd, knowing, sidelong look out of the narrow ovals of their eyes which, +though not without sweetness, would certainly make me murmur a defensive +prayer or so were I to find myself alone in the church towards dusk. +All this work is of the latter part of the sixth century and brilliantly +preserved. The gold backgrounds twinkle as if they had been inserted +yesterday, and here and there a figure is executed almost too much in +the modern manner to be interesting; for the charm of mosaic work is, +to my sense, confined altogether to the infancy of the art. The great +Christ, in the series of which I speak, is quite an elaborate picture, +and yet he retains enough of the orthodox stiffness to make him +impressive in the simpler, elder sense. He is clad in a purple robe, +even as an emperor, his hair and beard are artfully curled, his eyebrows +arched, his complexion brilliant, his whole aspect such a one as the +popular mind may have attributed to Honorius or Valentinian. It is all +very Byzantine, and yet I found in it much of that interest which is +inseparable, to a facile imagination, from all early representations of +our Lord. Practically they are no more authentic than the more or less +plausible inventions of Ary Scheffer and Holman Hunt; in spite of which +they borrow a certain value, factitious perhaps but irresistible, from +the mere fact that they are twelve or thirteen centuries less distant +from the original. It is something that this was the way the people in +the sixth century imagined Jesus to have looked; the image has suffered +by so many the fewer accretions. The great purple-robed monarch on the +wall of Ravenna is at least a very potent and positive Christ, and the +only objection I have to make to him is that though in this character he +must have had a full apportionment of divine foreknowledge he betrays no +apprehension of Dr. Channing and M. Renan. If one's preference lies, for +distinctness' sake, between the old plainness and the modern fantasy, +one must admit that the plainness has here a very grand outline. + +{Illustration: SANT APOLLINAR NUOVO, RAVENNA.} + +I spent the rest of the morning in charmed transition between the hot +yellow streets and the cool grey interiors of the churches. The +greyness everywhere was lighted up by the scintillation, on vault and +entablature, of mosaics more or less archaic, but always brilliant and +elaborate, and everywhere too by the same deep amaze of the fact that, +while centuries had worn themselves away and empires risen and fallen, +these little cubes of coloured glass had stuck in their allotted places +and kept their freshness. I have no space for a list of the various +shrines so distinguished, and, to tell the truth, my memory of them has +already become a very generalised and undiscriminated record. The total +aspect of the place, its sepulchral stillness, its absorbing perfume +of evanescence and decay and mortality, confounds the distinctions +and blurs the details. The Cathedral, which is vast and high, has +been excessively modernised, and was being still more so by a lavish +application of tinsel and cotton-velvet in preparation for the centenary +feast of St. Apollinaris, which befalls next month. Things on this +occasion are to be done handsomely, and a fair Ravennese informed me +that a single family had contributed three thousand francs towards a +month's vesper-music. It seemed to me hereupon that I should like in +the August twilight to wander into the quiet nave of San Apollinare, +and look up at the great mosaics through the resonance of some fine +chanting. I remember distinctly enough, however, the tall +basilica of San Vitale, of octagonal shape, like an exchange or +custom-house--modelled, I believe, upon St. Sophia at Constantinople. +It has a great span of height and a great solemnity, as well as a choir +densely pictured over on arch and apse with mosaics of the time of +Justinian. These are regular pictures, full of movement, gesture and +perspective, and just enough sobered in hue by time to bring home their +remoteness. In the middle of the church, under the great dome, sat an +artist whom I envied, making at an effective angle a study of the choir +and its broken lights, its decorated altar and its incrusted twinkling +walls. The picture, when finished, will hang, I suppose, on the library +wall of some person of taste; but even if it is much better than is +probable--I did n't look at it--all his taste won't tell the owner, +unless he has been there, in just what a soundless, mouldering, +out-of-the-way corner of old Italy it was painted. An even better place +for an artist fond of dusky architectural nooks, except that here the +dusk is excessive and he would hardly be able to tell his green from +his red, is the extraordinary little church of the Santi Nazaro e Celso, +otherwise known as the mausoleum of Galla Placidia. This is perhaps on +the whole the spot in Ravenna where the impression is of most sovereign +authority and most thrilling force. It consists of a narrow low-browed +cave, shaped like a Latin cross, every inch of which except the floor +is covered with dense symbolic mosaics. Before you and on each side, +through the thick brown light, loom three enormous barbaric sarcophagi, +containing the remains of potentates of the Lower Empire. It is as if +history had burrowed under ground to escape from research and you +had fairly run it to earth. On the right lie the ashes of the Emperor +Honorius, and in the middle those of his sister, Galla Placidia, a lady +who, I believe, had great adventures. On the other side rest the bones +of Constantius III. The place might be a small natural grotto lined with +glimmering mineral substances, and there is something quite tremendous +in being shut up so closely with these three imperial ghosts. The shadow +of the great Roman name broods upon the huge sepulchres and abides for +ever within the narrow walls. + +But still other memories hang about than those of primitive bishops and +degenerate emperors. Byron lived here and Dante died here, and the tomb +of the one poet and the dwelling of the other are among the advertised +appeals. The grave of Dante, it must be said, is anything but Dantesque, +and the whole precinct is disposed with that odd vulgarity of taste +which distinguishes most modern Italian tributes to greatness. The +author of _The Divine Comedy_ commemorated in stucco, even in a +slumbering corner of Ravenna, is not "sympathetic." Fortunately of all +poets he least needs a monument, as he was pre-eminently an architect in +diction and built himself his temple of fame in verses more solid +than Cyclopean blocks. If Dante's tomb is not Dantesque, so neither is +Byron's house Byronic, being a homely, shabby, two-storied dwelling, +directly on the street, with as little as possible of isolation and +mystery. In Byron's time it was an inn, and it is rather a curious +reflection that "Cain" and the "Vision of Judgment" should have been +written at an hotel. The fact supplies a commanding precedent for +self-abstraction to tourists at once sentimental and literary. I must +declare indeed that my acquaintance with Ravenna considerably increased +my esteem for Byron and helped to renew my faith in the sincerity of +his inspiration. A man so much _de son temps_ as the author of the +above-named and other pieces can have spent two long years in this +stagnant city only by the help of taking a great deal of disinterested +pleasure in his own genius. He had indeed a notable pastime--the various +churches are adorned with monuments of ancestral Guicciolis--but it is +none the less obvious that Ravenna, fifty years ago, would have been an +intolerably dull residence to a foreigner of distinction unequipped with +intellectual resources. The hour one spends with Byron's memory then +is almost compassionate. After all, one says to one's self as one turns +away from the grandiloquent little slab in front of his house and looks +down the deadly provincial vista of the empty, sunny street, the author +of so many superb stanzas asked less from the world than he gave it. One +of his diversions was to ride in the Pineta, which, beginning a couple +of miles from the city, extends some twenty-five miles along the sands +of the Adriatic. I drove out to it for Byron's sake, and Dante's, and +Boccaccio's, all of whom have interwoven it with their fictions, and for +that of a possible whiff of coolness from the sea. Between the city and +the forest, in the midst of malarious rice-swamps, stands the finest of +the Ravennese churches, the stately temple of San Apollinare in Classe. +The Emperor Augustus constructed hereabouts a harbour for fleets, which +the ages have choked up, and which survives only in the title of this +ancient church. Its extreme loneliness makes it doubly impressive. They +opened the great doors for me, and let a shaft of heated air go wander +up the beautiful nave between the twenty-four lustrous, pearly columns +of cipollino marble, and mount the wide staircase of the choir and spend +itself beneath the mosaics of the vault. I passed a memorable half-hour +sitting in this wave of tempered light, looking down the cool grey +avenue of the nave, out of the open door, at the vivid green swamps, and +listening to the melancholy stillness. I rambled for an hour in the Wood +of Associations, between the tall smooth, silvery stems of the pines, +and beside a creek which led me to the outer edge of the wood and a +view of white sails, gleaming and gliding behind the sand-hills. It +was infinitely, it was nobly "quaint," but, as the trees stand at wide +intervals and bear far aloft in the blue air but a little parasol of +foliage, I suppose that, of a glaring summer day, the forest itself +was only the more characteristic of its clime and country for being +perfectly shadeless. + +{Illustration: RAVENNA PINETA.} + +1873. + + + + + +THE SAINT'S AFTERNOON AND OTHERS + + +Before and above all was the sense that, with the narrow limits of past +adventure, I had never yet had such an impression of what the summer +could be in the south or the south in the summer; but I promptly found +it, for the occasion, a good fortune that my terms of comparison were +restricted. It was really something, at a time when the stride of the +traveller had become as long as it was easy, when the seven-league boots +positively hung, for frequent use, in the closet of the most sedentary, +to have kept one's self so innocent of strange horizons that the Bay of +Naples in June might still seem quite final. That picture struck me--a +particular corner of it at least, and for many reasons--as the last +word; and it is this last word that comes back to me, after a short +interval, in a green, grey northern nook, and offers me again its warm, +bright golden meaning before it also inevitably catches the chill. Too +precious, surely, for us not to suffer it to help us as it may is the +faculty of putting together again in an order the sharp minutes and +hours that the wave of time has been as ready to pass over as the salt +sea to wipe out the letters and words your stick has traced in the sand. +Let me, at any rate, recover a sufficient number of such signs to make a +sort of sense. + + +I + + +Far aloft on the great rock was pitched, as the first note, and indeed +the highest, of the wondrous concert, the amazing creation of the friend +who had offered me hospitality, and whom, more almost than I had ever +envied anyone anything, I envied the privilege of being able to reward +a heated, artless pilgrim with a revelation of effects so incalculable. +There was none but the loosest prefigurement as the creaking and puffing +little boat, which had conveyed me only from Sorrento, drew closer +beneath the prodigious island--beautiful, horrible and haunted--that +does most, of all the happy elements and accidents, towards making +the Bay of Naples, for the study of composition, a lesson in the grand +style. There was only, above and below, through the blue of the air and +sea, a great confused shining of hot cliffs and crags and buttresses, +a loss, from nearness, of the splendid couchant outline and the more +comprehensive mass, and an opportunity--oh, not lost, I assure you--to +sit and meditate, even moralise, on the empty deck, while a happy +brotherhood of American and German tourists, including, of course, many +sisters, scrambled down into little waiting, rocking tubs and, after a +few strokes, popped systematically into the small orifice of the Blue +Grotto. There was an appreciable moment when they were all lost to view +in that receptacle, the daily "psychological" moment during which it +must so often befall the recalcitrant observer on the deserted deck to +find himself aware of how delightful it might be if none of them +should come out again. The charm, the fascination of the idea is not a +little--though also not wholly--in the fact that, as the wave rises +over the aperture, there is the most encouraging appearance that they +perfectly may not. There it is. There is no more of them. It is a case +to which nature has, by the neatest stroke and with the best taste in +the world, just quietly attended. + +Beautiful, horrible, haunted: that is the essence of what, about itself, +Capri says to you--dip again into your Tacitus and see why; and yet, +while you roast a little under the awning and in the vaster shadow, it +is not because the trail of Tiberius is ineffaceable that you are most +uneasy. The trail of Germanicus in Italy to-day ramifies further and +bites perhaps even deeper; a proof of which is, precisely, that his +eclipse in the Blue Grotto is inexorably brief, that here he is popping +out again, bobbing enthusiastically back and scrambling triumphantly +back. The spirit, in truth, of his effective appropriation of Capri has +a broad-faced candour against which there is no standing up, supremely +expressive as it is of the well-known "love that kills," of Germanicus's +fatal susceptibility. If I were to let myself, however, incline to +_that_ aspect of the serious case of Capri I should embark on strange +depths. The straightness and simplicity, the classic, synthetic +directness of the German passion for Italy, make this passion probably +the sentiment in the world that is in the act of supplying enjoyment in +the largest, sweetest mouthfuls; and there is something unsurpassably +marked in the way that on this irresistible shore it has seated itself +to ruminate and digest. It keeps the record in its own loud accents; it +breaks out in the folds of the hills and on the crests of the crags into +every manner of symptom and warning. Huge advertisements and portents +stare across the bay; the acclivities bristle with breweries and +"restorations" and with great ugly Gothic names. I hasten, of course, to +add that some such general consciousness as this may well oppress, under +any sky, at the century's end, the brooding tourist who makes himself a +prey by staying anywhere, when the gong sounds, "behind." It is behind, +in the track and the reaction, that he least makes out the end of it +all, perceives that to visit anyone's country for anyone's sake is more +and more to find some one quite other in possession. No one, least of +all the brooder himself, is in his own. + + +II + + +I certainly, at any rate, felt the force of this truth when, on scaling +the general rock with the eye of apprehension, I made out at a point +much nearer its summit than its base the gleam of a dizzily-perched +white sea-gazing front which I knew for my particular landmark and which +promised so much that it would have been welcome to keep even no +more than half. Let me instantly say that it kept still more than it +promised, and by no means least in the way of leaving far below it the +worst of the outbreak of restorations and breweries. There is a road at +present to the upper village, with which till recently communication was +all by rude steps cut in the rock and diminutive donkeys scrambling on +the flints; one of those fine flights of construction which the +great road-making "Latin races" take, wherever they prevail, without +advertisement or bombast; and even while I followed along the face of +the cliff its climbing consolidated ledge, I asked myself how I could +think so well of it without consistently thinking better still of +the temples of beer so obviously destined to enrich its terminus. The +perfect answer to that was of course that the brooding tourist is never +bound to be consistent. What happier law for him than this very one, +precisely, when on at last alighting, high up in the blue air, to +stare and gasp and almost disbelieve, he embraced little by little the +beautiful truth particularly, on this occasion, reserved for himself, +and took in the stupendous picture? For here above all had the thought +and the hand come from far away--even from _ultima Thule_, and yet were +in possession triumphant and acclaimed. Well, all one could say was that +the way they had felt their opportunity, the divine conditions of the +place, spoke of the advantage of some such intellectual perspective as a +remote original standpoint alone perhaps can give. If what had finally, +with infinite patience, passion, labour, taste, got itself done there, +was like some supreme reward of an old dream of Italy, something perfect +after long delays, was it not verily in _ultima Thule_ that the vow +would have been piously enough made and the germ tenderly enough +nursed? For a certain art of asking of Italy all she can give, you must +doubtless either be a rare _raffine_ or a rare genius, a sophisticated +Norseman or just a Gabriele d' Annunzio. + +All she can give appeared to me, assuredly, for that day and the +following, gathered up and enrolled there: in the wondrous cluster and +dispersal of chambers, corners, courts, galleries, arbours, arcades, +long white ambulatories and vertiginous points of view. The greatest +charm of all perhaps was that, thanks to the particular conditions, she +seemed to abound, to overflow, in directions in which I had never yet +enjoyed the chance to find her so free. The indispensable thing was +therefore, in observation, in reflection, to press the opportunity hard, +to recognise that as the abundance was splendid, so, by the same stroke, +it was immensely suggestive. It dropped into one's lap, naturally, at +the end of an hour or two, the little white flower of its formula: the +brooding tourist, in other words, could only continue to brood till he +had made out in a measure, as I may say, what was so wonderfully the +matter with him. He was simply then in the presence, more than ever yet, +of the possible poetry of the personal and social life of the south, and +the fun would depend much--as occasions are fleeting--on his arriving +in time, in the interest of that imagination which is his only field +of sport, at adequate new notations of it. The sense of all this, his +obscure and special fun in the general bravery, mixed, on the morrow, +with the long, human hum of the bright, hot day and filled up the golden +cup with questions and answers. The feast of St. Antony, the patron of +the upper town, was the one thing in the air, and of the private beauty +of the place, there on the narrow shelf, in the shining, shaded loggias +and above the blue gulfs, all comers were to be made free. + + +III + + +The church-feast of its saint is of course for Anacapri, as for any +self-respecting Italian town, the great day of the year, and the +smaller the small "country," in native parlance, as well as the simpler, +accordingly, the life, the less the chance for leakage, on other +pretexts, of the stored wine of loyalty. This pure fluid, it was easy +to feel overnight, had not sensibly lowered its level; so that nothing +indeed, when the hour came, could well exceed the outpouring. All up and +down the Sorrentine promontory the early summer happens to be the time +of the saints, and I had just been witness there of a week on every day +of which one might have travelled, through kicked-up clouds and other +demonstrations, to a different hot holiday. There had been no bland +evening that, somewhere or other, in the hills or by the sea, the white +dust and the red glow didn't rise to the dim stars. Dust, perspiration, +illumination, conversation--these were the regular elements. "They're +very civilised," a friend who knows them as well as they can be known +had said to me of the people in general; "plenty of fireworks and plenty +of talk--that's all they ever want." That they were "civilised"--on the +side on which they were most to show--was therefore to be the word of +the whole business, and nothing could have, in fact, had more interest +than the meaning that for the thirty-six hours I read into it. + +Seen from below and diminished by distance, Anacapri makes scarce a +sign, and the road that leads to it is not traceable over the rock; but +it sits at its ease on its high, wide table, of which it covers--and +with picturesque southern culture as well--as much as it finds +convenient. As much of it as possible was squeezed all the morning, for +St. Antony, into the piazzetta before the church, and as much more into +that edifice as the robust odour mainly prevailing there allowed room +for. It was the odour that was in prime occupation, and one could only +wonder how so many men, women and children could cram themselves into so +much smell. It was surely the smell, thick and resisting, that was least +successfully to be elbowed. Meanwhile the good saint, before he could +move into the air, had, among the tapers and the tinsel, the opera-music +and the pulpit poundings, bravely to snuff it up. The shade outside was +hot, and the sun was hot; but we waited as densely for him to come out, +or rather to come "on," as the pit at the opera waits for the great +tenor. There were people from below and people from the mainland and +people from Pomerania and a brass band from Naples. There were other +figures at the end of longer strings--strings that, some of them indeed, +had pretty well given way and were now but little snippets trailing in +the dust. Oh, the queer sense of the good old Capri of artistic legend, +of which the name itself was, in the more benighted years--years of the +contadina and the pifferaro--a bright evocation! Oh, the echo, on the +spot, of each romantic tale! Oh, the loafing painters, so bad and so +happy, the conscious models, the vague personalities! The "beautiful +Capri girl" was of course not missed, though not perhaps so beautiful +as in her ancient glamour, which none the less didn't at all exclude +the probable presence--with _his_ legendary light quite undimmed--of +the English lord in disguise who will at no distant date marry her. The +whole thing was there; one held it in one's hand. + +The saint comes out at last, borne aloft in long procession and under a +high canopy: a rejoicing, staring, smiling saint, openly delighted +with the one happy hour in the year on which he may take his own walk. +Frocked and tonsured, but not at all macerated, he holds in his hand a +small wax puppet of an infant Jesus and shows him to all their friends, +to whom he nods and bows: to whom, in the dazzle of the sun he literally +seems to grin and wink, while his litter sways and his banners flap and +every one gaily greets him. The ribbons and draperies flutter, and the +white veils of the marching maidens, the music blares and the guns go +off and the chants resound, and it is all as holy and merry and noisy +as possible. The procession--down to the delightful little tinselled and +bare-bodied babies, miniature St. Antonys irrespective of sex, led or +carried by proud papas or brown grandsires--includes so much of the +population that you marvel there is such a muster to look on--like the +charades given in a family in which every one wants to act. But it +is all indeed in a manner one house, the little high-niched island +community, and nobody therefore, even in the presence of the head of it, +puts on an air of solemnity. Singular and suggestive before everything +else is the absence of any approach to our notion of the posture of +respect, and this among people whose manners in general struck one as so +good and, in particular, as so cultivated. The office of the saint--of +which the festa is but the annual reaffirmation--involves not the +faintest attribute of remoteness or mystery. + +While, with my friend, I waited for him, we went for coolness into the +second church of the place, a considerable and bedizened structure, +with the rare curiosity of a wondrous pictured pavement of majolica, +the garden of Eden done in large coloured tiles or squares, with every +beast, bird and river, and a brave _diminuendo_, in especial, from +portal to altar, of perspective, so that the animals and objects of the +foreground are big and those of the successive distances differ with +much propriety. Here in the sacred shade the old women were knitting, +gossipping, yawning, shuffling about; here the children were romping and +"larking"; here, in a manner, were the open parlour, the nursery, the +kindergarten and the _conversazione_ of the poor. This is everywhere the +case by the southern sea. I remember near Sorrento a wayside chapel that +seemed the scene of every function of domestic life, including cookery +and others. The odd thing is that it all appears to interfere so little +with that special civilised note--the note of manners--which is so +constantly touched. It is barbarous to expectorate in the temple of your +faith, but that doubtless is an extreme case. Is civilisation really +measured by the number of things people do respect? There would seem to +be much evidence against it. The oldest societies, the societies +with most traditions, are naturally not the least ironic, the least +_blasees_, and the African tribes who take so many things into account +that they fear to quit their huts at night are not the fine flower. + + +IV + + +Where, on the other hand, it was impossible not to feel to the full +all the charming _riguardi_--to use their own good word--in which our +friends _could_ abound, was, that afternoon, in the extraordinary temple +of art and hospitality that had been benignantly opened to me. Hither, +from three o'clock to seven, all the world, from the small in particular +to the smaller and the smallest, might freely flock, and here, from the +first hour to the last, the huge straw-bellied flasks of purple wine +were tilted for all the thirsty. They were many, the thirsty, they were +three hundred, they were unending; but the draughts they drank were +neither countable nor counted. This boon was dispensed in a long, +pillared portico, where everything was white and light save the blue +of the great bay as it played up from far below or as you took it in, +between shining columns, with your elbows on the parapet. Sorrento and +Vesuvius were over against you; Naples furthest off, melted, in the +middle of the picture, into shimmering vagueness and innocence; and the +long arm of Posilippo and the presence of the other islands, Procida, +the stricken Ischia, made themselves felt to the left. The grand air of +it all was in one's very nostrils and seemed to come from sources too +numerous and too complex to name. It was antiquity in solution, with +every brown, mild figure, every note of the old speech, every tilt of +the great flask, every shadow cast by every classic fragment, adding +its touch to the impression. What was the secret of the surprising +amenity?--to the essence of which one got no nearer than simply by +feeling afresh the old story of the deep interfusion of the present with +the past. You had felt that often before, and all that could, at the +most, help you now was that, more than ever yet, the present appeared +to become again really classic, to sigh with strange elusive sounds of +Virgil and Theocritus. Heaven only knows how little they would in truth +have had to say to it, but we yield to these visions as we must, and +when the imagination fairly turns in its pain almost any soft name is +good enough to soothe it. + +It threw such difficulties but a step back to say that the secret of +the amenity was "style"; for what in the world was the secret of style, +which you might have followed up and down the abysmal old Italy for so +many a year only to be still vainly calling for it? Everything, at any +rate, that happy afternoon, in that place of poetry, was bathed and +blessed with it. The castle of Barbarossa had been on the height behind; +the villa of black Tiberius had overhung the immensity from the right; +the white arcades and the cool chambers offered to every step some sweet +old "piece" of the past, some rounded porphyry pillar supporting a bust, +some shaft of pale alabaster upholding a trellis, some mutilated marble +image, some bronze that had roughly resisted. Our host, if we came to +that, had the secret; but he could only express it in grand practical +ways. One of them was precisely this wonderful "afternoon tea," in which +tea only--_that_, good as it is, has never the note of style--was not to +be found. The beauty and the poetry, at all events, were clear enough, +and the extraordinary uplifted distinction; but where, in all this, +it may be asked, was the element of "horror" that I have spoken of as +sensible?--what obsession that was not charming could find a place in +that splendid light, out of which the long summer squeezes every secret +and shadow? I'm afraid I'm driven to plead that these evils were exactly +in one's imagination, a predestined victim always of the cruel, the +fatal historic sense. To make so much distinction, how much history had +been needed!--so that the whole air still throbbed and ached with it, +as with an accumulation of ghosts to whom the very climate was pitiless, +condemning them to blanch for ever in the general glare and grandeur, +offering them no dusky northern nook, no place at the friendly fireside, +no shelter of legend or song. + + +V + + +My friend had, among many original relics, in one of his white +galleries--and how he understood the effect and the "value" of +whiteness!--two or three reproductions of the finest bronzes of the +Naples museum, the work of a small band of brothers whom he had found +himself justified in trusting to deal with their problem honourably +and to bring forth something as different as possible from the usual +compromise of commerce. They had brought forth, in especial, for him, a +copy of the young resting, slightly-panting Mercury which it was a pure +delight to live with, and they had come over from Naples on St. Antony's +eve, as they had done the year before, to report themselves to their +patron, to keep up good relations, to drink Capri wine and to join +in the tarantella. They arrived late, while we were at supper; they +received their welcome and their billet, and I am not sure it was not +the conversation and the beautiful manners of these obscure young men +that most fixed in my mind for the time the sense of the side of life +that, all around, was to come out strongest. It would be artless, +no doubt, to represent them as high types of innocence or even of +energy--at the same time that, weighing them against _some_ ruder folk +of our own race, we might perhaps have made bold to place their share +even of these qualities in the scale. It was an impression indeed never +infrequent in Italy, of which I might, in these days, first have felt +the force during a stay, just earlier, with a friend at Sorrento--a +friend who had good-naturedly "had in," on his wondrous terrace, after +dinner, for the pleasure of the gaping alien, the usual local quartette, +violins, guitar and flute, the musical barber, the musical tailor, +sadler, joiner, humblest sons of the people and exponents of Neapolitan +song. Neapolitan song, as we know, has been blown well about the world, +and it is late in the day to arrive with a ravished ear for it. That, +however, was scarcely at all, for me, the question: the question, on the +Sorrento terrace, so high up in the cool Capri night, was of the present +outlook, in the world, for the races with whom it has been a tradition, +in intercourse, positively to please. + +The personal civilisation, for intercourse, of the musical barber and +tailor, of the pleasant young craftsmen of my other friend's company, +was something that could be trusted to make the brooding tourist brood +afresh--to say more to him in fact, all the rest of the second occasion, +than everything else put together. The happy address, the charming +expression, the indistinctive discretion, the complete eclipse, in +short, of vulgarity and brutality--these things easily became among +these people the supremely suggestive note, begetting a hundred hopes +and fears as to the place that, with the present general turn of affairs +about the globe, is being kept for them. They are perhaps what the races +politically feeble have still most to contribute--but what appears to +be the happy prospect for the races politically feeble? And so the +afternoon waned, among the mellow marbles and the pleasant folk---the +purple wine flowed, the golden light faded, song and dance grew free and +circulation slightly embarrassed. But the great impression remained and +finally was exquisite. It was all purple wine, all art and song, and +nobody a grain the worse. It was fireworks and conversation--the former, +in the piazzetta, were to come later; it was civilisation and amenity. I +took in the greater picture, but I lost nothing else; and I talked with +the contadini about antique sculpture. No, nobody was a grain the worse; +and I had plenty to think of. So it was I was quickened to remember +that we others, we of my own country, as a race politically _not_ +weak, had--by what I had somewhere just heard--opened "three hundred +'saloons'" at Manila. + + +VI + + +The "other" afternoons I here pass on to--and I may include in them, +for that matter, various mornings scarce less charmingly sacred to +memory--were occasions of another and a later year; a brief but all +felicitous impression of Naples itself, and of the approach to it from +Rome, as well as of the return to Rome by a different wonderful way, +which I feel I shall be wise never to attempt to "improve on." Let +me muster assurance to confess that this comparatively recent and +superlatively rich reminiscence gives me for its first train of +ineffable images those of a motor-run that, beginning betimes of a +splendid June day, and seeing me, with my genial companions, blissfully +out of Porta San Paolo, hung over us thus its benediction till the +splendour had faded in the lamplit rest of the Chiaja. "We'll go by the +mountains," my friend, of the chariot of fire, had said, "and we'll come +back, after three days, by the sea"; which handsome promise flowered +into such flawless performance that I could but feel it to have closed +and rounded for me, beyond any further rehandling, the long-drawn rather +indeed than thick-studded chaplet of my visitations of Naples--from the +first, seasoned with the highest sensibility of youth, forty years ago, +to this last the other day. I find myself noting with interest--and just +to be able to emphasise it is what inspires me with these remarks--that, +in spite of the milder and smoother and perhaps, pictorially speaking, +considerably emptier, Neapolitan face of things, things in general, +of our later time, I recognised in my final impression a grateful, +a beguiling serenity. The place is at the best wild and weird and +sinister, and yet seemed on this occasion to be seated more at her ease +in her immense natural dignity. My disposition to feel that, I hasten to +add, was doubtless my own secret; my three beautiful days, at any rate, +filled themselves with the splendid harmony, several of the minor notes +of which ask for a place, such as it may be, just here. + +Wondrously, it was a clean and cool and, as who should say, quiet +and amply interspaced Naples--in tune with itself, no harsh jangle of +_forestieri_ vulgarising the concert. I seemed in fact, under the blaze +of summer, the only stranger--though the blaze of summer itself was, +for that matter, everywhere but a higher pitch of light and colour and +tradition, and a lower pitch of everything else; even, it struck me, +of sound and fury. The appeal in short was genial, and, faring out to +Pompeii of a Sunday afternoon, I enjoyed there, for the only time I +can recall, the sweet chance of a late hour or two, the hour of +the lengthening shadows, absolutely alone. The impression remains +ineffaceable--it was to supersede half-a-dozen other mixed memories, the +sense that had remained with me, from far back, of a pilgrimage always +here beset with traps and shocks and vulgar importunities, achieved +under fatal discouragements. Even Pompeii, in fine, haunt of _all_ the +cockneys of creation, burned itself, in the warm still eventide, as +clear as glass, or as the glow of a pale topaz, and the particular +cockney who roamed without a plan and at his ease, but with his feet on +Roman slabs, his hands on Roman stones, his eyes on the Roman void, his +consciousness really at last of some good to him, could open himself +as never before to the fond luxurious fallacy of a close communion, a +direct revelation. With which there were other moments for him not less +the fruit of the slow unfolding of time; the clearest of these again +being those enjoyed on the terrace of a small island-villa--the island +a rock and the villa a wondrous little rock-garden, unless a better term +would be perhaps rock-salon, just off the extreme point of Posilippo +and where, thanks to a friendliest hospitality, he was to hang ecstatic, +through another sublime afternoon, on the wave of a magical wand. Here, +as happened, were charming wise, original people even down to delightful +amphibious American children, enamelled by the sun of the Bay as for +figures of miniature Tritons and Nereids on a Renaissance plaque; and +above all, on the part of the general prospect, a demonstration of the +grand style of composition and effect that one was never to wish to see +bettered. The way in which the Italian scene on such occasions as +this seems to purify itself to the transcendent and perfect _idea_ +alone--idea of beauty, of dignity, of comprehensive grace, with all +accidents merged, all defects disowned, all experience outlived, and +to gather itself up into the mere mute eloquence of what has just +incalculably _been_, remains for ever the secret and the lesson of the +subtlest daughter of History. All one could do, at the heart of +the overarching crystal, and in presence of the relegated City, +the far-trailing Mount, the grand Sorrentine headland, the islands +incomparably stationed and related, was to wonder what may well become +of the so many other elements of any poor human and social complexus, +what might become of any successfully working or only struggling and +floundering civilisation at all, when high Natural Elegance proceeds to +take such exclusive charge and recklessly assume, as it were, _all_ the +responsibilities. + + +VII + + +This indeed had been quite the thing I was asking myself all the +wondrous way down from Rome, and was to ask myself afresh, on the +return, largely within sight of the sea, as our earlier course had +kept to the ineffably romantic inland valleys, the great decorated blue +vistas in which the breasts of the mountains shine vaguely with strange +high-lying city and castle and church and convent, even as shoulders of +no diviner line might be hung about with dim old jewels. It was odd, +at the end of time, long after those initiations, of comparative youth, +that had then struck one as extending the very field itself of felt +charm, as exhausting the possibilities of fond surrender, it was odd +to have positively a new basis of enjoyment, a new gate of triumphant +passage, thrust into one's consciousness and opening to one's use; just +as I confess I have to brace myself a little to call by such fine names +our latest, our ugliest and most monstrous aid to motion. It is true of +the monster, as we have known him up to now, that one can neither quite +praise him nor quite blame him without a blush--he reflects so the +nature of the company he's condemned to keep. His splendid easy power +addressed to noble aims makes him assuredly on occasion a purely +beneficent creature. I parenthesise at any rate that I know him in no +other light--counting out of course the acquaintance that consists of a +dismayed arrest in the road, with back flattened against wall or hedge, +for the dusty, smoky, stenchy shock of his passage. To no end is his +easy power more blest than to that of ministering to the ramifications, +as it were, of curiosity, or to that, in other words, of achieving for +us, among the kingdoms of the earth, the grander and more genial, the +comprehensive and _complete_ introduction. Much as was ever to be said +for our old forms of pilgrimage--and I am convinced that they are far +from wholly superseded--they left, they had to leave, dreadful gaps in +our yearning, dreadful lapses in our knowledge, dreadful failures in our +energy; there were always things off and beyond, goals of delight +and dreams of desire, that dropped as a matter of course into the +unattainable, and over to which our wonder-working agent now flings the +firm straight bridge. Curiosity has lost, under this amazing extension, +its salutary renouncements perhaps; contemplation has become one with +action and satisfaction one with desire--speaking always in the spirit +of the inordinate lover of an enlightened use of our eyes. That may +represent, for all I know, an insolence of advantage on which there will +be eventual heavy charges, as yet obscure and incalculable, to pay, and +I glance at the possibility only to avoid all thought of the lesson +of the long run, and to insist that I utter this dithyramb but in the +immediate flush and fever of the short. For such a beat of time as +our fine courteous and contemplative advance upon Naples, and for such +another as our retreat northward under the same fine law of observation +and homage, the bribed consciousness could only decline to question its +security. The sword of Damocles suspended over that presumption, the +skeleton at the banquet of extravagant ease, would have been that even +at our actual inordinate rate--leaving quite apart "improvements" to +come--such savings of trouble begin to use up the world; some hard +grain of difficulty being always a necessary part of the composition of +pleasure. The hard grain in our old comparatively pedestrian mixture, +before this business of our learning not so much even to fly (which +might indeed involve trouble) as to be mechanically and prodigiously +flown, quite another matter, was the element of uncertainty, effort +and patience; the handful of silver nails which, I admit, drove many an +impression home. The seated motorist misses the silver nails, I fully +acknowledge, save in so far as his aesthetic (let alone his moral) +conscience may supply him with some artful subjective substitute; in +which case the thing becomes a precious secret of his own. + +However, I wander wild--by which I mean I look too far ahead; my +intention having been only to let my sense of the merciless June beauty +of Naples Bay at the sunset hour and on the island terrace associate +itself with the whole inexpressible taste of our two motor-days' feast +of scenery. That queer question of the exquisite grand manner as the +most emphasised _all_ of things--of what it may, seated so predominant +in nature, insidiously, through the centuries, let generations and +populations "in for," hadn't in the least waited for the special +emphasis I speak of to hang about me. I must have found myself more or +less consciously entertaining it by the way--since how couldn't it be of +the very essence of the truth, constantly and intensely before us, that +Italy is really so much the most beautiful country in the world, taking +all things together, that others must stand off and be hushed while she +speaks? Seen thus in great comprehensive iridescent stretches, it is +the incomparable wrought _fusion_, fusion of human history and mortal +passion with the elements of earth and air, of colour, composition and +form, that constitutes her appeal and gives it the supreme heroic grace. +The chariot of fire favours fusion rather than promotes analysis, +and leaves much of that first June picture for me, doubtless, a great +accepted blur of violet and silver. The various hours and successive +aspects, the different strong passages of our reverse process, on +the other hand, still figure for me even as some series of sublime +landscape-frescoes--if the great Claude, say, had ever used that +medium--in the immense gallery of a palace; the homeward run by Capua, +Terracina, Gaeta and its storied headland fortress, across the deep, +strong, indescribable Pontine Marshes, white-cattled, strangely +pastoral, sleeping in the afternoon glow, yet stirred by the near +sea-breath. Thick somehow to the imagination as some full-bodied +sweetness of syrup is thick to the palate the atmosphere of that +region--thick with the sense of history and the very taste of time; as +if the haunt and home (which indeed it is) of some great fair bovine +aristocracy attended and guarded by halberdiers in the form of the +mounted and long-lanced herdsmen, admirably congruous with the whole +picture at every point, and never more so than in their manner of gaily +taking up, as with bell-voices of golden bronze, the offered wayside +greeting. + +{Illustration: TERRACINA} + +There had been this morning among the impressions of our first hour an +unforgettable specimen of that general type--the image of one of those +human figures on which our perception of the romantic so often pounces +in Italy as on the genius of the scene personified; with this advantage, +that as the scene there has, at its best, an unsurpassable distinction, +so the physiognomic representative, standing for it all, and with +an animation, a complexion, an expression, a fineness and fulness of +humanity that appear to have gathered it in and to sum it up, becomes +beautiful by the same simple process, very much, that makes the heir to +a great capitalist rich. Our early start, our roundabout descent from +Posilippo by shining Baire for avoidance of the city, had been an hour +of enchantment beyond any notation I can here recover; all lustre and +azure, yet all composition and classicism, the prospect developed and +spread, till after extraordinary upper reaches of radiance and horizons +of pearl we came at the turn of a descent upon a stalwart young +gamekeeper, or perhaps substantial young farmer, who, well-appointed and +blooming, had unslung his gun and, resting on it beside a hedge, just +lived for us, in the rare felicity of his whole look, during that +moment and while, in recognition, or almost, as we felt, in homage, we +instinctively checked our speed. He pointed, as it were, the lesson, +giving the supreme right accent or final exquisite turn to the immense +magnificent phrase; which from those moments on, and on and on, +resembled doubtless nothing so much as a page written, by a consummate +verbal economist and master of style, in the noblest of all tongues. Our +splendid human plant by the wayside had flowered thus into style--and +there wasn't to be, all day, a lapse of eloquence, a wasted word or a +cadence missed. + +These things are personal memories, however, with the logic of certain +insistences of that sort often difficult to seize. Why should I have +kept so sacredly uneffaced, for instance, our small afternoon wait at +tea-time or, as we made it, coffee-time, in the little brown piazzetta +of Velletri, just short of the final push on through the flushed +Castelli Romani and the drop and home-stretch across the darkening +Campagna? We had been dropped into the very lap of the ancient civic +family, after the inveterate fashion of one's sense of such stations in +small Italian towns. There was a narrow raised terrace, with steps, +in front of the best of the two or three local cafes, and in the soft +enclosed, the warm waning light of June various benign contemplative +worthies sat at disburdened tables and, while they smoked long black +weeds, enjoyed us under those probable workings of subtlety with +which we invest so many quite unimaginably blank (I dare say) Italian +simplicities. The charm was, as always in Italy, in the tone and the air +and the happy hazard of things, which made any positive pretension or +claimed importance a comparatively trifling question. We slid, in the +steep little place, more or less down hill; we wished, stomachically, we +had rather addressed ourselves to a tea-basket; we suffered importunity +from unchidden infants who swarmed about our chairs and romped about +our feet; we stayed no long time, and "went to see" nothing; yet we +communicated to intensity, we lay at our ease in the bosom of the past, +we practised intimacy, in short, an intimacy so much greater than +the mere accidental and ostensible: the difficulty for the right and +grateful expression of which makes the old, the familiar tax on the +luxury of loving Italy. + + +1900-1909. + + + + + + + +End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Italian Hours, by Henry James + +*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ITALIAN HOURS *** + +***** This file should be named 6354.txt or 6354.zip ***** +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: + http://www.gutenberg.org/6/3/5/6354/ + +Produced by Richard Farris and the online team at +Distributed Proofreaders + + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + +Title: Italian Hours + +Author: Henry James + + +Release Date: August, 2004 [EBook #6354] +This file was first posted on November 29, 2002] +Last Updated: September 18, 2016 + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: UTF-8 + +*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ITALIAN HOURS *** + + + + +Produced by Richard Farris and the online team at +Distributed Proofreaders + +HTML file produced by David Widger + + + + +</pre> + + <div style="height: 8em;"> + <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /> + </div> + <h1> + ITALIAN HOURS + </h1> + <h2> + By Henry James + </h2> + <p> + <br /> + </p> + <h4> + Published November 1909 + </h4> + <p> + <a name="link2H_PREF" id="link2H_PREF"> + <!-- H2 anchor --> </a> + </p> + <div style="height: 4em;"> + <br /><br /><br /><br /> + </div> + <h2> + PREFACE + </h2> + <p> + The chapters of which this volume is composed have with few exceptions + already been collected, and were then associated with others commemorative + of other impressions of (no very extensive) excursions and wanderings. The + notes on various visits to Italy are here for the first time exclusively + placed together, and as they largely refer to quite other days than these—the + date affixed to each paper sufficiently indicating this—I have + introduced a few passages that speak for a later and in some cases a + frequently repeated vision of the places and scenes in question. I have + not hesitated to amend my text, expressively, wherever it seemed urgently + to ask for this, though I have not pretended to add the element of + information or the weight of curious and critical insistence to a brief + record of light inquiries and conclusions. The fond appeal of the observer + concerned is all to aspects and appearances—above all to the + interesting face of things as it mainly <i>used</i> to be. + </p> + <h3> + H. J. + </h3> + <p> + <br /> <br /> + </p> + <hr /> + <p> + <br /> <br /> + </p> + <p> + <b>CONTENTS</b> + </p> + <p class="toc"> + <a href="#link2H_PREF"> PREFACE </a> + </p> + <p class="toc"> + <a href="#link2H_4_0002"> VENICE </a> + </p> + <p class="toc"> + <a href="#link2H_4_0003"> THE GRAND CANAL </a> + </p> + <p class="toc"> + <a href="#link2H_4_0004"> VENICE: AN EARLY IMPRESSION </a> + </p> + <p class="toc"> + <a href="#link2H_4_0005"> TWO OLD HOUSES AND THREE YOUNG WOMEN </a> + </p> + <p class="toc"> + <a href="#link2H_4_0006"> CASA ALVISI </a> + </p> + <p class="toc"> + <a href="#link2H_4_0007"> FROM CHAMBÉRY TO MILAN </a> + </p> + <p class="toc"> + <a href="#link2H_4_0008"> THE OLD SAINT-GOTHARD LEAVES FROM A NOTE-BOOK + </a> + </p> + <p class="toc"> + <a href="#link2H_4_0009"> ITALY REVISITED </a> + </p> + <p class="toc"> + <a href="#link2H_4_0010"> A ROMAN HOLIDAY </a> + </p> + <p class="toc"> + <a href="#link2H_4_0011"> ROMAN RIDES </a> + </p> + <p class="toc"> + <a href="#link2H_4_0012"> ROMAN NEIGHBOURHOODS </a> + </p> + <p class="toc"> + <a href="#link2H_4_0013"> THE AFTER-SEASON IN ROME </a> + </p> + <p class="toc"> + <a href="#link2H_4_0014"> FROM A ROMAN NOTE-BOOK </a> + </p> + <p class="toc"> + <a href="#link2H_4_0015"> A FEW OTHER ROMAN NEIGHBOURHOODS </a> + </p> + <p class="toc"> + <a href="#link2H_4_0016"> A CHAIN OF CITIES </a> + </p> + <p class="toc"> + <a href="#link2H_4_0017"> SIENA EARLY AND LATE </a> + </p> + <p class="toc"> + <a href="#link2H_4_0018"> THE AUTUMN IN FLORENCE </a> + </p> + <p class="toc"> + <a href="#link2H_4_0019"> FLORENTINE NOTES </a> + </p> + <p class="toc"> + <a href="#link2H_4_0020"> TUSCAN CITIES </a> + </p> + <p class="toc"> + <a href="#link2H_4_0021"> OTHER TUSCAN CITIES </a> + </p> + <p class="toc"> + <a href="#link2H_4_0022"> RAVENNA </a> + </p> + <p class="toc"> + <a href="#link2H_4_0023"> THE SAINT’S AFTERNOON AND OTHERS </a> + </p> + <p> + <br /> <br /> + </p> + <hr /> + <p> + <a name="link2H_4_0002" id="link2H_4_0002"> + <!-- H2 anchor --> </a> + </p> + <div style="height: 4em;"> + <br /><br /><br /><br /> + </div> + <h2> + VENICE + </h2> + <p> + It is a great pleasure to write the word; but I am not sure there is not a + certain impudence in pretending to add anything to it. Venice has been + painted and described many thousands of times, and of all the cities of + the world is the easiest to visit without going there. Open the first book + and you will find a rhapsody about it; step into the first + picture-dealer’s and you will find three or four high-coloured “views” of + it. There is notoriously nothing more to be said on the subject. Every one + has been there, and every one has brought back a collection of + photographs. There is as little mystery about the Grand Canal as about our + local thoroughfare, and the name of St. Mark is as familiar as the + postman’s ring. It is not forbidden, however, to speak of familiar things, + and I hold that for the true Venice-lover Venice is always in order. There + is nothing new to be said about her certainly, but the old is better than + any novelty. It would be a sad day indeed when there should be something + new to say. I write these lines with the full consciousness of having no + information whatever to offer. I do not pretend to enlighten the reader; I + pretend only to give a fillip to his memory; and I hold any writer + sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme. + </p> + <h3> + I + </h3> + <p> + Mr. Ruskin has given it up, that is very true; but only after extracting + half a lifetime of pleasure and an immeasurable quantity of fame from it. + We all may do the same, after it has served our turn, which it probably + will not cease to do for many a year to come. Meantime it is Mr. Ruskin + who beyond anyone helps us to enjoy. He has indeed lately produced several + aids to depression in the shape of certain little humorous—ill-humorous—pamphlets + (the series of <i>St. Mark’s Rest</i>) which embody his latest reflections + on the subject of our city and describe the latest atrocities perpetrated + there. These latter are numerous and deeply to be deplored; but to admit + that they have spoiled Venice would be to admit that Venice may be spoiled—an + admission pregnant, as it seems to us, with disloyalty. Fortunately one + reacts against the Ruskinian contagion, and one hour of the lagoon is + worth a hundred pages of demoralised prose. This queer late-coming prose + of Mr. Ruskin (including the revised and condensed issue of the <i>Stones + of Venice</i>, only one little volume of which has been published, or + perhaps ever will be) is all to be read, though much of it appears + addressed to children of tender age. It is pitched in the nursery-key, and + might be supposed to emanate from an angry governess. It is, however, all + suggestive, and much of it is delightfully just. There is an inconceivable + want of form in it, though the author has spent his life in laying down + the principles of form and scolding people for departing from them; but it + throbs and flashes with the love of his subject—a love disconcerted + and abjured, but which has still much of the force of inspiration. Among + the many strange things that have befallen Venice, she has had the good + fortune to become the object of a passion to a man of splendid genius, who + has made her his own and in doing so has made her the world’s. There is no + better reading at Venice therefore, as I say, than Ruskin, for every true + Venice-lover can separate the wheat from the chaff. The narrow theological + spirit, the moralism <i>à tout propos</i>, the queer provincialities and + pruderies, are mere wild weeds in a mountain of flowers. One may doubtless + be very happy in Venice without reading at all—without criticising + or analysing or thinking a strenuous thought. It is a city in which, I + suspect, there is very little strenuous thinking, and yet it is a city in + which there must be almost as much happiness as misery. The misery of + Venice stands there for all the world to see; it is part of the spectacle—a + thoroughgoing devotee of local colour might consistently say it is part of + the pleasure. The Venetian people have little to call their own—little + more than the bare privilege of leading their lives in the most beautiful + of towns. Their habitations are decayed; their taxes heavy; their pockets + light; their opportunities few. One receives an impression, however, that + life presents itself to them with attractions not accounted for in this + meagre train of advantages, and that they are on better terms with it than + many people who have made a better bargain. They lie in the sunshine; they + dabble in the sea; they wear bright rags; they fall into attitudes and + harmonies; they assist at an eternal <i>conversazione</i>. It is not easy + to say that one would have them other than they are, and it certainly + would make an immense difference should they be better fed. The number of + persons in Venice who evidently never have enough to eat is painfully + large; but it would be more painful if we did not equally perceive that + the rich Venetian temperament may bloom upon a dog’s allowance. Nature has + been kind to it, and sunshine and leisure and conversation and beautiful + views form the greater part of its sustenance. It takes a great deal to + make a successful American, but to make a happy Venetian takes only a + handful of quick sensibility. The Italian people have at once the good and + the evil fortune to be conscious of few wants; so that if the civilisation + of a society is measured by the number of its needs, as seems to be the + common opinion to-day, it is to be feared that the children of the lagoon + would make but a poor figure in a set of comparative tables. Not their + misery, doubtless, but the way they elude their misery, is what pleases + the sentimental tourist, who is gratified by the sight of a beautiful race + that lives by the aid of its imagination. The way to enjoy Venice is to + follow the example of these people and make the most of simple pleasures. + Almost all the pleasures of the place are simple; this may be maintained + even under the imputation of ingenious paradox. There is no simpler + pleasure than looking at a fine Titian, unless it be looking at a fine + Tintoret or strolling into St. Mark’s,—abominable the way one falls + into the habit,—and resting one’s light-wearied eyes upon the + windowless gloom; or than floating in a gondola or than hanging over a + balcony or than taking one’s coffee at Florian’s. It is of such + superficial pastimes that a Venetian day is composed, and the pleasure of + the matter is in the emotions to which they minister. These are + fortunately of the finest—otherwise Venice would be insufferably + dull. Reading Ruskin is good; reading the old records is perhaps better; + but the best thing of all is simply staying on. The only way to care for + Venice as she deserves it is to give her a chance to touch you often—to + linger and remain and return. + </p> + <h3> + II + </h3> + <p> + The danger is that you will not linger enough—a danger of which the + author of these lines had known something. It is possible to dislike + Venice, and to entertain the sentiment in a responsible and intelligent + manner. There are travellers who think the place odious, and those who are + not of this opinion often find themselves wishing that the others were + only more numerous. The sentimental tourist’s sole quarrel with his Venice + is that he has too many competitors there. He likes to be alone; to be + original; to have (to himself, at least) the air of making discoveries. + The Venice of to-day is a vast museum where the little wicket that admits + you is perpetually turning and creaking, and you march through the + institution with a herd of fellow-gazers. There is nothing left to + discover or describe, and originality of attitude is completely + impossible. This is often very annoying; you can only turn your back on + your impertinent playfellow and curse his want of delicacy. But this is + not the fault of Venice; it is the fault of the rest of the world. The + fault of Venice is that, though she is easy to admire, she is not so easy + to live with as you count living in other places. After you have stayed a + week and the bloom of novelty has rubbed off you wonder if you can + accommodate yourself to the peculiar conditions. Your old habits become + impracticable and you find yourself obliged to form new ones of an + undesirable and unprofitable character. You are tired of your gondola (or + you think you are) and you have seen all the principal pictures and heard + the names of the palaces announced a dozen times by your gondolier, who + brings them out almost as impressively as if he were an English butler + bawling titles into a drawing-room. You have walked several hundred times + round the Piazza and bought several bushels of photographs. You have + visited the antiquity mongers whose horrible sign-boards dishonour some of + the grandest vistas in the Grand Canal; you have tried the opera and found + it very bad; you have bathed at the Lido and found the water flat. You + have begun to have a shipboard-feeling—to regard the Piazza as an + enormous saloon and the Riva degli Schiavoni as a promenade-deck. You are + obstructed and encaged; your desire for space is unsatisfied; you miss + your usual exercise. You try to take a walk and you fail, and meantime, as + I say, you have come to regard your gondola as a sort of magnified baby’s + cradle. You have no desire to be rocked to sleep, though you are + sufficiently kept awake by the irritation produced, as you gaze across the + shallow lagoon, by the attitude of the perpetual gondolier, with his + turned-out toes, his protruded chin, his absurdly unscientific stroke. The + canals have a horrible smell, and the everlasting Piazza, where you have + looked repeatedly at every article in every shop-window and found them all + rubbish, where the young Venetians who sell bead bracelets and “panoramas” + are perpetually thrusting their wares at you, where the same + tightly-buttoned officers are for ever sucking the same black weeds, at + the same empty tables, in front of the same cafés—the Piazza, as I + say, has resolved itself into a magnificent tread-mill. This is the state + of mind of those shallow inquirers who find Venice all very well for a + week; and if in such a state of mind you take your departure you act with + fatal rashness. The loss is your own, moreover; it is not—with all + deference to your personal attractions—that of your companions who + remain behind; for though there are some disagreeable things in Venice + there is nothing so disagreeable as the visitors. The conditions are + peculiar, but your intolerance of them evaporates before it has had time + to become a prejudice. When you have called for the bill to go, pay it and + remain, and you will find on the morrow that you are deeply attached to + Venice. It is by living there from day to day that you feel the fulness of + her charm; that you invite her exquisite influence to sink into your + spirit. The creature varies like a nervous woman, whom you know only when + you know all the aspects of her beauty. She has high spirits or low, she + is pale or red, grey or pink, cold or warm, fresh or wan, according to the + weather or the hour. She is always interesting and almost always sad; but + she has a thousand occasional graces and is always liable to happy + accidents. You become extraordinarily fond of these things; you count upon + them; they make part of your life. Tenderly fond you become; there is + something indefinable in those depths of personal acquaintance that + gradually establish themselves. The place seems to personify itself, to + become human and sentient and conscious of your affection. You desire to + embrace it, to caress it, to possess it; and finally a soft sense of + possession grows up and your visit becomes a perpetual love-affair. It is + very true that if you go, as the author of these lines on a certain + occasion went, about the middle of March, a certain amount of + disappointment is possible. He had paid no visit for several years, and in + the interval the beautiful and helpless city had suffered an increase of + injury. The barbarians are in full possession and you tremble for what + they may do. You are reminded from the moment of your arrival that Venice + scarcely exists any more as a city at all; that she exists only as a + battered peep-show and bazaar. There was a horde of savage Germans + encamped in the Piazza, and they filled the Ducal Palace and the Academy + with their uproar. The English and Americans came a little later. They + came in good time, with a great many French, who were discreet enough to + make very long repasts at the Caffè Quadri, during which they were out of + the way. The months of April and May of the year 1881 were not, as a + general thing, a favourable season for visiting the Ducal Palace and the + Academy. The <i>valet-de-place</i> had marked them for his own and held + triumphant possession of them. He celebrates his triumphs in a terrible + brassy voice, which resounds all over the place, and has, whatever + language he be speaking, the accent of some other idiom. During all the + spring months in Venice these gentry abound in the great resorts, and they + lead their helpless captives through churches and galleries in dense + irresponsible groups. They infest the Piazza; they pursue you along the + Riva; they hang about the bridges and the doors of the cafés. In saying + just now that I was disappointed at first, I had chiefly in mind the + impression that assails me to-day in the whole precinct of St. Mark’s. The + condition of this ancient sanctuary is surely a great scandal. The pedlars + and commissioners ply their trade—often a very unclean one—at + the very door of the temple; they follow you across the threshold, into + the sacred dusk, and pull your sleeve, and hiss into your ear, scuffling + with each other for customers. There is a great deal of dishonour about + St. Mark’s altogether, and if Venice, as I say, has become a great bazaar, + this exquisite edifice is now the biggest booth. + </p> + <h3> + III + </h3> + <p> + It is treated as a booth in all ways, and if it had not somehow a great + spirit of solemnity within it the traveller would soon have little warrant + for regarding it as a religious affair. The restoration of the outer + walls, which has lately been so much attacked and defended, is certainly a + great shock. Of the necessity of the work only an expert is, I suppose, in + a position to judge; but there is no doubt that, if a necessity it be, it + is one that is deeply to be regretted. To no more distressing necessity + have people of taste lately had to resign themselves. Wherever the hand of + the restorer has been laid all semblance of beauty has vanished; which is + a sad fact, considering that the external loveliness of St. Mark’s has + been for ages less impressive only than that of the still comparatively + uninjured interior. I know not what is the measure of necessity in such a + case, and it appears indeed to be a very delicate question. To-day, at any + rate, that admirable harmony of faded mosaic and marble which, to the eye + of the traveller emerging from the narrow streets that lead to the Piazza, + filled all the further end of it with a sort of dazzling silver presence—to-day + this lovely vision is in a way to be completely reformed and indeed + well-nigh abolished. The old softness and mellowness of colour—the + work of the quiet centuries and of the breath of the salt sea—is + giving way to large crude patches of new material which have the effect of + a monstrous malady rather than of a restoration to health. They look like + blotches of red and white paint and dishonourable smears of chalk on the + cheeks of a noble matron. The face toward the Piazzetta is in especial the + newest-looking thing conceivable—as new as a new pair of boots or as + the morning’s paper. We do not profess, however, to undertake a scientific + quarrel with these changes; we admit that our complaint is a purely + sentimental one. The march of industry in united Italy must doubtless be + looked at as a whole, and one must endeavour to believe that it is through + innumerable lapses of taste that this deeply interesting country is + groping her way to her place among the nations. For the present, it is not + to be denied, certain odd phases of the process are more visible than the + result, to arrive at which it seems necessary that, as she was of old a + passionate votary of the beautiful, she should to-day burn everything that + she has adored. It is doubtless too soon to judge her, and there are + moments when one is willing to forgive her even the restoration of St. + Mark’s. Inside as well there has been a considerable attempt to make the + place more tidy; but the general effect, as yet, has not seriously + suffered. What I chiefly remember is the straightening out of that dark + and rugged old pavement—those deep undulations of primitive mosaic + in which the fond spectator was thought to perceive an intended + resemblance to the waves of the ocean. Whether intended or not the analogy + was an image the more in a treasure-house of images; but from a + considerable portion of the church it has now disappeared. Throughout the + greater part indeed the pavement remains as recent generations have known + it—dark, rich, cracked, uneven, spotted with porphyry and + time-blackened malachite, polished by the knees of innumerable + worshippers; but in other large stretches the idea imitated by the + restorers is that of the ocean in a dead calm, and the model they have + taken the floor of a London club-house or of a New York hotel. I think no + Venetian and scarcely any Italian cares much for such differences; and + when, a year ago, people in England were writing to the <i>Times</i> about + the whole business and holding meetings to protest against it the dear + children of the lagoon—so far as they heard or heeded the rumour—thought + them partly busy-bodies and partly asses. Busy-bodies they doubtless were, + but they took a good deal of disinterested trouble. It never occurs to the + Venetian mind of to-day that such trouble may be worth taking; the + Venetian mind vainly endeavours to conceive a state of existence in which + personal questions are so insipid that people have to look for grievances + in the wrongs of brick and marble. I must not, however, speak of St. + Mark’s as if I had the pretension of giving a description of it or as if + the reader desired one. The reader has been too well served already. It is + surely the best-described building in the world. Open the <i>Stones of + Venice</i>, open Théophile Gautier’s <i>Italia</i>, and you will see. + These writers take it very seriously, and it is only because there is + another way of taking it that I venture to speak of it; the way that + offers itself after you have been in Venice a couple of months, and the + light is hot in the great Square, and you pass in under the pictured + porticoes with a feeling of habit and friendliness and a desire for + something cool and dark. There are moments, after all, when the church is + comparatively quiet and empty, and when you may sit there with an easy + consciousness of its beauty. From the moment, of course, that you go into + any Italian church for any purpose but to say your prayers or look at the + ladies, you rank yourself among the trooping barbarians I just spoke of; + you treat the place as an orifice in the peep-show. Still, it is almost a + spiritual function—or, at the worst, an amorous one—to feed + one’s eyes on the molten colour that drops from the hollow vaults and + thickens the air with its richness. It is all so quiet and sad and faded + and yet all so brilliant and living. The strange figures in the mosaic + pictures, bending with the curve of niche and vault, stare down through + the glowing dimness; the burnished gold that stands behind them catches + the light on its little uneven cubes. St. Mark’s owes nothing of its + character to the beauty of proportion or perspective; there is nothing + grandly balanced or far-arching; there are no long lines nor triumphs of + the perpendicular. The church arches indeed, but arches like a dusky + cavern. Beauty of surface, of tone, of detail, of things near enough to + touch and kneel upon and lean against—it is from this the effect + proceeds. In this sort of beauty the place is incredibly rich, and you may + go there every day and find afresh some lurking pictorial nook. It is a + treasury of bits, as the painters say; and there are usually three or four + of the fraternity with their easels set up in uncertain equilibrium on the + undulating floor. It is not easy to catch the real complexion of St. + Mark’s, and these laudable attempts at portraiture are apt to look either + lurid or livid. But if you cannot paint the old loose-looking marble + slabs, the great panels of basalt and jasper, the crucifixes of which the + lonely anguish looks deeper in the vertical light, the tabernacles whose + open doors disclose a dark Byzantine image spotted with dull, crooked gems—if + you cannot paint these things you can at least grow fond of them. You grow + fond even of the old benches of red marble, partly worn away by the + breeches of many generations and attached to the base of those wide + pilasters of which the precious plating, delightful in its faded + brownness, with a faint grey bloom upon it, bulges and yawns a little with + honourable age. + </p> + <p> + {Illustration: FLAGS AT ST. MARK’S VENICE} + </p> + <h3> + IV + </h3> + <p> + Even at first, when the vexatious sense of the city of the Doges reduced + to earning its living as a curiosity-shop was in its keenness, there was a + great deal of entertainment to be got from lodging on Riva Schiavoni and + looking out at the far-shimmering lagoon. There was entertainment indeed + in simply getting into the place and observing the queer incidents of a + Venetian installation. A great many persons contribute indirectly to this + undertaking, and it is surprising how they spring out at you during your + novitiate to remind you that they are bound up in some mysterious manner + with the constitution of your little establishment. It was an interesting + problem for instance to trace the subtle connection existing between the + niece of the landlady and the occupancy of the fourth floor. Superficially + it was none too visible, as the young lady in question was a dancer at the + Fenice theatre—or when that was closed at the Rossini—and + might have been supposed absorbed by her professional duties. It proved + necessary, however, that she should hover about the premises in a velvet + jacket and a pair of black kid gloves with one little white button; as + also, that she should apply a thick coating of powder to her face, which + had a charming oval and a sweet weak expression, like that of most of the + Venetian maidens, who, as a general thing—it was not a peculiarity + of the land-lady’s niece—are fond of besmearing themselves with + flour. You soon recognise that it is not only the many-twinkling lagoon + you behold from a habitation on the Riva; you see a little of everything + Venetian. Straight across, before my windows, rose the great pink mass of + San Giorgio Maggiore, which has for an ugly Palladian church a success + beyond all reason. It is a success of position, of colour, of the immense + detached Campanile, tipped with a tall gold angel. I know not whether it + is because San Giorgio is so grandly conspicuous, with a great deal of + worn, faded-looking brickwork; but for many persons the whole place has a + kind of suffusion of rosiness. Asked what may be the leading colour in the + Venetian concert, we should inveterately say Pink, and yet without + remembering after all that this elegant hue occurs very often. It is a + faint, shimmering, airy, watery pink; the bright sea-light seems to flush + with it and the pale whiteish-green of lagoon and canal to drink it in. + There is indeed a great deal of very evident brickwork, which is never + fresh or loud in colour, but always burnt out, as it were, always + exquisitely mild. + </p> + <p> + Certain little mental pictures rise before the collector of memories at + the simple mention, written or spoken, of the places he has loved. When I + hear, when I see, the magical name I have written above these pages, it is + not of the great Square that I think, with its strange basilica and its + high arcades, nor of the wide mouth of the Grand Canal, with the stately + steps and the well-poised dome of the Salute; it is not of the low lagoon, + nor the sweet Piazzetta, nor the dark chambers of St. Mark’s. I simply see + a narrow canal in the heart of the city—a patch of green water and a + surface of pink wall. The gondola moves slowly; it gives a great smooth + swerve, passes under a bridge, and the gondolier’s cry, carried over the + quiet water, makes a kind of splash in the stillness. A girl crosses the + little bridge, which has an arch like a camel’s back, with an old shawl on + her head, which makes her characteristic and charming; you see her against + the sky as you float beneath. The pink of the old wall seems to fill the + whole place; it sinks even into the opaque water. Behind the wall is a + garden, out of which the long arm of a white June rose—the roses of + Venice are splendid—has flung itself by way of spontaneous ornament. + On the other side of this small water-way is a great shabby facade of + Gothic windows and balconies—balconies on which dirty clothes are + hung and under which a cavernous-looking doorway opens from a low flight + of slimy water-steps. It is very hot and still, the canal has a queer + smell, and the whole place is enchanting. + </p> + <p> + {Illustration: A NARROW CANAL, VENICE} + </p> + <p> + It is poor work, however, talking about the colour of things in Venice. + The fond spectator is perpetually looking at it from his window, when he + is not floating about with that delightful sense of being for the moment a + part of it, which any gentleman in a gondola is free to entertain. + Venetian windows and balconies are a dreadful lure, and while you rest + your elbows on these cushioned ledges the precious hours fly away. But in + truth Venice isn’t in fair weather a place for concentration of mind. The + effort required for sitting down to a writing-table is heroic, and the + brightest page of MS. looks dull beside the brilliancy of your <i>milieu</i>. + All nature beckons you forth and murmurs to you sophistically that such + hours should be devoted to collecting impressions. Afterwards, in ugly + places, at unprivileged times, you can convert your impressions into + prose. Fortunately for the present proser the weather wasn’t always fine; + the first month was wet and windy, and it was better to judge of the + matter from an open casement than to respond to the advances of persuasive + gondoliers. Even then however there was a constant entertainment in the + view. It was all cold colour, and the steel-grey floor of the lagoon was + stroked the wrong way by the wind. Then there were charming cool + intervals, when the churches, the houses, the anchored fishing-boats, the + whole gently-curving line of the Riva, seemed to be washed with a pearly + white. Later it all turned warm—warm to the eye as well as to other + senses. After the middle of May the whole place was in a glow. The sea + took on a thousand shades, but they were only infinite variations of blue, + and those rosy walls I just spoke of began to flush in the thick sunshine. + Every patch of colour, every yard of weather-stained stucco, every glimpse + of nestling garden or daub of sky above a <i>calle</i>, began to shine and + sparkle—began, as the painters say, to “compose.” The lagoon was + streaked with odd currents, which played across it like huge smooth + finger-marks. The gondolas multiplied and spotted it allover; every + gondola and gondolier looking, at a distance, precisely like every other. + </p> + <p> + There is something strange and fascinating in this mysterious + impersonality of the gondola. It has an identity when you are in it, but, + thanks to their all being of the same size, shape and colour, and of the + same deportment and gait, it has none, or as little as possible, as you + see it pass before you. From my windows on the Riva there was always the + same silhouette—the long, black, slender skiff, lifting its head and + throwing it back a little, moving yet seeming not to move, with the + grotesquely-graceful figure on the poop. This figure inclines, as may be, + more to the graceful or to the grotesque—standing in the “second + position” of the dancing-master, but indulging from the waist upward in a + freedom of movement which that functionary would deprecate. One may say as + a general thing that there is something rather awkward in the movement + even of the most graceful gondolier, and something graceful in the + movement of the most awkward. In the graceful men of course the grace + predominates, and nothing can be finer than the large, firm way in which, + from their point of vantage, they throw themselves over their tremendous + oar. It has the boldness of a plunging bird and the regularity of a + pendulum. Sometimes, as you see this movement in profile, in a gondola + that passes you—see, as you recline on your own low cushions, the + arching body of the gondolier lifted up against the sky—it has a + kind of nobleness which suggests an image on a Greek frieze. The gondolier + at Venice is your very good friend—if you choose him happily—and + on the quality of the personage depends a good deal that of your + impressions. He is a part of your daily life, your double, your shadow, + your complement. Most people, I think, either like their gondolier or hate + him; and if they like him, like him very much. In this case they take an + interest in him after his departure; wish him to be sure of employment, + speak of him as the gem of gondoliers and tell their friends to be certain + to “secure” him. There is usually no difficulty in securing him; there is + nothing elusive or reluctant about a gondolier. Nothing would induce me + not to believe them for the most part excellent fellows, and the + sentimental tourist must always have a kindness for them. More than the + rest of the population, of course, they are the children of Venice; they + are associated with its idiosyncrasy, with its essence, with its silence, + with its melancholy. + </p> + <p> + When I say they are associated with its silence I should immediately add + that they are associated also with its sound. Among themselves they are an + extraordinarily talkative company. They chatter at the <i>traghetti</i>, + where they always have some sharp point under discussion; they bawl across + the canals; they bespeak your commands as you approach; they defy each + other from afar. If you happen to have a <i>traghetto</i> under your + window, you are well aware that they are a vocal race. I should go even + further than I went just now, and say that the voice of the gondolier is + in fact for audibility the dominant or rather the only note of Venice. + There is scarcely another heard sound, and that indeed is part of the + interest of the place. There is no noise there save distinctly human + noise; no rumbling, no vague uproar, nor rattle of wheels and hoofs. It is + all articulate and vocal and personal. One may say indeed that Venice is + emphatically the city of conversation; people talk all over the place + because there is nothing to interfere with its being caught by the ear. + Among the populace it is a general family party. The still water carries + the voice, and good Venetians exchange confidences at a distance of half a + mile. It saves a world of trouble, and they don’t like trouble. Their + delightful garrulous language helps them to make Venetian life a long <i>conversazione</i>. + This language, with its soft elisions, its odd transpositions, its kindly + contempt for consonants and other disagreeables, has in it something + peculiarly human and accommodating. If your gondolier had no other merit + he would have the merit that he speaks Venetian. This may rank as a merit + even—some people perhaps would say especially—when you don’t + understand what he says. But he adds to it other graces which make him an + agreeable feature in your life. The price he sets on his services is + touchingly small, and he has a happy art of being obsequious without + being, or at least without seeming, abject. For occasional liberalities he + evinces an almost lyrical gratitude. In short he has delightfully good + manners, a merit which he shares for the most part with the Venetians at + large. One grows very fond of these people, and the reason of one’s + fondness is the frankness and sweetness of their address. That of the + Italian family at large has much to recommend it; but in the Venetian + manner there is something peculiarly ingratiating. One feels that the race + is old, that it has a long and rich civilisation in its blood, and that if + it hasn’t been blessed by fortune it has at least been polished by time. + It hasn’t a genius for stiff morality, and indeed makes few pretensions in + that direction. It scruples but scantly to represent the false as the + true, and has been accused of cultivating the occasion to grasp and to + overreach, and of steering a crooked course—not to your and my + advantage—amid the sanctities of property. It has been accused + further of loving if not too well at least too often, of being in fine as + little austere as possible. I am not sure it is very brave, nor struck + with its being very industrious. But it has an unfailing sense of the + amenities of life; the poorest Venetian is a natural man of the world. He + is better company than persons of his class are apt to be among the + nations of industry and virtue—where people are also sometimes + perceived to lie and steal and otherwise misconduct themselves. He has a + great desire to please and to be pleased. + </p> + <h3> + V + </h3> + <p> + In that matter at least the cold-blooded stranger begins at last to + imitate him; begins to lead a life that shall be before all things easy; + unless indeed he allow himself, like Mr. Ruskin, to be put out of humour + by Titian and Tiepolo. The hours he spends among the pictures are his best + hours in Venice, and I am ashamed to have written so much of common things + when I might have been making festoons of the names of the masters. Only, + when we have covered our page with such festoons what more is left to say? + When one has said Carpaccio and Bellini, the Tintoret and the Veronese, + one has struck a note that must be left to resound at will. Everything has + been said about the mighty painters, and it is of little importance that a + pilgrim the more has found them to his taste. “Went this morning to the + Academy; was very much pleased with Titian’s ‘Assumption.’” That honest + phrase has doubtless been written in many a traveller’s diary, and was not + indiscreet on the part of its author. But it appeals little to the general + reader, and we must moreover notoriously not expose our deepest feelings. + Since I have mentioned Titian’s “Assumption” I must say that there are + some people who have been less pleased with it than the observer we have + just imagined. It is one of the possible disappointments of Venice, and + you may if you like take advantage of your privilege of not caring for it. + It imparts a look of great richness to the side of the beautiful room of + the Academy on which it hangs; but the same room contains two or three + works less known to fame which are equally capable of inspiring a passion. + “The ‘Annunciation’ struck me as coarse and superficial”: that note was + once made in a simple-minded tourist’s book. At Venice, strange to say, + Titian is altogether a disappointment; the city of his adoption is far + from containing the best of him. Madrid, Paris, London, Florence, Dresden, + Munich—these are the homes of his greatness. + </p> + <p> + There are other painters who have but a single home, and the greatest of + these is the Tintoret. Close beside him sit Carpaccio and Bellini, who + make with him the dazzling Venetian trio. The Veronese may be seen and + measured in other places; he is most splendid in Venice, but he shines in + Paris and in Dresden. You may walk out of the noon-day dusk of Trafalgar + Square in November, and in one of the chambers of the National Gallery see + the family of Darius rustling and pleading and weeping at the feet of + Alexander. Alexander is a beautiful young Venetian in crimson pantaloons, + and the picture sends a glow into the cold London twilight. You may sit + before it for an hour and dream you are floating to the water-gate of the + Ducal Palace, where a certain old beggar who has one of the handsomest + heads in the world—he has sat to a hundred painters for Doges and + for personages more sacred—has a prescriptive right to pretend to + pull your gondola to the steps and to hold out a greasy immemorial cap. + But you must go to Venice in very fact to see the other masters, who form + part of your life while you are there, who illuminate your view of the + universe. It is difficult to express one’s relation to them; the whole + Venetian art-world is so near, so familiar, so much an extension and + adjunct of the spreading actual, that it seems almost invidious to say one + owes more to one of them than to the other. Nowhere, not even in Holland, + where the correspondence between the real aspects and the little polished + canvases is so constant and so exquisite, do art and life seem so + interfused and, as it were, so consanguineous. All the splendour of light + and colour, all the Venetian air and the Venetian history are on the walls + and ceilings of the palaces; and all the genius of the masters, all the + images and visions they have left upon canvas, seem to tremble in the + sunbeams and dance upon the waves. That is the perpetual interest of the + place—that you live in a certain sort of knowledge as in a rosy + cloud. You don’t go into the churches and galleries by way of a change + from the streets; you go into them because they offer you an exquisite + reproduction of the things that surround you. All Venice was both model + and painter, and life was so pictorial that art couldn’t help becoming so. + With all diminutions life is pictorial still, and this fact gives an + extraordinary freshness to one’s perception of the great Venetian works. + You judge of them not as a connoisseur, but as a man of the world, and you + enjoy them because they are so social and so true. Perhaps of all works of + art that are equally great they demand least reflection on the part of the + spectator—they make least of a mystery of being enjoyed. Reflection + only confirms your admiration, yet is almost ashamed to show its head. + These things speak so frankly and benignantly to the sense that even when + they arrive at the highest style—as in the Tintoret’s “Presentation + of the little Virgin at the Temple”—they are still more familiar. + </p> + <p> + But it is hard, as I say, to express all this, and it is painful as well + to attempt it—painful because in the memory of vanished hours so + filled with beauty the consciousness of present loss oppresses. Exquisite + hours, enveloped in light and silence, to have known them once is to have + always a terrible standard of enjoyment. Certain lovely mornings of May + and June come back with an ineffaceable fairness. Venice isn’t smothered + in flowers at this season, in the manner of Florence and Rome; but the sea + and sky themselves seem to blossom and rustle. The gondola waits at the + wave-washed steps, and if you are wise you will take your place beside a + discriminating companion. Such a companion in Venice should of course be + of the sex that discriminates most finely. An intelligent woman who knows + her Venice seems doubly intelligent, and it makes no woman’s perceptions + less keen to be aware that she can’t help looking graceful as she is borne + over the waves. The handsome Pasquale, with uplifted oar, awaits your + command, knowing, in a general way, from observation of your habits, that + your intention is to go to see a picture or two. It perhaps doesn’t + immensely matter what picture you choose: the whole affair is so charming. + It is charming to wander through the light and shade of intricate canals, + with perpetual architecture above you and perpetual fluidity beneath. It + is charming to disembark at the polished steps of a little empty <i>campo</i>—a + sunny shabby square with an old well in the middle, an old church on one + side and tall Venetian windows looking down. Sometimes the windows are + tenantless; sometimes a lady in a faded dressing-gown leans vaguely on the + sill. There is always an old man holding out his hat for coppers; there + are always three or four small boys dodging possible umbrella-pokes while + they precede you, in the manner of custodians, to the door of the church. + </p> + <h3> + VI + </h3> + <p> + The churches of Venice are rich in pictures, and many a masterpiece lurks + in the unaccommodating gloom of side-chapels and sacristies. Many a noble + work is perched behind the dusty candles and muslin roses of a + scantily-visited altar; some of them indeed, hidden behind the altar, + suffer in a darkness that can never be explored. The facilities offered + you for approaching the picture in such cases are a mockery of your + irritated wish. You stand at tip-toe on a three-legged stool, you climb a + rickety ladder, you almost mount upon the shoulders of the <i>custode</i>. + You do everything but see the picture. You see just enough to be sure it’s + beautiful. You catch a glimpse of a divine head, of a fig tree against a + mellow sky, but the rest is impenetrable mystery. You renounce all hope, + for instance, of approaching the magnificent Cima da Conegliano in San + Giovanni in Bragora; and bethinking yourself of the immaculate purity that + shines in the spirit of this master, you renounce it with chagrin and + pain. Behind the high altar in that church hangs a Baptism of Christ by + Cima which I believe has been more or less repainted. You make the thing + out in spots, you see it has a fullness of perfection. But you turn away + from it with a stiff neck and promise yourself consolation in the Academy + and at the Madonna dell’ Orto, where two noble works by the same hand—pictures + as clear as a summer twilight—present themselves in better + circumstances. It may be said as a general thing that you never see the + Tintoret. You admire him, you adore him, you think him the greatest of + painters, but in the great majority of cases your eyes fail to deal with + him. This is partly his own fault; so many of his works have turned to + blackness and are positively rotting in their frames. At the Scuola di San + Rocco, where there are acres of him, there is scarcely anything at all + adequately visible save the immense “Crucifixion” in the upper story. It + is true that in looking at this huge composition you look at many + pictures; it has not only a multitude of figures but a wealth of episodes; + and you pass from one of these to the other as if you were “doing” a + gallery. Surely no single picture in the world contains more of human + life; there is everything in it, including the most exquisite beauty. It + is one of the greatest things of art; it is always interesting. There are + works of the artist which contain touches more exquisite, revelations of + beauty more radiant, but there is no other vision of so intense a reality, + an execution so splendid. The interest, the impressiveness, of that whole + corner of Venice, however melancholy the effect of its gorgeous and + ill-lighted chambers, gives a strange importance to a visit to the Scuola. + Nothing that all travellers go to see appears to suffer less from the + incursions of travellers. It is one of the loneliest booths of the bazaar, + and the author of these lines has always had the good fortune, which he + wishes to every other traveller, of having it to himself. I think most + visitors find the place rather alarming and wicked-looking. They walk + about a while among the fitful figures that gleam here and there out of + the great tapestry (as it were) with which the painter has hung all the + walls, and then, depressed and bewildered by the portentous solemnity of + these objects, by strange glimpses of unnatural scenes, by the echo of + their lonely footsteps on the vast stone floors, they take a hasty + departure, finding themselves again, with a sense of release from danger, + a sense that the <i>genius loci</i> was a sort of mad white-washer who + worked with a bad mixture, in the bright light of the <i>campo</i>, among + the beggars, the orange-vendors and the passing gondolas. Solemn indeed is + the place, solemn and strangely suggestive, for the simple reason that we + shall scarcely find four walls elsewhere that inclose within a like area + an equal quantity of genius. The air is thick with it and dense and + difficult to breathe; for it was genius that was not happy, inasmuch as + it, lacked the art to fix itself for ever. It is not immortality that we + breathe at the Scuola di San Rocco, but conscious, reluctant mortality. + </p> + <p> + Fortunately, however, we can turn to the Ducal Palace, where everything is + so brilliant and splendid that the poor dusky Tintoret is lifted in spite + of himself into the concert. This deeply original building is of course + the loveliest thing in Venice, and a morning’s stroll there is a wonderful + illumination. Cunningly select your hour—half the enjoyment of + Venice is a question of dodging—and enter at about one o’clock, when + the tourists have flocked off to lunch and the echoes of the charming + chambers have gone to sleep among the sunbeams. There is no brighter place + in Venice—by which I mean that on the whole there is none half so + bright. The reflected sunshine plays up through the great windows from the + glittering lagoon and shimmers and twinkles over gilded walls and + ceilings. All the history of Venice, all its splendid stately past, glows + around you in a strong sealight. Everyone here is magnificent, but the + great Veronese is the most magnificent of all. He swims before you in a + silver cloud; he thrones in an eternal morning. The deep blue sky burns + behind him, streaked across with milky bars; the white colonnades sustain + the richest canopies, under which the first gentlemen and ladies in the + world both render homage and receive it. Their glorious garments rustle in + the air of the sea and their sun-lighted faces are the very complexion of + Venice. The mixture of pride and piety, of politics and religion, of art + and patriotism, gives a splendid dignity to every scene. Never was a + painter more nobly joyous, never did an artist take a greater delight in + life, seeing it all as a kind of breezy festival and feeling it through + the medium of perpetual success. He revels in the gold-framed ovals of the + ceilings, multiplies himself there with the fluttering movement of an + embroidered banner that tosses itself into the blue. He was the happiest + of painters and produced the happiest picture in the world. “The Rape of + Europa” surely deserves this title; it is impossible to look at it without + aching with envy. Nowhere else in art is such a temperament revealed; + never did inclination and opportunity combine to express such enjoyment. + The mixture of flowers and gems and brocade, of blooming flesh and shining + sea and waving groves, of youth, health, movement, desire—all this + is the brightest vision that ever descended upon the soul of a painter. + Happy the artist who could entertain such a vision; happy the artist who + could paint it as the masterpiece I here recall is painted. + </p> + <p> + The Tintoret’s visions were not so bright as that; but he had several that + were radiant enough. In the room that contains the work just cited are + several smaller canvases by the greatly more complex genius of the Scuola + di San Rocco, which are almost simple in their loveliness, almost happy in + their simplicity. They have kept their brightness through the centuries, + and they shine with their neighbours in those golden rooms. There is a + piece of painting in one of them which is one of the sweetest things in + Venice and which reminds one afresh of those wild flowers of execution + that bloom so profusely and so unheeded in the dark corners of all of the + Tintoret’s work. “Pallas chasing away Mars” is, I believe, the name that + is given to the picture; and it represents in fact a young woman of noble + appearance administering a gentle push to a fine young man in armour, as + if to tell him to keep his distance. It is of the gentleness of this push + that I speak, the charming way in which she puts out her arm, with a + single bracelet on it, and rests her young hand, its rosy fingers parted, + on his dark breastplate. She bends her enchanting head with the effort—a + head which has all the strange fairness that the Tintoret always sees in + women—and the soft, living, flesh-like glow of all these members, + over which the brush has scarcely paused in its course, is as pretty an + example of genius as all Venice can show. But why speak of the Tintoret + when I can say nothing of the great “Paradise,” which unfolds its somewhat + smoky splendour and the wonder of its multitudinous circles in one of the + other chambers? If it were not one of the first pictures in the world it + would be about the biggest, and we must confess that the spectator gets + from it at first chiefly an impression of quantity. Then he sees that this + quantity is really wealth; that the dim confusion of faces is a + magnificent composition, and that some of the details of this composition + are extremely beautiful. It is impossible however in a retrospect of + Venice to specify one’s happiest hours, though as one looks backward + certain ineffaceable moments start here and there into vividness. How is + it possible to forget one’s visits to the sacristy of the Frari, however + frequent they may have been, and the great work of John Bellini which + forms the treasure of that apartment? + </p> + <h3> + VII + </h3> + <p> + Nothing in Venice is more perfect than this, and we know of no work of art + more complete. The picture is in three compartments; the Virgin sits in + the central division with her child; two venerable saints, standing close + together, occupy each of the others. It is impossible to imagine anything + more finished or more ripe. It is one of those things that sum up the + genius of a painter, the experience of a life, the teaching of a school. + It seems painted with molten gems, which have only been clarified by time, + and is as solemn as it is gorgeous and as simple as it is deep. Giovanni + Bellini is more or less everywhere in Venice, and, wherever he is, almost + certain to be first—first, I mean, in his own line: paints little + else than the Madonna and the saints; he has not Carpaccio’s care for + human life at large, nor the Tintoret’s nor the of the Veronese. Some of + his greater pictures, however, where several figures are clustered + together, have a richness of sanctity that is almost profane. There is one + of them on the dark side of the room at the Academy that contains Titian’s + “Assumption,” which if we could only see it—its position is an + inconceivable scandal—would evidently be one of the mightiest of + so-called sacred pictures. So too is the Madonna of San Zaccaria, hung in + a cold, dim, dreary place, ever so much too high, but so mild and serene, + and so grandly disposed and accompanied, that the proper attitude for even + the most critical amateur, as he looks at it, strikes one as the bended + knee. There is another noble John Bellini, one of the very few in which + there is no Virgin, at San Giovanni Crisostomo—a St. Jerome, in a + red dress, sitting aloft upon the rocks and with a landscape of + extraordinary purity behind him. The absence of the peculiarly erect + Madonna makes it an interesting surprise among the works of the painter + and gives it a somewhat less strenuous air. But it has brilliant beauty + and the St. Jerome is a delightful old personage. + </p> + <p> + The same church contains another great picture for which the haunter of + these places must find a shrine apart in his memory; one of the most + interesting things he will have seen, if not the most brilliant. Nothing + appeals more to him than three figures of Venetian ladies which occupy the + foreground of a smallish canvas of Sebastian del Piombo, placed above the + high altar of San Giovanni Crisostomo. Sebastian was a Venetian by birth, + but few of his productions are to be seen in his native place; few indeed + are to be seen anywhere. The picture represents the patron-saint of the + church, accompanied by other saints and by the worldly votaries I have + mentioned. These ladies stand together on the left, holding in their hands + little white caskets; two of them are in profile, but the foremost turns + her face to the spectator. This face and figure are almost unique among + the beautiful things of Venice, and they leave the susceptible observer + with the impression of having made, or rather having missed, a strange, a + dangerous, but a most valuable, acquaintance. The lady, who is superbly + handsome, is the typical Venetian of the sixteenth century, and she + remains for the mind the perfect flower of that society. Never was there a + greater air of breeding, a deeper expression of tranquil superiority. She + walks a goddess—as if she trod without sinking the waves of the + Adriatic. It is impossible to conceive a more perfect expression of the + aristocratic spirit either in its pride or in its benignity. This + magnificent creature is so strong and secure that she is gentle, and so + quiet that in comparison all minor assumptions of calmness suggest only a + vulgar alarm. But for all this there are depths of possible disorder in + her light-coloured eye. + </p> + <p> + I had meant however to say nothing about her, for it’s not right to speak + of Sebastian when one hasn’t found room for Carpaccio. These visions come + to one, and one can neither hold them nor brush them aside. Memories of + Carpaccio, the magnificent, the delightful—it’s not for want of such + visitations, but only for want of space, that I haven’t said of him what I + would. There is little enough need of it for Carpaccio’s sake, his fame + being brighter to-day—thanks to the generous lamp Mr. Ruskin has + held up to it—than it has ever been. Yet there is something + ridiculous in talking of Venice without making him almost the refrain. He + and the Tintoret are the two great realists, and it is hard to say which + is the more human, the more various. The Tintoret had the mightier + temperament, but Carpaccio, who had the advantage of more newness and more + responsibility, sailed nearer to perfection. Here and there he quite + touches it, as in the enchanting picture, at the Academy, of St. Ursula + asleep in her little white bed, in her high clean room, where the angel + visits her at dawn; or in the noble St. Jerome in his study at S. Giorgio + Schiavoni. This latter work is a pearl of sentiment, and I may add without + being fantastic a ruby of colour. It unites the most masterly finish with + a kind of universal largeness of feeling, and he who has it well in his + memory will never hear the name of Carpaccio without a throb of almost + personal affection. Such indeed is the feeling that descends upon you in + that wonderful little chapel of St. George of the Slaves, where this most + personal and sociable of artists has expressed all the sweetness of his + imagination. The place is small and incommodious, the pictures are out of + sight and ill-lighted, the custodian is rapacious, the visitors are + mutually intolerable, but the shabby little chapel is a palace of art. Mr. + Ruskin has written a pamphlet about it which is a real aid to enjoyment, + though I can’t but think the generous artist, with his keen senses and his + just feeling, would have suffered to hear his eulogist declare that one of + his other productions—in the Museo Civico of Palazzo Correr, a + delightful portrait of two Venetian ladies with pet animals—is the + “finest picture in the world.” It has no need of that to be thought + admirable; and what more can a painter desire? + </p> + <h3> + VIII + </h3> + <p> + May in Venice is better than April, but June is best of all. Then the days + are hot, but not too hot, and the nights are more beautiful than the days. + Then Venice is rosier than ever in the morning and more golden than ever + as the day descends. She seems to expand and evaporate, to multiply all + her reflections and iridescences. Then the life of her people and the + strangeness of her constitution become a perpetual comedy, or at least a + perpetual drama. Then the gondola is your sole habitation, and you spend + days between sea and sky. You go to the Lido, though the Lido has been + spoiled. When I first saw it, in 1869, it was a very natural place, and + there was but a rough lane across the little island from the landing-place + to the beach. There was a bathing-place in those days, and a restaurant, + which was very bad, but where in the warm evenings your dinner didn’t much + matter as you sat letting it cool on the wooden terrace that stretched out + into the sea. To-day the Lido is a part of united Italy and has been made + the victim of villainous improvements. A little cockney village has sprung + up on its rural bosom and a third-rate boulevard leads from Santa + Elisabetta to the Adriatic. There are bitumen walks and gas-lamps, + lodging-houses, shops and a <i>teatro diurno</i>. The + bathing-establishment is bigger than before, and the restaurant as well; + but it is a compensation perhaps that the cuisine is no better. Such as it + is, however, you won’t scorn occasionally to partake of it on the breezy + platform under which bathers dart and splash, and which looks out to where + the fishing-boats, with sails of orange and crimson, wander along the + darkening horizon. The beach at the Lido is still lonely and beautiful, + and you can easily walk away from the cockney village. The return to + Venice in the sunset is classical and indispensable, and those who at that + glowing hour have floated toward the towers that rise out of the lagoon + will not easily part with the impression. But you indulge in larger + excursions—you go to Burano and Torcello, to Malamocco and Chioggia. + Torcello, like the Lido, has been improved; the deeply interesting little + cathedral of the eighth century, which stood there on the edge of the sea, + as touching in its ruin, with its grassy threshold and its primitive + mosaics, as the bleached bones of a human skeleton washed ashore by the + tide, has now been restored and made cheerful, and the charm of the place, + its strange and suggestive desolation, has well-nigh departed. + </p> + <p> + It will still serve you as a pretext, however, for a day on the lagoon, + especially as you will disembark at Burano and admire the wonderful + fisher-folk, whose good looks—and bad manners, I am sorry to say—can + scarcely be exaggerated. Burano is celebrated for the beauty of its women + and the rapacity of its children, and it is a fact that though some of the + ladies are rather bold about it every one of them shows you a handsome + face. The children assail you for coppers, and in their desire to be + satisfied pursue your gondola into the sea. Chioggia is a larger Burano, + and you carry away from either place a half-sad, half-cynical, but + altogether pictorial impression; the impression of bright-coloured hovels, + of bathing in stagnant canals, of young girls with faces of a delicate + shape and a susceptible expression, with splendid heads of hair and + complexions smeared with powder, faded yellow shawls that hang like old + Greek draperies, and little wooden shoes that click as they go up and down + the steps of the convex bridges; of brown-cheeked matrons with lustrous + tresses and high tempers, massive throats encased with gold beads, and + eyes that meet your own with a certain traditional defiance. The men + throughout the islands of Venice are almost as handsome as the women; I + have never seen so many good-looking rascals. At Burano and Chioggia they + sit mending their nets, or lounge at the street corners, where + conversation is always high-pitched, or clamour to you to take a boat; and + everywhere they decorate the scene with their splendid colour—cheeks + and throats as richly brown as the sails of their fishing-smacks—their + sea-faded tatters which are always a “costume,” their soft Venetian + jargon, and the gallantry with which they wear their hats, an article that + nowhere sits so well as on a mass of dense Venetian curls. If you are + happy you will find yourself, after a June day in Venice (about ten + o’clock), on a balcony that overhangs the Grand Canal, with your elbows on + the broad ledge, a cigarette in your teeth and a little good company + beside you. The gondolas pass beneath, the watery surface gleams here and + there from their lamps, some of which are coloured lanterns that move + mysteriously in the darkness. There are some evenings in June when there + are too many gondolas, too many lanterns, too many serenades in front of + the hotels. The serenading in particular is overdone; but on such a + balcony as I speak of you needn’t suffer from it, for in the apartment + behind you—an accessible refuge—there is more good company, + there are more cigarettes. If you are wise you will step back there + presently. + </p> + <h3> + 1882. + </h3> + <p> + <a name="link2H_4_0003" id="link2H_4_0003"> + <!-- H2 anchor --> </a> + </p> + <div style="height: 4em;"> + <br /><br /><br /><br /> + </div> + <h2> + THE GRAND CANAL + </h2> + <p> + The honour of representing the plan and the place at their best might + perhaps appear, in the City of St. Mark, properly to belong to the + splendid square which bears the patron’s name and which is the centre of + Venetian life so far (this is pretty well all the way indeed) as Venetian + life is a matter of strolling and chaffering, of gossiping and gaping, of + circulating without a purpose, and of staring—too often with a + foolish one—through the shop-windows of dealers whose hospitality + makes their doorsteps dramatic, at the very vulgarest rubbish in all the + modern market. If the Grand Canal, however, is not quite technically a + “street,” the perverted Piazza is perhaps even less normal; and I hasten + to add that I am glad not to find myself studying my subject under the + international arcades, or yet (I will go the length of saying) in the + solemn presence of the church. For indeed in that case I foresee I should + become still more confoundingly conscious of the stumbling-block that + inevitably, even with his first few words, crops up in the path of the + lover of Venice who rashly addresses himself to expression. “Venetian + life” is a mere literary convention, though it be an indispensable figure. + The words have played an effective part in the literature of sensibility; + they constituted thirty years ago the title of Mr. Howells’s delightful + volume of impressions; but in using them to-day one owes some frank amends + to one’s own lucidity. Let me carefully premise therefore that so often as + they shall again drop from my pen, so often shall I beg to be regarded as + systematically superficial. + </p> + <p> + Venetian life, in the large old sense, has long since come to an end, and + the essential present character of the most melancholy of cities resides + simply in its being the most beautiful of tombs. Nowhere else has the past + been laid to rest with such tenderness, such a sadness of resignation and + remembrance. Nowhere else is the present so alien, so discontinuous, so + like a crowd in a cemetery without garlands for the graves. It has no + flowers in its hands, but, as a compensation perhaps—and the thing + is doubtless more to the point—it has money and little red books. + The everlasting shuffle of these irresponsible visitors in the Piazza is + contemporary Venetian life. Everything else is only a reverberation of + that. The vast mausoleum has a turnstile at the door, and a functionary in + a shabby uniform lets you in, as per tariff, to see how dead it is. From + this <i>constatation</i>, this cold curiosity, proceed all the industry, + the prosperity, the vitality of the place. The shopkeepers and gondoliers, + the beggars and the models, depend upon it for a living; they are the + custodians and the ushers of the great museum—they are even + themselves to a certain extent the objects of exhibition. It is in the + wide vestibule of the square that the polygot pilgrims gather most + densely; Piazza San Marco is the lobby of the opera in the intervals of + the performance. The present fortune of Venice, the lamentable difference, + is most easily measured there, and that is why, in the effort to resist + our pessimism, we must turn away both from the purchasers and from the + vendors of <i>ricordi</i>. The <i>ricordi</i> that we prefer are gathered + best where the gondola glides—best of all on the noble waterway that + begins in its glory at the Salute and ends in its abasement at the railway + station. It is, however, the cockneyfied Piazzetta (forgive me, shade of + St. Theodore—has not a brand new café begun to glare there, + electrically, this very year?) that introduces us most directly to the + great picture by which the Grand Canal works its first spell, and to which + a thousand artists, not always with a talent apiece, have paid their + tribute. We pass into the Piazzetta to look down the great throat, as it + were, of Venice, and the vision must console us for turning our back on + St. Mark’s. + </p> + <p> + We have been treated to it again and again, of course, even if we have + never stirred from home; but that is only a reason the more for catching + at any freshness that may be left in the world of photography. It is in + Venice above all that we hear the small buzz of this vulgarising voice of + the familiar; yet perhaps it is in Venice too that the picturesque fact + has best mastered the pious secret of how to wait for us. Even the classic + Salute waits like some great lady on the threshold of her saloon. She is + more ample and serene, more seated at her door, than all the copyists have + told us, with her domes and scrolls, her scolloped buttresses and statues + forming a pompous crown, and her wide steps disposed on the ground like + the train of a robe. This fine air of the woman of the world is carried + out by the well-bred assurance with which she looks in the direction of + her old-fashioned Byzantine neighbour; and the juxtaposition of two + churches so distinguished and so different, each splendid in its sort, is + a sufficient mark of the scale and range of Venice. However, we ourselves + are looking away from St. Mark’s—we must blind our eyes to that + dazzle; without it indeed there are brightnesses and fascinations enough. + We see them in abundance even while we look away from the shady steps of + the Salute. These steps are cool in the morning, yet I don’t know that I + can justify my excessive fondness for them any better than I can explain a + hundred of the other vague infatuations with which Venice sophisticates + the spirit. Under such an influence fortunately one need n’t explain—it + keeps account of nothing but perceptions and affections. It is from the + Salute steps perhaps, of a summer morning, that this view of the open + mouth of the city is most brilliantly amusing. The whole thing composes as + if composition were the chief end of human institutions. The charming + architectural promontory of the Dogana stretches out the most graceful of + arms, balancing in its hand the gilded globe on which revolves the + delightful satirical figure of a little weathercock of a woman. This + Fortune, this Navigation, or whatever she is called—she surely needs + no name—catches the wind in the bit of drapery of which she has + divested her rotary bronze loveliness. On the other side of the Canal + twinkles and glitters the long row of the happy palaces which are mainly + expensive hotels. There is a little of everything everywhere, in the + bright Venetian air, but to these houses belongs especially the appearance + of sitting, across the water, at the receipt of custom, of watching in + their hypocritical loveliness for the stranger and the victim. I call them + happy, because even their sordid uses and their vulgar signs melt somehow, + with their vague sea-stained pinks and drabs, into that strange gaiety of + light and colour which is made up of the reflection of superannuated + things. The atmosphere plays over them like a laugh, they are of the + essence of the sad old joke. They are almost as charming from other places + as they are from their own balconies, and share fully in that universal + privilege of Venetian objects which consists of being both the picture and + the point of view. + </p> + <p> + This double character, which is particularly strong in the Grand Canal, + adds a difficulty to any control of one’s notes. The Grand Canal may be + practically, as in impression, the cushioned balcony of a high and + well-loved palace—the memory of irresistible evenings, of the + sociable elbow, of endless lingering and looking; or it may evoke the + restlessness of a fresh curiosity, of methodical inquiry, in a gondola + piled with references. There are no references, I ought to mention, in the + present remarks, which sacrifice to accident, not to completeness. A + rhapsody of Venice is always in order, but I think the catalogues are + finished. I should not attempt to write here the names of all the palaces, + even if the number of those I find myself able to remember in the immense + array were less insignificant. There are many I delight in that I don’t + know, or at least don’t keep, apart. Then there are the bad reasons for + preference that are better than the good, and all the sweet bribery of + association and recollection. These things, as one stands on the Salute + steps, are so many delicate fingers to pick straight out of the row a dear + little featureless house which, with its pale green shutters, looks + straight across at the great door and through the very keyhole, as it + were, of the church, and which I needn’t call by a name—a pleasant + American name—that every one in Venice, these many years, has had on + grateful lips. It is the very friendliest house in all the wide world, and + it has, as it deserves to have, the most beautiful position. It is a real + <i>porto di mare</i>, as the gondoliers say—a port within a port; it + sees everything that comes and goes, and takes it all in with practised + eyes. Not a tint or a hint of the immense iridescence is lost upon it, and + there are days of exquisite colour on which it may fancy itself the heart + of the wonderful prism. We wave to it from the Salute steps, which we must + decidedly leave if we wish to get on, a grateful hand across the water, + and turn into the big white church of Longhena—an empty shaft + beneath a perfunctory dome—where an American family and a German + party, huddled in a corner upon a pair of benches, are gazing, with a + conscientiousness worthy of a better cause, at nothing in particular. + </p> + <p> + For there is nothing particular in this cold and conventional temple to + gaze at save the great Tintoretto of the sacristy, to which we quickly pay + our respects, and which we are glad to have for ten minutes to ourselves. + The picture, though full of beauty, is not the finest of the master’s; but + it serves again as well as another to transport—there is no other + word—those of his lovers for whom, in far-away days when Venice was + an early rapture, this strange and mystifying painter was almost the + supreme revelation. The plastic arts may have less to say to us than in + the hungry years of youth, and the celebrated picture in general be more + of a blank; but more than the others any fine Tintoret still carries us + back, calling up not only the rich particular vision but the freshness of + the old wonder. Many things come and go, but this great artist remains for + us in Venice a part of the company of the mind. The others are there in + their obvious glory, but he is the only one for whom the imagination, in + our expressive modern phrase, sits up. “The Marriage in Cana,” at the + Salute, has all his characteristic and fascinating unexpectedness—the + sacrifice of the figure of our Lord, who is reduced to the mere final + point of a clever perspective, and the free, joyous presentation of all + the other elements of the feast. Why, in spite of this queer + one-sidedness, does the picture give us no impression of a lack of what + the critics call reverence? For no other reason that I can think of than + because it happens to be the work of its author, in whose very mistakes + there is a singular wisdom. Mr. Ruskin has spoken with sufficient + eloquence of the serious loveliness of the row of heads of the women on + the right, who talk to each other as they sit at the foreshortened + banquet. There could be no better example of the roving independence of + the painter’s vision, a real spirit of adventure for which his subject was + always a cluster of accidents; not an obvious order, but a sort of peopled + and agitated chapter of life, in which the figures are submissive + pictorial notes. These notes are all there in their beauty and + heterogeneity, and if the abundance is of a kind to make the principle of + selection seem in comparison timid, yet the sense of “composition” in the + spectator—if it happen to exist—reaches out to the painter in + peculiar sympathy. Dull must be the spirit of the worker tormented in any + field of art with that particular question who is not moved to recognise + in the eternal problem the high fellowship of Tintoretto. + </p> + <p> + If the long reach from this point to the deplorable iron bridge which + discharges the pedestrian at the Academy—or, more comprehensively, + to the painted and gilded Gothic of the noble Palazzo Foscari—is too + much of a curve to be seen at any one point as a whole, it represents the + better the arched neck, as it were, of the undulating serpent of which the + Canalazzo has the likeness. We pass a dozen historic houses, we note in + our passage a hundred component “bits,” with the baffled sketcher’s sense, + and with what would doubtless be, save for our intensely Venetian + fatalism, the baffled sketcher’s temper. It is the early palaces, of + course, and also, to be fair, some of the late, if we could take them one + by one, that give the Canal the best of its grand air. The fairest are + often cheek-by-jowl with the foulest, and there are few, alas, so fair as + to have been completely protected by their beauty. The ages and the + generations have worked their will on them, and the wind and the weather + have had much to say; but disfigured and dishonoured as they are, with the + bruises of their marbles and the patience of their ruin, there is nothing + like them in the world, and the long succession of their faded, conscious + faces makes of the quiet waterway they overhang a <i>promenade historique</i> + of which the lesson, however often we read it, gives, in the depth of its + interest, an incomparable dignity to Venice. We read it in the Romanesque + arches, crooked to-day in their very curves, of the early middle-age, in + the exquisite individual Gothic of the splendid time, and in the cornices + and columns of a decadence almost as proud. These things at present are + almost equally touching in their good faith; they have each in their + degree so effectually parted with their pride. They have lived on as they + could and lasted as they might, and we hold them to no account of their + infirmities, for even those of them whose blank eyes to-day meet criticism + with most submission are far less vulgar than the uses we have mainly + managed to put them to. We have botched them and patched them and covered + them with sordid signs; we have restored and improved them with a + merciless taste, and the best of them we have made over to the pedlars. + Some of the most striking objects in the finest vistas at present are the + huge advertisements of the curiosity-shops. + </p> + <p> + The antiquity-mongers in Venice have all the courage of their opinion, and + it is easy to see how well they know they can confound you with an + unanswerable question. What is the whole place but a curiosity-shop, and + what are you here for yourself but to pick up odds and ends? “We pick them + up <i>for</i> you,” say these honest Jews, whose prices are marked in + dollars, “and who shall blame us if, the flowers being pretty well + plucked, we add an artificial rose or two to the composition of the + bouquet?” They take care, in a word, that there be plenty of relics, and + their establishments are huge and active. They administer the antidote to + pedantry, and you can complain of them only if you never cross their + thresholds. If you take this step you are lost, for you have parted with + the correctness of your attitude. Venice becomes frankly from such a + moment the big depressing dazzling joke in which after all our sense of + her contradictions sinks to rest—the grimace of an over-strained + philosophy. It’s rather a comfort, for the curiosity-shops are amusing. + You have bad moments indeed as you stand in their halls of humbug and, in + the intervals of haggling, hear through the high windows the soft splash + of the sea on the old water-steps, for you think with anger of the noble + homes that are laid waste in such scenes, of the delicate lives that must + have been, that might still be, led there. You reconstruct the admirable + house according to your own needs; leaning on a back balcony, you drop + your eyes into one of the little green gardens with which, for the most + part, such establishments are exasperatingly blessed, and end by feeling + it a shame that you yourself are not in possession. (I take for granted, + of course, that as you go and come you are, in imagination, perpetually + lodging yourself and setting up your gods; for if this innocent pastime, + this borrowing of the mind, be not your favourite sport there is a flaw in + the appeal that Venice makes to you.) There may be happy cases in which + your envy is tempered, or perhaps I should rather say intensified, by real + participation. If you have had the good fortune to enjoy the hospitality + of an old Venetian home and to lead your life a little in the painted + chambers that still echo with one of the historic names, you have entered + by the shortest step into the inner spirit of the place. If it did n’t + savour of treachery to private kindness I should like to speak frankly of + one of these delightful, even though alienated, structures, to refer to it + as a splendid example of the old palatial type. But I can only do so in + passing, with a hundred precautions, and, lifting the curtain at the edge, + drop a commemorative word on the success with which, in this particularly + happy instance, the cosmopolite habit, the modern sympathy, the + intelligent, flexible attitude, the latest fruit of time, adjust + themselves to the great gilded, relinquished shell and try to fill it out. + A Venetian palace that has not too grossly suffered and that is not + overwhelming by its mass makes almost any life graceful that may be led in + it. With cultivated and generous contemporary ways it reveals a + pre-established harmony. As you live in it day after day its beauty and + its interest sink more deeply into your spirit; it has its moods and its + hours and its mystic voices and its shifting expressions. If in the + absence of its masters you have happened to have it to yourself for + twenty-four hours you will never forget the charm of its haunted + stillness, late on the summer afternoon for instance, when the call of + playing children comes in behind from the campo, nor the way the old + ghosts seemed to pass on tip-toe on the marble floors. It gives you + practically the essence of the matter that we are considering, for beneath + the high balconies Venice comes and goes, and the particular stretch you + command contains all the characteristics. Everything has its turn, from + the heavy barges of merchandise, pushed by long poles and the patient + shoulder, to the floating pavilions of the great serenades, and you may + study at your leisure the admirable Venetian arts of managing a boat and + organising a spectacle. Of the beautiful free stroke with which the + gondola, especially when there are two oars, is impelled, you never, in + the Venetian scene, grow weary; it is always in the picture, and the large + profiled action that lets the standing rowers throw themselves forward to + a constant recovery has the double value of being, at the fag-end of + greatness, the only energetic note. The people from the hotels are always + afloat, and, at the hotel pace, the solitary gondolier (like the solitary + horseman of the old-fashioned novel) is, I confess, a somewhat melancholy + figure. Perched on his poop without a mate, he re-enacts perpetually, in + high relief, with his toes turned out, the comedy of his odd and charming + movement. He always has a little the look of an absent-minded nursery-maid + pushing her small charges in a perambulator. + </p> + <p> + But why should I risk too free a comparison, where this picturesque and + amiable class are concerned? I delight in their sun-burnt complexions and + their childish dialect; I know them only by their merits, and I am grossly + prejudiced in their favour. They are interesting and touching, and alike + in their virtues and their defects human nature is simplified as with a + big effective brush. Affecting above all is their dependence on the + stranger, the whimsical stranger who swims out of their ken, yet whom + Providence sometimes restores. The best of them at any rate are in their + line great artists. On the swarming feast-days, on the strange feast-night + of the Redentore, their steering is a miracle of ease. The master-hands, + the celebrities and winners of prizes—you may see them on the + private gondolas in spotless white, with brilliant sashes and ribbons, and + often with very handsome persons—take the right of way with a + pardonable insolence. They penetrate the crush of boats with an authority + of their own. The crush of boats, the universal sociable bumping and + squeezing, is great when, on the summer nights, the ladies shriek with + alarm, the city pays the fiddlers, and the illuminated barges, scattering + music and song, lead a long train down the Canal. The barges used to be + rowed in rhythmic strokes, but now they are towed by the steamer. The + coloured lamps, the vocalists before the hotels, are not to my sense the + greatest seduction of Venice; but it would be an uncandid sketch of the + Canalazzo that shouldn’t touch them with indulgence. Taking one nuisance + with another, they are probably the prettiest in the world, and if they + have in general more magic for the new arrival than for the old + Venice-lover, they in any case, at their best, keep up the immemorial + tradition. The Venetians have had from the beginning of time the pride of + their processions and spectacles, and it’s a wonder how with empty pockets + they still make a clever show. The Carnival is dead, but these are the + scraps of its inheritance. Vauxhall on the water is of course more + Vauxhall than ever, with the good fortune of home-made music and of a + mirror that reduplicates and multiplies. The feast of the Redeemer—the + great popular feast of the year—is a wonderful Venetian Vauxhall. + All Venice on this occasion takes to the boats for the night and loads + them with lamps and provisions. Wedged together in a mass it sups and + sings; every boat is a floating arbour, a private <i>café-concert</i>. Of + all Christian commemorations it is the most ingenuously and harmlessly + pagan. Toward morning the passengers repair to the Lido, where, as the sun + rises, they plunge, still sociably, into the sea. The night of the + Redentore has been described, but it would be interesting to have an + account, from the domestic point of view, of its usual morrow. It is + mainly an affair of the Giudecca, however, which is bridged over from the + Zattere to the great church. The pontoons are laid together during the day—it + is all done with extraordinary celerity and art—and the bridge is + prolonged across the Canalazzo (to Santa Maria Zobenigo), which is my only + warrant for glancing at the occasion. We glance at it from our palace + windows; lengthening our necks a little, as we look up toward the Salute, + we see all Venice, on the July afternoon, so serried as to move slowly, + pour across the temporary footway. It is a flock of very good children, + and the bridged Canal is their toy. All Venice on such occasions is gentle + and friendly; not even all Venice pushes anyone into the water. + </p> + <p> + But from the same high windows we catch without any stretching of the neck + a still more indispensable note in the picture, a famous pretender eating + the bread of bitterness. This repast is served in the open air, on a neat + little terrace, by attendants in livery, and there is no indiscretion in + our seeing that the pretender dines. Ever since the table d’hôte in + “Candide” Venice has been the refuge of monarchs in want of thrones—she + would n’t know herself without her <i>rois en exil.</i> The exile is + agreeable and soothing, the gondola lets them down gently. Its movement is + an anodyne, its silence a philtre, and little by little it rocks all + ambitions to sleep. The proscript has plenty of leisure to write his + proclamations and even his memoirs, and I believe he has organs in which + they are published; but the only noise he makes in the world is the + harmless splash of his oars. He comes and goes along the Canalazzo, and he + might be much worse employed. He is but one of the interesting objects it + presents, however, and I am by no means sure that he is the most striking. + He has a rival, if not in the iron bridge, which, alas, is within our + range, at least—to take an immediate example—in the + Montecuculi Palace. Far-descended and weary, but beautiful in its crooked + old age, with its lovely proportions, its delicate round arches, its + carvings and its disks of marble, is the haunted Montecuculi. Those who + have a kindness for Venetian gossip like to remember that it was once for + a few months the property of Robert Browning, who, however, never lived in + it, and who died in the splendid Rezzonico, the residence of his son and a + wonderful cosmopolite “document,” which, as it presents itself, in an + admirable position, but a short way farther down the Canal, we can almost + see, in spite of the curve, from the window at which we stand. This great + seventeenth century pile, throwing itself upon the water with a peculiar + florid assurance, a certain upward toss of its cornice which gives it the + air of a rearing sea-horse, decorates immensely—and within, as well + as without—the wide angle that it commands. + </p> + <p> + There is a more formal greatness in the high square Gothic Foscari, just + below it, one of the noblest creations of the fifteenth century, a + masterpiece of symmetry and majesty. Dedicated to-day to official uses—it + is the property of the State—it looks conscious of the consideration + it enjoys, and is one of the few great houses within our range whose old + age strikes us as robust and painless. It is visibly “kept up”; perhaps it + is kept up too much; perhaps I am wrong in thinking so well of it. These + doubts and fears course rapidly through my mind—I am easily their + victim when it is a question of architecture—as they are apt to do + to-day, in Italy, almost anywhere, in the presence of the beautiful, of + the desecrated or the neglected. We feel at such moments as if the eye of + Mr. Ruskin were upon us; we grow nervous and lose our confidence. This + makes me inevitably, in talking of Venice, seek a pusillanimous safety in + the trivial and the obvious. I am on firm ground in rejoicing in the + little garden directly opposite our windows—it is another proof that + they really show us everything—and in feeling that the gardens of + Venice would deserve a page to themselves. They are infinitely more + numerous than the arriving stranger can suppose; they nestle with a charm + all their own in the complications of most back-views. Some of them are + exquisite, many are large, and even the scrappiest have an artful + understanding, in the interest of colour, with the waterways that edge + their foundations. On the small canals, in the hunt for amusement, they + are the prettiest surprises of all. The tangle of plants and flowers + crowds over the battered walls, the greenness makes an arrangement with + the rosy sordid brick. Of all the reflected and liquefied things in + Venice, and the number of these is countless, I think the lapping water + loves them most. They are numerous on the Canalazzo, but wherever they + occur they give a brush to the picture and in particular, it is easy to + guess, give a sweetness to the house. Then the elements are complete—the + trio of air and water and of things that grow. Venice without them would + be too much a matter of the tides and the stones. Even the little + trellises of the <i>traghetti</i> count charmingly as reminders, amid so + much artifice, of the woodland nature of man. The vine-leaves, trained on + horizontal poles, make a roof of chequered shade for the gondoliers and + ferrymen, who doze there according to opportunity, or chatter or hail the + approaching “fare.” There is no “hum” in Venice, so that their voices + travel far; they enter your windows and mingle even with your dreams. I + beg the reader to believe that if I had time to go into everything, I + would go into the <i>traghetti</i>, which have their manners and their + morals, and which used to have their piety. This piety was always a <i>madonnina</i>, + the protectress of the passage—a quaint figure of the Virgin with + the red spark of a lamp at her feet. The lamps appear for the most part to + have gone out, and the images doubtless have been sold for <i>bric-a-brac</i>. + The ferrymen, for aught I know, are converted to Nihilism—a faith + consistent happily with a good stroke of business. One of the figures has + been left, however—the Madonnetta which gives its name to a <i>traghetto</i> + near the Rialto. But this sweet survivor is a carven stone inserted ages + ago in the corner of an old palace and doubtless difficult of removal. <i>Pazienza</i>, + the day will come when so marketable a relic will also be extracted from + its socket and purchased by the devouring American. I leave that + expression, on second thought, standing; but I repent of it when I + remember that it is a devouring American—a lady long resident in + Venice and whose kindnesses all Venetians, as well as her country-people, + know, who has rekindled some of the extinguished tapers, setting up + especially the big brave Gothic shrine, of painted and gilded wood, which, + on the top of its stout <i>palo</i>, sheds its influence on the place of + passage opposite the Salute. + </p> + <p> + If I may not go into those of the palaces this devious discourse has left + behind, much less may I enter the great galleries of the Academy, which + rears its blank wall, surmounted by the lion of St. Mark, well within + sight of the windows at which we are still lingering. This wondrous temple + of Venetian art—for all it promises little from without—overhangs, + in a manner, the Grand Canal, but if we were so much as to cross its + threshold we should wander beyond recall. It contains, in some of the most + magnificent halls—where the ceilings have all the glory with which + the imagination of Venice alone could over-arch a room—some of the + noblest pictures in the world; and whether or not we go back to them on + any particular occasion for another look, it is always a comfort to know + that they are there, as the sense of them on the spot is a part of the + furniture of the mind—the sense of them close at hand, behind every + wall and under every cover, like the inevitable reverse of a medal, of the + side exposed to the air that reflects, intensifies, completes the scene. + In other words, as it was the inevitable destiny of Venice to be painted, + and painted with passion, so the wide world of picture becomes, as we live + there, and however much we go about our affairs, the constant habitation + of our thoughts. The truth is, we are in it so uninterruptedly, at home + and abroad, that there is scarcely a pressure upon us to seek it in one + place more than in another. Choose your standpoint at random and trust the + picture to come to you. This is manifestly why I have not, I find myself + conscious, said more about the features of the Canalazzo which occupy the + reach between the Salute and the position we have so obstinately taken up. + It is still there before us, however, and the delightful little Palazzo + Dario, intimately familiar to English and American travellers, picks + itself out in the foreshortened brightness. The Dario is covered with the + loveliest little marble plates and sculptured circles; it is made up of + exquisite pieces—as if there had been only enough to make it small—so + that it looks, in its extreme antiquity, a good deal like a house of cards + that hold together by a tenure it would be fatal to touch. An old Venetian + house dies hard indeed, and I should add that this delicate thing, with + submission in every feature, continues to resist the contact of + generations of lodgers. It is let out in floors (it used to be let as a + whole) and in how many eager hands—for it is in great requisition—under + how many fleeting dispensations have we not known and loved it? People are + always writing in advance to secure it, as they are to secure the + Jenkins’s gondolier, and as the gondola passes we see strange faces at the + windows—though it’s ten to one we recognise them—and the + millionth artist coming forth with his traps at the water-gate. The poor + little patient Dario is one of the most flourishing booths at the fair. + </p> + <p> + The faces in the window look out at the great Sansovino—the splendid + pile that is now occupied by the Prefect. I feel decidedly that I don’t + object as I ought to the palaces of the sixteenth and seventeenth + centuries. Their pretensions impose upon me, and the imagination peoples + them more freely than it can people the interiors of the prime. Was not + moreover this masterpiece of Sansovino once occupied by the Venetian + post-office, and thereby intimately connected with an ineffaceable first + impression of the author of these remarks? He had arrived, wondering, + palpitating, twenty-three years ago, after nightfall, and, the first thing + on the morrow, had repaired to the post-office for his letters. They had + been waiting a long time and were full of delayed interest, and he + returned with them to the gondola and floated slowly down the Canal. The + mixture, the rapture, the wonderful temple of the <i>poste restante</i>, + the beautiful strangeness, all humanised by good news—the memory of + this abides with him still, so that there always proceeds from the + splendid waterfront I speak of a certain secret appeal, something that + seems to have been uttered first in the sonorous chambers of youth. Of + course this association falls to the ground—or rather splashes into + the water—if I am the victim of a confusion. <i>Was</i> the edifice + in question twenty-three years ago the post-office, which has occupied + since, for many a day, very much humbler quarters? I am afraid to take the + proper steps for finding out, lest I should learn that during these years + I have misdirected my emotion. A better reason for the sentiment, at any + rate, is that such a great house has surely, in the high beauty of its + tiers, a refinement of its own. They make one think of colosseums and + aqueducts and bridges, and they constitute doubtless, in Venice, the most + pardonable specimen of the imitative. I have even a timid kindness for the + huge Pesaro, far down the Canal, whose main reproach, more even than the + coarseness of its forms, is its swaggering size, its want of consideration + for the general picture, which the early examples so reverently respect. + The Pesaro is as far out of the frame as a modern hotel, and the Cornaro, + close to it, oversteps almost equally the modesty of art. One more thing + they and their kindred do, I must add, for which, unfortunately, we can + patronise them less. They make even the most elaborate material + civilisation of the present day seem woefully shrunken and <i>bourgeois</i>, + for they simply—I allude to the biggest palaces—can’t be lived + in as they were intended to be. The modern tenant may take in all the + magazines, but he bends not the bow of Achilles. He occupies the place, + but he doesn’t fill it, and he has guests from the neighbouring inns with + ulsters and Baedekers. We are far at the Pesaro, by the way, from our + attaching window, and we take advantage of it to go in rather a melancholy + mood to the end. The long straight vista from the Foscari to the Rialto, + the great middle stretch of the Canal, contains, as the phrase is, a + hundred objects of interest, but it contains most the bright oddity of its + general Deluge air. In all these centuries it has never got over its + resemblance to a flooded city; for some reason or other it is the only + part of Venice in which the houses look as if the waters had overtaken + them. Everywhere else they reckon with them—have chosen them; here + alone the lapping seaway seems to confess itself an accident. + </p> + <p> + {Illustration: PALAZZO MONCENIGO, VENICE} + </p> + <p> + There are persons who hold this long, gay, shabby, spotty perspective, in + which, with its immense field of confused reflection, the houses have + infinite variety, the dullest expanse in Venice. It was not dull, we + imagine, for Lord Byron, who lived in the midmost of the three Mocenigo + palaces, where the writing-table is still shown at which he gave the rein + to his passions. For other observers it is sufficiently enlivened by so + delightful a creation as the Palazzo Loredan, once a masterpiece and at + present the Municipio, not to speak of a variety of other immemorial bits + whose beauty still has a degree of freshness. Some of the most touching + relics of early Venice are here—for it was here she precariously + clustered—peeping out of a submersion more pitiless than the sea. As + we approach the Rialto indeed the picture falls off and a comparative + commonness suffuses it. There is a wide paved walk on either side of the + Canal, on which the waterman—and who in Venice is not a waterman?—is + prone to seek repose. I speak of the summer days—it is the summer + Venice that is the visible Venice. The big tarry barges are drawn up at + the <i>fondamenta</i>, and the bare-legged boatmen, in faded blue cotton, + lie asleep on the hot stones. If there were no colour anywhere else there + would be enough in their tanned personalities. Half the low doorways open + into the warm interior of waterside drinking-shops, and here and there, on + the quay, beneath the bush that overhangs the door, there are rickety + tables and chairs. Where in Venice is there not the amusement of character + and of detail? The tone in this part is very vivid, and is largely that of + the brown plebeian faces looking out of the patchy miscellaneous houses—the + faces of fat undressed women and of other simple folk who are not aware + that they enjoy, from balconies once doubtless patrician, a view the + knowing ones of the earth come thousands of miles to envy them. The effect + is enhanced by the tattered clothes hung to dry in the windows, by the + sun-faded rags that flutter from the polished balustrades—these are + ivory-smooth with time; and the whole scene profits by the general law + that renders decadence and ruin in Venice more brilliant than any + prosperity. Decay is in this extraordinary place golden in tint and misery + <i>couleur de rose</i>. The gondolas of the correct people are unmitigated + sable, but the poor market-boats from the islands are kaleidoscopic. + </p> + <p> + The Bridge of the Rialto is a name to conjure with, but, honestly + speaking, it is scarcely the gem of the composition. There are of course + two ways of taking it—from the water or from the upper passage, + where its small shops and booths abound in Venetian character; but it + mainly counts as a feature of the Canal when seen from the gondola or even + from the awful <i>vaporetto</i>. The great curve of its single arch is + much to be commended, especially when, coming from the direction of the + railway-station, you see it frame with its sharp compass-line the perfect + picture, the reach of the Canal on the other side. But the backs of the + little shops make from the water a graceless collective hump, and the + inside view is the diverting one. The big arch of the bridge—like + the arches of all the bridges—is the waterman’s friend in wet + weather. The gondolas, when it rains, huddle beside the peopled barges, + and the young ladies from the hotels, vaguely fidgeting, complain of the + communication of insect life. Here indeed is a little of everything, and + the jewellers of this celebrated precinct—they have their immemorial + row—make almost as fine a show as the fruiterers. It is a universal + market, and a fine place to study Venetian types. The produce of the + islands is discharged there, and the fishmongers announce their presence. + All one’s senses indeed are vigorously attacked; the whole place is + violently hot and bright, all odorous and noisy. The churning of the screw + of the <i>vaporetto</i> mingles with the other sounds—not indeed + that this offensive note is confined to one part of the Canal. But Just + here the little piers of the resented steamer are particularly near + together, and it seems somehow to be always kicking up the water. As we go + further down we see it stopping exactly beneath the glorious windows of + the Ca’d’Oro. It has chosen its position well, and who shall gainsay it + for having put itself under the protection of the most romantic facade in + Europe? The companionship of these objects is a symbol; it expresses + supremely the present and the future of Venice. Perfect, in its prime, was + the marble Ca’d’Oro, with the noble recesses of its <i>loggie</i>, but + even then it probably never “met a want,” like the successful <i>vaporetto</i>. + If, however, we are not to go into the Museo Civico—the old Museo + Correr, which rears a staring renovated front far down on the left, near + the station, so also we must keep out of the great vexed question of steam + on the Canalazzo, just as a while since we prudently kept out of the + Accademia. These are expensive and complicated excursions. It is obvious + that if the <i>vaporetti</i> have contributed to the ruin of the + gondoliers, already hard pressed by fate, and to that of the palaces, + whose foundations their waves undermine, and that if they have robbed the + Grand Canal of the supreme distinction of its tranquillity, so on the + other hand they have placed “rapid transit,” in the New York phrase, in + everybody’s reach, and enabled everybody—save indeed those who + wouldn’t for the world—to rush about Venice as furiously as people + rush about New York. The suitability of this consummation needn’t be + pointed out. + </p> + <p> + Even we ourselves, in the irresistible contagion, are going so fast now + that we have only time to note in how clever and costly a fashion the + Museo Civico, the old Fondaco dei Turchi, has been reconstructed and + restored. It is a glare of white marble without, and a series of showy + majestic halls within, where a thousand curious mementos and relics of old + Venice are gathered and classified. Of its miscellaneous treasures I fear + I may perhaps frivolously prefer the series of its remarkable living + Longhis, an illustration of manners more copious than the celebrated + Carpaccio, the two ladies with their little animals and their long sticks. + Wonderful indeed today are the museums of Italy, where the renovations and + the <i>belle ordonnance</i> speak of funds apparently unlimited, in spite + of the fact that the numerous custodians frankly look starved. What is the + pecuniary source of all this civic magnificence—it is shown in a + hundred other ways—and how do the Italian cities manage to acquit + themselves of expenses that would be formidable to communities richer and + doubtless less aesthetic? Who pays the bills for the expressive statues + alone, the general exuberance of sculpture, with which every <i>piazzetta</i> + of almost every village is patriotically decorated? Let us not seek an + answer to the puzzling question, but observe instead that we are passing + the mouth of the populous Canareggio, next widest of the waterways, where + the race of Shylock abides, and at the corner of which the big colourless + church of San Geremia stands gracefully enough on guard. The Canareggio, + with its wide lateral footways and humpbacked bridges, makes on the feast + of St. John an admirable noisy, tawdry theatre for one of the prettiest + and the most infantile of the Venetian processions. + </p> + <p> + The rest of the course is a reduced magnificence, in spite of interesting + bits, of the battered pomp of the Pesaro and the Cornaro, of the recurrent + memories of royalty in exile which cluster about the Palazzo Vendramin + Calergi, once the residence of the Comte de Chambord and still that of his + half-brother, in spite too of the big Papadopoli gardens, opposite the + station, the largest private grounds in Venice, but of which Venice in + general mainly gets the benefit in the usual form of irrepressible + greenery climbing over walls and nodding at water. The rococo church of + the Scalzi is here, all marble and malachite, all a cold, hard glitter and + a costly, curly ugliness, and here too, opposite, on the top of its high + steps, is San Simeone Profeta, I won’t say immortalised, but unblushingly + misrepresented, by the perfidious Canaletto. I shall not stay to unravel + the mystery of this prosaic painter’s malpractices; he falsified without + fancy, and as he apparently transposed at will the objects he reproduced, + one is never sure of the particular view that may have constituted his + subject. It would look exactly like such and such a place if almost + everything were not different. San Simeone Profeta appears to hang there + upon the wall; but it is on the wrong side of the Canal and the other + elements quite fail to correspond. One’s confusion is the greater because + one doesn’t know that everything may not really have changed, even beyond + all probability—though it’s only in America that churches cross the + street or the river—and the mixture of the recognisable and the + different makes the ambiguity maddening, all the more that the painter is + almost as attaching as he is bad. Thanks at any rate to the white church, + domed and porticoed, on the top of its steps, the traveller emerging for + the first time upon the terrace of the railway-station seems to have a + Canaletto before him. He speedily discovers indeed even in the presence of + this scene of the final accents of the Canalazzo—there is a charm in + the old pink warehouses on the hot <i>fondamenta</i>—that he has + something much better. He looks up and down at the gathered gondolas; he + has his surprise after all, his little first Venetian thrill; and as the + terrace of the station ushers in these things we shall say no harm of it, + though it is not lovely. It is the beginning of his experience, but it is + the end of the Grand Canal. + </p> + <h3> + 1892. + </h3> + <p> + <a name="link2H_4_0004" id="link2H_4_0004"> + <!-- H2 anchor --> </a> + </p> + <div style="height: 4em;"> + <br /><br /><br /><br /> + </div> + <h2> + VENICE: AN EARLY IMPRESSION + </h2> + <p> + There would be much to say about that golden chain of historic cities + which stretches from Milan to Venice, in which the very names—Brescia, + Verona, Mantua, Padua—are an ornament to one’s phrase; but I should + have to draw upon recollections now three years old and to make my short + story a long one. Of Verona and Venice only have I recent impressions, and + even to these must I do hasty justice. I came into Venice, just as I had + done before, toward the end of a summer’s day, when the shadows begin to + lengthen and the light to glow, and found that the attendant sensations + bore repetition remarkably well. There was the same last intolerable delay + at Mestre, just before your first glimpse of the lagoon confirms the + already distinct sea-smell which has added speed to the precursive flight + of your imagination; then the liquid level, edged afar off by its band of + undiscriminated domes and spires, soon distinguished and proclaimed, + however, as excited and contentious heads multiply at the windows of the + train; then your long rumble on the immense white railway-bridge, which, + in spite of the invidious contrast drawn, and very properly, by Mr. Ruskin + between the old and the new approach, does truly, in a manner, shine + across the green lap of the lagoon like a mighty causeway of marble; then + the plunge into the station, which would be exactly similar to every other + plunge save for one little fact—that the keynote of the great medley + of voices borne back from the exit is not “Cab, sir!” but “Barca, + signore!” + </p> + <p> + I do not mean, however, to follow the traveller through every phase of his + initiation, at the risk of stamping poor Venice beyond repair as the + supreme bugbear of literature; though for my own part I hold that to a + fine healthy romantic appetite the subject can’t be too diffusely treated. + Meeting in the Piazza on the evening of my arrival a young American + painter who told me that he had been spending the summer just where I + found him, I could have assaulted him for very envy. He was painting + forsooth the interior of St. Mark’s. To be a young American painter + unperplexed by the mocking, elusive soul of things and satisfied with + their wholesome light-bathed surface and shape; keen of eye; fond of + colour, of sea and sky and anything that may chance between them; of old + lace and old brocade and old furniture (even when made to order); of + time-mellowed harmonies on nameless canvases and happy contours in cheap + old engravings; to spend one’s mornings in still, productive analysis of + the clustered shadows of the Basilica, one’s afternoons anywhere, in + church or campo, on canal or lagoon, and one’s evenings in star-light + gossip at Florian’s, feeling the sea-breeze throb languidly between the + two great pillars of the Piazzetta and over the low black domes of the + church—this, I consider, is to be as happy as is consistent with the + preservation of reason. + </p> + <p> + The mere use of one’s eyes in Venice is happiness enough, and generous + observers find it hard to keep an account of their profits in this line. + Everything the attention touches holds it, keeps playing with it—thanks + to some inscrutable flattery of the atmosphere. Your brown-skinned, + white-shirted gondolier, twisting himself in the light, seems to you, as + you lie at contemplation beneath your awning, a perpetual symbol of + Venetian “effect.” The light here is in fact a mighty magician and, with + all respect to Titian, Veronese and Tintoret, the greatest artist of them + all. You should see in places the material with which it deals—slimy + brick, marble battered and befouled, rags, dirt, decay. Sea and sky seem + to meet half-way, to blend their tones into a soft iridescence, a lustrous + compound of wave and cloud and a hundred nameless local reflections, and + then to fling the clear tissue against every object of vision. You may see + these elements at work everywhere, but to see them in their intensity you + should choose the finest day in the month and have yourself rowed far away + across the lagoon to Torcello. Without making this excursion you can + hardly pretend to know Venice or to sympathise with that longing for pure + radiance which animated her great colourists. It is a perfect bath of + light, and I couldn’t get rid of a fancy that we were cleaving the upper + atmosphere on some hurrying cloud-skiff. At Torcello there is nothing but + the light to see—nothing at least but a sort of blooming sand-bar + intersected by a single narrow creek which does duty as a canal and + occupied by a meagre cluster of huts, the dwellings apparently of + market-gardeners and fishermen, and by a ruinous church of the eleventh + century. It is impossible to imagine a more penetrating case of unheeded + collapse. Torcello was the mother-city of Venice, and she lies there now, + a mere mouldering vestige, like a group of weather-bleached parental bones + left impiously unburied. I stopped my gondola at the mouth of the shallow + inlet and walked along the grass beside a hedge to the low-browed, + crumbling cathedral. The charm of certain vacant grassy spaces, in Italy, + overfrowned by masses of brickwork that are honeycombed by the suns of + centuries, is something that I hereby renounce once for all the attempt to + express; but you may be sure that whenever I mention such a spot + enchantment lurks in it. + </p> + <p> + A delicious stillness covered the little campo at Torcello; I remember + none so subtly audible save that of the Roman Campagna. There was no life + but the visible tremor of the brilliant air and the cries of half-a-dozen + young children who dogged our steps and clamoured for coppers. These + children, by the way, were the handsomest little brats in the world, and, + each was furnished with a pair of eyes that could only have signified the + protest of nature against the meanness of fortune. They were very nearly + as naked as savages, and their little bellies protruded like those of + infant cannibals in the illustrations of books of travel; but as they + scampered and sprawled in the soft, thick grass, grinning like + suddenly-translated cherubs and showing their hungry little teeth, they + suggested forcibly that the best assurance of happiness in this world is + to be found in the maximum of innocence and the minimum of wealth. One + small urchin—framed, if ever a child was, to be the joy of an + aristocratic mamma—was the most expressively beautiful creature I + had ever looked upon. He had a smile to make Correggio sigh in his grave; + and yet here he was running wild among the sea-stunted bushes, on the + lonely margin of a decaying world, in prelude to how blank or to how dark + a destiny? Verily nature is still at odds with propriety; though indeed if + they ever really pull together I fear nature will quite lose her + distinction. An infant citizen of our own republic, straight-haired, + pale-eyed and freckled, duly darned and catechised, marching into a New + England schoolhouse, is an object often seen and soon forgotten; but I + think I shall always remember with infinite tender conjecture, as the + years roll by, this little unlettered Eros of the Adriatic strand. Yet all + youthful things at Torcello were not cheerful, for the poor lad who + brought us the key of the cathedral was shaking with an ague, and his + melancholy presence seemed to point the moral of forsaken nave and choir. + The church, admirably primitive and curious, reminded me of the two or + three oldest churches of Rome—St. Clement and St. Agnes. The + interior is rich in grimly mystical mosaics of the twelfth century and the + patchwork of precious fragments in the pavement not inferior to that of + St. Mark’s. But the terribly distinct Apostles are ranged against their + dead gold backgrounds as stiffly as grenadiers presenting arms—intensely + personal sentinels of a personal Deity. Their stony stare seems to wait + for ever vainly for some visible revival of primitive orthodoxy, and one + may well wonder whether it finds much beguilement in idly-gazing troops of + Western heretics—passionless even in their heresy. + </p> + <p> + I had been curious to see whether in the galleries and temples of Venice I + should be disposed to transpose my old estimates—to burn what I had + adored and adore what I had burned. It is a sad truth that one can stand + in the Ducal Palace for the first time but once, with the deliciously + ponderous sense of that particular half-hour’s being an era in one’s + mental history; but I had the satisfaction of finding at least—a + great comfort in a short stay—that none of my early memories were + likely to change places and that I could take up my admirations where I + had left them. I still found Carpaccio delightful, Veronese magnificent, + Titian supremely beautiful and Tintoret scarce to be appraised. I repaired + immediately to the little church of San Cassano, which contains the + smaller of Tintoret’s two great Crucifixions; and when I had looked at it + a while I drew a long breath and felt I could now face any other picture + in Venice with proper self-possession. It seemed to me I had advanced to + the uttermost limit of painting; that beyond this another art—inspired + poetry—begins, and that Bellini, Veronese, Giorgione, and Titian, + all joining hands and straining every muscle of their genius, reach + forward not so far but that they leave a visible space in which Tintoret + alone is master. I well remember the exaltations to which he lifted me + when first I learned to know him; but the glow of that comparatively + youthful amazement is dead, and with it, I fear, that confident vivacity + of phrase of which, in trying to utter my impressions, I felt less the + magniloquence than the impotence. In his power there are many weak spots, + mysterious lapses and fitful intermissions; but when the list of his + faults is complete he still remains to me the most <i>interesting</i> of + painters. His reputation rests chiefly on a more superficial sort of merit—his + energy, his unsurpassed productivity, his being, as Théophile Gautier + says, <i>le roi des fougueux</i>. These qualities are immense, but the + great source of his impressiveness is that his indefatigable hand never + drew a line that was not, as one may say, a moral line. No painter ever + had such breadth and such depth; and even Titian, beside him, scarce + figures as more than a great decorative artist. Mr. Ruskin, whose + eloquence in dealing with the great Venetians sometimes outruns his + discretion, is fond of speaking even of Veronese as a painter of deep + spiritual intentions. This, it seems to me, is pushing matters too far, + and the author of “The Rape of Europa” is, pictorially speaking, no + greater casuist than any other genius of supreme good taste. Titian was + assuredly a mighty poet, but Tintoret—well, Tintoret was almost a + prophet. Before his greatest works you are conscious of a sudden + evaporation of old doubts and dilemmas, and the eternal problem of the + conflict between idealism and realism dies the most natural of deaths. In + his genius the problem is practically solved; the alternatives are so + harmoniously interfused that I defy the keenest critic to say where one + begins and the other ends. The homeliest prose melts into the most + ethereal poetry—the literal and the imaginative fairly confound + their identity. + </p> + <p> + This, however, is vague praise. Tintoret’s great merit, to my mind, was + his unequalled distinctness of vision. When once he had conceived the germ + of a scene it defined itself to his imagination with an intensity, an + amplitude, an individuality of expression, which makes one’s observation + of his pictures seem less an operation of the mind than a kind of + supplementary experience of life. Veronese and Titian are content with a + much looser specification, as their treatment of any subject that the + author of the Crucifixion at San Cassano has also treated abundantly + proves. There are few more suggestive contrasts than that between the + absence of a total character at all commensurate with its scattered + variety and brilliancy in Veronese’s “Marriage of Cana,” at the Louvre, + and the poignant, almost startling, completeness of Tintoret’s + illustration of the theme at the Salute church. To compare his + “Presentation of the Virgin,” at the Madonna dell’ Orto, with Titian’s at + the Academy, or his “Annunciation” with Titian’s close at hand, is to + measure the essential difference between observation and imagination. One + has certainly not said all that there is to say for Titian when one has + called him an observer. <i>Il y mettait du sien</i>, and I use the term to + designate roughly the artist whose apprehension, infinitely deep and + strong when applied to the single figure or to easily balanced groups, + spends itself vainly on great dramatic combinations—or rather leaves + them ungauged. It was the whole scene that Tintoret seemed to have beheld + in a flash of inspiration intense enough to stamp it ineffaceably on his + perception; and it was the whole scene, complete, peculiar, individual, + unprecedented, that he committed to canvas with all the vehemence of his + talent. Compare his “Last Supper,” at San Giorgio—its long, + diagonally placed table, its dusky spaciousness, its scattered lamp-light + and halo-light, its startled, gesticulating figures, its richly realistic + foreground—with the customary formal, almost mathematical rendering + of the subject, in which impressiveness seems to have been sought in + elimination rather than comprehension. You get from Tintoret’s work the + impression that he <i>felt</i>, pictorially, the great, beautiful, + terrible spectacle of human life very much as Shakespeare felt it + poetically—with a heart that never ceased to beat a passionate + accompaniment to every stroke of his brush. Thanks to this fact his works + are signally grave, and their almost universal and rapidly increasing + decay doesn’t relieve their gloom. Nothing indeed can well be sadder than + the great collection of Tintorets at San Rocco. Incurable blackness is + settling fast upon all of them, and they frown at you across the sombre + splendour of their great chambers like gaunt twilight phantoms of + pictures. To our children’s children Tintoret, as things are going, can be + hardly more than a name; and such of them as shall miss the tragic beauty, + already so dimmed and stained, of the great “Bearing of the Cross” in that + temple of his spirit will live and die without knowing the largest + eloquence of art. If you wish to add the last touch of solemnity to the + place recall as vividly as possible while you linger at San Rocco the + painter’s singularly interesting portrait of himself, at the Louvre. The + old man looks out of the canvas from beneath a brow as sad as a sunless + twilight, with just such a stoical hopelessness as you might fancy him to + wear if he stood at your side gazing at his rotting canvases. It isn’t + whimsical to read it as the face of a man who felt that he had given the + world more than the world was likely to repay. Indeed before every picture + of Tintoret you may remember this tremendous portrait with profit. On one + side the power, the passion, the illusion of his art; on the other the + mortal fatigue of his spirit. The world’s knowledge of him is so small + that the portrait throws a doubly precious light on his personality; and + when we wonder vainly what manner of man he was, and what were his + purpose, his faith and his method, we may find forcible assurance there + that they were at any rate his life—one of the most intellectually + passionate ever led. + </p> + <p> + Verona, which was my last Italian stopping-place, is in any conditions a + delightfully interesting city; but the kindness of my own memory of it is + deepened by a subsequent ten days’ experience of Germany. I rose one + morning at Verona, and went to bed at night at Botzen! The statement needs + no comment, and the two places, though but fifty miles apart, are as + painfully dissimilar as their names. I had prepared myself for your + delectation with a copious tirade on German manners, German scenery, + German art and the German stage—on the lights and shadows of + Innsbrück, Munich, Nüremberg and Heidelberg; but just as I was about to + put pen to paper I glanced into a little volume on these very topics + lately published by that famous novelist and moralist, M. Ernest Feydeau, + the fruit of a summer’s observation at Homburg. This work produced a + reaction; and if I chose to follow M. Feydeau’s own example when he wishes + to qualify his approbation I might call his treatise by any vile name + known to the speech of man. But I content myself with pronouncing it + superficial. I then reflect that my own opportunities for seeing and + judging were extremely limited, and I suppress my tirade, lest some more + enlightened critic should come and hang me with the same rope. Its sum and + substance was to have been that—superficially—Germany is ugly; + that Munich is a nightmare, Heidelberg a disappointment (in spite of its + charming castle) and even Nüremberg not a joy for ever. But comparisons + are odious, and if Munich is ugly Verona is beautiful enough. You may + laugh at my logic, but will probably assent to my meaning. I carried away + from Verona a precious mental picture upon which I cast an introspective + glance whenever between Botzen and Strassburg the oppression of external + circumstance became painful. It was a lovely August afternoon in the Roman + arena—a ruin in which repair and restoration have been so watchfully + and plausibly practised that it seems all of one harmonious antiquity. The + vast stony oval rose high against the sky in a single clear, continuous + line, broken here and there only by strolling and reclining loungers. The + massive tiers inclined in solid monotony to the central circle, in which a + small open-air theatre was in active operation. A small quarter of the + great slope of masonry facing the stage was roped off into an auditorium, + in which the narrow level space between the foot-lights and the lowest + step figured as the pit. Foot-lights are a figure of speech, for the + performance was going on in the broad glow of the afternoon, with a + delightful and apparently by no means misplaced confidence in the + good-will of the spectators. What the piece was that was deemed so + superbly able to shift for itself I know not—very possibly the same + drama that I remember seeing advertised during my former visit to Verona; + nothing less than <i>La Tremenda Giustizia di Dio</i>. If titles are worth + anything this product of the melodramatist’s art might surely stand upon + its own legs. Along the tiers above the little group of regular spectators + was gathered a free-list of unauthorised observers, who, although beyond + ear-shot, must have been enabled by the generous breadth of Italian + gesture to follow the tangled thread of the piece. It was all deliciously + Italian—the mixture of old life and new, the mountebank’s booth (it + was hardly more) grafted on the antique circus, the dominant presence of a + mighty architecture, the loungers and idlers beneath the kindly sky and + upon the sun-warmed stones. I never felt more keenly the difference + between the background to life in very old and very new civilisations. + There are other things in Verona to make it a liberal education to be born + there, though that it is one for the contemporary Veronese I don’t pretend + to say. The Tombs of the Scaligers, with their soaring pinnacles, their + high-poised canopies, their exquisite refinement and concentration of the + Gothic idea, I can’t profess, even after much worshipful gazing, to have + fully comprehended and enjoyed. They seemed to me full of deep + architectural meanings, such as must drop gently into the mind one by one, + after infinite tranquil contemplation. But even to the hurried and + preoccupied traveller the solemn little chapel-yard in the city’s heart, + in which they stand girdled by their great swaying curtain of linked and + twisted iron, is one of the most impressive spots in Italy. Nowhere else + is such a wealth of artistic achievement crowded into so narrow a space; + nowhere else are the daily comings and goings of men blessed by the + presence of <i>manlier</i> art. Verona is rich furthermore in beautiful + churches—several with beautiful names: San Fermo, Santa Anastasia, + San Zenone. This last is a structure of high antiquity and of the most + impressive loveliness. The nave terminates in a double choir, that is a + sub-choir or crypt into which you descend and where you wander among + primitive columns whose variously grotesque capitals rise hardly higher + than your head, and an upper choral plane reached by broad stairways of + the bravest effect. I shall never forget the impression of majestic + chastity that I received from the great nave of the building on my former + visit. I then decided to my satisfaction that every church is from the + devotional point of view a solecism that has not something of a similar + absolute felicity of proportion; for strictly formal beauty seems best to + express our conception of spiritual beauty. The nobly serious character of + San Zenone is deepened by its single picture—a masterpiece of the + most serious of painters, the severe and exquisite Mantegna. + </p> + <p> + {Illustration: THE AMPHITHEATRE, VERONA} + </p> + <h3> + 1872 + </h3> + <p> + <a name="link2H_4_0005" id="link2H_4_0005"> + <!-- H2 anchor --> </a> + </p> + <div style="height: 4em;"> + <br /><br /><br /><br /> + </div> + <h2> + TWO OLD HOUSES AND THREE YOUNG WOMEN + </h2> + <p> + There are times and places that come back yet again, but that, when the + brooding tourist puts out his hand to them, meet it a little slowly, or + even seem to recede a step, as if in slight fear of some liberty he may + take. Surely they should know by this time that he is capable of taking + none. He has his own way—he makes it all right. It now becomes just + a part of the charming solicitation that it presents precisely a problem—that + of giving the particular thing as much as possible without at the same + time giving it, as we say, away. There are considerations, proprieties, a + necessary indirectness—he must use, in short, a little art. No + necessity, however, more than this, makes him warm to his work, and thus + it is that, after all, he hangs his three pictures. + </p> + <h3> + I + </h3> + <p> + The evening that was to give me the first of them was by no means the + first occasion of my asking myself if that inveterate “style” of which we + talk so much be absolutely conditioned—in dear old Venice and + elsewhere—on decrepitude. Is it the style that has brought about the + decrepitude, or the decrepitude that has, as it were, intensified and + consecrated the style? There is an ambiguity about it all that constantly + haunts and beguiles. Dear old Venice has lost her complexion, her figure, + her reputation, her self-respect; and yet, with it all, has so puzzlingly + not lost a shred of her distinction. Perhaps indeed the case is simpler + than it seems, for the poetry of misfortune is familiar to us all, + whereas, in spite of a stroke here and there of some happy justice that + charms, we scarce find ourselves anywhere arrested by the poetry of a run + of luck. The misfortune of Venice being, accordingly, at every point, what + we most touch, feel and see, we end by assuming it to be of the essence of + her dignity; a consequence, we become aware, by the way, sufficiently + discouraging to the general application or pretension of style, and all + the more that, to make the final felicity deep, the original greatness + must have been something tremendous. If it be the ruins that are noble we + have known plenty that were not, and moreover there are degrees and + varieties: certain monuments, solid survivals, hold up their heads and + decline to ask for a grain of your pity. Well, one knows of course when to + keep one’s pity to oneself; yet one clings, even in the face of the colder + stare, to one’s prized Venetian privilege of making the sense of doom and + decay a part of every impression. Cheerful work, it may be said of course; + and it is doubtless only in Venice that you gain more by such a trick than + you lose. What was most beautiful is gone; what was next most beautiful + is, thank goodness, going—that, I think, is the monstrous + description of the better part of your thought. Is it really your fault if + the place makes you want so desperately to read history into everything? + </p> + <p> + You do that wherever you turn and wherever you look, and you do it, I + should say, most of all at night. It comes to you there with longer + knowledge, and with all deference to what flushes and shimmers, that the + night is the real time. It perhaps even wouldn’t take much to make you + award the palm to the nights of winter. This is certainly true for the + form of progression that is most characteristic, for every question of + departure and arrival by gondola. The little closed cabin of this perfect + vehicle, the movement, the darkness and the plash, the indistinguishable + swerves and twists, all the things you don’t see and all the things you do + feel—each dim recognition and obscure arrest is a possible throb of + your sense of being floated to your doom, even when the truth is simply + and sociably that you are going out to tea. Nowhere else is anything as + innocent so mysterious, nor anything as mysterious so pleasantly deterrent + to protest. These are the moments when you are most daringly Venetian, + most content to leave cheap trippers and other aliens the high light of + the mid-lagoon and the pursuit of pink and gold. The splendid day is good + enough for <i>them</i>; what is best for you is to stop at last, as you + are now stopping, among clustered <i>pali</i> and softly-shifting poops + and prows, at a great flight of water-steps that play their admirable part + in the general effect of a great entrance. The high doors stand open from + them to the paved chamber of a basement tremendously tall and not vulgarly + lighted, from which, in turn, mounts the slow stone staircase that draws + you further on. The great point is, that if you are worthy of this + impression at all, there isn’t a single item of it of which the + association isn’t noble. Hold to it fast that there is no other such + dignity of arrival as arrival by water. Hold to it that to float and + slacken and gently bump, to creep out of the low, dark <i>felze</i> and + make the few guided movements and find the strong crooked and offered arm, + and then, beneath lighted palace-windows, pass up the few damp steps on + the precautionary carpet—hold to it that these things constitute a + preparation of which the only defect is that it may sometimes perhaps + really prepare too much. It’s so stately that what can come after?—it’s + so good in itself that what, upstairs, as we comparative vulgarians say, + can be better? Hold to it, at any rate, that if a lady, in especial, + scrambles out of a carriage, tumbles out of a cab, flops out of a + tram-car, and hurtles, projectile-like, out of a “lightning-elevator,” she + alights from the Venetian conveyance as Cleopatra may have stepped from + her barge. Upstairs—whatever may be yet in store for her—her + entrance shall still advantageously enjoy the support most opposed to the + “momentum” acquired. The beauty of the matter has been in the absence of + all momentum—elsewhere so scientifically applied to us, from behind, + by the terrible life of our day—and in the fact that, as the + elements of slowness, the felicities of deliberation, doubtless thus all + hang together, the last of calculable dangers is to enter a great Venetian + room with a rush. + </p> + <p> + Not the least happy note, therefore, of the picture I am trying to frame + is that there was absolutely no rushing; not only in the sense of a + scramble over marble floors, but, by reason of something dissuasive and + distributive in the very air of the place, a suggestion, under the fine + old ceilings and among types of face and figure abounding in the + unexpected, that here were many things to consider. Perhaps the simplest + rendering of a scene into the depths of which there are good grounds of + discretion for not sinking would be just this emphasis on the value of the + unexpected for such occasions—with due qualification, naturally, of + its degree. Unexpectedness pure and simple, it is needless to say, may + easily endanger any social gathering, and I hasten to add moreover that + the figures and faces I speak of were probably not in the least unexpected + to each other. The stage they occupied was a stage of variety—Venice + has ever been a garden of strange social flowers. It is only as reflected + in the consciousness of the visitor from afar—brooding tourist even + call him, or sharp-eyed bird on the branch—that I attempt to give + you the little drama; beginning with the felicity that most appealed to + him, the visible, unmistakable fact that he was the only representative of + his class. The whole of the rest of the business was but what he saw and + felt and fancied—what he was to remember and what he was to forget. + Through it all, I may say distinctly, he clung to his great Venetian clue—the + explanation of everything by the historic idea. It was a high historic + house, with such a quantity of recorded past twinkling in the + multitudinous candles that one grasped at the idea of something waning and + displaced, and might even fondly and secretly nurse the conceit that what + one was having was just the very last. Wasn’t it certainly, for instance, + no mere illusion that there is no appreciable future left for such manners—an + urbanity so comprehensive, a form so transmitted, as those of such a + hostess and such a host? The future is for a different conception of the + graceful altogether—so far as it’s for a conception of the graceful + at all. Into that computation I shall not attempt to enter; but these + representative products of an antique culture, at least, and one of which + the secret seems more likely than not to be lost, were not common, nor + indeed was any one else—in the circle to which the picture most + insisted on restricting itself. + </p> + <p> + Neither, on the other hand, was anyone either very beautiful or very + fresh: which was again, exactly, a precious “value” on an occasion that + was to shine most, to the imagination, by the complexity of its + references. Such old, old women with such old, old jewels; such ugly, ugly + ones with such handsome, becoming names; such battered, fatigued gentlemen + with such inscrutable decorations; such an absence of youth, for the most + part, in either sex—of the pink and white, the “bud” of new worlds; + such a general personal air, in fine, of being the worse for a good deal + of wear in various old ones. It was not a society—that was clear—in + which little girls and boys set the tune; and there was that about it all + that might well have cast a shadow on the path of even the most successful + little girl. Yet also—let me not be rudely inexact—it was in + honour of youth and freshness that we had all been convened. The <i>fiançailles</i> + of the last—unless it were the last but one—unmarried daughter + of the house had just been brought to a proper climax; the contract had + been signed, the betrothal rounded off—I’m not sure that the civil + marriage hadn’t, that day, taken place. The occasion then had in fact the + most charming of heroines and the most ingenuous of heroes, a young man, + the latter, all happily suffused with a fair Austrian blush. The young + lady had had, besides other more or less shining recent ancestors, a very + famous paternal grandmother, who had played a great part in the political + history of her time and whose portrait, in the taste and dress of 1830, + was conspicuous in one of the rooms. The grand-daughter of this celebrity, + of royal race, was strikingly like her and, by a fortunate stroke, had + been habited, combed, curled in a manner exactly to reproduce the + portrait. These things were charming and amusing, as indeed were several + other things besides. The great Venetian beauty of our period was there, + and nature had equipped the great Venetian beauty for her part with the + properest sense of the suitable, or in any case with a splendid generosity—since + on the ideally suitable <i>character</i> of so brave a human symbol who + shall have the last word? This responsible agent was at all events the + beauty in the world about whom probably, most, the absence of question (an + absence never wholly propitious) would a little smugly and monotonously + flourish: the one thing wanting to the interest she inspired was thus the + possibility of ever discussing it. There were plenty of suggestive + subjects round about, on the other hand, as to which the exchange of ideas + would by no means necessarily have dropped. You profit to the full at such + times by all the old voices, echoes, images—by that element of the + history of Venice which represents all Europe as having at one time and + another revelled or rested, asked for pleasure or for patience there; + which gives you the place supremely as the refuge of endless strange + secrets, broken fortunes and wounded hearts. + </p> + <h3> + II + </h3> + <p> + There had been, on lines of further or different speculation, a young + Englishman to luncheon, and the young Englishman had proved “sympathetic”; + so that when it was a question afterwards of some of the more hidden + treasures, the browner depths of the old churches, the case became one for + mutual guidance and gratitude—for a small afternoon tour and the + wait of a pair of friends in the warm little <i>campi</i>, at locked doors + for which the nearest urchin had scurried off to fetch the keeper of the + key. There are few brown depths to-day into which the light of the hotels + doesn’t shine, and few hidden treasures about which pages enough, + doubtless, haven’t already been printed: my business, accordingly, let me + hasten to say, is not now with the fond renewal of any discovery—at + least in the order of impressions most usual. Your discovery may be, for + that matter, renewed every week; the only essential is the good luck—which + a fair amount of practice has taught you to count upon-of not finding, for + the particular occasion, other discoverers in the field. Then, in the + quiet corner, with the closed door—then in the presence of the + picture and of your companion’s sensible emotion—not only the + original happy moment, but everything else, is renewed. Yet once again it + can all come back. The old custode, shuffling about in the dimness, jerks + away, to make sure of his tip, the old curtain that isn’t much more modern + than the wonderful work itself. He does his best to create light where + light can never be; but you have your practised groping gaze, and in + guiding the young eyes of your less confident associate, moreover, you + feel you possess the treasure. These are the refined pleasures that Venice + has still to give, these odd happy passages of communication and response. + </p> + <p> + But the point of my reminiscence is that there were other communications + that day, as there were certainly other responses. I have forgotten + exactly what it was we were looking for—without much success—when + we met the three Sisters. Nothing requires more care, as a long knowledge + of Venice works in, than not to lose the useful faculty of getting lost. I + had so successfully done my best to preserve it that I could at that + moment conscientiously profess an absence of any suspicion of where we + might be. It proved enough that, wherever we were, we were where the three + sisters found us. This was on a little bridge near a big campo, and a part + of the charm of the matter was the theory that it was very much out of the + way. They took us promptly in hand—they were only walking over to + San Marco to match some coloured wool for the manufacture of such belated + cushions as still bloom with purple and green in the long leisures of old + palaces; and that mild errand could easily open a parenthesis. The obscure + church we had feebly imagined we were looking for proved, if I am not + mistaken, that of the sisters’ parish; as to which I have but a confused + recollection of a large grey void and of admiring for the first time a + fine work of art of which I have now quite lost the identity. This was the + effect of the charming beneficence of the three sisters, who presently + were to give our adventure a turn in the emotion of which everything that + had preceded seemed as nothing. It actually strikes me even as a little + dim to have been told by them, as we all fared together, that a certain + low, wide house, in a small square as to which I found myself without + particular association, had been in the far-off time the residence of + George Sand. And yet this was a fact that, though I could then only feel + it must be for another day, would in a different connection have set me + richly reconstructing. + </p> + <p> + Madame Sand’s famous Venetian year has been of late immensely in the air—a + tub of soiled linen which the muse of history, rolling her sleeves well + up, has not even yet quite ceased energetically and publicly to wash. The + house in question must have been the house to which the wonderful lady + betook herself when, in 1834, after the dramatic exit of Alfred de Musset, + she enjoyed that remarkable period of rest and refreshment with the so + long silent, the but recently rediscovered, reported, extinguished, Doctor + Pagello. As an old Sandist—not exactly indeed of the <i>première + heure</i>, but of the fine high noon and golden afternoon of the great + career—I had been, though I confess too inactively, curious as to a + few points in the topography of the eminent adventure to which I here + allude; but had never got beyond the little public fact, in itself always + a bit of a thrill to the Sandist, that the present Hotel Danieli had been + the scene of its first remarkable stages. I am not sure indeed that the + curiosity I speak of has not at last, in my breast, yielded to another + form of wonderment—truly to the rather rueful question of why we + have so continued to concern ourselves, and why the fond observer of the + footprints of genius is likely so to continue, with a body of discussion, + neither in itself and in its day, nor in its preserved and attested + records, at all positively edifying. The answer to such an inquiry would + doubtless reward patience, but I fear we can now glance at its + possibilities only long enough to say that interesting persons—so + they be of a sufficiently approved and established interest—render + in some degree interesting whatever happens to them, and give it an + importance even when very little else (as in the case I refer to) may have + operated to give it a dignity. Which is where I leave the issue of further + identifications. + </p> + <p> + For the three sisters, in the kindest way in the world, had asked us if we + already knew their sequestered home and whether, in case we didn’t, we + should be at all amused to see it. My own acquaintance with them, though + not of recent origin, had hitherto lacked this enhancement, at which we + both now grasped with the full instinct, indescribable enough, of what it + was likely to give. But how, for that matter, either, can I find the right + expression of what was to remain with us of this episode? It is the fault + of the sad-eyed old witch of Venice that she so easily puts more into + things that can pass under the common names that do for them elsewhere. + Too much for a rough sketch was to be seen and felt in the home of the + three sisters, and in the delightful and slightly pathetic deviation of + their doing us so simply and freely the honours of it. What was most + immediately marked was their resigned cosmopolite state, the effacement of + old conventional lines by foreign contact and example; by the action, too, + of causes full of a special interest, but not to be emphasised perhaps—granted + indeed they be named at all—without a certain sadness of sympathy. + If “style,” in Venice, sits among ruins, let us always lighten our tread + when we pay her a visit. + </p> + <p> + Our steps were in fact, I am happy to think, almost soft enough for a + death-chamber as we stood in the big, vague <i>sala</i> of the three + sisters, spectators of their simplified state and their beautiful blighted + rooms, the memories, the portraits, the shrunken relics of nine Doges. If + I wanted a first chapter it was here made to my hand; the painter of life + and manners, as he glanced about, could only sigh—as he so + frequently has to—over the vision of so much more truth than he can + use. What on earth is the need to “invent,” in the midst of tragedy and + comedy that never cease? Why, with the subject itself, all round, so + inimitable, condemn the picture to the silliness of trying not to be aware + of it? The charming lonely girls, carrying so simply their great name and + fallen fortunes, the despoiled <i>decaduta</i> house, the unfailing + Italian grace, the space so out of scale with actual needs, the absence of + books, the presence of ennui, the sense of the length of the hours and the + shortness of everything else—all this was a matter not only for a + second chapter and a third, but for a whole volume, a <i>dénoûment</i> and + a sequel. + </p> + <p> + This time, unmistakably, it <i>was</i> the last—Wordsworth’s stately + “shade of that which once was great”; and it was <i>almost</i> as if our + distinguished young friends had consented to pass away slowly in order to + treat us to the vision. Ends are only ends in truth, for the painter of + pictures, when they are more or less conscious and prolonged. One of the + sisters had been to London, whence she had brought back the impression of + having seen at the British Museum a room exclusively filled with books and + documents devoted to the commemoration of her family. She must also then + have encountered at the National Gallery the exquisite specimen of an + early Venetian master in which one of her ancestors, then head of the + State, kneels with so sweet a dignity before the Virgin and Child. She was + perhaps old enough, none the less, to have seen this precious work taken + down from the wall of the room in which we sat and—on terms so far + too easy—carried away for ever; and not too young, at all events, to + have been present, now and then, when her candid elders, enlightened too + late as to what their sacrifice might really have done for them, looked at + each other with the pale hush of the irreparable. We let ourselves note + that these were matters to put a great deal of old, old history into sweet + young Venetian faces. + </p> + <h3> + III + </h3> + <p> + In Italy, if we come to that, this particular appearance is far from being + only in the streets, where we are apt most to observe it—in + countenances caught as we pass and in the objects marked by the + guide-books with their respective stellar allowances. It is behind the + walls of the houses that old, old history is thick and that the multiplied + stars of Baedeker might often best find their application. The feast of + St. John the Baptist is the feast of the year in Florence, and it seemed + to me on that night that I could have scattered about me a handful of + these signs. I had the pleasure of spending a couple of hours on a signal + high terrace that overlooks the Arno, as well as in the galleries that + open out to it, where I met more than ever the pleasant curious question + of the disparity between the old conditions and the new manners. Make our + manners, we moderns, as good as we can, there is still no getting over it + that they are not good enough for many of the great places. This was one + of those scenes, and its greatness came out to the full into the hot + Florentine evening, in which the pink and golden fires of the pyrotechnics + arranged on Ponte Carraja—the occasion of our assembly—lighted + up the large issue. The “good people” beneath were a huge, hot, gentle, + happy family; the fireworks on the bridge, kindling river as well as sky, + were delicate and charming; the terrace connected the two wings that give + bravery to the front of the palace, and the close-hung pictures in the + rooms, open in a long series, offered to a lover of quiet perambulation an + alternative hard to resist. + </p> + <p> + Wherever he stood—on the broad loggia, in the cluster of company, + among bland ejaculations and liquefied ices, or in the presence of the + mixed masters that led him from wall to wall—such a seeker for the + spirit of each occasion could only turn it over that in the first place + this was an intenser, finer little Florence than ever, and that in the + second the testimony was again wonderful to former fashions and ideas. + What did they do, in the other time, the time of so much smaller a + society, smaller and fewer fortunes, more taste perhaps as to some + particulars, but fewer tastes, at any rate, and fewer habits and wants—what + did they do with chambers so multitudinous and so vast? Put their “state” + at its highest—and we know of many ways in which it must have broken + down—how did they live in them without the aid of variety? How did + they, in minor communities in which every one knew every one, and every + one’s impression and effect had been long, as we say, discounted, find + representation and emulation sufficiently amusing? Much of the charm of + thinking of it, however, is doubtless that we are not able to say. This + leaves us with the conviction that does them most honour: the old + generations built and arranged greatly for the simple reason that they + liked it, and they could bore themselves—to say nothing of each + other, when it came to that—better in noble conditions than in mean + ones. + </p> + <p> + It was not, I must add, of the far-away Florentine age that I most + thought, but of periods more recent and of which the sound and beautiful + house more directly spoke. If one had always been homesick for the + Arno-side of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, here was a chance, + and a better one than ever, to taste again of the cup. Many of the + pictures—there was a charming quarter of an hour when I had them to + myself—were bad enough to have passed for good in those delightful + years. Shades of Grand-Dukes encompassed me—Dukes of the pleasant + later sort who weren’t really grand. There was still the sense of having + come too late—yet not too late, after all, for this glimpse and this + dream. My business was to people the place—its own business had + never been to save us the trouble of understanding it. And then the + deepest spell of all was perhaps that just here I was supremely out of the + way of the so terribly actual Florentine question. This, as all the world + knows, is a battle-ground, to-day, in many journals, with all Italy + practically pulling on one side and all England, America and Germany + pulling on the other: I speak of course of the more or less articulate + opinion. The “improvement,” the rectification of Florence is in the air, + and the problem of the particular ways in which, given such desperately + delicate cases, these matters should be understood. The little + treasure-city is, if there ever was one, a delicate case—more + delicate perhaps than any other in the world save that of our taking on + ourselves to persuade the Italians that they mayn’t do as they like with + their own. They so absolutely may that I profess I see no happy issue from + the fight. It will take more tact than our combined tactful genius may at + all probably muster to convince them that their own is, by an ingenious + logic, much rather <i>ours</i>. It will take more subtlety still to muster + for them that dazzling show of examples from which they may learn that + what in general is “ours” shall appear to them as a rule a sacrifice to + beauty and a triumph of taste. The situation, to the truly analytic mind, + offers in short, to perfection, all the elements of despair; and I am + afraid that if I hung back, at the Corsini palace, to woo illusions and + invoke the irrelevant, it was because I could think, in the conditions, of + no better way to meet the acute responsibility of the critic than just to + shirk it. + </p> + <h3> + {1899.} + </h3> + <p> + <a name="link2H_4_0006" id="link2H_4_0006"> + <!-- H2 anchor --> </a> + </p> + <div style="height: 4em;"> + <br /><br /><br /><br /> + </div> + <h2> + CASA ALVISI + </h2> + <p> + Invited to “introduce” certain pages of cordial and faithful reminiscence + from another hand, {1} + </p> + <p> + {1} “Browning in Venice,” being Recollections of the late Katharine De Kay + Bronson, with a Prefatory Note by H. J. (<i>Cornhill Magazine</i>, + February, 1902).} + </p> + <p> + in which a frankly predominant presence seems to live again, I undertook + that office with an interest inevitably somewhat sad—so passed and + gone to-day is so much of the life suggested. Those who fortunately knew + Mrs. Bronson will read into her notes still more of it—more of her + subject, more of herself too, and of many things—than she gives, and + some may well even feel tempted to do for her what she has done here for + her distinguished friend. In Venice, during a long period, for many + pilgrims, Mrs. Arthur Bronson, originally of New York, was, so far as + society, hospitality, a charming personal welcome were concerned, almost + in sole possession; she had become there, with time, quite the prime + representative of those private amenities which the Anglo-Saxon abroad is + apt to miss just in proportion as the place visited is publicly wonderful, + and in which he therefore finds a value twice as great as at home. Mrs. + Bronson really earned in this way the gratitude of mingled generations and + races. She sat for twenty years at the wide mouth, as it were, of the + Grand Canal, holding out her hand, with endless good-nature, patience, + charity, to all decently accredited petitioners, the incessant troop of + those either bewilderedly making or fondly renewing acquaintance with the + dazzling city. + </p> + <p> + {Illustration: CASA ALVISI, VENICE} + </p> + <p> + Casa Alvisi is directly opposite the high, broad-based florid church of S. + Maria della Salute—so directly that from the balcony over the + water-entrance your eye, crossing the canal, seems to find the key-hole of + the great door right in a line with it; and there was something in this + position that for the time made all Venice-lovers think of the genial <i>padrona</i> + as thus levying in the most convenient way the toll of curiosity and + sympathy. Every one passed, every one was seen to pass, and few were those + not seen to stop and to return. The most generous of hostesses died a year + ago at Florence; her house knows her no more—it had ceased to do so + for some time before her death; and the long, pleased procession—the + charmed arrivals, the happy sojourns at anchor, the reluctant departures + that made Ca’ Alvisi, as was currently said, a social <i>porto di mare</i>—is, + for remembrance and regret, already a possession of ghosts; so that, on + the spot, at present, the attention ruefully averts itself from the dear + little old faded but once familiarly bright façade, overtaken at last by + the comparatively vulgar uses that are doing their best to “paint out” in + Venice, right and left, by staring signs and other vulgarities, the + immemorial note of distinction. The house, in a city of palaces, was + small, but the tenant clung to her perfect, her inclusive position—the + one right place that gave her a better command, as it were, than a better + house obtained by a harder compromise; not being fond, moreover, of + spacious halls and massive treasures, but of compact and familiar rooms, + in which her remarkable accumulation of minute and delicate Venetian + objects could show. She adored—in the way of the Venetian, to which + all her taste addressed itself—the small, the domestic and the + exquisite; so that she would have given a Tintoretto or two, I think, + without difficulty, for a cabinet of tiny gilded glasses or a + dinner-service of the right old silver. + </p> + <p> + The general receptacle of these multiplied treasures played at any rate, + through the years, the part of a friendly private-box at the constant + operatic show, a box at the best point of the best tier, with the + cushioned ledge of its front raking the whole scene and with its + withdrawing rooms behind for more detached conversation; for easy—when + not indeed slightly difficult—polyglot talk, artful <i>bibite</i>, + artful cigarettes too, straight from the hand of the hostess, who could do + all that belonged to a hostess, place people in relation and keep them so, + take up and put down the topic, cause delicate tobacco and little gilded + glasses to circulate, without ever leaving her sofa-cushions or + intermitting her good-nature. She exercised in these conditions, with + never a block, as we say in London, in the traffic, with never an + admission, an acceptance of the least social complication, her positive + genius for easy interest, easy sympathy, easy friendship. It was as if, at + last, she had taken the human race at large, quite irrespective of + geography, for her neighbours, with neighbourly relations as a matter of + course. These things, on her part, had at all events the greater + appearance of ease from their having found to their purpose—and as + if the very air of Venice produced them—a cluster of forms so light + and immediate, so pre-established by picturesque custom. The old bright + tradition, the wonderful Venetian legend had appealed to her from the + first, closing round her house and her well-plashed water-steps, where the + waiting gondolas were thick, quite as if, actually, the ghost of the + defunct Carnival—since I have spoken of ghosts—still played + some haunting part. + </p> + <p> + Let me add, at the same time, that Mrs. Bronson’s social facility, which + was really her great refuge from importunity, a defence with serious + thought and serious feeling quietly cherished behind it, had its + discriminations as well as its inveteracies, and that the most marked of + all these, perhaps, was her attachment to Robert Browning. Nothing in all + her beneficent life had probably made her happier than to have found + herself able to minister, each year, with the returning autumn, to his + pleasure and comfort. Attached to Ca’ Alvisi, on the land side, is a + somewhat melancholy old section of a Giustiniani palace, which she had + annexed to her own premises mainly for the purpose of placing it, in + comfortable guise, at the service of her friends. She liked, as she + professed, when they were the real thing, to have them under her hand; and + here succeeded each other, through the years, the company of the + privileged and the more closely domesticated, who liked, harmlessly, to + distinguish between themselves and outsiders. Among visitors partaking of + this pleasant provision Mr. Browning was of course easily first. But I + must leave her own pen to show him as her best years knew him. The point + was, meanwhile, that if her charity was great even for the outsider, this + was by reason of the inner essence of it—her perfect tenderness for + Venice, which she always recognised as a link. That was the true principle + of fusion, the key to communication. She communicated in proportion—little + or much, measuring it as she felt people more responsive or less so; and + she expressed herself, or in other words her full affection for the place, + only to those who had most of the same sentiment. The rich and interesting + form in which she found it in Browning may well be imagined—together + with the quite independent quantity of the genial at large that she also + found; but I am not sure that his favour was not primarily based on his + paid tribute of such things as “Two in a Gondola” and “A Toccata of + Galuppi.” He had more ineffaceably than anyone recorded his initiation + from of old. + </p> + <p> + She was thus, all round, supremely faithful; yet it was perhaps after all + with the very small folk, those to the manner born, that she made the + easiest terms. She loved, she had from the first enthusiastically adopted, + the engaging Venetian people, whose virtues she found touching and their + infirmities but such as appeal mainly to the sense of humour and the love + of anecdote; and she befriended and admired, she studied and spoiled them. + There must have been a multitude of whom it would scarce be too much to + say that her long residence among them was their settled golden age. When + I consider that they have lost her now I fairly wonder to what shifts they + have been put and how long they may not have to wait for such another + messenger of Providence. She cultivated their dialect, she renewed their + boats, she piously relighted—at the top of the tide-washed <i>pali</i> + of traghetto or lagoon—the neglected lamp of the tutelary + Madonnetta; she took cognisance of the wives, the children, the accidents, + the troubles, as to which she became, perceptibly, the most prompt, the + established remedy. On lines where the amusement was happily less + one-sided she put together in dialect many short comedies, dramatic + proverbs, which, with one of her drawing-rooms permanently arranged as a + charming diminutive theatre, she caused to be performed by the young + persons of her circle—often, when the case lent itself, by the + wonderful small offspring of humbler friends, children of the Venetian + lower class, whose aptitude, teachability, drollery, were her constant + delight. It was certainly true that an impression of Venice as humanly + sweet might easily found itself on the frankness and quickness and + amiability of these little people. They were at least so much to the good; + for the philosophy of their patroness was as Venetian as everything else; + helping her to accept experience without bitterness and to remain fresh, + even in the fatigue which finally overtook her, for pleasant surprises and + proved sincerities. She was herself sincere to the last for the place of + her predilection; inasmuch as though she had arranged herself, in the + later time—and largely for the love of “Pippa Passes”—an + alternative refuge at Asolo, she absented herself from Venice with + continuity only under coercion of illness. + </p> + <p> + At Asolo, periodically, the link with Browning was more confirmed than + weakened, and there, in old Venetian territory, and with the invasion of + visitors comparatively checked, her preferentially small house became + again a setting for the pleasure of talk and the sense of Italy. It + contained again its own small treasures, all in the pleasant key of the + homelier Venetian spirit. The plain beneath it stretched away like a + purple sea from the lower cliffs of the hills, and the white <i>campanili</i> + of the villages, as one was perpetually saying, showed on the expanse like + scattered sails of ships. The rumbling carriage, the old-time, rattling, + red-velveted carriage of provincial, rural Italy, delightful and quaint, + did the office of the gondola; to Bassano, to Treviso, to high-walled + Castelfranco, all pink and gold, the home of the great Giorgione. Here + also memories cluster; but it is in Venice again that her vanished + presence is most felt, for there, in the real, or certainly the finer, the + more sifted Cosmopolis, it falls into its place among the others evoked, + those of the past seekers of poetry and dispensers of romance. It is a + fact that almost every one interesting, appealing, melancholy, memorable, + odd, seems at one time or another, after many days and much life, to have + gravitated to Venice by a happy instinct, settling in it and treating it, + cherishing it, as a sort of repository of consolations; all of which + to-day, for the conscious mind, is mixed with its air and constitutes its + unwritten history. The deposed, the defeated, the disenchanted, the + wounded, or even only the bored, have seemed to find there something that + no other place could give. But such people came for themselves, as we seem + to see them—only with the egotism of their grievances and the vanity + of their hopes. Mrs. Bronson’s case was beautifully different—she + had come altogether for others. + </p> + <p> + <a name="link2H_4_0007" id="link2H_4_0007"> + <!-- H2 anchor --> </a> + </p> + <div style="height: 4em;"> + <br /><br /><br /><br /> + </div> + <h2> + FROM CHAMBÉRY TO MILAN + </h2> + <p> + Your truly sentimental tourist will never take it from any occasion that + there is absolutely nothing for him, and it was at Chambéry—but four + hours from Geneva—that I accepted the situation and decided there + might be mysterious delights in entering Italy by a whizz through an + eight-mile tunnel, even as a bullet through the bore of a gun. I found my + reward in the Savoyard landscape, which greets you betimes with the smile + of anticipation. If it is not so Italian as Italy it is at least more + Italian than anything <i>but</i> Italy—more Italian, too, I should + think, than can seem natural and proper to the swarming red-legged + soldiery who so publicly proclaim it of the empire of M. Thiers. The light + and the complexion of things had to my eyes not a little of that mollified + depth last loved by them rather further on. It was simply perhaps that the + weather was hot and the mountains drowsing in that iridescent haze that I + have seen nearer home than at Chambéry. But the vegetation, assuredly, had + an all but Transalpine twist and curl, and the classic wayside tangle of + corn and vines left nothing to be desired in the line of careless grace. + Chambéry as a town, however, constitutes no foretaste of the monumental + cities. There is shabbiness and shabbiness, the fond critic of such things + will tell you; and that of the ancient capital of Savoy lacks style. I + found a better pastime, however, than strolling through the dark dull + streets in quest of effects that were not forthcoming. The first urchin + you meet will show you the way to Les Charmettes and the Maison + Jean-Jacques. A very pleasant way it becomes as soon as it leaves the town—a + winding, climbing by-road, bordered with such a tall and sturdy hedge as + to give it the air of an English lane—if you can fancy an English + lane introducing you to the haunts of a Madame de Warens. + </p> + <p> + The house that formerly sheltered this lady’s singular ménage stands on a + hillside above the road, which a rapid path connects with the little + grass-grown terrace before it. It is a small shabby, homely dwelling, with + a certain reputable solidity, however, and more of internal spaciousness + than of outside promise. The place is shown by an elderly competent dame + who points out the very few surviving objects which you may touch with the + reflection—complacent in whatsoever degree suits you—that they + have known the familiarity of Rousseau’s hand. It was presumably a + meagrely-appointed house, and I wondered that on such scanty features so + much expression should linger. But the structure has an ancient + ponderosity, and the dust of the eighteenth century seems to lie on its + worm-eaten floors, to cling to the faded old <i>papiers à ramages</i> on + the walls and to lodge in the crevices of the brown wooden ceilings. + Madame de Warens’s bed remains, with the narrow couch of Jean-Jacques as + well, his little warped and cracked yellow spinet, and a battered, + turnip-shaped silver timepiece, engraved with its master’s name—its + primitive tick as extinct as his passionate heart-beats. It cost me, I + confess, a somewhat pitying acceleration of my own to see this intimately + personal relic of the <i>genius loci</i>—for it had dwelt; in his + waistcoat-pocket, than which there is hardly a material point in space + nearer to a man’s consciousness—tossed so the dog’s-eared visitors’ + record or <i>livre de cuisine</i> recently denounced by Madame George + Sand. In fact the place generally, in so far as some faint ghostly + presence of its famous inmates seems to linger there, is by no means + exhilarating. Coppet and Ferney tell, if not of pure happiness, at least + of prosperity and, honour, wealth and success. But Les Charmettes is + haunted by ghosts unclean and forlorn. The place tells of poverty, + perversity, distress. A good deal of clever modern talent in France has + been employed in touching up the episode of which it was the scene and + tricking it out in idyllic love-knots. But as I stood on the charming + terrace I have mentioned—a little jewel of a terrace, with grassy + flags and a mossy parapet, and an admirable view of great swelling violet + hills—stood there reminded how much sweeter Nature is than man, the + story looked rather wan and unlovely beneath these literary decorations, + and I could pay it no livelier homage than is implied in perfect pity. + Hero and heroine have become too much creatures of history to take up + attitudes as part of any poetry. But, not to moralise too sternly for a + tourist between trains, I should add that, as an illustration, to be + inserted mentally in the text of the “Confessions,” a glimpse of Les + Charmettes is pleasant enough. It completes the rare charm of good + autobiography to behold with one’s eyes the faded and battered background + of the story; and Rousseau’s narrative is so incomparably vivid and + forcible that the sordid little house at Chambéry seems of a hardly deeper + shade of reality than so many other passages of his projected truth. + </p> + <p> + If I spent an hour at Les Charmettes, fumbling thus helplessly with the + past, I recognised on the morrow how strongly the Mont Cenis Tunnel smells + of the time to come. As I passed along the Saint-Gothard highway a couple + of months since, I perceived, half up the Swiss ascent, a group of navvies + at work in a gorge beneath the road. They had laid bare a broad surface of + granite and had punched in the centre of it a round black cavity, of about + the dimensions, as it seemed to me, of a soup-plate. This was to attain + its perfect development some eight years hence. The Mont Cenis may + therefore be held to have set a fashion which will be followed till the + highest Himalaya is but the ornamental apex or snow-capped gable-tip of + some resounding fuliginous corridor. The tunnel differs but in length from + other tunnels; you spend half an hour in it. But you whirl out into the + blest peninsula, and as you look back seem to see the mighty mass shrug + its shoulders over the line, the mere turn of a dreaming giant in his + sleep. The tunnel is certainly not a poetic object, out there is no + perfection without its beauty; and as you measure the long rugged outline + of the pyramid of which it forms the base you accept it as the perfection + of a short cut. Twenty-four hours from Paris to Turin is speed for the + times—speed which may content us, at any rate, until expansive + Berlin has succeeded in placing itself at thirty-six from Milan. + </p> + <p> + To enter Turin then of a lovely August afternoon was to find a city of + arcades, of pink and yellow stucco, of innumerable cafes, of blue-legged + officers, of ladies draped in the North-Italian mantilla. An old friend of + Italy coming back to her finds an easy waking for dormant memories. Every + object is a reminder and every reminder a thrill. Half an hour after my + arrival, as I stood at my window, which overhung the great square, I found + the scene, within and without, a rough epitome of every pleasure and every + impression I had formerly gathered from Italy: the balcony and the + Venetian-blind, the cool floor of speckled concrete, the lavish delusions + of frescoed wall and ceiling, the broad divan framed for the noonday + siesta, the massive medieval Castello in mid-piazza, with its shabby rear + and its pompous Palladian front, the brick campaniles beyond, the milder, + yellower light, the range of colour, the suggestion of sound. Later, + beneath the arcades, I found many an old acquaintance: beautiful officers, + resplendent, slow-strolling, contemplative of female beauty; civil and + peaceful dandies, hardly less gorgeous, with that religious faith in + moustache and shirt-front which distinguishes the <i>belle jeunesse of + Italy</i>; ladies with heads artfully shawled in Spanish-looking lace, but + with too little art—or too much nature at least—in the region + of the bodice; well-conditioned young <i>abbati</i> with neatly drawn + stockings. These indeed are not objects of first-rate interest, and with + such Turin is rather meagrely furnished. It has no architecture, no + churches, no monuments, no romantic street-scenery. It has the great + votive temple of the Superga, which stands on a high hilltop above the + city, gazing across at Monte Rosa and lifting its own fine dome against + the sky with no contemptible art. But when you have seen the Superga from + the quay beside the Po, a skein of a few yellow threads in August, despite + its frequent habit of rising high and running wild, and said to yourself + that in architecture position is half the battle, you have nothing left to + visit but the Museum of pictures. The Turin Gallery, which is large and + well arranged, is the fortunate owner of three or four masterpieces: a + couple of magnificent Vandycks and a couple of Paul Veroneses; the latter + a Queen of Sheba and a Feast of the House of Levi—the usual splendid + combination of brocades, grandees and marble colonnades dividing those + skies <i>de turquoise malade</i> to which Théophile Gautier is fond of + alluding. The Veroneses are fine, but with Venice in prospect the + traveller feels at liberty to keep his best attention in reserve. If, + however, he has the proper relish for Vandyck, let him linger long and + fondly here; for that admiration will never be more potently stirred than + by the adorable group of the three little royal highnesses, sons and the + daughter of Charles I. All the purity of childhood is here, and all its + soft solidity of structure, rounded tenderly beneath the spangled satin + and contrasted charmingly with the pompous rigidity. Clad respectively in + crimson, white and blue, these small scions stand up in their ruffs and + fardingales in dimpled serenity, squaring their infantine stomachers at + the spectator with an innocence, a dignity, a delightful grotesqueness, + which make the picture a thing of close truth as well as of fine decorum. + You might kiss their hands, but you certainly would think twice before + pinching their cheeks—provocative as they are of this tribute of + admiration—and would altogether lack presumption to lift them off + the ground or the higher level or dais on which they stand so sturdily + planted by right of birth. There is something inimitable in the paternal + gallantry with which the painter has touched off the young lady. She was a + princess, yet she was a baby, and he has contrived, we let ourselves + fancy, to interweave an intimation that she was a creature whom, in her + teens, the lucklessly smitten—even as he was prematurely—must + vainly sigh for. Though the work is a masterpiece of execution its merits + under this head may be emulated, at a distance; the lovely modulations of + colour in the three contrasted and harmonised little satin petticoats, the + solidity of the little heads, in spite of all their prettiness, the happy, + unexaggerated squareness and maturity of <i>pose</i>, are, severally, + points to study, to imitate, and to reproduce with profit. But the taste + of such a consummate thing is its great secret as well as its great merit—a + taste which seems one of the lost instincts of mankind. Go and enjoy this + supreme expression of Vandyck’s fine sense, and admit that never was a + politer production. + </p> + <p> + Milan speaks to us of a burden of felt life of which Turin is innocent, + but in its general aspect still lingers a northern reserve which makes the + place rather perhaps the last of the prose capitals than the first of the + poetic. The long Austrian occupation perhaps did something to Germanise + its physiognomy; though indeed this is an indifferent explanation when one + remembers how well, temperamentally speaking, Italy held her own in + Venetia. Milan, at any rate, if not bristling with the æsthetic impulse, + opens to us frankly enough the thick volume of her past. Of that volume + the Cathedral is the fairest and fullest page—a structure not + supremely interesting, not logical, not even, to some minds, commandingly + beautiful, but grandly curious and superbly rich. I hope, for my own part, + never to grow too particular to admire it. If it had no other distinction + it would still have that of impressive, immeasurable achievement. As I + strolled beside its vast indented base one evening, and felt it, above me, + rear its grey mysteries into the starlight while the restless human tide + on which I floated rose no higher than the first few layers of + street-soiled marble, I was tempted to believe that beauty in great + architecture is almost a secondary merit, and that the main point is mass—such + mass as may make it a supreme embodiment of vigorous effort. Viewed in + this way a great building is the greatest conceivable work of art. More + than any other it represents difficulties mastered, resources combined, + labour, courage and patience. And there are people who tell us that art + has nothing to do with morality! Little enough, doubtless, when it is + concerned, even ever so little, in painting the roof of Milan Cathedral + within to represent carved stone-work. Of this famous roof every one has + heard—how good it is, how bad, how perfect a delusion, how + transparent an artifice. It is the first thing your cicerone shows you on + entering the church. The occasionally accommodating art-lover may accept + it philosophically, I think; for the interior, though admirably effective + as a whole, has no great sublimity, nor even purity, of pitch. It is + splendidly vast and dim; the altarlamps twinkle afar through the + incense-thickened air like foglights at sea, and the great columns rise + straight to the roof, which hardly curves to meet them, with the girth and + altitude of oaks of a thousand years; but there is little refinement of + design—few of those felicities of proportion which the eye caresses, + when it finds them, very much as the memory retains and repeats some happy + lines of poetry or some haunting musical phrase. Consistently brave, none + the less, is the result produced, and nothing braver than a certain + exhibition that I privately enjoyed of the relics of St. Charles + Borromeus. This holy man lies at his eternal rest in a small but gorgeous + sepulchral chapel, beneath the boundless pavement and before the high + altar; and for the modest sum of five francs you may have his shrivelled + mortality unveiled and gaze at it with whatever reserves occur to you. The + Catholic Church never renounces a chance of the sublime for fear of a + chance of the ridiculous—especially when the chance of the sublime + may be the very excellent chance of five francs. The performance in + question, of which the good San Carlo paid in the first instance the cost, + was impressive certainly, but as a monstrous matter or a grim comedy may + still be. The little sacristan, having secured his audience, whipped on a + white tunic over his frock, lighted a couple of extra candles and + proceeded to remove from above the altar, by means of a crank, a sort of + sliding shutter, just as you may see a shop-boy do of a morning at his + master’s window. In this case too a large sheet of plate-glass was + uncovered, and to form an idea of the <i>étalage</i> you must imagine that + a jeweller, for reasons of his own, has struck an unnatural partnership + with an undertaker. The black mummified corpse of the saint is stretched + out in a glass coffin, clad in his mouldering canonicals, mitred, + crosiered and gloved, glittering with votive jewels. It is an + extraordinary mixture of death and life; the desiccated clay, the ashen + rags, the hideous little black mask and skull, and the living, glowing, + twinkling splendour of diamonds, emeralds and sapphires. The collection is + really fine, and many great historic names are attached to the different + offerings. Whatever may be the better opinion as to the future of the + Church, I can’t help thinking she will make a figure in the world so long + as she retains this great fund of precious “properties,” this prodigious + capital decoratively invested and scintillating throughout Christendom at + effectively-scattered points. You see I am forced to agree after all, in + spite of the sliding shutter and the profane swagger of the sacristan, + that a certain pastoral majesty saved the situation, or at least made + irony gape. Yet it was from a natural desire to breathe a sweeter air that + I immediately afterwards undertook the interminable climb to the roof of + the cathedral. This is another world of wonders, and one which enjoys due + renown, every square inch of wall on the winding stairways being + bescribbled with a traveller’s name. There is a great glare from the + far-stretching slopes of marble, a confusion (like the masts of a navy or + the spears of an army) of image-capped pinnacles, biting the impalpable + blue, and, better than either, the goodliest view of level Lombardy + sleeping in its rich transalpine light and resembling, with its + white-walled dwellings and the spires on its horizon, a vast green sea + spotted with ships. After two months of Switzerland the Lombard plain is a + rich rest to the eye, and the yellow, liquid, free-flowing light—as + if on favoured Italy the vessels of heaven were more widely opened—had + for mine a charm which made me think of a great opaque mountain as a + blasphemous invasion of the atmospheric spaces. + </p> + <p> + {Illustration: THE SIMPLON GATE, MILAN} + </p> + <p> + I have mentioned the cathedral first, but the prime treasure of Milan at + the present hour is the beautiful, tragical Leonardo. The cathedral is + good for another thousand years, but we ask whether our children will find + in the most majestic and most luckless of frescoes much more than the + shadow of a shadow. Its fame has been for a century or two that, as one + may say, of an illustrious invalid whom people visit to see how he lasts, + with leave-taking sighs and almost death-bed or tiptoe precautions. The + picture needs not another scar or stain, now, to be the saddest work of + art in the world; and battered, defaced, ruined as it is, it remains one + of the greatest. We may really compare its anguish of decay to the slow + conscious ebb of life in a human organism. The production of the prodigy + was a breath from the infinite, and the painter’s conception not + immeasurably less complex than the scheme, say, of his own mortal + constitution. There has been much talk lately of the irony of fate, but I + suspect fate was never more ironical than when she led the most + scientific, the most calculating of all painters to spend fifteen long + years in building his goodly house upon the sand. And yet, after all, may + not the playing of that trick represent but a deeper wisdom, since if the + thing enjoyed the immortal health and bloom of a first-rate Titian we + should have lost one of the most pertinent lessons in the history of art? + We know it as hearsay, but here is the plain proof, that there is no limit + to the amount of “stuff” an artist may put into his work. Every painter + ought once in his life to stand before the Cenacolo and decipher its + moral. Mix with your colours and mess on your palette every particle of + the very substance of your soul, and this lest perchance your “prepared + surface” shall play you a trick! Then, and then only, it will fight to the + last—it will resist even in death. Raphael was a happier genius; you + look at his lovely “Marriage of the Virgin” at the Brera, beautiful as + some first deep smile of conscious inspiration, but to feel that he + foresaw no complaint against fate, and that he knew the world he wanted to + know and charmed it into never giving him away. But I have left no space + to speak of the Brera, nor of that paradise of book-worms with an eye for + their background—if such creatures exist—the Ambrosian + Library; nor of that mighty basilica of St. Ambrose, with its spacious + atrium and its crudely solemn mosaics, in which it is surely your own + fault if you don’t forget Dr. Strauss and M. Renan and worship as grimly + as a Christian of the ninth century. + </p> + <p> + It is part of the sordid prose of the Mont Cenis road that, unlike those + fine old unimproved passes, the Simplon, the Splügen and—yet awhile + longer—the Saint-Gothard, it denies you a glimpse of that paradise + adorned by the four lakes even as that of uncommented Scripture by the + rivers of Eden. I made, however, an excursion to the Lake of Como, which, + though brief, lasted long enough to suggest to me that I too was a hero of + romance with leisure for a love-affair, and not a hurrying tourist with a + Bradshaw in his pocket. The Lake of Como has figured largely in novels of + “immoral” tendency—being commonly the spot to which inflamed young + gentlemen invite the wives of other gentlemen to fly with them and ignore + the restrictions of public opinion. But even the Lake of Como has been + revised and improved; the fondest prejudices yield to time; it gives one + somehow a sense of an aspiringly high tone. I should pay a poor compliment + at least to the swarming inmates of the hotels which now alternate + attractively by the water-side with villas old and new were I to read the + appearances more cynically. But if it is lost to florid fiction it still + presents its blue bosom to most other refined uses, and the + unsophisticated tourist, the American at least, may do any amount of + private romancing there. The pretty hotel at Cadenabbia offers him, for + instance, in the most elegant and assured form, the so often precarious + adventure of what he calls at home summer board. It is all so unreal, so + fictitious, so elegant and idle, so framed to undermine a rigid sense of + the chief end of man not being to float for ever in an ornamental boat, + beneath an awning tasselled like a circus-horse, impelled by an affable + Giovanni or Antonio from one stately stretch of lake-laved villa steps to + another, that departure seems as harsh and unnatural as the + dream-dispelling note of some punctual voice at your bedside on a dusky + winter morning. Yet I wondered, for my own part, where I had seen it all + before—the pink-walled villas gleaming through their shrubberies of + orange and oleander, the mountains shimmering in the hazy light like so + many breasts of doves, the constant presence of the melodious Italian + voice. Where indeed but at the Opera when the manager has been more than + usually regardless of expense? Here in the foreground was the palace of + the nefarious barytone, with its banqueting-hall opening as freely on the + stage as a railway buffet on the platform; beyond, the delightful back + scene, with its operatic gamut of colouring; in the middle the + scarlet-sashed <i>barcaiuoli</i>, grouped like a chorus, hat in hand, + awaiting the conductor’s signal. It was better even than being in a novel—this + being, this fairly wallowing, in a libretto. + </p> + <p> + <a name="link2H_4_0008" id="link2H_4_0008"> + <!-- H2 anchor --> </a> + </p> + <div style="height: 4em;"> + <br /><br /><br /><br /> + </div> + <h2> + THE OLD SAINT-GOTHARD LEAVES FROM A NOTE-BOOK + </h2> + <p> + Berne, <i>September</i>, 1873.—In Berne again, some eleven weeks + after having left it in July. I have never been in Switzerland so late, + and I came hither innocently supposing the last Cook’s tourist to have + paid out his last coupon and departed. But I was lucky, it seems, to + discover an empty cot in an attic and a very tight place at a table + d’hôte. People are all flocking out of Switzerland, as in July they were + flocking in, and the main channels of egress are terribly choked. I have + been here several days, watching them come and go; it is like the + march-past of an army. It gives one, for an occasional change from darker + thoughts, a lively impression of the numbers of people now living, and + above all now moving, at extreme ease in the world. Here is little + Switzerland disgorging its tens of thousands of honest folk, chiefly + English, and rarely, to judge by their faces and talk, children of light + in any eminent degree; for whom snow-peaks and glaciers and passes and + lakes and chalets and sunsets and a <i>café complet</i>, “including + honey,” as the coupon says, have become prime necessities for six weeks + every year. It’s not so long ago that lords and nabobs monopolised these + pleasures; but nowadays in a month’s tour in Switzerland is no more a <i>jeu + de prince</i> than a Sunday excursion. To watch this huge Anglo-Saxon wave + ebbing through Berne suggests, no doubt most fallaciously, that the common + lot of mankind isn’t after all so very hard and that the masses have + reached a high standard of comfort. The view of the Oberland chain, as you + see it from the garden of the hotel, really butters one’s bread most + handsomely; and here are I don’t know how many hundred Cook’s tourists a + day looking at it through the smoke of their pipes. Is it really the + “masses,” however, that I see every day at the table d’hôte? They have + rather too few h’s to the dozen, but their good-nature is great. Some + people complain that they “vulgarise” Switzerland; but as far as I am + concerned I freely give it up to them and offer them a personal welcome + and take a peculiar satisfaction in seeing them here. Switzerland is a + “show country”—I am more and more struck with the bearings of that + truth; and its use in the world is to reassure persons of a benevolent + imagination when they begin to wish for the drudging millions a greater + supply of elevating amusement. Here is amusement for a thousand years, and + as elevating certainly as mountains three miles high can make it. I expect + to live to see the summit of Monte Rosa heated by steam-tubes and adorned + with a hotel setting three tables d’hôte a day. + </p> + <p> + {Illustration: THE CLOCK TOWER, BERNE} + </p> + <p> + I have been walking about the arcades, which used to bestow a grateful + shade in July, but which seem rather dusky and chilly in these shortening + autumn days. I am struck with the way the English always speak of them—with + a shudder, as gloomy, as dirty, as evil-smelling, as suffocating, as + freezing, as anything and everything but admirably picturesque. I take us + Americans for the only people who, in travelling, judge things on the + first impulse—when we do judge them at all—not from the + standpoint of simple comfort. Most of us, strolling forth into these + bustling basements, are, I imagine, too much amused, too much diverted + from the sense of an alienable right to public ease, to be conscious of + heat or cold, of thick air, or even of the universal smell of strong <i>charcuterie</i>. + If the visible romantic were banished from the face of the earth I am sure + the idea of it would still survive in some typical American heart.... + </p> + <p> + <i>Lucerne, September</i>.—Berne, I find, has been filling with + tourists at the expense of Lucerne, which I have been having almost to + myself. There are six people at the table d’hôte; the excellent dinner + denotes on the part of the <i>chef</i> the easy leisure in which true + artists love to work. The waiters have nothing to do but lounge about the + hall and chink in their pockets the fees of the past season. The day has + been lovely in itself, and pervaded, to my sense, by the gentle glow of a + natural satisfaction at my finding myself again on the threshold of Italy. + I am lodged <i>en prince</i>, in a room with a balcony hanging over the + lake—a balcony on which I spent a long time this morning at dawn, + thanking the mountain-tops, from the depths of a landscape-lover’s heart, + for their promise of superbly fair weather. There were a great many + mountain-tops to thank, for the crags and peaks and pinnacles tumbled away + through the morning mist in an endless confusion of grandeur. I have been + all day in better humour with Lucerne than ever before—a forecast + reflection of Italian moods. If Switzerland, as I wrote the other day, is + so furiously a show-place, Lucerne is certainly one of the biggest booths + at the fair. The little quay, under the trees, squeezed in between the + decks of the steamboats and the doors of the hotels, is a terrible medley + of Saxon dialects—a jumble of pilgrims in all the phases of + devotion, equipped with book and staff, alpenstock and Baedeker. There are + so many hotels and trinket-shops, so many omnibuses and steamers, so many + Saint-Gothard <i>vetturini</i>, so many ragged urchins poking photographs, + minerals and Lucernese English at you, that you feel as if lake and + mountains themselves, in all their loveliness, were but a part of the + “enterprise” of landlords and pedlars, and half expect to see the Righi + and Pilatus and the fine weather figure as items on your hotel-bill + between the <i>bougie</i> and the <i>siphon</i>. Nature herself assists + you to this conceit; there is something so operatic and suggestive of + footlights and scene-shifters in the view on which Lucerne looks out. You + are one of five thousand—fifty thousand—“accommodated” + spectators; you have taken your season-ticket and there is a responsible + impresario somewhere behind the scenes. There is such a luxury of beauty + in the prospect—such a redundancy of composition and effect—so + many more peaks and pinnacles than are needed to make one heart happy or + regale the vision of one quiet observer, that you finally accept the + little Babel on the quay and the looming masses in the clouds as equal + parts of a perfect system, and feel as if the mountains had been waiting + so many ages for the hotels to come and balance the colossal group, that + they show a right, after all, to have them big and numerous. The + scene-shifters have been at work all day long, composing and discomposing + the beautiful background of the prospect—massing the clouds and + scattering the light, effacing and reviving, making play with their + wonderful machinery of mist and haze. The mountains rise, one behind the + other, in an enchanting gradation of distances and of melting blues and + greys; you think each successive tone the loveliest and haziest possible + till you see another loom dimly behind it. I couldn’t enjoy even <i>The + Swiss Times</i>, over my breakfast, till I had marched forth to the office + of the Saint-Gothard service of coaches and demanded the banquette for + to-morrow. The one place at the disposal of the office was taken, but I + might possibly <i>m’entendre</i> with the conductor for his own seat—the + conductor being generally visible, in the intervals of business, at the + post-office. To the post-office, after breakfast, I repaired, over the + fine new bridge which now spans the green Reuss and gives such a woeful + air of country-cousinship to the crooked old wooden structure which did + sole service when I was here four years ago. The old bridge is covered + with a running hood of shingles and adorned with a series of very quaint + and vivid little paintings of the “Dance of Death,” quite in the Holbein + manner; the new sends up a painful glare from its white limestone, and is + ornamented with candelabra in a meretricious imitation of platinum. As an + almost professional cherisher of the quaint I ought to have chosen to + return at least by the dark and narrow way; but mark how luxury unmans us. + I was already demoralised. I crossed the threshold of the timbered portal, + took a few steps, and retreated. It <i>smelt badly!</i> So I marched back, + counting the lamps in their fine falsity. But the other, the crooked and + covered way, smelt very badly indeed; and no good American is without a + fund of accumulated sensibility to the odour of stale timber. + </p> + <p> + Meanwhile I had spent an hour in the great yard of the postoffice, waiting + for my conductor to turn up and seeing the yellow malles-postes pushed to + and fro. At last, being told my man was at my service, I was brought to + speech of a huge, jovial, bearded, delightful Italian, clad in the blue + coat and waistcoat, with close, round silver buttons, which are a heritage + of the old postilions. No, it was not he; it was a friend of his; and + finally the friend was produced, <i>en costume de ville</i>, but equally + jovial, and Italian enough—a brave Lucernese, who had spent half of + his life between Bellinzona and Camerlata. For ten francs this worthy + man’s perch behind the luggage was made mine as far as Bellinzona, and we + separated with reciprocal wishes for good weather on the morrow. To-morrow + is so manifestly determined to be as fine as any other 30th of September + since the weather became on this planet a topic of conversation that I + have had nothing to do but stroll about Lucerne, staring, loafing and + vaguely intent on regarding the fact that, whatever happens, my place is + paid to Milan. I loafed into the immense new Hotel National and read the + <i>New York Tribune</i> on a blue satin divan; after which I was rather + surprised, on coming out, to find myself staring at a green Swiss lake and + not at the Broadway omnibuses. The Hotel National is adorned with a + perfectly appointed Broadway bar—one of the “prohibited” ones + seeking hospitality in foreign lands after the manner of an old-fashioned + French or Italian refugee. + </p> + <p> + <i>Milan, October</i>.—My journey hither was such a pleasant piece + of traveller’s luck that I feel a delicacy for taking it to pieces to see + what it was made of. Do what we will, however, there remains in all deeply + agreeable impressions a charming something we can’t analyse. I found it + agreeable even, given the rest of my case, to turn out of bed, at Lucerne, + by four o’clock, into the chilly autumn darkness. The thick-starred sky + was cloudless, and there was as yet no flush of dawn; but the lake was + wrapped in a ghostly white mist which crept halfway up the mountains and + made them look as if they too had been lying down for the night and were + casting away the vaporous tissues of their bedclothes. Into this fantastic + fog the little steamer went creaking away, and I hung about the deck with + the two or three travellers who had known better than to believe it would + save them francs or midnight sighs—over those debts you “pay with + your person”—to go and wait for the diligence at the Poste at + Fliielen, or yet at the Guillaume Tell. The dawn came sailing up over the + mountain-tops, flushed but unperturbed, and blew out the little stars and + then the big ones, as a thrifty matron after a party blows out her candles + and lamps; the mist went melting and wandering away into the duskier + hollows and recesses of the mountains, and the summits defined their + profiles against the cool soft light. + </p> + <p> + At Flüelen, before the landing, the big yellow coaches were actively + making themselves bigger, and piling up boxes and bags on their roofs in a + way to turn nervous people’s thoughts to the sharp corners of the downward + twists of the great road. I climbed into my own banquette, and stood + eating peaches—half-a-dozen women were hawking them about under the + horses’ legs—with an air of security that might have been offensive + to the people scrambling and protesting below between coupé and intérieur. + They were all English and all had false alarms about the claim of somebody + else to their place, the place for which they produced their ticket, with + a declaration in three or four different tongues of the inalienable right + to it given them by the expenditure of British gold. They were all + serenely confuted by the stout, purple-faced, many-buttoned conductors, + patted on the backs, assured that their bath-tubs had every advantage of + position on the top, and stowed away according to their dues. When once + one has fairly started on a journey and has but to go and go by the + impetus received, it is surprising what entertainment one finds in very + small things. We surrender to the gaping traveller’s mood, which surely + isn’t the unwisest the heart knows. I don’t envy people, at any rate, who + have outlived or outworn the simple sweetness of feeling settled to go + somewhere with bag and umbrella. If we are settled on the top of a coach, + and the “somewhere” contains an element of the new and strange, the case + is at its best. In this matter wise people are content to become children + again. We don’t turn about on our knees to look out of the omnibus-window, + but we indulge in very much the same round-eyed contemplation of + accessible objects. Responsibility is left at home or at the worst packed + away in the valise, relegated to quite another part of the diligence with + the clean shirts and the writing-case. I sucked in the gladness of gaping, + for this occasion, with the somewhat acrid juice of my indifferent + peaches; it made me think them very good. This was the first of a series + of kindly services it rendered me. It made me agree next, as we started, + that the gentleman at the booking-office at Lucerne had but played a + harmless joke when he told me the regular seat in the banquette was taken. + No one appeared to claim it; so the conductor and I reversed positions, + and I found him quite as conversible as the usual Anglo-Saxon. + </p> + <p> + He was trolling snatches of melody and showing his great yellow teeth in a + jovial grin all the way to Bellinzona—and this in face of the sombre + fact that the Saint-Gothard tunnel is scraping away into the mountain, all + the while, under his nose, and numbering the days of the many-buttoned + brotherhood. But he hopes, for long service’s sake, to be taken into the + employ of the railway; <i>he</i> at least is no cherisher of quaintness + and has no romantic perversity. I found the railway coming on, however, in + a manner very shocking to mine. About an hour short of Andermatt they have + pierced a huge black cavity in the mountain, around which has grown up a + swarming, digging, hammering, smoke-compelling colony. There are great + barracks, with tall chimneys, down in the gorge that bristled the other + day but with natural graces, and a wonderful increase of wine-shops in the + little village of Göschenen above. Along the breast of the mountain, + beside the road, come wandering several miles of very handsome iron pipes, + of a stupendous girth—a conduit for the water-power with which some + of the machinery is worked. It lies at its mighty length among the rocks + like an immense black serpent, and serves, as a mere detail, to give one + the measure of the central enterprise. When at the end of our long day’s + journey, well down in warm Italy, we came upon the other aperture of the + tunnel, I could but uncap with a grim reverence. Truly Nature is great, + but she seems to me to stand in very much the shoes of my poor friend the + conductor. She is being superseded at her strongest points, successively, + and nothing remains but for her to take humble service with her master. If + she can hear herself think amid that din of blasting and hammering she + must be reckoning up the years to elapse before the cleverest of + Ober-Ingénieurs decides that mountains are mere obstructive matter and has + the Jungfrau melted down and the residuum carried away in balloons and + dumped upon another planet. + </p> + <p> + The Devil’s Bridge, with the same failing apparently as the good Homer, + was decidedly nodding. The volume of water in the torrent was shrunken, + and I missed the thunderous uproar and far-leaping spray that have kept up + a miniature tempest in the neighbourhood on my other passages. It suddenly + occurs to me that the fault is not in the good Homer’s inspiration, but + simply in the big black pipes above-mentioned. They dip into the rushing + stream higher up, presumably, and pervert its fine frenzy to their prosaic + uses. There could hardly be a more vivid reminder of the standing quarrel + between use and beauty, and of the hard time poor beauty is having. I + looked wistfully, as we rattled into dreary Andermatt, at the great white + zigzags of the Oberalp road which climbed away to the left. Even on one’s + way to Italy one may spare a throb of desire for the beautiful vision of + the castled Grisons. Dear to me the memory of my day’s drive last summer + through that long blue avenue of mountains, to queer little mouldering + Ilanz, visited before supper in the ghostly dusk. At Andermatt a sign over + a little black doorway flanked by two dung-hills seemed to me tolerably + comical: <i>Mineraux</i>, <i>Quadrupedes</i>, <i>Oiseaux</i>, <i>OEufs</i>, + <i>Tableaux Antiques</i>. We bundled in to dinner and the American + gentleman in the banquette made the acquaintance of the Irish lady in the + coupé, who talked of the weather as <i>foine</i> and wore a Persian scarf + twisted about her head. At the other end of the table sat an Englishman, + out of the intérieur, who bore an extraordinary resemblance to the + portraits of Edward VI’s and Mary’s reigns. He walking, a convincing + Holbein. The impression was of value to a cherisher of quaintness, and he + must have wondered—not knowing me for such a character—why I + stared at him. It wasn’t him I was staring at, but some handsome Seymour + or Dudley or Digby with a ruff and a round cap and plume. + </p> + <p> + From Andermatt, through its high, cold, sunny valley, we passed into + rugged little Hospenthal, and then up the last stages of the ascent. From + here the road was all new to me. Among the summits of the various Alpine + passes there is little to choose. You wind and double slowly into keener + cold and deeper stillness; you put on your overcoat and turn up the + collar; you count the nestling snow-patches and then you cease to count + them; you pause, as you trudge before the lumbering coach, and listen to + the last-heard cow-bell tinkling away below you in kindlier herbage. The + sky was tremendously blue, and the little stunted bushes on the + snow-streaked slopes were all dyed with autumnal purples and crimsons. It + was a great display of colour. Purple and crimson too, though not so fine, + were the faces thrust out at us from the greasy little double casements of + a barrack beside the road, where the horses paused before the last pull. + There was one little girl in particular, beginning to <i>lisser</i> her + hair, as civilisation approached, in a manner not to be described, with + her poor little blue-black hands. At the summit are the two usual grim + little stone taverns, the steel-blue tarn, the snow-white peaks, the pause + in the cold sunshine. Then we begin to rattle down with two horses. In + five minutes we are swinging along the famous zigzags. Engineer, driver, + horses—it’s very handsomely done by all of them. The road curves and + curls and twists and plunges like the tail of a kite; sitting perched in + the banquette, you see it making below you and in mid-air certain bold + gyrations which bring you as near as possible, short of the actual + experience, to the philosophy of that immortal Irishman who wished that + his fall from the house-top would only last. But the zigzags last no more + than Paddy’s fall, and in due time we were all coming to our senses over + <i>cafe au lait</i> in the little inn at Faido. After Faido the valley, + plunging deeper, began to take thick afternoon shadows from the hills, and + at Airolo we were fairly in the twilight. But the pink and yellow houses + shimmered through the gentle gloom, and Italy began in broken syllables to + whisper that she was at hand. For the rest of the way to Bellinzona her + voice was muffled in the grey of evening, and I was half vexed to lose the + charming sight of the changing vegetation. But only half vexed, for the + moon was climbing all the while nearer the edge of the crags that + overshadowed us, and a thin magical light came trickling down into the + winding, murmuring gorges. It was a most enchanting business. The + chestnut-trees loomed up with double their daylight stature; the vines + began to swing their low festoons like nets to trip up the fairies. At + last the ruined towers of Bellinzona stood gleaming in the moonshine, and + we rattled into the great post-yard. It was eleven o’clock and I had risen + at four; moonshine apart I wasn’t sorry. + </p> + <p> + All that was very well; but the drive next day from Bellinzona to Como is + to my mind what gives its supreme beauty to this great pass. One can’t + describe the beauty of the Italian lakes, nor would one try if one could; + the floweriest rhetoric can recall it only as a picture on a fireboard + recalls a Claude. But it lay spread before me for a whole perfect day: in + the long gleam of the Major, from whose head the diligence swerves away + and begins to climb the bosky hills that divide it from Lugano; in the + shimmering, melting azure of the southern slopes and masses; in the + luxurious tangle of nature and the familiar amenity of man; in the + lawn-like inclinations, where the great grouped chestnuts make so cool a + shadow in so warm a light; in the rusty vineyards, the littered cornfields + and the tawdry wayside shrines. But most of all it’s the deep yellow light + that enchants you and tells you where you are. See it come filtering down + through a vine-covered trellis on the red handkerchief with which a ragged + contadina has bound her hair, and all the magic of Italy, to the eye, + makes an aureole about the poor girl’s head. Look at a brown-breasted + reaper eating his chunk of black bread under a spreading chestnut; nowhere + is shadow so charming, nowhere is colour so charged, nowhere has accident + such grace. The whole drive to Lugano was one long loveliness, and the + town itself is admirably Italian. There was a great unlading of the coach, + during which I wandered under certain brown old arcades and bought for six + sous, from a young woman in a gold necklace, a hatful of peaches and figs. + When I came back I found the young man holding open the door of the second + diligence, which had lately come up, and beckoning to me with a despairing + smile. The young man, I must note, was the most amiable of Ticinese; + though he wore no buttons he was attached to the diligence in some + amateurish capacity, and had an eye to the mail-bags and other valuables + in the boot. I grumbled at Berne over the want of soft curves in the Swiss + temperament; but the children of the tangled Tessin are cast in the + Italian mould. My friend had as many quips and cranks as a Neapolitan; we + walked together for an hour under the chestnuts, while the coach was + plodding up from Bellinzona, and he never stopped singing till we reached + a little wine-house where he got his mouth full of bread and cheese. I + looked into his open door, a la Sterne, and saw the young woman sitting + rigid and grim, staring over his head and with a great pile of bread and + butter in her lap. He had only informed her most politely that she was to + be transferred to another diligence and must do him the favour to descend; + but she evidently knew of but one way for a respectable young insulary of + her sex to receive the politeness of a foreign adventurer guilty of an eye + betraying latent pleasantry. Heaven only knew what he was saying! I told + her, and she gathered up her parcels and emerged. A part of the day’s + great pleasure perhaps was my grave sense of being an instrument in the + hands of the powers toward the safe consignment of this young woman and + her boxes. When once you have really bent to the helpless you are caught; + there is no such steel trap, and it holds you fast. My rather grim Abigail + was a neophyte in foreign travel, though doubtless cunning enough at her + trade, which I inferred to be that of making up those prodigious chignons + worn mainly by English ladies. Her mistress had gone on a mule over the + mountains to Cadenabbia, and she herself was coming up with the wardrobe, + two big boxes and a bath-tub. I had played my part, under the powers, at + Bellinzona, and had interposed between the poor girl’s frightened English + and the dreadful Ticinese French of the functionaries in the post-yard. At + the custom-house on the Italian frontier I was of peculiar service; there + was a kind of fateful fascination in it. The wardrobe was voluminous; I + exchanged a paternal glance with my charge as the <i>douanier</i> plunged + his brown fists into it. Who was the lady at Cadenabbia? What was she to + me or I to her? She wouldn’t know, when she rustled down to dinner next + day, that it was I who had guided the frail skiff of her public basis of + vanity to port. So unseen but not unfelt do we cross each other’s orbits. + The skiff however may have foundered that evening in sight of land. I + disengaged the young woman from among her fellow-travellers and placed her + boxes on a hand-cart in the picturesque streets of Como, within a stone’s + throw of that lovely striped and toned cathedral which has the facade of + cameo medallions. I could only make the <i>facchino</i> swear to take her + to the steamboat. He too was a jovial dog, but I hope he was polite with + precautions. + </p> + <h3> + 1873. + </h3> + <p> + <a name="link2H_4_0009" id="link2H_4_0009"> + <!-- H2 anchor --> </a> + </p> + <div style="height: 4em;"> + <br /><br /><br /><br /> + </div> + <h2> + ITALY REVISITED + </h2> + <h3> + I + </h3> + <p> + I waited in Paris until after the elections for the new Chamber (they took + place on the 14th of October); as only after one had learned that the + famous attempt of Marshal MacMahon and his ministers to drive the French + nation to the polls like a flock of huddling sheep, each with the white + ticket of an official candidate round his neck, had not achieved the + success which the energy of the process might have promised—only + then it was possible to draw a long breath and deprive the republican + party of such support as might have been conveyed in one’s sympathetic + presence. Seriously speaking too, the weather had been enchanting—there + were Italian fancies to be gathered without leaving the banks of the + Seine. Day after day the air was filled with golden light, and even those + chalkish vistas of the Parisian <i>beaux quartiers</i> assumed the + iridescent tints of autumn. Autumn weather in Europe is often such a very + sorry affair that a fair-minded American will have it on his conscience to + call attention to a rainless and radiant October. + </p> + <p> + The echoes of the electoral strife kept me company for a while after + starting upon that abbreviated journey to Turin which, as you leave Paris + at night, in a train unprovided with encouragements to slumber, is a + singular mixture of the odious and the charming. The charming indeed I + think prevails; for the dark half of the journey is the least interesting. + The morning light ushers you into the romantic gorges of the Jura, and + after a big bowl of <i>cafe au lait</i> at Culoz you may compose yourself + comfortably for the climax of your spectacle. The day before leaving Paris + I met a French friend who had just returned from a visit to a Tuscan + country-seat where he had been watching the vintage. “Italy,” he said, “is + more lovely than words can tell, and France, steeped in this electoral + turmoil, seems no better than a bear-garden.” The part of the bear-garden + through which you travel as you approach the Mont Cenis seemed to me that + day very beautiful. The autumn colouring, thanks to the absence of rain, + had been vivid and crisp, and the vines that swung their low garlands + between the mulberries round about Chambery looked like long festoons of + coral and amber. The frontier station of Modane, on the further side of + the Mont Cenis Tunnel, is a very ill-regulated place; but even the most + irritable of tourists, meeting it on his way southward, will be disposed + to consider it good-naturedly. There is far too much bustling and + scrambling, and the facilities afforded you for the obligatory process of + ripping open your luggage before the officers of the Italian custom-house + are much scantier than should be; but for myself there is something that + deprecates irritation in the shabby green and grey uniforms of all the + Italian officials who stand loafing about and watching the northern + invaders scramble back into marching order. Wearing an administrative + uniform doesn’t necessarily spoil a man’s temper, as in France one is + sometimes led to believe; for these excellent under-paid Italians carry + theirs as lightly as possible, and their answers to your inquiries don’t + in the least bristle with rapiers, buttons and cockades. After leaving + Modane you slide straight downhill into the Italy of your desire; from + which point the road edges, after the grand manner, along those It + precipices that stand shoulder to shoulder, in a prodigious perpendicular + file, till they finally admit you to a distant glimpse he ancient capital + of Piedmont. + </p> + <p> + Turin is no city of a name to conjure with, and I pay an extravagant + tribute to subjective emotion in speaking of it as ancient, if the place + is less bravely peninsular than Florence and Rome, at least it is more in + the scenic tradition than New York Paris; and while I paced the great + arcades and looked at the fourth-rate shop windows I didn’t scruple to + cultivate a shameless optimism. Relatively speaking, Turin touches a + chord; but there is after all no reason in a large collection of + shabbily-stuccoed houses, disposed in a rigidly rectangular manner, for + passing a day of deep, still gaiety. The only reason, I am afraid, is the + old superstition of Italy—that property in the very look of the + written word, the evocation of a myriad images, that makes any lover of + the arts take Italian satisfactions on easier terms than any others. The + written word stands for something that eternally tricks us; we juggle to + our credulity even with such inferior apparatus as is offered to our hand + at Turin. I roamed all the morning under the tall porticoes, thinking it + sufficient joy to take note of the soft, warm air, of that local colour of + things that is at once so broken and so harmonious, and of the comings and + goings, the physiognomy and manners, of the excellent Turinese. I had + opened the old book again; the old charm was in the style; I was in a more + delightful world. I saw nothing surpassingly beautiful or curious; but + your true taster of the most seasoned of dishes finds well-nigh the whole + mixture in any mouthful. Above all on the threshold of Italy he knows + again the solid and perfectly definable pleasure of finding himself among + the traditions of the grand style in architecture. It must be said that we + have still to go there to recover the sense of the domiciliary mass. In + northern cities there are beautiful houses, picturesque and curious + houses; sculptured gables that hang over the street, charming bay-windows, + hooded doorways, elegant proportions, a profusion of delicate ornament; + but a good specimen of an old Italian palazzo has a nobleness that is all + its own. We laugh at Italian “palaces,” at their peeling paint, their + nudity, their dreariness; but they have the great palatial quality—elevation + and extent. They make of smaller things the apparent abode of pigmies; + they round their great arches and interspace their huge windows with a + proud indifference to the cost of materials. These grand proportions—the + colossal basements, the doorways that seem meant for cathedrals, the far + away cornices—impart by contrast a humble and <i>bourgeois</i> + expression to interiors founded on the sacrifice of the whole to the part, + and in which the air of grandeur depends largely on the help of the + upholsterer. At Turin my first feeling was really one of renewed shame for + our meaner architectural manners. If the Italians at bottom despise the + rest of mankind and regard them as barbarians, disinherited of the + tradition of form, the idea proceeds largely, no doubt, from our living in + comparative mole-hills. They alone were really to build their + civilisation. + </p> + <p> + {Illustration: UNDER THE ARCADES, TURIN.} + </p> + <p> + An impression which on coming back to Italy I find even stronger than when + it was first received is that of the contrast between the fecundity of the + great artistic period and the vulgarity there of the genius of to-day. The + first few hours spent on Italian soil are sufficient to renew it, and the + question I allude to is, historically speaking, one of the oddest. That + the people who but three hundred years ago had the best taste in the world + should now have the worst; that having produced the noblest, loveliest, + costliest works, they should now be given up to the manufacture of objects + at once ugly and paltry; that the race of which Michael Angelo and + Raphael, Leonardo and Titian were characteristic should have no other + title to distinction than third-rate <i>genre</i> pictures and catchpenny + statues—all this is a frequent perplexity to the observer of actual + Italian life. The flower of “great” art in these latter years ceased to + bloom very powerfully anywhere; but nowhere does it seem so drooping and + withered as in the shadow of the immortal embodiments of the old Italian + genius. You go into a church or a gallery and feast your fancy upon a + splendid picture or an exquisite piece of sculpture, and on issuing from + the door that has admitted you to the beautiful past are confronted with + something that has the effect of a very bad joke. The aspect of your + lodging—the carpets, the curtains, the upholstery in general, with + their crude and violent colouring and their vulgar material—the + trumpery things in the shops, the extreme bad taste of the dress of the + women, the cheapness and baseness of every attempt at decoration in the + cafes and railway-stations, the hopeless frivolity of everything that + pretends to be a work of art—all this modern crudity runs riot over + the relics of the great period. + </p> + <p> + We can do a thing for the first time but once; it is but once for all that + we can have a pleasure in its freshness. This is a law not on the whole, I + think, to be regretted, for we sometimes learn to know things better by + not enjoying them too much. It is certain, however, at the same time, that + a visitor who has worked off the immediate ferment for this inexhaustibly + interesting country has by no means entirely drained the cup. After + thinking of Italy as historical and artistic it will do him no great harm + to think of her for a while as panting both for a future and for a balance + at the bank; aspirations supposedly much at variance with the Byronic, the + Ruskinian, the artistic, poetic, aesthetic manner of considering our + eternally attaching peninsula. He may grant—I don’t say it is + absolutely necessary—that its actual aspects and economics are ugly, + prosaic, provokingly out of relation to the diary and the album; it is + nevertheless true that, at the point things have come to, modern Italy in + a manner imposes herself. I hadn’t been many hours in the country before + that truth assailed me; and I may add that, the first irritation past, I + found myself able to accept it. For, if we think, nothing is more easy to + understand than an honest ire on the part of the young Italy of to-day at + being looked at by all the world as a kind of soluble pigment. Young + Italy, preoccupied with its economical and political future, must be + heartily tired of being admired for its eyelashes and its pose. In one of + Thackeray’s novels occurs a mention of a young artist who sent to the + Royal Academy a picture representing “A Contadino dancing with a + Trasteverina at the door of a Locanda, to the music of a Pifferaro.” It is + in this attitude and with these conventional accessories that the world + has hitherto seen fit to represent young Italy, and one doesn’t wonder + that if the youth has any spirit he should at last begin to resent our + insufferable aesthetic patronage. He has established a line of tram-cars + in Rome, from the Porta del Popolo to the Ponte Molle, and it is on one of + these democratic vehicles that I seem to see him taking his triumphant + course down the vista of the future. I won’t pretend to rejoice with him + any more than I really do; I won’t pretend, as the sentimental tourists + say about it all, as if it were the setting of an intaglio or the border + of a Roman scarf, to “like” it. Like it or not, as we may, it is evidently + destined to be; I see a new Italy in the future which in many important + respects will equal, if not surpass, the most enterprising sections of our + native land. Perhaps by that time Chicago and San Francisco will have + acquired a pose, and their sons and daughters will dance at the doors of + <i>locande</i>. + </p> + <p> + However this may be, the accomplished schism between the old order and the + new is the promptest moral of a fresh visit to this ever-suggestive part + of the world. The old has become more and more a museum, preserved and + perpetuated in the midst of the new, but without any further relation to + it—it must be admitted indeed that such a relation is considerable—than + that of the stock on his shelves to the shopkeeper, or of the Siren of the + South to the showman who stands before his booth. More than once, as we + move about nowadays in the Italian cities, there seems to pass before our + eyes a vision of the coming years. It represents to our satisfaction an + Italy united and prosperous, but altogether scientific and commercial. The + Italy indeed that we sentimentalise and romance about was an ardently + mercantile country; though I suppose it loved not its ledgers less, but + its frescoes and altar-pieces more. Scattered through this paradise + regained of trade—this country of a thousand ports—we see a + large number of beautiful buildings in which an endless series of dusky + pictures are darkening, dampening, fading, failing, through the years. By + the doors of the beautiful buildings are little turnstiles at which there + sit a great many uniformed men to whom the visitor pays a tenpenny fee. + Inside, in the vaulted and frescoed chambers, the art of Italy lies buried + as in a thousand mausoleums. It is well taken care of; it is constantly + copied; sometimes it is “restored”—as in the case of that beautiful + boy-figure of Andrea del Sarto at Florence, which may be seen at the + gallery of the Uffizi with its honourable duskiness quite peeled off and + heaven knows what raw, bleeding cuticle laid bare. One evening lately, + near the same Florence, in the soft twilight, I took a stroll among those + encircling hills on which the massive villas are mingled with the vaporous + olives. Presently I arrived where three roads met at a wayside shrine, in + which, before some pious daub of an old-time Madonna, a little votive lamp + glimmered through the evening air. The hour, the atmosphere, the place, + the twinkling taper, the sentiment of the observer, the thought that some + one had been rescued here from an assassin or from some other peril and + had set up a little grateful altar in consequence, against the + yellow-plastered wall of a tangled <i>podere</i>; all this led me to + approach the shrine with a reverent, an emotional step. I drew near it, + but after a few steps I paused. I became aware of an incongruous odour; it + seemed to me that the evening air was charged with a perfume which, + although to a certain extent familiar, had not hitherto associated itself + with rustic frescoes and wayside altars. I wondered, I gently sniffed, and + the question so put left me no doubt. The odour was that of petroleum; the + votive taper was nourished with the essence of Pennsylvania. I confess + that I burst out laughing, and a picturesque contadino, wending his + homeward way in the dusk, stared at me as if I were an iconoclast. He + noticed the petroleum only, I imagine, to snuff it fondly up; but to me + the thing served as a symbol of the Italy of the future. There is a + horse-car from the Porta del Popolo to the Ponte Molle, and the Tuscan + shrines are fed with kerosene. + </p> + <h3> + II + </h3> + <p> + If it’s very well meanwhile to come to Turin first it’s better still to go + to Genoa afterwards. Genoa is the tightest topographic tangle in the + world, which even a second visit helps you little to straighten out. In + the wonderful crooked, twisting, climbing, soaring, burrowing Genoese + alleys the traveller is really up to his neck in the old Italian + sketchability. The pride of the place, I believe, is a port of great + capacity, and the bequest of the late Duke of Galliera, who left four + millions of dollars for the purpose of improving and enlarging it, will + doubtless do much toward converting it into one of the great commercial + stations of Europe. But as, after leaving my hotel the afternoon I + arrived, I wandered for a long time at hazard through the tortuous by-ways + of the city, I said to myself, not without an accent of private triumph, + that here at last was something it would be almost impossible to + modernise. I had found my hotel, in the first place, extremely + entertaining—the Croce di Malta, as it is called, established in a + gigantic palace on the edge of the swarming and not over-clean harbour. It + was the biggest house I had ever entered—the basement alone would + have contained a dozen American caravansaries. I met an American gentleman + in the vestibule who (as he had indeed a perfect right to be) was annoyed + by its troublesome dimensions—one was a quarter of an hour ascending + out of the basement—and desired to know if it were a “fair sample” + of the Genoese inns. It appeared an excellent specimen of Genoese + architecture generally; so far as I observed there were few houses + perceptibly smaller than this Titanic tavern. I lunched in a dusky + ballroom whose ceiling was vaulted, frescoed and gilded with the fatal + facility of a couple of centuries ago, and which looked out upon another + ancient housefront, equally huge and equally battered, separated from it + only by a little wedge of dusky space—one of the principal streets, + I believe, of Genoa—whence out of dim abysses the population sent up + to the windows (I had to crane out very far to see it) a perpetual + clattering, shuffling, chaffering sound. Issuing forth presently into this + crevice of a street I found myself up to my neck in that element of the + rich and strange—as to visible and reproducible “effect,” I mean—for + the love of which one revisits Italy. It offered itself indeed in a + variety of colours, some of which were not remarkable for their freshness + or purity. But their combined charm was not to be resisted, and the + picture glowed with the rankly human side of southern lowlife. + </p> + <p> + Genoa, as I have hinted, is the crookedest and most incoherent of cities; + tossed about on the sides and crests of a dozen hills, it is seamed with + gullies and ravines that bristle with those innumerable palaces for which + we have heard from our earliest years that the place is celebrated. These + great structures, with their mottled and faded complexions, lift their big + ornamental cornices to a tremendous height in the air, where, in a certain + indescribably forlorn and desolate fashion, overtopping each other, they + seem to reflect the twinkle and glitter of the warm Mediterranean. Down + about the basements, in the close crepuscular alleys, the people are for + ever moving to and fro or standing in their cavernous doorways and their + dusky, crowded shops, calling, chattering, laughing, lamenting, living + their lives in the conversational Italian fashion. I had for a long time + had no such vision of possible social pressure. I hadn’t for a long time + seen people elbowing each other so closely or swarming so thickly out of + populous hives. A traveller is often moved to ask himself whether it has + been worth while to leave his home—whatever his home may have been—only + to encounter new forms of human suffering, only to be reminded that toil + and privation, hunger and sorrow and sordid effort, are the portion of the + mass of mankind. To travel is, as it were, to go to the play, to attend a + spectacle; and there is something heartless in stepping forth into foreign + streets to feast on “character” when character consists simply of the + slightly different costume in which labour and want present themselves. + These reflections were forced upon me as I strolled as through a twilight + patched with colour and charged with stale smells; but after a time they + ceased to bear me company. The reason of this, I think, is because—at + least to foreign eyes—the sum of Italian misery is, on the whole, + less than the sum of the Italian knowledge of life. That people should + thank you, with a smile of striking sweetness, for the gift of twopence, + is a proof, certainly, of extreme and constant destitution; but (keeping + in mind the sweetness) it also attests an enviable ability not to be + depressed by circumstances. I know that this may possibly be great + nonsense; that half the time we are acclaiming the fine quality of the + Italian smile the creature so constituted for physiognomic radiance may be + in a sullen frenzy of impatience and pain. Our observation in any foreign + land is extremely superficial, and our remarks are happily not addressed + to the inhabitants themselves, who would be sure to exclaim upon the + impudence of the fancy-picture. + </p> + <p> + The other day I visited a very picturesque old city upon a mountain-top, + where, in the course of my wanderings, I arrived at an old disused gate in + the ancient town-wall. The gate hadn’t been absolutely forfeited; but the + recent completion of a modern road down the mountain led most vehicles + away to another egress. The grass-grown pavement, which wound into the + plain by a hundred graceful twists and plunges, was now given up to ragged + contadini and their donkeys, and to such wayfarers as were not alarmed at + the disrepair into which it had fallen. I stood in the shadow of the tall + old gateway admiring the scene, looking to right and left at the wonderful + walls of the little town, perched on the edge of a shaggy precipice; at + the circling mountains over against them; at the road dipping downward + among the chestnuts and olives. There was no one within sight but a young + man who slowly trudged upward with his coat slung over his shoulder and + his hat upon his ear in the manner of a cavalier in an opera. Like an + operatic performer too he sang as he came; the spectacle, generally, was + operatic, and as his vocal flourishes reached my ear I said to myself that + in Italy accident was always romantic and that such a figure had been + exactly what was wanted to set off the landscape. It suggested in a high + degree that knowledge of life for which I just now commended the Italians. + I was turning back under the old gateway when the young man overtook me + and, suspending his song, asked me if I could favour him with a match to + light the hoarded remnant of a cigar. This request led, as I took my way + again to the inn, to my falling into talk with him. He was a native of the + ancient city, and answered freely all my inquiries as to its manners and + customs and its note of public opinion. But the point of my anecdote is + that he presently acknowledged himself a brooding young radical and + communist, filled with hatred of the present Italian government, raging + with discontent and crude political passion, professing a ridiculous hope + that Italy would soon have, as France had had, her “‘89,” and declaring + that he for his part would willingly lend a hand to chop off the heads of + the king and the royal family. He was an unhappy, underfed, unemployed + young man, who took a hard, grim view of everything and was operatic only + quite in spite of himself. This made it very absurd of me to have looked + at him simply as a graceful ornament to the prospect, an harmonious little + figure in the middle distance. “Damn the prospect, damn the middle + distance!” would have been all <i>his</i> philosophy. Yet but for the + accident of my having gossipped with him I should have made him do + service, in memory, as an example of sensuous optimism! + </p> + <p> + I am bound to say however that I believe a great deal of the sensuous + optimism observable in the Genoese alleys and beneath the low, crowded + arcades along the port was very real. Here every one was magnificently + sunburnt, and there were plenty of those queer types, mahogany-coloured, + bare-chested mariners with earrings and crimson girdles, that seem to + people a southern seaport with the chorus of “Masaniello.” But it is not + fair to speak as if at Genoa there were nothing but low-life to be seen, + for the place is the residence of some of the grandest people in the + world. Nor are all the palaces ranged upon dusky alleys; the handsomest + and most impressive form a splendid series on each side of a couple of + very proper streets, in which there is plenty of room for a coach-and-four + to approach the big doorways. Many of these doorways are open, revealing + great marble staircases with couchant lions for balustrades and + ceremonious courts surrounded by walls of sun-softened yellow. One of the + great piles in the array is coloured a goodly red and contains in + particular the grand people I just now spoke of. They live indeed on the + third floor; but here they have suites of wonderful painted and gilded + chambers, in which foreshortened frescoes also cover the vaulted ceilings + and florid mouldings emboss the ample walls. These distinguished tenants + bear the name of Vandyck, though they are members of the noble family of + Brignole-Sale, one of whose children—the Duchess of Galliera—has + lately given proof of nobleness in presenting the gallery of the red + palace to the city of Genoa. + </p> + <h3> + III + </h3> + <p> + On leaving Genoa I repaired to Spezia, chiefly with a view of + accomplishing a sentimental pilgrimage, which I in fact achieved in the + most agreeable conditions. The Gulf of Spezia is now the headquarters of + the Italian fleet, and there were several big iron-plated frigates riding + at anchor in front of the town. The streets were filled with lads in blue + flannel, who were receiving instruction at a schoolship in the harbour, + and in the evening—there was a brilliant moon—the little + breakwater which stretched out into the Mediterranean offered a scene of + recreation to innumerable such persons. But this fact is from the point of + view of the cherisher of quaintness of little account, for since it has + become prosperous Spezia has grown ugly. The place is filled with long, + dull stretches of dead wall and great raw expanses of artificial land. It + wears that look of monstrous, of more than far-western newness which + distinguishes all the creations of the young Italian State. Nor did I find + any great compensation in an immense inn of recent birth, an establishment + seated on the edge of the sea in anticipation of a <i>passeggiata</i> + which is to come that way some five years hence, the region being in the + meantime of the most primitive formation. The inn was filled with grave + English people who looked respectable and bored, and there was of course a + Church of England service in the gaudily-frescoed parlour. Neither was it + the drive to Porto Venere that chiefly pleased me—a drive among + vines and olives, over the hills and beside the Mediterranean, to a queer + little crumbling village on a headland, as sweetly desolate and + superannuated as the name it bears. There is a ruined church near the + village, which occupies the site (according to tradition) of an ancient + temple of Venus; and if Venus ever revisits her desecrated shrines she + must sometimes pause a moment in that sunny stillness and listen to the + murmur of the tideless sea at the base of the narrow promontory. If Venus + sometimes comes there Apollo surely does as much; for close to the temple + is a gateway surmounted by an inscription in Italian and English, which + admits you to a curious, and it must be confessed rather cockneyfied, cave + among the rocks. It was here, says the inscription, that the great Byron, + swimmer and poet, “defied the waves of the Ligurian sea.” The fact is + interesting, though not supremely so; for Byron was always defying + something, and if a slab had been put up wherever this performance came + off these commemorative tablets would be in many parts of Europe as thick + as milestones. + </p> + <p> + No; the great merit of Spezia, to my eye, is that I engaged a boat there + of a lovely October afternoon and had myself rowed across the gulf—it + took about an hour and a half—to the little bay of Lerici, which + opens out of it. This bay of Lerici is charming; the bosky grey-green + hills close it in, and on either side of the entrance, perched on a bold + headland, a wonderful old crumbling castle keeps ineffectual guard. The + place is classic to all English travellers, for in the middle of the + curving shore is the now desolate little villa in which Shelley spent the + last months of his short life. He was living at Lerici when he started on + that short southern cruise from which he never returned. The house he + occupied is strangely shabby and as sad as you may choose to find it. It + stands directly upon the beach, with scarred and battered walls and a + loggia of several arches opening to a little terrace with a rugged + parapet, which, when the wind blows, must be drenched with the salt spray. + The place is very lonely—all overwearied with sun and breeze and + brine—very close to nature, as it was Shelley’s passion to be. I can + fancy a great lyric poet sitting on the terrace of a warm evening and + feeling very far from England in the early years of the century. In that + place, and with his genius, he would as a matter of course have heard in + the voice of nature a sweetness which only the lyric movement could + translate. It is a place where an English-speaking pilgrim himself may + very honestly think thoughts and feel moved to lyric utterance. But I must + content myself with saying in halting prose that I remember few episodes + of Italian travel more sympathetic, as they have it here, than that + perfect autumn afternoon; the half-hour’s station on the little battered + terrace of the villa; the climb to the singularly felicitous old castle + that hangs above Lerici; the meditative lounge, in the fading light, on + the vine-decked platform that looked out toward the sunset and the + darkening mountains and, far below, upon the quiet sea, beyond which the + pale-faced tragic villa stared up at the brightening moon. + </p> + <h3> + IV + </h3> + <p> + I had never known Florence more herself, or in other words more attaching, + than I found her for a week in that brilliant October. She sat in the + sunshine beside her yellow river like the little treasure-city she has + always seemed, without commerce, without other industry than the + manufacture of mosaic paper-weights and alabaster Cupids, without + actuality or energy or earnestness or any of those rugged virtues which in + most cases are deemed indispensable for civic cohesion; with nothing but + the little unaugmented stock of her mediaeval memories, her + tender-coloured mountains, her churches and palaces, pictures and statues. + There were very few strangers; one’s detested fellow-pilgrim was + infrequent; the native population itself seemed scanty; the sound of + wheels in the streets was but occasional; by eight o’clock at night, + apparently, every one had gone to bed, and the musing wanderer, still + wandering and still musing, had the place to himself—had the thick + shadow-masses of the great palaces, and the shafts of moonlight striking + the polygonal paving-stones, and the empty bridges, and the silvered + yellow of the Arno, and the stillness broken only by a homeward step, a + step accompanied by a snatch of song from a warm Italian voice. My room at + the inn looked out on the river and was flooded all day with sunshine. + There was an absurd orange-coloured paper on the walls; the Arno, of a hue + not altogether different, flowed beneath; and on the other side of it rose + a line of sallow houses, of extreme antiquity, crumbling and mouldering, + bulging and protruding over the stream. (I seem to speak of their fronts; + but what I saw was their shabby backs, which were exposed to the cheerful + flicker of the river, while the fronts stood for ever in the deep damp + shadow of a narrow mediaeval street.) All this brightness and yellowness + was a perpetual delight; it was a part of that indefinably charming colour + which Florence always seems to wear as you look up and down at it from the + river, and from the bridges and quays. This is a kind of grave radiance—a + harmony of high tints—which I scarce know how to describe. There are + yellow walls and green blinds and red roofs, there are intervals of + brilliant brown and natural-looking blue; but the picture is not spotty + nor gaudy, thanks to the distribution of the colours in large and + comfortable masses, and to the washing-over of the scene by some happy + softness of sunshine. The river-front of Florence is in short a delightful + composition. Part of its charm comes of course from the generous aspect of + those high-based Tuscan palaces which a renewal of acquaintance with them + has again commended to me as the most dignified dwellings in the world. + Nothing can be finer than that look of giving up the whole immense + ground-floor to simple purposes of vestibule and staircase, of court and + high-arched entrance; as if this were all but a massive pedestal for the + real habitation and people weren’t properly housed unless, to begin with, + they should be lifted fifty feet above the pavement. The great blocks of + the basement; the great intervals, horizontally and vertically, from + window to window (telling of the height and breadth of the rooms within); + the armorial shield hung forward at one of the angles; the wide-brimmed + roof, overshadowing the narrow street; the rich old browns and yellows of + the walls: these definite elements put themselves together with admirable + art. + </p> + <p> + {Illustration: ROMAN GATEWAY, RIMINI.} + </p> + <p> + Take a Tuscan pile of this type out of its oblique situation in the town; + call it no longer a palace, but a villa; set it down by a terrace on one + of the hills that encircle Florence, place a row of high-waisted cypresses + beside it, give it a grassy court-yard and a view of the Florentine towers + and the valley of the Arno, and you will think it perhaps even more worthy + of your esteem. It was a Sunday noon, and brilliantly warm, when I again + arrived; and after I had looked from my windows a while at that + quietly-basking river-front I have spoken of I took my way across one of + the bridges and then out of one of the gates—that immensely tall + Roman Gate in which the space from the top of the arch to the cornice + (except that there is scarcely a cornice, it is all a plain massive piece + of wall) is as great, or seems to be, as that from the ground to the + former point. Then I climbed a steep and winding way—much of it a + little dull if one likes, being bounded by mottled, mossy garden-walls—to + a villa on a hill-top, where I found various things that touched me with + almost too fine a point. Seeing them again, often, for a week, both by + sunlight and moonshine, I never quite learned not to covet them; not to + feel that not being a part of them was somehow to miss an exquisite + chance. What a tranquil, contented life it seemed, with romantic beauty as + a part of its daily texture!—the sunny terrace, with its tangled <i>podere</i> + beneath it; the bright grey olives against the bright blue sky; the long, + serene, horizontal lines of other villas, flanked by their upward + cypresses, disposed upon the neighbouring hills; the richest little city + in the world in a softly-scooped hollow at one’s feet, and beyond it the + most appealing of views, the most majestic, yet the most familiar. Within + the villa was a great love of art and a painting-room full of felicitous + work, so that if human life there confessed to quietness, the quietness + was mostly but that of the intent act. A beautiful occupation in that + beautiful position, what could possibly be better? That is what I spoke + just now of envying—a way of life that doesn’t wince at such + refinements of peace and ease. When labour self-charmed presents itself in + a dull or an ugly place we esteem it, we admire it, but we scarce feel it + to be the ideal of good fortune. When, however, its votaries move as + figures in an ancient, noble landscape, and their walks and contemplations + are like a turning of the leaves of history, we seem to have before us an + admirable case of virtue made easy; meaning here by virtue contentment and + concentration, a real appreciation of the rare, the exquisite though + composite, medium of life. You needn’t want a rush or a crush when the + scene itself, the mere scene, shares with you such a wealth of + consciousness. + </p> + <p> + It is true indeed that I might after a certain time grow weary of a + regular afternoon stroll among the Florentine lanes; of sitting on low + parapets, in intervals of flower-topped wall, and looking across at + Fiesole or down the rich-hued valley of the Arno; of pausing at the open + gates of villas and wondering at the height of cypresses and the depth of + loggias; of walking home in the fading light and noting on a dozen + westward-looking surfaces the glow of the opposite sunset. But for a week + or so all this was delightful. The villas are innumerable, and if you’re + an aching alien half the talk is about villas. This one has a story; that + one has another; they all look as if they had stories—none in truth + predominantly gay. Most of them are offered to rent (many of them for + sale) at prices unnaturally low; you may have a tower and a garden, a + chapel and an expanse of thirty windows, for five hundred dollars a year. + In imagination you hire three or four; you take possession and settle and + stay. Your sense of the fineness of the finest is of something very grave + and stately; your sense of the bravery of two or three of the best + something quite tragic and sinister. From what does this latter impression + come? You gather it as you stand there in the early dusk, with your eyes + on the long, pale-brown facade, the enormous windows, the iron cages + fastened to the lower ones. Part of the brooding expression of these great + houses comes, even when they have not fallen into decay, from their look + of having outlived their original use. Their extraordinary largeness and + massiveness are a satire on their present fate. They weren’t built with + such a thickness of wall and depth of embrasure, such a solidity of + staircase and superfluity of stone, simply to afford an economical winter + residence to English and American families. I don’t know whether it was + the appearance of these stony old villas, which seemed so dumbly conscious + of a change of manners, that threw a tinge of melancholy over the general + prospect; certain it is that, having always found this note as of a myriad + old sadnesses in solution in the view of Florence, it seemed to me now + particularly strong. “Lovely, lovely, but it makes me ‘blue,’” the + sensitive stranger couldn’t but murmur to himself as, in the late + afternoon, he looked at the landscape from over one of the low parapets, + and then, with his hands in his pockets, turned away indoors to candles + and dinner. + </p> + <h3> + V + </h3> + <p> + Below, in the city, through all frequentation of streets and churches and + museums, it was impossible not to have a good deal of the same feeling; + but here the impression was more easy to analyse. It came from a sense of + the perfect separateness of all the great productions of the Renaissance + from the present and the future of the place, from the actual life and + manners, the native ideal. I have already spoken of the way in which the + vast aggregation of beautiful works of art in the Italian cities strikes + the visitor nowadays—so far as present Italy is concerned—as + the mere stock-in-trade of an impecunious but thrifty people. It is this + spiritual solitude, this conscious disconnection of the great works of + architecture and sculpture that deposits a certain weight upon the heart; + when we see a great tradition broken we feel something of the pain with + which we hear a stifled cry. But regret is one thing and resentment is + another. Seeing one morning, in a shop-window, the series of <i>Mornings + in Florence</i> published a few years since by Mr. Ruskin, I made haste to + enter and purchase these amusing little books, some passages of which I + remembered formerly to have read. I couldn’t turn over many pages without + observing that the “separateness” of the new and old which I just + mentioned had produced in their author the liveliest irritation. With the + more acute phases of this condition it was difficult to sympathise, for + the simple reason, it seems to me, that it savours of arrogance to demand + of any people, as a right of one’s own, that they shall be artistic. “Be + artistic yourselves!” is the very natural reply that young Italy has at + hand for English critics and censors. When a people produces beautiful + statues and pictures it gives us something more than is set down in the + bond, and we must thank it for its generosity; and when it stops producing + them or caring for them we may cease thanking, but we hardly have a right + to begin and rail. The wreck of Florence, says Mr. Ruskin, “is now too + ghastly and heart-breaking to any human soul that remembers the days of + old”; and these desperate words are an allusion to the fact that the + little square in front of the cathedral, at the foot of Giotto’s Tower, + with the grand Baptistery on the other side, is now the resort of a number + of hackney-coaches and omnibuses. This fact is doubtless lamentable, and + it would be a hundred times more agreeable to see among people who have + been made the heirs of so priceless a work of art as the sublime campanile + some such feeling about it as would keep it free even from the danger of + defilement. A cab-stand is a very ugly and dirty thing, and Giotto’s Tower + should have nothing in common with such conveniences. But there is more + than one way of taking such things, and the sensitive stranger who has + been walking about for a week with his mind full of the sweetness and + suggestiveness of a hundred Florentine places may feel at last in looking + into Mr. Ruskin’s little tracts that, discord for discord, there isn’t + much to choose between the importunity of the author’s personal ill-humour + and the incongruity of horse-pails and bundles of hay. And one may say + this without being at all a partisan of the doctrine of the inevitableness + of new desecrations. For my own part, I believe there are few things in + this line that the new Italian spirit isn’t capable of, and not many + indeed that we aren’t destined to see. Pictures and buildings won’t be + completely destroyed, because in that case the <i>forestieri</i>, + scatterers of cash, would cease to arrive and the turn-stiles at the doors + of the old palaces and convents, with the little patented slit for + absorbing your half-franc, would grow quite rusty, would stiffen with + disuse. But it’s safe to say that the new Italy growing into an old Italy + again will continue to take her elbow-room wherever she may find it. + </p> + <p> + {Illustration: SANTA MARIA NOVELLA, FLORENCE} + </p> + <p> + I am almost ashamed to say what I did with Mr. Ruskin’s little books. I + put them into my pocket and betook myself to Santa Maria Novella. There I + sat down and, after I had looked about for a while at the beautiful + church, drew them forth one by one and read the greater part of them. + Occupying one’s self with light literature in a great religious edifice is + perhaps as bad a piece of profanation as any of those rude dealings which + Mr. Ruskin justly deplores; but a traveller has to make the most of odd + moments, and I was waiting for a friend in whose company I was to go and + look at Giotto’s beautiful frescoes in the cloister of the church. My + friend was a long time coming, so that I had an hour with Mr. Ruskin, whom + I called just now a light <i>littérateur</i> because in these little + Mornings in Florence he is for ever making his readers laugh. I remembered + of course where I was, and in spite of my latent hilarity felt I had + rarely got such a snubbing. I had really been enjoying the good old city + of Florence, but I now learned from Mr. Ruskin that this was a scandalous + waste of charity. I should have gone about with an imprecation on my lips, + I should have worn a face three yards long. I had taken great pleasure in + certain frescoes by Ghirlandaio in the choir of that very church; but it + appeared from one of the little books that these frescoes were as naught. + I had much admired Santa Croce and had thought the Duomo a very noble + affair; but I had now the most positive assurance I knew nothing about + them. After a while, if it was only ill-humour that was needed for doing + honour to the city of the Medici, I felt that I had risen to a proper + level; only now it was Mr. Ruskin himself I had lost patience with, not + the stupid Brunelleschi, not the vulgar Ghirlandaio. Indeed I lost + patience altogether, and asked myself by what right this informal votary + of form pretended to run riot through a poor charmed <i>flaneur’s</i> + quiet contemplations, his attachment to the noblest of pleasures, his + enjoyment of the loveliest of cities. The little books seemed invidious + and insane, and it was only when I remembered that I had been under no + obligation to buy them that I checked myself in repenting of having done + so. + </p> + <p> + Then at last my friend arrived and we passed together out of the church, + and, through the first cloister beside it, into a smaller enclosure where + we stood a while to look at the tomb of the Marchesa Strozzi-Ridolfi, upon + which the great Giotto has painted four superb little pictures. It was + easy to see the pictures were superb; but I drew forth one of my little + books again, for I had observed that Mr. Ruskin spoke of them. Hereupon I + recovered my tolerance; for what could be better in this case, I asked + myself, than Mr. Ruskin’s remarks? They are in fact excellent and charming—full + of appreciation of the deep and simple beauty of the great painter’s work. + I read them aloud to my companion; but my companion was rather, as the + phrase is, “put off” by them. One of the frescoes—it is a picture of + the birth of the Virgin—contains a figure coming through a door. “Of + ornament,” I quote, “there is only the entirely simple outline of the vase + which the servant carries; of colour two or three masses of sober red and + pure white, with brown and grey. That is all,” Mr. Ruskin continues. “And + if you are pleased with this you can see Florence. But if not, by all + means amuse yourself there, if you find it amusing, as long as you like; + you can never see it.” <i>You can never see it.</i> This seemed to my + friend insufferable, and I had to shuffle away the book again, so that we + might look at the fresco with the unruffled geniality it deserves. We + agreed afterwards, when in a more convenient place I read aloud a good + many more passages from the precious tracts, that there are a great many + ways of seeing Florence, as there are of seeing most beautiful and + interesting things, and that it is very dry and pedantic to say that the + happy vision depends upon our squaring our toes with a certain particular + chalk-mark. We see Florence wherever and whenever we enjoy it, and for + enjoying it we find a great many more pretexts than Mr. Ruskin seems + inclined to allow. My friend and I convinced ourselves also, however, that + the little books were an excellent purchase, on account of the great charm + and felicity of much of their incidental criticism; to say nothing, as I + hinted just now, of their being extremely amusing. Nothing in fact is more + comical than the familiar asperity of the author’s style and the pedagogic + fashion in which he pushes and pulls his unhappy pupils about, jerking + their heads toward this, rapping their knuckles for that, sending them to + stand in corners and giving them Scripture texts to copy. But it is + neither the felicities nor the aberrations of detail, in Mr. Ruskin’s + writings, that are the main affair for most readers; it is the general + tone that, as I have said, puts them off or draws them on. For many + persons he will never bear the test of being read in this rich old Italy, + where art, so long as it really lived at all, was spontaneous, joyous, + irresponsible. If the reader is in daily contact with those beautiful + Florentine works which do still, in away, force themselves into notice + through the vulgarity and cruelty of modern profanation, it will seem to + him that this commentator’s comment is pitched in the strangest falsetto + key. “One may read a hundred pages of this sort of thing,” said my friend, + “without ever dreaming that he is talking about <i>art</i>. You can say + nothing worse about him than that.” Which is perfectly true. Art is the + one corner of human life in which we may take our ease. To justify our + presence there the only thing demanded of us is that we shall have felt + the representational impulse. In other connections our impulses are + conditioned and embarrassed; we are allowed to have only so many as are + consistent with those of our neighbours; with their convenience and + well-being, with their convictions and prejudices, their rules and + regulations. Art means an escape from all this. Wherever her shining + standard floats the need for apology and compromise is over; there it is + enough simply that we please or are pleased. There the tree is judged only + by its fruits. If these are sweet the tree is justified—and not less + so the consumer. + </p> + <p> + One may read a great many pages of Mr. Ruskin without getting a hint of + this delightful truth; a hint of the not unimportant fact that art after + all is made for us and not we for art. This idea that the value of a work + is in the amount of illusion it yields is conspicuous by its absence. And + as for Mr. Ruskin’s world’s being a place—his world of art—where + we may take life easily, woe to the luckless mortal who enters it with any + such disposition. Instead of a garden of delight, he finds a sort of + assize court in perpetual session. Instead of a place in which human + responsibilities are lightened and suspended, he finds a region governed + by a kind of Draconic legislation. His responsibilities indeed are tenfold + increased; the gulf between truth and error is for ever yawning at his + feet; the pains and penalties of this same error are advertised, in + apocalyptic terminology, upon a thousand sign-posts; and the rash intruder + soon begins to look back with infinite longing to the lost paradise of the + artless. There can be no greater want of tact in dealing with those things + with which men attempt to ornament life than to be perpetually talking + about “error.” A truce to all rigidities is the law of the place; the only + thing absolute there is that some force and some charm have worked. The + grim old bearer of the scales excuses herself; she feels this not to be + her province. Differences here are not iniquity and righteousness; they + are simply variations of temperament, kinds of curiosity. We are not under + theological government. + </p> + <h3> + VI + </h3> + <p> + It was very charming, in the bright, warm days, to wander from one corner + of Florence to another, paying one’s respects again to remembered + masterpieces. It was pleasant also to find that memory had played no + tricks and that the rarest things of an earlier year were as rare as ever. + To enumerate these felicities would take a great deal of space; for I + never had been more struck with the mere quantity of brilliant Florentine + work. Even giving up the Duomo and Santa Croce to Mr. Ruskin as very + ill-arranged edifices, the list of the Florentine treasures is almost + inexhaustible. Those long outer galleries of the Uffizi had never beguiled + me more; sometimes there were not more than two or three figures standing + there, Baedeker in hand, to break the charming perspective. One side of + this upstairs portico, it will be remembered, is entirely composed of + glass; a continuity of old-fashioned windows, draped with white curtains + of rather primitive fashion, which hang there till they acquire a + perceptible tone. The light, passing through them, is softly filtered and + diffused; it rests mildly upon the old marbles—chiefly antique Roman + busts—which stand in the narrow intervals of the casements. It is + projected upon the numerous pictures that cover the opposite wall and that + are not by any means, as a general thing, the gems of the great + collection; it imparts a faded brightness to the old ornamental arabesques + upon the painted wooden ceiling, and it makes a great soft shining upon + the marble floor, in which, as you look up and down, you see the strolling + tourists and the motionless copyists almost reflected. I don’t know why I + should find all this very pleasant, but in fact, I have seldom gone into + the Uffizi without walking the length of this third-story cloister, + between the (for the most part) third-rate canvases and panels and the + faded cotton curtains. Why is it that in Italy we see a charm in things in + regard to which in other countries we always take vulgarity for granted? + If in the city of New York a great museum of the arts were to be provided, + by way of decoration, with a species of verandah enclosed on one side by a + series of small-paned windows draped in dirty linen, and furnished on the + other with an array of pictorial feebleness, the place being surmounted by + a thinly-painted wooden roof, strongly suggestive of summer heat, of + winter cold, of frequent leakage, those amateurs who had had the advantage + of foreign travel would be at small pains to conceal their contempt. + Contemptible or respectable, to the judicial mind, this quaint old loggia + of the Uffizi admitted me into twenty chambers where I found as great a + number of ancient favourites. I don’t know that I had a warmer greeting + for any old friend than for Andrea del Sarto, that most touching of + painters who is not one of the first. But it was on the other side of the + Arno that I found him in force, in those dusky drawing-rooms of the Pitti + Palace to which you take your way along the tortuous tunnel that wanders + through the houses of Florence and is supported by the little goldsmiths’ + booths on the Ponte Vecchio. In the rich insufficient light of these + beautiful rooms, where, to look at the pictures, you sit in damask chairs + and rest your elbows on tables of malachite, the elegant Andrea becomes + deeply effective. Before long he has drawn you close. But the great + pleasure, after all, was to revisit the earlier masters, in those + specimens of them chiefly that bloom so unfadingly on the big plain walls + of the Academy. Fra Angelico and Filippo Lippi, Botticelli and Lorenzo di + Credi are the clearest, the sweetest and best of all painters; as I sat + for an hour in their company, in the cold great hall of the institution I + have mentioned—there are shabby rafters above and an immense expanse + of brick tiles below, and many bad pictures as well as good—it + seemed to me more than ever that if one really had to choose one couldn’t + do better than choose here. You may rest at your ease at the Academy, in + this big first room—at the upper end especially, on the left—because + more than many other places it savours of old Florence. More for instance, + in reality, than the Bargello, though the Bargello makes great + pretensions. Beautiful and masterful though the Bargello is, it smells too + strongly of restoration, and, much of old Italy as still lurks in its + furbished and renovated chambers, it speaks even more distinctly of the + ill-mannered young kingdom that has—as “unavoidably” as you please—lifted + down a hundred delicate works of sculpture from the convent-walls where + their pious authors placed them. If the early Tuscan painters are + exquisite I can think of no praise pure enough for the sculptors of the + same period, Donatello and Luca della Robbia, Matteo Civitale and Mina da + Fiesole, who, as I refreshed my memory of them, seemed to me to leave + absolutely nothing to be desired in the way of straightness of inspiration + and grace of invention. The Bargello is full of early Tuscan sculpture, + most of the pieces of which have come from suppressed religious houses; + and even if the visitor be an ardent liberal he is uncomfortably conscious + of the rather brutal process by which it has been collected. One can + hardly envy young Italy the number of odious things she has had to do. + </p> + <p> + The railway journey from Florence to Rome has been altered both for the + better and for the worse; for the better in that it has been shortened by + a couple of hours; for the worse inasmuch as when about half the distance + has been traversed the train deflects to the west and leaves the beautiful + old cities of Assisi, Perugia, Terni, Narni, unvisited. Of old it was + possible to call at these places, in a manner, from the window of the + train; even if you didn’t stop, as you probably couldn’t, every time you + passed, the immensely interesting way in which, like a loosened belt on an + aged and shrunken person, their ample walls held them easily together was + something well worth noting. Now, however, for compensation, the express + train to Rome stops at Orvieto, and in consequence... In consequence what? + What is the result of the stop of an express train at Orvieto? As I glibly + wrote that sentence I suddenly paused, aware of the queer stuff I was + uttering. That an express train would graze the base of the horrid purple + mountain from the apex of which this dark old Catholic city uplifts the + glittering front of its cathedral—that might have been foretold by a + keen observer of contemporary manners. But that it would really have the + grossness to hang about is a fact over which, as he records it, an + inveterate, a perverse cherisher of the sense of the past order, the order + still largely prevailing at the time of his first visit to Italy, may well + make what is vulgarly called an ado. The train does stop at Orvieto, not + very long, it is true, but long enough to let you out. The same phenomenon + takes place on the following day, when, having visited the city, you get + in again. I availed myself without scruple of both of these occasions, + having formerly neglected to drive to the place in a post-chaise. But + frankly, the railway-station being in the plain and the town on the summit + of an extraordinary hill, you have time to forget the puffing indiscretion + while you wind upwards to the city-gate. The position of Orvieto is superb—worthy + of the “middle distance” of an eighteenth-century landscape. But, as every + one knows, the splendid Cathedral is the proper attraction of the spot, + which, indeed, save for this fine monument and for its craggy and + crumbling ramparts, is a meanly arranged and, as Italian cities go, not + particularly impressive little town. I spent a beautiful Sunday there and + took in the charming church. I gave it my best attention, though on the + whole I fear I found it inferior to its fame. A high concert of colour, + however, is the densely carved front, richly covered with radiant mosaics. + The old white marble of the sculptured portions is as softly yellow as + ancient ivory; the large exceedingly bright pictures above them flashed + and twinkled in the glorious weather. Very striking and interesting the + theological frescoes of Luca Signorelli, though I have seen compositions + of this general order that appealed to me more. Characteristically fresh, + finally, the clear-faced saints and seraphs, in robes of pink and azure, + whom Fra Angelico has painted upon the ceiling of the great chapel, along + with a noble sitting figure—more expressive of movement than most of + the creations of this pictorial peace-maker—of Christ in judgment. + Yet the interest of the cathedral of Orvieto is mainly not the visible + result, but the historical process that lies behind it; those three + hundred years of the applied devotion of a people of which an American + scholar has written an admirable account.{1} + </p> + <h3> + 1877. + </h3> + <p> + {1} Charles Eliot Norton, <i>Notes of Travel and Study in Italy</i>. + </p> + <p> + <a name="link2H_4_0010" id="link2H_4_0010"> + <!-- H2 anchor --> </a> + </p> + <div style="height: 4em;"> + <br /><br /><br /><br /> + </div> + <h2> + A ROMAN HOLIDAY + </h2> + <p> + It is certainly sweet to be merry at the right moment; but the right + moment hardly seems to me the ten days of the Roman Carnival. It was my + rather cynical suspicion perhaps that they wouldn’t keep to my imagination + the brilliant promise of legend; but I have been justified by the event + and have been decidedly less conscious of the festal influences of the + season than of the inalienable gravity of the place. There was a time when + the Carnival was a serious matter—that is a heartily joyous one; + but, thanks to the seven-league boots the kingdom of Italy has lately + donned for the march of progress in quite other directions, the fashion of + public revelry has fallen woefully out of step. The state of mind and + manners under which the Carnival was kept in generous good faith I doubt + if an American can exactly conceive: he can only say to himself that for a + month in the year there must have been things—things considerably of + humiliation—it was comfortable to forget. But now that Italy is made + the Carnival is unmade; and we are not especially tempted to envy the + attitude of a population who have lost their relish for play and not yet + acquired to any striking extent an enthusiasm for work. The spectacle on + the Corso has seemed to me, on the whole, an illustration of that great + breach with the past of which Catholic Christendom felt the somewhat + muffled shock in September, 1870. A traveller acquainted with the fully + papal Rome, coming back any time during the past winter, must have + immediately noticed that something momentous had happened—something + hostile to the elements of picture and colour and “style.” My first + warning was that ten minutes after my arrival I found myself face to face + with a newspaper stand. The impossibility in the other days of having + anything in the journalistic line but the <i>Osservatore Romano</i> and + the <i>Voce della Verità</i> used to seem to me much connected with the + extraordinary leisure of thought and stillness of mind to which the place + admitted you. But now the slender piping of the Voice of Truth is stifled + by the raucous note of eventide vendors of the <i>Capitale</i>, the <i>Libertà</i> + and the <i>Fanfulla</i>; and Rome reading unexpurgated news is another + Rome indeed. For every subscriber to the <i>Libertà</i> there may well be + an antique masker and reveller less. As striking a sign of the new régime + is the extraordinary increase of population. The Corso was always a + well-filled street, but now it’s a perpetual crush. I never cease to + wonder where the new-comers are lodged, and how such spotless flowers of + fashion as the gentlemen who stare at the carriages can bloom in the + atmosphere of those <i>camere mobiliate</i> of which I have had glimpses. + This, however, is their own question, and bravely enough they meet it. + They proclaimed somehow, to the first freshness of my wonder, as I say, + that by force of numbers Rome had been secularised. An Italian dandy is a + figure visually to reckon with, but these goodly throngs of them scarce + offered compensation for the absent monsignori, treading the streets in + their purple stockings and followed by the solemn servants who returned on + their behalf the bows of the meaner sort; for the mourning gear of the + cardinals’ coaches that formerly glittered with scarlet and swung with the + weight of the footmen clinging behind; for the certainty that you’ll not, + by the best of traveller’s luck, meet the Pope sitting deep in the shadow + of his great chariot with uplifted fingers like some inaccessible idol in + his shrine. You may meet the King indeed, who is as ugly, as imposingly + ugly, as some idols, though not so inaccessible. The other day as I passed + the Quirinal he drove up in a low carriage with a single attendant; and a + group of men and women who had been waiting near the gate rushed at him + with a number of folded papers. The carriage slackened pace and he + pocketed their offerings with a business-like air—hat of a + good-natured man accepting handbills at a street-corner. Here was a + monarch at his palace gate receiving petitions from his subjects—being + adjured to right their wrongs. The scene ought to have thrilled me, but + somehow it had no more intensity than a woodcut in an illustrated + newspaper. Homely I should call it at most; admirably so, certainly, for + there were lately few sovereigns standing, I believe, with whom their + people enjoyed these filial hand-to-hand relations. The King this year, + however, has had as little to do with the Carnival as the Pope, and the + innkeepers and Americans have marked it for their own. + </p> + <p> + It was advertised to begin at half-past two o’clock of a certain Saturday, + and punctually at the stroke of the hour, from my room across a wide + court, I heard a sudden multiplication of sounds and confusion of tongues + in the Corso. I was writing to a friend for whom I cared more than for any + mere romp; but as the minutes elapsed and the hubbub deepened curiosity + got the better of affection, and I remembered that I was really within + eye-shot of an affair the fame of which had ministered to the daydreams of + my infancy. I used to have a scrap-book with a coloured print of the + starting of the bedizened wild horses, and the use of a library rich in + keepsakes and annuals with a frontispiece commonly of a masked lady in a + balcony, the heroine of a delightful tale further on. Agitated by these + tender memories I descended into the street; but I confess I looked in + vain for a masked lady who might serve as a frontispiece, in vain for any + object whatever that might adorn a tale. Masked and muffled ladies there + were in abundance; but their masks were of ugly wire, perfectly resembling + the little covers placed upon strong cheese in German hotels, and their + drapery was a shabby water-proof with the hood pulled over their chignons. + They were armed with great tin scoops or funnels, with which they solemnly + shovelled lime and flour out of bushel-baskets and down on the heads of + the people in the street. They were packed into balconies all the way + along the straight vista of the Corso, in which their calcareous shower + maintained a dense, gritty, unpalatable fog. The crowd was compact in the + street, and the Americans in it were tossing back confetti out of great + satchels hung round their necks. It was quite the “you’re another” sort of + repartee, and less seasoned than I had hoped with the airy mockery + tradition hangs about this festival. The scene was striking, in a word; + but somehow not as I had dreamed of its being. I stood regardful, I + suppose, but with a peculiarly tempting blankness of visage, for in a + moment I received half a bushel of flour on my too-philosophic head. + Decidedly it was an ignoble form of humour. I shook my ears like an + emergent diver, and had a sudden vision of how still and sunny and solemn, + how peculiarly and undisturbedly themselves, how secure from any intrusion + less sympathetic than one’s own, certain outlying parts of Rome must just + then be. The Carnival had received its deathblow in my imagination; and it + has been ever since but a thin and dusky ghost of pleasure that has + flitted at intervals in and out of my consciousness. + </p> + <p> + I turned my back accordingly on the Corso and wandered away to the + grass-grown quarters delightfully free even from the possibility of a + fellow-countryman. And so having set myself an example I have been keeping + Carnival by strolling perversely along the silent circumference of Rome. I + have doubtless lost a great deal. The Princess Margaret has occupied a + balcony opposite the open space which leads into Via Condotti and, I + believe, like the discreet princess she is, has dealt in no missiles but + bonbons, bouquets and white doves. I would have waited half an hour any + day to see the Princess Margaret hold a dove on her forefinger; but I + never chanced to notice any preparation for that effect. And yet do what + you will you can’t really elude the Carnival. As the days elapse it + filters down into the manners of the common people, and before the week is + over the very beggars at the church-doors seem to have gone to the expense + of a domino. When you meet these specimens of dingy drollery capering + about in dusky back-streets at all hours of the day and night, meet them + flitting out of black doorways between the greasy groups that cluster + about Roman thresholds, you feel that a love of “pranks,” the more vivid + the better, must from far back have been implanted in the Roman + temperament with a strong hand. An unsophisticated American is + wonderstruck at the number of persons, of every age and various + conditions, whom it costs nothing in the nature of an ingenuous blush to + walk up and down the streets in the costume of a theatrical supernumerary. + Fathers of families do it at the head of an admiring progeniture; aunts + and uncles and grandmothers do it; all the family does it, with varying + splendour but with the same good conscience. “A pack of babies!” the + doubtless too self-conscious alien pronounces it for its pains, and tries + to imagine himself strutting along Broadway in a battered tin helmet and a + pair of yellow tights. Our vices are certainly different; it takes those + of the innocent sort to be so ridiculous. A self-consciousness lapsing so + easily, in fine, strikes me as so near a relation to amenity, urbanity and + general gracefulness that, for myself, I should be sorry to lay a tax on + it, lest these other commodities should also cease to come to market. + </p> + <p> + I was rewarded, when I had turned away with my ears full of flour, by a + glimpse of an intenser life than the dingy foolery of the Corso. I walked + down by the back streets to the steps mounting to the Capitol—that + long inclined plane, rather, broken at every two paces, which is the + unfailing disappointment, I believe, of tourists primed for retrospective + raptures. Certainly the Capitol seen from this side isn’t commanding. The + hill is so low, the ascent so narrow, Michael Angelo’s architecture in the + quadrangle at the top so meagre, the whole place somehow so much more of a + mole-hill than a mountain, that for the first ten minutes of your standing + there Roman history seems suddenly to have sunk through a trap-door. It + emerges however on the other side, in the Forum; and here meanwhile, if + you get no sense of the sublime, you get gradually a sense of exquisite + composition. Nowhere in Rome is more colour, more charm, more sport for + the eye. The mild incline, during the winter months, is always covered + with lounging sun-seekers, and especially with those more constantly + obvious members of the Roman population—beggars, soldiers, monks and + tourists. The beggars and peasants lie kicking their heels along that + grandest of loafing-places the great steps of the Ara Coeli. The dwarfish + look of the Capitol is intensified, I think, by the neighbourhood of this + huge blank staircase, mouldering away in disuse, the weeds thick in its + crevices, and climbing to the rudely solemn facade of the church. The + sunshine glares on this great unfinished wall only to light up its + featureless despair, its expression of conscious, irremediable + incompleteness. Sometimes, massing its rusty screen against the deep blue + sky, with the little cross and the sculptured porch casting a clear-cut + shadow on the bricks, it seems to have even more than a Roman desolation, + it confusedly suggests Spain and Africa—lands with no latent <i>risorgimenti</i>, + with absolutely nothing but a fatal past. The legendary wolf of Rome has + lately been accommodated with a little artificial grotto, among the cacti + and the palms, in the fantastic triangular garden squeezed between the + steps of the church and the ascent to the Capitol, where she holds a + perpetual levee and “draws” apparently as powerfully as the Pope himself. + Above, in the piazzetta before the stuccoed palace which rises so jauntily + on a basement of thrice its magnitude, are more loungers and knitters in + the sun, seated round the massively inscribed base of the statue of Marcus + Aurelius. Hawthorne has perfectly expressed the attitude of this admirable + figure in saying that it extends its arm with “a command which is in + itself a benediction.” I doubt if any statue of king or captain in the + public places of the world has more to commend it to the general heart. + Irrecoverable simplicity—residing so in irrecoverable Style—has + no sturdier representative. Here is an impression that the sculptors of + the last three hundred years have been laboriously trying to reproduce; + but contrasted with this mild old monarch their prancing horsemen suggest + a succession of riding-masters taking out young ladies’ schools. The + admirably human character of the figure survives the rusty decomposition + of the bronze and the slight “debasement” of the art; and one may call it + singular that in the capital of Christendom the portrait most suggestive + of a Christian conscience is that of a pagan emperor. + </p> + <p> + You recover in some degree your stifled hopes of sublimity as you pass + beyond the palace and take your choice of either curving slope to descend + into the Forum. Then you see that the little stuccoed edifice is but a + modern excrescence on the mighty cliff of a primitive construction, whose + great squares of porous tufa, as they underlie each other, seem to resolve + themselves back into the colossal cohesion of unhewn rock. There are + prodigious strangenesses in the union of this airy and comparatively + fresh-faced superstructure and these deep-plunging, hoary foundations; and + few things in Rome are more entertaining to the eye than to measure the + long plumb-line which drops from the inhabited windows of the palace, with + their little over-peeping balconies, their muslin curtains and their + bird-cages, down to the rugged constructional work of the Republic. In the + Forum proper the sublime is eclipsed again, though the late extension of + the excavations gives a chance for it. + </p> + <p> + Nothing in Rome helps your fancy to a more vigorous backward flight than + to lounge on a sunny day over the railing which guards the great central + researches. It “says” more things to you than you can repeat to see the + past, the ancient world, as you stand there, bodily turned up with the + spade and transformed from an immaterial, inaccessible fact of time into a + matter of soils and surfaces. The pleasure is the same—in kind—as + what you enjoy of Pompeii, and the pain the same. It wasn’t here, however, + that I found my compensation for forfeiting the spectacle on the Corso, + but in a little church at the end of the narrow byway which diverges up + the Palatine from just beside the Arch of Titus. This byway leads you + between high walls, then takes a bend and introduces you to a long row of + rusty, dusty little pictures of the stations of the cross. Beyond these + stands a small church with a front so modest that you hardly recognise it + till you see the leather curtain. I never see a leather curtain without + lifting it; it is sure to cover a constituted <i>scene</i> of some sort—good, + bad or indifferent. The scene this time was meagre—whitewash and + tarnished candlesticks and mouldy muslin flowers being its principal + features. I shouldn’t have remained if I hadn’t been struck with the + attitude of the single worshipper—a young priest kneeling before one + of the sidealtars, who, as I entered, lifted his head and gave me a + sidelong look so charged with the languor of devotion that he immediately + became an object of interest. He was visiting each of the altars in turn + and kissing the balustrade beneath them. He was alone in the church, and + indeed in the whole region. There were no beggars even at the door; they + were plying their trade on the skirts of the Carnival. In the entirely + deserted place he alone knelt for religion, and as I sat respectfully by + it seemed to me I could hear in the perfect silence the far-away uproar of + the maskers. It was my late impression of these frivolous people, I + suppose, joined with the extraordinary gravity of the young priest’s face—his + pious fatigue, his droning prayer and his isolation—that gave me + just then and there a supreme vision of the religious passion, its + privations and resignations and exhaustions and its terribly small share + of amusement. He was young and strong and evidently of not too refined a + fibre to enjoy the Carnival; but, planted there with his face pale with + fasting and his knees stiff with praying, he seemed so stern a satire on + it and on the crazy thousands who were preferring it to <i>his</i> way, + that I half expected to see some heavenly portent out of a monastic legend + come down and confirm his choice. Yet I confess that though I wasn’t + enamoured of the Carnival myself, his seemed a grim preference and this + forswearing of the world a terrible game—a gaining one only if your + zeal never falters; a hard fight when it does. In such an hour, to a stout + young fellow like the hero of my anecdote, the smell of incense must seem + horribly stale and the muslin flowers and gilt candlesticks to figure no + great bribe. And it wouldn’t have helped him much to think that not so + very far away, just beyond the Forum, in the Corso, there was sport for + the million, and for nothing. I doubt on the other hand whether my young + priest had thought of this. He had made himself a temple out of the very + elements of his innocence, and his prayers followed each other too fast + for the tempter to slip in a whisper. And so, as I say, I found a solider + fact of human nature than the love of <i>coriandoli</i>. + </p> + <p> + One of course never passes the Colosseum without paying it one’s respects—without + going in under one of the hundred portals and crossing the long oval and + sitting down a while, generally at the foot of the cross in the centre. I + always feel, as I do so, as if I were seated in the depths of some Alpine + valley. The upper portions of the side toward the Esquiline look as remote + and lonely as an Alpine ridge, and you raise your eyes to their rugged + sky-line, drinking in the sun and silvered by the blue air, with much the + same feeling with which you would take in a grey cliff on which an eagle + might lodge. This roughly mountainous quality of the great ruin is its + chief interest; beauty of detail has pretty well vanished, especially + since the high-growing wild-flowers have been plucked away by the new + government, whose functionaries, surely, at certain points of their task, + must have felt as if they shared the dreadful trade of those who gather + samphire. Even if you are on your way to the Lateran you won’t grudge the + twenty minutes it will take you, on leaving the Colosseum, to turn away + under the Arch of Constantine, whose noble battered bas-reliefs, with the + chain of tragic statues—fettered, drooping barbarians—round + its summit, I assume you to have profoundly admired, toward the piazzetta + of the church of San Giovanni e Paolo, on the slope of Caelian. No spot in + Rome can show a cluster of more charming accidents. The ancient brick apse + of the church peeps down into the trees of the little wooded walk before + the neighbouring church of San Gregorio, intensely venerable beneath its + excessive modernisation; and a series of heavy brick buttresses, flying + across to an opposite wall, overarches the short, steep, paved passage + which leads into the small square. This is flanked on one side by the long + mediaeval portico of the church of the two saints, sustained by eight + time-blackened columns of granite and marble. On another rise the great + scarce-windowed walls of a Passionist convent, and on the third the + portals of a grand villa, whose tall porter, with his cockade and + silver-topped staff, standing sublime behind his grating, seems a kind of + mundane St. Peter, I suppose, to the beggars who sit at the church door or + lie in the sun along the farther slope which leads to the gate of the + convent. The place always seems to me the perfection of an out-of-the-way + corner—a place you would think twice before telling people about, + lest you should find them there the next time you were to go. It is such a + group of objects, singly and in their happy combination, as one must come + to Rome to find at one’s house door; but what makes it peculiarly a + picture is the beautiful dark red campanile of the church, which stands + embedded in the mass of the convent. It begins, as so many things in Rome + begin, with a stout foundation of antique travertine, and rises high, in + delicately quaint mediaeval brickwork—little tiers and apertures + sustained on miniature columns and adorned with small cracked slabs of + green and yellow marble, inserted almost at random. When there are three + or four brown-breasted contadini sleeping in the sun before the convent + doors, and a departing monk leading his shadow down over them, I think you + will not find anything in Rome more <i>sketchable</i>. + </p> + <p> + If you stop, however, to observe everything worthy of your water-colours + you will never reach St. John Lateran. My business was much less with the + interior of that vast and empty, that cold clean temple, which I have + never found peculiarly interesting, than with certain charming features of + its surrounding precinct—the crooked old court beside it, which + admits you to the Baptistery and to a delightful rear-view of the queer + architectural odds and ends that may in Rome compose a florid + ecclesiastical façade. There are more of these, a stranger jumble of + chance detail, of lurking recesses and wanton projections and inexplicable + windows, than I have memory or phrase for; but the gem of the collection + is the oddly perched peaked turret, with its yellow travertine welded upon + the rusty brickwork, which was not meant to be suspected, and the + brickwork retreating beneath and leaving it in the odd position of a tower + <i>under</i> which you may see the sky. As to the great front of the + church overlooking the Porta San Giovanni, you are not admitted behind the + scenes; the term is quite in keeping, for the architecture has a vastly + theatrical air. It is extremely imposing—that of St. Peter’s alone + is more so; and when from far off on the Campagna you see the colossal + images of the mitred saints along the top standing distinct against the + sky, you forget their coarse construction and their inflated draperies. + The view from the great space which stretches from the church steps to the + city wall is the very prince of views. Just beside you, beyond the great + alcove of mosaic, is the Scala Santa, the marble staircase which (says the + legend) Christ descended under the weight of Pilate’s judgment, and which + all Christians must for ever ascend on their knees; before you is the city + gate which opens upon the Via Appia Nuova, the long gaunt file of arches + of the Claudian aqueduct, their jagged ridge stretching away like the + vertebral column of some monstrous mouldering skeleton, and upon the + blooming brown and purple flats and dells of the Campagna and the glowing + blue of the Alban Mountains, spotted with their white, high-nestling + towns; while to your left is the great grassy space, lined with dwarfish + mulberry-trees, which stretches across to the damp little sister-basilica + of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme. During a former visit to Rome I lost my + heart to this idle tract,{1} + </p> + <p> + {1} Utterly overbuilt and gone—1909. + </p> + <p> + and wasted much time in sitting on the steps of the church and watching + certain white-cowled friars who were sure to be passing there for the + delight of my eyes. There are fewer friars now, and there are a great many + of the king’s recruits, who inhabit the ex-conventual barracks adjoining + Santa Croce and are led forward to practise their goose-step on the sunny + turf. Here too the poor old cardinals who are no longer to be seen on the + Pincio descend from their mourning-coaches and relax their venerable + knees. These members alone still testify to the traditional splendour of + the princes of the Church; for as they advance the lifted black petticoat + reveals a flash of scarlet stockings and makes you groan at the victory of + civilisation over colour. + </p> + <p> + {Illustration: THE FAÇADE OF ST. JOHN LATERAN, ROME.} + </p> + <p> + If St. John Lateran disappoints you internally, you have an easy + compensation in pacing the long lane which connects it with Santa Maria + Maggiore and entering the singularly perfect nave of that most delightful + of churches. The first day of my stay in Rome under the old dispensation I + spent in wandering at random through the city, with accident for my <i>valet-de-place</i>. + It served me to perfection and introduced me to the best things; among + others to an immediate happy relation with Santa Maria Maggiore. First + impressions, memorable impressions, are generally irrecoverable; they + often leave one the wiser, but they rarely return in the same form. I + remember, of my coming uninformed and unprepared into the place of worship + and of curiosity that I have named, only that I sat for half an hour on + the edge of the base of one of the marble columns of the beautiful nave + and enjoyed a perfect revel of—what shall I call it?—taste, + intelligence, fancy, perceptive emotion? The place proved so endlessly + suggestive that perception became a throbbing confusion of images, and I + departed with a sense of knowing a good deal that is not set down in + Murray. I have seated myself more than once again at the base of the same + column; but you live your life only once, the parts as well as the whole. + The obvious charm of the church is the elegant grandeur of the nave—its + perfect shapeliness and its rich simplicity, its long double row of white + marble columns and its high flat roof, embossed with intricate gildings + and mouldings. It opens into a choir of an extraordinary splendour of + effect, which I recommend you to look out for of a fine afternoon. At such + a time the glowing western light, entering the high windows of the + tribune, kindles the scattered masses of colour into sombre bright-ness, + scintillates on the great solemn mosaic of the vault, touches the porphyry + columns of the superb baldachino with ruby lights, and buries its shining + shafts in the deep-toned shadows that hang about frescoes and sculptures + and mouldings. The deeper charm even than in such things, however, is the + social or historic note or tone or atmosphere of the church—I + fumble, you see, for my right expression; the sense it gives you, in + common with most of the Roman churches, and more than any of them, of + having been prayed in for several centuries by an endlessly curious and + complex society. It takes no great attention to let it come to you that + the authority of Italian Catholicism has lapsed not a little in these + days; not less also perhaps than to feel that, as they stand, these + deserted temples were the fruit of a society leavened through and through + by ecclesiastical manners, and that they formed for ages the constant + background of the human drama. They are, as one may say, the <i>churchiest</i> + churches in Europe—the fullest of gathered memories, of the + experience of their office. There’s not a figure one has read of in + old-world annals that isn’t to be imagined on proper occasion kneeling + before the lamp-decked Confession beneath the altar of Santa Maria + Maggiore. One sees after all, however, even among the most palpable + realities, very much what the play of one’s imagination projects there; + and I present my remarks simply as a reminder that one’s constant + excursions into these places are not the least interesting episodes of + one’s walks in Rome. + </p> + <p> + I had meant to give a simple illustration of the church-habit, so to + speak, but I have given it at such a length as leaves scant space to touch + on the innumerable topics brushed by the pen that begins to take Roman + notes. It is by the aimless <i>flânerie</i> which leaves you free to + follow capriciously every hint of entertainment that you get to know Rome. + The greater part of the life about you goes on in the streets; and for an + observer fresh from a country in which town scenery is at the least + monotonous incident and character and picture seem to abound. I become + conscious with compunction, let me hasten to add, that I have launched + myself thus on the subject of Roman churches and Roman walks without so + much as a preliminary allusion to St. Peter’s. One is apt to proceed + thither on rainy days with intentions of exercise—to put the case + only at that—and to carry these out body and mind. Taken as a walk + not less than as a church, St. Peter’s of course reigns alone. Even for + the profane “constitutional” it serves where the Boulevards, where + Piccadilly and Broadway, fall short, and if it didn’t offer to our use the + grandest area in the world it would still offer the most diverting. Few + great works of art last longer to the curiosity, to the perpetually + transcended attention. You think you have taken the whole thing in, but it + expands, it rises sublime again, and leaves your measure itself poor. You + never let the ponderous leather curtain bang down behind you—your + weak lift of a scant edge of whose padded vastness resembles the liberty + taken in folding back the parchment corner of some mighty folio page—without + feeling all former visits to have been but missed attempts at apprehension + and the actual to achieve your first real possession. The conventional + question is ever as to whether one hasn’t been “disappointed in the size,” + but a few honest folk here and there, I hope, will never cease to say no. + The place struck me from the first as the hugest thing conceivable—a + real exaltation of one’s idea of space; so that one’s entrance, even from + the great empty square which either glares beneath the deep blue sky or + makes of the cool far-cast shadow of the immense front something that + resembles a big slate-coloured country on a map, seems not so much a going + in somewhere as a going out. The mere man of pleasure in quest of new + sensations might well not know where to better his encounter there of the + sublime shock that brings him, within the threshold, to an immediate + gasping pause. There are days when the vast nave looks mysteriously vaster + than on others and the gorgeous baldachino a longer journey beyond the + far-spreading tessellated plain of the pavement, and when the light has + yet a quality which lets things loom their largest, while the scattered + figures—I mean the human, for there are plenty of others—mark + happily the scale of items and parts. Then you have only to stroll and + stroll and gaze and gaze; to watch the glorious altar-canopy lift its + bronze architecture, its colossal embroidered contortions, like a temple + within a temple, and feel yourself, at the bottom of the abysmal shaft of + the dome, dwindle to a crawling dot. + </p> + <p> + Much of the constituted beauty resides in the fact that it is all general + beauty, that you are appealed to by no specific details, or that these at + least, practically never importunate, are as taken for granted as the + lieutenants and captains are taken for granted in a great standing army—among + whom indeed individual aspects may figure here the rather shifting range + of decorative dignity in which details, when observed, often prove poor + (though never not massive and substantially precious) and sometimes prove + ridiculous. The sculptures, with the sole exception of Michael Angelo’s + ineffable “Pieta,” which lurks obscurely in a side-chapel—this + indeed to my sense the rarest artistic <i>combination</i> of the greatest + things the hand of man has produced—are either bad or indifferent; + and the universal incrustation of marble, though sumptuous enough, has a + less brilliant effect than much later work of the same sort, that for + instance of St. Paul’s without the Walls. The supreme beauty is the + splendidly sustained simplicity of the whole. The thing represents a + prodigious imagination extraordinarily strained, yet strained, at its + happiest pitch, without breaking. Its happiest pitch I say, because this + is the only creation of its strenuous author in presence of which you are + in presence of serenity. You may invoke the idea of ease at St. Peter’s + without a sense of sacrilege—which you can hardly do, if you are at + all spiritually nervous, in Westminster Abbey or Notre Dame. The vast + enclosed clearness has much to do with the idea. There are no shadows to + speak of, no marked effects of shade; only effects of light innumerably—points + at which this element seems to mass itself in airy density and scatter + itself in enchanting gradations and cadences. It performs the office of + gloom or of mystery in Gothic churches; hangs like a rolling mist along + the gilded vault of the nave, melts into bright interfusion the mosaic + scintillations of the dome, clings and clusters and lingers, animates the + whole huge and otherwise empty shell. A good Catholic, I suppose, is the + same Catholic anywhere, before the grandest as well as the humblest + altars; but to a visitor not formally enrolled St. Peter’s speaks less of + aspiration than of full and convenient assurance. The soul infinitely + expands there, if one will, but all on its quite human level. It marvels + at the reach of our dreams and the immensity of our resources. To be so + impressed and put in our place, we say, is to be sufficiently “saved”; we + can’t be more than the heaven itself; and what specifically celestial + beauty such a show or such a substitute may lack it makes up for in + certainty and tangibility. And yet if one’s hours on the scene are not + actually spent in praying, the spirit seeks it again as for the finer + comfort, for the blessing, exactly, of its example, its protection and its + exclusion. When you are weary of the swarming democracy of your + fellow-tourists, of the unremunerative aspects of human nature on Corso + and Pincio, of the oppressively frequent combination of coronets on + carriage panels and stupid faces in carriages, of addled brains and + lacquered boots, of ruin and dirt and decay, of priests and beggars and + takers of advantage, of the myriad tokens of a halting civilisation, the + image of the great temple depresses the balance of your doubts, seems to + rise above even the highest tide of vulgarity and make you still believe + in the heroic will and the heroic act. It’s a relief, in other words, to + feel that there’s nothing but a cab-fare between your pessimism and one of + the greatest of human achievements. + </p> + <p> + {Illustration: THE COLONNADE OF ST. PETER, ROME.} + </p> + <p> + This might serve as a Lenten peroration to these remarks of mine which + have strayed so woefully from their jovial text, save that I ought fairly + to confess that my last impression of the Carnival was altogether + Carnivalesque.. The merry-making of Shrove Tuesday had life and felicity; + the dead letter of tradition broke out into nature and grace. I pocketed + my scepticism and spent a long afternoon on the Corso. Almost every one + was a masker, but you had no need to conform; the pelting rain of confetti + effectually disguised you. I can’t say I found it all very exhilarating; + but here and there I noticed a brighter episode—a capering clown + inflamed with contagious jollity, some finer humourist forming a circle + every thirty yards to crow at his indefatigable sallies. One clever + performer so especially pleased me that I should have been glad to catch a + glimpse of the natural man. You imagined for him that he was taking a + prodigious intellectual holiday and that his gaiety was in inverse ratio + to his daily mood. Dressed as a needy scholar, in an ancient evening-coat + and with a rusty black hat and gloves fantastically patched, he carried a + little volume carefully under his arm. His humours were in excellent + taste, his whole manner the perfection of genteel comedy. The crowd seemed + to relish him vastly, and he at once commanded a glee-fully attentive + audience. Many of his sallies I lost; those I caught were excellent. His + trick was often to begin by taking some one urbanely and caressingly by + the chin and complimenting him on the <i>intelligenza della sua fisionomia</i>. + I kept near him as long as I could; for he struck me as a real ironic + artist, cherishing a disinterested, and yet at the same time a motived and + a moral, passion for the grotesque. I should have liked, however—if + indeed I shouldn’t have feared—to see him the next morning, or when + he unmasked that night over his hard-earned supper in a smoky <i>trattoria</i>. + As the evening went on the crowd thickened and became a motley press of + shouting, pushing, scrambling, everything but squabbling, revellers. The + rain of missiles ceased at dusk, but the universal deposit of chalk and + flour was trampled into a cloud made lurid by flaring pyramids of the + gas-lamps that replaced for the occasion the stingy Roman luminaries. + Early in the evening came off the classic exhibition of the <i>moccoletti</i>, + which I but half saw, like a languid reporter resigned beforehand to be + cashiered for want of enterprise. From the mouth of a side-street, over a + thousand heads, I caught a huge slow-moving illuminated car, from which + blue-lights and rockets and Roman candles were in course of discharge, + meeting all in a dim fuliginous glare far above the house-tops. It was + like a glimpse of some public orgy in ancient Babylon. In the small hours + of the morning, walking homeward from a private entertainment, I found Ash + Wednesday still kept at bay. The Corso, flaring with light, smelt like a + circus. Every one was taking friendly liberties with every one else and + using up the dregs of his festive energy in convulsive hootings and + gymnastics. Here and there certain indefatigable spirits, clad all in red + after the manner of devils and leaping furiously about with torches, were + supposed to affright you. But they shared the universal geniality and + bequeathed me no midnight fears as a pretext for keeping Lent, the <i>carnevale + dei preti</i>, as I read in that profanely radical sheet the <i>Capitale</i>. + Of this too I have been having glimpses. Going lately into Santa Francesca + Romana, the picturesque church near the Temple of Peace, I found a feast + for the eyes—a dim crimson-toned light through curtained windows, a + great festoon of tapers round the altar, a bulging girdle of lamps before + the sunken shrine beneath, and a dozen white-robed Dominicans scattered in + the happiest composition on the pavement. It was better than the <i>moccoletti</i>. + </p> + <h3> + 1873. + </h3> + <p> + <a name="link2H_4_0011" id="link2H_4_0011"> + <!-- H2 anchor --> </a> + </p> + <div style="height: 4em;"> + <br /><br /><br /><br /> + </div> + <h2> + ROMAN RIDES + </h2> + <p> + I shall always remember the first I took: out of the Porta del Popolo, to + where the Ponte Molle, whose single arch sustains a weight of historic + tradition, compels the sallow Tiber to flow between its four + great-mannered ecclesiastical statues, over the crest of the hill and + along the old posting-road to Florence. It was mild midwinter, the season + peculiarly of colour on the Roman Campagna; and the light was full of that + mellow purple glow, that tempered intensity, which haunts the + after-visions of those who have known Rome like the memory of some + supremely irresponsible pleasure. An hour away I pulled up and at the edge + of a meadow gazed away for some time into remoter distances. Then and + there, it seemed to me, I measured the deep delight of knowing the + Campagna. But I saw more things in it than I can easily tell. The country + rolled away around me into slopes and dells of long-drawn grace, chequered + with purple and blue and blooming brown. The lights and shadows were at + play on the Sabine Mountains—an alternation of tones so exquisite as + to be conveyed only by some fantastic comparison to sapphire and amber. In + the foreground a contadino in his cloak and peaked hat jogged solitary on + his ass; and here and there in the distance, among blue undulations, some + white village, some grey tower, helped deliciously to make the picture the + typical “Italian landscape” of old-fashioned art. It was so bright and yet + so sad, so still and yet so charged, to the supersensuous ear, with the + murmur of an extinguished life, that you could only say it was intensely + and adorably strange, could only impute to the whole overarched scene an + unsurpassed secret for bringing tears of appreciation to no matter how + ignorant—archaeologically ignorant—eyes. To ride once, in + these conditions, is of course to ride again and to allot to the Campagna + a generous share of the time one spends in Rome. + </p> + <p> + It is a pleasure that doubles one’s horizon, and one can scarcely say + whether it enlarges or limits one’s impression of the city proper. It + certainly makes St. Peter’s seem a trifle smaller and blunts the edge of + one’s curiosity in the Forum. It must be the effect of the experience, at + all extended, that when you think of Rome afterwards you will think still + respectfully and regretfully enough of the Vatican and the Pincio, the + streets and the picture-making street life; but will even more wonder, + with an irrepressible contraction of the heart, when again you shall feel + yourself bounding over the flower-smothered turf, or pass from one framed + picture to another beside the open arches of the crumbling aqueducts. You + look back at the City so often from some grassy hill-top—hugely + compact within its walls, with St. Peter’s overtopping all things and yet + seeming small, and the vast girdle of marsh and meadow receding on all + sides to the mountains and the sea—that you come to remember it at + last as hardly more than a respectable parenthesis in a great sweep of + generalisation. Within the walls, on the other hand, you think of your + intended ride as the most romantic of all your possibilities; of the + Campagna generally as an illimitable experience. One’s rides certainly + give Rome an inordinate scope for the reflective—by which I suppose + I mean after all the aesthetic and the “esoteric”—life. To dwell in + a city which, much as you grumble at it, is after all very fairly a modern + city; with crowds and shops and theatres and cafes and balls and + receptions and dinner-parties, and all the modern confusion of social + pleasures and pains; to have at your door the good and evil of it all; and + yet to be able in half an hour to gallop away and leave it a hundred + miles, a hundred years, behind, and to look at the tufted broom glowing on + a lonely tower-top in the still blue air, and the pale pink asphodels + trembling none the less for the stillness, and the shaggy-legged shepherds + leaning on their sticks in motionless brotherhood with the heaps of ruin, + and the scrambling goats and staggering little kids treading out wild + desert smells from the top of hollow-sounding mounds; and then to come + back through one of the great gates and a couple of hours later find + yourself in the “world,” dressed, introduced, entertained, inquiring, + talking about “Middlemarch” to a young English lady or listening to + Neapolitan songs from a gentleman in a very low-cut shirt—all this + is to lead in a manner a double life and to gather from the hurrying hours + more impressions than a mind of modest capacity quite knows how to dispose + of. + </p> + <p> + I touched lately upon this theme with a friend who, I fancied, would + understand me, and who immediately assured me that he had just spent a day + that this mingled diversity of sensation made to the days one spends + elsewhere what an uncommonly good novel may be to the daily paper. “There + was an air of idleness about it, if you will,” he said, “and it was + certainly pleasant enough to have been wrong. Perhaps, being after all + unused to long stretches of dissipation, this was why I had a half-feeling + that I was reading an odd chapter in the history of a person very much + more of a <i>héros de roman</i> than myself.” Then he proceeded to relate + how he had taken a long ride with a lady whom he extremely admired. “We + turned off from the Tor di Quinto Road to that castellated farm-house you + know of—once a Ghibelline fortress—whither Claude Lorraine + used to come to paint pictures of which the surrounding landscape is still + so artistically, so compositionally, suggestive. We went into the inner + court, a cloister almost, with the carven capitals of its loggia columns, + and looked at a handsome child swinging shyly against the half-opened door + of a room whose impenetrable shadow, behind her, made her, as it were, a + sketch in bituminous water-colours. We talked with the farmer, a handsome, + pale, fever-tainted fellow with a well-to-do air that didn’t in the least + deter his affability from a turn compatible with the acceptance of small + coin; and then we galloped away and away over the meadows which stretch + with hardly a break to Veii. The day was strangely delicious, with a cool + grey sky and just a touch of moisture in the air stirred by our rapid + motion. The Campagna, in the colourless even light, was more solemn and + romantic than ever; and a ragged shepherd, driving a meagre straggling + flock, whom we stopped to ask our way of, was a perfect type of pastoral, + weather-beaten misery. He was precisely the shepherd for the foreground of + a scratchy etching. There were faint odours of spring in the air, and the + grass here and there was streaked with great patches of daisies; but it + was spring with a foreknowledge of autumn, a day to be enjoyed with a + substrain of sadness, the foreboding of regret, a day somehow to make one + feel as if one had seen and felt a great deal—quite, as I say, like + a <i>heros de roman</i>. Touching such characters, it was the illustrious + Pelham, I think, who, on being asked if he rode, replied that he left + those violent exercises to the ladies. But under such a sky, in such an + air, over acres of daisied turf, a long, long gallop is certainly a + supersubtle joy. The elastic bound of your horse is the poetry of motion; + and if you are so happy as to add to it not the prose of companionship + riding comes almost to affect you as a spiritual exercise. My gallop, at + any rate,” said my friend, “threw me into a mood which gave an + extraordinary zest to the rest of the day.” He was to go to a dinner-party + at a villa on the edge of Rome, and Madam X—, who was also going, + called for him in her carriage. “It was a long drive,” he went on, + “through the Forum, past the Colosseum. She told me a long story about a + most interesting person. Toward the end my eyes caught through the + carriage window a slab of rugged sculptures. We were passing under the + Arch of Constantine. In the hall pavement of the villa is a rare antique + mosaic—one of the largest and most perfect; the ladies on their way + to the drawing-room trail over it the flounces of Worth. We drove home + late, and there’s my day.” + </p> + <p> + On your exit from most of the gates of Rome you have generally + half-an-hour’s progress through winding lanes, many of which are hardly + less charming than the open meadows. On foot the walls and high hedges + would vex you and spoil your walk; but in the saddle you generally overtop + them, to an endless peopling of the minor vision. Yet a Roman wall in the + springtime is for that matter almost as interesting as anything it + conceals. Crumbling grain by grain, coloured and mottled to a hundred + tones by sun and storm, with its rugged structure of brick extruding + through its coarse complexion of peeling stucco, its creeping lacework of + wandering ivy starred with miniature violets, and its wild fringe of + stouter flowers against the sky—it is as little as possible a blank + partition; it is practically a luxury of landscape. At the moment at which + I write, in mid-April, all the ledges and cornices are wreathed with + flaming poppies, nodding there as if they knew so well what faded greys + and yellows are an offset to their scarlet. But the best point in a + dilapidated enclosing surface of vineyard or villa is of course the + gateway, lifting its great arch of cheap rococo scroll-work, its balls and + shields and mossy dish-covers—as they always perversely figure to me—and + flanked with its dusky cypresses. I never pass one without taking out my + mental sketch-book and jotting it down as a vignette in the insubstantial + record of my ride. They are as sad and dreary as if they led to the moated + grange where Mariana waited in desperation for something to happen; and + it’s easy to take the usual inscription over the porch as a recommendation + to those who enter to renounce all hope of anything but a glass of more or + less agreeably acrid <i>vino romano</i>. For what you chiefly see over the + walls and at the end of the straight short avenue of rusty cypresses are + the appurtenances of a <i>vigna</i>—a couple of acres of little + upright sticks blackening in the sun, and a vast sallow-faced, scantily + windowed mansion, whose expression denotes little of the life of the mind + beyond what goes to the driving of a hard bargain over the tasted + hogsheads. If Mariana is there she certainly has no pile of old magazines + to beguile her leisure. The life of the mind, if the term be in any + application here not ridiculous, appears to any asker of curious + questions, as he wanders about Rome, the very thinnest deposit of the + past. Within the rococo gateway, which itself has a vaguely esthetic + self-consciousness, at the end of the cypress walk, you will probably see + a mythological group in rusty marble—a Cupid and Psyche, a Venus and + Paris, an Apollo and Daphne—the relic of an age when a Roman + proprietor thought it fine to patronise the arts. But I imagine you are + safe in supposing it to constitute the only allusion savouring of culture + that has been made on the premises for three or four generations. + </p> + <p> + There is a franker cheerfulness—though certainly a proper amount of + that forlornness which lurks about every object to which the Campagna + forms a background—in the primitive little taverns where, on the + homeward stretch, in the waning light, you are often glad to rein up and + demand a bottle of their best. Their best and their worst are indeed the + same, though with a shifting price, and plain <i>vino bianco</i> or <i>vino + rosso</i> (rarely both) is the sole article of refreshment in which they + deal. There is a ragged bush over the door, and within, under a dusky + vault, on crooked cobble-stones, sit half-a-dozen contadini in their + indigo jackets and goatskin breeches and with their elbows on the table. + There is generally a rabble of infantile beggars at the door, pretty + enough in their dusty rags, with their fine eyes and intense Italian + smile, to make you forget your private vow of doing your individual best I + to make these people, whom you like so much, unlearn their old vices. Was + Porta Pia bombarded three years ago that Peppino should still grow up to + whine for a copper? But the Italian shells had no direct message for + Peppino’s stomach—and you are going to a dinner-party at a villa. So + Peppino “points” an instant for the copper in the dust and grows up a + Roman beggar. The whole little place represents the most primitive form of + hostelry; but along any of the roads leading out of the city you may find + establishments of a higher type, with Garibaldi, superbly mounted and + foreshortened, painted on the wall, or a lady in a low-necked dress + opening a fictive lattice with irresistible hospitality, and a yard with + the classic vine-wreathed arbour casting thin shadows upon benches and + tables draped and cushioned with the white dust from which the highways + from the gates borrow most of their local colour. None the less, I say, + you avoid the highroads, and, if you are a person of taste, don’t grumble + at the occasional need of following the walls of the city. City walls, to + a properly constituted American, can never be an object of indifference; + and it is emphatically “no end of a sensation” to pace in the shadow of + this massive cincture of Rome. I have found myself, as I skirted its base, + talking of trivial things, but never without a sudden reflection on the + deplorable impermanence of first impressions. A twelvemonth ago the raw + plank fences of a Boston suburb, inscribed with the virtues of healing + drugs, bristled along my horizon: now I glance with idle eyes at a + compacted antiquity in which a more learned sense may read portentous + dates and signs—Servius, Aurelius, Honorius. But even to idle eyes + the prodigious, the continuous thing bristles with eloquent passages. In + some places, where the huge brickwork is black with time and certain + strange square towers look down at you with still blue eyes, the Roman sky + peering through lidless loopholes, and there is nothing but white dust in + the road and solitude in the air, I might take myself for a wandering + Tartar touching on the confines of the Celestial Empire. The wall of China + must have very much such a gaunt robustness. The colour of the Roman + ramparts is everywhere fine, and their rugged patchwork has been subdued + by time and weather into a mellow harmony that the brush only asks to + catch up. On the northern side of the city, behind the Vatican, St. + Peter’s and the Trastevere, I have seen them glowing in the late afternoon + with the tones of ancient bronze and rusty gold. Here at various points + they are embossed with the Papal insignia, the tiara with its flying bands + and crossed keys; to the high style of which the grace that attaches to + almost any lost cause—even if not quite the “tender” grace of a day + that is dead—considerably adds a style. With the dome of St. Peter’s + resting on their cornice and the hugely clustered architecture of the + Vatican rising from them as from a terrace, they seem indeed the valid + bulwark of an ecclesiastical city. Vain bulwark, alas! sighs the + sentimental tourist, fresh from the meagre entertainment of this latter + Holy Week. But he may find monumental consolation in this neighbourhood at + a source where, as I pass, I never fail to apply for it. At half-an-hour’s + walk beyond Porta San Pancrazio, beneath the wall of the Villa Doria, is a + delightfully pompous ecclesiastical gateway of the seventeenth century, + erected by Paul V to commemorate his restoration of the aqueducts through + which the stream bearing his name flows towards the fine florid portico + protecting its clear-sheeted outgush on the crest of the Janiculan. It + arches across the road in the most ornamental manner of the period, and + one can hardly pause before it without seeming to assist at a ten minutes’ + revival of old Italy—without feeling as if one were in a cocked hat + and sword and were coming up to Rome, in another mood than Luther’s, with + a letter of recommendation to the mistress of a cardinal. + </p> + <p> + The Campagna differs greatly on the two sides of the Tiber; and it is hard + to say which, for the rider, has the greater charm. The half-dozen rides + you may take from Porta San Giovanni possess the perfection of traditional + Roman interest and lead you through a far-strewn wilderness of ruins—a + scattered maze of tombs and towers and nameless fragments of antique + masonry. The landscape here has two great features; close before you on + one side is the long, gentle swell of the Alban Hills, deeply, + fantastically blue in most weathers, and marbled with the vague white + masses of their scattered towns and villas. It would be difficult to draw + the hard figure to a softer curve than that with which the heights sweep + from Albano to the plain; this a perfect example of the classic beauty of + line in the Italian landscape—that beauty which, when it fills the + background of a picture, makes us look in the foreground for a broken + column couched upon flowers and a shepherd piping to dancing nymphs. At + your side, constantly, you have the broken line of the Claudian Aqueduct, + carrying its broad arches far away into the plain. The meadows along which + it lies are not the smoothest in the world for a gallop, but there is no + pleasure greater than to wander near it. It stands knee-deep in the + flower-strewn grass, and its rugged piers are hung with ivy as the columns + of a church are draped for a festa. Every archway is a picture, massively + framed, of the distance beyond—of the snow-tipped Sabines and lonely + Soracte. As the spring advances the whole Campagna smiles and waves with + flowers; but I think they are nowhere more rank and lovely than in the + shifting shadow of the aqueducts, where they muffle the feet of the + columns and smother the half-dozen brooks which wander in and out like + silver meshes between the legs of a file of giants. They make a niche for + themselves too in every crevice and tremble on the vault of the empty + conduits. The ivy hereabouts in the springtime is peculiarly brilliant and + delicate; and though it cloaks and muffles these Roman fragments far less + closely than the castles and abbeys of England it hangs with the light + elegance of all Italian vegetation. It is partly doubtless because their + mighty outlines are still unsoftened that the aqueducts are so impressive. + They seem the very source of the solitude in which they stand; they look + like architectural spectres and loom through the light mists of their + grassy desert, as you recede along the line, with the same insubstantial + vastness as if they rose out of Egyptian sands. It is a great + neighbourhood of ruins, many of which, it must be confessed, you have + applauded in many an album. But station a peasant with sheepskin coat and + bandaged legs in the shadow of a tomb or tower best known to drawing-room + art, and scatter a dozen goats on the mound above him, and the picture has + a charm which has not yet been sketched away. + </p> + <p> + The other quarter of the Campagna has wider fields and smoother turf and + perhaps a greater number of delightful rides; the earth is sounder, and + there are fewer pitfalls and ditches. The land for the most part lies + higher and catches more wind, and the grass is here and there for great + stretches as smooth and level as a carpet. You have no Alban Mountains + before you, but you have in the distance the waving ridge of the nearer + Apennines, and west of them, along the course of the Tiber, the long + seaward level of deep-coloured fields, deepening as they recede to the + blue and purple of the sea itself. Beyond them, of a very clear day, you + may see the glitter of the Mediterranean. These are the occasions perhaps + to remember most fondly, for they lead you to enchanting nooks, and the + landscape has details of the highest refinement. Indeed when my sense + reverts to the lingering impressions of so blest a time, it seems a fool’s + errand to have attempted to express them, and a waste of words to do more + than recommend the reader to go citywards at twilight of the end of March, + making for Porta Cavalleggieri, and note what he sees. At this hour the + Campagna is to the last point its melancholy self, and I remember roadside + “effects” of a strange and intense suggestiveness. Certain mean, + mouldering villas behind grass-grown courts have an indefinably sinister + look; there was one in especial of which it was impossible not to argue + that a despairing creature must have once committed suicide there, behind + bolted door and barred window, and that no one has since had the pluck to + go in and see why he never came out. Every wayside mark of manners, of + history, every stamp of the past in the country about Rome, touches my + sense to a thrill, and I may thus exaggerate the appeal of very common + things. This is the more likely because the appeal seems ever to rise out + of heaven knows what depths of ancient trouble. To delight in the aspects + of <i>sentient</i> ruin might appear a heartless pastime, and the + pleasure, I confess, shows the note of perversity. The sombre and the hard + are as common an influence from southern things as the soft and the + bright, I think; sadness rarely fails to assault a northern observer when + he misses what he takes for comfort. Beauty is no compensation for the + loss, only making it more poignant. Enough beauty of climate hangs over + these Roman cottages and farm-houses—beauty of light, of atmosphere + and of vegetation; but their charm for the maker-out of the stories in + things is the way the golden air shows off their desolation. Man lives + more with Nature in Italy than in New or than in Old England; she does + more work for him and gives him more holidays than in our short-summered + climes, and his home is therefore much more bare of devices for helping + him to do without her, forget her and forgive her. These reflections are + perhaps the source of the character you find in a moss-coated stone + stairway climbing outside of a wall; in a queer inner court, befouled with + rubbish and drearily bare of convenience; in an ancient quaintly carven + well, worked with infinite labour from an overhanging window; in an arbour + of time-twisted vines under which you may sit with your feet in the dirt + and remember as a dim fable that there are races for which the type of + domestic allurement is the parlour hearth-rug. For reasons apparent or + otherwise these things amuse me beyond expression, and I am never weary of + staring into gateways, of lingering by dreary, shabby, half-barbaric + farm-yards, of feasting a foolish gaze on sun-cracked plaster and unctuous + indoor shadows. I mustn’t forget, however, that it’s not for wayside + effects that one rides away behind St. Peter’s, but for the strong sense + of wandering over boundless space, of seeing great classic lines of + landscape, of watching them dispose themselves into pictures so full of + “style” that you can think of no painter who deserves to have you admit + that they suggest him—hardly knowing whether it is better pleasure + to gallop far and drink deep of air and grassy distance and the whole + delicious opportunity, or to walk and pause and linger, and try and grasp + some ineffaceable memory of sky and colour and outline. Your pace can + hardly help falling into a contemplative measure at the time, everywhere + so wonderful, but in Rome so persuasively divine, when the winter begins + palpably to soften and quicken. Far out on the Campagna, early in + February, you feel the first vague earthly emanations, which in a few + weeks come wandering into the heart of the city and throbbing through the + close, dark streets. Springtime in Rome is an immensely poetic affair; but + you must stand often far out in the ancient waste, between grass and sky, + to measure its deep, full, steadily accelerated rhythm. The winter has an + incontestable beauty, and is pre-eminently the time of colour—the + time when it is no affectation, but homely verity, to talk about the + “purple” tone of the atmosphere. As February comes and goes your purple is + streaked with green and the rich, dark bloom of the distance begins to + lose its intensity. But your loss is made up by other gains; none more + precious than that inestimable gain to the ear—the disembodied voice + of the lark. It comes with the early flowers, the white narcissus and the + cyclamen, the half-buried violets and the pale anemones, and makes the + whole atmosphere ring like a vault of tinkling glass. You never see the + source of the sound, and are utterly unable to localise his note, which + seems to come from everywhere at once, to be some hundred-throated voice + of the air. Sometimes you fancy you just catch him, a mere vague spot + against the blue, an intenser throb in the universal pulsation of light. + As the weeks go on the flowers multiply and the deep blues and purples of + the hills, turning to azure and violet, creep higher toward the narrowing + snow-line of the Sabines. The temperature rises, the first hour of your + ride you feel the heat, but you beguile it with brushing the + hawthorn-blossoms as you pass along the hedges, and catching at the wild + rose and honeysuckle; and when you get into the meadows there is stir + enough in the air to lighten the dead weight of the sun. The Roman air, + however, is not a tonic medicine, and it seldom suffers exercise to be all + exhilarating. It has always seemed to me indeed part of the charm of the + latter that your keenest consciousness is haunted with a vague languor. + Occasionally when the sirocco blows that sensation becomes strange and + exquisite. Then, under the grey sky, before the dim distances which the + south-wind mostly brings with it, you seem to ride forth into a world from + which all hope has departed and in which, in spite of the flowers that + make your horse’s footfalls soundless, nothing is left save some queer + probability that your imagination is unable to measure, but from which it + hardly shrinks. This quality in the Roman element may now and then “relax” + you almost to ecstasy; but a season of sirocco would be an overdose of + morbid pleasure. You may at any rate best feel the peculiar beauty of the + Campagna on those mild days of winter when the mere quality and temper of + the sunshine suffice to move the landscape to joy, and you pause on the + brown grass in the sunny stillness and, by listening long enough, almost + fancy you hear the shrill of the midsummer cricket. It is detail and + ornament that vary from month to month, from week to week even, and make + your returns to the same places a constant feast of unexpectedness; but + the great essential features of the prospect preserve throughout the year + the same impressive serenity. Soracte, be it January or May, rises from + its blue horizon like an island from the sea and with an elegance of + contour which no mood of the year can deepen or diminish. You know it + well; you have seen it often in the mellow backgrounds of Claude; and it + has such an irresistibly classic, academic air that while you look at it + you begin to take your saddle for a faded old arm-chair in a palace + gallery. A month’s rides in different directions will show you a dozen + prime Claudes. After I had seen them all I went piously to the Doria + gallery to refresh my memory of its two famous specimens and to enjoy to + the utmost their delightful air of reference to something that had become + a part of my personal experience. Delightful it certainly is to feel the + common element in one’s own sensibility and those of a genius whom that + element has helped to do great things. Claude must have haunted the very + places of one’s personal preference and adjusted their divine undulations + to his splendid scheme of romance, his view of the poetry of life. He was + familiar with aspects in which there wasn’t a single uncompromising line. + I saw a few days ago a small finished sketch from his hand, in the + possession of an American artist, which was almost startling in its clear + reflection of forms unaltered by the two centuries that have dimmed and + cracked the paint and canvas. + </p> + <p> + This unbroken continuity of the impressions I have tried to indicate is an + excellent example of the intellectual background of all enjoyment in Rome. + It effectually prevents pleasure from becoming vulgar, for your sensation + rarely begins and ends with itself; it reverberates—it recalls, + commemorates, resuscitates something else. At least half the merit of + everything you enjoy must be that it suits you absolutely; but the larger + half here is generally that it has suited some one else and that you can + never flatter yourself you have discovered it. It has been addressed to + some use a million miles out of your range, and has had great adventures + before ever condescending to please you. It was in admission of this truth + that my discriminating friend who showed me the Claudes found it + impossible to designate a certain delightful region which you enter at the + end of an hour’s riding from Porta Cavalleggieri as anything but Arcadia. + The exquisite correspondence of the term in this case altogether revived + its faded bloom; here veritably the oaten pipe must have stirred the + windless air and the satyrs have laughed among the brookside reeds. Three + or four long grassy dells stretch away in a chain between low hills over + which delicate trees are so discreetly scattered that each one is a + resting place for a shepherd. The elements of the scene are simple enough, + but the composition has extraordinary refinement. By one of those happy + chances which keep observation in Italy always in her best humour a + shepherd had thrown himself down under one of the trees in the very + attitude of Meliboeus. He had been washing his feet, I suppose, in the + neighbouring brook, and had found it pleasant afterwards to roll his short + breeches well up on his thighs. Lying thus in the shade, on his elbow, + with his naked legs stretched out on the turf and his soft peaked hat over + his long hair crushed back like the veritable bonnet of Arcady, he was + exactly the figure of the background of this happy valley. The poor + fellow, lying there in rustic weariness and ignorance, little fancied that + he was a symbol of old-world meanings to new-world eyes. + </p> + <p> + Such eyes may find as great a store of picturesque meanings in the + cork-woods of Monte Mario, tenderly loved of all equestrians. These are + less severely pastoral than our Arcadia, and you might more properly lodge + there a damosel of Ariosto than a nymph of Theocritus. Among them is + strewn a lovely wilderness of flowers and shrubs, and the whole place has + such a charming woodland air, that, casting about me the other day for a + compliment, I declared that it reminded me of New Hampshire. My compliment + had a double edge, and I had no sooner uttered it than I smiled—or + sighed—to perceive in all the undiscriminated botany about me the + wealth of detail, the idle elegance and grace of Italy alone, the natural + stamp of the land which has the singular privilege of making one love her + unsanctified beauty all but as well as those features of one’s own country + toward which nature’s small allowance doubles that of one’s own affection. + For this effect of casting a spell no rides have more value than those you + take in Villa Doria or Villa Borghese; or don’t take, possibly, if you + prefer to reserve these particular regions—the latter in especial—for + your walking hours. People do ride, however, in both villas, which deserve + honourable mention in this regard. Villa Doria, with its noble site, its + splendid views, its great groups of stone-pines, so clustered and yet so + individual, its lawns and flowers and fountains, its altogether princely + disposition, is a place where one may pace, well mounted, of a brilliant + day, with an agreeable sense of its being rather a more elegant pastime to + balance in one’s stirrups than to trudge on even the smoothest gravel. But + at Villa Borghese the walkers have the best of it; for they are free of + those adorable outlying corners and bosky byways which the rumble of + barouches never reaches. In March the place becomes a perfect epitome of + the spring. You cease to care much for the melancholy greenness of the + disfeatured statues which has been your chief winter’s intimation of + verdure; and before you are quite conscious of the tender streaks and + patches in the great quaint grassy arena round which the Propaganda + students, in their long skirts, wander slowly, like dusky seraphs + revolving the gossip of Paradise, you spy the brave little violets + uncapping their azure brows beneath the high-stemmed pines. One’s walks + here would take us too far, and one’s pauses detain us too long, when in + the quiet parts under the wall one comes across a group of charming small + school-boys in full-dress suits and white cravats, shouting over their + play in clear Italian, while a grave young priest, beneath a tree, watches + them over the top of his book. It sounds like nothing, but the force + behind it and the frame round it, the setting, the air, the chord struck, + make it a hundred wonderful things. + </p> + <h3> + 1873. + </h3> + <p> + <a name="link2H_4_0012" id="link2H_4_0012"> + <!-- H2 anchor --> </a> + </p> + <div style="height: 4em;"> + <br /><br /><br /><br /> + </div> + <h2> + ROMAN NEIGHBOURHOODS + </h2> + <p> + I made a note after my first stroll at Albano to the effect that I had + been talking of the “picturesque” all my life, but that now for a change I + beheld it. I had been looking all winter across the Campagna at the + free-flowing outline of the Alban Mount, with its half-dozen towns shining + on its purple side even as vague sun-spots in the shadow of a cloud, and + thinking it simply an agreeable incident in the varied background of Rome. + But now that during the last few days I have been treating it as a + foreground, have been suffering St. Peter’s to play the part of a small + mountain on the horizon, with the Campagna swimming mistily through the + ambiguous lights and shadows of the interval, I find the interest as great + as in the best of the by-play of Rome. The walk I speak of was just out of + the village, to the south, toward the neighbouring town of L’Ariccia, + neighbouring these twenty years, since the Pope (the late Pope, I was on + the point of calling him) threw his superb viaduct across the deep ravine + which divides it from Albano. At the risk of seeming to fantasticate I + confess that the Pope’s having built the viaduct—in this very recent + antiquity—made me linger there in a pensive posture and marvel at + the march of history and at Pius the Ninth’s beginning already to profit + by the sentimental allowances we make to vanished powers. An ardent <i>nero</i> + then would have had his own way with me and obtained a frank admission + that the Pope was indeed a father to his people. Far down into the + charming valley which slopes out of the ancestral woods of the Chigis into + the level Campagna winds the steep stone-paved road at the bottom of + which, in the good old days, tourists in no great hurry saw the mules and + oxen tackled to their carriage for the opposite ascent. And indeed even an + impatient tourist might have been content to lounge back in his jolting + chaise and look out at the mouldy foundations of the little city plunging + into the verdurous flank of the gorge. Questioned, as a cherisher of + quaintness, as to the best “bit” hereabouts, I should certainly name the + way in which the crumbling black houses of these ponderous villages plant + their weary feet on the flowery edges of all the steepest chasms. Before + you enter one of them you invariably find yourself lingering outside its + pretentious old gateway to see it clutched and stitched to the stony + hillside by this rank embroidery of the wildest and bravest things that + grow. Just at this moment nothing is prettier than the contrast between + their dusky ruggedness and the tender, the yellow and pink and violet + fringe of that mantle. All this you may observe from the viaduct at the + Ariccia; but you must wander below to feel the full force of the eloquence + of our imaginary <i>papalino</i>. The pillars and arches of pale grey + peperino arise in huge tiers with a magnificent spring and solidity. The + older Romans built no better; and the work has a deceptive air of being + one of their sturdy bequests which help one to drop another sigh over the + antecedents the Italians of to-day are so eager to repudiate. Will those + <i>they</i> give their descendants be as good? + </p> + <p> + At the Ariccia, in any case, I found a little square with a couple of + mossy fountains, occupied on one side by a vast dusky-faced Palazzo Chigi + and on the other by a goodly church with an imposing dome. The dome, + within, covers the whole edifice and is adorned with some extremely + elegant stucco-work of the seventeenth century. It gave a great value to + this fine old decoration that preparations were going forward for a local + festival and that the village carpenter was hanging certain mouldy strips + of crimson damask against the piers of the vaults. The damask might have + been of the seventeenth century too, and a group of peasant-women were + seeing it unfurled with evident awe. I regarded it myself with interest—it + seemed so the tattered remnant of a fashion that had gone out for ever. I + thought again of the poor disinherited Pope, wondering whether, when such + venerable frippery will no longer bear the carpenter’s nails, any more + will be provided. It was hard to fancy anything but shreds and patches in + that musty tabernacle. Wherever you go in Italy you receive some such + intimation as this of the shrunken proportions of Catholicism, and every + church I have glanced into on my walks hereabouts has given me an almost + pitying sense of it. One finds one’s self at last—without fatuity, I + hope—feeling sorry for the solitude of the remaining faithful. It’s + as if the churches had been made so for the world, in its social sense, + and the world had so irrevocably moved away. They are in size out of all + modern proportion to the local needs, and the only thing at all alive in + the melancholy waste they collectively form is the smell of stale incense. + There are pictures on all the altars by respectable third-rate painters; + pictures which I suppose once were ordered and paid for and criticised by + worshippers who united taste with piety. At Genzano, beyond the Ariccia, + rises on the grey village street a pompous Renaissance temple whose + imposing nave and aisles would contain the population of a capital. But + where is the <i>taste</i> of the Ariccia and Genzano? Where are the choice + spirits for whom Antonio Raggi modelled the garlands of his dome and a + hundred clever craftsmen imitated Guido and Caravaggio? Here and there, + from the pavement, as you pass, a dusky crone interlards her devotions + with more profane importunities, or a grizzled peasant on rusty-jointed + knees, tilted forward with his elbows on a bench, reveals the dimensions + of the patch in his blue breeches. But where is the connecting link + between Guido and Caravaggio and those poor souls for whom an undoubted + original is only a something behind a row of candlesticks, of no very + clear meaning save that you must bow to it? You find a vague memory of it + at best in the useless grandeurs about you, and you seem to be looking at + a structure of which the stubborn earth-scented foundations alone remain, + with the carved and painted shell that bends above them, while the central + substance has utterly crumbled away. + </p> + <p> + I shall seem to have adopted a more meditative pace than befits a brisk + constitutional if I say that I also fell a-thinking before the shabby + façade of the old Chigi Palace. But it seemed somehow in its grey + forlornness to respond to the sadly superannuated expression of the + opposite church; and indeed in any condition what self-respecting + cherisher of quaintness can forbear to do a little romancing in the shadow + of a provincial palazzo? On the face of the matter, I know, there is often + no very salient peg to hang a romance on. A sort of dusky blankness + invests the establishment, which has often a rather imbecile old age. But + a hundred brooding secrets lurk in this inexpressive mask, and the Chigi + Palace did duty for me in the suggestive twilight as the most haunted of + houses. Its basement walls sloped outward like the beginning of a pyramid, + and its lower windows were covered with massive iron cages. Within the + doorway, across the court, I saw the pale glimmer of flowers on a terrace, + and I made much, for the effect of the roof, of a great covered loggia or + belvedere with a dozen window-panes missing or mended with paper. Nothing + gives one a stronger impression of old manners than an ancestral palace + towering in this haughty fashion over a shabby little town; you hardly + stretch a point when you call it an impression of feudalism. The scene may + pass for feudal to American eyes, for which a hundred windows on a facade + mean nothing more exclusive than a hotel kept (at the most invidious) on + the European plan. The mouldy grey houses on the steep crooked street, + with their black cavernous archways pervaded by bad smells, by the braying + of asses and by human intonations hardly more musical, the haggard and + tattered peasantry staring at you with hungry-heavy eyes, the + brutish-looking monks (there are still enough to point a moral), the + soldiers, the mounted constables, the dirt, the dreariness, the misery, + and the dark over-grown palace frowning over it all from barred window and + guarded gateway—what more than all this do we dimly descry in a + mental image of the dark ages? For all his desire to keep the peace with + the vivid image of things if it be only vivid enough, the votary of this + ideal may well occasionally turn over such values with the wonder of what + one takes them as paying for. They pay sometimes for such sorry “facts of + life.” At Genzano, out of the very midst of the village squalor, rises the + Palazzo Cesarini, separated from its gardens by a dirty lane. Between + peasant and prince, the contact is unbroken, and one would suppose Italian + good-nature sorely taxed by their mutual allowances; that the prince in + especial must cultivate a firm impervious shell. There are no comfortable + townsfolk about him to remind him of the blessings of a happy mediocrity + of fortune. When he looks out of his window he sees a battered old peasant + against a sunny wall sawing off his dinner from a hunch of black bread. + </p> + <p> + I must confess, however, that “feudal” as it amused me to find the little + piazza of the Ariccia, it appeared to threaten in no manner an exasperated + rising. On the contrary, the afternoon being cool, many of the villagers + were contentedly muffled in those ancient cloaks, lined with green baize, + which, when tossed over the shoulder and surmounted with a peaked hat, + form one of the few lingering remnants of “costume” in Italy; others were + tossing wooden balls light-heartedly enough on the grass outside the town. + The egress on this side is under a great stone archway thrown out from the + palace and surmounted with the family arms. Nothing could better confirm + your theory that the townsfolk are groaning serfs. The road leads away + through the woods, like many of the roads hereabouts, among trees less + remarkable for their size than for their picturesque contortions and + posturings. The woods, at the moment at which I write, are full of the raw + green light of early spring, a <i>jour</i> vastly becoming to the various + complexions of the wild flowers that cover the waysides. I have never seen + these untended parterres in such lovely exuberance; the sturdiest + pedestrian becomes a lingering idler if he allows them to catch his eye. + The pale purple cyclamen, with its hood thrown back, stands up in masses + as dense as tulip-beds; and here and there in the duskier places great + sheets of forget-me-not seem to exhale a faint blue mist. These are the + commonest plants; there are dozens more I know no name for—a rich + profusion in especial of a beautiful five-petalled flower whose white + texture is pencilled with hair-strokes certain fair copyists I know of + would have to hold their breath to imitate. An Italian oak has neither the + girth nor the height of its English brothers, but it contrives in + proportion to be perhaps even more effective. It crooks its back and + twists its arms and clinches its hundred fists with the queerest + extravagance, and wrinkles its bark into strange rugosities from which its + first scattered sprouts of yellow green seem to break out like a morbid + fungus. But the tree which has the greatest charm to northern eyes is the + cold grey-green ilex, whose clear crepuscular shade drops against a Roman + sun a veil impenetrable, yet not oppressive. The ilex has even less colour + than the cypress, but it is much less funereal, and a landscape in which + it is frequent may still be said to smile faintly, though by no means to + laugh. It abounds in old Italian gardens, where the boughs are trimmed and + interlocked into vaulted corridors in which, from point to point, as in + the niches of some dimly frescoed hall, you see mildewed busts stare at + you with a solemnity which the even grey light makes strangely intense. A + humbler relative of the ilex, though it does better things than help + broken-nosed emperors to look dignified, is the olive, which covers many + of the neighbouring hillsides with its little smoky puffs of foliage. A + stroke of composition I never weary of is that long blue stretch of the + Campagna which makes a high horizon and rests on this vaporous base of + olive-tops. A reporter intent upon a simile might liken it to the ocean + seen above the smoke of watch-fires kindled on the strand. + </p> + <p> + To do perfect justice to the wood-walk away from the Ariccia I ought to + touch upon the birds that were singing vespers as I passed. But the reader + would find my rhapsody as poor entertainment as the programme of a concert + he had been unable to attend. I have no more learning about bird-music + than would help me to guess that a dull dissyllabic refrain in the heart + of the wood came from the cuckoo; and when at moments I heard a twitter of + fuller tone, with a more suggestive modulation, I could only <i>hope</i> + it was the nightingale. I have listened for the nightingale more than once + in places so charming that his song would have seemed but the articulate + expression of their beauty, and have never heard much beyond a provoking + snatch or two—a prelude that came to nothing. In spite of a natural + grudge, however, I generously believe him a great artist or at least a + great genius—a creature who despises any prompting short of absolute + inspiration. For the rich, the multitudinous melody around me seemed but + the offering to my ear of the prodigal spirit of tradition. The wood was + ringing with sound because it was twilight, spring and Italy. It was also + because of these good things and various others besides that I relished so + keenly my visit to the Capuchin convent upon which I emerged after + half-an-hour in the wood. It stands above the town on the slope of the + Alban Mount, and its wild garden climbs away behind it and extends its + melancholy influence. Before it is a small stiff avenue of trimmed + live-oaks which conducts you to a grotesque little shrine beneath the + staircase ascending to the church. Just here, if you are apt to grow + timorous at twilight, you may take a very pretty fright; for as you draw + near you catch behind the grating of the shrine the startling semblance of + a gaunt and livid monk. A sickly lamplight plays down upon his face, and + he stares at you from cavernous eyes with a dreadful air of death in life. + Horror of horrors, you murmur, is this a Capuchin penance? You discover of + course in a moment that it is only a Capuchin joke, that the monk is a + pious dummy and his spectral visage a matter of the paint-brush. You + resent his intrusion on the surrounding loveliness; and as you proceed to + demand entertainment at their convent you pronounce the Capuchins very + foolish fellows. This declaration, as I made it, was supported by the + conduct of the simple brother who opened the door of the cloister in + obedience to my knock and, on learning my errand, demurred about admitting + me at so late an hour. If I would return on the morrow morning he’d be + most happy. He broke into a blank grin when I assured him that this was + the very hour of my desire and that the garish morning light would do no + justice to the view. These were mysteries beyond his ken, and it was only + his good-nature (of which he had plenty) and not his imagination that was + moved. So that when, passing through the narrow cloister and out upon the + grassy terrace, I saw another cowled brother standing with folded hands + profiled against the sky, in admirable harmony with the scene, I + questioned his knowing the uses for which he is still most precious. This, + however, was surely too much to ask of him, and it was cause enough for + gratitude that, though he was there before me, he was not a fellow-tourist + with an opera-glass slung over his shoulder. There was support to my idea + of the convent in the expiring light, for the scene was in its way + unsurpassable. Directly below the terrace lay the deep-set circle of the + Alban Lake, shining softly through the light mists of evening. This + beautiful pool—it is hardly more—occupies the crater of a + prehistoric volcano, a perfect cup, shaped and smelted by furnace-fires. + The rim of the cup, rising high and densely wooded round the placid + stone-blue water, has a sort of natural artificiality. The sweep and + contour of the long circle are admirable; never was a lake so charmingly + lodged. It is said to be of extraordinary depth; and though stone-blue + water seems at first a very innocent substitute for boiling lava, it has a + sinister look which betrays its dangerous antecedents. The winds never + reach it and its surface is never ruffled; but its deep-bosomed placidity + seems to cover guilty secrets, and you fancy it in communication with the + capricious and treacherous forces of nature. Its very colour is of a + joyless beauty, a blue as cold and opaque as a solidified sheet of lava. + Streaked and wrinkled by a mysterious motion of its own, it affects the + very type of a legendary pool, and I could easily have believed that I had + only to sit long enough into the evening to see the ghosts of classic + nymphs and naiads cleave its sullen flood and beckon me with irresistible + arms. Is it because its shores are haunted with these vague Pagan + influences that two convents have risen there to purge the atmosphere? + From the Capuchin terrace you look across at the grey Franciscan monastery + of Palazzuola, which is not less romantic certainly than the most + obstinate myth it may have exorcised. The Capuchin garden is a wild tangle + of great trees and shrubs and clinging, trembling vines which in these + hard days are left to take care of themselves; a weedy garden, if there + ever was one, but none the less charming for that, in the deepening dusk, + with its steep grassy vistas struggling away into impenetrable shadow. I + braved the shadow for the sake of climbing upon certain little flat-roofed + crumbling pavilions that rise from the corners of the further wall and + give you a wider and lovelier view of lake and hills and sky. + </p> + <p> + I have perhaps justified to the reader the mild proposition with which I + started—convinced him, that is, that Albano is worth a walk. It may + be a different walk each day, moreover, and not resemble its predecessors + save by its keeping in the shade. “Galleries” the roads are prettily + called, and with the justice that they are vaulted and draped overhead and + hung with an immense succession of pictures. As you follow the few miles + from Genzano to Frascati you have perpetual views of the Campagna framed + by clusters of trees; the vast iridescent expanse of which completes the + charm and comfort of your verdurous dusk. I compared it just now to the + sea, and with a good deal of truth, for it has the same incalculable + lights and shades, the same confusion of glitter and gloom. But I have + seen it at moments—chiefly in the misty twilight—when it + resembled less the waste of waters than something more portentous, the + land itself in fatal dissolution. I could believe the fields to be dimly + surging and tossing and melting away into quicksands, and that one’s very + last chance of an impression was taking place. A view, however, which has + the merit of being really as interesting as it seems, is that of the Lake + of Nemi; which the enterprising traveller hastens to compare with its + sister sheet of Albano. Comparison in this case is particularly odious, + for in order to prefer one lake to the other you have to discover faults + where there are none. Nemi is a smaller circle, but lies in a deeper cup, + and if with no grey Franciscan pile to guard its woody shores, at least, + in the same position, the little high-perched black town to which it gives + its name and which looks across at Genzano on the opposite shore as + Palazzuola regards Castel Gandolfo. The walk from the Ariccia to Genzano + is charming, most of all when it reaches a certain grassy piazza from + which three public avenues stretch away under a double row of stunted and + twisted elms. The Duke Cesarini has a villa at Genzano—I mentioned + it just now—whose gardens overhang the lake; but he has also a + porter in a faded rakish-looking livery who shakes his head at your + proffered franc unless you can reinforce it with a permit countersigned at + Rome. For this annoying complication of dignities he is justly to be + denounced; but I forgive him for the sake of that ancestor who in the + seventeenth century planted this shady walk. Never was a prettier approach + to a town than by these low-roofed light-chequered corridors. Their only + defect is that they prepare you for a town of rather more rustic coquetry + than Genzano exhibits. It has quite the usual allowance, the common + cynicism, of accepted decay, and looks dismally as if its best families + had all fallen into penury together and lost the means of keeping anything + better than donkeys in their great dark, vaulted basements and mending + their broken window-panes with anything better than paper. It was on the + occasion of this drear Genzano that I had a difference of opinion with a + friend who maintained that there was nothing in the same line so pretty in + Europe as a pretty New England village. The proposition seemed to a + cherisher of quaintness on the face of it inacceptable; but calmly + considered it has a measure of truth. I am not fond of chalk-white painted + planks, certainly; I vastly prefer the dusky tones of ancient stucco and + peperino; but I succumb on occasion to the charms of a vine-shaded porch, + of tulips and dahlias glowing in the shade of high-arching elms, of + heavy-scented lilacs bending over a white paling to brush your cheek. + </p> + <p> + “I prefer Siena to Lowell,” said my friend; “but I prefer Farmington to + such a thing as this.” In fact an Italian village is simply a miniature + Italian city, and its various parts imply a town of fifty times the size. + At Genzano are neither dahlias nor lilacs, and no odours but foul ones. + Flowers and other graces are all confined to the high-walled precincts of + Duke Cesarini, to which you must obtain admission twenty miles away. The + houses on the other hand would generally lodge a New England cottage, + porch and garden and high-arching elms included, in one of their cavernous + basements. These vast grey dwellings are all of a fashion denoting more + generous social needs than any they serve nowadays. They speak of better + days and of a fabulous time when Italy was either not shabby or could at + least “carry off” her shabbiness. For what follies are they doing penance? + Through what melancholy stages have their fortunes ebbed? You ask these + questions as you choose the shady side of the long blank street and watch + the hot sun glare upon the dust-coloured walls and pause before the fetid + gloom of open doors. + </p> + <p> + I should like to spare a word for mouldy little Nemi, perched upon a cliff + high above the lake, at the opposite side; but after all, when I had + climbed up into it from the water-side, passing beneath a great arch which + I suppose once topped a gateway, and counted its twenty or thirty apparent + inhabitants peeping at me from black doorways, and looked at the old round + tower at whose base the village clusters, and declared that it was all + queer, queer, desperately queer, I had said all that is worth saying about + it. Nemi has a much better appreciation of its lovely position than + Genzano, where your only view of the lake is from a dunghill behind one of + the houses. At the foot of the round tower is an overhanging terrace, from + which you may feast your eyes on the only freshness they find in these + dusky human hives—the blooming seam, as one may call it, of strong + wild flowers which binds the crumbling walls to the face of the cliff. Of + Rocca di Papa I must say as little, It consorted generally with the + bravery of its name; but the only object I made a note of as I passed + through it on my way to Monte Cavo, which rises directly above it, was a + little black house with a tablet in its face setting forth that Massimo d’ + Azeglio had dwelt there. The story of his sojourn is not the least + attaching episode in his delightful <i>Ricordi</i>. From the summit of + Monte Cavo is a prodigious view, which you may enjoy with whatever + good-nature is left you by the reflection that the modern Passionist + convent occupying this admirable site was erected by the Cardinal of York + (grandson of James II) on the demolished ruins of an immemorial temple of + Jupiter: the last foolish act of a foolish race. For me I confess this + folly spoiled the convent, and the convent all but spoiled the view; for I + kept thinking how fine it would have been to emerge upon the old pillars + and sculptures from the lava pavement of the Via Triumphalis, which + wanders grass-grown and untrodden through the woods. A convent, however, + which nothing spoils is that of Palazzuola, to which I paid my respects on + this same occasion. It rises on a lower spur of Monte Cavo, on the edge, + as we have seen, of the Alban Lake, and though it occupies a classic site, + that of early Alba Longa, it displaced nothing more precious than memories + and legends so dim that the antiquarians are still quarrelling about them. + It has a meagre little church and the usual sham Perugino with a couple of + tinsel crowns for the Madonna and the Infant inserted into the canvas; and + it has also a musty old room hung about with faded portraits and charts + and queer ecclesiastical knick-knacks, which borrowed a mysterious + interest from the sudden assurance of the simple Franciscan brother who + accompanied me that it was the room of the Son of the King of Portugal. + But my peculiar pleasure was the little thick-shaded garden which adjoins + the convent and commands from its massive artificial foundations an + enchanting view of the lake. Part of it is laid out in cabbages and + lettuce, over which a rubicund brother, with his frock tucked up, was + bending with a solicitude which he interrupted to remove his skullcap and + greet me with the unsophisticated sweet-humoured smile that every now and + then in Italy does so much to make you forget the ambiguities of + monachism. The rest is occupied by cypresses and other funereal umbrage, + making a dank circle round an old cracked fountain black with water-moss. + The parapet of the terrace is furnished with good stone seats where you + may lean on your elbows to gaze away a sunny half-hour and, feeling the + general charm of the scene, declare that the best mission of such a + country in the world has been simply to produce, in the way of prospect + and picture, these masterpieces of mildness. Mild here as a dream the + whole attained effect, mild as resignation, mild as one’s thoughts of + another life. Such a session wasn’t surely an experience of the irritable + flesh; it was the deep degustation, on a summer’s day, of something + immortally expressed by a man of genius. + </p> + <p> + {Illustration: CASTEL GANDOLFO.} + </p> + <p> + From Albano you may take your way through several ancient little cities to + Frascati, a rival centre of <i>villeggiatura</i>, the road following the + hillside for a long morning’s walk and passing through alternations of + denser and clearer shade—the dark vaulted alleys of ilex and the + brilliant corridors of fresh-sprouting oak. The Campagna is beneath you + continually, with the sea beyond Ostia receiving the silver arrows of the + sun upon its chased and burnished shield, and mighty Rome, to the north, + lying at no great length in the idle immensity around it. The highway + passes below Castel Gandolfo, which stands perched on an eminence behind a + couple of gateways surmounted with the Papal tiara and twisted cordon; and + I have more than once chosen the roundabout road for the sake of passing + beneath these pompous insignia. Castel Gandolfo is indeed an + ecclesiastical village and under the peculiar protection of the Popes, + whose huge summer-palace rises in the midst of it like a rural Vatican. In + speaking of the road to Frascati I necessarily revert to my first + impressions, gathered on the occasion of the feast of the Annunziata, + which falls on the 25th of March and is celebrated by a peasants’ fair. As + Murray strongly recommends you to visit this spectacle, at which you are + promised a brilliant exhibition of all the costumes of modern Latium, I + took an early train to Frascati and measured, in company with a prodigious + stream of humble pedestrians, the half-hour’s interval to Grotta Ferrata, + where the fair is held. The road winds along the hillside, among the + silver-sprinkled olives and through a charming wood where the ivy seemed + tacked upon the oaks by women’s fingers and the birds were singing to the + late anemones. It was covered with a very jolly crowd of vulgar + pleasure-takers, and the only creatures not in a state of manifest + hilarity were the pitiful little overladen, overbeaten donkeys (who surely + deserve a chapter to themselves in any description of these + neighbourhoods) and the horrible beggars who were thrusting their sores + and stumps at you from under every tree. Every one was shouting, singing, + scrambling, making light of dust and distance and filling the air with + that childlike jollity which the blessed Italian temperament never goes + roundabout to conceal. There is no crowd surely at once so jovial and so + gentle as an Italian crowd, and I doubt if in any other country the + tightly packed third-class car in which I went out from Rome would have + introduced me to so much smiling and so little swearing. Grotta Ferrata is + a very dirty little village, with a number of raw new houses baking on the + hot hillside and nothing to charm the fond gazer but its situation and its + old fortified abbey. After pushing about among the shabby little booths + and declining a number of fabulous bargains in tinware, shoes and pork, I + was glad to retire to a comparatively uninvaded corner of the abbey and + divert myself with the view. This grey ecclesiastical stronghold is a + thoroughly scenic affair, hanging over the hillside on plunging + foundations which bury themselves among the dense olives. It has massive + round towers at the corners and a grass-grown moat, enclosing a church and + a monastery. The fore-court, within the abbatial gateway, now serves as + the public square of the village and in fair-time of course witnesses the + best of the fun. The best of the fun was to be found in certain great + vaults and cellars of the abbey, where wine was in free flow from gigantic + hogsheads. At the exit of these trickling grottos shady trellises of + bamboo and gathered twigs had been improvised, and under them a grand + guzzling proceeded. All of which was so in the fine old style that I was + roughly reminded of the wedding-feast of Gamacho. The banquet was far less + substantial of course, but it had a note as of immemorial manners that + couldn’t fail to suggest romantic analogies to a pilgrim from the land of + no cooks. There was a feast of reason close at hand, however, and I was + careful to visit the famous frescoes of Domenichino in the adjoining + church. It sounds rather brutal perhaps to say that, when I came back into + the clamorous little piazza, the sight of the peasants swilling down their + sour wine appealed to me more than the masterpieces—Murray calls + them so—of the famous Bolognese. It amounts after all to saying that + I prefer Teniers to Domenichino; which I am willing to let pass for the + truth. The scene under the rickety trellises was the more suggestive of + Teniers that there were no costumes to make it too Italian. Murray’s + attractive statement on this point was, like many of his statements, much + truer twenty years ago than to-day. Costume is gone or fast going; I saw + among the women not a single crimson bodice and not a couple of classic + head-cloths. The poorer sort, dressed in vulgar rags of no fashion and + colour, and the smarter ones in calico gowns and printed shawls of the + vilest modern fabric, had honoured their dusky tresses but with rich + applications of grease. The men are still in jackets and breeches, and, + with their slouched and pointed hats and open-breasted shirts and rattling + leather leggings, may remind one sufficiently of the Italian peasant as he + figured in the woodcuts familiar to our infancy. After coming out of the + church I found a delightful nook—a queer little terrace before a + more retired and tranquil drinking-shop—where I called for a bottle + of wine to help me to guess why I “drew the line” at Domenichino. + </p> + <p> + This little terrace was a capricious excrescence at the end of the piazza, + itself simply a greater terrace; and one reached it, picturesquely, by + ascending a short inclined plane of grass-grown cobble-stones and passing + across a little dusky kitchen through whose narrow windows the light of + the mighty landscape beyond touched up old earthen pots. The terrace was + oblong and so narrow that it held but a single small table, placed + lengthwise; yet nothing could be pleasanter than to place one’s bottle on + the polished parapet. Here you seemed by the time you had emptied it to be + swinging forward into immensity—hanging poised above the Campagna. A + beautiful gorge with a twinkling stream wandered down the hill far below + you, beyond which Marino and Castel Gandolfo peeped above the trees. In + front you could count the towers of Rome and the tombs of the Appian Way. + I don’t know that I came to any very distinct conclusion about + Domenichino; but it was perhaps because the view was perfection that he + struck me as more than ever mediocrity. And yet I don’t think it was one’s + bottle of wine, either, that made one after all maudlin about him; it was + the sense of the foolishly usurped in his tenure of fame, of the derisive + in his ever having been put forward. To say so indeed savours of flogging + a dead horse, but it is surely an unkind stroke of fate for him that + Murray assures ten thousand Britons every winter in the most emphatic + manner that his Communion of St. Jerome is the second finest picture in + the world. If this were so one would certainly here in Rome, where such + institutions are convenient, retire into the very nearest convent; with + such a world one would have a standing quarrel. And yet this sport of + destiny is an interesting case, in default of being an interesting + painter, and I would take a moderate walk, in most moods, to see one of + his pictures. He is so supremely good an example of effort detached from + inspiration and school-merit divorced from spontaneity, that one of his + fine frigid performances ought to hang in a conspicuous place in every + academy of design. Few things of the sort contain more urgent lessons or + point a more precious moral; and I would have the head-master in the + drawing-school take each ingenuous pupil by the hand and lead him up to + the Triumph of David or the Chase of Diana or the red-nosed Persian Sibyl + and make him some such little speech as the following: “This great + picture, my son, was hung here to show you how you must <i>never</i> + paint; to give you a perfect specimen of what in its boundless generosity + the providence of nature created for our fuller knowledge—an artist + whose development was a negation. The great thing in art is charm, and the + great thing in charm is spontaneity. Domenichino, having talent, is here + and there an excellent model—he was devoted, conscientious, + observant, industrious; but now that we’ve seen pretty well what can + simply be learned do its best, these things help him little with us, + because his imagination was cold. It loved nothing, it lost itself in + nothing, its efforts never gave it the heartache. It went about trying + this and that, concocting cold pictures after cold receipts, dealing in + the second-hand, in the ready-made, and putting into its performances a + little of everything but itself. When you see so many things in a + composition you might suppose that among them all some charm might be + born; yet they’re really but the hundred mouths through which you may hear + the unhappy thing murmur ‘I’m dead!’ It’s by the simplest thing it has + that a picture lives—by its temper. Look at all the great talents, + Domenichino as well as at Titian; but think less of dogma than of plain + nature, and I can almost promise you that yours will remain true.” This is + very little to what the aesthetic sage I have imagined <i>might</i> say; + and we are after all unwilling to let our last verdict be an unkind one on + any great bequest of human effort. The faded frescoes in the chapel at + Grotta Ferrata leave us a memory the more of man’s effort to dream + beautifully; and they thus mingle harmoniously enough with our multifold + impressions of Italy, where dreams and realities have both kept such pace + and so strangely diverged. It was absurd—that was the truth—to + be critical at all among the appealing old Italianisms round me and to + treat the poor exploded Bolognese more harshly than, when I walked back to + Frascati, I treated the charming old water-works of the Villa + Aldobrandini. I confound these various products of antiquated art in a + genial absolution, and should like especially to tell how fine it was to + watch this prodigious fountain come tumbling down its channel of mouldy + rock-work, through its magnificent vista of ilex, to the fantastic old + hemicycle where a dozen tritons and naiads sit posturing to receive it. + The sky above the ilexes was incredibly blue and the ilexes themselves + incredibly black; and to see the young white moon peeping above the trees + you could easily have fancied it was midnight. I should like furthermore + to expatiate on Villa Mondragone, the most grandly impressive hereabouts, + of all such domestic monuments. The Casino in the midst is as big as the + Vatican, which it strikingly resembles, and it stands perched on a terrace + as vast as the parvise of St. Peter’s, looking straight away over black + cypress-tops into the shining vastness of the Campagna. Everything somehow + seemed immense and solemn; there was nothing small but certain little + nestling blue shadows on the Sabine Mountains, to which the terrace seems + to carry you wonderfully near. The place been for some time lost to + private uses, since it figures fantastically in a novel of George Sand—<i>La + Daniella</i>—and now, in quite another way, as a Jesuit college for + boys. The afternoon was perfect, and as it waned it filled the dark alleys + with a wonderful golden haze. Into this came leaping and shouting a herd + of little collegians with a couple of long-skirted Jesuits striding at + their heels. We all know—I make the point for my antithesis—the + monstrous practices of these people; yet as I watched the group I verily + believe I declared that if I had a little son he should go to Mondragone + and receive their crooked teachings for the sake of the other memories, + the avenues of cypress and ilex, the view of the Campagna, the atmosphere + of antiquity. But doubtless when a sense of “mere character,” shameless + incomparable character, has brought one to this it is time one should + pause. + </p> + <p> + <a name="link2H_4_0013" id="link2H_4_0013"> + <!-- H2 anchor --> </a> + </p> + <div style="height: 4em;"> + <br /><br /><br /><br /> + </div> + <h2> + THE AFTER-SEASON IN ROME + </h2> + <p> + One may at the blest end of May say without injustice to anybody that the + state of mind of many a <i>forestiero</i> in Rome is one of intense + impatience for the moment when all other <i>forestieri</i> shall have + taken themselves off. One may confess to this state of mind and be no + misanthrope. The place has passed so completely for the winter months into + the hands of the barbarians that that estimable character the passionate + pilgrim finds it constantly harder to keep his passion clear. He has a + rueful sense of impressions perverted and adulterated; the all-venerable + visage disconcerts us by a vain eagerness to see itself mirrored in + English, American, German eyes. It isn’t simply that you are never first + or never alone at the classic or historic spots where you have dreamt of + persuading the shy <i>genius loci</i> into confidential utterance; it + isn’t simply that St. Peter’s, the Vatican, the Palatine, are for ever + ringing with the false note of the languages without style: it is the + general oppressive feeling that the city of the soul has become for the + time a monstrous mixture of watering-place and curiosity-shop and that its + most ardent life is that of the tourists who haggle over false intaglios + and yawn through palaces and temples. But you are told of a happy time + when these abuses begin to pass away, when Rome becomes Rome again and you + may have her all to yourself. “You may like her more or less now,” I was + assured at the height of the season; “but you must wait till the month of + May, when she’ll give you <i>all</i> she has, to love her. Then the + foreigners, or the excess of them, are gone; the galleries and ruins are + empty, and the place,” said my informant, who was a happy Frenchman of the + Académie de France, <i>“renait a ellememe.”</i> Indeed I was haunted all + winter by an irresistible prevision of what Rome <i>must</i> be in + declared spring. Certain charming places seemed to murmur: “Ah, this is + nothing! Come back at the right weeks and see the sky above us almost + black with its excess of blue, and the new grass already deep, but still + vivid, and the white roses tumble in odorous spray and the warm radiant + air distil gold for the smelting-pot that the <i>genius loci</i> then dips + his brush into before making play with it, in his inimitable way, for the + general effect of complexion.” + </p> + <p> + A month ago I spent a week in the country, and on my return, the first + time I approached the Corso, became conscious of a change. Something + delightful had happened, to which at first I couldn’t give a name, but + which presently shone out as the fact that there were but half as many + people present and that these were chiefly the natural or the naturalised. + We had been docked of half our irrelevance, our motley excess, and now + physically, morally, æesthetically there was elbow-room. In the afternoon + I went to the Pincio, and the Pincio was almost dull. The band was playing + to a dozen ladies who lay in landaus poising their lace-fringed parasols; + but they had scarce more than a light-gloved dandy apiece hanging over + their carriage doors. By the parapet to the great terrace that sweeps the + city stood but three or four interlopers looking at the sunset and with + their Baedekers only just showing in their pockets—the sunsets not + being down among the tariffed articles in these precious volumes. I went + so far as to hope for them that, like myself, they were, under every + precaution, taking some amorous intellectual liberty with the scene. + </p> + <p> + Practically I violate thus the instinct of monopoly, since it’s a shame + not to publish that Rome in May is indeed exquisitely worth your patience. + I have just been so gratified at finding myself in undisturbed possession + for a couple of hours of the Museum of the Lateran that I can afford to be + magnanimous. It’s almost as if the old all-papal paradise had come back. + The weather for a month has been perfect, the sky an extravagance of blue, + the air lively enough, the nights cool, nippingly cool, and the whole + ancient greyness lighted with an irresistible smile. Rome, which in some + moods, especially to new-comers, seems a place of almost sinister gloom, + has an occasional art, as one knows her better, of brushing away care by + the grand gesture with which some splendid impatient mourning matron—just + the Niobe of Nations, surviving, emerging and looking about her again—might + pull off and cast aside an oppression of muffling crape. This admirable + power still temperamentally to react and take notice lurks in all her + darkness and dirt and decay—a something more careless and hopeless + than our thrifty northern cheer, and yet more genial and urbane than the + Parisian spirit of <i>blague</i>. The collective Roman nature is a healthy + and hearty one, and you feel it abroad in the streets even when the + sirocco blows and the medium of life seems to proceed more or less from + the mouth of a furnace. But who shall analyse even the simplest Roman + impression? It is compounded of so many things, it says so much, it + involves so much, it so quickens the intelligence and so flatters the + heart, that before we fairly grasp the case the imagination has marked it + for her own and exposed us to a perilous likelihood of talking nonsense + about it. + </p> + <p> + The smile of Rome, as I have called it, and its insidious message to those + who incline to ramble irresponsibly and take things as they come, is + ushered in with the first breath of spring, and then grows and grows with + the advancing season till it wraps the whole place in its tenfold charm. + As the process develops you can do few better things than go often to + Villa Borghese and sit on the grass—on a stout bit of drapery—and + watch its exquisite stages. It has a frankness and a sweetness beyond any + relenting of <i>our</i> clumsy climates even when ours leave off their + damnable faces and begin. Nature departs from every reserve with a + confidence that leaves one at a loss where, as it were, to look—leaves + one, as I say, nothing to do but to lay one’s head among the anemones at + the base of a high-stemmed pine and gaze up crestward and sky-ward along + its slanting silvery column. You may watch the whole business from a dozen + of these choice standpoints and have a different villa for it every day in + the week. The Doria, the Ludovisi, the Medici, the Albani, the Wolkonski, + the Chigi, the Mellini, the Massimo—there are more of them, with all + their sights and sounds and odours and memories, than you have senses for. + But I prefer none of them to the Borghese, which is free to all the world + at all times and yet never crowded; for when the whirl of carriages is + great in the middle regions you may find a hundred untrodden spots and + silent corners, tenanted at the worst by a group of those long-skirted + young Propagandists who stalk about with solemn angularity, each with a + book under his arm, like silhouettes from a medieval missal, and “compose” + so extremely well with the still more processional cypresses and with + stretches of golden-russet wall overtopped by ultramarine. And yet if the + Borghese is good the Medici is strangely charming, and you may stand in + the little belvedere which rises with such surpassing oddity out of the + dusky heart of the Boschetto at the latter establishment—a miniature + presentation of the wood of the Sleeping Beauty—and look across at + the Ludovisi pines lifting their crooked parasols into a sky of what a + painter would call the most morbid blue, and declare that the place where + <i>they</i> grow is the most delightful in the world. Villa Ludovisi has + been all winter the residence of the lady familiarly known in Roman + society as “Rosina,” Victor Emmanuel’s morganatic wife, the only + familiarity it would seem, that she allows, for the grounds were rigidly + closed, to the inconsolable regret of old Roman sojourners. Just as the + nightingales began to sing, however, the quasi-august <i>padrona</i> + departed, and the public, with certain restrictions, have been admitted to + hear them. The place takes, where it lies, a princely ease, and there + could be no better example of the expansive tendencies of ancient + privilege than the fact that its whole vast extent is contained by the + city walls. It has in this respect very much the same enviable air of + having got up early that marks the great intramural demesne of Magdalen + College at Oxford. The stern old ramparts of Rome form the outer enclosure + of the villa, and hence a series of “striking scenic effects” which it + would be unscrupulous flattery to say you can imagine. The grounds are + laid out in the formal last-century manner; but nowhere do the straight + black cypresses lead off the gaze into vistas of a melancholy more charged + with associations—poetic, romantic, historic; nowhere are there + grander, smoother walls of laurel and myrtle. + </p> + <p> + I recently spent an afternoon hour at the little Protestant cemetery close + to St. Paul’s Gate, where the ancient and the modern world are insidiously + contrasted. They make between them one of the solemn places of Rome—although + indeed when funereal things are so interfused it seems ungrateful to call + them sad. Here is a mixture of tears and smiles, of stones and flowers, of + mourning cypresses and radiant sky, which gives us the impression of our + looking back at death from the brighter side of the grave. The cemetery + nestles in an angle of the city wall, and the older graves are sheltered + by a mass of ancient brickwork, through whose narrow loopholes you peep at + the wide purple of the Campagna. Shelley’s grave is here, buried in roses—a + happy grave every way for the very type and figure of the Poet. Nothing + could be more impenetrably tranquil than this little corner in the bend of + the protecting rampart, where a cluster of modern ashes is held tenderly + in the rugged hand of the Past. The past is tremendously embodied in the + hoary pyramid of Caius Cestius, which rises hard by, half within the wall + and half without, cutting solidly into the solid blue of the sky and + casting its pagan shadow upon the grass of English graves—that of + Keats, among them—with an effect of poetic justice. It is a + wonderful confusion of mortality and a grim enough admonition of our + helpless promiscuity in the crucible of time. But the most touching + element of all is the appeal of the pious English inscriptions among all + these Roman memories; touching because of their universal expression of + that trouble within trouble, misfortune in a foreign land. Something + special stirs the heart through the fine Scriptural language in which + everything is recorded. The echoes of massive Latinity with which the + atmosphere is charged suggest nothing more majestic and monumental. I may + seem unduly to refine, but the injunction to the reader in the monument to + Miss Bathurst, drowned in the Tiber in 1824, “If thou art young and + lovely, build not thereon, for she who lies beneath thy feet in death was + the loveliest flower ever cropt in its bloom,” affects us irresistibly as + a case for tears on the spot. The whole elaborate inscription indeed says + something over and beyond all it does say. The English have the reputation + of being the most reticent people in the world, and as there is no smoke + without fire I suppose they have done something to deserve it; yet who can + say that one doesn’t constantly meet the most startling examples of the + insular faculty to “gush”? In this instance the mother of the deceased + takes the public into her confidence with surprising frankness and omits + no detail, seizing the opportunity to mention by the way that she had + already lost her husband by a most mysterious visitation. The appeal to + one’s attention and the confidence in it are withal most moving. The whole + record has an old-fashioned gentility that makes its frankness tragic. You + seem to hear the garrulity of passionate grief. + </p> + <p> + To be choosing these positive commonplaces of the Roman tone for a theme + when there are matters of modern moment going on may seem none the less to + require an apology. But I make no claim to your special correspondent’s + faculty for getting an “inside” view of things, and I have hardly more + than a pictorial impression of the Pope’s illness and of the discussion of + the Law of the Convents. Indeed I am afraid to speak of the Pope’s illness + at all, lest I should say something egregiously heartless about it, + recalling too forcibly that unnatural husband who was heard to wish that + his wife would “either” get well—! He had his reasons, and Roman + tourists have theirs in the shape of a vague longing for something + spectacular at St. Peter’s. If it takes the sacrifice of somebody to + produce it let somebody then be sacrificed. Meanwhile we have been having + a glimpse of the spectacular side of the Religious Corporations Bill. + Hearing one morning a great hubbub in the Corso I stepped forth upon my + balcony. A couple of hundred men were strolling slowly down the street + with their hands in their pockets, shouting in unison “Abbasso il + ministero!” and huzzaing in chorus. Just beneath my window they stopped + and began to murmur “Al Quirinale, al Quirinale!” The crowd surged a + moment gently and then drifted to the Quirinal, where it scuffled + harmlessly with half-a-dozen of the king’s soldiers. It ought to have been + impressive, for what was it, strictly, unless the seeds of revolution? But + its carriage was too gentle and its cries too musical to send the most + timorous tourist to packing his trunk. As I began with saying: in Rome, in + May, everything has an amiable side, even popular uprisings. + </p> + <p> + <a name="link2H_4_0014" id="link2H_4_0014"> + <!-- H2 anchor --> </a> + </p> + <div style="height: 4em;"> + <br /><br /><br /><br /> + </div> + <h2> + FROM A ROMAN NOTE-BOOK + </h2> + <p> + December 28, 1872.—In Rome again for the last three days—that + second visit which, when the first isn’t followed by a fatal illness in + Florence, the story goes that one is doomed to pay. I didn’t drink of the + Fountain of Trevi on the eve of departure the other time; but I feel as if + I had drunk of the Tiber itself. Nevertheless as I drove from the station + in the evening I wondered what I should think of it at this first glimpse + hadn’t I already known it. All manner of evil perhaps. Paris, as I passed + along the Boulevards three evenings before to take the train, was swarming + and glittering as befits a great capital. Here, in the black, narrow, + crooked, empty streets, I saw nothing I would fain regard as eternal. But + there were new gas-lamps round the spouting Triton in Piazza Barberini and + a newspaper stall on the corner of the Condotti and the Corso—salient + signs of the emancipated state. An hour later I walked up to Via + Gregoriana by Piazza di Spagna. It was all silent and deserted, and the + great flight of steps looked surprisingly small. Everything seemed meagre, + dusky, provincial. Could Rome after all really <i>be</i> a world-city? + That queer old rococo garden gateway at the top of the Gregoriana stirred + a dormant memory; it awoke into a consciousness of the delicious mildness + of the air, and very soon, in a little crimson drawing-room, I was + reconciled and re-initiated.... Everything is dear (in the way of + lodgings), but it hardly matters, as everything is taken and some one else + paying for it. I must make up my mind to a bare perch. But it seems poorly + perverse here to aspire to an “interior” or to be conscious of the + economic side of life. The æesthetic is so intense that you feel you + should live on the taste of it, should extract the nutritive essence of + the atmosphere. For positively it’s <i>such</i> an atmosphere! The weather + is perfect, the sky as blue as the most exploded tradition fames it, the + whole air glowing and throbbing with lovely colour.... The glitter of + Paris is now all gaslight. And oh the monotonous miles of rain-washed + asphalte! + </p> + <p> + <i>December 30th</i>.—I have had nothing to do with the + “ceremonies.” In fact I believe there have hardly been any—no + midnight mass at the Sistine chapel, no silver trumpets at St. Peter’s. + Everything is remorselessly clipped and curtailed—the Vatican in + deepest mourning. But I saw it in its superbest scarlet in ‘69.... I went + yesterday with L. to the Colonna gardens—an adventure that would + have reconverted me to Rome if the thing weren’t already done. It’s a rare + old place—rising in mouldy bosky terraces and mossy stairways and + winding walks from the back of the palace to the top of the Quirinal. It’s + the grand style of gardening, and resembles the present natural manner as + a chapter of Johnsonian rhetoric resembles a piece of clever contemporary + journalism. But it’s a better style in horticulture than in literature; I + prefer one of the long-drawn blue-green Colonna vistas, with a maimed and + mossy-coated garden goddess at the end, to the finest possible quotation + from a last-century classic. Perhaps the best thing there is the old + orangery with its trees in fantastic terra-cotta tubs. The late afternoon + light was gilding the monstrous jars and suspending golden chequers among + the golden-fruited leaves. Or perhaps the best thing is the broad terrace + with its mossy balustrade and its benches; also its view of the great + naked Torre di Nerone (I think), which might look stupid if the rosy + brickwork didn’t take such a colour in the blue air. Delightful, at any + rate, to stroll and talk there in the afternoon sunshine. + </p> + <p> + <i>January 2nd,</i> 1873.—Two or three drives with A.—one to + St. Paul’s without the Walls and back by a couple of old churches on the + Aventine. I was freshly struck with the rare distinction of the little + Protestant cemetery at the Gate, lying in the shadow of the black + sepulchral Pyramid and the thick-growing black cypresses. Bathed in the + clear Roman light the place is heartbreaking for what it asks you—in + such a world as <i>this</i>—to renounce. If it should “make one in + love with death to lie there,” that’s only if death should be conscious. + As the case stands, the weight of a tremendous past presses upon the + flowery sod, and the sleeper’s mortality feels the contact of all the + mortality with which the brilliant air is tainted.... The restored + Basilica is incredibly splendid. It seems a last pompous effort of formal + Catholicism, and there are few more striking emblems of later Rome—the + Rome foredoomed to see Victor Emmanuel in the Quirinal, the Rome of + abortive councils and unheeded anathemas. It rises there, gorgeous and + useless, on its miasmatic site, with an air of conscious bravado—a + florid advertisement of the superabundance of faith. Within it’s + magnificent, and its magnificence has no shabby spots—a rare thing + in Rome. Marble and mosaic, alabaster and malachite, lapis and porphyry, + incrust it from pavement to cornice and flash back their polished lights + at each other with such a splendour of effect that you seem to stand at + the heart of some immense prismatic crystal. One has to come to Italy to + know marbles and love them. I remember the fascination of the first great + show of them I met in Venice—at the Scalzi and Gesuiti. Colour has + in no other form so cool and unfading a purity and lustre. Softness of + tone and hardness of substance—isn’t that the sum of the artist’s + desire? G., with his beautiful caressing, open-lipped Roman utterance, so + easy to understand and, to my ear, so finely suggestive of genuine Latin, + not our horrible Anglo-Saxon and Protestant kind, urged upon us the charms + of a return by the Aventine and the sight of a couple of old churches. The + best is Santa Sabina, a very fine old structure of the fifth century, + mouldering in its dusky solitude and consuming its own antiquity. What a + massive heritage Christianity and Catholicism are leaving here! What a + substantial fact, in all its decay, this memorial Christian temple + outliving its uses among the sunny gardens and vineyards! It has a noble + nave, filled with a stale smell which (like that of the onion) brought + tears to my eyes, and bordered with twenty-four fluted marble columns of + Pagan origin. The crudely primitive little mosaics along the entablature + are extremely curious. A Dominican monk, still young, who showed us the + church, seemed a creature generated from its musty shadows I odours. His + physiognomy was wonderfully <i>de l’emploi</i>, and his voice, most + agreeable, had the strangest jaded humility. His lugubrious salute and + sanctimonious impersonal appropriation of my departing franc would have + been a master-touch on the stage. While we were still in the church a bell + rang that he had to go and answer, and as he came back and approached us + along the nave he made with his white gown and hood and his cadaverous + face, against the dark church background, one of those pictures which, + thank the Muses, have not yet been reformed out of Italy. It was the exact + illustration, for insertion in a text, of heaven knows how many old + romantic and conventional literary Italianisms—plays, poems, + mysteries of Udolpho. We got back into the carriage and talked of profane + things and went home to dinner—drifting recklessly, it seemed to me, + from aesthetic luxury to social. + </p> + <p> + On the 31st we went to the musical vesper-service at the Gesu—hitherto + done so splendidly before the Pope and the cardinals. The manner of it was + eloquent of change—no Pope, no cardinals, and indifferent music; but + a great <i>mise-en-scène</i> nevertheless. The church is gorgeous; late + Renaissance, of great proportions, and full, like so many others, but in a + pre-eminent degree, of seventeenth and eighteenth century Romanism. It + doesn’t impress the imagination, but richly feeds the curiosity, by which + I mean one’s sense of the curious; suggests no legends, but innumerable + anecdotes à la Stendhal. There is a vast dome, filled with a florid + concave fresco of tumbling foreshortened angels, and all over the ceilings + and cornices a wonderful outlay of dusky gildings and mouldings. There are + various Bernini saints and seraphs in stucco-sculpture, astride of the + tablets and door-tops, backing against their rusty machinery of coppery <i>nimbi</i> + and egg-shaped cloudlets. Marble, damask and tapers in gorgeous profusion. + The high altar a great screen of twinkling chandeliers. The choir perched + in a little loft high up in the right transept, like a balcony in a + side-scene at the opera, and indulging in surprising roulades and + flourishes.... Near me sat a handsome, opulent-looking nun—possibly + an abbess or prioress of noble lineage. Can a holy woman of such a + complexion listen to a fine operatic barytone in a sumptuous temple and + receive none but ascetic impressions? What a cross-fire of influences does + Catholicism provide! + </p> + <p> + <i>January 4th.</i>—A drive with A. out of Porta San Giovanni and + along Via Appia Nuova. More and more beautiful as you get well away from + the walls and the great view opens out before you—the rolling + green-brown dells and flats of the Campagna, the long, disjointed arcade + of the aqueducts, the deep-shadowed blue of the Alban Hills, touched into + pale lights by their scattered towns. We stopped at the ruined basilica of + San Stefano, an affair of the fifth century, rather meaningless without a + learned companion. But the perfect little sepulchral chambers of the + Pancratii, disinterred beneath the church, tell their own tale—in + their hardly dimmed frescoes, their beautiful sculptured coffin and great + sepulchral slab. Better still the tomb of the Valerii adjoining it—a + single chamber with an arched roof, covered with stucco mouldings + perfectly intact, exquisite figures and arabesques as sharp and delicate + as if the plasterer’s scaffold had just been taken from under them. + Strange enough to think of these things—so many of them as there are—surviving + their immemorial eclipse in this perfect shape and coming up like + long-lost divers on the sea of time. + </p> + <p> + <i>January 16th.</i>—A delightful walk last Sunday with F. to Monte + Mario. We drove to Porta Angelica, the little gate hidden behind the right + wing of Bernini’s colonnade, and strolled thence up the winding road to + the Villa Mellini, where one of the greasy peasants huddled under the wall + in the sun admits you for half franc into the finest old ilex-walk in + Italy. It is all vaulted grey-green shade with blue Campagna stretches in + the interstices. The day was perfect; the still sunshine, as we sat at the + twisted base of the old trees, seemed to have the drowsy hum of mid-summer—with + that charm of Italian vegetation that comes to us as its confession of + having scenically served, to weariness at last, for some pastoral these + many centuries a classic. In a certain cheapness and thinness of substance—as + compared with the English stoutness, never left athirst—it reminds + me of our own, and it is relatively dry enough and pale enough to explain + the contempt of many unimaginative Britons. But it has an idle abundance + and wantonness, a romantic shabbiness and dishevelment. At the Villa + Mellini is the famous lonely pine which “tells” so in the landscape from + other points, bought off from the axe by (I believe) Sir George Beaumont, + commemorated in a like connection in Wordsworth’s great sonnet. He at + least was not an unimaginative Briton. As you stand under it, its far-away + shallow dome, supported on a single column almost white enough to be + marble, seems to dwell in the dizziest depths of the blue. Its pale + grey-blue boughs and its silvery stem make a wonderful harmony with the + ambient air. The Villa Mellini is full of the elder Italy of one’s + imagination—the Italy of Boccaccio and Ariosto. There are twenty + places where the Florentine story-tellers might have sat round on the + grass. Outside the villa walls, beneath the over-crowding orange-boughs, + straggled old Italy as well—but not in Boccaccio’s velvet: a row of + ragged and livid contadini, some simply stupid in their squalor, but some + downright brigands of romance, or of reality, with matted locks and + terribly sullen eyes. + </p> + <p> + A couple of days later I walked for old acquaintance’ sake over to San + Onofrio on the Janiculan. The approach is one of the dirtiest adventures + in Rome, and though the view is fine from the little terrace, the church + and convent are of a meagre and musty pattern. Yet here—almost like + pearls in a dunghill—are hidden mementos of two of the most + exquisite of Italian minds. Torquato Tasso spent the last months of his + life here, and you may visit his room and various warped and faded relics. + The most interesting is a cast of his face taken after death—looking, + like all such casts, almost more than mortally gallant and distinguished. + But who should look all ideally so if not he? In a little shabby, chilly + corridor adjoining is a fresco of Leonardo, a Virgin and Child with the <i>donatorio</i>. + It is very small, simple and faded, but it has all the artist’s magic, + that mocking, illusive refinement and hint of a vague <i>arriere-pensee</i> + which mark every stroke of Leonardo’s brush. Is it the perfection of irony + or the perfection of tenderness? What does he mean, what does he affirm, + what does he deny? Magic wouldn’t be magic, nor the author of such things + stand so absolutely alone, if we were ready with an explanation. As I + glanced from the picture to the poor stupid little red-faced brother at my + side I wondered if the thing mightn’t pass for an elegant epigram on + monasticism. Certainly, at any rate, there is more intellect in it than + under all the monkish tonsures it has seen coming and going these three + hundred years. + </p> + <p> + <i>January 21st.</i>—The last three or four days I have regularly + spent a couple of hours from noon baking myself in the sun of the Pincio + to get rid of a cold. The weather perfect and the crowd (especially + to-day) amazing. Such a staring, lounging, dandified, amiable crowd! Who + does the vulgar stay-at-home work of Rome? All the grandees and half the + foreigners are there in their carriages, the <i>bourgeoisie</i> on foot + staring at them and the beggars lining all the approaches. The great + difference between public places in America and Europe is in the number of + unoccupied people of every age and condition sitting about early and late + on benches and gazing at you, from your hat to your boots, as you pass. + Europe is certainly the continent of the practised stare. The ladies on + the Pincio have to run the gauntlet; but they seem to do so complacently + enough. The European woman is brought up to the sense of having a definite + part in the way of manners or manner to play in public. To lie back in a + barouche alone, balancing a parasol and seeming to ignore the extremely + immediate gaze of two serried ranks of male creatures on each side of her + path, save here and there to recognise one of them with an imperceptible + nod, is one of her daily duties. The number of young men here who, like + the coenobites of old, lead the purely contemplative life is enormous. + They muster in especial force on the Pincio, but the Corso all day is + thronged with them. They are well-dressed, good-humoured, good-looking, + polite; but they seem never to do a harder stroke of work than to stroll + from the Piazza Colonna to the Hotel de Rome or <i>vice versa</i>. Some of + them don’t even stroll, but stand leaning by the hour against the + doorways, sucking the knobs of their canes, feeling their back hair and + settling their shirt-cuffs. At my cafe in the morning several stroll in + already (at nine o’clock) in light, in “evening” gloves. But they order + nothing, turn on their heels, glance at the mirrors and stroll out again. + When it rains they herd under the <i>portes-cochères</i> and in the + smaller cafes.... Yesterday Prince Humbert’s little <i>primogenito</i> was + on the Pincio in an open landau with his governess. He’s a sturdy blond + little man and the image of the King. They had stopped to listen to the + music, and the crowd was planted about the carriage-wheels, staring and + criticising under the child’s snub little nose. It appeared bold cynical + curiosity, without the slightest manifestation of “loyalty,” and it gave + me a singular sense of the vulgarisation of Rome under the new regime. + When the Pope drove abroad it was a solemn spectacle; even if you neither + kneeled nor uncovered you were irresistibly impressed. But the Pope never + stopped to listen to opera tunes, and he had no little popelings, under + the charge of superior nurse-maids, whom you might take liberties with. + The family at the Quirinal make something of a merit, I believe, of their + modest and inexpensive way of life. The merit is great; yet, + representationally, what a change for the worse from an order which + proclaimed stateliness a part of its essence! The divinity that doth hedge + a king must be pretty well on the wane. But how many more fine old + traditions will the extremely sentimental traveller miss in the Italians + over whom that little jostled prince in the landau will have come into his + kinghood? ... The Pincio continues to beguile; it’s a great resource. I am + for ever being reminded of the “aesthetic luxury,” as I called it above, + of living in Rome. To be able to choose of an afternoon for a lounge + (respectfully speaking) between St. Peter’s and the high precinct you + approach by the gate just beyond Villa Medici—counting nothing else—is + a proof that if in Rome you may suffer from ennui, at least your ennui has + a throbbing soul in it. It is something to say for the Pincio that you + don’t always choose St. Peter’s. Sometimes I lose patience with its parade + of eternal idleness, but at others this very idleness is balm to one’s + conscience. Life on just these terms seems so easy, so monotonously sweet, + that you feel it would be unwise, would be really unsafe, to change. The + Roman air is charged with an elixir, the Roman cup seasoned with some + insidious drop, of which the action is fatally, yet none the less + agreeably, “lowering.” + </p> + <p> + <i>January 26th.</i>—With S. to the Villa Medici—perhaps on + the whole the most enchanting place in Rome. The part of the garden called + the Boschetto has an incredible, impossible charm; an upper terrace, + behind locked gates, covered with a little dusky forest of evergreen oaks. + Such a dim light as of a fabled, haunted place, such a soft suffusion of + tender grey-green tones, such a company of gnarled and twisted little + miniature trunks—dwarfs playing with each other at being giants—and + such a shower of golden sparkles drifting in from the vivid west! At the + end of the wood is a steep, circular mound, up which the short trees + scramble amain, with a long mossy staircase climbing up to a belvedere. + This staircase, rising suddenly out of the leafy dusk to you don’t see + where, is delightfully fantastic. You expect to see an old woman in a + crimson petticoat and with a distaff come hobbling down and turn into a + fairy and offer you three wishes. I should name for my own first wish that + one didn’t have to be a Frenchman to come and live and dream and work at + the Académie de France. Can there be for a while a happier destiny than + that of a young artist conscious of talent and of no errand but to + educate, polish and perfect it, transplanted to these sacred shades? One + has fancied Plato’s Academy—his gleaming colonnades, his blooming + gardens and Athenian sky; but was it as good as this one, where Monsieur + Hebert does the Platonic? The blessing in Rome is not that this or that or + the other isolated object is so very unsurpassable; but that the general + air so contributes to interest, to impressions that are not as any other + impressions anywhere in the world. And from this general air the Villa + Medici has distilled an essence of its own—walled it in and made it + delightfully private. The great façade on the gardens is like an enormous + rococo clock-face all incrusted with images and arabesques and tablets. + What mornings and afternoons one might spend there, brush in hand, + unpreoccupied, untormented, pensioned, satisfied—either persuading + one’s self that one would be “doing something” in consequence or not + caring if one shouldn’t be. + </p> + <p> + <i>At a later date—middle of March</i>.—A ride with S. W. out + of the Porta Pia to the meadows beyond the Ponte Nomentana—close to + the site of Phaon’s villa where Nero in hiding had himself stabbed. It all + spoke as things here only speak, touching more chords than one can <i>now</i> + really know or say. For these are predestined memories and the stuff that + regrets are made of; the mild divine efflorescence of spring, the + wonderful landscape, the talk suspended for another gallop.... Returning, + we dismounted at the gate of the Villa Medici and walked through the + twilight of the vaguely perfumed, bird-haunted alleys to H.‘s studio, + hidden in the wood like a cottage in a fairy tale. I spent there a + charming half-hour in the fading light, looking at the pictures while my + companion discoursed of her errand. The studio is small and more like a + little salon; the painting refined, imaginative, somewhat morbid, full of + consummate French ability. A portrait, idealised and etherealised, but a + likeness of Mme. de—-(from last year’s Salon) in white satin, + quantities of lace, a coronet, diamonds and pearls; a striking combination + of brilliant silvery tones. A “Femme Sauvage,” a naked dusky girl in a + wood, with a wonderfully clever pair of shy, passionate eyes. The author + is different enough from any of the numerous American artists. They may be + producers, but he’s a product as well—a product of influences of a + sort of which we have as yet no general command. One of them is his + charmed lapse of life in that unprofessional-looking little studio, with + his enchanted wood on one side and the plunging wall of Rome on the other. + </p> + <p> + <i>January 30th.</i>—A drive the other day with a friend to Villa + Madama, on the side of Monte Mario; a place like a page out of one of + Browning’s richest evocations of this clime and civilisation. Wondrous in + its haunting melancholy, it might have inspired half “The Ring and the + Book” at a stroke. What a grim commentary on history such a scene—what + an irony of the past! The road up to it through the outer enclosure is + almost impassable with mud and stones. At the end, on a terrace, rises the + once elegant Casino, with hardly a whole pane of glass in its façade, + reduced to its sallow stucco and degraded ornaments. The front away from + Rome has in the basement a great loggia, now walled in from the weather, + preceded by a grassy be littered platform with an immense sweeping view of + the Campagna; the sad-looking, more than sad-looking, evil-looking, Tiber + beneath (the colour of gold, the sentimentalists say, the colour of + mustard, the realists); a great vague stretch beyond, of various + complexions and uses; and on the horizon the ever-iridescent mountains. + The place has become the shabbiest farm-house, with muddy water in the old + <i>pièces d’eau</i> and dunghills on the old parterres. The “feature” is + the contents of the loggia: a vaulted roof and walls decorated by Giulio + Romano; exquisite stucco-work and still brilliant frescoes; arabesques and + figurini, nymphs and fauns, animals and flowers—gracefully lavish + designs of every sort. Much of the colour—especially the blues—still + almost vivid, and all the work wonderfully ingenious, elegant and + charming. Apartments so decorated can have been meant only for the + recreation of people greater than any we know, people for whom life was + impudent ease and success. Margaret Farnese was the lady of the house, but + where she trailed her cloth of gold the chickens now scamper between your + legs over rotten straw. It is all inexpressibly dreary. A stupid peasant + scratching his head, a couple of critical Americans picking their steps, + the walls tattered and befouled breast-high, dampness and decay striking + in on your heart, and the scene overbowed by these heavenly frescoes, + moulering there in their airy artistry! It’s poignant; it provokes tears; + it tells so of the waste of effort. Something human seems to pant beneath + the grey pall of time and to implore you to rescue it, to pity it, to + stand by it somehow. But you leave it to its lingering death without + compunction, almost with pleasure; for the place seems vaguely + crime-haunted—paying at least the penalty of some hard immorality. + The end of a Renaissance pleasure-house. Endless for the didactic observer + the moral, abysmal for the storyseeker the tale. + </p> + <p> + <i>February 12th</i>.—Yesterday to the Villa Albani. Over-formal and + (as my companion says) too much like a tea-garden; but with beautiful + stairs and splendid geometrical lines of immense box-hedge, intersected + with high pedestals supporting little antique busts. The light to-day + magnificent; the Alban Hills of an intenser broken purple than I had yet + seen them—their white towns blooming upon it like vague projected + lights. It was like a piece of very modern painting, and a good example of + how Nature has at times a sort of mannerism which ought to make us careful + how we condemn out of hand the more refined and affected artists. The + collection of marbles in the Casino (Winckelmann’s) admirable and to be + seen again. The famous Antinous crowned with lotus a strangely beautiful + and impressive thing. The “Greek manner,” on the showing of something now + and again encountered here, moves one to feel that even for purely + romantic and imaginative effects it surpasses any since invented. If there + be not imagination, even in our comparatively modern sense of the word, in + the baleful beauty of that perfect young profile there is none in “Hamlet” + or in “Lycidas.” There is five hundred times as much as in “The + Transfiguration.” With this at any rate to point to it’s not for sculpture + not professedly to produce any emotion producible by painting. There are + numbers of small and delicate fragments of bas-reliefs of exquisite grace, + and a huge piece (two combatants—one, on horseback, beating down + another—murder made eternal and beautiful) attributed to the + Parthenon and certainly as grandly impressive as anything in the Elgin + marbles. S. W. suggested again the Roman villas as a “subject.” Excellent + if one could find a feast of facts à la Stendhal. A lot of vague ecstatic + descriptions and anecdotes wouldn’t at all pay. There have been too many + already. Enough facts are recorded, I suppose; one should discover them + and soak in them for a twelvemonth. And yet a Roman villa, in spite of + statues, ideas and atmosphere, affects me as of a scanter human and social + <i>portee</i>, a shorter, thinner reverberation, than an old English + country-house, round which experience seems piled so thick. But this + perhaps is either hair-splitting or “racial” prejudice. + </p> + <p> + {Illustration: ENTRANCE TO THE VATICAN, ROME} + </p> + <p> + <i>March 9th.</i>—The Vatican is still deadly cold; a couple of + hours there yesterday with R. W. E. Yet he, illustrious and enviable man, + fresh from the East, had no overcoat and wanted none. Perfect bliss, I + think, would be to live in Rome without thinking of overcoats. The Vatican + seems very familiar, but strangely smaller than of old. I never lost the + sense before of confusing vastness. <i>Sancta simplicitas!</i> All my old + friends however stand there in undimmed radiance, keeping most of them + their old pledges. I am perhaps more struck now with the enormous amount + of padding—the number of third-rate, fourth-rate things that weary + the eye desirous to approach freshly the twenty and thirty best. In spite + of the padding there are dozens of treasures that one passes regretfully; + but the impression of the whole place is the great thing—the feeling + that through these solemn vistas flows the source of an incalculable part + of our present conception of Beauty. + </p> + <p> + <i>April 10th.</i>—Last night, in the rain, to the Teatro Valle to + see a comedy of Goldoni in Venetian dialect—“I Quattro Rustighi.” I + could but half follow it; enough, however, to be sure that, for all its + humanity of irony, it wasn’t so good as Molière. The acting was capital—broad, + free and natural; the play of talk easier even than life itself; but, like + all the Italian acting I have seen, it was wanting in <i>finesse</i>, that + shade of the shade by which, and by which alone, one really knows art. I + contrasted the affair with the evening in December last that I walked over + (also in the rain) to the Odeon and saw the “Plaideurs” and the “Malade + lmaginaire.” There, too, was hardly more than a handful of spectators; but + what rich, ripe, fully representational and above all intellectual comedy, + and what polished, educated playing! These Venetians in particular, + however, have a marvellous <i>entrain</i> of their own; they seem even + less than the French to recite. In some of the women—ugly, with red + hands and shabby dresses—an extraordinary gift of natural utterance, + of seeming to invent joyously as they go. + </p> + <p> + <i>Later</i>.—Last evening in H.‘s box at the Apollo to hear Ernesto + Rossi in “Othello.” He shares supremacy with Salvini in Italian tragedy. + Beautiful great theatre with boxes you can walk about in; brilliant + audience. The Princess Margaret was there—I have never been to the + theatre that she was not—and a number of other princesses in + neighbouring boxes. G. G. came in and instructed us that they were the M., + the L., the P., &c. Rossi is both very bad and very fine; bad where + anything like taste and discretion is required, but “all there,” and more + than there, in violent passion. The last act reduced too much, however, to + mere exhibitional sensibility. The interesting thing to me was to observe + the Italian conception of the part—to see how crude it was, how + little it expressed the hero’s moral side, his depth, his dignity—anything + more than his being a creature terrible in mere tantrums. The great point + was his seizing Iago’s head and whacking it half-a-dozen times on the + floor, and then flinging him twenty yards away. It was wonderfully done, + but in the doing of it and in the evident relish for it in the house there + was I scarce knew what force of easy and thereby rather cheap expression. + </p> + <p> + <i>April 27th</i>.—A morning with L. B. at Villa Ludovisi, which we + agreed that we shouldn’t soon forget. The villa now belongs to the King, + who has lodged his morganatic wife there. There is nothing so blissfully + <i>right</i> in Rome, nothing more consummately consecrated to style. The + grounds and gardens are immense, and the great rusty-red city wall + stretches away behind them and makes the burden of the seven hills seem + vast without making <i>them</i> seem small. There is everything—dusky + avenues trimmed by the clippings of centuries, groves and dells and glades + and glowing pastures and reedy fountains and great flowering meadows + studded with enormous slanting pines. The day was delicious, the trees all + one melody, the whole place a revelation of what Italy and hereditary pomp + can do together. Nothing could be more in the grand manner than this + garden view of the city ramparts, lifting their fantastic battlements + above the trees and flowers. They are all tapestried with vines and made + to serve as sunny fruit-walls—grim old defence as they once were; + now giving nothing but a splendid buttressed privacy. The sculptures in + the little Casino are few, but there are two great ones—the + beautiful sitting Mars and the head of the great Juno, the latter thrust + into a corner behind a shutter. These things it’s almost impossible to + praise; we can only mark them well and keep them clear, as we insist on + silence to hear great music.... If I don’t praise Guercino’s Aurora in the + greater Casino, it’s for another reason; this is certainly a very muddy + masterpiece. It figures on the ceiling of a small low hall; the painting + is coarse and the ceiling too near. Besides, it’s unfair to pass straight + from the Greek mythology to the Bolognese. We were left to roam at will + through the house; the custode shut us in and went to walk in the park. + The apartments were all open, and I had an opportunity to reconstruct, + from its <i>milieu</i> at least, the character of a morganatic queen. I + saw nothing to indicate that it was not amiable; but I should have thought + more highly of the lady’s discrimination if she had had the Juno removed + from behind her shutter. In such a house, girdled about with such a park, + me thinks I could be amiable—and perhaps discriminating too. The + Ludovisi Casino is small, but the perfection of the life of ease might + surely be led there. There are English houses enough in wondrous parks, + but they expose you to too many small needs and observances—to say + nothing of a red-faced butler dropping his h’s. You are oppressed with the + detail of accommodation. Here the billiard-table is old-fashioned, perhaps + a trifle crooked; but you have Guercino above your head, and Guercino, + after all, is almost as good as Guido. The rooms, I noticed, all pleased + by their shape, by a lovely proportion, by a mass of delicate + ornamentation on the high concave ceilings. One might live over again in + them some deliciously benighted life of a forgotten type—with + graceful old <i>sale</i>, and immensely thick walls, and a winding stone + staircase, and a view from the loggia at the top; a view of twisted + parasol-pines balanced, high above a wooden horizon, against a sky of + faded sapphire. + </p> + <p> + <i>May 17th.</i>—It was wonderful yesterday at St. John Lateran. The + spring now has turned to perfect summer; there are cascades of verdure + over all the walls; the early flowers are a fading memory, and the new + grass knee-deep in the Villa Borghese. The winter aspect of the region + about the Lateran is one of the best things in Rome; the sunshine is + nowhere so golden and the lean shadows nowhere so purple as on the long + grassy walk to Santa Croce. But yesterday I seemed to see nothing but + green and blue. The expanse before Santa Croce was vivid green; the + Campagna rolled away in great green billows, which seemed to break high + about the gaunt aqueducts; and the Alban Hills, which in January and + February keep shifting and melting along the whole scale of azure, were + almost monotonously fresh, and had lost some of their finer modelling. But + the sky was ultramarine and everything radiant with light and warmth—warmth + which a soft steady breeze kept from excess. I strolled some time about + the church, which has a grand air enough, though I don’t seize the point + of view of Miss——, who told me the other day how vastly finer + she thought it than St. Peter’s. But on Miss——‘s lips this + seemed a very pretty paradox. The choir and transepts have a sombre + splendour, and I like the old vaulted passage with its slabs and monuments + behind the choir. The charm of charms at St. John Lateran is the admirable + twelfth-century cloister, which was never more charming than yesterday. + The shrubs and flowers about the ancient well were blooming away in the + intense light, and the twisted pillars and chiselled capitals of the + perfect little colonnade seemed to enclose them like the sculptured rim of + a precious vase. Standing out among the flowers you may look up and see a + section of the summit of the great façade of the church. The robed and + mitred apostles, bleached and rain-washed by the ages, rose into the blue + air like huge snow figures. I spent at the incorporated museum a + subsequent hour of fond vague attention, having it quite to myself. It is + rather scantily stocked, but the great cool halls open out impressively + one after the other, and the wide spaces between the statues seem to + suggest at first that each is a masterpiece. I was in the loving mood of + one’s last days in Rome, and when I had nothing else to admire I admired + the magnificent thickness of the embrasures of the doors and windows. If + there were no objects of interest at all in the Lateran the palace would + be worth walking through every now and then, to keep up one’s idea of + solid architecture. I went over to the Scala Santa, where was no one but a + very shabby priest sitting like a ticket-taker at the door. But he let me + pass, and I ascended one of the profane lateral stairways and treated + myself to a glimpse of the Sanctum Sanctorum. Its threshold is crossed but + once or twice a year, I believe, by three or four of the most exalted + divines, but you may look into it freely enough through a couple of gilded + lattices. It is very sombre and splendid, and conveys the impression of a + very holy place. And yet somehow it suggested irreverent thoughts; it had + to my fancy—perhaps on account of the lattice—an Oriental, a + Mahometan note. I expected every moment to see a sultana appear in a + silver veil and silken trousers and sit down on the crimson carpet. + </p> + <p> + Farewell, packing, the sharp pang of going. One would like to be able + after five months in Rome to sum up for tribute and homage, one’s + experience, one’s gains, the whole adventure of one’s sensibility. But one + has really vibrated too much—the addition of so many items isn’t + easy. What is simply clear is the sense of an acquired passion for the + place and of an incalculable number of gathered impressions. Many of these + have been intense and momentous, but one has trodden on the other—there + are always the big fish that swallow up the little—and one can + hardly say what has become of them. They store themselves noiselessly + away, I suppose, in the dim but safe places of memory and “taste,” and we + live in a quiet faith that they will emerge into vivid relief if life or + art should demand them. As for the passion we needn’t perhaps trouble + ourselves about that. Fifty swallowed palmfuls of the Fountain of Trevi + couldn’t make us more ardently sure that we shall at any cost come back. + </p> + <h3> + 1873. + </h3> + <p> + <a name="link2H_4_0015" id="link2H_4_0015"> + <!-- H2 anchor --> </a> + </p> + <div style="height: 4em;"> + <br /><br /><br /><br /> + </div> + <h2> + A FEW OTHER ROMAN NEIGHBOURHOODS + </h2> + <p> + If I find my old notes, in all these Roman connections, inevitably bristle + with the spirit of the postscript, so I give way to this prompting to the + extent of my scant space and with the sense of other occasions awaiting me + on which I shall have to do no less. The impression of Rome was repeatedly + to renew itself for the author of these now rather antique and artless + accents; was to overlay itself again and again with almost heavy + thicknesses of experience, the last of which is, as I write, quite fresh + to memory; and he has thus felt almost ashamed to drop his subject (though + it be one that tends so easily to turn to the infinite) as if the law of + change had in all the years had nothing to say to his case. It’s of course + but of his case alone that he speaks—wondering little what he may + make of it for the profit of others by an attempt, however brief, to point + the moral of the matter, or in other words compare the musing <i>mature</i> + visitor’s “feeling about Rome” with that of the extremely agitated, even + if though extremely inexpert, consciousness reflected in the previous + pages. The actual, the current Rome affects him as a world governed by new + conditions altogether and ruefully pleading that sorry fact in the ear of + the antique wanderer wherever he may yet mournfully turn for some + re-capture of what he misses. The city of his first unpremeditated rapture + shines to memory, on the other hand, in the manner of a lost paradise the + rustle of whose gardens is still just audible enough in the air to make + him wonder if some sudden turn, some recovered vista, mayn’t lead him back + to the thing itself. My genial, my helpful tag, at this point, would + doubtless properly resolve itself, for the reader, into a clue toward some + such successful ingenuity of quest; a remark I make, I may add, even while + reflecting that the Paradise isn’t apparently at all “lost” to visitors + not of my generation. It is the seekers of <i>that</i> remote and romantic + tradition who have seen it, from one period of ten, or even of five, years + to another, systematically and remorselessly built out from their view. + Their helpless plaint, their sense of the generally irrecoverable and + unspeakable, is not, however, what I desire here most to express; I should + like, on the contrary, with ampler opportunity, positively to enumerate + the cases, the cases of contact, impression, experience, in which the cold + ashes of a long-chilled passion may fairly feel themselves made to glow + again. No one who has ever loved Rome as Rome could be loved in youth and + before her poised basketful of the finer appeals to fond fancy was + actually upset, wants to stop loving her; so that our bleeding and + wounded, though perhaps not wholly moribund, loyalty attends us as a + hovering admonitory, anticipatory ghost, one of those magnanimous + life-companions who before complete extinction designate to the other + member of the union their approved successor. So it is at any rate that I + conceive the pilgrim old enough to have become aware in all these later + years of what he misses to be counselled and pacified in the interest of + recognitions that shall a little make up for it. + </p> + <p> + It was this wisdom I was putting into practice, no doubt, for instance, + when I lately resigned myself to motoring of a splendid June day “out to” + Subiaco; as a substitute for a resignation that had anciently taken, alas, + but the form of my never getting there at all. Everything that day, + moreover, seemed right, surely; everything on certain other days that were + like it through their large indebtedness, at this, that and the other + point, to the last new thing, seemed so right that they come back to me + now, after a moderate interval, in the full light of that unchallenged + felicity. I couldn’t at all gloriously recall, for instance, as I floated + to Subiaco on vast brave wings, how on the occasion of my first visit to + Rome, thirty-eight years before, I had devoted certain evenings, evenings + of artless “preparation” in my room at the inn, to the perusal of Alphonse + Dantier’s admirable <i>Monastères Bénédictins d’ltalie</i>, taking piously + for granted that I should get myself somehow conveyed to Monte Cassino and + to Subiaco at least: such an affront to the passion of curiosity, the + generally infatuated state then kindled, would any suspicion of my + foredoomed, my all but interminable, privation during visits to come have + seemed to me. Fortune, in the event, had never favoured my going, but I + was to give myself up at last to the sense of her quite taking me by the + hand, and that is how I now think of our splendid June day at Subiaco. The + note of the wondrous place itself is conventional “wild” Italy raised to + the highest intensity, the ideally, the sublimely conventional and wild, + complete and supreme in itself, without a disparity or a flaw; which + character of perfect picturesque orthodoxy seemed more particularly to + begin for me, I remember, as we passed, on our way, through that + indescribable and indestructible Tivoli, where the jumble of the elements + of the familiarly and exploitedly, the all too notoriously fair and queer, + was more violent and vociferous than ever—so the whole spectacle + there seemed at once to rejoice in cockneyfication and to resist it. There + at least I had old memories to renew—including that in especial, + from a few years back, of one of the longest, hottest, dustiest + return-drives to Rome that the Campagna on a sirocco day was ever to have + treated me to. + </p> + <p> + {Illustration: VILLA D’ESTE, TIVOLI} + </p> + <p> + That was to be more than made up on this later occasion by an hour of + early evening, snatched on the run back to Rome, that remains with me as + one of those felicities we are wise to leave for ever, just as they are, + just, that is, where they fell, never attempting to renew or improve them. + So happy a chance was it that ensured me at the afternoon’s end a solitary + stroll through the Villa d’ Este, where the day’s invasion, whatever it + might have been, had left no traces and where I met nobody in the great + rococo passages and chambers, and in the prodigious alleys and on the + repeated flights of tortuous steps, but the haunting Genius of Style, into + whose noble battered old face, as if it had come out clearer in the golden + twilight and on recognition of response so deeply moved, I seemed to + exhale my sympathy. This was truly, amid a conception and order of things + all mossed over from disuse, but still without a form abandoned or a + principle disowned, one of the hours that one doesn’t forget. The ruined + fountains seemed strangely to <i>wait</i>, in the stillness and under + cover of the approaching dusk, not to begin ever again to play, also, but + just only to be tenderly imagined to do so; quite as everything held its + breath, at the mystic moment, for the drop of the cruel and garish + exposure, for the Spirit of the place to steal forth and go his round. The + vistas of the innumerable mighty cypresses ranged themselves, in their + files and companies, like beaten heroes for their captain’s, review; the + great artificial “works” of every description, cascades, hemicycles, all + graded and grassed and stone-seated as for floral games, mazes and bowers + and alcoves and grottos, brave indissoluble unions of the planted and the + builded symmetry, with the terraces and staircases that overhang and the + arcades and cloisters that underspread, made common cause together as for + one’s taking up a little, in kindly lingering wonder, the “feeling” out of + which they have sprung. One didn’t see it, under the actual influence, one + wouldn’t for the world have seen it, as that they longed to be justified, + during a few minutes in the twenty-four hours, of their absurdity of pomp + and circumstance—but only that they asked for company, once in a + way, as they were so splendidly formed to give it, and that the best + company, in a changed world, at the end of time, what could they hope it + to be but just the lone, the dawdling person of taste, the visitor with a + flicker of fancy, not to speak of a pang of pity, to spare for them? It + was in the flicker of fancy, no doubt, that as I hung about the great + top-most terrace in especial, and then again took my way through the high + gaunt corridors and the square and bare alcoved and recessed saloons, all + overscored with such a dim waste of those painted, those delicate and + capricious decorations which the loggie of the Vatican promptly borrowed + from the ruins of the Palatine, or from whatever other revealed and + inspiring ancientries, and which make ghostly confession here of that + descent, I gave the rein to my sense of the sinister too, of that vague + after-taste as of evil things that lurks so often, for a suspicious + sensibility, wherever the terrible game of the life of the Renaissance was + played as the Italians played it; wherever the huge tessellated chessboard + seems to stretch about us; swept bare, almost always violently swept bare, + of its chiselled and shifting figures, of every value and degree, but with + this echoing desolation itself representing the long gasp, as it were, of + overstrained time, the great after-hush that follows on things too + wonderful or dreadful. + </p> + <p> + I am putting here, however, my cart before my horse, for the hour just + glanced at was but a final tag to a day of much brighter curiosity, and + which seemed to take its baptism, as we passed through prodigious perched + and huddled, adorably scattered and animated and even crowded Tivoli, from + the universal happy spray of the drumming Anio waterfalls, all set in + their permanent rainbows and Sibylline temples and classic allusions and + Byronic quotations; a wondrous romantic jumble of such things and quite + others—heterogeneous inns and clamorous <i>guingettes</i> and + factories grabbing at the torrent, to say nothing of innumerable guides + and donkeys and white-tied, swallow-tailed waiters dashing out of grottos + and from under cataracts, and of the air, on the part of the whole + population, of standing about, in the most characteristic <i>contadino</i> + manner, to pounce on you and take you somewhere, snatch you from somebody + else, shout something at you, the aqueous and other uproar permitting, and + then charge you for it, your innocence aiding. I’m afraid our run the rest + of the way to Subiaco remains with me but as an after-sense of that + exhilaration, in spite of our rising admirably higher, all the while, and + plunging constantly deeper into splendid solitary gravities, supreme + romantic solemnities and sublimities, of landscape. The Benedictine + convent, which clings to certain more or less vertiginous ledges and + slopes of a vast precipitous gorge, constitutes, with the whole perfection + of its setting, the very ideal of the tradition of that <i>extraordinary + in the romantic</i> handed down to us, as the most attaching and inviting + spell of Italy, by all the old academic literature of travel and art of + the Salvator Rosas and Claudes. This is the main tribute I may pay in a + few words to an impression of which a sort of divine rightness of oddity, + a pictorial felicity that was almost not of this world, but of a higher + degree of distinction altogether, affected me as the leading note; yet + about the whole exquisite complexity of which I can’t pretend to be + informing. + </p> + <p> + All the elements of the scene melted for me together; even from the pause + for luncheon on a grassy wayside knoll, over heaven knows what admirable + preparatory headlong slopes and ravines and iridescent distances, under + spreading chestnuts and in the high air that was cool and sweet, to the + final pedestrian climb of sinuous mountain-paths that the shining + limestone and the strong green of shrub and herbage made as white as + silver. There the miraculous home of St. Benedict awaited us in the form + of a builded and pictured-over maze of chapels and shrines, cells and + corridors, stupefying rock-chambers and caves, places all at an + extraordinary variety of different levels and with labyrinthine + intercommunications; there the spirit of the centuries sat like some + invisible icy presence that only permits you to stare and wonder. I + stared, I wondered, I went up and down and in and out and lost myself in + the fantastic fable of the innumerable hard facts themselves; and whenever + I could, above all, I peeped out of small windows and hung over chance + terraces for the love of the general outer picture, the splendid fashion + in which the fretted mountains of marble, as they might have been, round + about, seemed to inlay themselves, for the effect of the “distinction” I + speak of, with vegetations of dark emerald. There above all—or at + least in what such aspects did further for the prodigy of the Convent, + whatever that prodigy might for do <i>them</i>—was, to a life-long + victim of Italy, almost verily as never before, the operation of the old + love-philtre; there were the inexhaustible sources of interest and charm. + </p> + <p> + {Illustration: SUBIACO} + </p> + <p> + These mystic fountains broke out for me elsewhere, again and again, I + rejoice to say—and perhaps more particularly, to be frank about it, + where the ground about them was pressed with due emphasis of appeal by the + firm wheels of the great winged car. I motored, under invitation and + protection, repeatedly back into the sense of the other years, that sense + of the “old” and comparatively idle Rome of my particular infatuated prime + which I was living to see superseded, and this even when the fond vista + bristled with innumerable “signs of the times,” unmistakable features of + the new era, that, by I scarce know what perverse law, succeeded in + ministering to a happy effect. Some of these false notes proceed simply + from the immense growth of every sort of facilitation—so that people + are much more free than of old to come and go and do, to inquire and + explore, to pervade and generally “infest”; with a consequent loss, for + the fastidious individual, of his blest earlier sense, not infrequent, of + having the occasion and the impression, as he used complacently to say, + all to himself. We none of us had anything quite all to ourselves during + an afternoon at Ostia, on a beautiful June Sunday; it was a different + affair, rather, from the long, the comparatively slow and quite unpeopled + drive that I was to remember having last taken early in the autumn thirty + years before, and which occupied the day—with the aid of a hamper + from once supreme old Spillman, the provider for picnics to a vanished + world (since I suspect the antique ideal of “a picnic in the Campagna,” + the fondest conception of a happy day, has lost generally much of its + glamour). Our idyllic afternoon, at any rate, left no chord of sensibility + that could possibly have been in question untouched—not even that of + tea on the shore at Fiumincino, after we had spent an hour among the ruins + of Ostia and seen our car ferried across the Tiber, almost + saffron-coloured here and swirling towards its mouth, on a boat that was + little more than a big rustic raft and that yet bravely resisted the + prodigious weight. What shall I say, in the way of the particular, of the + general felicity before me, for the sweetness of the hour to which the + incident just named, with its strange and amusing juxtapositions of the + patriarchally primitive and the insolently supersubtle, the earliest and + the latest efforts of restless science, were almost immediately to + succeed? + </p> + <p> + We had but skirted the old gold-and-brown walls of Castel Fusano, where + the massive Chigi tower and the immemorial stone-pines and the afternoon + sky and the desolate sweetness and concentrated rarity of the picture all + kept their appointment, to fond memory, with that especial form of Roman + faith, the fine aesthetic conscience in things, that is never, never + broken. We had wound through tangled lanes and met handsome sallow + country-folk lounging at leisure, as became the Sunday, and ever so + pleasantly and garishly clothed, if not quite consistently costumed, as + just on purpose to feed our wanton optimism; and then we had addressed + ourselves with a soft superficiality to the open, the exquisite little + Ostian reliquary, an exhibition of stony vaguenesses half straightened + out. The ruins of the ancient port of Rome, the still recoverable identity + of streets and habitations and other forms of civil life, are a not + inconsiderable handful, though making of the place at best a very small + sister to Pompeii; but a soft superficiality is ever the refuge of my shy + sense before any ghost of informed reconstitution, and I plead my + surrender to it with the less shame that I believe I “enjoy” such scenes + even on such futile pretexts as much as it can be appointed them by the + invidious spirit of History to <i>be</i> enjoyed. It may be said, of + course, that enjoyment, question-begging term at best, isn’t in these + austere connections designated—but rather some principle of + appreciation that can at least give a coherent account of itself. On that + basis then—as I could, I profess, <i>but</i> revel in the looseness + of my apprehension, so wide it seemed to fling the gates of vision and + divination—I won’t pretend to dot, as it were, too many of the i’s + of my incompetence. I was competent only to have been abjectly interested. + On reflection, moreover, I see that no impression of over-much company + invaded the picture till the point was exactly reached for its + contributing thoroughly to character and amusement; across at Fiumincino, + which the age of the bicycle has made, in a small way, the handy Gravesend + or Coney Island of Rome, the cafés and <i>birrerie</i> were at high + pressure, and the bustle all motley and friendly beside the melancholy + river, where the water-side life itself had twenty quaint and vivid notes + and where a few upstanding objects, ancient or modern, looked eminent and + interesting against the delicate Roman sky that dropped down and down to + the far-spreading marshes of malaria. Besides which “company” is ever + intensely gregarious, hanging heavily together and easily outwitted; so + that we had but to proceed a scant distance further and meet the tideless + Mediterranean, where it tumbled in a trifle breezily on the sands, to be + all to ourselves with our tea-basket, quite as in the good old fashion—only + in truth with the advantage that the contemporary tea-basket is so much + improved. + </p> + <p> + I jumble my memories as a tribute to the whole idyll—I give the + golden light in which they come back to me for what it is worth; worth, I + mean, as allowing that the possibilities of charm of the Witch of the + Seven Hills, as we used to call her in magazines, haven’t all been + vulgarised away. It was precisely there, on such an occasion and in such a + place, that this might seem signally to have happened; whereas in fact the + mild suburban riot, in which the so gay but so light potations before the + array of little houses of entertainment were what struck one as really + making most for mildness, was brushed over with a fabled grace, was + harmonious, felicitous, distinguished, quite after the fashion of some + thoroughly trained chorus or phalanx of opera or ballet. Bicycles were + stacked up by the hundred; the youth of Rome are ardent cyclists, with a + great taste for flashing about in more or less denuded or costumed + athletic and romantic bands and guilds, and on our return cityward, toward + evening, along the right bank of the river, the road swarmed with the + patient wheels and bent backs of these budding <i>cives Romani</i> quite + to the effect of its finer interest. Such at least, I felt, could only be + one’s acceptance of almost any feature of a scene bathed in that + extraordinarily august air that the waning Roman day is so insidiously + capable of taking on when any other element of style happens at all to + contribute. Weren’t they present, these other elements, in the great + classic lines and folds, the fine academic or historic attitudes of the + darkening land itself as it hung about the old highway, varying its vague + accidents, but achieving always perfect “composition”? I shamelessly add + that cockneyfied impression, at all events, to what I have called my + jumble; Rome, to which we all swept on together in the wondrous glowing + medium, <i>saved</i> everything, spreading afar her wide wing and applying + after all but her supposed grand gift of the secret of salvation. We kept + on and on into the great dim rather sordidly papal streets that approach + the quarter of St. Peter’s; to the accompaniment, finally, of that + markedly felt provocation of fond wonder which had never failed to lie in + wait for me under any question of a renewed glimpse of the huge unvisited + rear of the basilica. There was no renewed glimpse just then, in the + gloaming; but the region I speak of had been for me, in fact, during the + previous weeks, less unvisited than ever before, so that I had come to + count an occasional walk round and about it as quite of the essence of the + convenient small change with which the heterogeneous City may still keep + paying you. These frequentations in the company of a sculptor friend had + been incidental to our reaching a small artistic foundry of fine metal, an + odd and interesting little establishment placed, as who should say in the + case of such a mere left-over scrap of a large loose margin, nowhere: it + lurked so unsuspectedly, that is, among the various queer things that Rome + comprehensively refers to as “behind St. Peter’s.” + </p> + <p> + We had passed then, on the occasion of our several pilgrimages, in beneath + the great flying, or at least straddling buttresses to the left of the + mighty façade, where you enter that great idle precinct of fine dense + pavement and averted and sacrificed grandeur, the reverse of the monstrous + medal of the front. Here the architectural monster rears its back and + shoulders on an equal scale and this whole unregarded world of colossal + consistent symmetry and hidden high finish gives you the measure of the + vast total treasure of items and features. The outward face of all sorts + of inward majesties of utility and ornament here above all correspondingly + reproduces itself; the expanses of golden travertine—the freshness + of tone, the cleanness of surface, in the sunny air, being extraordinary—climb + and soar and spread under the crushing weight of a scheme carried out in + every ponderous particular. Never was such a show of <i>wasted</i> art, of + pomp for pomp’s sake, as where all the chapels bulge and all the windows, + each one a separate constructional masterpiece, tower above almost + grassgrown vacancy; with the full and immediate effect, of course, of + reading us a lesson on the value of lawful pride. The pride is the pride + of indifference as to whether a greatness so founded be gaped at in all + its features or not. My friend and I were alone to gape at them most often + while, for the unfailing impression of them, on our way to watch the + casting of our figure, we extended our circuit of the place. To which I + may add, as another example of that tentative, that appealing twitch of + the garment of Roman association of which one kept renewing one’s + consciousness, the half-hour at the little foundry itself was all charming—with + its quite shabby and belittered and ramshackle recall of the old Roman + “art-life” of one’s early dreams. Everything was somehow in the picture, + the rickety sheds, the loose paraphernalia, the sunny, grassy yard where a + goat was browsing; then the queer interior gloom of the pits, frilled with + little overlooking scaffoldings and bridges, for the sinking fireward of + the image that was to take on hardness; and all the pleasantness and + quickness, the beguiling refinement, of the three or four light fine + “hands” of whom the staff consisted and into whose type and tone one liked + to read, with whatever harmless extravagance, so many signs that a lively + sense of stiff processes, even in humble life, could still leave untouched + the traditional rare feeling for the artistic. How delightful such an + occupation in such a general setting—those of my friend, I at such + moments irrepressibly moralised; and how one might after such a fashion + endlessly go and come and ask nothing better; or if better, only so to the + extent of another impression I was to owe to him: that of an evening meal + spread, in the warm still darkness that made no candle flicker, on the + wide high space of an old loggia that overhung, in one quarter, the great + obelisked Square preceding one of the Gates, and in the other the Tiber + and the far Trastevere and more things than I can say—above all, as + it were, the whole backward past, the mild confused romance of the Rome + one had loved and of which one was exactly taking leave under protection + of the friendly lanterned and garlanded feast and the commanding, + all-embracing roof-garden. It was indeed a reconciling, it was an + altogether penetrating, last hour. + </p> + <h3> + 1909. + </h3> + <p> + <a name="link2H_4_0016" id="link2H_4_0016"> + <!-- H2 anchor --> </a> + </p> + <div style="height: 4em;"> + <br /><br /><br /><br /> + </div> + <h2> + A CHAIN OF CITIES + </h2> + <p> + One day in midwinter, some years since, during a journey from Rome to + Florence perforce too rapid to allow much wayside sacrifice to curiosity, + I waited for the train at Narni. There was time to stroll far enough from + the station to have a look at the famous old bridge of Augustus, broken + short off in mid-Tiber. While I stood admiring the measure of impression + was made to overflow by the gratuitous grace of a white-cowled monk who + came trudging up the road that wound to the gate of the town. Narni stood, + in its own presented felicity, on a hill a good space away, boxed in + behind its perfect grey wall, and the monk, to oblige me, crept slowly + along and disappeared within the aperture. Everything was distinct in the + clear air, and the view exactly as like the bit of background by an + Umbrian master as it ideally should have been. The winter is bare and + brown enough in southern Italy and the earth reduced to more of a mere + anatomy than among ourselves, for whom the very <i>crânerie</i> of its + exposed state, naked and unashamed, gives it much of the robust serenity, + not of a fleshless skeleton, but of a fine nude statue. In these regions + at any rate, the tone of the air, for the eye, during the brief + desolation, has often an extraordinary charm: nature still smiles as with + the deputed and provisional charity of colour and light, the duty of not + ceasing to cheer man’s heart. Her whole behaviour, at the time, cast such + a spell on the broken bridge, the little walled town and the trudging + friar, that I turned away with the impatient vow and the fond vision of + how I would take the journey again and pause to my heart’s content at + Narni, at Spoleto, at Assisi, at Perugia, at Cortona, at Arezzo. But we + have generally to clip our vows a little when we come to fulfil them; and + so it befell that when my blest springtime arrived I had to begin as + resignedly as possible, yet with comparative meagreness, at Assisi. + </p> + <p> + {Illustration: ASSISI.} + </p> + <p> + I suppose enjoyment would have a simple zest which it often lacks if we + always did things at the moment we want to, for it’s mostly when we can’t + that we’re thoroughly sure we <i>would</i>, and we can answer too little + for moods in the future conditional. Winter at least seemed to me to have + put something into these seats of antiquity that the May sun had more or + less melted away—a desirable strength of tone, a depth upon depth of + queerness and quaintness. Assisi had been in the January twilight, after + my mere snatch at Narni, a vignette out of some brown old missal. But + you’ll have to be a fearless explorer now to find of a fine spring day any + such cluster of curious objects as doesn’t seem made to match before + anything else Mr. Baedeker’s polyglot estimate of its chief + recommendations. This great man was at Assisi in force, and a brand-new + inn for his accommodation has just been opened cheek by jowl with the + church of St. Francis. I don’t know that even the dire discomfort of this + harbourage makes it seem less impertinent; but I confess I sought its + protection, and the great view seemed hardly less beautiful from my window + than from the gallery of the convent. This view embraces the whole wide + reach of Umbria, which becomes as twilight deepens a purple counterfeit of + the misty sea. The visitor’s first errand is with the church; and it’s + fair furthermore to admit that when he has crossed that threshold the + position and quality of his hotel cease for the time to be matters of + moment. This two-fold temple of St. Francis is one of the very sacred + places of Italy, and it would be hard to breathe anywhere an air more + heavy with holiness. Such seems especially the case if you happen thus to + have come from Rome, where everything ecclesiastical is, in aspect, so + very much of this world—so florid, so elegant, so full of + accommodations and excrescences. The mere site here makes for authority, + and they were brave builders who laid the foundation-stones. The thing + rises straight from a steep mountain-side and plunges forward on its great + substructure of arches even as a crowned headland may frown over the main. + Before it stretches a long, grassy piazza, at the end of which you look up + a small grey street, to see it first climb a little way the rest of the + hill and then pause and leave a broad green slope, crested, high in the + air, with a ruined castle. When I say before it I mean before the upper + church; for by way of doing something supremely handsome and impressive + the sturdy architects of the thirteenth century piled temple upon temple + and bequeathed a double version of their idea. One may imagine them to + have intended perhaps an architectural image of the relation between heart + and head. Entering the lower church at the bottom of the great flight of + steps which leads from the upper door, you seem to push at least into the + very heart of Catholicism. + </p> + <p> + For the first minutes after leaving the clearer gloom you catch nothing + but a vista of low black columns closed by the great fantastic cage + surrounding the altar, which is thus placed, by your impression, in a sort + of gorgeous cavern. Gradually you distinguish details, become accustomed + to the penetrating chill, and even manage to make out a few frescoes; but + the general effect remains splendidly sombre and subterranean. The vaulted + roof is very low and the pillars dwarfish, though immense in girth, as + befits pillars supporting substantially a cathedral. The tone of the place + is a triumph of mystery, the richest harmony of lurking shadows and dusky + corners, all relieved by scattered images and scintillations. There was + little light but what came through the windows of the choir over which the + red curtains had been dropped and were beginning to glow with the downward + sun. The choir was guarded by a screen behind which a dozen venerable + voices droned vespers; but over the top of the screen came the heavy + radiance and played among the ornaments of the high fence round the + shrine, casting the shadow of the whole elaborate mass forward into the + obscured nave. The darkness of vaults and side-chapels is overwrought with + vague frescoes, most of them by Giotto and his school, out of which + confused richness the terribly distinct little faces characteristic of + these artists stare at you with a solemn formalism. Some are faded and + injured, and many so ill-lighted and ill-placed that you can only glance + at them with decent conjecture; the great group, however—four + paintings by Giotto on the ceiling above the altar—may be examined + with some success. Like everything of that grim and beautiful master they + deserve examination; but with the effect ever of carrying one’s + appreciation in and in, as it were, rather than of carrying it out and + out, off and off, as happens for us with those artists who have been + helped by the process of “evolution” to grow wings. This one, “going in” + for emphasis at any price, stamps hard, as who should say, on the very + spot of his idea—thanks to which fact he has a concentration that + has never been surpassed. He was in other words, in proportion to his + means, a genius supremely expressive; he makes the very shade of an + intended meaning or a represented attitude so unmistakable that his + figures affect us at moments as creatures all too suddenly, too + alarmingly, too menacingly met. Meagre, primitive, undeveloped, he yet is + immeasurably strong; he even suggests that if he had lived the due span of + years later Michael Angelo might have found a rival. Not that he is given, + however, to complicated postures or superhuman flights. The something + strange that troubles and haunts us in his work springs rather from a kind + of fierce familiarity. + </p> + <p> + It is part of the wealth of the lower church that it contains an admirable + primitive fresco by an artist of genius rarely encountered, Pietro + Cavallini, pupil of Giotto. This represents the Crucifixion; the three + crosses rising into a sky spotted with the winged heads of angels while a + dense crowd presses below. You will nowhere see anything more direfully + lugubrious, or more approaching for direct force, though not of course for + amplitude of style, Tintoretto’s great renderings of the scene in Venice. + The abject anguish of the crucified and the straddling authority and + brutality of the mounted guards in the foreground are contrasted in a + fashion worthy of a great dramatist. But the most poignant touch is the + tragic grimaces of the little angelic heads that fall like hailstones + through the dark air. It is genuine realistic weeping, the act of + irrepressible “crying,” that the painter has depicted, and the effect is + pitiful at the same time as grotesque. There are many more frescoes + besides; all the chapels on one side are lined with them, but these are + chiefly interesting in their general impressiveness—as they people + the dim recesses with startling presences, with apparitions out of scale. + Before leaving the place I lingered long near the door, for I was sure I + shouldn’t soon again enjoy such a feast of scenic composition. The + opposite end glowed with subdued colour; the middle portion was vague and + thick and brown, with two or three scattered worshippers looming through + the obscurity; while, all the way down, the polished pavement, its uneven + slabs glittering dimly in the obstructed light, was of the very essence of + expensive picture. It is certainly desirable, if one takes the lower + church of St. Francis to represent the human heart, that one should find a + few bright places there. But if the general effect is of brightness + terrorised and smothered, is the symbol less valid? For the contracted, + prejudiced, passionate heart let it stand. + </p> + <p> + One thing at all events we can say, that we should rejoice to boast as + capacious, symmetrical and well-ordered a head as the upper sanctuary. + Thanks to these merits, in spite of a brave array of Giottesque work which + has the advantage of being easily seen, it lacks the great character of + its counterpart. The frescoes, which are admirable, represent certain + leading events in the life of St. Francis, and suddenly remind you, by one + of those anomalies that are half the secret of the consummate <i>mise-en-scene</i> + of Catholicism, that the apostle of beggary, the saint whose only tenement + in life was the ragged robe which barely covered him, is the hero of this + massive structure. Church upon church, nothing less will adequately shroud + his consecrated clay. The great reality of Giotto’s designs adds to the + helpless wonderment with which we feel the passionate pluck of the Hero, + the sense of being separated from it by an impassable gulf, the reflection + on all that has come and gone to make morality at that vertiginous pitch + impossible. There are no such high places of humility left to climb to. An + observant friend who has lived long in Italy lately declared to me, + however, that she detested the name of this moralist, deeming him chief + propagator of the Italian vice most trying to the would-be lover of the + people, the want of personal self-respect. There is a solidarity in the + use of soap, and every cringing beggar, idler, liar and pilferer + flourished for her under the shadow of the great Francisan indifference to + it. She was possibly right; at Rome, at Naples, I might have admitted she + was right; but at Assisi, face to face with Giotto’s vivid chronicle, we + admire too much in its main subject the exquisite play of that subject’s + genius—we don’t remit to him, and this for very envy, a single throb + of his consciousness. It took in, that human, that divine embrace, + everything <i>but</i> soap. + </p> + <p> + I should find it hard to give an orderly account of my next adventures or + impressions at Assisi, which could n’t well be anything more than mere + romantic <i>flanerie</i>. One may easily plead as the final result of a + meditation at the shrine of St. Francis a great and even an amused + charity. This state of mind led me slowly up and down for a couple of + hours through the steep little streets, and at last stretched itself on + the grass with me in the shadow of the great ruined castle that decorates + so grandly the eminence above the town. I remember edging along the + sunless side of the small mouldy houses and pausing very often to look at + nothing in particular. It was all very hot, very hushed, very resignedly + but very persistently old. A wheeled vehicle in such a place is an event, + and the <i>forestiero’s</i> interrogative tread in the blank sonorous + lanes has the privilege of bringing the inhabitants to their doorways. + Some of the better houses, however, achieve a sombre stillness that + protests against the least curiosity as to what may happen in any such + century as this. You wonder, as you pass, what lingering old-world social + types vegetate there, but you won’t find out; albeit that in one very + silent little street I had a glimpse of an open door which I have not + forgotten. A long-haired peddler who must have been a Jew, and who yet + carried without prejudice a burden of mass-books and rosaries, was + offering his wares to a stout old priest. The priest had opened the door + rather stingily and appeared half-heartedly to dismiss him. But the + peddler held up something I couldn’t see; the priest wavered with a + timorous concession to profane curiosity and then furtively pulled the + agent of sophistication, or whatever it might be, into the house. I should + have liked to enter with that worthy. + </p> + <p> + I saw later some gentlemen of Assisi who also seemed bored enough to have + found entertainment in his tray. They were at the door of the cafe on the + Piazza, and were so thankful to me for asking them the way to the + cathedral that, answering all in chorus, they lighted up with smiles as + sympathetic as if I had done them a favour. Of that type were my mild, my + delicate adventures. The Piazza has a fine old portico of an ancient + Temple of Minerva—six fluted columns and a pediment, of beautiful + proportions, but sadly battered and decayed. Goethe, I believe, found it + much more interesting than the mighty mediaeval church, and Goethe, as a + cicerone, doubtless could have persuaded one that it was so; but in the + humble society of Murray we shall most of us find a richer sense in the + later monument. I found quaint old meanings enough in the dark yellow + facade of the small cathedral as I sat on a stone bench by the oblong + green stretched before it. This is a pleasing piece of Italian Gothic and, + like several of its companions at Assisi, has an elegant wheel window and + a number of grotesque little carvings of creatures human and bestial. If + with Goethe I were to balance anything against the attractions of the + double church I should choose the ruined castle on the hill above the + town. I had been having glimpses of it all the afternoon at the end of + steep street-vistas, and promising myself half-an-hour beside its grey + walls at sunset. The sun was very late setting, and my half-hour became a + long lounge in the lee of an abutment which arrested the gentle uproar of + the wind. The castle is a splendid piece of ruin, perched on the summit of + the mountain to whose slope Assisi clings and dropping a pair of stony + arms to enclose the little town in its embrace. The city wall, in other + words, straggles up the steep green hill and meets the crumbling skeleton + of the fortress. On the side off from the town the mountain plunges into a + deep ravine, the opposite face of which is formed by the powerful undraped + shoulder of Monte Subasio, a fierce reflector of the sun. Gorge and + mountain are wild enough, but their frown expires in the teeming softness + of the great vale of Umbria. To lie aloft there on the grass, with + silver-grey ramparts at one’s back and the warm rushing wind in one’s + ears, and watch the beautiful plain mellow into the tones of twilight, was + as exquisite a form of repose as ever fell to a tired tourist’s lot. + </p> + <p> + {Illustration: PERUGIA.} + </p> + <p> + Perugia too has an ancient stronghold, which one must speak of in earnest + as that unconscious humorist the classic American traveller is supposed + invariably to speak of the Colosseum: it will be a very handsome building + when it’s finished. Even Perugia is going the way of all Italy—straightening + out her streets, preparing her ruins, laying her venerable ghosts. The + castle is being completely <i>remis a neuf</i>—a Massachusetts + schoolhouse could n’t cultivate a “smarter" ideal. There are shops in the + basement and fresh putty on all the windows; so that the only thing proper + to a castle it has kept is its magnificent position and range, which you + may enjoy from the broad platform where the Perugini assemble at eventide. + Perugia is chiefly known to fame as the city of Raphael’s master; but it + has a still higher claim to renown and ought to figure in the gazetteer of + fond memory as the little City of the infinite View. The small dusky, + crooked place tries by a hundred prompt pretensions, immediate + contortions, rich mantling flushes and other ingenuities, to waylay your + attention and keep it at home; but your consciousness, alert and uneasy + from the first moment, is all abroad even when your back is turned to the + vast alternative or when fifty house-walls conceal it, and you are for + ever rushing up by-streets and peeping round corners in the hope of + another glimpse or reach of it. As it stretches away before you in that + eminent indifference to limits which is at the same time at every step an + eminent homage to style, it is altogether too free and fair for compasses + and terms. You can only say, and rest upon it, that you prefer it to any + other visible fruit of position or claimed empire of the eye that you are + anywhere likely to enjoy. + </p> + <p> + For it is such a wondrous mixture of blooming plain and gleaming river and + wavily-multitudinous mountain vaguely dotted with pale grey cities, that, + placed as you are, roughly speaking, in the centre of Italy, you all but + span the divine peninsula from sea to sea. Up the long vista of the Tiber + you look—almost to Rome; past Assisi, Spello, Foligno, Spoleto, all + perched on their respective heights and shining through the violet haze. + To the north, to the east, to the west, you see a hundred variations of + the prospect, of which I have kept no record. Two notes only I have made: + one—though who hasn’t made it over and over again?—on the + exquisite elegance of mountain forms in this endless play of the + excrescence, it being exactly as if there were variation of sex in the + upheaved mass, with the effect here mainly of contour and curve and + complexion determined in the feminine sense. It further came home to me + that the command of such an outlook on the world goes far, surely, to give + authority and centrality and experience, those of the great seats of + dominion, even to so scant a cluster of attesting objects as here. It must + deepen the civic consciousness and take off the edge of ennui. It performs + this kindly office, at any rate, for the traveller who may overstay his + curiosity as to Perugino and the Etruscan relics. It continually solicits + his wonder and praise—it reinforces the historic page. I spent a + week in the place, and when it was gone I had had enough of Perugino, but + had n’t had enough of the View. + </p> + <p> + I should perhaps do the reader a service by telling him just how a week at + Perugia may be spent. His first care must be to ignore the very dream of + haste, walking everywhere very slowly and very much at random, and to + impute an esoteric sense to almost anything his eye may happen to + encounter. Almost everything in fact lends itself to the historic, the + romantic, the æsthetic fallacy—almost everything has an antique + queerness and richness that ekes out the reduced state; that of a grim and + battered old adventuress, the heroine of many shames and scandals, + surviving to an extraordinary age and a considerable penury, but with + ancient gifts of princes and other forms of the wages of sin to show, and + the most beautiful garden of all the world to sit and doze and count her + beads in and remember. He must hang a great deal about the huge Palazzo + Pubblico, which indeed is very well worth any acquaintance you may scrape + with it. It masses itself gloomily above the narrow street to an immense + elevation, and leads up the eye along a cliff-like surface of rugged wall, + mottled with old scars and new repairs, to the loggia dizzily perched on + its cornice. He must repeat his visit to the Etruscan Gate, by whose + immemorial composition he must indeed linger long to resolve it back into + the elements originally attending it. He must uncap to the irrecoverable, + the inimitable style of the statue of Pope Julius III before the + cathedral, remembering that Hawthorne fabled his Miriam, in an air of + romance from which we are well-nigh as far to-day as from the building of + Etruscan gates, to have given rendezvous to Kenyon at its base. Its + material is a vivid green bronze, and the mantle and tiara are covered + with a delicate embroidery worthy of a silver-smith. + </p> + <p> + Then our leisurely friend must bestow on Perugino’s frescoes in the + Exchange, and on his pictures in the University, all the placid + contemplation they deserve. He must go to the theatre every evening, in an + orchestra-chair at twenty-two soldi, and enjoy the curious didacticism of + “Amore senza Stima,” “Severita e Debolezza,” “La Societa Equivoca,” and + other popular specimens of contemporaneous Italian comedy—unless + indeed the last-named be not the edifying title applied, for peninsular + use, to “Le Demi-Monde” of the younger Dumas. I shall be very much + surprised if, at the end of a week of this varied entertainment, he hasn’t + learnt how to live, not exactly in, but with, Perugia. His strolls will + abound in small accidents and mercies of vision, but of which a dozen + pencil-strokes would be a better memento than this poor word-sketching. + From the hill on which the town is planted radiate a dozen ravines, down + whose sides the houses slide and scramble with an alarming indifference to + the cohesion of their little rugged blocks of flinty red stone. You ramble + really nowhither without emerging on some small court or terrace that + throws your view across a gulf of tangled gardens or vineyards and over to + a cluster of serried black dwellings which have to hollow in their backs + to keep their balance on the opposite ledge. On archways and + street-staircases and dark alleys that bore through a density of massive + basements, and curve and climb and plunge as they go, all to the truest + mediaeval tune, you may feast your fill. These are the local, the + architectural, the compositional commonplaces.. Some of the little streets + in out-of-the-way corners are so rugged and brown and silent that you may + imagine them passages long since hewn by the pick-axe in a deserted + stone-quarry. The battered black houses, of the colour of buried things—things + buried, that is, in accumulations of time, closer packed, even as such + are, than spadefuls of earth—resemble exposed sections of natural + rock; none the less so when, beyond some narrow gap, you catch the blue + and silver of the sublime circle of landscape. + </p> + <p> + {Illustration: ETRUSCAN GATEWAY, PERUGIA.} + </p> + <p> + But I ought n’t to talk of mouldy alleys, or yet of azure distances, as if + they formed the main appeal to taste in this accomplished little city. In + the Sala del Cambio, where in ancient days the money-changers rattled + their embossed coin and figured up their profits, you may enjoy one of the + serenest aesthetic pleasures that the golden age of art anywhere offers + us. Bank parlours, I believe, are always handsomely appointed, but are + even those of Messrs. Rothschild such models of mural bravery as this + little counting-house of a bygone fashion? The bravery is Perugino’s own; + for, invited clearly to do his best, he left it as a lesson to the ages, + covering the four low walls and the vault with scriptural and mythological + figures of extraordinary beauty. They are ranged in artless attitudes + round the upper half of the room—the sibyls, the prophets, the + philosophers, the Greek and Roman heroes—looking down with broad + serene faces, with small mild eyes and sweet mouths that commit them to + nothing in particular unless to being comfortably and charmingly alive, at + the incongruous proceedings of a Board of Brokers. Had finance a very high + tone in those days, or were genius and faith then simply as frequent as + capital and enterprise are among ourselves? The great distinction of the + Sala del Cambio is that it has a friendly Yes for both these questions. + There was a rigid transactional probity, it seems to say; there was also a + high tide of inspiration. About the artist himself many things come up for + us—more than I can attempt in their order; for he was not, I think, + to an attentive observer, the mere smooth and entire and devout spirit we + at first are inclined to take him for. He has that about him which leads + us to wonder if he may not, after all, play a proper part enough here as + the patron of the money-changers. He is the delight of a million of young + ladies; but who knows whether we should n’t find in his works, might we + “go into” them a little, a trifle more of manner than of conviction, and + of system than of deep sincerity? + </p> + <p> + This, I allow, would put no great affront on them, and one speculates thus + partly but because it’s a pleasure to hang about him on any pretext, and + partly because his immediate effect is to make us quite inordinately + embrace the pretext of his lovely soul. His portrait, painted on the wall + of the Sala (you may see it also in Rome and Florence) might at any rate + serve for the likeness of Mr. Worldly-Wiseman in Bunyan’s allegory. He was + fond of his glass, I believe, and he made his art lucrative. This + tradition is not refuted by his preserved face, and after some experience—or + rather after a good deal, since you can’t have a <i>little</i> of + Perugino, who abounds wherever old masters congregate, so that one has + constantly the sense of being “in” for all there is—you may find an + echo of it in the uniform type of his creatures, their monotonous grace, + their prodigious invariability. He may very well have wanted to produce + figures of a substantial, yet at the same time of an impeccable innocence; + but we feel that he had taught himself <i>how</i> even beyond his own + belief in them, and had arrived at a process that acted at last + mechanically. I confess at the same time that, so interpreted, the painter + affects me as hardly less interesting, and one can’t but become conscious + of one’s style when one’s style has become, as it were, so conscious of + one’s, or at least of its own, fortune. If he was the inventor of a + remarkably calculable <i>facture</i>, a calculation that never fails is in + its way a grace of the first order, and there are things in this special + appearance of perfection of practice that make him the forerunner of a + mighty and more modern race. More than any of the early painters who + strongly charm, you may take all his measure from a single specimen. The + other samples infallibly match, reproduce unerringly the one type he had + mastered, but which had the good fortune to be adorably fair, to seem to + have dawned on a vision unsullied by the shadows of earth. Which truth, + moreover, leaves Perugino all delightful as composer and draughtsman; he + has in each of these characters a sort of spacious neatness which suggests + that the whole conception has been washed clean by some spiritual + chemistry the last thing before reaching the canvas; after which it has + been applied to that surface with a rare economy of time and means. Giotto + and Fra Angelico, beside him, are full of interesting waste and irrelevant + passion. In the sacristy of the charming church of San Pietro—a + museum of pictures and carvings—is a row of small heads of saints + formerly covering the frame of the artist’s Ascension, carried off by the + French. It is almost miniature work, and here at least Perugino triumphs + in sincerity, in apparent candour, as well as in touch. Two of the holy + men are reading their breviaries, but with an air of infantine innocence + quite consistent with their holding the book upside down. + </p> + <p> + Between Perugia and Cortona lies the large weedy water of Lake Thrasymene, + turned into a witching word for ever by Hannibal’s recorded victory over + Rome. Dim as such records have become to us and remote such realities, he + is yet a passionless pilgrim who does n’t, as he passes, of a heavy + summer’s day, feel the air and the light and the very faintness of the + breeze all charged and haunted with them, all interfused as with the + wasted ache of experience and with the vague historic gaze. Processions of + indistinguishable ghosts bore me company to Cortona itself, most sturdily + ancient of Italian towns. It must have been a seat of ancient knowledge + even when Hannibal and Flaminius came to the shock of battle, and have + looked down afar from its grey ramparts on the contending swarm with + something of the philosophic composure suitable to a survivor of Pelasgic + and Etruscan revolutions. These grey ramparts are in great part still + visible, and form the chief attraction of Cortona. It is perched on the + very pinnacle of a mountain, and I wound and doubled interminably over the + face of the great hill, while the jumbled roofs and towers of the arrogant + little city still seemed nearer to the sky than to the railway-station. + “Rather rough,” Murray pronounces the local inn; and rough indeed it was; + there was scarce a square foot of it that you would have cared to stroke + with your hand. The landlord himself, however, was all smoothness and the + best fellow in the world; he took me up into a rickety old loggia on the + tip-top of his establishment and played showman as to half the kingdoms of + the earth. I was free to decide at the same time whether my loss or my + gain was the greater for my seeing Cortona through the medium of a festa. + On the one hand the museum was closed (and in a certain sense the smaller + and obscurer the town the more I like the museum); the churches—an + interesting note of manners and morals—were impenetrably crowded, + though, for that matter, so was the cafe, where I found neither an empty + stool nor the edge of a table. I missed a sight of the famous painted + Muse, the art-treasure of Cortona and supposedly the most precious, as it + falls little short of being the only, sample of the Greek painted picture + that has come down to us. On the other hand, I saw—but this is what + I saw. + </p> + <p> + {Illustration: A STREET, CORTONA.} + </p> + <p> + A part of the mountain-top is occupied by the church of St. Margaret, and + this was St. Margaret’s day. The houses pause roundabout it and leave a + grassy slope, planted here and there with lean black cypresses. The + contadini from near and far had congregated in force and were crowding + into the church or winding up the slope. When I arrived they were all + kneeling or uncovered; a bedizened procession, with banners and censers, + bearing abroad, I believe, the relics of the saint, was re-entering the + church. The scene made one of those pictures that Italy still brushes in + for you with an incomparable hand and from an inexhaustible palette when + you find her in the mood. The day was superb—the sky blazed overhead + like a vault of deepest sapphire. The grave brown peasantry, with no great + accent of costume, but with sundry small ones—decked, that is, in + cheap fineries of scarlet and yellow—made a mass of motley colour in + the high wind-stirred light. The procession halted in the pious hush, and + the lovely land around and beneath us melted away, almost to either sea, + in tones of azure scarcely less intense than the sky. Behind the church + was an empty crumbling citadel, with half-a-dozen old women keeping the + gate for coppers. Here were views and breezes and sun and shade and grassy + corners to the heart’s content, together with one could n’t say what huge + seated mystic melancholy presence, the after-taste of everything the still + open maw of time had consumed. I chose a spot that fairly combined all + these advantages, a spot from which I seemed to look, as who should say, + straight down the throat of the monster, no dark passage now, but with all + the glorious day playing into it, and spent a good part of my stay at + Cortona lying there at my length and observing the situation over the top + of a volume that I must have brought in my pocket just for that especial + wanton luxury of the resource provided and slighted. In the afternoon I + came down and hustled a while through the crowded little streets, and then + strolled forth under the scorching sun and made the outer circuit of the + wall. There I found tremendous uncemented blocks; they glared and twinkled + in the powerful light, and I had to put on a blue eye-glass in order to + throw into its proper perspective the vague Etruscan past, obtruded and + magnified in such masses quite as with the effect of + inadequately-withdrawn hands and feet in photographs. + </p> + <p> + I spent the next day at Arezzo, but I confess in very much the same + uninvestigating fashion—taking in the “general impression,” I dare + say, at every pore, but rather systematically leaving the dust of the ages + unfingered on the stored records: I should doubtless, in the poor time at + my command, have fingered it to so little purpose. The seeker for the + story of things has moreover, if he be worth his salt, a hundred insidious + arts; and in that case indeed—by which I mean when his sensibility + has come duly to adjust itself—the story assaults him but from too + many sides. He even feels at moments that he must sneak along on tiptoe in + order not to have too much of it. Besides which the case all depends on + the kind of use, the range of application, his tangled consciousness, or + his intelligible genius, say, may come to recognize for it. At Arezzo, + however this might be, one was far from Rome, one was well within genial + Tuscany, and the historic, the romantic decoction seemed to reach one’s + lips in less stiff doses. There at once was the “general impression”—the + exquisite sense of the scarce expressible Tuscan quality, which makes + immediately, for the whole pitch of one’s perception, a grateful, a not at + all strenuous difference, attaches to almost any coherent group of + objects, to any happy aspect of the scene, for a main note, some mild + recall, through pleasant friendly colour, through settled ample form, + through something homely and economic too at the very heart of “style,” of + an identity of temperament and habit with those of the divine little + Florence that one originally knew. Adorable Italy in which, for the + constant renewal of interest, of attention, of affection, these + refinements of variety, these so harmoniously-grouped and + individually-seasoned fruits of the great garden of history, keep + presenting themselves! It seemed to fall in with the cheerful Tuscan + mildness for instance—sticking as I do to that ineffectual + expression of the Tuscan charm, of the yellow-brown Tuscan dignity at + large—that the ruined castle on the hill (with which agreeable + feature Arezzo is no less furnished than Assisi and Cortona) had been + converted into a great blooming, and I hope all profitable, podere or + market-garden. I lounged away the half-hours there under a spell as potent + as the “wildest” forecast of propriety—propriety to all the + particular conditions—could have figured it. I had seen Santa Maria + della Pieve and its campanile of quaint colonnades, the stately, dusky + cathedral—grass-plotted and residenced about almost after the + fashion of an English “close”—and John of Pisa’s elaborate marble + shrine; I had seen the museum and its Etruscan vases and majolica + platters. These were very well, but the old pacified citadel somehow, + through a day of soft saturation, placed me most in relation. Beautiful + hills surrounded it, cypresses cast straight shadows at its corners, while + in the middle grew a wondrous Italian tangle of wheat and corn, vines and + figs, peaches and cabbages, memories and images, anything and everything. + </p> + <h3> + 1873. + </h3> + <p> + <a name="link2H_4_0017" id="link2H_4_0017"> + <!-- H2 anchor --> </a> + </p> + <div style="height: 4em;"> + <br /><br /><br /><br /> + </div> + <h2> + SIENA EARLY AND LATE + </h2> + <h3> + I + </h3> + <p> + Florence being oppressively hot and delivered over to the mosquitoes, the + occasion seemed to favour that visit to Siena which I had more than once + planned and missed. I arrived late in the evening, by the light of a + magnificent moon, and while a couple of benignantly-mumbling old crones + were making up my bed at the inn strolled forth in quest of a first + impression. Five minutes brought me to where I might gather it unhindered + as it bloomed in the white moonshine. The great Piazza of Siena is famous, + and though in this day of multiplied photographs and blunted surprises and + profaned revelations none of the world’s wonders can pretend, like + Wordsworth’s phantom of delight, really to “startle and waylay,” yet as I + stepped upon the waiting scene from under a dark archway I was conscious + of no loss of the edge of a precious presented sensibility. The waiting + scene, as I have called it, was in the shape of a shallow horse-shoe—as + the untravelled reader who has turned over his travelled friends’ + portfolios will respectfully remember; or, better, of a bow in which the + high wide face of the Palazzo Pubblico forms the cord and everything else + the arc. It was void of any human presence that could figure to me the + current year; so that, the moonshine assisting, I had half-an-hour’s + infinite vision of mediæval Italy. The Piazza being built on the side of a + hill—or rather, as I believe science affirms, in the cup of a + volcanic crater—the vast pavement converges downwards in slanting + radiations of stone, the spokes of a great wheel, to a point directly + before the Palazzo, which may mark the hub, though it is nothing more + ornamental than the mouth of a drain. The great monument stands on the + lower side and might seem, in spite of its goodly mass and its embattled + cornice, to be rather defiantly out-countenanced by vast private + constructions occupying the opposite eminence. This might be, without the + extraordinary dignity of the architectural gesture with which the huge + high-shouldered pile asserts itself. + </p> + <p> + On the firm edge of the palace, from bracketed base to grey-capped summit + against the sky, where grows a tall slim tower which soars and soars till + it has given notice of the city’s greatness over the blue mountains that + mark the horizon. It rises as slender and straight as a pennoned lance + planted on the steel-shod toe of a mounted knight, and keeps all to itself + in the blue air, far above the changing fashions of the market, the proud + consciousness or rare arrogance once built into it. This beautiful tower, + the finest thing in Siena and, in its rigid fashion, as permanently fine + thus as a really handsome nose on a face of no matter what accumulated + age, figures there still as a Declaration of Independence beside which + such an affair as ours, thrown off at Philadelphia, appears to have scarce + done more than helplessly give way to time. Our Independence has become a + dependence on a thousand such dreadful things as the incorrupt declaration + of Siena strikes us as looking for ever straight over the level of. As it + stood silvered by the moonlight, while my greeting lasted, it seemed to + speak, all as from soul to soul, very much indeed as some ancient worthy + of a lower order, buttonholing one on the coveted chance and at the quiet + hour, might have done, of a state of things long and vulgarly superseded, + but to the pride and power, the once prodigious vitality, of which who + could expect any one effect to testify more incomparably, more + indestructibly, quite, as it were, more immortally? The gigantic houses + enclosing the rest of the Piazza took up the tale and mingled with it + their burden. “We are very old and a trifle weary, but we were built + strong and piled high, and we shall last for many an age. The present is + cold and heedless, but we keep ourselves in heart by brooding over our + store of memories and traditions. We are haunted houses in every creaking + timber and aching stone.” Such were the gossiping connections I + established with Siena before I went to bed. + </p> + <p> + Since that night I have had a week’s daylight knowledge of the surface of + the subject at least, and don’t know how I can better present it than + simply as another and a vivider page of the lesson that the ever-hungry + artist has only to <i>trust</i> old Italy for her to feed him at every + single step from her hand—and if not with one sort of sweetly-stale + grain from that wondrous mill of history which during so many ages ground + finer than any other on earth, why then always with something else. Siena + has at any rate “preserved appearances”—kept the greatest number of + them, that is, unaltered for the eye—about as consistently as one + can imagine the thing done. Other places perhaps may treat you to as + drowsy an odour of antiquity, but few exhale it from so large an area. + Lying massed within her walls on a dozen clustered hill-tops, she shows + you at every turn in how much greater a way she once lived; and if so much + of the grand manner is extinct, the receptacle of the ashes still solidly + rounds itself. This heavy general stress of all her emphasis on the past + is what she constantly keeps in your eyes and your ears, and if you be but + a casual observer and admirer the generalised response is mainly what you + give her. The casual observer, however beguiled, is mostly not very + learned, not over-equipped in advance with data; he hasn’t specialised, + his notions are necessarily vague, the chords of his imagination, for all + his good-will, are inevitably muffled and weak. But such as it is, his + received, his welcome impression serves his turn so far as the life of + sensibility goes, and reminds him from time to time that even the lore of + German doctors is but the shadow of satisfied curiosity. I have been + living at the inn, walking about the streets, sitting in the Piazza; these + are the simple terms of my experience. But streets and inns in Italy are + the vehicles of half one’s knowledge; if one has no fancy for their + lessons one may burn one’s note-book. In Siena everything is Sienese. The + inn has an English sign over the door—a little battered plate with a + rusty representation of the lion and the unicorn; but advance hopefully + into the mouldy stone alley which serves as vestibule and you will find + local colour enough. The landlord, I was told, had been servant in an + English family, and I was curious to see how he met the probable argument + of the casual Anglo-Saxon after the latter’s first twelve hours in his + establishment. As he failed to appear I asked the waiter if he, weren’t at + home. “Oh,” said the latter, “he’s a <i>piccolo grasso vecchiotto</i> who + doesn’t like to move.” I’m afraid this little fat old man has simply a bad + conscience. It’s no small burden for one who likes the Italians—as + who doesn’t, under this restriction?—to have so much indifference + even to rudimentary purifying processes to dispose of. What is the real + philosophy of dirty habits, and are foul surfaces merely superficial? If + unclean manners have in truth the moral meaning which I suspect in them we + must love Italy better than consistency. This a number of us are prepared + to do, but while we are making the sacrifice it is as well we should be + aware. + </p> + <p> + We may plead moreover for these impecunious heirs of the past that even if + it were easy to be clean in the midst of their mouldering heritage it + would be difficult to appear so. At the risk of seeming to flaunt the + silly superstition of restless renovation for the sake of renovation, + which is but the challenge of the infinitely precious principle of + duration, one is still moved to say that the prime result of one’s + contemplative strolls in the dusky alleys of such a place is an ineffable + sense of disrepair. Everything is cracking, peeling, fading, crumbling, + rotting. No young Sienese eyes rest upon anything youthful; they open into + a world battered and befouled with long use. Everything has passed its + meridian except the brilliant façade of the cathedral, which is being + diligently retouched and restored, and a few private palaces whose broad + fronts seem to have been lately furbished and polished. Siena was long ago + mellowed to the pictorial tone; the operation of time is now to deposit + shabbiness upon shabbiness. But it’s for the most part a patient, sturdy, + sympathetic shabbiness, which soothes rather than irritates the nerves, + and has in many cases doubtless as long a career to run as most of our + pert and shallow freshnesses. It projects at all events a deeper shadow + into the constant twilight of the narrow streets—that vague historic + dusk, as I may call it, in which one walks and wonders. These streets are + hardly more than sinuous flagged alleys, into which the huge black houses, + between their almost meeting cornices, suffer a meagre light to filter + down over rough-hewn stone, past windows often of graceful Gothic form, + and great pendent iron rings and twisted sockets for torches. Scattered + over their many-headed hill, they suffer the roadway often to incline to + the perpendicular, becoming so impracticable for vehicles that the sound + of wheels is only a trifle less anomalous than it would be in Venice. But + all day long there comes up to my window an incessant shuffling of feet + and clangour of voices. The weather is very warm for the season, all the + world is out of doors, and the Tuscan tongue (which in Siena is reputed to + have a classic purity) wags in every imaginable key. It doesn’t rest even + at night, and I am often an uninvited guest at concerts and <i>conversazioni</i> + at two o’clock in the morning. The concerts are sometimes charming. I not + only don’t curse my wakefulness, but go to my window to listen. Three men + come carolling by, trolling and quavering with voices of delightful + sweetness, or a lonely troubadour in his shirt-sleeves draws such artful + love-notes from his clear, fresh tenor, that I seem for the moment to be + behind the scenes at the opera, watching some Rubini or Mario go “on” and + waiting for the round of applause. In the intervals a couple of friends or + enemies stop—Italians always make their points in conversation by + pulling up, letting you walk on a few paces, to turn and find them + standing with finger on nose and engaging your interrogative eye—they + pause, by a happy instinct, directly under my window, and dispute their + point or tell their story or make their confidence. One scarce is sure + which it may be; everything has such an explosive promptness, such a + redundancy of inflection and action. But everything for that matter takes + on such dramatic life as our lame colloquies never know—so that + almost any uttered communications here become an acted play, improvised, + mimicked, proportioned and rounded, carried bravely to its <i>dénoûment</i>. + The speaker seems actually to establish his stage and face his + foot-lights, to create by a gesture a little scenic circumscription about + him; he rushes to and fro and shouts and stamps and postures, he ranges + through every phase of his inspiration. I noted the other evening a + striking instance of the spontaneity of the Italian gesture, in the person + of a small Sienese of I hardly know what exact age—the age of + inarticulate sounds and the experimental use of a spoon. It was a Sunday + evening, and this little man had accompanied his parents to the café. The + Caffè Greco at Siena is a most delightful institution; you get a capital + <i>demi-tasse</i> for three sous, and an excellent ice for eight, and + while you consume these easy luxuries you may buy from a little hunchback + the local weekly periodical, the <i>Vita Nuova</i>, for three centimes + (the two centimes left from your sou, if you are under the spell of this + magical frugality, will do to give the waiter). My young friend was + sitting on his father’s knee and helping himself to the half of a + strawberry-ice with which his mamma had presented him. He had so many + misadventures with his spoon that this lady at length confiscated it, + there being nothing left of the ice but a little crimson liquid which he + might dispose of by the common instinct of childhood. But he was no + friend, it appeared, to such freedoms; he was a perfect little gentleman + and he resented it being expected of him that he should drink down his + remnant. He protested therefore, and it was the manner of his protest that + struck me. He didn’t cry audibly, though he made a very wry face. It was + no stupid squall, and yet he was too young to speak. It was a penetrating + concord of inarticulately pleading, accusing sounds, accompanied by + gestures of the most exquisite propriety. These were perfectly mature; he + did everything that a man of forty would have done if he had been pouring + out a flood of sonorous eloquence. He shrugged his shoulders and wrinkled + his eyebrows, tossed out his hands and folded his arms, obtruded his chin + and bobbed about his head—and at last, I am happy to say, recovered + his spoon. If I had had a solid little silver one I would have presented + it to him as a testimonial to a perfect, though as yet unconscious, + artist. + </p> + <p> + My actual tribute to him, however, has diverted me from what I had in mind—a + much weightier matter—the great private palaces which are the + massive majestic syllables, sentences, periods, of the strange message the + place addresses to us. They are extraordinarily spacious and numerous, and + one wonders what part they can play in the meagre economy of the actual + city. The Siena of to-day is a mere shrunken semblance of the rabid little + republic which in the thirteenth century waged triumphant war with + Florence, cultivated the arts with splendour, planned a cathedral (though + it had ultimately to curtail the design) of proportions almost unequalled, + and contained a population of two hundred thousand souls. Many of these + dusky piles still bear the names of the old mediaeval magnates the vague + mild occupancy of whose descendants has the effect of armour of proof worn + over “pot” hats and tweed jackets and trousers. Half-a-dozen of them are + as high as the Strozzi and Riccardi palaces in Florence; they couldn’t + well be higher. The very essence of the romantic and the scenic is in the + way these colossal dwellings are packed together in their steep streets, + in the depths of their little enclosed, agglomerated city. When we, in our + day and country, raise a structure of half the mass and dignity, we leave + a great space about it in the manner of a pause after a showy speech. But + when a Sienese countess, as things are here, is doing her hair near the + window, she is a wonderfully near neighbour to the cavalier opposite, who + is being shaved by his valet. Possibly the countess doesn’t object to a + certain chosen publicity at her toilet; what does an Italian gentleman + assure me but that the aristocracy make very free with each other? Some of + the palaces are shown, but only when the occupants are at home, and now + they are in <i>villeggiatura</i>. Their villeggiatura lasts eight months + of the year, the waiter at the inn informs me, and they spend little more + than the carnival in the city. The gossip of an inn-waiter ought perhaps + to be beneath the dignity of even such thin history as this; but I confess + that when, as a story-seeker always and ever, I have come in from my + strolls with an irritated sense of the dumbness of stones and mortar, it + has been to listen with avidity, over my dinner, to the proffered + confidences of the worthy man who stands by with a napkin. His talk is + really very fine, and he prides himself greatly on his cultivated tone, to + which he calls my attention. He has very little good to say about the + Sienese nobility. They are “proprio d’origine egoista”—whatever that + may be—and there are many who can’t write their names. This may be + calumny; but I doubt whether the most blameless of them all could have + spoken more delicately of a lady of peculiar personal appearance who had + been dining near me. “She’s too fat,” I grossly said on her leaving the + room. The waiter shook his head with a little sniff: “È troppo materiale.” + This lady and her companion were the party whom, thinking I might relish a + little company—I had been dining alone for a week—he gleefully + announced to me as newly arrived Americans. They were Americans, I found, + who wore, pinned to their heads in permanence, the black lace veil or + mantilla, conveyed their beans to their mouth with a knife, and spoke a + strange raucous Spanish. They were in fine compatriots from Montevideo. + </p> + <p> + {Illustration: THE RED PALACE, SIENA.} + </p> + <p> + The genius of old Siena, however, would make little of any stress of such + distinctions; one representative of a far-off social platitude being about + as much in order as another as he stands before the great loggia of the + Casino di Nobili, the club of the best society. The nobility, which is + very numerous and very rich, is still, says the apparently competent + native I began by quoting, perfectly feudal and uplifted and separate. + Morally and intellectually, behind the walls of its palaces, the + fourteenth century, it’s thrilling to think, hasn’t ceased to hang on. + There is no bourgeoisie to speak of; immediately after the aristocracy + come the poor people, who are very poor indeed. My friend’s account of + these matters made me wish more than ever, as a lover of the preserved + social specimen, of type at almost any price, that one weren’t, a helpless + victim of the historic sense, reduced simply to staring at black stones + and peeping up stately staircases; and that when one had examined the + street-face of the palace, Murray in hand, one might walk up to the great + drawing-room, make one’s bow to the master and mistress, the old abbe and + the young count, and invite them to favour one with a sketch of their + social philosophy or a few first-hand family anecdotes. + </p> + <p> + The dusky labyrinth of the streets, we must in default of such initiations + content ourselves with noting, is interrupted by two great candid spaces: + the fan-shaped piazza, of which I just now said a word, and the smaller + square in which the cathedral erects its walls of many-coloured marble. Of + course since paying the great piazza my compliments by moonlight I have + strolled through it often at sunnier and shadier hours. The market is held + there, and wherever Italians buy and sell, wherever they count and chaffer—as + indeed you hear them do right and left, at almost any moment, as you take + your way among them—the pulse of life beats fast. It has been doing + so on the spot just named, I suppose, for the last five hundred years, and + during that time the cost of eggs and earthen pots has been gradually but + inexorably increasing. The buyers nevertheless wrestle over their + purchases as lustily as so many fourteenth-century burghers suddenly + waking up in horror to current prices. You have but to walk aside, + however, into the Palazzo Pubblico really to feel yourself a thrifty old + medievalist. The state affairs of the Republic were formerly transacted + here, but it now gives shelter to modern law-courts and other prosy + business. I was marched through a number of vaulted halls and chambers, + which, in the intervals of the administrative sessions held in them, are + peopled only by the great mouldering archaic frescoes—anything but + inanimate these even in their present ruin—that cover the walls and + ceiling. The chief painters of the Sienese school lent a hand in producing + the works I name, and you may complete there the connoisseurship in which, + possibly, you will have embarked at the Academy. I say “possibly” to be + very judicial, my own observation having led me no great length. I have + rather than otherwise cherished the thought that the Sienese school + suffers one’s eagerness peacefully to slumber—benignantly abstains + in fact from whipping up a languid curiosity and a tepid faith. “A + formidable rival to the Florentine,” says some book—I forget which—into + which I recently glanced. Not a bit of it thereupon boldly say I; the + Florentines may rest on their laurels and the lounger on his lounge. The + early painters of the two groups have indeed much in common; but the + Florentines had the good fortune to see their efforts gathered up and + applied by a few pre-eminent spirits, such as never came to the rescue of + the groping Sienese. Fra Angelico and Ghirlandaio said all their feebler + <i>confrères</i> dreamt of and a great deal more beside, but the + inspiration of Simone Memmi and Ambrogio Lorenzetti and Sano di Pietro has + a painful air of never efflorescing into a maximum. Sodoma and Beccafumi + are to my taste a rather abortive maximum. But one should speak of them + all gently—and I do, from my soul; for their labour, by their + lights, has wrought a precious heritage of still-living colour and rich + figure-peopled shadow for the echoing chambers of their old civic + fortress. The faded frescoes cover the walls like quaintly-storied + tapestries; in one way or another they cast their spell. If one owes a + large debt of pleasure to pictorial art one comes to think tenderly and + easily of its whole evolution, as of the conscious experience of a single + mysterious, striving spirit, and one shrinks from saying rude things about + any particular phase of it, just as one would from referring without + precautions to some error or lapse in the life of a person one esteemed. + You don’t care to remind a grizzled veteran of his defeats, and why should + we linger in Siena to talk about Beccafumi? I by no means go so far as to + say, with an amateur with whom I have just been discussing the matter, + that “Sodoma is a precious poor painter and Beccafumi no painter at all”; + but, opportunity being limited, I am willing to let the remark about + Beccafumi pass for true. With regard to Sodoma, I remember seeing four + years ago in the choir of the Cathedral of Pisa a certain small dusky + specimen of the painter—an Abraham and Isaac, if I am not mistaken—which + was charged with a gloomy grace. One rarely meets him in general + collections, and I had never done so till the other day. He was not + prolific, apparently; he had however his own elegance, and his rarity is a + part of it. + </p> + <p> + Here in Siena are a couple of dozen scattered frescoes and three or four + canvases; his masterpiece, among others, an harmonious Descent from the + Cross. I wouldn’t give a fig for the equilibrium of the figures or the + ladders; but while it lasts the scene is all intensely solemn and graceful + and sweet—too sweet for so bitter a subject. Sodoma’s women are + strangely sweet; an imaginative sense of morbid appealing attitude—as + notably in the sentimental, the pathetic, but the none the less pleasant, + “Swooning of St. Catherine,” the great Sienese heroine, at San Domenico—seems + to me the author’s finest accomplishment. His frescoes have all the same + almost appealing evasion of difficulty, and a kind of mild melancholy + which I am inclined to think the sincerest part of them, for it strikes me + as practically the artist’s depressed suspicion of his own want of force. + Once he determined, however, that if he couldn’t be strong he would make + capital of his weakness, and painted the Christ bound to the Column, of + the Academy. Here he got much nearer and I have no doubt mixed his colours + with his tears; but the result can’t be better described than by saying + that it is, pictorially, the first of the modern Christs. Unfortunately it + hasn’t been the last. + </p> + <p> + {Illustration: SAN DOMINICO, SIENA} + </p> + <p> + The main strength of Sienese art went possibly into the erection of the + Cathedral, and yet even here the strength is not of the greatest strain. + If, however, there are more interesting temples in Italy, there are few + more richly and variously scenic and splendid, the comparative meagreness + of the architectural idea being overlaid by a marvellous wealth of + ingenious detail. Opposite the church—with the dull old archbishop’s + palace on one side and a dismantled residence of the late Grand Duke of + Tuscany on the other—is an ancient hospital with a big stone bench + running all along its front. Here I have sat a while every morning for a + week, like a philosophic convalescent, watching the florid façade of the + cathedral glitter against the deep blue sky. It has been lavishly restored + of late years, and the fresh white marble of the densely clustered + pinnacles and statues and beasts and flowers flashes in the sunshine like + a mosaic of jewels. There is more of this goldsmith’s work in stone than I + can remember or describe; it is piled up over three great doors with + immense margins of exquisite decorative sculpture—still in the + ancient cream-coloured marble—and beneath three sharp pediments + embossed with images relieved against red marble and tipped with golden + mosaics. It is in the highest degree fantastic and luxuriant—it is + on the whole very lovely. As a triumph of the many-hued it prepares you + for the interior, where the same parti-coloured splendour is endlessly at + play—a confident complication of harmonies and contrasts and of the + minor structural refinements and braveries. The internal surface is mainly + wrought in alternate courses of black and white marble; but as the latter + has been dimmed by the centuries to a fine mild brown the place is all a + concert of relieved and dispersed glooms. Save for Pinturicchio’s + brilliant frescoes in the Sacristy there are no pictures to speak of; but + the pavement is covered with many elaborate designs in black and white + mosaic after cartoons by Beccafumi. The patient skill of these + compositions makes them a rare piece of decoration; yet even here the + friend whom I lately quoted rejects this over-ripe fruit of the Sienese + school. The designs are nonsensical, he declares, and all his admiration + is for the cunning artisans who have imitated the hatchings and shadings + and hair-strokes of the pencil by the finest curves of inserted black + stone. But the true romance of handiwork at Siena is to be seen in the + wondrous stalls of the choir, under the coloured light of the great + wheel-window. Wood-carving has ever been a cherished craft of the place, + and the best masters of the art during the fifteenth century lavished + themselves on this prodigious task. It is the frost-work on one’s + window-panes interpreted in polished oak. It would be hard to find, + doubtless, a more moving illustration of the peculiar patience, the sacred + candour, of the great time. Into such artistry as this the author seems to + put more of his personal substance than into any other; he has to wrestle + not only with his subject, but with his material. He is richly fortunate + when his subject is charming—when his devices, inventions and + fantasies spring lightly to his hand; for in the material itself, after + age and use have ripened and polished and darkened it to the richness of + ebony and to a greater warmth there is something surpassingly delectable + and venerable. Wander behind the altar at Siena when the chanting is over + and the incense has faded, and look well at the stalls of the Barili. + </p> + <h3> + 1873. + </h3> + <h3> + II + </h3> + <p> + I leave the impression noted in the foregoing pages to tell its own small + story, but have it on my conscience to wonder, in this connection, quite + candidly and publicly and by way of due penance, at the scantness of such + first-fruits of my sensibility. I was to see Siena repeatedly in the years + to follow, I was to know her better, and I would say that I was to do her + an ampler justice didn’t that remark seem to reflect a little on my + earlier poor judgment. This judgment strikes me to-day as having fallen + short—true as it may be that I find ever a value, or at least an + interest, even in the moods and humours and lapses of any brooding, musing + or fantasticating observer to whom the finer sense of things is <i>on the + whole</i> not closed. If he has on a given occasion nodded or stumbled or + strayed, this fact by itself speaks to me of him—speaks to me, that + is, of his faculty and his idiosyncrasies, and I care nothing for the + application of his faculty unless it be, first of all, in itself + interesting. Which may serve as my reply to any objection here breaking + out—on the ground that if a spectator’s languors are evidence, of a + sort, about that personage, they are scarce evident about the case before + him, at least if the case be important. I let my perhaps rather weak + expression of the sense of Siena stand, at any rate—for the sake of + what I myself read into it; but I should like to amplify it by other + memories, and would do so eagerly if I might here enjoy the space. The + difficulty for these rectifications is that if the early vision has failed + of competence or of full felicity, if initiation has thus been slow, so, + with renewals and extensions, so, with the larger experience, one + hindrance is exchanged for another. There is quite such a possibility as + having lived into a relation too much to be able to make a statement of + it. + </p> + <p> + I remember on one occasion arriving very late of a summer night, after an + almost unbroken run from London, and the note of that approach—I was + the only person alighting at the station below the great hill of the + little fortress city, under whose at once frowning and gaping gate I must + have passed, in the warm darkness and the absolute stillness, very much + after the felt fashion of a person of importance about to be enormously + incarcerated—gives me, for preservation thus belated, the pitch, as + I may call it, at various times, though always at one season, of an almost + systematised esthetic use of the place. It wasn’t to be denied that the + immensely better “accommodations” instituted by the multiplying, though + alas more bustling, years had to be recognised as supplying a basis, + comparatively prosaic if one would, to that luxury. No sooner have I + written which words, however, than I find myself adding that one + “wouldn’t,” that one doesn’t—doesn’t, that is, consent now to regard + the then “new” hotel (pretty old indeed by this time) as anything but an + aid to a free play of perception. The strong and rank old Arme + d’Inghilterra, in the darker street, has passed away; but its ancient + rival the Aquila Nera put forth claims to modernisation, and the Grand + Hotel, the still fresher flower of modernity near the gate by which you + enter from the station, takes on to my present remembrance a mellowness as + of all sorts of comfort, cleanliness and kindness. The particular facts, + those of the visit I began here by alluding to and those of still others, + at all events, inveterately made in June or early in July, enter together + in a fusion as of hot golden-brown objects seen through the practicable + crevices of shutters drawn upon high, cool, darkened rooms where the + scheme of the scene involved longish days of quiet work, with late + afternoon emergence and contemplation waiting on the better or the worse + conscience. I thus associate the compact world of the admirable hill-top, + the world of a predominant golden-brown, with a general invocation of + sensibility and fancy, and think of myself as going forth into the + lingering light of summer evenings all attuned to intensity of the idea of + compositional beauty, or in other words, freely speaking, to the question + of colour, to intensity of picture. To communicate with Siena in this + charming way was thus, I admit, to have no great margin for the + prosecution of inquiries, but I am not sure that it wasn’t, little by + little, to feel the whole combination of elements better than by a more + exemplary method, and this from beginning to end of the scale. + </p> + <p> + More of the elements indeed, for memory, hang about the days that were + ushered in by that straight flight from the north than about any other + series—if partly, doubtless, but because of my having then stayed + longest. I specify it at all events for fond reminiscence as the year, the + only year, at which I was present at the Palio, the earlier one, the + series of furious horse-races between elected representatives of different + quarters of the town taking place toward the end of June, as the second + and still more characteristic exhibition of the same sort is appointed to + the month of August; a spectacle that I am far from speaking of as the + finest flower of my old and perhaps even a little faded cluster of + impressions, but which smudges that special sojourn as with the big thumb—mark + of a slightly soiled and decidedly ensanguined hand. For really, after + all, the great loud gaudy romp or heated frolic, simulating ferocity if + not achieving it, that is the annual pride of the town, was not + intrinsically, to my-view, extraordinarily impressive—in spite of + its bristling with all due testimony to the passionate Italian clutch of + any pretext for costume and attitude and utterance, for mumming and + masquerading and raucously representing; the vast cheap vividness rather + somehow refines itself, and the swarm and hubbub of the immense square + melt, to the uplifted sense of a very high-placed balcony of the + overhanging Chigi palace, where everything was superseded but the intenser + passage, across the ages, of the great Renaissance tradition of + architecture and the infinite sweetness of the waning golden day. The + Palio, indubitably, was <i>criard</i>—and the more so for quite + monopolising, at Siena, the note of crudity; and much of it demanded + doubtless of one’s patience a due respect for the long local continuity of + such things; it drops into its humoured position, however, in any + retrospective command of the many brave aspects of the prodigious place. + Not that I am pretending here, even for rectification, to take these at + all in turn; I only go on a little with my rueful glance at the marked + gaps left in my original report of sympathies entertained. + </p> + <p> + I bow my head for instance to the mystery of my not having mentioned that + the coolest and freshest flower of the day was ever that of one’s constant + renewal of a charmed homage to Pinturicchio, coolest and freshest and + signally youngest and most matutinal (as distinguished from merely + primitive or crepuscular) of painters, in the library or sacristy of the + Cathedral. Did I <i>always</i> find time before work to spend half-an-hour + of immersion, under that splendid roof, in the clearest and tenderest, the + very cleanest and “straightest,” as it masters our envious credulity, of + all storied fresco-worlds? This wondrous apartment, a monument in itself + to the ancient pride and power of the Church, and which contains an + unsurpassed treasure of gloriously illuminated missals, psalters and other + vast parchment folios, almost each of whose successive leaves gives the + impression of rubies, sapphires and emeralds set in gold and practically + embedded in the page, offers thus to view, after a fashion splendidly + sustained, a pictorial record of the career of Pope Pius II, Aeneas + Sylvius of the Siena Piccolomini (who gave him for an immediate successor + a second of their name), most profanely literary of Pontiffs and last of + would-be Crusaders, whose adventures and achievements under Pinturicchio’s + brush smooth themselves out for us very much to the tune of the “stories” + told by some fine old man of the world, at the restful end of his life, to + the cluster of his grandchildren. The end of AEneas Sylvius was not + restful; he died at Ancona in troublous times, preaching war, and + attempting to make it, against the then terrific Turk; but over no great + worldly personal legend, among those of men of arduous affairs, arches a + fairer, lighter or more pacific memorial vault than the shining Libreria + of Siena. I seem to remember having it and its unfrequented enclosing + precinct so often all to myself that I must indeed mostly have resorted to + it for a prompt benediction on the day. Like no other strong solicitation, + among artistic appeals to which one may compare it up and down the whole + wonderful country, is the felt neighbouring presence of the overwrought + Cathedral in its little proud possessive town: you may so often feel by + the week at a time that it stands there really for your own personal + enjoyment, your romantic convenience, your small wanton aesthetic use. In + such a light shines for me, at all events, under such an accumulation and + complication of tone flushes and darkens and richly recedes for me, across + the years, the treasure-house of many-coloured marbles in the untrodden, + the drowsy, empty Sienese square. One could positively do, in the free + exercise of any responsible fancy or luxurious taste, what one would with + it. + </p> + <p> + But that proposition holds true, after all, for almost any mild pastime of + the incurable student of loose meanings and stray relics and odd + references and dim analogies in an Italian hill-city bronzed and seasoned + by the ages. I ought perhaps, for justification of the right to talk, to + have plunged into the Siena archives of which, on one occasion, a kindly + custodian gave me, in rather dusty and stuffy conditions, as the incident + vaguely comes back to me, a glimpse that was like a moment’s stand at the + mouth of a deep, dark mine. I didn’t descend into the pit; I did, instead + of this, a much idler and easier thing: I simply went every afternoon, my + stint of work over, I like to recall, for a musing stroll upon the Lizza—the + Lizza which had its own unpretentious but quite insidious art of meeting + the lover of old stories halfway. The great and subtle thing, if you are + not a strenuous specialist, in places of a heavily charged historic + consciousness, is to profit by the sense of that consciousness—or in + other words to cultivate a relation with the oracle—after the + fashion that suits yourself; so that if the general after-taste of + experience, experience at large, the fine distilled essence of the matter, + seems to breathe, in such a case, from the very stones and to make a thick + strong liquor of the very air, you may thus gather as you pass what is + most to your purpose; which is more the indestructible mixture of lived + things, with its concentrated lingering odour, than any interminable list + of numbered chapters and verses. Chapters and verses, literally scanned, + refuse coincidence, mostly, with the divisional proprieties of your own + pile of manuscript—which is but another way of saying, in short, + that if the Lizza is a mere fortified promontory of the great Sienese + hill, serving at once as a stronghold for the present military garrison + and as a planted and benched and band-standed walk and recreation-ground + for the citizens, so I could never, toward close of day, either have + enough of it or yet feel the vaguest saunterings there to be vain. They + were vague with the qualification always of that finer massing, as one + wandered off, of the bronzed and seasoned element, the huge rock pedestal, + the bravery of walls and gates and towers and palaces and loudly asserted + dominion; and then of that pervaded or mildly infested air in which one + feels the experience of the ages, of which I just spoke, to be exquisitely + in solution; and lastly of the wide, strange, sad, beautiful horizon, a + rim of far mountains that always pictured, for the leaner on old rubbed + and smoothed parapets at the sunset hour, a country not exactly blighted + or deserted, but that had had its life, on an immense scale, and had gone, + with all its memories and relics, into rather austere, in fact into almost + grim and misanthropic, retirement. This was a manner and a mood, at any + rate, in all the land, that favoured in the late afternoons the divinest + landscape blues and purples—not to speak of its favouring still more + my practical contention that the whole guarded headland in question, with + the immense ramparts of golden brown and red that dropped into vineyards + and orchards and cornfields and all the rustic elegance of the Tuscan <i>podere</i>, + was knitting for me a chain of unforgettable hours; to the justice of + which claim let these divagations testify. + </p> + <p> + It wasn’t, however, that one mightn’t without disloyalty to that scheme of + profit seek impressions further afield—though indeed I may best say + of such a matter as the long pilgrimage to the pictured convent of Monte + Oliveto that it but played on the same fine chords as the overhanging, the + far-gazing Lizza. What it came to was that one simply put to the friendly + test, as it were, the mood and manner of the country. This remembrance is + precious, but the demonstration of that sense as of a great heaving region + stilled by some final shock and returning thoughtfully, in fact + tragically, on itself, couldn’t have been more pointed. The long-drawn + rural road I refer to, stretching over hill and dale and to which I + devoted the whole of the longest day of the year—I was in a small + single-horse conveyance, of which I had already made appreciative use, and + with a driver as disposed as myself ever to sacrifice speed to + contemplation—is doubtless familiar now with the rush of the + motor-car; the thought of whose free dealings with the solitude of Monte + Oliveto makes me a little ruefully reconsider, I confess, the spirit in + which I have elsewhere in these pages, on behalf of the lust, the + landscape lust, of the eyes, acknowledged our general increasing debt to + that vehicle. For that we met nothing whatever, as I seem at this distance + of time to recall, while we gently trotted and trotted through the + splendid summer hours and a dry desolation that yet somehow smiled and + smiled, was part of the charm and the intimacy of the whole impression—the + impression that culminated at last, before the great cloistered square, + lonely, bleak and stricken, in the almost aching vision, more frequent in + the Italy of to-day than anywhere in the world, of the uncalculated waste + of a myriad forms of piety, forces of labour, beautiful fruits of genius. + However, one gaped above all things for the impression, and what one + mainly asked was that it should be strong of its kind. That was the case, + I think I couldn’t but feel, at every moment of the couple of hours I + spent in the vast, cold, empty shell, out of which the Benedictine + brotherhood sheltered there for ages had lately been turned by the strong + arm of a secular State. There was but one good brother left, a very lean + and tough survivor, a dusky, elderly, friendly Abbate, of an indescribable + type and a perfect manner, of whom I think I felt immediately thereafter + that I should have liked to say much, but as to whom I must have yielded + to the fact that ingenious and vivid commemoration was even then in store + for him. Literary portraiture had marked him for its own, and in the short + story of <i>Un Saint</i>, one of the most finished of contemporary French + <i>nouvelles</i>, the art and the sympathy of Monsieur Paul Bourget + preserve his interesting image. He figures in the beautiful tale, the + Abbate of the desolate cloister and of those comparatively quiet years, as + a clean, clear type of sainthood; a circumstance this in itself to cause a + fond analyst of other than “Latin” race (model and painter in this case + having their Latinism so strongly in common) almost endlessly to meditate. + Oh, the unutterable differences in any scheme or estimate of physiognomic + values, in any range of sensibility to expressional association, among + observers of different, of inevitably more or less opposed, traditional + and “racial” points of view! One had heard convinced Latins—or at + least I had!—speak of situations of trust and intimacy in which they + couldn’t have endured near them a Protestant or, as who should say for + instance, an Anglo-Saxon; but I was to remember my own private attempt to + measure such a change of sensibility as might have permitted the prolonged + close approach of the dear dingy, half-starved, very possibly all heroic, + and quite ideally urbane Abbate. The depth upon depth of things, the cloud + upon cloud of associations, on one side and the other, that would have had + to change first! + </p> + <p> + To which I may add nevertheless that since one ever supremely invoked + intensity of impression and abundance of character, I feasted my fill of + it at Monte Oliveto, and that for that matter this would have constituted + my sole refreshment in the vast icy void of the blighted refectory if I + hadn’t bethought myself of bringing with me a scrap of food, too scantly + apportioned, I recollect—very scantly indeed, since my <i>cocchiere</i> + was to share with me—by my purveyor at Siena. Our tragic—even + if so tenderly tragic—entertainer had nothing to give us; but the + immemorial cold of the enormous monastic interior in which we smilingly + fasted would doubtless not have had for me without that such a wealth of + reference. I was to have “liked” the whole adventure, so I must somehow + have liked that; by which remark I am recalled to the special treasure of + the desecrated temple, those extraordinarily strong and brave frescoes of + Luca Signorelli and Sodoma that adorn, in admirable condition, several + stretches of cloister wall. These creations in a manner took care of + themselves; aided by the blue of the sky above the cloister-court they + glowed, they insistently lived; I remember the frigid prowl through all + the rest of the bareness, including that of the big dishonoured church and + that even of the Abbate’s abysmally resigned testimony to his mere human + and personal situation; and then, with such a force of contrast and effect + of relief, the great sheltered sun-flares and colour-patches of scenic + composition and design where a couple of hands centuries ago turned to + dust had so wrought the defiant miracle of life and beauty that the effect + is of a garden blooming among ruins. Discredited somehow, since they all + would, the destroyers themselves, the ancient piety, the general spirit + and intention, but still bright and assured and sublime—practically, + enviably immortal—the other, the still subtler, the all aesthetic + good faith. + </p> + <h3> + 1909. + </h3> + <p> + <a name="link2H_4_0018" id="link2H_4_0018"> + <!-- H2 anchor --> </a> + </p> + <div style="height: 4em;"> + <br /><br /><br /><br /> + </div> + <h2> + THE AUTUMN IN FLORENCE + </h2> + <p> + Florence too has its “season,” not less than Rome, and I have been + rejoicing for the past six weeks in the fact that this comparatively + crowded parenthesis hasn’t yet been opened. Coming here in the first days + of October I found the summer still in almost unmenaced possession, and + ever since, till within a day or two, the weight of its hand has been + sensible. Properly enough, as the city of flowers, Florence mingles the + elements most artfully in the spring—during the divine crescendo of + March and April, the weeks when six months of steady shiver have still not + shaken New York and Boston free of the long Polar reach. But the very + quality of the decline of the year as we at present here feel it suits + peculiarly the mood in which an undiscourageable gatherer of the sense of + things, or taster at least of “charm,” moves through these many-memoried + streets and galleries and churches. Old things, old places, old people, or + at least old races, ever strike us as giving out their secrets most freely + in such moist, grey, melancholy days as have formed the complexion of the + past fortnight. With Christmas arrives the opera, the only opera worth + speaking of—which indeed often means in Florence the only opera + worth talking through; the gaiety, the gossip, the reminders in fine of + the cosmopolite and watering-place character to which the city of the + Medici long ago began to bend her antique temper. Meanwhile it is pleasant + enough for the tasters of charm, as I say, and for the makers of invidious + distinctions, that the Americans haven’t all arrived, however many may be + on their way, and that the weather has a monotonous overcast softness in + which, apparently, aimless contemplation grows less and less ashamed. + There is no crush along the Cascine, as on the sunny days of winter, and + the Arno, wandering away toward the mountains in the haze, seems as shy of + being looked at as a good picture in a bad light. No light, to my eyes, + nevertheless, could be better than this, which reaches us, all strained + and filtered and refined, exquisitely coloured and even a bit + conspicuously sophisticated, through the heavy air of the past that hangs + about the place for ever. + </p> + <p> + I first knew Florence early enough, I am happy to say, to have heard the + change for the worse, the taint of the modern order, bitterly lamented by + old haunters, admirers, lovers—those qualified to present a picture + of the conditions prevailing under the good old Grand-Dukes, the two last + of their line in especial, that, for its blest reflection of sweetness and + mildness and cheapness and ease, of every immediate boon in life to be + enjoyed quite for nothing, could but draw tears from belated listeners. + Some of these survivors from the golden age—just the beauty of which + indeed was in the gold, of sorts, that it poured into your lap, and not in + the least in its own importunity on that head—have needfully + lingered on, have seen the ancient walls pulled down and the compact and + belted mass of which the Piazza della Signoria was the immemorial centre + expand, under the treatment of enterprising syndics, into an ungirdled + organism of the type, as they viciously say, of Chicago; one of those + places of which, as their grace of a circumference is nowhere, the dignity + of a centre can no longer be predicated. Florence loses itself to-day in + dusty boulevards and smart <i>beaux quartiers</i>, such as Napoleon III + and Baron Haussmann were to set the fashion of to a too mediæval Europe—with + the effect of some precious page of antique text swallowed up in a + marginal commentary that smacks of the style of the newspaper. So much for + what has happened on this side of that line of demarcation which, by an + odd law, makes us, with our preference for what we are pleased to call the + picturesque, object to such occurrences even <i>as</i> occurrences. The + real truth is that objections are too vain, and that he would be too rude + a critic here, just now, who shouldn’t be in the humour to take the thick + with the thin and to try at least to read something of the old soul into + the new forms. + </p> + <p> + There is something to be said moreover for your liking a city (once it’s a + question of your actively circulating) to pretend to comfort you more by + its extent than by its limits; in addition to which Florence was + anciently, was in her palmy days peculiarly, a daughter of change and + movement and variety, of shifting moods, policies and régimes—just + as the Florentine character, as we have it to-day, is a character that + takes all things easily for having seen so many come and go. It saw the + national capital, a few years since, arrive and sit down by the Arno, and + took no further thought than sufficed for the day; then it saw, the odd + visitor depart and whistled her cheerfully on her way to Rome. The new + boulevards of the Sindaco Peruzzi come, it may be said, but they don’t go; + which, after all, it isn’t from the æsthetic point of view strictly + necessary they should. A part of the essential amiability of Florence, of + her genius for making you take to your favour on easy terms everything + that in any way belongs to her, is that she has already flung an element + of her grace over all their undried mortar and plaster. Such modern + arrangements as the Piazza d’ Azeglio and the <i>viale</i> or Avenue of + the Princess Margaret please not a little, I think—for what they + are!—and do so even in a degree, by some fine local privilege just + because they are Florentine. The afternoon lights rest on them as if to + thank them for not being worse, and their vistas are liberal where they + look toward the hills. They carry you close to these admirable elevations, + which hang over Florence on all sides, and if in the foreground your sense + is a trifle perplexed by the white pavements dotted here and there with a + policeman or a nursemaid, you have only to reach beyond and see Fiesole + turn to violet, on its ample eminence, from the effect of the opposite + sunset. + </p> + <p> + Facing again then to Florence proper you have local colour enough and to + spare—which you enjoy the more, doubtless, from standing off to get + your light and your point of view. The elder streets abutting on all this + newness bore away into the heart of the city in narrow, dusky perspectives + that quite refine, in certain places, by an art of their own, on the + romantic appeal. There are temporal and other accidents thanks to which, + as you pause to look down them and to penetrate the deepening shadows that + accompany their retreat, they resemble little corridors leading out from + the past, mystical like the ladder in Jacob’s dream; so that when you see + a single figure advance and draw nearer you are half afraid to wait till + it arrives—it must be too much of the nature of a ghost, a messenger + from an underworld. However this may be, a place paved with such great + mosaics of slabs and lined with palaces of so massive a tradition, + structures which, in their large dependence on pure proportion for + interest and beauty, reproduce more than other modern styles the simple + nobleness of Greek architecture, must ever have placed dignity first in + the scale of invoked effect and laid up no great treasure of that ragged + picturesqueness—the picturesqueness of large poverty—on which + we feast our idle eyes at Rome and Naples. Except in the unfinished fronts + of the churches, which, however, unfortunately, are mere ugly blankness, + one finds less of the poetry of ancient over-use, or in other words less + romantic southern shabbiness, than in most Italian cities. At two or three + points, none the less, this sinister grace exists in perfection—just + such perfection as so often proves that what is literally hideous may be + constructively delightful and what is intrinsically tragic play on the + finest chords of appreciation. On the north side of the Arno, between + Ponte Vecchio and Ponte Santa Trinita, is a row of immemorial houses that + back on the river, in whose yellow flood they bathe their sore old feet. + Anything more battered and befouled, more cracked and disjointed, dirtier, + drearier, poorer, it would be impossible to conceive. They look as if + fifty years ago the liquid mud had risen over their chimneys and then + subsided again and left them coated for ever with its unsightly slime. And + yet forsooth, because the river is yellow, and the light is yellow, and + here and there, elsewhere, some mellow mouldering surface, some hint of + colour, some accident of atmosphere, takes up the foolish tale and repeats + the note—because, in short, it is Florence, it is Italy, and the + fond appraiser, the infatuated alien, may have had in his eyes, at birth + and afterwards, the micaceous sparkle of brown-stone fronts no more + interesting than so much sand-paper, these miserable dwellings, instead of + suggesting mental invocations to an enterprising board of health, simply + create their own standard of felicity and shamelessly live in it. Lately, + during the misty autumn nights, the moon has shone on them faintly and + refined their shabbiness away into something ineffably strange and + spectral. The turbid stream sweeps along without a sound, and the pale + tenements hang above it like a vague miasmatic exhalation. The dimmest + back-scene at the opera, when the tenor is singing his sweetest, seems + hardly to belong to a world more detached from responsibility. + </p> + <p> + {Illustration: ON THE ARNO, FLORENCE.} + </p> + <p> + What it is that infuses so rich an interest into the general charm is + difficult to say in a few words; yet as we wander hither and thither in + quest of sacred canvas and immortal bronze and stone we still feel the + genius of the place hang about. Two industrious English ladies, the Misses + Horner, have lately published a couple of volumes of “Walks” by the + Arno-side, and their work is a long enumeration of great artistic deeds. + These things remain for the most part in sound preservation, and, as the + weeks go by and you spend a constant portion of your days among them the + sense of one of the happiest periods of human Taste—to put it only + at that—settles upon your spirit. It was not long; it lasted, in its + splendour, for less than a century; but it has stored away in the palaces + and churches of Florence a heritage of beauty that these three enjoying + centuries since haven’t yet exhausted. This forms a clear intellectual + atmosphere into which you may turn aside from the modern world and fill + your lungs as with the breath of a forgotten creed. The memorials of the + past here address us moreover with a friendliness, win us by we scarcely + know what sociability, what equal amenity, that we scarce find matched in + other great esthetically endowed communities and periods. Venice, with her + old palaces cracking under the weight of their treasures, is, in her + influence, insupportably sad; Athens, with her maimed marbles and + dishonoured memories, transmutes the consciousness of sensitive observers, + I am told, into a chronic heartache; but in one’s impression of old + Florence the abiding felicity, the sense of saving sanity, of something + sound and human, predominates, offering you a medium still conceivable for + life. The reason of this is partly, no doubt, the “sympathetic” nature, + the temperate joy, of Florentine art in general—putting the sole + Dante, greatest of literary artists, aside; partly the tenderness of time, + in its lapse, which, save in a few cases, has been as sparing of injury as + if it knew that when it should have dimmed and corroded these charming + things it would have nothing so sweet again for its tooth to feed on. If + the beautiful Ghirlandaios and Lippis are fading, this generation will + never know it. The large Fra Angelico in the Academy is as clear and keen + as if the good old monk stood there wiping his brushes; the colours seem + to <i>sing</i>, as it were, like new-fledged birds in June. Nothing is + more characteristic of early Tuscan art than the high-reliefs of Luca + della Robbia; yet there isn’t one of them that, except for the unique + mixture of freshness with its wisdom, of candour with its expertness, + mightn’t have been modelled yesterday. + </p> + <p> + But perhaps the best image of the absence of stale melancholy or wasted + splendour, of the positive presence of what I have called temperate joy, + in the Florentine impression and genius, is the bell-tower of Giotto, + which rises beside the cathedral. No beholder of it will have forgotten + how straight and slender it stands there, how strangely rich in the common + street, plated with coloured marble patterns, and yet so far from simple + or severe in design that we easily wonder how its author, the painter of + exclusively and portentously grave little pictures, should have fashioned + a building which in the way of elaborate elegance, of the true play of + taste, leaves a jealous modern criticism nothing to miss. Nothing can be + imagined at once more lightly and more pointedly fanciful; it might have + been handed over to the city, as it stands, by some Oriental genie tired + of too much detail. Yet for all that suggestion it seems of no particular + time—not grey and hoary like a Gothic steeple, not cracked and + despoiled like a Greek temple; its marbles shining so little less freshly + than when they were laid together, and the sunset lighting up its cornice + with such a friendly radiance, that you come at last to regard it simply + as the graceful, indestructible soul of the place made visible. The + Cathedral, externally, for all its solemn hugeness, strikes the same note + of would-be reasoned elegance and cheer; it has conventional grandeur, of + course, but a grandeur so frank and ingenuous even in its <i>parti-pris</i>. + It has seen so much, and outlived so much, and served so many sad + purposes, and yet remains in aspect so full of the fine Tuscan geniality, + the feeling for life, one may almost say the feeling for amusement, that + inspired it. Its vast many-coloured marble walls become at any rate, with + this, the friendliest note of all Florence; there is an unfailing charm in + walking past them while they lift their great acres of geometrical mosaic + higher in the air than you have time or other occasion to look. You greet + them from the deep street as you greet the side of a mountain when you + move in the gorge—not twisting back your head to keep looking at the + top, but content with the minor accidents, the nestling hollows and soft + cloud-shadows, the general protection of the valley. + </p> + <p> + Florence is richer in pictures than we really know till we have begun to + look for them in outlying corners. Then, here and there, one comes upon + lurking values and hidden gems that it quite seems one might as a good New + Yorker quietly “bag” for the so aspiring Museum of that city without their + being missed. The Pitti Palace is of course a collection of masterpieces; + they jostle each other in their splendour, they perhaps even, in their + merciless multitude, rather fatigue our admiration. The Uffizi is almost + as fine a show, and together with that long serpentine artery which + crosses the Arno and connects them, making you ask yourself, whichever way + you take it, what goal can be grand enough to crown such a journey, they + form the great central treasure-chamber of the town. But I have been + neglecting them of late for love of the Academy, where there are fewer + copyists and tourists, above all fewer pictorial lions, those whose roar + is heard from afar and who strike us as expecting overmuch to have it + their own way in the jungle. The pictures at the Academy are all, rather, + doves—the whole impression is less pompously tropical. Selection + still leaves one too much to say, but I noted here, on my last occasion, + an enchanting Botticelli so obscurely hung, in one of the smaller rooms, + that I scarce knew whether most to enjoy or to resent its relegation. + Placed, in a mean black frame, where you wouldn’t have looked for a + masterpiece, it yet gave out to a good glass every characteristic of one. + Representing as it does the walk of Tobias with the angel, there are + really parts of it that an angel might have painted; but I doubt whether + it is observed by half-a-dozen persons a year. That was my excuse for my + wanting to know, on the spot, though doubtless all sophistically, what + dishonour, could the transfer be artfully accomplished, a strong American + light and a brave gilded frame would, comparatively speaking, do it. There + and then it would, shine with the intense authority that we claim for the + fairest things—would exhale its wondrous beauty as a sovereign + example. What it comes to is that this master is the most interesting of a + great band—the only Florentine save Leonardo and Michael in whom the + impulse was original and the invention rare. His imagination is of things + strange, subtle and complicated—things it at first strikes us that + we moderns have reason to know, and that it has taken us all the ages to + learn; so that we permit ourselves to wonder how a “primitive” could come + by them. We soon enough reflect, however, that we ourselves have come by + them almost only <i>through</i> him, exquisite spirit that he was, and + that when we enjoy, or at least when we encounter, in our William + Morrises, in our Rossettis and Burne-Joneses, the note of the haunted or + over-charged consciousness, we are but treated, with other matters, to + repeated doses of diluted Botticelli. He practically set with his own hand + almost all the copies to almost all our so-called pre-Raphaelites, earlier + and later, near and remote. + </p> + <p> + Let us at the same time, none the less, never fail of response to the + great Florentine geniality at large. Fra Angelico, Filippo Lippi, + Ghirlandaio, were not “subtly” imaginative, were not even riotously so; + but what other three were ever more gladly observant, more vividly and + richly true? If there should some time be a weeding out of the world’s + possessions the best works of the early Florentines will certainly be + counted among the flowers. With the ripest performances of the Venetians—by + which I don’t mean the over-ripe—we can but take them for the most + valuable things in the history of art. Heaven forbid we should be narrowed + down to a cruel choice; but if it came to a question of keeping or losing + between half-a-dozen Raphaels and half-a-dozen things it would be a joy to + pick out at the Academy, I fear that, for myself, the memory of the + Transfiguration, or indeed of the other Roman relics of the painter, + wouldn’t save the Raphaels. And yet this was so far from the opinion of a + patient artist whom I saw the other day copying the finest of Ghirlandaios—a + beautiful Adoration of the Kings at the Hospital of the Innocenti. Here + was another sample of the buried art-wealth of Florence. It hangs in an + obscure chapel, far aloft, behind an altar, and though now and then a + stray tourist wanders in and puzzles a while over the vaguely-glowing + forms, the picture is never really seen and enjoyed. I found an aged + Frenchman of modest mien perched on a little platform beneath it, behind a + great hedge of altar-candlesticks, with an admirable copy all completed. + The difficulties of his task had been well-nigh insuperable, and his + performance seemed to me a real feat of magic. He could scarcely move or + turn, and could find room for his canvas but by rolling it together and + painting a small piece at a time, so that he never enjoyed a view of his + <i>ensemble</i>. The original is gorgeous with colour and bewildering with + decorative detail, but not a gleam of the painter’s crimson was wanting, + not a curl in his gold arabesques. It seemed to me that if I had copied a + Ghirlandaio in such conditions I would at least maintain for my own credit + that he was the first painter in the world. “Very good of its kind,” said + the weary old man with a shrug of reply for my raptures; “but oh, how far + short of Raphael!” However that may be, if the reader chances to observe + this consummate copy in the so commendable Museum devoted in Paris to such + works, let him stop before it with a due reverence; it is one of the + patient things of art. Seeing it wrought there, in its dusky nook, under + such scant convenience, I found no bar in the painter’s foreignness to a + thrilled sense that the old art-life of Florence isn’t yet extinct. It + still at least works spells and almost miracles. + </p> + <h3> + 1873. + </h3> + <p> + <a name="link2H_4_0019" id="link2H_4_0019"> + <!-- H2 anchor --> </a> + </p> + <div style="height: 4em;"> + <br /><br /><br /><br /> + </div> + <h2> + FLORENTINE NOTES + </h2> + <h3> + I + </h3> + <p> + Yesterday that languid organism known as the Florentine Carnival put on a + momentary semblance of vigour, and decreed a general <i>corso</i> through + the town. The spectacle was not brilliant, but it suggested some natural + reflections. I encountered the line of carriages in the square before + Santa Croce, of which they were making the circuit. They rolled solemnly + by, with their inmates frowning forth at each other in apparent wrath at + not finding each other more worth while. There were no masks, no costumes, + no decorations, no throwing of flowers or sweetmeats. It was as if each + carriageful had privately and not very heroically resolved not to be at + costs, and was rather discomfited at finding that it was getting no better + entertainment than it gave. The middle of the piazza was filled with + little tables, with shouting mountebanks, mostly disguised in battered + bonnets and crinolines, offering chances in raffles for plucked fowls and + kerosene lamps. I have never thought the huge marble statue of Dante, + which overlooks the scene, a work of the last refinement; but, as it stood + there on its high pedestal, chin in hand, frowning down on all this cheap + foolery, it seemed to have a great moral intention. The carriages followed + a prescribed course—through Via Ghibellina, Via del Proconsolo, past + the Badia and the Bargello, beneath the great tessellated cliffs of the + Cathedral, through Via Tornabuoni and out into ten minutes’ sunshine + beside the Arno. Much of all this is the gravest and stateliest part of + Florence, a quarter of supreme dignity, and there was an almost ludicrous + incongruity in seeing Pleasure leading her train through these dusky + historic streets. It was most uncomfortably cold, and in the absence of + masks many a fair nose was fantastically tipped with purple. But as the + carriages crept solemnly along they seemed to keep a funeral march—to + follow an antique custom, an exploded faith, to its tomb. The Carnival is + dead, and these good people who had come abroad to make merry were funeral + mutes and grave-diggers. Last winter in Rome it showed but a galvanised + life, yet compared with this humble exhibition it was operatic. At Rome + indeed it was too operatic. The knights on horseback there were a bevy of + circus-riders, and I’m sure half the mad revellers repaired every night to + the Capitol for their twelve sous a day. + </p> + <p> + I have just been reading over the Letters of the President de Brosses. A + hundred years ago, in Venice, the Carnival lasted six months; and at Rome + for many weeks each year one was free, under cover of a mask, to + perpetrate the most fantastic follies and cultivate the most remunerative + vices. It’s very well to read the President’s notes, which have indeed a + singular interest; but they make us ask ourselves why we should expect the + Italians to persist in manners and practices which we ourselves, if we had + responsibilities in the matter, should find intolerable. The Florentines + at any rate spend no more money nor faith on the carnivalesque. And yet + this truth has a qualification; for what struck me in the whole spectacle + yesterday, and prompted these observations, was not at all the more or + less of costume of the occupants of the carriages, but the obstinate + survival of the merrymaking instinct in the people at large. There could + be no better example of it than that so dim a shadow of entertainment + should keep all Florence standing and strolling, densely packed for hours, + in the cold streets. There was nothing to see that mightn’t be seen on the + Cascine any fine day in the year—nothing but a name, a tradition, a + pretext for sweet staring idleness. The faculty of making much of common + things and converting small occasions into great pleasures is, to a son of + communities strenuous as ours are strenuous, the most salient + characteristic of the so-called Latin civilisations. It charms him and + vexes him, according to his mood; and for the most part it represents a + moral gulf between his own temperamental and indeed spiritual sense of + race, and that of Frenchmen and Italians, far wider than the watery + leagues that a steamer may annihilate. But I think his mood is wisest when + he accepts the “foreign” easy surrender to <i>all</i> the senses as the + sign of an unconscious philosophy of life, instilled by the experience of + centuries—the philosophy of people who have lived long and much, who + have discovered no short cuts to happiness and no effective circumvention + of effort, and so have come to regard the average lot as a ponderous fact + that absolutely calls for a certain amount of sitting on the lighter tray + of the scales. Florence yesterday then took its holiday in a natural, + placid fashion that seemed to make its own temper an affair quite + independent of the splendour of the compensation decreed on a higher line + to the weariness of its legs. That the <i>corso</i> was stupid or lively + was the shame or the glory of the powers “above”—the fates, the + gods, the <i>forestieri</i>, the town-councilmen, the rich or the stingy. + Common Florence, on the narrow footways, pressed against the houses, + obeyed a natural need in looking about complacently, patiently, gently, + and never pushing, nor trampling, nor swearing, nor staggering. This + liberal margin for festivals in Italy gives the masses a more than + man-of-the-world urbanity in taking their pleasure. + </p> + <p> + Meanwhile it occurs to me that by a remote New England fireside an + unsophisticated young person of either sex is reading in an old volume of + travels or an old romantic tale some account of these anniversaries and + appointed revels as old Catholic lands offer them to view. Across the page + swims a vision of sculptured palace-fronts draped in crimson and gold and + shining in a southern sun; of a motley train of maskers sweeping on in + voluptuous confusion and pelting each other with nosegays and + love-letters. Into the quiet room, quenching the rhythm of the Connecticut + clock, floats an uproar of delighted voices, a medley of stirring foreign + sounds, an echo of far-heard music of a strangely alien cadence. But the + dusk is falling, and the unsophisticated young person closes the book + wearily and wanders to the window. The dusk is falling on the beaten snow. + Down the road is a white wooden meeting-house, looking grey among the + drifts. The young person surveys the prospect a while, and then wanders + back and stares at the fire. The Carnival of Venice, of Florence, of Rome; + colour and costume, romance and rapture! The young person gazes in the + firelight at the flickering chiaroscuro of the future, discerns at last + the glowing phantasm of opportunity, and determines with a wild heart-beat + to go and see it all—twenty years hence! + </p> + <h3> + II + </h3> + <p> + A couple of days since, driving to Fiesole, we came back by the castle of + Vincigliata. The afternoon was lovely; and, though there is as yet + (February 10th) no visible revival of vegetation, the air was full of a + vague vernal perfume, and the warm colours of the hills and the yellow + western sunlight flooding the plain seemed to contain the promise of + Nature’s return to grace. It’s true that above the distant pale blue gorge + of Vallombrosa the mountain-line was tipped with snow; but the liberated + soul of Spring was nevertheless at large. The view from Fiesole seems + vaster and richer with each visit. The hollow in which Florence lies, and + which from below seems deep and contracted, opens out into an immense and + generous valley and leads away the eye into a hundred gradations of + distance. The place itself showed, amid its chequered fields and gardens, + with as many towers and spires as a chess-board half cleared. The domes + and towers were washed over with a faint blue mist. The scattered columns + of smoke, interfused with the sinking sunlight, hung over them like + streamers and pennons of silver gauze; and the Arno, twisting and curling + and glittering here and there, was a serpent cross-striped with silver. + </p> + <p> + Vincigliata is a product of the millions, the leisure and the + eccentricity, I suppose people say, of an English gentleman—Mr. + Temple Leader, whose name should be commemorated. You reach the castle + from Fiesole by a narrow road, returning toward Florence by a romantic + twist through the hills and passing nothing on its way save thin + plantations of cypress and cedar. Upward of twenty years ago, I believe, + this gentleman took a fancy to the crumbling shell of a mediæval fortress + on a breezy hill-top overlooking the Val d’ Arno and forthwith bought it + and began to “restore” it. I know nothing of what the original ruin may + have cost; but in the dusky courts and chambers of the present elaborate + structure this impassioned archæologist must have buried a fortune. He + has, however, the compensation of feeling that he has erected a monument + which, if it is never to stand a feudal siege, may encounter at least some + critical over-hauling. It is a disinterested work of art and really a + triumph of æsthetic culture. The author has reproduced with minute + accuracy a sturdy home-fortress of the fourteenth century, and has kept + throughout such rigid terms with his model that the result is literally + uninhabitable to degenerate moderns. It is simply a massive facsimile, an + elegant museum of archaic images, mainly but most amusingly counterfeit, + perched on a spur of the Apennines. The place is most politely shown. + There is a charming cloister, painted with extremely clever “quaint” + frescoes, celebrating the deeds of the founders of the castle—a + cloister that is everything delightful a cloister should be except truly + venerable and employable. There is a beautiful castle court, with the + embattled tower climbing into the blue far above it, and a spacious loggia + with rugged medallions and mild-hued Luca della Robbias fastened unevenly + into the walls. But the apartments are the great success, and each of them + as good a “reconstruction” as a tale of Walter Scott; or, to speak + frankly, a much better one. They are all low-beamed and vaulted, + stone-paved, decorated in grave colours and lighted, from narrow, deeply + recessed windows, through small leaden-ringed plates of opaque glass. + </p> + <p> + The details are infinitely ingenious and elaborately grim, and the indoor + atmosphere of mediaevalism most forcibly revived. No compromising fact of + domiciliary darkness and cold is spared us, no producing condition of + mediaeval manners not glanced at. There are oaken benches round the room, + of about six inches in depth, and gaunt fauteuils of wrought leather, + illustrating the suppressed transitions which, as George Eliot says, unite + all contrasts—offering a visible link between the modern conceptions + of torture and of luxury. There are fireplaces nowhere but in the kitchen, + where a couple of sentry-boxes are inserted on either side of the great + hooded chimney-piece, into which people might creep and take their turn at + being toasted and smoked. One may doubt whether this dearth of the + hearthstone could have raged on such a scale, but it’s a happy stroke in + the representation of an Italian dwelling of any period. It shows how the + graceful fiction that Italy is all “meridional” flourished for some time + before being refuted by grumbling tourists. And yet amid this cold comfort + you feel the incongruous presence of a constant intuitive regard for + beauty. The shapely spring of the vaulted ceilings; the richly figured + walls, coarse and hard in substance as they are; the charming shapes of + the great platters and flagons in the deep recesses of the quaintly carved + black dressers; the wandering hand of ornament, as it were, playing here + and there for its own diversion in unlighted corners—such things + redress, to our fond credulity, with all sorts of grace, the balance of + the picture. + </p> + <p> + And yet, somehow, with what dim, unillumined vision one fancies even such + inmates as those conscious of finer needs than the mere supply of blows + and beef and beer would meet passing their heavy eyes over such slender + household beguilements! These crepuscular chambers at Vincigliata are a + mystery and a challenge; they seem the mere propounding of an answerless + riddle. You long, as you wander through them, turning up your coat-collar + and wondering whether ghosts can catch bronchitis, to answer it with some + positive notion of what people so encaged and situated “did,” how they + looked and talked and carried themselves, how they took their pains and + pleasures, how they counted off the hours. Deadly ennui seems to ooze out + of the stones and hang in clouds in the brown corners. No wonder men + relished a fight and panted for a fray. “Skull-smashers” were sweet, ears + ringing with pain and ribs cracking in a tussle were soothing music, + compared with the cruel quietude of the dim-windowed castle. When they + came back they could only have slept a good deal and eased their + dislocated bones on those meagre oaken ledges. Then they woke up and + turned about to the table and ate their portion of roasted sheep. They + shouted at each other across the board and flung the wooden plates at the + servingmen. They jostled and hustled and hooted and bragged; and then, + after gorging and boozing and easing their doublets, they squared their + elbows one by one on the greasy table and buried their scarred foreheads + and dreamed of a good gallop after flying foes. And the women? They must + have been strangely simple—simpler far than any moral archraeologist + can show us in a learned restoration. Of course, their simplicity had its + graces and devices; but one thinks with a sigh that, as the poor things + turned away with patient looks from the viewless windows to the same, same + looming figures on the dusky walls, they hadn’t even the consolation of + knowing that just this attitude and movement, set off by their peaked + coifs, their falling sleeves and heavily-twisted trains, would sow the + seed of yearning envy—of sorts—on the part of later + generations. + </p> + <p> + There are moods in which one feels the impulse to enter a tacit protest + against too gross an appetite for pure aesthetics in this starving and + sinning world. One turns half away, musingly, from certain beautiful + useless things. But the healthier state of mind surely is to lay no tax on + any really intelligent manifestation of the curious, and exquisite. + Intelligence hangs together essentially, all along the line; it only needs + time to make, as we say, its connections. The massive <i>pastiche</i> of + Vincigliata has no superficial use; but, even if it were less complete, + less successful, less brilliant, I should feel a reflective kindness for + it. So disinterested and expensive a toy is its own justification; it + belongs to the heroics of dilettantism. + </p> + <h3> + III + </h3> + <p> + One grows to feel the collection of pictures at the Pitti Palace splendid + rather than interesting. After walking through it once or twice you catch + the key in which it is pitched—you know what you are likely not to + find on closer examination; none of the works of the uncompromising + period, nothing from the half-groping geniuses of the early time, those + whose colouring was sometimes harsh and their outlines sometimes angular. + Vague to me the principle on which the pictures were originally gathered + and of the aesthetic creed of the princes who chiefly selected them. A + princely creed I should roughly call it—the creed of people who + believed in things presenting a fine face to society; who esteemed showy + results rather than curious processes, and would have hardly cared more to + admit into their collection a work by one of the laborious precursors of + the full efflorescence than to see a bucket and broom left standing in a + state saloon. The gallery contains in literal fact some eight or ten + paintings of the early Tuscan School—notably two admirable specimens + of Filippo Lippi and one of the frequent circular pictures of the great + Botticelli—a Madonna, chilled with tragic prescience, laying a pale + cheek against that of a blighted Infant. Such a melancholy mother as this + of Botticelli would have strangled her baby in its cradle to rescue it + from the future. But of Botticelli there is much to say. One of the + Filippo Lippis is perhaps his masterpiece—a Madonna in a small + rose-garden (such a “flowery close” as Mr. William Morris loves to haunt), + leaning over an Infant who kicks his little human heels on the grass while + half-a-dozen curly-pated angels gather about him, looking back over their + shoulders with the candour of children in <i>tableaux vivants</i>, and one + of them drops an armful of gathered roses one by one upon the baby. The + delightful earthly innocence of these winged youngsters is quite + inexpressible. Their heads are twisted about toward the spectator as if + they were playing at leap-frog and were expecting a companion to come and + take a jump. Never did “young” art, never did subjective freshness, + attempt with greater success to represent those phases. But these three + fine works are hung over the tops of doors in a dark back room—the + bucket and broom are thrust behind a curtain. It seems to me, + nevertheless, that a fine Filippo Lippi is good enough company for an + Allori or a Cigoli, and that that too deeply sentient Virgin of Botticelli + might happily balance the flower-like irresponsibility of Raphael’s + “Madonna of the Chair.” + </p> + <p> + Taking the Pitti collection, however, simply for what it pretends to be, + it gives us the very flower of the sumptuous, the courtly, the + grand-ducal. It is chiefly official art, as one may say, but it presents + the fine side of the type—the brilliancy, the facility, the + amplitude, the sovereignty of good taste. I agree on the whole with a + nameless companion and with what he lately remarked about his own humour + on these matters; that, having been on his first acquaintance with + pictures nothing if not critical, and held the lesson incomplete and the + opportunity slighted if he left a gallery without a headache, he had come, + as he grew older, to regard them more as the grandest of all pleasantries + and less as the most strenuous of all lessons, and to remind himself that, + after all, it is the privilege of art to make us friendly to the human + mind and not to make us suspicious of it. We do in fact as we grow older + unstring the critical bow a little and strike a truce with invidious + comparisons. We work off the juvenile impulse to heated partisanship and + discover that one spontaneous producer isn’t different enough from another + to keep the all-knowing Fates from smiling over our loves and our + aversions. We perceive a certain human solidarity in all cultivated + effort, and are conscious of a growing accommodation of judgment—an + easier disposition, the fruit of experience, to take the joke for what it + is worth as it passes. We have in short less of a quarrel with the masters + we don’t delight in, and less of an impulse to pin all our faith on those + in whom, in more zealous days, we fancied that we made our peculiar + meanings. The meanings no longer seem quite so peculiar. Since then we + have arrived at a few in the depths of our own genius that are not + sensibly less striking. + </p> + <p> + And yet it must be added that all this depends vastly on one’s mood—as + a traveller’s impressions do, generally, to a degree which those who give + them to the world would do well more explicitly to declare. We have our + hours of expansion and those of contraction, and yet while we follow the + traveller’s trade we go about gazing and judging with unadjusted + confidence. We can’t suspend judgment; we must take our notes, and the + notes are florid or crabbed, as the case may be. A short time ago I spent + a week in an ancient city on a hill-top, in the humour, for which I was + not to blame, which produces crabbed notes. I knew it at the time, but + couldn’t help it. I went through all the motions of liberal appreciation; + I uncapped in all the churches and on the massive ramparts stared all the + views fairly out of countenance; but my imagination, which I suppose at + bottom had very good reasons of its own and knew perfectly what it was + about, refused to project into the dark old town and upon the yellow hills + that sympathetic glow which forms half the substance of our genial + impressions. So it is that in museums and palaces we are alternate + radicals and conservatives. On some days we ask but to be somewhat + sensibly affected; on others, Ruskin-haunted, to be spiritually steadied. + After a long absence from the Pitti Palace I went back there the other + morning and transferred myself from chair to chair in the great + golden-roofed saloons—the chairs are all gilded and covered with + faded silk—in the humour to be diverted at any price. I needn’t + mention the things that diverted me; I yawn now when I think of some of + them. But an artist, for instance, to whom my kindlier judgment has made + permanent concessions is that charming Andrea del Sarto. When I first knew + him, in my cold youth, I used to say without mincing that I didn’t like + him. <i>Cet âge est sans pitié</i>. The fine sympathetic, melancholy, + pleasing painter! He has a dozen faults, and if you insist pedantically on + your rights the conclusive word you use about him will be the word weak. + But if you are a generous soul you will utter it low—low as the mild + grave tone of his own sought harmonies. He is monotonous, narrow, + incomplete; he has but a dozen different figures and but two or three ways + of distributing them; he seems able to utter but half his thought, and his + canvases lack apparently some final return on the whole matter—some + process which his impulse failed him before he could bestow. And yet in + spite of these limitations his genius is both itself of the great pattern + and lighted by the air of a great period. Three gifts he had largely: an + instinctive, unaffected, unerring grace; a large and rich, and yet a sort + of withdrawn and indifferent sobriety; and best of all, as well as rarest + of all, an indescribable property of relatedness as to the moral world. + Whether he was aware of the connection or not, or in what measure, I + cannot say; but he gives, so to speak, the taste of it. Before his + handsome vague-browed Madonnas; the mild, robust young saints who kneel in + his foregrounds and look round at you with a conscious anxiety which seems + to say that, though in the picture, they are not of it, but of your own + sentient life of commingled love and weariness; the stately apostles, with + comely heads and harmonious draperies, who gaze up at the high-seated + Virgin like early astronomers at a newly seen star—there comes to + you the brush of the dark wing of an inward life. A shadow falls for the + moment, and in it you feel the chill of moral suffering. Did the Lippis + suffer, father or son? Did Raphael suffer? Did Titian? Did Rubens suffer? + Perish the thought—it wouldn’t be fair to <i>us</i> that they should + have had everything. And I note in our poor second-rate Andrea an element + of interest lacking to a number of stronger talents. + </p> + <p> + Interspersed with him at the Pitti hang the stronger and the weaker in + splendid abundance. Raphael is there, strong in portraiture—easy, + various, bountiful genius that he was—and (strong here isn’t the + word, but) happy beyond the common dream in his beautiful “Madonna of the + Chair.” The general instinct of posterity seems to have been to treat this + lovely picture as a semi-sacred, an almost miraculous, manifestation. + People stand in a worshipful silence before it, as they would before a + taper-studded shrine. If we suspend in imagination on the right of it the + solid, realistic, unidealised portrait of Leo the Tenth (which hangs in + another room) and transport to the left the fresco of the School of Athens + from the Vatican, and then reflect that these were three separate fancies + of a single youthful, amiable genius we recognise that such a producing + consciousness must have been a “treat.” My companion already quoted has a + phrase that he “doesn’t care for Raphael,” but confesses, when pressed, + that he was a most remarkable young man. Titian has a dozen portraits of + unequal interest. I never particularly noticed till lately—it is + very ill hung—that portentous image of the Emperor Charles the + Fifth. He was a burlier, more imposing personage than his usual legend + figures, and in his great puffed sleeves and gold chains and full-skirted + over-dress he seems to tell of a tread that might sometimes have been + inconveniently resonant. But the <i>purpose</i> to have his way and work + his will is there—the great stomach for divine right, the old + monarchical temperament. The great Titian, in portraiture, however, + remains that formidable young man in black, with the small compact head, + the delicate nose and the irascible blue eye. Who was he? What was he? “<i>Ritratto + virile</i>” is all the catalogue is able to call the picture. “Virile!” + Rather! you vulgarly exclaim. You may weave what romance you please about + it, but a romance your dream must be. Handsome, clever, defiant, + passionate, dangerous, it was not his own fault if he hadn’t adventures + and to spare. He was a gentleman and a warrior, and his adventures + balanced between camp and court. I imagine him the young orphan of a noble + house, about to come into mortgaged estates. One wouldn’t have cared to be + his guardian, bound to paternal admonitions once a month over his + precocious transactions with the Jews or his scandalous abduction from her + convent of such and such a noble maiden. + </p> + <p> + The Pitti Gallery contains none of Titian’s golden-toned groups; but it + boasts a lovely composition by Paul Veronese, the dealer in silver hues—a + Baptism of Christ. W—— named it to me the other day as the + picture he most enjoyed, and surely painting seems here to have proposed + to itself to discredit and annihilate—and even on the occasion of + such a subject—everything but the loveliness of life. The picture + bedims and enfeebles its neighbours. We ask ourselves whether painting as + such can go further. It is simply that here at last the art stands + complete. The early Tuscans, as well as Leonardo, as Raphael, as Michael, + saw the great spectacle that surrounded them in beautiful sharp-edged + elements and parts. The great Venetians felt its indissoluble unity and + recognised that form and colour and earth and air were equal members of + every possible subject; and beneath their magical touch the hard outlines + melted together and the blank intervals bloomed with meaning. In this + beautiful Paul Veronese of the Pitti everything is part of the charm—the + atmosphere as well as the figures, the look of radiant morning in the + white-streaked sky as well as the living human limbs, the cloth of + Venetian purple about the loins of the Christ as well as the noble + humility of his attitude. The relation to Nature of the other Italian + schools differs from that of the Venetian as courtship—even ardent + courtship—differs from marriage. + </p> + <h3> + IV + </h3> + <p> + I went the other day to the secularised Convent of San Marco, paid my + franc at the profane little wicket which creaks away at the door—no + less than six custodians, apparently, are needed to turn it, as if it may + have a recusant conscience—passed along the bright, still cloister + and paid my respects to Fra Angelico’s Crucifixion, in that dusky chamber + in the basement. I looked long; one can hardly do otherwise. The fresco + deals with the pathetic on the grand scale, and after taking in its beauty + you feel as little at liberty to go away abruptly as you would to leave + church during the sermon. You may be as little of a formal Christian as + Fra Angelico was much of one; you yet feel admonished by spiritual decency + to let so yearning a view of the Christian story work its utmost will on + you. The three crosses rise high against a strange completely crimson sky, + which deepens mysteriously the tragic expression of the scene, though I + remain perforce vague as to whether this lurid background be a fine + intended piece of symbolism or an effective accident of time. In the first + case the extravagance quite triumphs. Between the crosses, under no great + rigour of composition, are scattered the most exemplary saints—kneeling, + praying, weeping, pitying, worshipping. The swoon of the Madonna is + depicted at the left, and this gives the holy presences, in respect to the + case, the strangest historical or actual air. Everything is so real that + you feel a vague impatience and almost ask yourself how it was that amid + the army of his consecrated servants our Lord was permitted to suffer. On + reflection you see that the painter’s design, so far as coherent, has been + simply to offer an immense representation of Pity, and all with such + concentrated truth that his colours here seem dissolved in tears that drop + and drop, however softly, through all time. Of this single yearning + consciousness the figures are admirably expressive. No later painter + learned to render with deeper force than Fra Angelico the one state of the + spirit he could conceive—a passionate pious tenderness. Immured in + his quiet convent, he apparently never received an intelligible impression + of evil; and his conception of human life was a perpetual sense of + sacredly loving and being loved. But how, immured in his quiet convent, + away from the streets and the studios, did he become that genuine, + finished, perfectly professional painter? No one is less of a mere mawkish + amateur. His range was broad, from this really heroic fresco to the little + trumpeting seraphs, in their opaline robes, enamelled, as it were, on the + gold margins of his pictures. + </p> + <p> + I sat out the sermon and departed, I hope, with the gentle preacher’s + blessing. I went into the smaller refectory, near by, to refresh my memory + of the beautiful Last Supper of Domenico Ghirlandaio. It would be putting + things coarsely to say that I adjourned thus from a sernlon to a comedy, + though Ghirlandaio’s theme, as contrasted with the blessed Angelico’s, was + the dramatic spectacular side of human life. How keenly he observed it and + how richly he rendered it, the world about him of colour and costume, of + handsome heads and pictorial groupings! In his admirable school there is + no painter one enjoys—<i>pace</i> Ruskin—more sociably and + irresponsibly. Lippo Lippi is simpler, quainter, more frankly expressive; + but we retain before him a remnant of the sympathetic discomfort provoked + by the masters whose conceptions were still a trifle too large for their + means. The pictorial vision in their minds seems to stretch and strain + their undeveloped skill almost to a sense of pain. In Ghirlandaio the + skill and the imagination are equal, and he gives us a delightful + impression of enjoying his own resources. Of all the painters of his time + he affects us least as positively not of ours. He enjoyed a crimson mantle + spreading and tumbling in curious folds and embroidered with needlework of + gold, just as he enjoyed a handsome well-rounded head, with vigorous dusky + locks, profiled in courteous adoration. He enjoyed in short the various + reality of things, and had the good fortune to live in an age when reality + flowered into a thousand amusing graces—to speak only of those. He + was not especially addicted to giving spiritual hints; and yet how hard + and meagre they seem, the professed and finished realists of our own day, + with the spiritual <i>bonhomie</i> or candour that makes half + Ghirlandaio’s richness left out! The Last Supper at San Marco is an + excellent example of the natural reverence of an artist of that time with + whom reverence was not, as one may say, a specialty. The main idea with + him has been the variety, the material bravery and positively social charm + of the scene, which finds expression, with irrepressible generosity, in + the accessories of the background. Instinctively he imagines an opulent + garden—imagines it with a good faith which quite tides him over the + reflection that Christ and his disciples were poor men and unused to sit + at meat in palaces. Great full-fruited orange-trees peep over the wall + before which the table is spread, strange birds fly through the air, while + a peacock perches on the edge of the partition and looks down on the + sacred repast. It is striking that, without any at all intense religious + purpose, the figures, in their varied naturalness, have a dignity and + sweetness of attitude that admits of numberless reverential constructions. + I should call all this the happy tact of a robust faith. + </p> + <p> + On the staircase leading up to the little painted cells of the Beato + Angelico, however, I suddenly faltered and paused. Somehow I had grown + averse to the intenser zeal of the Monk of Fiesole. I wanted no more of + him that day. I wanted no more macerated friars and spear-gashed sides. + Ghirlandaio’s elegant way of telling his story had put me in the humour + for something more largely intelligent, more profanely pleasing. I + departed, walked across the square, and found it in the Academy, standing + in a particular spot and looking up at a particular high-hung picture. It + is difficult to speak adequately, perhaps even intelligibly, of Sandro + Botticelli. An accomplished critic—Mr. Pater, in his <i>Studies on + the History of the Renaissance</i>—has lately paid him the tribute + of an exquisite, a supreme, curiosity. He was rarity and distinction + incarnate, and of all the multitudinous masters of his group incomparably + the most interesting, the one who detains and perplexes and fascinates us + most. Exquisitely fine his imagination—infinitely audacious and + adventurous his fancy. Alone among the painters of his time he strikes us + as having invention. The glow and thrill of expanding observation—this + was the feeling that sent his comrades to their easels; but Botticelli’s + moved him to reactions and emotions of which they knew nothing, caused his + faculty to sport and wander and explore on its own account. These impulses + have fruits often so ingenious and so lovely that it would be easy to talk + nonsense about them. I hope it is not nonsense, however, to say that the + picture to which I just alluded (the “Coronation of the Virgin,” with a + group of life-sized saints below and a garland of miniature angels above) + is one of the supremely beautiful productions of the human mind. It is + hung so high that you need a good glass to see it; to say nothing of the + unprecedented delicacy of the work. The lower half is of moderate + interest; but the dance of hand-clasped angels round the heavenly couple + above has a beauty newly exhaled from the deepest sources of inspiration. + Their perfect little hands are locked with ineffable elegance; their + blowing robes are tossed into folds of which each line is a study; their + charming feet have the relief of the most delicate sculpture. But, as I + have already noted, of Botticelli there is much, too much to say—besides + which Mr. Pater has said all. Only add thus to his inimitable grace of + design that the exquisite pictorial force driving him goes a-Maying not on + wanton errands of its own, but on those of some mystic superstition which + trembles for ever in his heart. + </p> + <p> + {Illustration: THE GREAT EAVES, FLORENCE} + </p> + <h3> + V + </h3> + <p> + The more I look at the old Florentine domestic architecture the more I + like it—that of the great examples at least; and if I ever am able + to build myself a lordly pleasure-house I don’t see how in conscience I + can build it different from these. They are sombre and frowning, and look + a trifle more as if they were meant to keep people out than to let them + in; but what equally “important” type—if there be an equally + important—is more expressive of domiciliary dignity and security and + yet attests them with a finer æesthetic economy? They are impressively + “handsome,” and yet contrive to be so by the simplest means. I don’t say + at the smallest pecuniary cost—that’s another matter. There is money + buried in the thick walls and diffused through the echoing excess of + space. The merchant nobles of the fifteenth century had deep and full + pockets, I suppose, though the present bearers of their names are glad to + let out their palaces in suites of apartments which are occupied by the + commercial aristocracy of another republic. One is told of fine old + mouldering chambers of which possession is to be enjoyed for a sum not + worth mentioning. I am afraid that behind these so gravely harmonious + fronts there is a good deal of dusky discomfort, and I speak now simply of + the large serious faces themselves as you can see them from the street; + see them ranged cheek to cheek, in the grey historic light of Via dei + Bardi, Via Maggio, Via degli Albizzi. The force of character, the familiar + severity and majesty, depend on a few simple features: on the great + iron-caged windows of the rough-hewn basement; on the noble stretch of + space between the summit of one high, round-topped window and the bottom + of that above; on the high-hung sculptured shield at the angle of the + house; on the flat far-projecting roof; and, finally, on the magnificent + tallness of the whole building, which so dwarfs our modern attempts at + size. The finest of these Florentine palaces are, I imagine, the tallest + habitations in Europe that are frankly and amply habitations—not + mere shafts for machinery of the American grain-elevator pattern. Some of + the creations of M. Haussmann in Paris may climb very nearly as high; but + there is all the difference in the world between the impressiveness of a + building which takes breath, as it were, some six or seven times, from + storey to storey, and of one that erects itself to an equal height in + three long-drawn pulsations. When a house is ten windows wide and the + drawing-room floor is as high as a chapel it can afford but three floors. + The spaciousness of some of those ancient drawing-rooms is that of a + Russian steppe. The “family circle,” gathered anywhere within speaking + distance, must resemble a group of pilgrims encamped in the desert on a + little oasis of carpet. Madame Gryzanowska, living at the top of a house + in that dusky, tortuous old Borgo Pinti, initiated me the other evening + most good-naturedly, lamp in hand, into the far-spreading mysteries of her + apartment. Such quarters seem a translation into space of the + old-fashioned idea of leisure. Leisure and “room” have been passing out of + our manners together, but here and there, being of stouter structure, the + latter lingers and survives. + </p> + <p> + Here and there, indeed, in this blessed Italy, reluctantly modern in spite + alike of boasts and lamentations, it seems to have been preserved for + curiosity’s and fancy’s sake, with a vague, sweet odour of the embalmer’s + spices about it. I went the other morning to the Corsini Palace. The + proprietors obviously are great people. One of the ornaments of Rome is + their great white-faced palace in the dark Trastevere and its voluminous + gallery, none the less delectable for the poorness of the pictures. Here + they have a palace on the Arno, with another large, handsome, respectable + and mainly uninteresting collection. It contains indeed three or four fine + examples of early Florentines. It was not especially for the pictures that + I went, however; and certainly not for the pictures that I stayed. I was + under the same spell as the inveterate companion with whom I walked the + other day through the beautiful private apartments of the Pitti Palace and + who said: “I suppose I care for nature, and I know there have been times + when I have thought it the greatest pleasure in life to lie under a tree + and gaze away at blue hills. But just now I had rather lie on that faded + sea-green satin sofa and gaze down through the open door at that + retreating vista of gilded, deserted, haunted chambers. In other words I + prefer a good ‘interior’ to a good landscape. The impression has a greater + intensity—the thing itself a more complex animation. I like fine old + rooms that have been occupied in a fine old way. I like the musty + upholstery, the antiquated knick-knacks, the view out of the tall + deep-embrasured windows at garden cypresses rocking against a grey sky. If + you don’t know why, I’m afraid I can’t tell you.” It seemed to me at the + Palazzo Corsini that I did know why. In places that have been lived in so + long and so much and in such a fine old way, as my friend said—that + is under social conditions so multifold and to a comparatively starved and + democratic sense so curious—the past seems to have left a sensible + deposit, an aroma, an atmosphere. This ghostly presence tells you no + secrets, but it prompts you to try and guess a few. What has been done and + said here through so many years, what has been ventured or suffered, what + has been dreamed or despaired of? Guess the riddle if you can, or if you + think it worth your ingenuity. The rooms at Palazzo Corsini suggest + indeed, and seem to recall, but a monotony of peace and plenty. One of + them imaged such a noble perfection of a home-scene that I dawdled there + until the old custodian came shuffling back to see whether possibly I was + trying to conceal a Caravaggio about my person: a great crimson-draped + drawing-room of the amplest and yet most charming proportions; walls hung + with large dark pictures, a great concave ceiling frescoed and moulded + with dusky richness, and half-a-dozen south windows looking out on the + Arno, whose swift yellow tide sends up the light in a cheerful flicker. I + fear that in my appreciation of the particular effect so achieved I + uttered a monstrous folly—some momentary willingness to be maimed or + crippled all my days if I might pass them in such a place. In fact half + the pleasure of inhabiting this spacious saloon would be that of using + one’s legs, of strolling up and down past the windows, one by one, and + making desultory journeys from station to station and corner to corner. + Near by is a colossal ball-room, domed and pilastered like a Renaissance + cathedral, and super-abundantly decorated with marble effigies, all yellow + and grey with the years. + </p> + <h3> + VI + </h3> + <p> + In the Carthusian Monastery outside the Roman Gate, mutilated and profaned + though it is, one may still snuff up a strong if stale redolence of old + Catholicism and old Italy. The road to it is ugly, being encumbered with + vulgar waggons and fringed with tenements suggestive of an Irish-American + suburb. Your interest begins as you come in sight of the convent perched + on its little mountain and lifting against the sky, around the bell-tower + of its gorgeous chapel, a coronet of clustered cells. You make your way + into the lower gate, through a clamouring press of deformed beggars who + thrust at you their stumps of limbs, and you climb the steep hillside + through a shabby plantation which it is proper to fancy was better tended + in the monkish time. The monks are not totally abolished, the government + having the grace to await the natural extinction of the half-dozen old + brothers who remain, and who shuffle doggedly about the cloisters, + looking, with their white robes and their pale blank old faces, quite + anticipatory ghosts of their future selves. A prosaic, profane old man in + a coat and trousers serves you, however, as custodian. The melancholy + friars have not even the privilege of doing you the honours of their + dishonour. One must imagine the pathetic effect of their former silent + pointings to this and that conventual treasure under stress of the feeling + that such pointings were narrowly numbered. The convent is vast and + irregular—it bristles with those picture-making arts and accidents + which one notes as one lingers and passes, but which in Italy the + overburdened memory learns to resolve into broadly general images. I + rather deplore its position at the gates of a bustling city—it ought + rather to be lodged in some lonely fold of the Apennines. And yet to look + out from the shady porch of one of the quiet cells upon the teeming vale + of the Arno and the clustered towers of Florence must have deepened the + sense of monastic quietude. + </p> + <p> + The chapel, or rather the church, which is of great proportions and + designed by Andrea Orcagna, the primitive painter, refines upon the + consecrated type or even quite glorifies it. The massive cincture of black + sculptured stalls, the dusky Gothic roof, the high-hung, deep-toned + pictures and the superb pavement of verd-antique and dark red marble, + polished into glassy lights, must throw the white-robed figures of the + gathered friars into the highest romantic relief. All this luxury of + worship has nowhere such value as in the chapels of monasteries, where we + find it contrasted with the otherwise so ascetic economy of the + worshippers. The paintings and gildings of their church, the gem-bright + marbles and fantastic carvings, are really but the monastic tribute to + sensuous delight—an imperious need for which the fond imagination of + Rome has officiously opened the door. One smiles when one thinks how + largely a fine starved sense for the forbidden things of earth, if it + makes the most of its opportunities, may gratify this need under cover of + devotion. Nothing is too base, too hard, too sordid for real humility, but + nothing too elegant, too amiable, too caressing, caressed, caressable, for + the exaltation of faith. The meaner the convent cell the richer the + convent chapel. Out of poverty and solitude, inanition and cold, your + honest friar may rise at his will into a Mahomet’s Paradise of luxurious + analogies. + </p> + <p> + There are further various dusky subterranean oratories where a number of + bad pictures contend faintly with the friendly gloom. Two or three of + these funereal vaults, however, deserve mention. In one of them, side by + side, sculptured by Donatello in low relief, lie the white marble effigies + of the three members of the Accaiuoli family who founded the convent in + the thirteenth century. In another, on his back, on the pavement, rests a + grim old bishop of the same stout race by the same honest craftsman. + Terribly grim he is, and scowling as if in his stony sleep he still + dreamed of his hates and his hard ambitions. Last and best, in another low + chapel, with the trodden pavement for its bed, shines dimly a grand image + of a later bishop—Leonardo Buonafede, who, dying in 1545, owes his + monument to Francesco di San Gallo. I have seen little from this artist’s + hand, but it was clearly of the cunningest. His model here was a very + sturdy old prelate, though I should say a very genial old man. The + sculptor has respected his monumental ugliness, but has suffused it with a + singular homely charm—a look of confessed physical comfort in the + privilege of paradise. All these figures have an inimitable reality, and + their lifelike marble seems such an incorruptible incarnation of the + genius of the place that you begin to think of it as even more reckless + than cruel on the part of the present public powers to have begun to pull + the establishment down, morally speaking, about their ears. They are lying + quiet yet a while; but when the last old friar dies and the convent + formally lapses, won’t they rise on their stiff old legs and hobble out to + the gates and thunder forth anathemas before which even a future and more + enterprising régime may be disposed to pause? + </p> + <p> + Out of the great central cloister open the snug little detached dwellings + of the absent fathers. When I said just now that the Certosa in Val d’Ema + gives you a glimpse of old Italy I was thinking of this great pillared + quadrangle, lying half in sun and half in shade, of its tangled + garden-growth in the centre, surrounding the ancient customary well, and + of the intense blue sky bending above it, to say nothing of the + indispensable old white-robed monk who pokes about among the lettuce and + parsley. We have seen such places before; we have visited them in that + divinatory glance which strays away into space for a moment over the top + of a suggestive book. I don’t quite know whether it’s more or less as + one’s fancy would have it that the monkish cells are no cells at all, but + very tidy little <i>appartements complets</i>, consisting of a couple of + chambers, a sitting-room and a spacious loggia, projecting out into space + from the cliff-like wall of the monastery and sweeping from pole to pole + the loveliest view in the world. It’s poor work, however, taking notes on + views, and I will let this one pass. The little chambers are terribly cold + and musty now. Their odour and atmosphere are such as one used, as a + child, to imagine those of the school-room during Saturday and Sunday. + </p> + <h3> + VII + </h3> + <p> + In the Roman streets, wherever you turn, the facade of a church in more or + less degenerate flamboyance is the principal feature of the scene; and if, + in the absence of purer motives, you are weary of aesthetic trudging over + the corrugated surface of the Seven Hills, a system of pavement in which + small cobble-stones anomalously endowed with angles and edges are alone + employed, you may turn aside at your pleasure and take a reviving sniff at + the pungency of incense. In Florence, one soon observes, the churches are + relatively few and the dusky house-fronts more rarely interrupted by + specimens of that extraordinary architecture which in Rome passes for + sacred. In Florence, in other words, ecclesiasticism is less cheap a + commodity and not dispensed in the same abundance at the street-corners. + Heaven forbid, at the same time, that I should undervalue the Roman + churches, which are for the most part treasure-houses of history, of + curiosity, of promiscuous and associational interest. It is a fact, + nevertheless, that, after St. Peter’s, I know but one really beautiful + church by the Tiber, the enchanting basilica of St. Mary Major. Many have + structural character, some a great <i>allure</i>, but as a rule they all + lack the dignity of the best of the Florentine temples. Here, the list + being immeasurably shorter and the seed less scattered, the principal + churches are all beautiful. And yet I went into the Annunziata the other + day and sat there for half-an-hour because, forsooth, the gildings and the + marbles and the frescoed dome and the great rococo shrine near the door, + with its little black jewelled fetish, reminded me so poignantly of Rome. + Such is the city properly styled eternal—since it is eternal, at + least, as regards the consciousness of the individual. One loves it in its + sophistications—though for that matter isn’t it all rich and + precious sophistication?—better than other places in their purity. + </p> + <p> + Coming out of the Annunziata you look past the bronze statue of the Grand + Duke Ferdinand I (whom Mr. Browning’s heroine used to watch for—in + the poem of “The Statue and the Bust”—from the red palace near by), + and down a street vista of enchanting picturesqueness. The street is + narrow and dusky and filled with misty shadows, and at its opposite end + rises the vast bright-coloured side of the Cathedral. It stands up in very + much the same mountainous fashion as the far-shining mass of the bigger + prodigy at Milan, of which your first glimpse as you leave your hotel is + generally through another such dark avenue; only that, if we talk of + mountains, the white walls of Milan must be likened to snow and ice from + their base, while those of the Duomo of Florence may be the image of some + mighty hillside enamelled with blooming flowers. The big bleak interior + here has a naked majesty which, though it may fail of its effect at first, + becomes after a while extraordinarily touching. Originally disconcerting, + it soon inspired me with a passion. Externally, at any rate, it is one of + the loveliest works of man’s hands, and an overwhelming proof into the + bargain that when elegance belittles grandeur you have simply had a + bungling artist. + </p> + <p> + Santa Croce within not only triumphs here, but would triumph anywhere. “A + trifle naked if you like,” said my irrepressible companion, “but that’s + what I call architecture, just as I don’t call bronze or marble clothes + (save under urgent stress of portraiture) statuary.” And indeed we are far + enough away from the clustering odds and ends borrowed from every art and + every province without which the ritually builded thing doesn’t trust its + spell to work in Rome. The vastness, the lightness, the open spring of the + arches at Santa Croce, the beautiful shape of the high and narrow choir, + the impression made as of mass without weight and the gravity yet reigning + without gloom—these are my frequent delight, and the interest grows + with acquaintance. The place is the great Florentine Valhalla, the final + home or memorial harbour of the native illustrious dead, but that + consideration of it would take me far. It must be confessed moreover that, + between his coarsely-imagined statue out in front and his horrible + monument in one of the aisles, the author of <i>The Divine Comedy</i>, for + instance, is just hereabouts rather an extravagant figure. “Ungrateful + Florence,” declaims Byron. Ungrateful indeed—would she were more so! + the susceptible spirit of the great exile may be still aware enough to + exclaim; in common, that is, with most of the other immortals sacrificed + on so very large a scale to current Florentine “plastic” facility. In + explanation of which remark, however, I must confine myself to noting + that, as almost all the old monuments at Santa Croce are small, + comparatively small, and interesting and exquisite, so the modern, well + nigh without exception, are disproportionately vast and pompous, or in + other words distressingly vague and vain. The aptitude of hand, the + compositional assurance, with which such things are nevertheless turned + out, constitutes an anomaly replete with suggestion for an observer of the + present state of the arts on the soil and in the air that once befriended + them, taking them all together, as even the soil and the air of Greece + scarce availed to do. But on this head, I repeat, there would be too much + to say; and I find myself checked by the same warning at the threshold of + the church in Florence really interesting beyond Santa Croce, beyond all + others. Such, of course, easily, is Santa Maria Novella, where the chapels + are lined and plated with wonderful figured and peopled fresco-work even + as most of those in Rome with precious inanimate substances. These + overscored retreats of devotion, as dusky, some of them, as eremitic caves + swarming with importunate visions, have kept me divided all winter between + the love of Ghirlandaio and the fear of those seeds of catarrh to which + their mortal chill seems propitious till far on into the spring. So I + pause here just on the praise of that delightful painter—as to the + spirit of whose work the reflections I have already made are but confirmed + by these examples. In the choir at Santa Maria Novella, where the incense + swings and the great chants resound, between the gorgeous coloured window + and the florid grand altar, he still “goes in,” with all his might, for + the wicked, the amusing world, the world of faces and forms and + characters, of every sort of curious human and rare material thing. + </p> + <p> + {Illustration: BOBOLI GARDEN, FLORENCE.} + </p> + <h3> + VIII + </h3> + <p> + I had always felt the Boboli Gardens charming enough for me to “haunt” + them; and yet such is the interest of Florence in every quarter that it + took another <i>corso</i> of the same cheap pattern as the last to cause + me yesterday to flee the crowded streets, passing under that archway of + the Pitti Palace which might almost be the gate of an Etruscan city, so + that I might spend the afternoon among the mouldy statues that compose + with their screens of cypress, looking down at our clustered towers and + our background of pale blue hills vaguely freckled with white villas. + These pleasure-grounds of the austere Pitti pile, with its inconsequent + charm of being so rough-hewn and yet somehow so elegantly balanced, plead + with a voice all their own the general cause of the ample enclosed, + planted, cultivated private preserve—preserve of tranquillity and + beauty and immunity—in the heart of a city; a cause, I allow, for + that matter, easy to plead anywhere, once the pretext is found, the large, + quiet, distributed town-garden, with the vague hum of big grudging + boundaries all about it, but with everything worse excluded, being of + course the most insolently-pleasant thing in the world. In addition to + which, when the garden is in the Italian manner, with flowers rather + remarkably omitted, as too flimsy and easy and cheap, and without lawns + that are too smart, paths that are too often swept and shrubs that are too + closely trimmed, though with a fanciful formalism giving style to its + shabbiness, and here and there a dusky ilex-walk, and here and there a + dried-up fountain, and everywhere a piece of mildewed sculpture staring at + you from a green alcove, and just in the right place, above all, a grassy + amphitheatre curtained behind with black cypresses and sloping downward in + mossy marble steps—when, I say, the place possesses these + attractions, and you lounge there of a soft Sunday afternoon, the racier + spectacle of the streets having made your fellow-loungers few and left you + to the deep stillness and the shady vistas that lead you wonder where, + left you to the insidious irresistible mixture of nature and art, nothing + too much of either, only a supreme happy resultant, a divine <i>tertium + quid</i>: under these conditions, it need scarce be said the revelation + invoked descends upon you. + </p> + <p> + The Boboli Gardens are not large—you wonder how compact little + Florence finds room for them within her walls. But they are scattered, to + their extreme, their all-romantic advantage and felicity, over a group of + steep undulations between the rugged and terraced palace and a + still-surviving stretch of city wall, where the unevenness of the ground + much adds to their apparent size. You may cultivate in them the fancy of + their solemn and haunted character, of something faint and dim and even, + if you like, tragic, in their prescribed, their functional smile; as if + they borrowed from the huge monument that overhangs them certain of its + ponderous memories and regrets. This course is open to you, I mention, but + it isn’t enjoined, and will doubtless indeed not come up for you at all if + it isn’t your habit, cherished beyond any other, to spin your impressions + to the last tenuity of fineness. Now that I bethink myself I must always + have happened to wander here on grey and melancholy days. It remains none + the less true that the place contains, thank goodness—or at least + thank the grave, the infinitely-distinguished traditional <i>taste</i> of + Florence—no cheerful, trivial object, neither parterres, nor + pagodas, nor peacocks, nor swans. They have their famous amphitheatre + already referred to, with its degrees or stone benches of a thoroughly + aged and mottled complexion and its circular wall of evergreens behind, in + which small cracked images and vases, things that, according to + association, and with the law of the same quite indefinable, may make as + much on one occasion for exquisite dignity as they may make on another for + (to express it kindly) nothing at all. Something was once done in this + charmed and forsaken circle—done or meant to be done; what was it, + dumb statues, who saw it with your blank eyes? Opposite stands the huge + flat-roofed palace, putting forward two great rectangular arms and + looking, with its closed windows and its foundations of almost unreduced + rock, like some ghost of a sample of a ruder Babylon. In the wide + court-like space between the wings is a fine old white marble fountain + that never plays. Its dusty idleness completes the general air of + abandonment. Chancing on such a cluster of objects in Italy—glancing + at them in a certain light and a certain mood—I get (perhaps on too + easy terms, you may think) a sense of <i>history</i> that takes away my + breath. Generations of Medici have stood at these closed windows, + embroidered and brocaded according to their period, and held <i>fetes + champetres</i> and floral games on the greensward, beneath the mouldering + hemicycle. And the Medici were great people! But what remains of it all + now is a mere tone in the air, a faint sigh in the breeze, a vague + expression in things, a passive—or call it rather, perhaps, to be + fair, a shyly, pathetically responsive—accessibility to the yearning + guess. Call it much or call it little, the ineffaceability of this deep + stain of experience, it is the interest of old places and the bribe to the + brooding analyst. Time has devoured the doers and their doings, but there + still hangs about some effect of their passage. We can “layout” parks on + virgin soil, and cause them to bristle with the most expensive + importations, but we unfortunately can’t scatter abroad again this seed of + the eventual human soul of a place—that comes but in its time and + takes too long to grow. There is nothing like it when it <i>has</i> come. + </p> + <p> + <a name="link2H_4_0020" id="link2H_4_0020"> + <!-- H2 anchor --> </a> + </p> + <div style="height: 4em;"> + <br /><br /><br /><br /> + </div> + <h2> + TUSCAN CITIES + </h2> + <p> + The cities I refer to are Leghorn, Pisa, Lucca and Pistoia, among which I + have been spending the last few days. The most striking fact as to + Leghorn, it must be conceded at the outset, is that, being in Tuscany, it + should be so scantily Tuscan. The traveller curious in local colour must + content himself with the deep blue expanse of the Mediterranean. The + streets, away from the docks, are modern, genteel and rectangular; + Liverpool might acknowledge them if it weren’t for their clean-coloured, + sun-bleached stucco. They are the offspring of the new industry which is + death to the old idleness. Of interesting architecture, fruit of the old + idleness or at least of the old leisure, Leghorn is singularly destitute. + It has neither a church worth one’s attention, nor a municipal palace, nor + a museum, and it may claim the distinction, unique in Italy, of being the + city of no pictures. In a shabby corner near the docks stands a statue of + one of the elder Grand Dukes of Tuscany, appealing to posterity on grounds + now vague—chiefly that of having placed certain Moors under tribute. + Four colossal negroes, in very bad bronze, are chained to the base of the + monument, which forms with their assistance a sufficiently fantastic + group; but to patronise the arts is not the line of the Livornese, and for + want of the slender annuity which would keep its precinct sacred this + curious memorial is buried in dockyard rubbish. I must add that on the + other hand there is a very well-conditioned and, in attitude and gesture, + extremely natural and familiar statue of Cavour in one of the city + squares, and in another a couple of effigies of recent Grand Dukes, + represented, that is dressed, or rather undressed, in the character of + heroes of Plutarch. Leghorn is a city of magnificent spaces, and it was so + long a journey from the sidewalk to the pedestal of these images that I + never took the time to go and read the inscriptions. And in truth, + vaguely, I bore the originals a grudge, and wished to know as little about + them as possible; for it seemed to me that as <i>patres patrae</i>, in + their degree, they might have decreed that the great blank, ochre-faced + piazza should be a trifle less ugly. There is a distinct amenity, however, + in any experience of Italy almost anywhere, and I shall probably in the + future not be above sparing a light regret to several of the hours of + which the one I speak of was composed. I shall remember a large cool + bourgeois villa in the garden of a noiseless suburb—a middle-aged + Villa Franco (I owe it as a genial pleasant <i>pension</i> the tribute of + recognition), roomy and stony, as an Italian villa should be. I shall + remember that, as I sat in the garden, and, looking up from my book, saw + through a gap in the shrubbery the red house-tiles against the deep blue + sky and the grey underside of the ilex-leaves turned up by the + Mediterranean breeze, it was all still quite Tuscany, if Tuscany in the + minor key. + </p> + <p> + If you should naturally desire, in such conditions, a higher intensity, + you have but to proceed, by a very short journey, to Pisa—where, for + that matter, you will seem to yourself to have hung about a good deal + already, and from an early age. Few of us can have had a childhood so + unblessed by contact with the arts as that one of its occasional + diversions shan’t have been a puzzled scrutiny of some alabaster model of + the Leaning Tower under a glass cover in a back-parlour. Pisa and its + monuments have, in other words, been industriously vulgarised, but it is + astonishing how well they have survived the process. The charm of the + place is in fact of a high order and but partially foreshadowed by the + famous crookedness of its campanile. I felt it irresistibly and yet almost + inexpressibly the other afternoon, as I made my way to the classic corner + of the city through the warm drowsy air which nervous people come to + inhale as a sedative. I was with an invalid companion who had had no sleep + to speak of for a fortnight. “Ah! stop the carriage,” she sighed, or + yawned, as I could feel, deliciously, “in the shadow of this old + slumbering palazzo, and let me sit here and close my eyes, and taste for + an hour of oblivion.” Once strolling over the grass, however, out of which + the quartette of marble monuments rises, we awaked responsively enough to + the present hour. Most people remember the happy remark of tasteful, + old-fashioned Forsyth (who touched a hundred other points in his “Italy” + scarce less happily) as to the fact that the four famous objects are + “fortunate alike in their society and their solitude.” It must be admitted + that they are more fortunate in their society than we felt ourselves to be + in ours; for the scene presented the animated appearance for which, on any + fine spring day, all the choicest haunts of ancient quietude in Italy are + becoming yearly more remarkable. There were clamorous beggars at all the + sculptured portals, and bait for beggars, in abundance, trailing in and + out of them under convoy of loquacious ciceroni. I forget just how I + apportioned the responsibility, of intrusion, for it was not long before + fellow-tourists and fellow-countrymen became a vague, deadened, muffled + presence, that of the dentist’s last words when he is giving you ether. + They suffered mystic disintegration in the dense, bright, tranquil air, so + charged with its own messages. The Cathedral and its companions are + fortunate indeed in everything—fortunate in the spacious angle of + the grey old city-wall which folds about them in their sculptured elegance + like a strong protecting arm; fortunate in the broad greensward which + stretches from the marble base of Cathedral and cemetery to the rugged + foot of the rampart; fortunate in the little vagabonds who dot the grass, + plucking daisies and exchanging Italian cries; fortunate in the pale-gold + tone to which time and the soft sea-damp have mellowed and darkened their + marble plates; fortunate, above all, in an indescribable grace of + grouping, half hazard, half design, which insures them, in one’s memory of + things admired, very much the same isolated corner that they occupy in the + charming city. + </p> + <p> + Of the smaller cathedrals of Italy I know none I prefer to that of Pisa; + none that, on a moderate scale, produces more the impression of a great + church. It has without so modest a measurability, represents so clean and + compact a mass, that you are startled when you cross the threshold at the + apparent space it encloses. An architect of genius, for all that he works + with colossal blocks and cumbrous pillars, is certainly the most cunning + of conjurors. The front of the Duomo is a small pyramidal screen, covered + with delicate carvings and chasings, distributed over a series of short + columns upholding narrow arches. It might be a sought imitation of + goldsmith’s work in stone, and the area covered is apparently so small + that extreme fineness has been prescribed. How it is therefore that on the + inner side of this façade the wall should appear to rise to a splendid + height and to support one end of a ceiling as remote in its gilded + grandeur, one could almost fancy, as that of St. Peter’s; how it is that + the nave should stretch away in such solemn vastness, the shallow + transepts emphasise the grand impression and the apse of the choir hollow + itself out like a dusky cavern fretted with golden stalactites, is all + matter for exposition by a keener architectural analyst than I. To sit + somewhere against a pillar where the vista is large and the incidents + cluster richly, and vaguely revolve these mysteries without answering + them, is the best of one’s usual enjoyment of a great church. It takes no + deep sounding to conclude indeed that a gigantic Byzantine Christ in + mosaic, on the concave roof of the choir, contributes largely to the + particular impression here as of very old and choice and original and + individual things. It has even more of stiff solemnity than is common to + works of its school, and prompts to more wonder than ever on the nature of + the human mind at a time when such unlovely shapes could satisfy its + conception of holiness. Truly pathetic is the fate of these huge mosaic + idols, thanks to the change that has overtaken our manner of acceptance of + them. Strong the contrast between the original sublimity of their + pretensions and the way in which they flatter that free sense of the + grotesque which the modern imagination has smuggled even into the + appreciation of religious forms. They were meant to yield scarcely to the + Deity itself in grandeur, but the only part they play now is to stare + helplessly at our critical, our aesthetic patronage of them. The spiritual + refinement marking the hither end of a progress had n’t, however, to wait + for us to signalise it; it found expression three centuries ago in the + beautiful specimen of the painter Sodoma on the wall of the choir. This + latter, a small Sacrifice of Isaac, is one of the best examples of its + exquisite author, and perhaps, as chance has it, the most perfect + opposition that could be found in the way of the range of taste to the + effect of the great mosaic. There are many painters more powerful than + Sodoma—painters who, like the author of the mosaic, attempted and + compassed grandeur; but none has a more persuasive grace, none more than + he was to sift and chasten a conception till it should affect one with the + sweetness of a perfectly distilled perfume. + </p> + <p> + Of the patient successive efforts of painting to arrive at the supreme + refinement of such a work as the Sodoma the Campo Santo hard by offers a + most interesting memorial. It presents a long, blank marble wall to the + relative profaneness of the Cathedral close, but within it is a perfect + treasure-house of art. This quadrangular defence surrounds an open court + where weeds and wild roses are tangled together and a sunny stillness + seems to rest consentingly, as if Nature had been won to consciousness of + the precious relics committed to her. Something in the quality of the + place recalls the collegiate cloisters of Oxford, but it must be added + that this is the handsomest compliment to that seat of learning. The open + arches of the quadrangles of Magdalen and Christ Church are not of mellow + Carrara marble, nor do they offer to sight columns, slim and elegant, that + seem to frame the unglazed windows of a cathedral. To be buried in the + Campo Santo of Pisa, I may however further qualify, you need only be, or + to have more or less anciently been, illustrious, and there is a liberal + allowance both as to the character and degree of your fame. The most + obtrusive object in one of the long vistas is a most complicated monument + to Madame Catalani, the singer, recently erected by her possibly + too-appreciative heirs. The wide pavement is a mosaic of sepulchral slabs, + and the walls, below the base of the paling frescoes, are incrusted with + inscriptions and encumbered with urns and antique sarcophagi. The place is + at once a cemetery and a museum, and its especial charm is its strange + mixture of the active and the passive, of art and rest, of life and death. + Originally its walls were one vast continuity of closely pressed frescoes; + but now the great capricious scars and stains have come to outnumber the + pictures, and the cemetery has grown to be a burial-place of pulverised + masterpieces as well as of finished lives. The fragments of painting that + remain are fortunately the best; for one is safe in believing that a host + of undimmed neighbours would distract but little from the two great works + of Orcagna. Most people know the “Triumph of Death” and the “Last + Judgment” from descriptions and engravings; but to measure the possible + good faith of imitative art one must stand there and see the painter’s + howling potentates dragged into hell in all the vividness of his bright + hard colouring; see his feudal courtiers, on their palfreys, hold their + noses at what they are so fast coming to; see his great Christ, in + judgment, refuse forgiveness with a gesture commanding enough, really + inhuman enough, to make virtue merciless for ever. The charge that Michael + Angelo borrowed his cursing Saviour from this great figure of Orcagna is + more valid than most accusations of plagiarism; but of the two figures one + at least could be spared. For direct, triumphant expressiveness these two + superb frescoes have probably never been surpassed. The painter aims at no + very delicate meanings, but he drives certain gross ones home so + effectively that for a parallel to his process one must look to the art of + the actor, the emphasising “point”—making mime. Some of his female figures + are superb—they represent creatures of a formidable temperament. + </p> + <p> + There are charming women, however, on the other side of the cloister—in + the beautiful frescoes of Benozzo Gozzoli. If Orcagna’s work was appointed + to survive the ravage of time it is a happy chance that it should be + balanced by a group of performances of such a different temper. The + contrast is the more striking that in subject the inspiration of both + painters is strictly, even though superficially, theological. But Benozzo + cares, in his theology, for nothing but the story, the scene and the drama—the + chance to pile up palaces and spires in his backgrounds against pale blue + skies cross-barred with pearly, fleecy clouds, and to scatter sculptured + arches and shady trellises over the front, with every incident of human + life going forward lightly and gracefully beneath them. Lightness and + grace are the painter’s great qualities, marking the hithermost limit of + unconscious elegance, after which “style” and science and the wisdom of + the serpent set in. His charm is natural fineness; a little more and we + should have refinement—which is a very different thing. Like all <i>les + délicats</i> of this world, as M. Renan calls them, Benozzo has suffered + greatly. The space on the walls he originally covered with his Old + Testament stories is immense; but his exquisite handiwork has peeled off + by the acre, as one may almost say, and the latter compartments of the + series are swallowed up in huge white scars, out of which a helpless head + or hand peeps forth like those of creatures sinking into a quicksand. As + for Pisa at large, although it is not exactly what one would call a + mouldering city—for it has a certain well-aired cleanness and + brightness, even in its supreme tranquillity—it affects the + imagination very much in the same way as the Campo Santo. And, in truth, a + city so ancient and deeply historic as Pisa is at every step but the + burial-ground of a larger life than its present one. The wide empty + streets, the goodly Tuscan palaces—which look as if about all of + them there were a genteel private understanding, independent of placards, + that they are to be let extremely cheap—the delicious relaxing air, + the full-flowing yellow river, the lounging Pisani, smelling, + metaphorically, their poppy-flowers, seemed to me all so many admonitions + to resignation and oblivion. And this is what I mean by saying that the + charm of Pisa (apart from its cluster of monuments) is a charm of a high + order. The architecture has but a modest dignity; the lions are few; there + are no fixed points for stopping and gaping. And yet the impression is + profound; the charm is a moral charm. If I were ever to be incurably + disappointed in life, if I had lost my health, my money, or my friends, if + I were resigned forevermore to pitching my expectations in a minor key, I + should go and invoke the Pisan peace. Its quietude would seem something + more than a stillness—a hush. Pisa may be a dull place to live in, + but it’s an ideal place to wait for death. + </p> + <p> + Nothing could be more charming than the country between Pisa and Lucca—unless + possibly the country between Lucca and Pistoia. If Pisa is dead Tuscany, + Lucca is Tuscany still living and enjoying, desiring and intending. The + town is a charming mixture of antique “character” and modern + inconsequence; and! not only the town, but the country—the blooming + romantic country which you admire from the famous promenade on the + city-wall. The wall is of superbly solid and intensely “toned” brickwork + and of extraordinary breadth, and its summit, planted with goodly trees + and swelling here and there into bastions and outworks and little open + gardens, surrounds the city with a circular lounging-place of a splendid + dignity. This well-kept, shady, ivy-grown rampart reminded me of certain + mossy corners of England; but it looks away to a prospect of more than + English loveliness—a broad green plain where the summer yields a + double crop of grain, and a circle of bright blue mountains speckled with + high-hung convents and profiled castles and nestling villas, and traversed + by valleys of a deeper and duskier blue. In one of the deepest and + shadiest of these recesses one of the most “sympathetic” of small + watering-places is hidden away yet a while longer from easy invasion—the + Baths to which Lucca has lent its name. Lucca is pre-eminently a city of + churches; ecclesiastical architecture being indeed the only one of the + arts to which it seems to have given attention. There are curious bits of + domestic architecture, but no great palaces, and no importunate frequency + of pictures. The Cathedral, however, sums up the merits of its companions + and is a singularly noble and interesting church. Its peculiar boast is a + wonderful inlaid front, on which horses and hounds and hunted beasts are + lavishly figured in black marble over a white ground. What I chiefly + appreciated in the grey solemnity of the nave and transepts was the superb + effect of certain second-storey Gothic arches—those which rest on + the pavement being Lombard. These arches are delicate and slender, like + those of the cloister at Pisa, and they play their part in the dusky upper + air with real sublimity. + </p> + <p> + At Pistoia there is of course a Cathedral, and there is nothing unexpected + in its being, externally at least, highly impressive; in its having a + grand campanile at its door, a gaudy baptistery, in alternate layers of + black and white marble, across the way, and a stately civic palace on + either side. But even had I the space to do otherwise I should prefer to + speak less of the particular objects of interest in the place than of the + pleasure I found it to lounge away in the empty streets the quiet hours of + a warm afternoon. To say where I lingered longest would be to tell of a + little square before the hospital, out of which you look up at the + beautiful frieze in coloured earthernware by the brothers Della Robbia, + which runs across the front of the building. It represents the seven + orthodox offices of charity and, with its brilliant blues and yellows and + its tender expressiveness, brightens up amazingly, to the sense and soul, + this little grey corner of the mediaeval city. Pi stoia is still + mediaeval. How grass-grown it seemed, how drowsy, how full of idle vistas + and melancholy nooks! If nothing was supremely wonderful, everything was + delicious. + </p> + <p> + {Illustration: THE HOSPITAL, PISTOIA.} + </p> + <h3> + 1874. + </h3> + <p> + <a name="link2H_4_0021" id="link2H_4_0021"> + <!-- H2 anchor --> </a> + </p> + <div style="height: 4em;"> + <br /><br /><br /><br /> + </div> + <h2> + OTHER TUSCAN CITIES + </h2> + <h3> + I + </h3> + <p> + I had scanted charming Pisa even as I had scanted great Siena in my + original small report of it, my scarce more than stammering notes of years + before; but even if there had been meagreness of mere gaping vision—which + there in fact hadn’t been—as well as insufficiency of public + tribute, the indignity would soon have ceased to weigh on my conscience. + For to this affection I was to return again still oftener than to the + strong call of Siena my eventual frequentations of Pisa, all merely + impressionistic and amateurish as they might be—and I pretended, up + and down the length of the land, to none other—leave me at the + hither end of time with little more than a confused consciousness of + exquisite <i>quality</i> on the part of the small sweet scrap of a place + of ancient glory; a consciousness so pleadingly content to be general and + vague that I shrink from pulling it to pieces. The Republic of Pisa fought + with the Republic of Florence, through the ages so ferociously and all but + invincibly that what is so pale and languid in her to-day may well be the + aspect of any civil or, still more, military creature bled and bled and + bled at the “critical” time of its life. She has verily a just languor and + is touchingly anæmic; the past history, or at any rate the present perfect + acceptedness, of which condition hangs about her with the last grace of + weakness, making her state in this particular the very secret of her + irresistible appeal. I was to find the appeal, again and again, one of the + sweetest, tenderest, even if not one of the fullest and richest + impressions possible; and if I went back whenever I could it was very much + as one doesn’t indecently neglect a gentle invalid friend. The couch of + the invalid friend, beautifully, appealingly resigned, has been wheeled, + say, for the case, into the warm still garden, and your visit but consists + of your sitting beside it with kind, discreet, testifying silences. Such + is the figurative form under which the once rugged enemy of Florence, + stretched at her length by the rarely troubled Arno, to-day presents + herself; and I find my analogy complete even to my sense of the mere mild + <i>séance</i>, the inevitably tacit communion or rather blank interchange, + between motionless cripple and hardly more incurable admirer. + </p> + <p> + The terms of my enjoyment of Pisa scarce departed from that ideal—slow + contemplative perambulations, rather late in the day and after work done + mostly in the particular decent inn-room that was repeatedly my portion; + where the sunny flicker of the river played up from below to the very + ceiling, which, by the same sign, anciently and curiously raftered and + hanging over my table at a great height, had been colour-pencilled into + ornament as fine (for all practical purposes) as the page of a missal. I + add to this, for remembrance, an inveteracy of evening idleness and of + reiterated ices in front of one of the quiet cafés—quiet as + everything at Pisa is quiet, or will certainly but in these latest days + have ceased to be; one in especial so beautifully, so mysteriously void of + bustle that almost always the neighbouring presence and admirable chatter + of some group of the local University students would fall upon my ear, by + the half-hour at a time, not less as a privilege, frankly, than as a + clear-cut image of the young Italian mind and life, by which I lost + nothing. I use such terms as “admirable” and “privilege,” in this last + most casual of connections—which was moreover no connection at all + but what my attention made it—simply as an acknowledgment of the + interest that might play there through some inevitable thoughts. These + were, for that matter, intensely in keeping with the ancient scene and + air: they dealt with the exquisite difference between that tone and type + of ingenuous adolescence—in the mere relation of charmed <i>audition</i>—and + other forms of juvenility of whose mental and material accent one had + elsewhere met the assault. Civilised, charmingly civilised, were my + loquacious neighbours—as how had n’t they to be, one asked one’s + self, through the use of a medium of speech that is in itself a sovereign + saturation? <i>There</i> was the beautiful congruity of the happily-caught + impression; the fact of my young men’s general Tuscanism of tongue, which + related them so on the spot to the whole historic consensus of things. It + wasn’t dialect—as it of course easily might have been elsewhere, at + Milan, at Turin, at Bologna, at Naples; it was the clear Italian in which + all the rest of the surrounding story was told, all the rest of the result + of time recorded; and it made them delightful, prattling, unconscious men + of the particular little constituted and bequeathed world which everything + else that was charged with old meanings and old beauty referred to—all + the more that their talk was never by any chance of romping games or deeds + of violence, but kept flowering, charmingly and incredibly, into eager + ideas and literary opinions and philosophic discussions and, upon my + honour, vital questions. + </p> + <p> + They have taken me too far, for so light a reminiscence; but I claim for + the loose web of my impressions at no point a heavier texture. Which comes + back to what I was a moment ago saying—that just in proportion as + you “feel” the morbid charm of Pisa you press on it gently, and this + somehow even under stress of whatever respectful attention. I found this + last impulse, at all events, so far as I was concerned, quite contentedly + spend itself in a renewed sense of the simple large pacified felicity of + such an afternoon aspect as that of the Lung’ Arno, taken up or down its + course; whether to within sight of small Santa Maria della Spina, the + tiny, the delicate, the exquisite Gothic chapel perched where the quay + drops straight, or, in the other direction, toward the melting perspective + of the narrow local pleasure-ground, the rather thin and careless bosky + grace of which recedes, beside the stream whose very turbidity pleases, to + a middle distance of hot and tangled and exuberant rural industry and a + proper blue horizon of Carrara mountains. The Pisan Lung’ Arno is shorter + and less featured and framed than the Florentine, but it has the fine + accent of a marked curve and is quite as bravely Tuscan; witness the type + of river-fronting palace which, in half-a-dozen massive specimens, the + last word of the anciently “handsome,” are of the essence of the + physiognomy of the place. In the glow of which retrospective admission I + ask myself how I came, under my first flush, reflected in other pages, to + fail of justice to so much proud domestic architecture—in the very + teeth moreover of the fact that I was for ever paying my compliments, in a + wistful, wondering way, to the fine Palazzo Lanfranchi, occupied in 1822 + by the migratory Byron, and whither Leigh Hunt, as commemorated in the + latter’s Autobiography, came out to join him in an odd journalistic + scheme. + </p> + <p> + Of course, however, I need scarcely add, the centre of my daily revolution—quite + thereby on the circumference—was the great Company of Four in their + sequestered corner; objects of regularly recurrent pious pilgrimage, if + for no other purpose than to see whether each would each time again so + inimitably carry itself as one of a group of wonderfully-worked old + ivories. Their charm of relation to each other and to everything else that + concerns them, that of the quartette of monuments, is more or less + inexpressible all round; but not the least of it, ever, is in their + beautiful secret for taking at different hours and seasons, in different + states of the light, the sky, the wind, the weather—in different + states, even, it used verily to seem to me, of an admirer’s imagination or + temper or nerves—different complexional appearances, different + shades and pallors, different glows and chills. I have seen them look + almost viciously black, and I have seen them as clear and fair as pale + gold. And these things, for the most part, off on the large grassy carpet + spread for them, and with the elbow of the old city-wall, not elsewhere + erect, respectfully but protectingly crooked about, to the tune of a usual + unanimity save perhaps in the case of the Leaning Tower—so abnormal + a member of any respectable family this structure at best that I always + somehow fancied its three companions, the Cathedral, the Baptistery and + the Campo Santo, capable of quiet common understandings, for the major or + the minor effect, into which their odd fellow, no hint thrown out to him, + was left to enter as he might. If one haunted the place, one ended by + yielding to the conceit that, beautifully though the others of the group + may be said to behave about him, one sometimes caught them in the act of + tacitly combining to ignore him—as if he had, after so long, begun + to give on their nerves. Or is that absurdity but my shamefaced form of + admission that, for all the wonder of him, he finally gave on mine? + Frankly—I would put it at such moments—he becomes at last an + optical bore or <i>betise</i>. + </p> + <p> + {Illustration: THE LOGGIA, LUCCA.} + </p> + <h3> + II + </h3> + <p> + To Lucca I was not to return often—I was to return only once; when + that compact and admirable little city, the very model of a small <i>pays + de Cocagne</i>, overflowing with everything that makes for ease, for + plenty, for beauty, for interest and good example, renewed for me, in the + highest degree, its genial and robust appearance. The perfection of this + renewal must indeed have been, at bottom, the ground of my rather hanging + back from possible excess of acquaintance—with the instinct that so + right and rich and rounded a little impression had better be left than + endangered. I remember positively saying to myself the second time that no + brown-and-gold Tuscan city, even, could <i>be</i> as happy as Lucca looked—save + always, exactly, Lucca; so that, on the chance of any shade of human + illusion in the case, I wouldn’t, as a brooding analyst, go within fifty + miles of it again. Just so, I fear I must confess, it was this mere + face-value of the place that, when I went back, formed my sufficiency; I + spent all my scant time—or the greater part, for I took a day to + drive over to the Bagni—just gaping at its visible attitude. This + may be described as that of simply sitting there, through the centuries, + at the receipt of perfect felicity; on its splendid solid seat of russet + masonry, that is—for its great republican ramparts of long ago still + lock it tight—with its wide garden-land, its ancient appanage or + hereditary domain, teeming and blooming with everything that is good and + pleasant for man, all about, and with a ring of graceful and noble, yet + comparatively unbeneficed uplands and mountains watching it, for very + envy, across the plain, as a circle of bigger boys, in the playground, may + watch a privileged or pampered smaller one munch a particularly fine + apple. Half smothered thus in oil and wine and corn and all the fruits of + the earth, Lucca seems fairly to laugh for good-humour, and it’s as if one + can’t say more for her than that, thanks to her putting forward for you a + temperament somehow still richer than her heritage, you forgive her at + every turn her fortune. She smiles up at you her greeting as you dip into + her wide lap, out of which you may select almost any rare morsel whatever. + Looking back at my own choice indeed I see it must have suffered a certain + embarrassment—that of the sense of too many things; for I scarce + remember choosing at all, any more than I recall having had to go hungry. + I turned into all the churches—taking care, however, to pause before + one of them, though before which I now irrecoverably forget, for + verification of Ruskin’s so characteristically magnified rapture over the + high and rather narrow and obscure hunting-frieze on its front—and + in the Cathedral paid my respects at every turn to the greatest of + Lucchesi, Matteo Civitale, wisest, sanest, homeliest, kindest of <i>quattro-cento</i> + sculptors, to whose works the Duomo serves almost as a museum. But my + nearest approach to anything so invidious as a discrimination or a + preference, under the spell of so felt an equilibrium, must have been the + act of engaging a carriage for the Baths. + </p> + <p> + That inconsequence once perpetrated, let me add, the impression was as + right as any other—the impression of the drive through the huge + general tangled and fruited <i>podere</i> of the countryside; that of the + pair of jogging hours that bring the visitor to where the wideish gate of + the valley of the Serchio opens. The question after this became quite + other; the narrowing, though always more or less smiling gorge that draws + you on and on is a different, a distinct proposition altogether, with its + own individual grace of appeal and association. It is the association, + exactly, that would even now, on this page, beckon me forward, or perhaps + I should rather say backward—weren’t more than a glance at it out of + the question—to a view of that easier and not so inordinately remote + past when “people spent the summer” in these perhaps slightly stuffy + shades. I speak of that age, I think of it at least, as easier than ours, + in spite of the fact that even as I made my pilgrimage the mark of modern + change, the railway in construction, had begun to be distinct, though the + automobile was still pretty far in the future. The relations and + proportions of everything are of course now altered—I indeed, I + confess, wince at the vision of the cloud of motor-dust that must in the + fine season hang over the whole connection. That represents greater + promptness of approach to the bosky depths of Ponte-a-Serraglio and the + Bagni Caldi, but it throws back the other time, that of the old jogging + relation, of the Tuscan grand-ducal “season” and the small cosmopolite + sociability, into quite Arcadian air and the comparatively primitive + scale. The “easier” Italy of our infatuated precursors there wears its + glamour of facility not through any question of “the development of + communications,” but through the very absence of the dream of that boon, + thanks to which every one (among the infatuated) lived on terms of so much + closer intercourse with the general object of their passion. After we had + crossed the Serchio that beautiful day we passed into the charming, the + amiably tortuous, the thickly umbrageous, valley of the Lima, and then it + was that I seemed fairly to remount the stream of time; figuring to myself + wistfully, at the small scattered centres of entertainment—modest + inns, pensions and other places of convenience clustered where the + friendly torrent is bridged or the forested slopes adjust themselves—what + the summer days and the summer rambles and the summer dreams must have + been, in the blest place, when “people” (by which I mean the contingent of + beguiled barbarians) didn’t know better, as we say, than to content + themselves with such a mild substitute, such a soft, sweet and essentially + elegant apology, for adventure. One wanted not simply to hang about a + little, but really to live back, as surely one might, have done by staying + on, into the so romantically strong, if mechanically weak, Italy of the + associations of one’s youth. It was a pang to have to revert to the + present even in the form of Lucca—which says everything. + </p> + <h3> + III + </h3> + <p> + If undeveloped communications were to become enough for me at those + retrospective moments, I might have felt myself supplied to my taste, let + me go on to say, at the hour of my making, with great resolution, an + attempt on high-seated and quite grandly out-of-the-way Volterra: a + reminiscence associated with quite a different year and, I should perhaps + sooner have bethought myself, with my fond experience of Pisa—inasmuch + as it was during a pause under that bland and motionless wing that I seem + to have had to organise in the darkness of a summer dawn my approach to + the old Etruscan stronghold. The railway then existed, but I rose in the + dim small hours to take my train; moreover, so far as that might too much + savour of an incongruous facility, the fault was in due course quite + adequately repaired by an apparent repudiation of any awareness of such + false notes on the part of the town. I may not invite the reader to + penetrate with me by so much as a step the boundless backward reach of + history to which the more massive of the Etruscan gates of Volterra, the + Porta all’ Arco, forms the solidest of thresholds; since I perforce take + no step myself, and am even exceptionally condemned here to impressionism + unashamed. My errand was to spend a Sunday with an Italian friend, a + native in fact of the place, master of a house there in which he offered + me hospitality; who, also arriving from Florence the night before, had + obligingly come on with me from Pisa, and whose consciousness of a due + urbanity, already rather overstrained, and still well before noon, by the + accumulation of our matutinal vicissitudes and other grounds for patience, + met all ruefully at the station the supreme shock of an apparently great + desolate world of volcanic hills, of blank, though “engineered,” + undulations, as the emergence of a road testified, unmitigated by the + smallest sign of a wheeled vehicle. The station, in other words, looked + out at that time (and I daresay the case hasn’t strikingly altered) on a + mere bare huge hill-country, by some remote mighty shoulder of which the + goal of our pilgrimage, so questionably “served” by the railway, was + hidden from view. Served as well by a belated omnibus, a four-in-hand of + lame and lamentable quality, the place, I hasten to add, eventually put + forth some show of being; after a complete practical recognition of which, + let me at once further mention, all the other, the positive and sublime, + connections of Volterra established themselves for me without my lifting a + finger. + </p> + <p> + The small shrunken, but still lordly prehistoric city is perched, when + once you have rather painfully zigzagged to within sight of it, very much + as an eagle’s eyrie, oversweeping the land and the sea; and to that type + of position, the ideal of the airy peak of vantage, with all accessories + and minor features a drop, a slide and a giddiness, its individual items + and elements strike you at first as instinctively conforming. This + impression was doubtless after a little modified for me; there were + levels, there were small stony practicable streets, there were walks and + strolls, outside the gates and roundabout the cyclopean wall, to the far + end of downward-tending protrusions and promontories, natural buttresses + and pleasant terrene headlands, friendly suburban spots (one would call + them if the word had less detestable references) where games of bowls and + overtrellised wine-tables could put in their note; in spite of which + however my friend’s little house of hospitality, clean and charming and + oh, so immemorially Tuscan, was as perpendicular and ladder-like as so + compact a residence could be; it kept up for me beautifully—as + regards posture and air, though humanly and socially it rather cooed like + a dovecote—the illusion of the vertiginously “balanced” eagle’s + nest. The air, in truth, all the rest of that splendid day, must have been + the key to the promptly-produced intensity of one’s relation to every + aspect of the charming episode; the light, cool, keen air of those + delightful high places, in Italy, that tonically correct the ardours of + July, and which at our actual altitude could but affect me as the very + breath of the grand local legend. I might have “had” the little house, our + particular eagle’s nest, for the summer, and even on such touching terms; + and I well remember the force of the temptation to take it, if only other + complications had permitted; to spend the series of weeks with that + admirable <i>interesting</i> freshness in my lungs: interesting, I + especially note, as the strong appropriate medium in which a continuity + with the irrecoverable but still effective past had been so robustly + preserved. I couldn’t yield, alas, to the conceived felicity, which had + half-a-dozen appealing aspects; I could only, while thus feeling how the + atmospheric medium itself made for a positively initiative exhilaration, + enjoy my illusion till the morrow. The exhilaration therefore supplies to + memory the whole light in which, for the too brief time, I went about + “seeing” Volterra; so that my glance at the seated splendour reduces + itself, as I have said, to the merest impressionism; nothing more was to + be looked for, on the stretched surface of consciousness, from one breezy + wash of the brush. I find there the clean strong image simplified to the + three or four unforgettable particulars of the vast rake of the view; with + the Maremma, of evil fame, more or less immediately below, but with those + islands of the sea, Corsica and Elba, the names of which are sharply + associational beyond any others, dressing the far horizon in the grand + manner, and the Ligurian coast-line melting northward into beauty and + history galore; with colossal uncemented blocks of Etruscan gates and + walls plunging you—and by their very interest—into a sweet + surrender of any privilege of appreciation more crushing than your general + synthetic stare; and with the rich and perfectly arranged museum, an + unsurpassed exhibition of monumental treasure from Etruscan tombs, + funereal urns mainly, reliquaries of an infinite power to move and charm + us still, contributing to this same so designed, but somehow at the same + time so inspired, collapse of the historic imagination under too heavy a + pressure, or abeyance of “private judgment” in too unequal a relation. + </p> + <h3> + IV + </h3> + <p> + I remember recovering private judgment indeed in the course of two or + three days following the excursion I have just noted; which must have + shaped themselves in some sort of consonance with the idea that as we were + hereabouts in the very middle of dim Etruria a common self-respect + prescribed our somehow profiting by the fact. This kindled in us the + spirit of exploration, but with results of which I here attempt to record, + so utterly does the whole impression swoon away, for present memory, into + vagueness, confusion and intolerable heat, Our self-respect was of the + common order, but the blaze of the July sun was, even for Tuscany, of the + uncommon; so that the project of a trudging quest for Etruscan tombs in + shadeless wastes yielded to its own temerity. There comes back to me + nevertheless at the same time, from the mild misadventure, and quite as + through this positive humility of failure, the sense of a supremely + intimate revelation of Italy in undress, so to speak (the state, it + seemed, in which one would most fondly, most ideally, enjoy her); Italy no + longer in winter starch and sobriety, with winter manners and winter + prices and winter excuses, all addressed to the <i>forestieri</i> and the + philistines; but lolling at her length, with her graces all relaxed, and + thereby only the more natural; the brilliant performer, in short, <i>en + famille</i>, the curtain down and her salary stopped for the season—thanks + to which she is by so much more the easy genius and the good creature as + she is by so much less the advertised <i>prima donna</i>. She received us + nowhere more sympathetically, that is with less ceremony or + self-consciousness, I seem to recall, than at Montepulciano, for instance—where + it was indeed that the recovery of private judgment I just referred to + couldn’t help taking place. What we were doing, or what we expected to do, + at Montepulciano I keep no other trace of than is bound up in a present + quite tender consciousness that I wouldn’t for the world not have been + there. I think my reason must have been largely just in the beauty of the + name (for could any beauty be greater?), reinforced no doubt by the fame + of the local vintage and the sense of how we should quaff it on the spot. + Perhaps we quaffed it too constantly; since the romantic picture reduces + itself for me but to two definite appearances; that of the more priggish + discrimination so far reasserting itself as to advise me that + Montepulciano was dirty, even remarkably dirty; and that of her being not + much else besides but perched and brown and queer and crooked, and noble + withal (which is what almost any Tuscan city more easily than not acquits + herself of; all the while she may on such occasions figure, when one looks + off from her to the end of dark street-vistas or catches glimpses through + high arcades, some big battered, blistered, overladen, overmasted ship, + swimming in a violet sea). + </p> + <p> + If I have lost the sense of what we were doing, that could at all suffer + commemoration, at Montepulciano, so I sit helpless before the memory of + small stewing Torrita, which we must somehow have expected to yield, under + our confidence, a view of shy charms, but which did n’t yield, to my + recollection, even anything that could fairly be called a breakfast or a + dinner. There may have been in the neighbourhood a rumour of Etruscan + tombs; the neighbourhood, however, was vast, and that possibility not to + be verified, in the conditions, save after due refreshment. Then it was, + doubtless, that the question of refreshment so beckoned us, by a direct + appeal, straight across country, from Perugia, that, casting consistency, + if not to the winds, since alas there were none, but to the lifeless air, + we made the sweltering best of our way (and it took, for the distance, a + terrible time) to the Grand Hotel of that city. This course shines for me, + in the retrospect, with a light even more shameless than that in which my + rueful conscience then saw it; since we thus exchanged again, at a stroke, + the tousled <i>bonne fille</i> of our vacational Tuscany for the formal + and figged-out presence of Italy on her good behaviour. We had never seen + her conform more to all the proprieties, we felt, than under this aspect + of lavish hospitality to that now apparently quite inveterate swarm of + pampered <i>forestieri</i>, English and Americans in especial, who, having + had Roman palaces and villas deliciously to linger in, break the northward + journey, when once they decide to take it, in the Umbrian paradise. They + were, goodness knows, within their rights, and we profited, as anyone may + easily and cannily profit at that time, by the sophistications paraded for + them; only I feel, as I pleasantly recover it all, that though we had + arrived perhaps at the most poetical of watering-places we had lost our + finer clue. (The difference from other days was immense, all the span of + evolution from the ancient malodorous inn which somehow did n’t matter, to + that new type of polyglot caravanserai which everywhere insists on + mattering—mattering, even in places where other interests abound, so + much more than anything else.) That clue, the finer as I say, I would fain + at any rate to-day pick up for its close attachment to another Tuscan city + or two—for a felt pull from strange little San Gimignano delle belle + Torre in especial; by which I mean from the memory of a summer Sunday + spent there during a stay at Siena. But I have already superabounded, for + mere love of my general present rubric—the real thickness of + experience having a good deal evaporated, so that the Tiny Town of the + Many Towers hangs before me, not to say, rather, far behind me, after the + manner of an object directly meeting the wrong or diminishing lens of + one’s telescope. + </p> + <p> + It did everything, on the occasion of that pilgrimage, that it was + expected to do, presenting itself more or less in the guise of some rare + silvery shell, washed up by the sea of time, cracked and battered and + dishonoured, with its mutilated marks of adjustment to the extinct type of + creature it once harboured figuring against the sky as maimed + gesticulating arms flourished in protest against fate. If the centuries, + however, had pretty well cleaned out, vulgarly speaking, this amazing + little fortress-town, it wasn’t that a mere aching void was bequeathed us, + I recognise as I consult a somewhat faded impression; the whole scene and + occasion come back to me as the exhibition, on the contrary, of a stage + rather crowded and agitated, of no small quantity of sound and fury, of + concussions, discussions, vociferations, hurryings to and fro, that could + scarce have reached a higher pitch in the old days of the siege and the + sortie. San Gimignano affected me, to a certainty, as not dead, I mean, + but as inspired with that strange and slightly sinister new life that is + now, in case after case, up and down the peninsula, and even in presence + of the dryest and most scattered bones, producing the miracle of + resurrection. The effect is often—and I find it strikingly involved + in this particular reminiscence—that of the buried hero himself + positively waking up to show you his bones for a fee, and almost capering + about in his appeal to your attention. What has become of the soul of San + Gimignano who shall say?—but, of a genial modern Sunday, it is as if + the heroic skeleton, risen from the dust, were in high activity, officious + for your entertainment and your detention, clattering and changing plates + at the informal friendly inn, personally conducting you to a sight of the + admirable Santa Fina of Ghirlandaio, as I believe is supposed, in a dim + chapel of the Collegiata church; the poor young saint, on her low bed, in + a state of ecstatic vision (the angelic apparition is given), acconpanied + by a few figures and accessories of the most beautiful and touching truth. + This image is what has most vividly remained with me, of the day I thus so + ineffectually recover; the precious ill-set gem or domestic treasure of + Santa Fina, and then the wonderful drive, at eventide, back to Siena: the + progress through the darkening land that was like a dense fragrant garden, + all fireflies and warm emanations and dimly-seen motionless festoons, + extravagant vines and elegant branches intertwisted for miles, with + couples and companies of young countryfolk almost as fondly united and + raising their voices to the night as if superfluously to sing out at you + that they were happy, and above all were Tuscan. On reflection, and to be + just, I connect the slightly incongruous loudness that hung about me under + the Beautiful Towers with the really too coarse competition for my favour + among the young vetturini who lay in wait for my approach, and with an eye + to my subsequent departure, on my quitting, at some unremembered spot, the + morning train from Siena, from which point there was then still a drive. + That onset was of a fine mediaeval violence, but the subsiding echoes of + it alone must have afterwards borne me company; mingled, at the worst, + with certain reverberations of the animated rather than concentrated + presence of sundry young sketchers and copyists of my own nationality, + which element in the picture conveyed beyond anything else how thoroughly + it was all to sit again henceforth in the eye of day. My final vision + perhaps was of a sacred reliquary not so much rudely as familiarly and + “humorously” torn open. The note had, with all its references, its own + interest; but I never went again. + </p> + <p> + {Illustration: TOWERS OF SAN GIMIGNANO.} + </p> + <p> + <a name="link2H_4_0022" id="link2H_4_0022"> + <!-- H2 anchor --> </a> + </p> + <div style="height: 4em;"> + <br /><br /><br /><br /> + </div> + <h2> + RAVENNA + </h2> + <p> + I write these lines on a cold Swiss mountain-top, shut in by an intense + white mist from any glimpse of the underworld of lovely Italy; but as I + jotted down the other day in the ancient capital of Honorius and Theodoric + the few notes of which they are composed, I let the original date stand + for local colour’s sake. Its mere look, as I transcribe it, emits a + grateful glow in the midst of the Alpine rawness, and gives a depressed + imagination something tangible to grasp while awaiting the return of fine + weather. For Ravenna was glowing, less than a week since, as I edged along + the narrow strip of shadow binding one side of the empty, white streets. + After a long, chill spring the summer this year descended upon Italy with + a sudden jump and an ominous hot breath. I stole away from Florence in the + night, and even on top of the Apennines, under the dull starlight and in + the rushing train, one could but sit and pant perspiringly. + </p> + <p> + At Bologna I found a festa, or rather two festas, a civil and a religious, + going on in mutual mistrust and disparagement. The civil, that of the + Statuto, was the one fully national Italian holiday as by law established—the + day that signalises everywhere over the land at once its achieved and + hard-won unification; the religious was a jubilee of certain local + churches. The latter is observed by the Bolognese parishes in couples, and + comes round for each couple but once in ten years—an arrangement by + which the faithful at large insure themselves a liberal recurrence of + expensive processions. It was n’t my business to distinguish the sheep + from the goats, the pious from the profane, the prayers from the scoffers; + it was enough that, melting together under the scorching sun, they filled + the admirably solid city with a flood of spectacular life. The combination + at one point was really dramatic. While a long procession of priests and + young virgins in white veils, bearing tapers, marshalled itself in one of + the streets, a review of the King’s troops went forward outside the town. + On its return a large detachment of cavalry passed across the space where + the incense was burning, the pictured banners swaying and the litany being + droned, and checked the advance of the little ecclesiastical troop. The + long vista of the street, between the porticoes, was festooned with + garlands and scarlet and tinsel; the robes and crosses and canopies of the + priests, the clouds of perfumed smoke and the white veils of the maidens, + were resolved by the hot bright air into a gorgeous medley of colour, + across which the mounted soldiers rattled and flashed as if it had been a + conquering army trampling on an embassy of propitiation. It was, to tell + the truth, the first time an’ Italian festa had really exhibited to my + eyes the genial glow and the romantic particulars promised by song and + story; and I confess that those eyes found more pleasure in it than they + were to find an hour later in the picturesque on canvas as one observes it + in the Pinacoteca. I found myself scowling most unmercifully at Guido and + Domenichino. + </p> + <p> + For Ravenna, however, I had nothing but smiles—grave, reflective, + philosophic smiles, I hasten to add, such as accord with the historic + dignity, not to say the mortal sunny sadness, of the place. I arrived + there in the evening, before, even at drowsy Ravenna, the festa of the + Statuto had altogether put itself to bed. I immediately strolled forth + from the inn, and found it sitting up a while longer on the piazza, + chiefly at the cafe door, listening to the band of the garrison by the + light of a dozen or so of feeble tapers, fastened along the front of the + palace of the Government. Before long, however, it had dispersed and + departed, and I was left alone with the grey illumination and with an + affable citizen whose testimony as to the manners and customs of Ravenna I + had aspired to obtain. I had, borrowing confidence from prompt + observation, suggested deferentially that it was n’t the liveliest place + in the world, and my friend admitted that it was in fact not a seat of + ardent life. But had I seen the Corso? Without seeing the Corso one did + n’t exhaust the possibilities. The Corso of Ravenna, of a hot summer + night, had an air of surprising seclusion and repose. Here and there in an + upper closed window glimmered a light; my companion’s footsteps and my own + were the only sounds; not a creature was within sight. The suffocating air + helped me to believe for a moment that I walked in the Italy of Boccaccio, + hand-in-hand with the plague, through a city which had lost half its + population by pestilence and the other half by flight. I turned back into + my inn profoundly satisfied. This at last was the old-world dulness of a + prime distillation; this at last was antiquity, history, repose. + </p> + <p> + The impression was largely confirmed and enriched on the following day; + but it was obliged at an early stage of my visit to give precedence to + another—the lively perception, namely, of the thinness of my + saturation with Gibbon and the other sources of legend. At Ravenna the + waiter at the café and the coachman who drives you to the Pine-Forest + allude to Galla Placidia and Justinian as to any attractive topic of the + hour; wherever you turn you encounter some fond appeal to your historic + presence of mind. For myself I could only attune my spirit vaguely to so + ponderous a challenge, could only feel I was breathing an air of + prodigious records and relics. I conned my guide-book and looked up at the + great mosaics, and then fumbled at poor Murray again for some intenser + light on the court of Justinian; but I can imagine that to a visitor more + intimate with the originals of the various great almond-eyed mosaic + portraits in the vaults of the churches these extremely curious works of + art may have a really formidable interest. I found in the place at large, + by daylight, the look of a vast straggling depopulated village. The + streets with hardly an exception are grass-grown, and though I walked + about all day I failed to encounter a single wheeled vehicle. I remember + no shop but the little establishment of an urbane photographer, whose + views of the Pineta, the great legendary pine-forest just without the + town, gave me an irresistible desire to seek that refuge. There was no + architecture to speak of; and though there are a great many large + domiciles with aristocratic names they stand cracking and baking in the + sun in no very comfortable fashion. The houses have for the most part an + all but rustic rudeness; they are low and featureless and shabby, as well + as interspersed with high garden walls over which the long arms of tangled + vines hang motionless into the stagnant streets. Here and there in all + this dreariness, in some particularly silent and grassy corner, rises an + old brick church with a front more or less spoiled, by cheap + modernisation, and a strange cylindrical campanile pierced with small + arched windows and extremely suggestive of the fifth century. These + churches constitute the palpable interest of Ravenna, and their own + principal interest, after thirteen centuries of well-intentioned + spoliation, resides in their unequalled collection of early Christian + mosaics. It is an interest simple, as who should say, almost to harshness, + and leads one’s attention along a straight and narrow way. There are older + churches in Rome, and churches which, looked at as museums, are more + variously and richly informing; but in Rome you stumble at every step on + some curious pagan memorial, often beautiful enough to make your thoughts + wander far from the strange stiff primitive Christian forms. + </p> + <p> + Ravenna, on the other hand, began with the Church, and all her monuments + and relics are harmoniously rigid. By the middle of the first century she + possessed an exemplary saint, Apollinaris, a disciple of Peter, to whom + her two finest places of worship are dedicated. It was to one of these, + jocosely entitled the “new,” that I first directed my steps. I lingered + outside a while and looked at the great red, barrel-shaped bell-towers, so + rusty, so crumbling, so archaic, and yet so resolute to ring in another + century or two, and then went in to the coolness, the shining marble + columns, the queer old sculptured slabs and sarcophagi and the long + mosaics that scintillated, under the roof, along the wall of the nave. San + Apollinare Nuovo, like most of its companions, is a magazine of early + Christian odds and ends; fragments of yellow marble incrusted with quaint + sculptured emblems of primitive dogma; great rough troughs, containing the + bones of old bishops; episcopal chairs with the marble worn narrow by + centuries of pressure from the solid episcopal person; slabs from the + fronts of old pulpits, covered with carven hierogylphics of an almost + Egyptian abstruseness—lambs and stags and fishes and beasts of + theological affinities even less apparent. Upon all these strange things + the strange figures in the great mosaic panorama look down, with coloured + cheeks and staring eyes, lifelike enough to speak to you and answer your + wonderment and tell you in bad Latin of the decadence that it was in such + and such a fashion they believed and worshipped. First, on each side, near + the door, are houses and ships and various old landmarks of Ravenna; then + begins a long procession, on one side, of twenty-two white-robed virgins + and three obsequious magi, terminating in a throne bearing the Madonna and + Child, surrounded by four angels; on the other side, of an equal number of + male saints (twenty-five, that is) holding crowns in their hands and + leading to a Saviour enthroned between angels of singular expressiveness. + What it is these long slim seraphs express I cannot quite say, but they + have an odd, knowing, sidelong look out of the narrow ovals of their eyes + which, though not without sweetness, would certainly make me murmur a + defensive prayer or so were I to find myself alone in the church towards + dusk. All this work is of the latter part of the sixth century and + brilliantly preserved. The gold backgrounds twinkle as if they had been + inserted yesterday, and here and there a figure is executed almost too + much in the modern manner to be interesting; for the charm of mosaic work + is, to my sense, confined altogether to the infancy of the art. The great + Christ, in the series of which I speak, is quite an elaborate picture, and + yet he retains enough of the orthodox stiffness to make him impressive in + the simpler, elder sense. He is clad in a purple robe, even as an emperor, + his hair and beard are artfully curled, his eyebrows arched, his + complexion brilliant, his whole aspect such a one as the popular mind may + have attributed to Honorius or Valentinian. It is all very Byzantine, and + yet I found in it much of that interest which is inseparable, to a facile + imagination, from all early representations of our Lord. Practically they + are no more authentic than the more or less plausible inventions of Ary + Scheffer and Holman Hunt; in spite of which they borrow a certain value, + factitious perhaps but irresistible, from the mere fact that they are + twelve or thirteen centuries less distant from the original. It is + something that this was the way the people in the sixth century imagined + Jesus to have looked; the image has suffered by so many the fewer + accretions. The great purple-robed monarch on the wall of Ravenna is at + least a very potent and positive Christ, and the only objection I have to + make to him is that though in this character he must have had a full + apportionment of divine foreknowledge he betrays no apprehension of Dr. + Channing and M. Renan. If one’s preference lies, for distinctness’ sake, + between the old plainness and the modern fantasy, one must admit that the + plainness has here a very grand outline. + </p> + <p> + {Illustration: SANT APOLLINAR NUOVO, RAVENNA.} + </p> + <p> + I spent the rest of the morning in charmed transition between the hot + yellow streets and the cool grey interiors of the churches. The greyness + everywhere was lighted up by the scintillation, on vault and entablature, + of mosaics more or less archaic, but always brilliant and elaborate, and + everywhere too by the same deep amaze of the fact that, while centuries + had worn themselves away and empires risen and fallen, these little cubes + of coloured glass had stuck in their allotted places and kept their + freshness. I have no space for a list of the various shrines so + distinguished, and, to tell the truth, my memory of them has already + become a very generalised and undiscriminated record. The total aspect of + the place, its sepulchral stillness, its absorbing perfume of evanescence + and decay and mortality, confounds the distinctions and blurs the details. + The Cathedral, which is vast and high, has been excessively modernised, + and was being still more so by a lavish application of tinsel and + cotton-velvet in preparation for the centenary feast of St. Apollinaris, + which befalls next month. Things on this occasion are to be done + handsomely, and a fair Ravennese informed me that a single family had + contributed three thousand francs towards a month’s vesper-music. It + seemed to me hereupon that I should like in the August twilight to wander + into the quiet nave of San Apollinare, and look up at the great mosaics + through the resonance of some fine chanting. I remember distinctly enough, + however, the tall basilica of San Vitale, of octagonal shape, like an + exchange or custom-house—modelled, I believe, upon St. Sophia at + Constantinople. It has a great span of height and a great solemnity, as + well as a choir densely pictured over on arch and apse with mosaics of the + time of Justinian. These are regular pictures, full of movement, gesture + and perspective, and just enough sobered in hue by time to bring home + their remoteness. In the middle of the church, under the great dome, sat + an artist whom I envied, making at an effective angle a study of the choir + and its broken lights, its decorated altar and its incrusted twinkling + walls. The picture, when finished, will hang, I suppose, on the library + wall of some person of taste; but even if it is much better than is + probable—I did n’t look at it—all his taste won’t tell the + owner, unless he has been there, in just what a soundless, mouldering, + out-of-the-way corner of old Italy it was painted. An even better place + for an artist fond of dusky architectural nooks, except that here the dusk + is excessive and he would hardly be able to tell his green from his red, + is the extraordinary little church of the Santi Nazaro e Celso, otherwise + known as the mausoleum of Galla Placidia. This is perhaps on the whole the + spot in Ravenna where the impression is of most sovereign authority and + most thrilling force. It consists of a narrow low-browed cave, shaped like + a Latin cross, every inch of which except the floor is covered with dense + symbolic mosaics. Before you and on each side, through the thick brown + light, loom three enormous barbaric sarcophagi, containing the remains of + potentates of the Lower Empire. It is as if history had burrowed under + ground to escape from research and you had fairly run it to earth. On the + right lie the ashes of the Emperor Honorius, and in the middle those of + his sister, Galla Placidia, a lady who, I believe, had great adventures. + On the other side rest the bones of Constantius III. The place might be a + small natural grotto lined with glimmering mineral substances, and there + is something quite tremendous in being shut up so closely with these three + imperial ghosts. The shadow of the great Roman name broods upon the huge + sepulchres and abides for ever within the narrow walls. + </p> + <p> + But still other memories hang about than those of primitive bishops and + degenerate emperors. Byron lived here and Dante died here, and the tomb of + the one poet and the dwelling of the other are among the advertised + appeals. The grave of Dante, it must be said, is anything but Dantesque, + and the whole precinct is disposed with that odd vulgarity of taste which + distinguishes most modern Italian tributes to greatness. The author of <i>The + Divine Comedy</i> commemorated in stucco, even in a slumbering corner of + Ravenna, is not “sympathetic.” Fortunately of all poets he least needs a + monument, as he was pre-eminently an architect in diction and built + himself his temple of fame in verses more solid than Cyclopean blocks. If + Dante’s tomb is not Dantesque, so neither is Byron’s house Byronic, being + a homely, shabby, two-storied dwelling, directly on the street, with as + little as possible of isolation and mystery. In Byron’s time it was an + inn, and it is rather a curious reflection that “Cain” and the “Vision of + Judgment” should have been written at an hotel. The fact supplies a + commanding precedent for self-abstraction to tourists at once sentimental + and literary. I must declare indeed that my acquaintance with Ravenna + considerably increased my esteem for Byron and helped to renew my faith in + the sincerity of his inspiration. A man so much <i>de son temps</i> as the + author of the above-named and other pieces can have spent two long years + in this stagnant city only by the help of taking a great deal of + disinterested pleasure in his own genius. He had indeed a notable pastime—the + various churches are adorned with monuments of ancestral Guicciolis—but + it is none the less obvious that Ravenna, fifty years ago, would have been + an intolerably dull residence to a foreigner of distinction unequipped + with intellectual resources. The hour one spends with Byron’s memory then + is almost compassionate. After all, one says to one’s self as one turns + away from the grandiloquent little slab in front of his house and looks + down the deadly provincial vista of the empty, sunny street, the author of + so many superb stanzas asked less from the world than he gave it. One of + his diversions was to ride in the Pineta, which, beginning a couple of + miles from the city, extends some twenty-five miles along the sands of the + Adriatic. I drove out to it for Byron’s sake, and Dante’s, and + Boccaccio’s, all of whom have interwoven it with their fictions, and for + that of a possible whiff of coolness from the sea. Between the city and + the forest, in the midst of malarious rice-swamps, stands the finest of + the Ravennese churches, the stately temple of San Apollinare in Classe. + The Emperor Augustus constructed hereabouts a harbour for fleets, which + the ages have choked up, and which survives only in the title of this + ancient church. Its extreme loneliness makes it doubly impressive. They + opened the great doors for me, and let a shaft of heated air go wander up + the beautiful nave between the twenty-four lustrous, pearly columns of + cipollino marble, and mount the wide staircase of the choir and spend + itself beneath the mosaics of the vault. I passed a memorable half-hour + sitting in this wave of tempered light, looking down the cool grey avenue + of the nave, out of the open door, at the vivid green swamps, and + listening to the melancholy stillness. I rambled for an hour in the Wood + of Associations, between the tall smooth, silvery stems of the pines, and + beside a creek which led me to the outer edge of the wood and a view of + white sails, gleaming and gliding behind the sand-hills. It was + infinitely, it was nobly “quaint,” but, as the trees stand at wide + intervals and bear far aloft in the blue air but a little parasol of + foliage, I suppose that, of a glaring summer day, the forest itself was + only the more characteristic of its clime and country for being perfectly + shadeless. + </p> + <p> + {Illustration: RAVENNA PINETA.} + </p> + <h3> + 1873. + </h3> + <p> + <a name="link2H_4_0023" id="link2H_4_0023"> + <!-- H2 anchor --> </a> + </p> + <div style="height: 4em;"> + <br /><br /><br /><br /> + </div> + <h2> + THE SAINT’S AFTERNOON AND OTHERS + </h2> + <p> + Before and above all was the sense that, with the narrow limits of past + adventure, I had never yet had such an impression of what the summer could + be in the south or the south in the summer; but I promptly found it, for + the occasion, a good fortune that my terms of comparison were restricted. + It was really something, at a time when the stride of the traveller had + become as long as it was easy, when the seven-league boots positively + hung, for frequent use, in the closet of the most sedentary, to have kept + one’s self so innocent of strange horizons that the Bay of Naples in June + might still seem quite final. That picture struck me—a particular + corner of it at least, and for many reasons—as the last word; and it + is this last word that comes back to me, after a short interval, in a + green, grey northern nook, and offers me again its warm, bright golden + meaning before it also inevitably catches the chill. Too precious, surely, + for us not to suffer it to help us as it may is the faculty of putting + together again in an order the sharp minutes and hours that the wave of + time has been as ready to pass over as the salt sea to wipe out the + letters and words your stick has traced in the sand. Let me, at any rate, + recover a sufficient number of such signs to make a sort of sense. + </p> + <h3> + I + </h3> + <p> + Far aloft on the great rock was pitched, as the first note, and indeed the + highest, of the wondrous concert, the amazing creation of the friend who + had offered me hospitality, and whom, more almost than I had ever envied + anyone anything, I envied the privilege of being able to reward a heated, + artless pilgrim with a revelation of effects so incalculable. There was + none but the loosest prefigurement as the creaking and puffing little + boat, which had conveyed me only from Sorrento, drew closer beneath the + prodigious island—beautiful, horrible and haunted—that does + most, of all the happy elements and accidents, towards making the Bay of + Naples, for the study of composition, a lesson in the grand style. There + was only, above and below, through the blue of the air and sea, a great + confused shining of hot cliffs and crags and buttresses, a loss, from + nearness, of the splendid couchant outline and the more comprehensive + mass, and an opportunity—oh, not lost, I assure you—to sit and + meditate, even moralise, on the empty deck, while a happy brotherhood of + American and German tourists, including, of course, many sisters, + scrambled down into little waiting, rocking tubs and, after a few strokes, + popped systematically into the small orifice of the Blue Grotto. There was + an appreciable moment when they were all lost to view in that receptacle, + the daily “psychological” moment during which it must so often befall the + recalcitrant observer on the deserted deck to find himself aware of how + delightful it might be if none of them should come out again. The charm, + the fascination of the idea is not a little—though also not wholly—in + the fact that, as the wave rises over the aperture, there is the most + encouraging appearance that they perfectly may not. There it is. There is + no more of them. It is a case to which nature has, by the neatest stroke + and with the best taste in the world, just quietly attended. + </p> + <p> + Beautiful, horrible, haunted: that is the essence of what, about itself, + Capri says to you—dip again into your Tacitus and see why; and yet, + while you roast a little under the awning and in the vaster shadow, it is + not because the trail of Tiberius is ineffaceable that you are most + uneasy. The trail of Germanicus in Italy to-day ramifies further and bites + perhaps even deeper; a proof of which is, precisely, that his eclipse in + the Blue Grotto is inexorably brief, that here he is popping out again, + bobbing enthusiastically back and scrambling triumphantly back. The + spirit, in truth, of his effective appropriation of Capri has a + broad-faced candour against which there is no standing up, supremely + expressive as it is of the well-known “love that kills,” of Germanicus’s + fatal susceptibility. If I were to let myself, however, incline to <i>that</i> + aspect of the serious case of Capri I should embark on strange depths. The + straightness and simplicity, the classic, synthetic directness of the + German passion for Italy, make this passion probably the sentiment in the + world that is in the act of supplying enjoyment in the largest, sweetest + mouthfuls; and there is something unsurpassably marked in the way that on + this irresistible shore it has seated itself to ruminate and digest. It + keeps the record in its own loud accents; it breaks out in the folds of + the hills and on the crests of the crags into every manner of symptom and + warning. Huge advertisements and portents stare across the bay; the + acclivities bristle with breweries and “restorations” and with great ugly + Gothic names. I hasten, of course, to add that some such general + consciousness as this may well oppress, under any sky, at the century’s + end, the brooding tourist who makes himself a prey by staying anywhere, + when the gong sounds, “behind.” It is behind, in the track and the + reaction, that he least makes out the end of it all, perceives that to + visit anyone’s country for anyone’s sake is more and more to find some one + quite other in possession. No one, least of all the brooder himself, is in + his own. + </p> + <h3> + II + </h3> + <p> + I certainly, at any rate, felt the force of this truth when, on scaling + the general rock with the eye of apprehension, I made out at a point much + nearer its summit than its base the gleam of a dizzily-perched white + sea-gazing front which I knew for my particular landmark and which + promised so much that it would have been welcome to keep even no more than + half. Let me instantly say that it kept still more than it promised, and + by no means least in the way of leaving far below it the worst of the + outbreak of restorations and breweries. There is a road at present to the + upper village, with which till recently communication was all by rude + steps cut in the rock and diminutive donkeys scrambling on the flints; one + of those fine flights of construction which the great road-making “Latin + races” take, wherever they prevail, without advertisement or bombast; and + even while I followed along the face of the cliff its climbing + consolidated ledge, I asked myself how I could think so well of it without + consistently thinking better still of the temples of beer so obviously + destined to enrich its terminus. The perfect answer to that was of course + that the brooding tourist is never bound to be consistent. What happier + law for him than this very one, precisely, when on at last alighting, high + up in the blue air, to stare and gasp and almost disbelieve, he embraced + little by little the beautiful truth particularly, on this occasion, + reserved for himself, and took in the stupendous picture? For here above + all had the thought and the hand come from far away—even from <i>ultima + Thule</i>, and yet were in possession triumphant and acclaimed. Well, all + one could say was that the way they had felt their opportunity, the divine + conditions of the place, spoke of the advantage of some such intellectual + perspective as a remote original standpoint alone perhaps can give. If + what had finally, with infinite patience, passion, labour, taste, got + itself done there, was like some supreme reward of an old dream of Italy, + something perfect after long delays, was it not verily in <i>ultima Thule</i> + that the vow would have been piously enough made and the germ tenderly + enough nursed? For a certain art of asking of Italy all she can give, you + must doubtless either be a rare <i>raffine</i> or a rare genius, a + sophisticated Norseman or just a Gabriele d’ Annunzio. + </p> + <p> + All she can give appeared to me, assuredly, for that day and the + following, gathered up and enrolled there: in the wondrous cluster and + dispersal of chambers, corners, courts, galleries, arbours, arcades, long + white ambulatories and vertiginous points of view. The greatest charm of + all perhaps was that, thanks to the particular conditions, she seemed to + abound, to overflow, in directions in which I had never yet enjoyed the + chance to find her so free. The indispensable thing was therefore, in + observation, in reflection, to press the opportunity hard, to recognise + that as the abundance was splendid, so, by the same stroke, it was + immensely suggestive. It dropped into one’s lap, naturally, at the end of + an hour or two, the little white flower of its formula: the brooding + tourist, in other words, could only continue to brood till he had made out + in a measure, as I may say, what was so wonderfully the matter with him. + He was simply then in the presence, more than ever yet, of the possible + poetry of the personal and social life of the south, and the fun would + depend much—as occasions are fleeting—on his arriving in time, + in the interest of that imagination which is his only field of sport, at + adequate new notations of it. The sense of all this, his obscure and + special fun in the general bravery, mixed, on the morrow, with the long, + human hum of the bright, hot day and filled up the golden cup with + questions and answers. The feast of St. Antony, the patron of the upper + town, was the one thing in the air, and of the private beauty of the + place, there on the narrow shelf, in the shining, shaded loggias and above + the blue gulfs, all comers were to be made free. + </p> + <h3> + III + </h3> + <p> + The church-feast of its saint is of course for Anacapri, as for any + self-respecting Italian town, the great day of the year, and the smaller + the small “country,” in native parlance, as well as the simpler, + accordingly, the life, the less the chance for leakage, on other pretexts, + of the stored wine of loyalty. This pure fluid, it was easy to feel + overnight, had not sensibly lowered its level; so that nothing indeed, + when the hour came, could well exceed the outpouring. All up and down the + Sorrentine promontory the early summer happens to be the time of the + saints, and I had just been witness there of a week on every day of which + one might have travelled, through kicked-up clouds and other + demonstrations, to a different hot holiday. There had been no bland + evening that, somewhere or other, in the hills or by the sea, the white + dust and the red glow didn’t rise to the dim stars. Dust, perspiration, + illumination, conversation—these were the regular elements. “They’re + very civilised,” a friend who knows them as well as they can be known had + said to me of the people in general; “plenty of fireworks and plenty of + talk—that’s all they ever want.” That they were “civilised”—on + the side on which they were most to show—was therefore to be the + word of the whole business, and nothing could have, in fact, had more + interest than the meaning that for the thirty-six hours I read into it. + </p> + <p> + Seen from below and diminished by distance, Anacapri makes scarce a sign, + and the road that leads to it is not traceable over the rock; but it sits + at its ease on its high, wide table, of which it covers—and with + picturesque southern culture as well—as much as it finds convenient. + As much of it as possible was squeezed all the morning, for St. Antony, + into the piazzetta before the church, and as much more into that edifice + as the robust odour mainly prevailing there allowed room for. It was the + odour that was in prime occupation, and one could only wonder how so many + men, women and children could cram themselves into so much smell. It was + surely the smell, thick and resisting, that was least successfully to be + elbowed. Meanwhile the good saint, before he could move into the air, had, + among the tapers and the tinsel, the opera-music and the pulpit poundings, + bravely to snuff it up. The shade outside was hot, and the sun was hot; + but we waited as densely for him to come out, or rather to come “on,” as + the pit at the opera waits for the great tenor. There were people from + below and people from the mainland and people from Pomerania and a brass + band from Naples. There were other figures at the end of longer strings—strings + that, some of them indeed, had pretty well given way and were now but + little snippets trailing in the dust. Oh, the queer sense of the good old + Capri of artistic legend, of which the name itself was, in the more + benighted years—years of the contadina and the pifferaro—a + bright evocation! Oh, the echo, on the spot, of each romantic tale! Oh, + the loafing painters, so bad and so happy, the conscious models, the vague + personalities! The “beautiful Capri girl” was of course not missed, though + not perhaps so beautiful as in her ancient glamour, which none the less + didn’t at all exclude the probable presence—with <i>his</i> + legendary light quite undimmed—of the English lord in disguise who + will at no distant date marry her. The whole thing was there; one held it + in one’s hand. + </p> + <p> + The saint comes out at last, borne aloft in long procession and under a + high canopy: a rejoicing, staring, smiling saint, openly delighted with + the one happy hour in the year on which he may take his own walk. Frocked + and tonsured, but not at all macerated, he holds in his hand a small wax + puppet of an infant Jesus and shows him to all their friends, to whom he + nods and bows: to whom, in the dazzle of the sun he literally seems to + grin and wink, while his litter sways and his banners flap and every one + gaily greets him. The ribbons and draperies flutter, and the white veils + of the marching maidens, the music blares and the guns go off and the + chants resound, and it is all as holy and merry and noisy as possible. The + procession—down to the delightful little tinselled and bare-bodied + babies, miniature St. Antonys irrespective of sex, led or carried by proud + papas or brown grandsires—includes so much of the population that + you marvel there is such a muster to look on—like the charades given + in a family in which every one wants to act. But it is all indeed in a + manner one house, the little high-niched island community, and nobody + therefore, even in the presence of the head of it, puts on an air of + solemnity. Singular and suggestive before everything else is the absence + of any approach to our notion of the posture of respect, and this among + people whose manners in general struck one as so good and, in particular, + as so cultivated. The office of the saint—of which the festa is but + the annual reaffirmation—involves not the faintest attribute of + remoteness or mystery. + </p> + <p> + While, with my friend, I waited for him, we went for coolness into the + second church of the place, a considerable and bedizened structure, with + the rare curiosity of a wondrous pictured pavement of majolica, the garden + of Eden done in large coloured tiles or squares, with every beast, bird + and river, and a brave <i>diminuendo</i>, in especial, from portal to + altar, of perspective, so that the animals and objects of the foreground + are big and those of the successive distances differ with much propriety. + Here in the sacred shade the old women were knitting, gossipping, yawning, + shuffling about; here the children were romping and “larking”; here, in a + manner, were the open parlour, the nursery, the kindergarten and the <i>conversazione</i> + of the poor. This is everywhere the case by the southern sea. I remember + near Sorrento a wayside chapel that seemed the scene of every function of + domestic life, including cookery and others. The odd thing is that it all + appears to interfere so little with that special civilised note—the + note of manners—which is so constantly touched. It is barbarous to + expectorate in the temple of your faith, but that doubtless is an extreme + case. Is civilisation really measured by the number of things people do + respect? There would seem to be much evidence against it. The oldest + societies, the societies with most traditions, are naturally not the least + ironic, the least <i>blasees</i>, and the African tribes who take so many + things into account that they fear to quit their huts at night are not the + fine flower. + </p> + <h3> + IV + </h3> + <p> + Where, on the other hand, it was impossible not to feel to the full all + the charming <i>riguardi</i>—to use their own good word—in + which our friends <i>could</i> abound, was, that afternoon, in the + extraordinary temple of art and hospitality that had been benignantly + opened to me. Hither, from three o’clock to seven, all the world, from the + small in particular to the smaller and the smallest, might freely flock, + and here, from the first hour to the last, the huge straw-bellied flasks + of purple wine were tilted for all the thirsty. They were many, the + thirsty, they were three hundred, they were unending; but the draughts + they drank were neither countable nor counted. This boon was dispensed in + a long, pillared portico, where everything was white and light save the + blue of the great bay as it played up from far below or as you took it in, + between shining columns, with your elbows on the parapet. Sorrento and + Vesuvius were over against you; Naples furthest off, melted, in the middle + of the picture, into shimmering vagueness and innocence; and the long arm + of Posilippo and the presence of the other islands, Procida, the stricken + Ischia, made themselves felt to the left. The grand air of it all was in + one’s very nostrils and seemed to come from sources too numerous and too + complex to name. It was antiquity in solution, with every brown, mild + figure, every note of the old speech, every tilt of the great flask, every + shadow cast by every classic fragment, adding its touch to the impression. + What was the secret of the surprising amenity?—to the essence of + which one got no nearer than simply by feeling afresh the old story of the + deep interfusion of the present with the past. You had felt that often + before, and all that could, at the most, help you now was that, more than + ever yet, the present appeared to become again really classic, to sigh + with strange elusive sounds of Virgil and Theocritus. Heaven only knows + how little they would in truth have had to say to it, but we yield to + these visions as we must, and when the imagination fairly turns in its + pain almost any soft name is good enough to soothe it. + </p> + <p> + It threw such difficulties but a step back to say that the secret of the + amenity was “style”; for what in the world was the secret of style, which + you might have followed up and down the abysmal old Italy for so many a + year only to be still vainly calling for it? Everything, at any rate, that + happy afternoon, in that place of poetry, was bathed and blessed with it. + The castle of Barbarossa had been on the height behind; the villa of black + Tiberius had overhung the immensity from the right; the white arcades and + the cool chambers offered to every step some sweet old “piece” of the + past, some rounded porphyry pillar supporting a bust, some shaft of pale + alabaster upholding a trellis, some mutilated marble image, some bronze + that had roughly resisted. Our host, if we came to that, had the secret; + but he could only express it in grand practical ways. One of them was + precisely this wonderful “afternoon tea,” in which tea only—<i>that</i>, + good as it is, has never the note of style—was not to be found. The + beauty and the poetry, at all events, were clear enough, and the + extraordinary uplifted distinction; but where, in all this, it may be + asked, was the element of “horror” that I have spoken of as sensible?—what + obsession that was not charming could find a place in that splendid light, + out of which the long summer squeezes every secret and shadow? I’m afraid + I’m driven to plead that these evils were exactly in one’s imagination, a + predestined victim always of the cruel, the fatal historic sense. To make + so much distinction, how much history had been needed!—so that the + whole air still throbbed and ached with it, as with an accumulation of + ghosts to whom the very climate was pitiless, condemning them to blanch + for ever in the general glare and grandeur, offering them no dusky + northern nook, no place at the friendly fireside, no shelter of legend or + song. + </p> + <h3> + V + </h3> + <p> + My friend had, among many original relics, in one of his white galleries—and + how he understood the effect and the “value” of whiteness!—two or + three reproductions of the finest bronzes of the Naples museum, the work + of a small band of brothers whom he had found himself justified in + trusting to deal with their problem honourably and to bring forth + something as different as possible from the usual compromise of commerce. + They had brought forth, in especial, for him, a copy of the young resting, + slightly-panting Mercury which it was a pure delight to live with, and + they had come over from Naples on St. Antony’s eve, as they had done the + year before, to report themselves to their patron, to keep up good + relations, to drink Capri wine and to join in the tarantella. They arrived + late, while we were at supper; they received their welcome and their + billet, and I am not sure it was not the conversation and the beautiful + manners of these obscure young men that most fixed in my mind for the time + the sense of the side of life that, all around, was to come out strongest. + It would be artless, no doubt, to represent them as high types of + innocence or even of energy—at the same time that, weighing them + against <i>some</i> ruder folk of our own race, we might perhaps have made + bold to place their share even of these qualities in the scale. It was an + impression indeed never infrequent in Italy, of which I might, in these + days, first have felt the force during a stay, just earlier, with a friend + at Sorrento—a friend who had good-naturedly “had in,” on his + wondrous terrace, after dinner, for the pleasure of the gaping alien, the + usual local quartette, violins, guitar and flute, the musical barber, the + musical tailor, sadler, joiner, humblest sons of the people and exponents + of Neapolitan song. Neapolitan song, as we know, has been blown well about + the world, and it is late in the day to arrive with a ravished ear for it. + That, however, was scarcely at all, for me, the question: the question, on + the Sorrento terrace, so high up in the cool Capri night, was of the + present outlook, in the world, for the races with whom it has been a + tradition, in intercourse, positively to please. + </p> + <p> + The personal civilisation, for intercourse, of the musical barber and + tailor, of the pleasant young craftsmen of my other friend’s company, was + something that could be trusted to make the brooding tourist brood afresh—to + say more to him in fact, all the rest of the second occasion, than + everything else put together. The happy address, the charming expression, + the indistinctive discretion, the complete eclipse, in short, of vulgarity + and brutality—these things easily became among these people the + supremely suggestive note, begetting a hundred hopes and fears as to the + place that, with the present general turn of affairs about the globe, is + being kept for them. They are perhaps what the races politically feeble + have still most to contribute—but what appears to be the happy + prospect for the races politically feeble? And so the afternoon waned, + among the mellow marbles and the pleasant folk—-the purple wine + flowed, the golden light faded, song and dance grew free and circulation + slightly embarrassed. But the great impression remained and finally was + exquisite. It was all purple wine, all art and song, and nobody a grain + the worse. It was fireworks and conversation—the former, in the + piazzetta, were to come later; it was civilisation and amenity. I took in + the greater picture, but I lost nothing else; and I talked with the + contadini about antique sculpture. No, nobody was a grain the worse; and I + had plenty to think of. So it was I was quickened to remember that we + others, we of my own country, as a race politically <i>not</i> weak, had—by + what I had somewhere just heard—opened “three hundred ‘saloons’” at + Manila. + </p> + <h3> + VI + </h3> + <p> + The “other” afternoons I here pass on to—and I may include in them, + for that matter, various mornings scarce less charmingly sacred to memory—were + occasions of another and a later year; a brief but all felicitous + impression of Naples itself, and of the approach to it from Rome, as well + as of the return to Rome by a different wonderful way, which I feel I + shall be wise never to attempt to “improve on.” Let me muster assurance to + confess that this comparatively recent and superlatively rich reminiscence + gives me for its first train of ineffable images those of a motor-run + that, beginning betimes of a splendid June day, and seeing me, with my + genial companions, blissfully out of Porta San Paolo, hung over us thus + its benediction till the splendour had faded in the lamplit rest of the + Chiaja. “We’ll go by the mountains,” my friend, of the chariot of fire, + had said, “and we’ll come back, after three days, by the sea”; which + handsome promise flowered into such flawless performance that I could but + feel it to have closed and rounded for me, beyond any further rehandling, + the long-drawn rather indeed than thick-studded chaplet of my visitations + of Naples—from the first, seasoned with the highest sensibility of + youth, forty years ago, to this last the other day. I find myself noting + with interest—and just to be able to emphasise it is what inspires + me with these remarks—that, in spite of the milder and smoother and + perhaps, pictorially speaking, considerably emptier, Neapolitan face of + things, things in general, of our later time, I recognised in my final + impression a grateful, a beguiling serenity. The place is at the best wild + and weird and sinister, and yet seemed on this occasion to be seated more + at her ease in her immense natural dignity. My disposition to feel that, I + hasten to add, was doubtless my own secret; my three beautiful days, at + any rate, filled themselves with the splendid harmony, several of the + minor notes of which ask for a place, such as it may be, just here. + </p> + <p> + Wondrously, it was a clean and cool and, as who should say, quiet and + amply interspaced Naples—in tune with itself, no harsh jangle of <i>forestieri</i> + vulgarising the concert. I seemed in fact, under the blaze of summer, the + only stranger—though the blaze of summer itself was, for that + matter, everywhere but a higher pitch of light and colour and tradition, + and a lower pitch of everything else; even, it struck me, of sound and + fury. The appeal in short was genial, and, faring out to Pompeii of a + Sunday afternoon, I enjoyed there, for the only time I can recall, the + sweet chance of a late hour or two, the hour of the lengthening shadows, + absolutely alone. The impression remains ineffaceable—it was to + supersede half-a-dozen other mixed memories, the sense that had remained + with me, from far back, of a pilgrimage always here beset with traps and + shocks and vulgar importunities, achieved under fatal discouragements. + Even Pompeii, in fine, haunt of <i>all</i> the cockneys of creation, + burned itself, in the warm still eventide, as clear as glass, or as the + glow of a pale topaz, and the particular cockney who roamed without a plan + and at his ease, but with his feet on Roman slabs, his hands on Roman + stones, his eyes on the Roman void, his consciousness really at last of + some good to him, could open himself as never before to the fond luxurious + fallacy of a close communion, a direct revelation. With which there were + other moments for him not less the fruit of the slow unfolding of time; + the clearest of these again being those enjoyed on the terrace of a small + island-villa—the island a rock and the villa a wondrous little + rock-garden, unless a better term would be perhaps rock-salon, just off + the extreme point of Posilippo and where, thanks to a friendliest + hospitality, he was to hang ecstatic, through another sublime afternoon, + on the wave of a magical wand. Here, as happened, were charming wise, + original people even down to delightful amphibious American children, + enamelled by the sun of the Bay as for figures of miniature Tritons and + Nereids on a Renaissance plaque; and above all, on the part of the general + prospect, a demonstration of the grand style of composition and effect + that one was never to wish to see bettered. The way in which the Italian + scene on such occasions as this seems to purify itself to the transcendent + and perfect <i>idea</i> alone—idea of beauty, of dignity, of + comprehensive grace, with all accidents merged, all defects disowned, all + experience outlived, and to gather itself up into the mere mute eloquence + of what has just incalculably <i>been</i>, remains for ever the secret and + the lesson of the subtlest daughter of History. All one could do, at the + heart of the overarching crystal, and in presence of the relegated City, + the far-trailing Mount, the grand Sorrentine headland, the islands + incomparably stationed and related, was to wonder what may well become of + the so many other elements of any poor human and social complexus, what + might become of any successfully working or only struggling and + floundering civilisation at all, when high Natural Elegance proceeds to + take such exclusive charge and recklessly assume, as it were, <i>all</i> + the responsibilities. + </p> + <h3> + VII + </h3> + <p> + This indeed had been quite the thing I was asking myself all the wondrous + way down from Rome, and was to ask myself afresh, on the return, largely + within sight of the sea, as our earlier course had kept to the ineffably + romantic inland valleys, the great decorated blue vistas in which the + breasts of the mountains shine vaguely with strange high-lying city and + castle and church and convent, even as shoulders of no diviner line might + be hung about with dim old jewels. It was odd, at the end of time, long + after those initiations, of comparative youth, that had then struck one as + extending the very field itself of felt charm, as exhausting the + possibilities of fond surrender, it was odd to have positively a new basis + of enjoyment, a new gate of triumphant passage, thrust into one’s + consciousness and opening to one’s use; just as I confess I have to brace + myself a little to call by such fine names our latest, our ugliest and + most monstrous aid to motion. It is true of the monster, as we have known + him up to now, that one can neither quite praise him nor quite blame him + without a blush—he reflects so the nature of the company he’s + condemned to keep. His splendid easy power addressed to noble aims makes + him assuredly on occasion a purely beneficent creature. I parenthesise at + any rate that I know him in no other light—counting out of course + the acquaintance that consists of a dismayed arrest in the road, with back + flattened against wall or hedge, for the dusty, smoky, stenchy shock of + his passage. To no end is his easy power more blest than to that of + ministering to the ramifications, as it were, of curiosity, or to that, in + other words, of achieving for us, among the kingdoms of the earth, the + grander and more genial, the comprehensive and <i>complete</i> + introduction. Much as was ever to be said for our old forms of pilgrimage—and + I am convinced that they are far from wholly superseded—they left, + they had to leave, dreadful gaps in our yearning, dreadful lapses in our + knowledge, dreadful failures in our energy; there were always things off + and beyond, goals of delight and dreams of desire, that dropped as a + matter of course into the unattainable, and over to which our + wonder-working agent now flings the firm straight bridge. Curiosity has + lost, under this amazing extension, its salutary renouncements perhaps; + contemplation has become one with action and satisfaction one with desire—speaking + always in the spirit of the inordinate lover of an enlightened use of our + eyes. That may represent, for all I know, an insolence of advantage on + which there will be eventual heavy charges, as yet obscure and + incalculable, to pay, and I glance at the possibility only to avoid all + thought of the lesson of the long run, and to insist that I utter this + dithyramb but in the immediate flush and fever of the short. For such a + beat of time as our fine courteous and contemplative advance upon Naples, + and for such another as our retreat northward under the same fine law of + observation and homage, the bribed consciousness could only decline to + question its security. The sword of Damocles suspended over that + presumption, the skeleton at the banquet of extravagant ease, would have + been that even at our actual inordinate rate—leaving quite apart + “improvements” to come—such savings of trouble begin to use up the + world; some hard grain of difficulty being always a necessary part of the + composition of pleasure. The hard grain in our old comparatively + pedestrian mixture, before this business of our learning not so much even + to fly (which might indeed involve trouble) as to be mechanically and + prodigiously flown, quite another matter, was the element of uncertainty, + effort and patience; the handful of silver nails which, I admit, drove + many an impression home. The seated motorist misses the silver nails, I + fully acknowledge, save in so far as his aesthetic (let alone his moral) + conscience may supply him with some artful subjective substitute; in which + case the thing becomes a precious secret of his own. + </p> + <p> + However, I wander wild—by which I mean I look too far ahead; my + intention having been only to let my sense of the merciless June beauty of + Naples Bay at the sunset hour and on the island terrace associate itself + with the whole inexpressible taste of our two motor-days’ feast of + scenery. That queer question of the exquisite grand manner as the most + emphasised <i>all</i> of things—of what it may, seated so + predominant in nature, insidiously, through the centuries, let generations + and populations “in for,” hadn’t in the least waited for the special + emphasis I speak of to hang about me. I must have found myself more or + less consciously entertaining it by the way—since how couldn’t it be + of the very essence of the truth, constantly and intensely before us, that + Italy is really so much the most beautiful country in the world, taking + all things together, that others must stand off and be hushed while she + speaks? Seen thus in great comprehensive iridescent stretches, it is the + incomparable wrought <i>fusion</i>, fusion of human history and mortal + passion with the elements of earth and air, of colour, composition and + form, that constitutes her appeal and gives it the supreme heroic grace. + The chariot of fire favours fusion rather than promotes analysis, and + leaves much of that first June picture for me, doubtless, a great accepted + blur of violet and silver. The various hours and successive aspects, the + different strong passages of our reverse process, on the other hand, still + figure for me even as some series of sublime landscape-frescoes—if + the great Claude, say, had ever used that medium—in the immense + gallery of a palace; the homeward run by Capua, Terracina, Gaeta and its + storied headland fortress, across the deep, strong, indescribable Pontine + Marshes, white-cattled, strangely pastoral, sleeping in the afternoon + glow, yet stirred by the near sea-breath. Thick somehow to the imagination + as some full-bodied sweetness of syrup is thick to the palate the + atmosphere of that region—thick with the sense of history and the + very taste of time; as if the haunt and home (which indeed it is) of some + great fair bovine aristocracy attended and guarded by halberdiers in the + form of the mounted and long-lanced herdsmen, admirably congruous with the + whole picture at every point, and never more so than in their manner of + gaily taking up, as with bell-voices of golden bronze, the offered wayside + greeting. + </p> + <p> + {Illustration: TERRACINA} + </p> + <p> + There had been this morning among the impressions of our first hour an + unforgettable specimen of that general type—the image of one of + those human figures on which our perception of the romantic so often + pounces in Italy as on the genius of the scene personified; with this + advantage, that as the scene there has, at its best, an unsurpassable + distinction, so the physiognomic representative, standing for it all, and + with an animation, a complexion, an expression, a fineness and fulness of + humanity that appear to have gathered it in and to sum it up, becomes + beautiful by the same simple process, very much, that makes the heir to a + great capitalist rich. Our early start, our roundabout descent from + Posilippo by shining Baire for avoidance of the city, had been an hour of + enchantment beyond any notation I can here recover; all lustre and azure, + yet all composition and classicism, the prospect developed and spread, + till after extraordinary upper reaches of radiance and horizons of pearl + we came at the turn of a descent upon a stalwart young gamekeeper, or + perhaps substantial young farmer, who, well-appointed and blooming, had + unslung his gun and, resting on it beside a hedge, just lived for us, in + the rare felicity of his whole look, during that moment and while, in + recognition, or almost, as we felt, in homage, we instinctively checked + our speed. He pointed, as it were, the lesson, giving the supreme right + accent or final exquisite turn to the immense magnificent phrase; which + from those moments on, and on and on, resembled doubtless nothing so much + as a page written, by a consummate verbal economist and master of style, + in the noblest of all tongues. Our splendid human plant by the wayside had + flowered thus into style—and there wasn’t to be, all day, a lapse of + eloquence, a wasted word or a cadence missed. + </p> + <p> + These things are personal memories, however, with the logic of certain + insistences of that sort often difficult to seize. Why should I have kept + so sacredly uneffaced, for instance, our small afternoon wait at tea-time + or, as we made it, coffee-time, in the little brown piazzetta of Velletri, + just short of the final push on through the flushed Castelli Romani and + the drop and home-stretch across the darkening Campagna? We had been + dropped into the very lap of the ancient civic family, after the + inveterate fashion of one’s sense of such stations in small Italian towns. + There was a narrow raised terrace, with steps, in front of the best of the + two or three local cafes, and in the soft enclosed, the warm waning light + of June various benign contemplative worthies sat at disburdened tables + and, while they smoked long black weeds, enjoyed us under those probable + workings of subtlety with which we invest so many quite unimaginably blank + (I dare say) Italian simplicities. The charm was, as always in Italy, in + the tone and the air and the happy hazard of things, which made any + positive pretension or claimed importance a comparatively trifling + question. We slid, in the steep little place, more or less down hill; we + wished, stomachically, we had rather addressed ourselves to a tea-basket; + we suffered importunity from unchidden infants who swarmed about our + chairs and romped about our feet; we stayed no long time, and “went to + see” nothing; yet we communicated to intensity, we lay at our ease in the + bosom of the past, we practised intimacy, in short, an intimacy so much + greater than the mere accidental and ostensible: the difficulty for the + right and grateful expression of which makes the old, the familiar tax on + the luxury of loving Italy. + </p> + <h3> + 1900-1909. + </h3> + <div style="height: 6em;"> + <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /> + </div> + + + + + + + +<pre> + + + + + +End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Italian Hours, by Henry James + +*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ITALIAN HOURS *** + +***** This file should be named 6354-h.htm or 6354-h.zip ***** +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: + http://www.gutenberg.org/6/3/5/6354/ + +Produced by Richard Farris and the online team at +Distributed Proofreaders + +HTML file produced by David Widger + + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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