Italian Hours

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

litt****** 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.]