Italian Hours

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

Chamb**--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 Chamb**. 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. Chamb** 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 m************ 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 Chamb** 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 Th****** 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

******* 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 *********** 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 Spl********--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.