Italian Hours

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 cr***** 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 s*x 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 ****************--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.