Italian Hours

Siena Early and Late

I

Florence being oppressively hot and delivered over to the

mosquitoes, the occasion seemed to favour that visit to Siena

which I had more than once planned and missed. I arrived late in

the evening, by the light of a magnificent moon, and while a

couple of benignantly-mumbling old crones were making up my bed

at the inn strolled forth in quest of a first impression. Five

minutes brought me to where I might gather it unhindered as it

bloomed in the white moonshine. The great Piazza of Siena is

famous, and though in this day of multiplied photographs and

blunted surprises and profaned revelations none of the world's

wonders can pretend, like Wordsworth's phantom of delight, really

to "startle and waylay," yet as I stepped upon the waiting scene

from under a dark archway I was conscious of no loss of the edge

of a precious presented sensibility. The waiting scene, as I have

called it, was in the shape of a shallow horse-shoe--as the

untravelled reader who has turned over his travelled friends'

portfolios will respectfully remember; or, better, of a bow in

which the high wide face of the Palazzo Pubblico forms the cord

and everything else the arc. It was void of any human presence

that could figure to me the current year; so that, the moonshine

assisting, I had half-an-hour's infinite vision of medi**********. The Piazza being built on the side of a hill--or rather,

as I believe science affirms, in the cup of a volcanic crater--

the vast pavement converges downwards in slanting radiations of

stone, the spokes of a great wheel, to a point directly before

the Palazzo, which may mark the hub, though it is nothing more

ornamental than the mouth of a drain. The great monument stands

on the lower side and might seem, in spite of its goodly mass and

its embattled cornice, to be rather defiantly out-countenanced by

vast private constructions occupying the opposite eminence. This

might be, without the extraordinary dignity of the architectural

gesture with which the huge high-shouldered pile asserts itself.

On the firm edge of the palace, from bracketed base to grey-

capped summit against the sky, where grows a tall slim tower

which soars and soars till it has given notice of the city's

greatness over the blue mountains that mark the horizon. It rises

as slender and straight as a pennoned lance planted on the steel-

shod toe of a mounted knight, and keeps all to itself in the blue

air, far above the changing fashions of the market, the proud

consciousness or rare arrogance once built into it. This

beautiful tower, the finest thing in Siena and, in its rigid

fashion, as permanently fine thus as a really handsome nose on a

face of no matter what accumulated age, figures there still as a

Declaration of Independence beside which such an affair as ours,

thrown off at Philadelphia, appears to have scarce done more than

helplessly give way to time. Our Independence has become a

dependence on a thousand such dreadful things as the incorrupt

declaration of Siena strikes us as looking for ever straight over

the level of. As it stood silvered by the moonlight, while my

greeting lasted, it seemed to speak, all as from soul to soul,

very much indeed as some ancient worthy of a lower order,

buttonholing one on the coveted chance and at the quiet hour,

might have done, of a state of things long and vulgarly

superseded, but to the pride and power, the once prodigious

vitality, of which who could expect any one effect to testify

more incomparably, more indestructibly, quite, as it were, more

immortally? The gigantic houses enclosing the rest of the Piazza

took up the tale and mingled with it their burden. "We are very

old and a trifle weary, but we were built strong and piled high,

and we shall last for many an age. The present is cold and

heedless, but we keep ourselves in heart by brooding over our

store of memories and traditions. We are haunted houses in every

creaking timber and aching stone." Such were the gossiping

connections I established with Siena before I went to bed.

Since that night I have had a week's daylight knowledge of the

surface of the subject at least, and don't know how I can better

present it than simply as another and a vivider page of the

lesson that the ever-hungry artist has only to trust old

Italy for her to feed him at every single step from her hand--and

if not with one sort of sweetly-stale grain from that wondrous

mill of history which during so many ages ground finer than any

other on earth, why then always with something else. Siena has at

any rate "preserved appearances"--kept the greatest number of

them, that is, unaltered for the eye--about as consistently as

one can imagine the thing done. Other places perhaps may treat

you to as drowsy an odour of antiquity, but few exhale it from so

large an area. Lying massed within her walls on a dozen clustered

hill-tops, she shows you at every turn in how much greater a way

she once lived; and if so much of the grand manner is extinct,

the receptacle of the ashes still solidly rounds itself. This

heavy general stress of all her emphasis on the past is what she

constantly keeps in your eyes and your ears, and if you be but a

casual observer and admirer the generalised response is mainly

what you give her. The casual observer, however beguiled, is

mostly not very learned, not over-equipped in advance with data;

he hasn't specialised, his notions are necessarily vague, the

chords of his imagination, for all his good-will, are inevitably

muffled and weak. But such as it is, his received, his welcome

impression serves his turn so far as the life of sensibility

goes, and reminds him from time to time that even the lore of

German doctors is but the shadow of satisfied curiosity. I have

been living at the inn, walking about the streets, sitting in the

Piazza; these are the simple terms of my experience. But streets

and inns in Italy are the vehicles of half one's knowledge; if

one has no fancy for their lessons one may burn one's note-book.

In Siena everything is Sienese. The inn has an English sign over

the door--a little battered plate with a rusty representation of

the lion and the unicorn; but advance hopefully into the mouldy

stone alley which serves as vestibule and you will find local

colour enough. The landlord, I was told, had been servant in an

English family, and I was curious to see how he met the probable

argument of the casual Anglo-Saxon after the latter's first

twelve hours in his establishment. As he failed to appear I asked

the waiter if he, weren't at home. "Oh," said the latter, "he's a

piccolo grasso vecchiotto who doesn't like to move." I'm

afraid this little fat old man has simply a bad conscience. It's

no small burden for one who likes the Italians--as who doesn't,

under this restriction?--to have so much indifference even to

rudimentary purifying processes to dispose of. What is the real

philosophy of dirty habits, and are foul surfaces merely

superficial? If unclean manners have in truth the moral meaning

which I suspect in them we must love Italy better than

consistency. This a number of us are prepared to do, but while we

are making the sacrifice it is as well we should be aware.

We may plead moreover for these impecunious heirs of the past

that even if it were easy to be clean in the midst of their

mouldering heritage it would be difficult to appear so. At the

risk of seeming to flaunt the silly superstition of restless

renovation for the sake of renovation, which is but the challenge

of the infinitely precious principle of duration, one is still

moved to say that the prime result of one's contemplative strolls

in the dusky alleys of such a place is an ineffable sense of

disrepair. Everything is cracking, peeling, fading, crumbling,

rotting. No young Sienese eyes rest upon anything youthful; they

open into a world battered and befouled with long use. Everything

has passed its meridian except the brilliant fa*** of the

cathedral, which is being diligently retouched and restored, and

a few private palaces whose broad fronts seem to have been lately

furbished and polished. Siena was long ago mellowed to the

pictorial tone; the operation of time is now to deposit

shabbiness upon shabbiness. But it's for the most part a patient,

sturdy, sympathetic shabbiness, which soothes rather than

irritates the nerves, and has in many cases doubtless as long a

career to run as most of our pert and shallow freshnesses. It

projects at all events a deeper shadow into the constant twilight

of the narrow streets--that vague historic dusk, as I may call

it, in which one walks and wonders. These streets are hardly more

than sinuous flagged alleys, into which the huge black houses,

between their almost meeting cornices, suffer a meagre light to

filter down over rough-hewn stone, past windows often of

graceful Gothic form, and great pendent iron rings and twisted

sockets for torches. Scattered over their many-headed hill, they

suffer the roadway often to incline to the perpendicular,

becoming so impracticable for vehicles that the sound of wheels

is only a trifle less anomalous than it would be in Venice. But

all day long there comes up to my window an incessant shuffling

of feet and clangour of voices. The weather is very warm for the

season, all the world is out of doors, and the Tuscan tongue

(which in Siena is reputed to have a classic purity) wags in

every imaginable key. It doesn't rest even at night, and I am

often an uninvited guest at concerts and conversazioni at

two o'clock in the morning. The concerts are sometimes charming.

I not only don't curse my wakefulness, but go to my window to

listen. Three men come carolling by, trolling and quavering with

voices of delightful sweetness, or a lonely troubadour in his

shirt-sleeves draws such artful love-notes from his clear, fresh

tenor, that I seem for the moment to be behind the scenes at the

opera, watching some Rubini or Mario go "on" and waiting for the

round of applause. In the intervals a couple of friends or

enemies stop--Italians always make their points in conversation

by pulling up, letting you walk on a few paces, to turn and find

them standing with finger on nose and engaging your interrogative

eye--they pause, by a happy instinct, directly under my window,

and dispute their point or tell their story or make their

confidence. One scarce is sure which it may be; everything has

such an explosive promptness, such a redundancy of inflection and

action. But everything for that matter takes on such dramatic

life as our lame colloquies never know--so that almost any

uttered communications here become an acted play, improvised,

mimicked, proportioned and rounded, carried bravely to its

d******. The speaker seems actually to establish his

stage and face his foot-lights, to create by a gesture a little

scenic circumscription about him; he rushes to and fro and shouts

and stamps and postures, he ranges through every phase of his

inspiration. I noted the other evening a striking instance of the

spontaneity of the Italian gesture, in the person of a small

Sienese of I hardly know what exact age--the age of inarticulate

sounds and the experimental use of a spoon. It was a Sunday

evening, and this little man had accompanied his parents to the

caf. The Caff Greco at Siena is a most delightful institution;

you get a capital demi-tasse for three sous, and an

excellent ice for eight, and while you consume these easy

luxuries you may buy from a little hunchback the local weekly

periodical, the Vita Nuova, for three centimes (the two

centimes left from your sou, if you are under the spell of this

magical frugality, will do to give the waiter). My young friend

was sitting on his father's knee and helping himself to the half

of a strawberry-ice with which his mamma had presented him. He

had so many misadventures with his spoon that this lady at length

confiscated it, there being nothing left of the ice but a little

crimson liquid which he might dispose of by the common instinct

of childhood. But he was no friend, it appeared, to such

freedoms; he was a perfect little gentleman and he resented it

being expected of him that he should drink down his remnant. He

protested therefore, and it was the manner of his protest that

struck me. He didn't cry audibly, though he made a very wry face.

It was no stupid squall, and yet he was too young to speak. It

was a penetrating concord of inarticulately pleading, accusing

sounds, accompanied by gestures of the most exquisite propriety.

These were perfectly mature; he did everything that a man of

forty would have done if he had been pouring out a flood of

sonorous eloquence. He shrugged his shoulders and wrinkled his

eyebrows, tossed out his hands and folded his arms, obtruded his

chin and bobbed about his head--and at last, I am happy to say,

recovered his spoon. If I had had a solid little silver one I

would have presented it to him as a testimonial to a perfect,

though as yet unconscious, artist.

My actual tribute to him, however, has diverted me from what I

had in mind--a much weightier matter--the great private palaces

which are the massive majestic syllables, sentences, periods, of

the strange message the place addresses to us. They are

extraordinarily spacious and numerous, and one wonders what part

they can play in the meagre economy of the actual city. The Siena

of to-day is a mere shrunken semblance of the rabid little

republic which in the thirteenth century waged triumphant war

with Florence, cultivated the arts with splendour, planned a

cathedral (though it had ultimately to curtail the design) of

proportions almost unequalled, and contained a population of two

hundred thousand souls. Many of these dusky piles still bear the

names of the old mediaeval magnates the vague mild occupancy of

whose descendants has the effect of armour of proof worn over

"pot" hats and tweed jackets and trousers. Half-a-dozen of them

are as high as the Strozzi and Riccardi palaces in Florence; they

couldn't well be higher. The very essence of the romantic and the

scenic is in the way these colossal dwellings are packed together

in their steep streets, in the depths of their little enclosed,

agglomerated city. When we, in our day and country, raise a

structure of half the mass and dignity, we leave a great space

about it in the manner of a pause after a showy speech. But when

a Sienese countess, as things are here, is doing her hair near

the window, she is a wonderfully near neighbour to the cavalier

opposite, who is being shaved by his valet. Possibly the countess

doesn't object to a certain chosen publicity at her toilet; what

does an Italian gentleman assure me but that the aristocracy make

very free with each other? Some of the palaces are shown, but

only when the occupants are at home, and now they are in

villeggiatura. Their villeggiatura lasts eight months of

the year, the waiter at the inn informs me, and they spend little

more than the carnival in the city. The gossip of an inn-waiter

ought perhaps to be beneath the dignity of even such thin history

as this; but I confess that when, as a story-seeker always and

ever, I have come in from my strolls with an irritated sense of

the dumbness of stones and mortar, it has been to listen with

avidity, over my dinner, to the proffered confidences of the

worthy man who stands by with a napkin. His talk is really very

fine, and he prides himself greatly on his cultivated tone, to

which he calls my attention. He has very little good to say about

the Sienese nobility. They are "proprio d'origine egoista"--

whatever that may be--and there are many who can't write their

names. This may be calumny; but I doubt whether the most

blameless of them all could have spoken more delicately of a lady

of peculiar personal appearance who had been dining near me.

"She's too fat," I grossly said on her leaving the room. The

waiter shook his head with a little sniff: " troppo materiale."

This lady and her companion were the party whom, thinking I might

relish a little company--I had been dining alone for a week--he

gleefully announced to me as newly arrived Americans. They were

Americans, I found, who wore, pinned to their heads in

permanence, the black lace veil or mantilla, conveyed their beans

to their mouth with a knife, and spoke a strange raucous

Spanish. They were in fine compatriots from Montevideo.

[Illustration: THE RED PALACE, SIENA.]

The genius of old Siena, however, would make little of any stress

of such distinctions; one representative of a far-off social

platitude being about as much in order as another as he stands

before the great loggia of the Casino di Nobili, the club of the

best society. The nobility, which is very numerous and very rich,

is still, says the apparently competent native I began by

quoting, perfectly feudal and uplifted and separate. Morally and

intellectually, behind the walls of its palaces, the fourteenth

century, it's thrilling to think, hasn't ceased to hang on. There

is no bourgeoisie to speak of; immediately after the aristocracy

come the poor people, who are very poor indeed. My friend's

account of these matters made me wish more than ever, as a lover

of the preserved social specimen, of type at almost any price,

that one weren't, a helpless victim of the historic sense,

reduced simply to staring at black stones and peeping up stately

staircases; and that when one had examined the street-face of the

palace, Murray in hand, one might walk up to the great drawing-

room, make one's bow to the master and mistress, the old abbe and

the young count, and invite them to favour one with a sketch of

their social philosophy or a few first-hand family anecdotes.

The dusky labyrinth of the streets, we must in default of such

initiations content ourselves with noting, is interrupted by two

great candid spaces: the fan-shaped piazza, of which I just now

said a word, and the smaller square in which the cathedral erects

its walls of many-coloured marble. Of course since paying the

great piazza my compliments by moonlight I have strolled through

it often at sunnier and shadier hours. The market is held there,

and wherever Italians buy and sell, wherever they count and

chaffer--as indeed you. hear them do right and left, at almost

any moment, as you take your way among them--the pulse of life

beats fast. It has been doing so on the spot just named, I

suppose, for the last five hundred years, and during that time

the cost of eggs and earthen pots has been gradually but

inexorably increasing. The buyers nevertheless wrestle over their

purchases as lustily as so many fourteenth-century burghers

suddenly waking up in horror to current prices. You have but to

walk aside, however, into the Palazzo Pubblico really to feel

yourself a thrifty old medievalist. The state affairs of the

Republic were formerly transacted here, but it now gives shelter

to modern law-courts and other prosy business. I was marched

through a number of vaulted halls and chambers, which, in the

intervals of the administrative sessions held in them, are

peopled only by the great mouldering archaic frescoes--anything

but inanimate these even in their present ruin--that cover the

walls and ceiling. The chief painters of the Sienese school lent

a hand in producing the works I name, and you may complete there

the connoisseurship in which, possibly, you will have embarked at

the Academy. I say "possibly" to be very judicial, my own

observation having led me no great length. I have rather than

otherwise cherished the thought that the Sienese school suffers

one's eagerness peacefully to slumber--benignantly abstains in

fact from whipping up a languid curiosity and a tepid faith. "A

formidable rival to the Florentine," says some book--I forget

which--into which I recently glanced. Not a bit of it thereupon

boldly say I; the Florentines may rest on their laurels and the

lounger on his lounge. The early painters of the two groups have

indeed much in common; but the Florentines had the good fortune

to see their efforts gathered up and applied by a few pre-eminent

spirits, such as never came to the rescue of the groping Sienese.

Fra Angelico and Ghirlandaio said all their feebler

confr*** dreamt of and a great deal more beside, but the

inspiration of Simone Memmi and Ambrogio Lorenzetti and Sano di

Pietro has a painful air of never efflorescing into a maximum.

Sodoma and Beccafumi are to my taste a rather abortive maximum.

But one should speak of them all gently--and I do, from my soul;

for their labour, by their lights, has wrought a precious

heritage of still-living colour and rich figure-peopled shadow

for the echoing chambers of their old civic fortress. The faded

frescoes cover the walls like quaintly-storied tapestries; in one

way or another they cast their spell. If one owes a large debt of

pleasure to pictorial art one comes to think tenderly and easily

of its whole evolution, as of the conscious experience of a

single mysterious, striving spirit, and one shrinks from saying

rude things about any particular phase of it, just as one would

from referring without precautions to some error or lapse in the

life of a person one esteemed. You don't care to remind a

grizzled veteran of his defeats, and why should we linger in

Siena to talk about Beccafumi? I by no means go so far as to say,

with an amateur with whom I have just been discussing the matter,

that "Sodoma is a precious poor painter and Beccafumi no painter

at all"; but, opportunity being limited, I am willing to let the

remark about Beccafumi pass for true. With regard to Sodoma, I

remember seeing four years ago in the choir of the Cathedral of

Pisa a certain small dusky specimen of the painter--an Abraham

and Isaac, if I am not mistaken--which was charged with a gloomy

grace. One rarely meets him in general collections, and I had

never done so till the other day. He was not prolific,

apparently; he had however his own elegance, and his rarity is a

part of it.

Here in Siena are a couple of dozen scattered frescoes and three

or four canvases; his masterpiece, among others, an harmonious

Descent from the Cross. I wouldn't give a fig for the equilibrium

of the figures or the ladders; but while it lasts the scene is

all intensely solemn and graceful and sweet--too sweet for so

bitter a subject. Sodoma's women are strangely sweet; an

imaginative sense of morbid appealing attitude--as notably in the

sentimental, the pathetic, but the none the less pleasant,

"Swooning of St. Catherine," the great Sienese heroine, at San

Domenico--seems to me the author's finest accomplishment. His

frescoes have all the same almost appealing evasion of

difficulty, and a kind of mild melancholy which I am inclined to

think the sincerest part of them, for it strikes me as

practically the artist's depressed suspicion of his own want of

force. Once he determined, however, that if he couldn't be strong

he would make capital of his weakness, and painted the Christ

bound to the Column, of the Academy. Here he got much nearer and

I have no doubt mixed his colours with his tears; but the result

can't be better described than by saying that it is, pictorially,

the first of the modern Christs. Unfortunately it hasn't been the

last.

[Illustration: SAN DOMINICO, SIENA]

The main strength of Sienese art went possibly into the erection

of the Cathedral, and yet even here the strength is not of the

greatest strain. If, however, there are more interesting temples

in Italy, there are few more richly and variously scenic and

splendid, the comparative meagreness of the architectural idea

being overlaid by a marvellous wealth of ingenious detail.

Opposite the church--with the dull old archbishop's palace on one

side and a dismantled residence of the late Grand Duke of Tuscany

on the other--is an ancient hospital with a big stone bench

running all along its front. Here I have sat a while every

morning for a week, like a philosophic convalescent, watching the

florid fa*** of the cathedral glitter against the deep blue sky.

It has been lavishly restored of late years, and the fresh white

marble of the densely clustered pinnacles and statues and beasts

and flowers flashes in the sunshine like a mosaic of jewels.

There is more of this goldsmith's work in stone than I can

remember or describe; it is piled up over three great doors with

immense margins of exquisite decorative sculpture--still in the

ancient cream-coloured marble--and beneath three sharp pediments

embossed with images relieved against red marble and tipped with

golden mosaics. It is in the highest degree fantastic and

luxuriant--it is on the whole very lovely. As a triumph of the

many-hued it prepares you for the interior, where the same parti-

coloured splendour is endlessly at play--a confident complication

of harmonies and contrasts and of the minor structural

refinements and braveries. The internal surface is mainly wrought

in alternate courses of black and white marble; but as the latter

has been dimmed by the centuries to a fine mild brown the place

is all a concert of relieved and dispersed glooms. Save for

Pinturicchio's brilliant frescoes in the Sacristy there are no

pictures to speak of; but the pavement is covered with many

elaborate designs in black and white mosaic after cartoons by

Beccafumi. The patient skill of these compositions makes them a

rare piece of decoration; yet even here the friend whom I lately

quoted rejects this over-ripe fruit of the Sienese school. The

designs are nonsensical, he declares, and all his admiration is

for the cunning artisans who have imitated the hatchings and

shadings and hair-strokes of the pencil by the finest curves of

inserted black stone. But the true romance of handiwork at Siena

is to be seen in the wondrous stalls of the choir, under the

coloured light of the great wheel-window. Wood-carving has ever

been a cherished craft of the place, and the best masters of the

art during the fifteenth century lavished themselves on this

prodigious task. It is the frost-work on one's window-panes

interpreted in polished oak. It would be hard to find, doubtless,

a more moving illustration of the peculiar patience, the sacred

candour, of the great time. Into such artistry as this the author

seems to put more of his personal substance than into any other;

he has to wrestle not only with his subject, but with his

material. He is richly fortunate when his subject is charming--

when his devices, inventions and fantasies spring lightly to his

hand; for in the material itself, after age and use have ripened

and polished and darkened it to the richness of ebony and to a

greater warmth there is something surpassingly delectable and

venerable. Wander behind the altar at Siena when the chanting is

over and the incense has faded, and look well at the stalls of

the Barili.

1873.

II

I leave the impression noted in the foregoing pages to tell its

own small story, but have it on my conscience to wonder, in this

connection, quite candidly and publicly and by way of due

penance, at the scantness of such first-fruits of my sensibility.

I was to see Siena repeatedly in the years to follow, I was to

know her better, and I would say that I was to do her an ampler

justice didn't that remark seem to reflect a little on my earlier

poor judgment. This judgment strikes me to-day as having fallen

short--true as it may be that I find ever a value, or at least an

interest, even in the moods and humours and lapses of any

brooding, musing or fantasticating observer to whom the finer

sense of things is on the whole not closed. If he has on a

given occasion nodded or stumbled or strayed, this fact by itself

speaks to me of him--speaks to me, that is, of his faculty and

his idiosyncrasies, and I care nothing for the application of his

faculty unless it be, first of all, in itself interesting. Which

may serve as my reply to any objection here breaking out--on the

ground that if a spectator's languors are evidence, of a sort,

about that personage, they are scarce evident about the case

before him, at least if the case be important. I let my perhaps

rather weak expression of the sense of Siena stand, at any rate--

for the sake of what I myself read into it; but I should like to

amplify it by other memories, and would do so eagerly if I might

here enjoy the space. The difficulty for these rectifications is

that if the early vision has failed of competence or of full

felicity, if initiation has thus been slow, so, with renewals and

extensions, so, with the larger experience, one hindrance is

exchanged for another. There is quite such a possibility as

having lived into a relation too much to be able to make a

statement of it.

I remember on one occasion arriving very late of a summer night,

after an almost unbroken run from London, and the note of that

approach--I was the only person alighting at the station below

the great hill of the little fortress city, under whose at once

frowning and gaping gate I must have passed, in the warm darkness

and the absolute stillness, very much after the felt fashion of a

person of importance about to be enormously incarcerated--gives

me, for preservation thus belated, the pitch, as I may call it,

at various times, though always at one season, of an almost

systematised esthetic use of the place. It wasn't to be denied

that the immensely better "accommodations" instituted by the

multiplying, though alas more bustling, years had to be

recognised as supplying a basis, comparatively prosaic if one

would, to that luxury. No sooner have I written which words,

however, than I find myself adding that one "wouldn't," that one

doesn't--doesn't, that is, consent now to regard the then "new"

hotel (pretty old indeed by this time) as anything but an aid to

a free play of perception. The strong and rank old Arme

d'Inghilterra, in the darker street, has passed away; but its

ancient rival the Aquila Nera put forth claims to modernisation,

and the Grand Hotel, the still fresher flower of modernity near

the gate by which you enter from the station, takes on to my

present remembrance a mellowness as of all sorts of comfort,

cleanliness and kindness. The particular facts, those of the

visit I began here by alluding to and those of still others, at

all events, inveterately made in June or early in July, enter

together in a fusion as of hot golden-brown objects seen through

the practicable crevices of shutters drawn upon high, cool,

darkened rooms where the scheme of the scene involved longish

days of quiet work, with late afternoon emergence and

contemplation waiting on the better or the worse conscience. I

thus associate the compact world of the admirable hill-top, the

world of a predominant golden-brown, with a general invocation of

sensibility and fancy, and think of myself as going forth into

the lingering light of summer evenings all attuned to intensity

of the idea of compositional beauty, or in other words, freely

speaking, to the question of colour, to intensity of picture. To

communicate with Siena in this charming way was thus, I admit, to

have no great margin for the prosecution of inquiries, but I am

not sure that it wasn't, little by little, to feel the whole

combination of elements better than by a more exemplary method,

and this from beginning to end of the scale.

More of the elements indeed, for memory, hang about the days that

were ushered in by that straight flight from the north than about

any other series--if partly, doubtless, but because of my having

then stayed longest. I specify it at all events for fond

reminiscence as the year, the only year, at which I was present

at the Palio, the earlier one, the series of furious horse-races

between elected representatives of different quarters of the town

taking place toward the end of June, as the second and still more

characteristic exhibition of the same sort is appointed to the

month of August; a spectacle that I am far from speaking of as

the finest flower of my old and perhaps even a little faded

cluster of impressions, but which smudges that special sojourn as

with the big thumb--mark of a slightly soiled and decidedly

ensanguined hand. For really, after all, the great loud gaudy

romp or heated frolic, simulating ferocity if not achieving it,

that is the annual pride of the town, was not intrinsically, to

my-view, extraordinarily impressive--in spite of its bristling

with all due testimony to the passionate Italian clutch of any

pretext for costume and attitude and utterance, for mumming and

masquerading and raucously representing; the vast cheap vividness

rather somehow refines itself, and the swarm and hubbub of the

immense square melt, to the uplifted sense of a very high-placed

balcony of the overhanging Chigi palace, where everything was

superseded but the intenser passage, across the ages, of the

great Renaissance tradition of architecture and the infinite

sweetness of the waning golden day. The Palio, indubitably, was

criard--and the more so for quite monopolising, at Siena,

the note of crudity; and much of it demanded doubtless of one's

patience a due respect for the long local continuity of such

things; it drops into its humoured position, however, in any

retrospective command of the many brave aspects of the prodigious

place. Not that I am pretending here, even for rectification, to

take these at all in turn; I only go on a little with my rueful

glance at the marked gaps left in my original report of

sympathies entertained.

I bow my head for instance to the mystery of my not having

mentioned that the coolest and freshest flower of the day was

ever that of one's constant renewal of a charmed homage to

Pinturicchio, coolest and freshest and signally youngest and most

matutinal (as distinguished from merely primitive or crepuscular)

of painters, in the library or sacristy of the Cathedral. Did I

always find time before work to spend half-an-hour of

immersion, under that splendid roof, in the clearest and

tenderest, the very cleanest and "straightest," as it masters our

envious credulity, of all storied fresco-worlds? This wondrous

apartment, a monument in itself to the ancient pride and power of

the Church, and which contains an unsurpassed treasure of

gloriously illuminated missals, psalters and other vast parchment

folios, almost each of whose successive leaves gives the

impression of rubies, sapphires and emeralds set in gold and

practically embedded in the page, offers thus to view, after a

fashion splendidly sustained, a pictorial record of the career of

Pope Pius II, Aeneas Sylvius of the Siena Piccolomini (who gave

him for an immediate successor a second of their name), most

profanely literary of Pontiffs and last of would-be Crusaders,

whose adventures and achievements under Pinturicchio's brush

smooth themselves out for us very much to the tune of the

"stories" told by some fine old man of the world, at the restful

end of his life, to the cluster of his grandchildren. The end of

AEneas Sylvius was not restful; he died at Ancona in troublous

times, preaching war, and attempting to make it, against the then

terrific Turk; but over no great worldly personal legend, among

those of men of arduous affairs, arches a fairer, lighter or more

pacific memorial vault than the shining Libreria of Siena. I seem

to remember having it and its unfrequented enclosing precinct so

often all to myself that I must indeed mostly have resorted to it

for a prompt benediction on the day. Like no other strong

solicitation, among artistic appeals to which one may compare it

up and down the whole wonderful country, is the felt neighbouring

presence of the overwrought Cathedral in its little proud

possessive town: you may so often feel by the week at a time that

it stands there really for your own personal enjoyment, your

romantic convenience, your small wanton aesthetic use. In such a

light shines for me, at all events, under such an accumulation

and complication of tone flushes and darkens and richly recedes

for me, across the years, the treasure-house of many-coloured

marbles in the untrodden, the drowsy, empty Sienese square. One

could positively do, in the free exercise of any responsible

fancy or luxurious taste, what one would with it.

But that proposition holds true, after all, for almost any mild

pastime of the incurable student of loose meanings and stray

relics and odd references and dim analogies in an Italian hill-

city bronzed and seasoned by the ages. I ought perhaps, for

justification of the right to talk, to have plunged into the

Siena archives of which, on one occasion, a kindly custodian gave

me, in rather dusty and stuffy conditions, as the incident

vaguely comes back to me, a glimpse that was like a moment's

stand at the mouth of a deep, dark mine. I didn't descend into

the pit; I did, instead of this, a much idler and easier thing: I

simply went every afternoon, my stint of work over, I like to

recall, for a musing stroll upon the Lizza--the Lizza which had

its own unpretentious but quite insidious art of meeting the

lover of old stories halfway. The great and subtle thing, if you

are not a strenuous specialist, in places of a heavily charged

historic consciousness, is to profit by the sense of that

consciousness--or in other words to cultivate a relation with the

oracle--after the fashion that suits yourself; so that if the

general after-taste of experience, experience at large, the fine

distilled essence of the matter, seems to breathe, in such a

case, from the very stones and to make a thick strong liquor of

the very air, you may thus gather as you pass what is most to

your purpose; which is more the indestructible mixture of lived

things, with its concentrated lingering odour, than any

interminable list of numbered chapters and verses. Chapters and

verses, literally scanned, refuse coincidence, mostly, with the

divisional proprieties of your own pile of manuscript--which is

but another way of saying, in short, that if the Lizza is a mere

fortified promontory of the great Sienese hill, serving at once

as a stronghold for the present military garrison and as a

planted and benched and band-standed walk and recreation-ground

for the citizens, so I could never, toward close of day, either

have enough of it or yet feel the vaguest saunterings there to be

vain. They were vague with the qualification always of that finer

massing, as one wandered off, of the bronzed and seasoned

element, the huge rock pedestal, the bravery of walls and gates

and towers and palaces and loudly asserted dominion; and then of

that pervaded or mildly infested air in which one feels the

experience of the ages, of which I just spoke, to be exquisitely

in solution; and lastly of the wide, strange, sad, beautiful

horizon, a rim of far mountains that always pictured, for the

leaner on old rubbed and smoothed parapets at the sunset hour, a

country not exactly blighted or deserted, but that had had its

life, on an immense scale, and had gone, with all its memories

and relics, into rather austere, in fact into almost grim and

misanthropic, retirement. This was a manner and a mood, at any

rate, in all the land, that favoured in the late afternoons the

divinest landscape blues and purples--not to speak of its

favouring still more my practical contention that the whole

guarded headland in question, with the immense ramparts of golden

brown and red that dropped into vineyards and orchards and

cornfields and all the rustic elegance of the Tuscan

podere, was knitting for me a chain of unforgettable

hours; to the justice of which claim let these divagations

testify.

It wasn't, however, that one mightn't without disloyalty to that

scheme of profit seek impressions further afield--though indeed I

may best say of such a matter as the long pilgrimage to the

pictured convent of Monte Oliveto that it but played on the same

fine chords as the overhanging, the far-gazing Lizza. What it

came to was that one simply put to the friendly test, as it were,

the mood and manner of the country. This remembrance is precious,

but the demonstration of that sense as of a great heaving region

stilled by some final shock and returning thoughtfully, in fact

tragically, on itself, couldn't have been more pointed. The long-

drawn rural road I refer to, stretching over hill and dale and to

which I devoted the whole of the longest day of the year--I was

in a small single-horse conveyance, of which I had already made

appreciative use, and with a driver as disposed as myself ever to

sacrifice speed to contemplation--is doubtless familiar now with

the rush of the motor-car; the thought of whose free dealings

with the solitude of Monte Oliveto makes me a little ruefully

reconsider, I confess, the spirit in which I have elsewhere in

these pages, on behalf of the lust, the landscape lust, of the

eyes, acknowledged our general increasing debt to that vehicle.

For that we met nothing whatever, as I seem at this distance of

time to recall, while we gently trotted and trotted through the

splendid summer hours and a dry desolation that yet somehow

smiled and smiled, was part of the charm and the intimacy of the

whole impression--the impression that culminated at last, before

the great cloistered square, lonely, bleak and stricken, in the

almost aching vision, more frequent in the Italy of to-day than

anywhere in the world, of the uncalculated waste of a myriad

forms of piety, forces of labour, beautiful fruits of genius.

However, one gaped above all things for the impression, and what

one mainly asked was that it should be strong of its kind. That

was the case, I think I couldn't but feel, at every moment of the

couple of hours I spent in the vast, cold, empty shell, out of

which the Benedictine brotherhood sheltered there for ages had

lately been turned by the strong arm of a secular State. There

was but one good brother left, a very lean and tough survivor, a

dusky, elderly, friendly Abbate, of an indescribable type and a

perfect manner, of whom I think I felt immediately thereafter

that I should have liked to say much, but as to whom I must have

yielded to the fact that ingenious and vivid commemoration was

even then in store for him. Literary portraiture had marked him

for its own, and in the short story of Un Saint, one of

the most finished of contemporary French nouvelles, the

art and the sympathy of Monsieur Paul Bourget preserve his

interesting image. He figures in the beautiful tale, the Abbate

of the desolate cloister and of those comparatively quiet years,

as a clean, clear type of sainthood; a circumstance this in

itself to cause a fond analyst of other than "Latin" race (model

and painter in this case having their Latinism so strongly in

common) almost endlessly to meditate. Oh, the unutterable

differences in any scheme or estimate of physiognomic values, in

any range of sensibility to expressional association, among

observers of different, of inevitably more or less opposed,

traditional and "racial" points of view! One had heard convinced

Latins--or at least I had!--speak of situations of trust and

intimacy in which they couldn't have endured near them a

Protestant or, as who should say for instance, an Anglo-Saxon;

but I was to remember my own private attempt to measure such a

change of sensibility as might have permitted the prolonged close

approach of the dear dingy, half-starved, very possibly all

heroic, and quite ideally urbane Abbate. The depth upon depth of

things, the cloud upon cloud of associations, on one side and the

other, that would have had to change first!

To which I may add nevertheless that since one ever supremely

invoked intensity of impression and abundance of character, I

feasted my fill of it at Monte Oliveto, and that for that matter

this would have constituted my sole refreshment in the vast icy

void of the blighted refectory if I hadn't bethought myself of

bringing with me a scrap of food, too scantly apportioned, I

recollect--very scantly indeed, since my cocchiere was to

share with me--by my purveyor at Siena. Our tragic--even if so

tenderly tragic--entertainer had nothing to give us; but the

immemorial cold of the enormous monastic interior in which we

smilingly fasted would doubtless not have had for me without that

such a wealth of reference. I was to have "liked" the whole

adventure, so I must somehow have liked that; by which remark I

am recalled to the special treasure of the desecrated temple,

those extraordinarily strong and brave frescoes of Luca

Signorelli and Sodoma that adorn, in admirable condition, several

stretches of cloister wall. These creations in a manner took care

of themselves; aided by the blue of the sky above the cloister-

court they glowed, they insistently lived; I remember the frigid

prowl through all the rest of the bareness, including that of the

big dishonoured church and that even of the Abbate's abysmally

resigned testimony to his mere human and personal situation; and

then, with such a force of contrast and effect of relief, the

great sheltered sun-flares and colour-patches of scenic

composition and design where a couple of hands centuries ago

turned to dust had so wrought the defiant miracle of life and

beauty that the effect is of a garden blooming among ruins.

Discredited somehow, since they all would, the destroyers

themselves, the ancient piety, the general spirit and intention,

but still bright and assured and sublime--practically, enviably

immortal--the other, the still subtler, the all aesthetic good

faith.

1909.