a^iiC i^4* 1 ^a.,^ -l»«^*SW»a#s«« CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY Cornell University Library DG 428.J27 1909a 3 1924 028 396 004 ......i The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924028396004 ITALIAN HOURS THE HARBOUR, GENOA. ITALIAN HOURS BY HENRY JAMES WITH ILLUSTRATIONS IN COLOR BY JOSEPH PENNELL BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY MDCCCCIX COPYRICJHT, 1909, BY HENRY JAMES ALL RIGHTS RESERVED PUBLISHED NOVEMBER I9O9 PREFACE j^^^ 1 1 j]HE chapters of which this volume is com- posed have with few exceptions already been collected, and were then associated with others commemorative of other impressions of (no very extensive) ex- cursions and wanderings. The notes on various visits to Italy are here for the first time exclusively placed together, and as they largely refer to quite other days than these — the date affixed to each paper sufficiently indicating this — I have introduced a few passages that speak for a later and in some cases a frequently repeated vision of the places and scenes in question. I have not hesitated to amend my text, expressively, wherever it seemed urgently to ask for this, though I have not pretended to add the element of information or the weight of curious and critical insistence to a brief record of light inquiries and conclu- sions. The fond appeal of the observer concerned is all to aspects and appearances — above all to the interesting face of things as it mainly used to be. H. J. CONTENTS VENICE I THE GRAND CANAL 41 VENICE: AN EARLY IMPRESSION 71 TWO OLD HOUSES AND THREE YOUNG WOMEN . . 87 CASA ALVISI 107 FROM CHAMBERY TO MILAN 117 THE OLD SAINT-GOTHARD 133 ITALY REVISITED 151 A ROMAN HOLIDAY 189 ROMAN RIDES 215 ROMAN NEIGHBOURHOODS 237 THE AFTER-SEASON IN ROME 263 FROM A ROMAN NOTE-BOOK 275 A FEW OTHER ROMAN NEIGHBOURHOODS . . .301 A CHAIN OF CITIES 319 SIENA EARLY AND LATE 343 THE AUTUMN IN FLORENCE 373 [ vii ] CONTENTS FLORENTINE NOTES 389 TUSCAN CITIES 429 OTHER TUSCAN CITIES 443 RAVENNA 465 THE SAINT'S AFTERNOON AND OTHERS . . . -479 ILLUSTRATIONS THE HARBOUR, GENOA {page 162) .... Frontispiece FLAGS AT ST. MARK'S, VENICE 12 A NARROW CANAL, VENICE 18 PALAZZO MOCENIGO, VENICE 64 THE AMPHITHEATRE, VERONA 84 CASA ALVISI, VENICE no THE SIMPLON GATE, MILAN 126 THE CLOCK TOWER, BERNE 136 UNDER THE ARCADES, TURIN 156 ROMAN GATEWAY, RIMINI 172 SANTA MARIA NOVELLA, FLORENCE . . . .178 THE FACADE OF ST. JOHN LATERAN, ROME . . .204 THE COLONNADE OF ST. PETER'S, ROME. . . .210 CASTEL GANDOLFO 254 ENTRANCE TO THE VATICAN, ROME . . . .292 VILLA D'ESTE, TIVOLI 306 SUBIACO 310 [k] ILLUSTRATIONS ASSISI 322 PERUGIA 330 ETRUSCAN GATEWAY, PERUGIA 334 A STREET, CORTONA 338 THE RED PALACE, SIENA 354 SAN DOMENICO, SIENA 358 ON THE ARNO, FLORENCE 380 THE GREAT EAVES, FLORENCE ...... 412 BOBOLI GARDENS, FLORENCE 424 THE HOSPITAL, PISTOIA 442 THE LOGGIA, LUCCA 450 TOWERS OF SAN GIMIGNANO 462 SAN APOLLINARE NUOVO, RAVENNA 472 RAVENNA PINETA 478 TERRACINA 502 VENICE <«e ITALIAN HOURS SV VENICE T is a great pleasure to write the word; but I am not sure there is not a certain impudence in pretending to add any- thing to it. Venice has been painted and described many thousands of times, and of all the cities of the world is the easiest to visit without going there. Open the first book and you will find a rhapsody about it; step into the first picture-dealer's and you will find three or four high-coloured "views" of it. There is notori- ously nothing more to be said on the subject. Every one has been there, and every one has brought back a collection of photographs. There is as little mystery about the Grand Canal as about our local thoroughfare, and the name of St. Mark is as familiar as the postman's ring. It is not forbidden, however, to speak of familiar things, and I hold that for the true Venice-lover Venice is always in order. There is nothing new to be said about her certainly, but the old is better than any novelty. It would be a sad day indeed when there should be something new to say. I write these lines with the full consciousness of having no information whatever to [3] ITALIAN HOURS offer. I do not pretend to enlighten the reader; I pretend only to give a fillip to his memory; and I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme. Mr. Ruskin has given it up, that is very true ; but only after ex- tracting half a lifetime of pleasure and an immeasurable quantity of fame from it. We all may do the same, after it has served our turn, which it probably will not cease to do for many a year to come. Meantime it is Mr. Ruskin who beyond any one helps us to enjoy. He has indeed lately produced several aids to depression in the shape of certain little humorous — ill-humorous — pam- phlets (the series of St. Mark's Rest) which embody his latest re- flections on the subject of our city and describe the latest atrocities perpetrated there. These latter are numerous and deeply to be deplored ; but to admit that they have spoiled Venice would be to admit that Venice may be spoiled — an admission pregnant, as it seems to us, with disloyalty. Fortunately one reacts against the Ruskinian contagion, and one hour of the lagoon is worth a hun- dred pages of demoralised prose. This queer late-coming prose of Mr. Ruskin (including the revised and condensed issue of the Stones of Venice, only one little volume of which has been pub- lished, or perhaps ever will be) is all to be read, though much of it appears addressed to children of tender age. It is pitched in the nursery-key, and might be supposed to emanate from an angry [4] VENICE governess. It is, however, all suggestive, and much of it is deHght- fully just. There is an inconceivable want of form in it, though the author has spent his life in laying down the principles of form and scolding people for departing from them ; but it throbs and flashes with the love of his subject — a love disconcerted and abjured, but which has still much of the force of inspiration. Among the many strange things that have befallen Venice, she has had the good fortune to become the object of a passion to a man of splendid genius, who has made her his own and in doing so has made her the world's. There is no better reading at Venice therefore, as I say, than Ruskin, for every true Venice-lover can separate the wheat from the chaff. The narrow theological spirit, the moralism a tout propos, the queer provincialities and pruderies, are mere wild weeds in a mountain of flowers. One may doubtless be very happy in Venice without reading at all — without criti- cising or analysing or thinking a strenuous thought. It is a city in which, I suspect, there is very little strenuous thinking, and yet it is a city in which there must be almost as much happiness as misery. The misery of Venice stands there for all the world to see ; it is part of the spectacle — a thoroughgoing devotee of local colour might consistently say it is part of the pleasure. The Venetian people have little to call their own — little more than the bare privilege of leading their lives in the most beautiful of towns. Their habitations are decayed; their taxes heavy; their pockets light ; their opportunities few. One receives an impression, how- ever, that life presents itself to them with attractions not accounted for in this meagre train of advantages, and that they are on better is] ITALIAN HOURS terms with it than many people who have made a better bargain. They He in the sunshine ; they dabble in the sea ; they wear bright rags; they fall into attitudes and harmonies ; they assist at an eter- nal conversazione. It is not easy to say that one would have them other than they are, and it certainly would make an immense difference should they be better fed. The number of persons in Venice who evidently never have enough to eat is painfully large; but it would be more painful if we did not equally perceive that the rich Venetian temperament may bloom upon a dog's allow- ance. Nature has been kind to it, and sunshine and leisure and conversation and beautiful views form the greater part of its sustenance. It takes a great deal to make a successful American, but to make a happy Venetian takes only a handful of quick sen- sibility. The Italian people have at once the good and the evil fortune to be conscious of few wants ; so that if the civilisation of a society is measured by the number of its needs, as seems to be the common opinion to-day, it is to be feared that the children of the lagoon would make but a poor figure in a set of comparative tables. Not their misery, doubtless, but the way they elude their misery, is what pleases the sentimental tourist, who is gratified by the sight of a beautiful race that lives by the aid of its imagination. The way to enjoy Venice is to follow the example of these people and make the most of simple pleasures. Almost all the pleasures of the place are simple ; this may be maintained even under the imputation of ingenious paradox. There is no simpler pleasure than looking at a fine Titian, unless it be looking at a fine Tin- toret or strolling into St. Mark's, — abominable the way one falls [6J VENICE into the habit, — and resting one's light-wearied eyes upon the windowless gloom ; or than floating in a gondola or than hanging over a balcony or than taking one's coffee at Florian's. It is of such superficial pastimes that a Venetian day is composed, and the pleasure of the matter is in the emotions to which they minis- ter. These are fortunately of the finest — otherwise Venice would be insufferably dull. Reading Ruskin is good; reading the old records is perhaps better; but the best thing of all is simply stay- ing on. The only way to care for Venice as she deserves it is to give her a chance to touch you often — to linger and remain and return. II The danger is that you will not linger enough — a danger of which the author of these lines had known something. It is possible to dislike Venice, and to entertain the sentiment in a responsible and intelligent manner. There are travellers who think the place odious, and those who are not of this opinion often find themselves wishing that the others were only more numerous. The sentimental tourist's sole quarrel with his Ven- ice is that he has too many competitors there. He likes to be alone; to be original; to have (to himself, at least) the air of making discoveries. The Venice of to-day is a vast museum where the little wicket that admits you is perpetually turning and creaking, and you march through the institution with a herd of fellow-gazers. There is nothing left to discover or describe, [73 ITALIAN HOURS and originality of attitude is completely impossible. This is often very annoying; you can only turn your back on your im- pertinent playfellow and curse his want of delicacy. But this is not the fault of Venice; it is the fault of the rest of the world. The fault of Venice is that, though she is easy to admire, she is not so easy to live with as you count living in other places. After you have stayed a week and the bloom of novelty has rubbed off you wonder if you can accommodate yourself to the peculiar conditions. Your old habits become impracticable and you find yourself obliged to form new ones of an undesirable and un- profitable character. You are tired of your gondola (or you think you are) and you have seen all the principal pictures and heard the names of the palaces announced a dozen times by your gondolier, who brings them out almost as impressively as if he were an English butler bawling titles into a drawing-room. You have walked several hundred times round the Piazza and bought several bushels of photographs. You have' visited the antiquity inongers whose horrible signrboards dishonour some of the grand- est vistas in the Grand Canal ; you have tried the opera and found it very bad ; you have bathed at the Lido and found the water flat. You have begun to have a shipboard-feeling — to regard the Pi- azza as an enormous saloon and the Riva degli Schiavoni as a promenade-deck. You are obstructed and encaged; your desire for space is unsatisfied ; you miss your usual exercise. You try to take a walk and you fail, and meantime, as I say, you have come to regard your gondola as a sort of magnified baby's cradle. You have no desire to be rocked to sleep, though you are sufficiently [8] VENICE kept awake by the irritation produced, as you gaze across the shallow lagoon, by the attitude of the perpetual gondolier, with his turned-out toes, his protruded chin, his absurdly unscientific stroke. The canals have a horrible smell, and the everlasting Piazza, where you have looked repeatedly at every article in every shop-window and found them all rubbish, where the young Venetians who sell bead bracelets and "panoramas" are perpetu- ally thrusting their wares at you, where the same tightly-buttoned officers are for ever sucking the same black weeds, at the same empty tables, in front of the same cafes — the Piazza, as I say, has resolved itself into a magnificent tread-mill. This is the state of mind of those shallow inquirers who find Venice all very well for a week ; and if in such a state of mind you take your departure you act with fatal rashness. The loss is your own, moreover; it is not — with all deference to your personal attractions — that of your companions who remain behind ; for though there are some disagreeable things in Venice there is nothing so disagreeable as the visitors. The conditions are peculiar, but your intolerance of them evaporates before it has had time to become a prejudice. When you have called for the bill to go, pay it and remain, and you will find on the morrow that you are deeply attached to Venice. It is by living there from day to day that you feel the fulness of her charm; that you invite her exquisite influence to sink into your spirit. The creature varies like a nervous woman, whom you know only when you know all the aspects of her beauty. She has high spirits or low, she is pale or red, grey or pink, cold or warm, fresh or wan, according to the weather or the hour. She is always in- [9] ITALIAN HOURS teresting and almost always sad ; but she has a thousand occasional graces and is always liable to happy accidents. You become extraordinarily fond of these things; you count upon them; they make part of your life. Tenderly fond you become ; there is some- thing indefinable in those depths of personal acquaintance that gradually establish themselves. The place seems to personify itself, to become human and sentient and conscious of your affec- tion. You desire to embrace it, to caress it, to possess it ; and finally a soft sense of possession grows up and your visit becomes a per- petual love-affair. It is very true that if you go, as the author of these lines on a certain occasion went, about the middle of March, a certain amount of disappointment is possible. He had paid no visit for several years, and in the interval the beautiful and help- less city had suffered an increase of injury. The barbarians are in full possession and you tremble for what they may do. You are reminded from the moment of your arrival that Venice scarcely exists any more as a city at all ; that she exists only as a battered peep-show and bazaar. There was a horde of savage Germans encamped in the Piazza, and they filled the Ducal Palace and the Academy with their uproar. The English and Americans came a little later. They came in good time, with a great many French, who were discreet enough to make very long repasts at the Caffe Quadri, during which they were out of the way. The months of April and May of the year i88 1 were not, as a general thing, a favourable season for visiting the Ducal Palace and the Academy. The valet-de-place had marked them for his own and held trium- phant possession of them. He celebrates his triumphs in a terrible [ 10 ] VENICE brassy voice, which resounds all over the place, and has, whatever language he be speaking, the accent of some other idiom. During all the spring months in Venice these gentry abound in the great resorts, and they lead their helpless captives through churches and galleries in dense irresponsible groups. They infest the Piazza; they pursue you along the Riva ; they hang about the bridges and the doors of the cafes. In saying just now that I was disappointed at first, I had chiefly in mind the impression that assails me to-day in the whole precinct of St. Mark's. The condition of this ancient sanctuary is surely a great scandal. The pedlars and commis- sioners ply their trade — often a very unclean one — at the very door of the temple ; they follow you across the threshold, into the sacred dusk, and pull your sleeve, and hiss into your ear, scuflEling with each other for customers. There is a great deal of dishonour about St. Mark's altogether, and if Venice, as I say, has become a great bazaar, this exquisite edifice is now the biggest booth. Ill It is treated as a booth in all ways, and if it had not somehow a great spirit of solemnity within it the traveller would soon have little warrant for regarding it as a religious affair. The restoration of the outer walls, which has lately been so much attacked and defended, is certainly a great shock. Of the necessity of the work only an expert is, I suppose, in a position to judge ; but there is no doubt that, if a necessity it be, it is one that is deeply to be re« [ II] ITALIAN HOURS gretted. To no more distressing necessity have people of taste lately had to resign themselves. Wherever the hand of the restorer has been laid all semblance of beauty has vanished ; which is a sad fact, considering that the external loveliness of St. Mark's has been for ages less impressive only than that of the still compara- tively uninjured interior. I know not what is the measure of ne- cessity in such a case, and it appears indeed to be a very delicate question. To-day, at any rate, that admirable harmony of faded mosaic and marble which, to the eye of the traveller emerging from the narrow streets that lead to the Piazza, filled all the fur- ther end of it with a sort of dazzling silver presence — to-day this lovely vision is in a way to be completely reformed and indeed well-nigh abolished. The old softness and mellowness of colour — the work of the quiet centuries and of the breath of the salt sea — is giving way to large crude patches of new material which have the effect of a monstrous malady rather than of a restoration to health. They look like blotches of red and white paint and dishon- ourable smears of chalk on the cheeks of a noble matron. The face toward the Piazzetta is in especial the newest-looking thing conceivable — as new as a new pair of boots or as the morning's paper. We do not profess, however, to undertake a scientific quar- rel with these changes ; we admit that our complaint is a purely sentimental one. The march of industry in united Italy must doubtless be looked at as a whole, and one must endeavour to believe that it is through innumerable lapses of taste that this deeply interesting country is groping her way to her place among the nations. For the present, it is not to be denied, certain odd [ 12 ] FLAGS AT ST. MARK'S, VENICE. VENICE phases of the process are more visible than the resuh, to arrive at which it seems necessary that, as she was of old a passionate votary of the beautiful, she should to-day burn everything that she has adored. It is doubtless too soon to judge her, and there are moments when one is willing to forgive her even the restoration of St. Mark's. Inside as well there has been a considerable at- tempt to make the place more tidy; but the general effect, as yet, has not seriously suffered. What I chiefly remember is the straight- ening out of that dark and rugged old pavement — those deep undulations of primitive mosaic in which the fond spectator was thought to perceive an intended resemblance to the waves of the ocean. Whether intended or not the analogy was an image the more in a treasure-house of images ; but from a considerable por- tion of the church it has now disappeared. Throughout the greater part indeed the pavement remains as recent generations have known it — dark, rich, cracked, uneven, spotted with porphyry and time-blackened malachite, polished by the knees of innumerable worshippers ; but in other large stretches the idea imitated by the restorers is that of the ocean in a dead calm, and the model they have taken the floor of a London club-house or of a New York hotel. I think no Venetian and scarcely any Italian cares much for such differences ; and when, a year ago, people in England were writing to the Times about the whole business and holding meet- ings to protest against it the dear children of the lagoon — so far as they heard or heeded the rumour — thought them partly busy- bodies and partly asses. Busy-bodies they doubtless were, but they took a good deal of disinterested trouble. It never occurs to [ 13] ITALIAN HOURS the Venetian mind of to-day that such trouble may be worth tak- ing; the Venetian mind vainly endeavours to conceive a state of existence in which personal questions are so insipid that people have to look for grievances in the wrongs of brick and marble. I must not, however, speak of St. Mark's as if I had the pretension of giving a description of it or as if the reader desired one. The reader has been too well served already. It is surely the best- described building in the world. Open the Stones of Venice, open Th6ophile Gautier's Italia, and you will see. These writers take it very seriously, and it is only because there is another way of taking it that I venture to speak of it ; the way that offers itself after you have been in Venice a couple of months, and the light is hot in the great Square, and you pass in under the pictured porti- coes with a feeling of habit and friendliness and a desire for some- thing cool and dark. There are moments, after all, when the church is comparatively quiet and empty, and when you may sit there with an easy consciousness of its beauty. From the moment, of course, that you go into any Italian church for any purpose but to say your prayers or look at the ladies, you rank yourself among the trooping barbarians I just spoke of; you treat the place as an orifice in the peep-show. Still, it is almost a spiritual function — or, at the worst, an amorous one — to feed one's eyes on the mol- ten colour that drops from the hollow vaults and thickens the air with its richness. It is all so quiet and sad and faded and yet all so brilliant and living. The strange figures in the mosaic pictures, bending with the curve of niche and vault, stare down through the glowing dimness; the burnished gold that stands behind them [ 14] VENICE catches the light on its little uneven cubes. St. Mark's owes no- thing of its character to the beauty of proportion or perspective ; there is nothing grandly balanced or far-arching; there are no long lines nor triumphs of the perpendicular. The church arches in- deed, but arches like a dusky cavern. Beauty of surface, of tone, of detail, of things near enough to touch and kneel upon and lean against — it is from this the effect proceeds. In this sort of beauty the place is incredibly rich, and you may go there everyday and find afresh some lurking pictorial nook. It is a treasury of bits, as the painters say ; and there are usually three or four of the fraternity with their easels set up in uncertain equilibrium on the undulating floor. It is not easy to catch the real complexion of St. Mark's, and these laudable attempts at portraiture are apt to look either lurid or livid. But if you cannot paint the old loose-looking marble slabs, the great panels of basalt and jasper, the crucifixes of which the lonely anguish looks deeper in the ver- tical light, the tabernacles whose open doors disclose a dark By- zantine image spotted with dull, crooked gems — if you cannot paint these things you can at least grow fond of them. You grow fond even of the old benches of red marble, partly worn away by the breeches of many generations and attached to the base of those wide pilasters of which the precious plating, delightful in its faded brownness, with a faint grey bloom upon it, bulges and yawns a little with honourable age. ITALIAN HOURS IV Even at first, when the vexatious sense of the city of the Doges reduced to earning its living as a curiosity-shop was in its keen- ness, there was a great deal of entertainment to be got from lodging on Riva Schiavoni and looking out at the far-shimmering lagoon. There was entertainment indeed in simply getting into the place and observing the queer incidents of a Venetian instal- lation. A great many persons contribute indirectly to this under- taking, and it is surprising how they spring out at you during your novitiate to remind you that they are bound up in some mysterious manner with the constitution of your little establish- ment. It was an interesting problem for instance to trace the subtle connection existing between the niece of the landlady and the occupancy of the fourth floor. Superficially it was none too visible, as the young lady in question was a dancer at the Fenice theatre — or when that was closed at the Rossini — and might have been supposed absorbed by her professional duties. It proved necessary, however, that she should hover about the premises in a velvet jacket and a pair of black kid gloves with one little white button; as also, that she should apply a thick coating of powder to her face, which had a charming oval and a sweet weak expression, like that of most of the Venetian maidens, who, as a general thing — it was not a peculiarity of the land- lady's niece — are fond of besmearing themselves with flour. You soon recognise that it is not only the many-twinkling lagoon [ i6] VENICE you behold from a habitation on the Riva; you see a little of everything Venetian. Straight across, before my windows, rose the great pink mass of San Giorgio Maggiore, which has for an ugly Palladian church a success beyond all reason. It is a success of position, of colour, of the immense detached Campanile, tipped with a tall gold angel. I know not whether it is because San Giorgio is so grandly conspicuous, with a great deal of worn, faded-looking brickwork ; but for many persons the whole place has a kind of suffusion of rosiness. Asked what may be the leading colour in the Venetian concert, we should inveter- ately say Pink, and yet without remembering after all that this elegant hue occurs very often. It is a faint, shimmering, airy, watery pink; the bright sea-light seems to flush with it and the pale whiteish-green of lagoon and canal to drink it in. There is indeed a great deal of very evident brickwork, which is never fresh or loud in colour, but always burnt out, as it were, always exquisitely mild. Certain little mental pictures rise before the collector of memo- ries at the simple mention, written or spoken, of the places he has loved. When I hear, when I see, the magical name I have written above these pages, it is not of the great Square that I think, with its strange basilica and its high arcades, nor of the wide mouth of the Grand Canal, with the stately steps and the well- poised dome of the Salute ; it is not of the low lagoon, nor the sweet Piazzetta, nor the dark chambers of St. Mark's. I simply see a narrow canal in the heart of the city — a patch of green water and a surface of pink wall. The gondola moves slowly; [ 17] ITALIAN HOURS it gives a great smooth swerve, passes under a bridge, and the gondolier's cry, carried over the quiet water, makes a kind of splash in the stillness. A girl crosses the little bridge, which has an arch like a camel's back, with an old shawl on her head, which makes her characteristic and charming; you see her against the sky as you float beneath. The pink of the old wall seems to fill the whole place ; it sinks even into the opaque water. Behind the wall is a garden, out of which the long arm of a white June rose — the roses of Venice are splendid — has flung itself by way of spontaneous ornament. On the other side of this small water-way is a great shabby facade of Gothic windows and balconies — balconies on which dirty clothes are hung and under which a cavernous-looking doorway opens from a low flight of slimy water-steps. It is very hot and still, the canal has a queer smell, and the whole place is enchanting. It is poor work, however, talking about the colour of things in Venice. The fond spectator is perpetually looking at it from his window, when he is not floating about with that delightful sense of being for the moment a part of it, which any gentleman in a gondola is free to entertain. Venetian windows and bal- conies are a dreadful lure, and while you rest your elbows on these cushioned ledges the precious hours fly away. But in truth Venice is n't in fair weather a place for concentration of mind. The effort required for sitting down to a writing-table is heroic, and the brightest page of MS. looks dull beside the brilliancy of your milieu. All nature beckons you forth and murmurs to you sophistically that such hours should be devoted to collecting [ 18 1 A NARROW CANAL, VENICE. VENICE impressions. Afterwards, in ugly places, at unprivileged times, you can convert your impressions into prose. Fortunately for the present proser the weather was n't always fine ; the first month was wet and windy, and it was better to judge of the matter from an open casement than to respond to the advances of persuasive gondoliers. Even then however there was a constant entertain- ment in the view. It was all cold colour, and the steel-grey floor of the lagoon was stroked the wrong way by the wind. Then there were charming cool intervals, when the churches, the houses, the anchored fishing-boats, the whole gently-curving line of the Riva, seemed to be washed with a pearly white. Later it all turned warm — warm to the eye as well as to other senses. After the middle of May the whole place was in a glow. The sea took on a thousand shades, but they were only infinite varia- tions of blue, and those rosy walls I just spoke of began to flush in the thick sunshine. Every patch of colour, every yard of weather-stained stucco, every glimpse of nestling garden or daub of sky above a calle, began to shine and sparkle — began, as the painters say, to "compose." The lagoon was streaked with odd currents, which played across it like huge smooth finger-marks. The gondolas multiplied and spotted it all over; every gondola and gondolier looking, at a distance, precisely like every other. There is something strange and fascinating in this mysterious impersonality of the gondola. It has an identity when you are in it, but, thanks to their all being of the same size, shape and colour, and of the same deportment and gait, it has none, or as little as possible, as you see it pass before you. From my win- [ 19] ITALIAN HOURS dows on the Riva there was always the same silhouette — the long, black, slender skiff, lifting its head and throwing it back a little, moving yet seeming not to move, with the grotesquely- graceful figure on the poop. This figure inclines, as may be, more to the graceful or to the grotesque — standing in the "second position" of the dancing-master, but indulging from the waist upward in a freedom of movement which that func- tionary would deprecate. One may say as a general thing that there is something rather awkward in the movement even of the most graceful gondolier, and something graceful in the move- ment of the most awkward. In the graceful men of course the grace predominates, and nothing can be finer than the large, firm way in which, from their point of vantage, they throw themselves over their tremendous oar. It has the boldness of a plunging bird and the regularity of a pendulum. Sometimes, as you see this movement in profile, in a gondola that passes you — see, as you recline on your own low cushions, the arching body of the gondolier lifted up against the sky — it has a kind of nobleness which suggests an image on a Greek frieze. The gondolier at Venice is your very good friend — if you choose him happily — and on the quality of the personage depends a good deal that of your impressions. He is a part of your daily life, your double, your shadow, your complement. Most people, I think, either like their gondolier or hate him ; and if they like him, like him very much. In this case they take an interest in him after his departure; wish him to be sure of employment, speak of him as the gem of gondoliers and tell their friends to be certain to [20] VENICE "secure" him. There is usually no difficulty in securing him; there is nothing elusive or reluctant about a gondolier. Nothing would induce me not to believe them for the most part excellent fellows, and the sentimental tourist must always have a kind- ness for them. More than the rest of the population, of course, they are the children of Venice ; they are associated with its idio- syncrasy, with its essence, with its silence, with its melancholy. When I say they are associated with its silence I should immediately add that they are associated also with its sound. Among themselves they are an extraordinarily talkative com- pany. They chatter at the traghetti, where they always have some sharp point under discussion ; they bawl across the canals ; they bespeak your commands as you approach; they defy each other from afar. If you happen to have a traghetto under your window, you are well aware that they are a vocal race. I should go even further than I went just now, and say that the voice of the gondolier is in fact for audibility the dominant or rather the only note of Venice. There is scarcely another heard sound, and that indeed is part of the interest of the place. There is no noise there save distinctly human noise ; no rumbling, no vague uproar, nor rattle of wheels and hoofs. It is all articulate and vocal and personal. One may say indeed that Venice is em- phatically the city of conversation ; people talk all over the place because there is nothing to interfere with its being caught by the ear. Among the populace it is a general family party. The still water carries the voice, and good Venetians exchange con- fidences at a distance of half a mile. It saves a world of trouble, [2il ITALIAN HOURS and they don't like trouble. Their delightful garrulous lan- guage helps them to make Venetian life a long conversazione. This language, with its soft elisions, its odd transpositions, its kindly contempt for consonants and other disagreeables, has in it some- thing peculiarly human and accommodating. If your gondolier had no other merit he would have the merit that he speaks Venetian. This may rank as a merit even — some people per- haps would say especially — when you don't understand what he says. But he adds to it other graces which make him an agreeable feature in your life. The price he sets on his services is touchingly small, and he has a happy art of being obsequious without being, or at least without seeming, abject. For occa- sional liberalities he evinces an almost lyrical gratitude. In short he has delightfully good manners, a merit which he shares for the most part with the Venetians at large. One grows very fond of these people, and the reason of one's fondness is the frank- ness and sweetness of their address. That of the Italian family at large has much to recommend it ; but in the Venetian manner there is something peculiarly ingratiating. One feels that the race is old, that it has a long and rich civilisation in its blood, and that if it has n't been blessed by fortune it has at least been polished by time. It has n't a genius for stiff morality, and indeed makes few pretensions in that direction. It scruples but scantly to represent the false as the true, and has been accused of cultivating the occasion to grasp and to overreach, and of steering a crooked course — not to your and my advan- tage — amid the sanctities of property. It has been accused [22 ] VENICE further of loving if not too well at least too often, of being in fine as little austere as possible. I am not sure it is very brave, nor struck with its being very industrious. But it has an un- failing sense of the amenities of life; the poorest Venetian is a natural man of the world. He is better company than persons of his class are apt to be among the nations of industry and virtue — where people are also sometimes perceived to lie and steal and otherwise misconduct themselves. He has a great desire to please and to be pleased. In that matter at least the cold-blooded stranger begins at last to imitate him ; begins to lead a life that shall be before all things easy ; unless indeed he allow himself, like Mr. Ruskin, to be put out of humour by Titian and Tiepolo. The hours he spends among the pictures are his best hours in Venice, and I am ashamed to have written so much of common things when I might have been making festoons of the names of the masters. Only, when we have covered our page with such festoons what more is left to say ? When one has said Carpaccio and Bellini, the Tintoret and the Veronese, one has struck a note that must be left to resound at will. Everything has been said about the mighty painters, and it is of little importance that a pilgrim the more has found them to his taste. "Went this morning to the Academy; was very much pleased with Titian's 'Assumption.'" [23] ITALIAN HOURS That honest phrase has doubtless been written in many a trav- eller's diary, and was not indiscreet on the part of its author. But it appeals little to the general reader, and we must more- over notoriously not expose our deepest feelings. Since I have mentioned Titian's "Assumption" I must say that there are some people who have been less pleased with it than the observer we have just imagined. It is one of the possible disappoint- ments of Venice, and you may if you like take advantage of your privilege of not caring for it. It imparts a look of great richness to the side of the beautiful room of the Academy on which it hangs ; but the same room contains two or three works less known to fame which are equally capable of inspiring a passion. "The 'Annunciation* struck me as coarse and super- ficial": that note was once made in a simple-minded tourist's book. At Venice, strange to say, Titian is altogether a disap- pointment; the city of his adoption is far from containing the best of him. Madrid, Paris, London, Florence, Dresden, Munich — these are the homes of his greatness. There are other painters who have but a single home, and the greatest of these is the Tintoret. Close beside him sit Gar- paccio and Bellini, who make with him the dazzling Venetian trio. The Veronese may be seen and measured in other places ; he is most splendid in Venice, but he shines in Paris and in Dres- den. You may walk out of the noon-day dusk of Trafalgar Square in November, and in one of the chambers of the National Gallery see the family of Darius rustling and pleading and weeping at the feet of Alexander. Alexander is a beautiful young [24] VENICE Venetian in crimson pantaloons, and the picture sends a glow into the cold London twilight. You may sit before it for an hour and dream you are floating to the water-gate of the Ducal Pal- ace, where a certain old beggar who has one of the handsomest heads in the world — he has sat to a hundred painters for Doges and for personages more sacred — has a prescriptive right to pre- tend to pull your gondola to the steps and to hold out a greasy immemorial cap. But you must go to Venice in very fact to see the other masters, who form part of your life while you are there, who illuminate your view of the universe. It is difficult to express one's relation to them ; the whole Venetian art-world is so near, so familiar, so much an extension and adjunct of the spreading actual, that it seems almost invidious to say one owes more to one of them than to the other. Nowhere, not even in Holland, where the correspondence between the real aspects and the little polished canvases is so constant and so exquisite, do art and life seem so interfused and, as it were, so consanguineous. All the splendour of light and colour, all the Venetian air and the Venetian history are on the walls and ceilings of the palaces; and all the genius of the masters, all the images and visions they have left upon canvas, seem to tremble in the sunbeams and dance upon the waves. That is the perpetual interest of the place — that you live in a certain sort of knowledge as in a rosy cloud. You don't go into the churches and galleries by way of a change from the streets ; you go into them because they offer you an exquisite reproduction of the things that surround you. All Venice was both model and painter, and life was so picto- [25] ITALIAN HOURS rial that art coiild n't help becoming so. With all diminutions life is pictorial still, and this fact gives an extraordinary fresh- ness to one's perception of the great Venetian works. You judge of them not as a connoisseur, but as a man of the world, and you enjoy them because they are so social and so true. Perhaps of all works of art that are equally great they demand least re- flection on the part of the spectator — they make least of a mys- tery of being enjoyed. Reflection only confirms your admiration, yet is almost ashamed to show its head. These things speak so frankly and benignantly to the sense that even when they arrive at the highest style — as in the Tintoret's " Presentation of the little Virgin at the Temple" — they are still more familiar. But it is hard, as I say, to express all this, and it is painful as well to attempt it — painful because in the memory of vanished hours so filled with beauty the consciousness of present loss oppresses. Exquisite hours, enveloped in light and silence, to have known them once is to have always a terrible standard of enjoyment. Certain lovely mornings of May and June come back with an ineffaceable fairness. Venice is n't smothered in flowers at this season, in the manner of Florence and Rome; but the sea and sky themselves seem to blossom and rustle. The gondola waits at the wave-washed steps, and if you are wise you will take your place beside a discriminating companion. Such a companion in Venice should of course be of the sex that discriminates most finely. An intelligent woman who knows her Venice seems doubly intelligent, and it makes no woman's, perceptions less keen to be aware that she can't help looking [26 ] VENICE graceful as she is borne over the waves. The handsome Pas- quale, with uplifted oar, awaits your command, knowing, in a general way, from observation of your habits, that your inten- tion is to go to see a picture or two. It perhaps does n't immensely matter what picture you choose : the whole affair is so charming. It is charming to wander through the light and shade of intricate canals, with perpetual architecture above you and perpetual fluidity beneath. It is charming to disembark at the polished steps of a little empty campo — a sunny shabby square with an old well in the middle, an old church on one side and tall Venetian windows looking down. Sometimes the windows are tenantless ; sometimes a lady in a faded dressing-gown leans vaguely on the sill. There is always an old man holding out his hat for coppers • there are always three or four small boys dodging possible umbrella-pokes while they precede you, in the manner of custo- dians, to the door of the church. VI The churches of Venice are rich in pictures, and many a master- piece lurks in the unaccommodating gloom of side-chapels and sacristies. Many a noble work is perched behind the dusty can- dles and muslin roses of a scantily-visited altar ; some of them indeed, hidden behind the ahar, suffer in a darkness that can never be explored. The facilities offered you for approaching the picture in such cases are a mockery of your irritated wish. You [27 J ITALIAN HOURS stand at tip-toe on a three-legged stool, you climb a rickety lad- der, yOu almost mount upon the shoulders of the custode. You do everything but see the picture. You see just enough to be sure it's beautiful. You catch a glimpse of a divine head, of a fig- tree against a mellow sky, but the rest is impenetrable mystery. You renounce all hope, for instance, of approaching the mag- nificent Cima da Conegliano in San Giovanni in Bragora; and bethinking yourself of the immaculate purity that shines in the spirit of this master, you renounce it with chagrin and pain. Behind the high altar in that church hangs a Baptism of Christ by Cima which I believe has been more or less repainted. You make the thing out in spots, you see it has a fulness of perfec- tion. But you turn away from it with a stiff neck and promise yourself consolation in the Academy and at the Madonna dell! Orto, where two noble works by the same hand — pictures as clear as a summer twilight — present themselves in better cir- cumstances. It may be said as a general thing that you never see the Tintoret. You admire him, you adore him, you think him the greatest of painters, but in the great majority of cases your eyes fail to deal with him. This is partly his own fault; so many of his works have turned to blackness and are positively rotting in their frames. At the Scuola di San Rocco, where there are acres of him, there is scarcely anything at all adequately visi- ble save the immense "Crucifixion" in the upper story. It is true that in looking at this huge composition you look at many pictures ; it has not only a multitude of figures but a wealth of episodes ; and you pass from one of these to the other as if you [28 J VENICE were "doing" a gallery. Surely no single picture in the world contains more of human life ; there is everything in it, including the most exquisite beauty. It is one of the greatest things of art ; it is always interesting. There are works of the artist which contain touches more exquisite, revelations of beauty more ra- diant, but there is no other vision of so intense a reality, an exe- cution so splendid. The interest, the impressiveness, of that whole corner of Venice, however melancholy the effect of its gor- geous and ill-lighted chambers, gives a strange importance to a visit to the Scuola. Nothing that all travellers go to see appears to suffer less from the incursions of travellers. It is one of the loneliest booths of the bazaar, and the author of these lines has always had the good fortune, which he wishes to every other traveller, of having it to himself. I think most visitors find the place rather alarming and wicked-looking. They walk about a while among the fitful figures that gleam here and there out of the great tapestry (as it were) with which the painter has hung all the walls, and then, depressed and bewildered by the portentous solemnity of these objects, by strange glimpses of unnatural scenes, by the echo of their lonely footsteps on the vast stone floors, they take a hasty departure, finding themselves again, with a sense of release from danger, a sense that the genius loci was a sort of mad white-washer who worked with a bad mixture, in the bright light of the campo, among the beggars, the orange-vendors and the passing gondolas. Solemn indeed is the place, solemn and strangely suggestive, for the simple reason that we shall scarcely find four walls elsewhere that inclose within a [29 J ITALIAN HOURS like area an equal quantity of genius. The air is thick with it and dense and difficult to breathe ; for it was genius that was not happy, inasmuch as it lacked the art to fix itself for ever. It is not immortality that we breathe at the Scuola di San Rocco, but conscious, reluctant mortality. Fortunately, however, we can turn to the Ducal Palace, where everything is so brilliant and splendid that the poor dusky Tintoret is lifted in spite of himself into the concert. This deeply original building is of course the loveliest thing in Venice, and a morning's stroll there is a wonderful illumination. Cunningly select your hour — half the enjoyment of Venice is a question of dodging — and enter at about one o'clock, when the tourists have flocked off to lunch and the echoes of the charming cham- bers have gone to sleep among the sunbeams. There is no brighter place in Venice — by which I mean that on the whole there is none half so bright. The reflected sunshine plays up through the great windows from the glittering lagoon and shimmers and twinkles over gilded walls and ceilings. All the history of Ven- ice, all its splendid stately past, glows around you in a strong sea- light. Every one here is magnificent, but the great Veronese is the most magnificent of all. He swims before you in a silver cloud ; he thrones in an eternal morning. The deep blue sky burns behind him, streaked across with milky bars; the white colon- nades sustain the richest canopies, under which the first gentle- men and ladies in the world both render homage and receive it. Their glorious garments rustle in the air of the sea and their sun-lighted faces are the very complexion of Venice. The mix- [30 J VENICE ture of pride and piety, of politics and religion, of art and patriot- ism, gives a splendid dignity to every scene. Never was a painter more nobly joyous, never did an artist take a greater delight in life, seeing it all as a kind of breezy festival and feeling it through the medium of perpetual success. He revels in the gold-framed ovals of the ceilings, multiplies himself there with the fluttering movement of an embroidered banner that tosses itself into the blue. He was the happiest of painters and produced the happiest picture in the world. "The Rape of Europa" surely deserves this title ; it is impossible to look at it without aching with envy. Nowhere else in art is such a temperament revealed ; never did inclination and opportunity combine to express such enjoyment. The mixture of flowers and gems and brocade, of blooming flesh and shining sea and waving groves, of youth, health, move- ment, desire — all this is the brightest vision that ever descended upon the soul of a painter. Happy the artist who could enter- tain such a vision; happy the artist who could paint it as the masterpiece I here recall is painted. The Tintoret's visions were not so bright as that ; but he had several that were radiant enough. In the room that contains the work just cited are several smaller canvases by the greatly more complex genius of the Scuola di San Rocco, which are al- most simple in their loveliness, almost happy in their simplicity. They have kept their brightness through the centuries, and they shine with their neighbours in those golden rooms. There is a piece of painting in one of them which is one of the sweetest things in Venice and which reminds one afresh of those wild [31] ITALIAN HOURS flowers of execution that bloom so profusely and so unheeded in the dark corners of all of the Tintoret's work. " Pallas chasing away Mars" is, I believe, the name that is given to the picture; and it represents in fact a young woman of noble appearance administering a gentle push to a fine young man in armour, as if to tell him to keep his distance. It is of the gentleness of this push that I speak, the charming way in which she puts out her arm, with a single bracelet on it, and rests her young hand, its rosy fingers parted, on his dark breastplate. She bends her enchant- ing head with the effort — a head which has all the strange fair- ness that the Tintoret always sees in women — and the soft, living, flesh-like glow of all these members, over which the brush has scarcely paused in its course, is as pretty an example of genius as all Venice can show. But why speak of the Tintoret when I can say nothing of the great "Paradise," which unfolds its somewhat smoky splendour and the wonder of its multitudi- nous circles in one of the other chambers ? If it were not one of the first pictures in the world it would be about the biggest, and we must confess that the spectator gets from it at first chiefly an impression of quantity. Then he sees that this quantity is really wealth; that the dim confusion of faces is a magnificent composition, and that some of the details of this composition are extremely beautiful. It is impossible however in a retro- spect of Venice to specify one's happiest hours, though as one looks backward certain ineff^aceable moments start here and there into vividness. How is it possible to forget one's visits to the sacristy of the Frari, however frequent they may have been, [32] VENICE and the great work of John Bellini which forms the treasure of that apartment? VII Nothing in Venice is more perfect than this, and we know of no work of art more complete. The picture is in three compart- ments ; the Virgin sits in the central division with her child ; two venerable saints, standing close together, occupy each of the others. It is impossible to imagine anything more finished or more ripe. It is one of those things that sum up the genius of a painter, the experience of a life, the teaching of a school. It seems painted with molten gems, which have only been clarified by time, and it is as solemn as it is gorgeous and as simple as it is deep. Gio- vanni Bellini is more or less everywhere in Venice, and, wherever he is, almost certain to be first — first, I mean, in his own line : he paints little else than the Madonna and the saints ; he has not Carpaccio's care for human life at large, nor the Tintoret's nor that of the Veronese. Some of his greater pictures, however, where several figures are clustered together, have a richness of sanctity that is almost profane. There is one of them on the dark side of the room at the Academy that contains Titian's "Assumption," which if we could only see it — its position is an inconceivable scandal — would evidently be one of the mightiest of so-called sacred pictures. So too is the Madonna of San Zac^ caria, hung in a cold, dim, dreary place, ever so much too high, but so mild and serene, and so grandly disposed and accom- [33 ] ITALIAN HOURS panied, that the proper attitude for even the most critical ama- teur, as he looks at it, strikes one as the bended knee. There is another noble John Bellini, one of the very few in which there is no Virgin, at San Giovanni Crisostomo — a St, Jerome, in a red dress, sitting aloft upon the rocks and with a landscape of ex- traordinary purity behind him. The absence of the peculiarly erect Madonna makes it an interesting surprise among the works of the painter and gives it a somewhat less strenuous air. But it has brilliant beauty and the St. Jerome is a delightful old per- sonage. The same church contains another great picture for which the haunter of these places must find a shrine apart in his memory; one of the most interesting things he will have seen, if not the most brilliant. Nothing appeals more to him than three figures of Venetian ladies which occupy the foreground of a smallish canvas of Sebastian del Piombo, placed above the high altar of San Giovanni Crisostomo. Sebastian was a Venetian by birth, but few of his productions are to be seen in his native place; few indeed are to be seen anjrwhere. The picture represents the patron-saint of the church, accompanied by other saints and by the worldly votaries I have mentioned. These ladies stand to- gether on the left, holding in their hands little white caskets; two of them are in profile, but the foremost turns her face to the spectator. This face and figure are almost unique among the beautiful things of Venice, and they leave the susceptible observer with the impression of having made, or rather having missed, a strange, a dangerous, but a most valuable, acquaintance. [34] VENICE The lady, who is superbly handsome, is the typical Venetian of the sixteenth century, and she remains for the mind the perfect flower of that society. Never was there a greater air of breeding, a deeper expression of tranquil superiority. She walks a goddess — as if she trod without sinking the waves , of the Adriatic. It is impossible to conceive a more perfect expression of the aristocratic spirit either in its pride or in its benignity. This magnificent creature is so strong and secure that she is gentle, and so quiet that in comparison all minor assump- tions of calmness suggest only a vulgar alarm. But for all this there are depths of possible disorder in her light-coloured eye. I had meant however to say nothing about her, for it's not right to speak of Sebastian when one has n't found room for Carpaccio. These visions come to one, and one can neither hold them nor brush them aside. Memories of Carpaccio, the magnificent, the delightful — it 's not for want of such visitations, but only for want of space, that I have n't said of him what I would. There is little enough need of it for Carpaccio's sake, his fame being brighter to-day — thanks to the generous lamp Mr. Ruskin has held up to it — than it has ever been. Yet there is something ridiculous in talking of Venice without making him almost the refrain. He and the Tintoret are the two great realists, and it is hard to say which is the more human, the more various. The Tintoret had the mightier temperament, but Car- paccio, who had the advantage of more newness and more re- sponsibility, sailed nearer to perfection. Here and there he quite [35] ITALIAN HOURS touches it, as in the enchanting picture, at the Academy, of St. Ursula asleep in her little white bed, in her high clean room, where the angel visits her at dawn; or in the noble St. Jerome in his study at S. Giorgio Schiavoni. This latter work is a pearl of sentiment, and I may add without being fantastic a ruby of colour. It unites the most masterly finish with a kind of universal large- ness of feeling, and he who has it well in his memory will never hear the name of Carpaccio without a throb of almost personal affection. Such indeed is the feeling that descends upon you in that wonderful little chapel of St. George of the Slaves, where this most personal and sociable of artists has expressed all the sweetness of his imagination. The place is small and incom- modious, the pictures are out of sight and ill-lighted, the custo- dian is rapacious, the visitors are mutually intolerable, but the shabby little chapel is a palace of art. Mr. Ruskin has written a pamphlet about it which is a real aid to enjoyment, though I can't but think the generous artist, with his keen senses and his just feeling, would have suffered to hear his eulogist declare that one of his other productions — in the Museo Civico of Pa- lazzo Correr, a delightful portrait of two Venetian ladies with pet animals — is the "finest picture in the world." It has no need of that to be thought admirable; and what more can a painter desire? VENICE VIII May in Venice is better than April, but June is bdst of all. Then the days are hot, but not too hot, and the nights are more beau- tiful than the days. Then Venice is rosier than ever in the morn- ing and more golden than ever as the day descends. She seems to expand and evaporate, to multiply all her reflections and iri-r descences. Then the life of her people and the strangeness of her constitution become a perpetual comedy, or at least a perpet- ual drama. Then the gondola is your sole habitation, and you spend days between sea and sky. You go to the Lido, though the Lido has been spoiled. When I first saw it, in 1869, ^^ was a very natural place, and there was but a rough lane across the little island from the landing-place to the beach. There was a bathing- place in those days, and a restaurant, which was very bad, but where in the warm evenings your dinner did n't much matter as you sat letting it cool on the wooden terrace that stretched out into the sea. To-day the Lido is a part of united Italy and has been made the victim of villainous improvements. A little cock- ney village has sprung up on its rural bosom and a third-rate boulevard leads from Santa Elisabetta to the Adriatic. There are bitumen walks and gas-lamps, lodging-houses, shops and a teatro diurno. The bathing-establishment is bigger than before, and the restaurant as well ; but it is a compensation perhaps that the cuisine is no better. Such as it is, however, you won't scorn occasionally to partake of it on the breezy platform under which [37] ITALIAN HOURS bathers dart and splash, and which looks out to where the fishing- boats, with sails of orange and crimson, wander along the darken- ing horizon. The beach at the Lido is still lonely and beautiful, and you can easily walk away from the cockney village. The return to Venice in the sunset is classical and indispensable, and those who at that glowing hour have floated toward the towers that rise out of the lagoon will not easily part with the impression. But you indulge in larger excursions— you go to Burano and Torcello, to Malamocco and Chioggia. Torcello, like the Lido, has been improved ; the deeply interesting little cathedral of the eighth century, which stood there on the edge of the sea, as touching in its ruin, with its grassy threshold and its primitive mosaics, as the bleached bones of a human skele- ton washed ashore by the tide, has now been restored and made cheerful, and the charm of the place, its strange and suggestive desolation, has well-nigh departed. It will still serve you as a pretext, however, for a day on the lagoon, especially as you will disembark at Burano and admire the wonderful fisher-folk, whose good looks — and bad manners, I am sorry to say — can scarcely be exaggerated. Burano is celebrated for the beauty of its women and the rapacity of its children, and it is a fact that though some of the ladies are rather bold about it every one of them shows you a handsome face. The children assail you for coppers, and in their desire to be satisfied pursue your gondola into the sea. Chioggia is a larger Burano, and you carry away from either place a half-sad, half- cynical, but altogether pictorial impression; the impression of [38 ] VENICE bright-coloured hovels, of bathing in stagnant canals, of young girls with faces of a delicate shape and a susceptible expres- sion, with splendid heads of hair and complexions smeared with powder, faded yellow shawls that hang like old Greek draperies, and little wooden shoes that click as they go up and down the steps of the convex bridges ; of brown-cheeked matrons with lus- trous tresses and high tempers, massive throats encased with gold beads, and eyes that meet your own with a certain tradi- tional defiance. The men throughout the islands of Venice are almost as handsome as the women ; I have never seen so many good-looking rascals. At Burano and Chioggia they sit mending their nets, or lounge at the street corners, where conversation is always high-pitched, or clamour to you to take a boat; and everjrwhere they decorate the scene with their splendid colour — cheeks and throats as richly brown as the sails of their fishing- smacks — their sea-faded tatters which are always a "costume," their soft Venetian jargon, and the gallantry with which they wear their hats, an article that nowhere sits so well as on a mass of dense Venetian curls. If you are happy you will find yourself, after a June day in Venice (about ten o'clock), on a balcony that overhangs the Grand Canal, with your elbows on the broad ledge, a cigarette in your teeth and a little good company beside you. The gondolas pass beneath, the watery surface gleams here and there from their lamps, some of which are coloured lan- terns that move mysteriously in the darkness. There are some evenings in June when there are too many gondolas, too many lanterns, too many serenades in front of the hotels. The sere- [39] ITALIAN HOURS nading in particular is overdone; but on such a balcony as I speak of you need n't suffer from it, for in the apartment behind you — an accessible refuge — there is more good company, there are more cigarettes. If you are wise you will step back there presently. . 1882. THE GRAND CANAL THE GRAND CANAL 1^^^ ^^^ 1 1 HE honour of representing the plan and the place at their best might perhaps ap- pear, in the City of St. Mark, properly to belong to the splendid square which bears the patron's name and which is the centre of Venetian life so far (this is pretty well all the way indeed) as Venetian life is a matter of strolling and chaffering, of gossiping and gaping, of circulating without a purpose, and of staring — too often with a foolish one — through the shop-win- dows of dealers whose hospitality makes their doorsteps dramatic, at the very vulgarest rubbish in all the modern market. If the Grand Canal, however, is not quite technically a "street," the perverted Piazza is perhaps even less normal; and I hasten to add that I am glad not to find myself studying my subject under the international arcades, or yet (I will go the length of saying) in the solemn presence of the church. For indeed in that case I foresee I should become still more confoundingly conscious of the stumbling-block that inevitably, even with his first few words, crops up in the path of the lover of Venice who rashly addresses himself to expression. " Venetian life " is a mere lit- erary convention, though it be an indispensable figure. The words [43] ITALIAN HOURS have played an effective part in the Hterature of sensibility ; they constituted thirty years ago the title of Mr. Howells's delight- ful volume of impressions; but in using them to-day one owes some frank amends to one's own lucidity. Let me carefully premise therefore that so often as they shall again drop from my pen, so often shall I beg to be regarded as systematically superficial. Venetian life, in the large old sense, has long since come to an end, and the essential present character of the most melancholy of cities resides simply in its being the most beautiful of tombs. Nowhere else has the past been laid to rest with such tenderness, such a sadness of resignation and remembrance. Nowhere else is the present so alien, so discontinuous, so like a crowd in a ceme- tery without garlands for the graves. It has no flowers in its hands, but, as a compensation perhaps — and the thing is doubt- less more to the point — it has money and little red books. The everlasting shuffle of these irresponsible visitors in the Piazza is contemporary Venetian life. Everything else is only a rever- beration of that. The vast mausoleum has a turnstile at the door, and a functionary in a shabby uniform lets you in, as per tariff, to see how dead it is. From this constatation, this cold curiosity, proceed all the industry, the prosperity, the vitality of the place. The shopkeepers and gondoliers, the beggars and the models, depend upon it for a living ; they are the custodians and the ushers of the great museum — they are even themselves to a certain extent the objects of exhibition. It is in the wide vesti- bule of the square that the polygot pilgrims gather most densely; [44] THE GRAND CANAL Piazza San Marco is the lobby of the opera in the intervals of the performance. The present fortune of Venice, the lamentable difference, is most easily measured there, and that is why, in the effort to resist our pessimism, we must turn away both from the purchasers and from the vendors of ricordi. The ricordi that we prefer are gathered best where the gondola glides — best of all on the noble waterway that begins in its glory at the Salute and ends in its abasement at the railway station. It is, however, the cockneyfied Piazzetta (forgive me, shade of St. Theodore — has not a brand new cafe begun to glare there, electrically, this very year ?) that introduces us most directly to the great picture by which the Grand Canal works its first spell, and to which a thousand artists, not always with a talent apiece, have paid their tribute. We pass into the Piazzetta to look down the great throat, as it were, of Venice, and the vision must console us for turning our back on St. Mark's. We have been treated to it again and again, of course, even if we have never stirred from home ; but that is only a reason the more for catching at any freshness that may be left in the world of photography. It is in Venice above all that we hear the small buzz of this vulgarising voice of the familiar; yet perhaps it is in Venice too that the picturesque fact has best mastered the pious secret of how to wait for us. Even the classic Salute waits like some great lady on the threshold of her saloon. She is more ample and serene, more seated at her door, than all the copyists have told us, with her domes and scrolls, her scolloped buttresses and statues forming a pompous crown, and her wiHe [45] ITALIAN HOURS steps disposed on the ground like the train of a robe. This fine air of the woman of the world is carried out by the well-bred as- surance with which she looks in the direction of her old-fashioned Byzantine neighbour ; and the juxtaposition of two churches so distinguished and so different, each splendid in its sort, is a suffi- cient mark of the scale and range of Venice. However, we our- selves are looking away from St. Mark's — we must blind our eyes to that dazzle ; without it indeed there are brightnesses and fascinations enough. We see them in abundance even while we look away from the shady steps of the Salute. These steps are cool in the morning, yet I don't know that I can justify my ex- cessive fondness for them any better than I can explain a hun- dred of the other vague infatuations with which Venice sophisti- cates the spirit. Under such an influence fortunately one need n't explain — it keeps account of nothing but perceptions and affec- tions. It is from the Salute steps perhaps, of a summer morning, that this view of the open mouth of the city is most brilliantly amusing. The whole thing composes as if composition were the chief end of human institutions. The charming architectural promontory of the Dogana stretches out the most graceful of arms, balancing in its hand the gilded globe on which revolves the delightful satirical figure of a little weathercock of a woman. This Fortune, this Navigation, or whatever she is called — she surely needs no name — catches the wind in the bit of drapery of which she has divested her rotary bronze loveliness. On the other side of the Canal twinkles and glitters the long row of the happy palaces which are mainly expensive hotels. There is a U6] THE GRAND CANAL little of everything everywhere, in the bright Venetian air, but to these houses belongs especially the appearance of sitting, across the water, at the receipt of custom, of watching in their hypocritical loveliness for the stranger and the victim. I call them happy, because even their sordid uses and their vulgar signs melt somehow, with their vague sea-stained pinks and drabs, into that strange gaiety of light and colour which is made up of the reflection of superannuated things. The atmosphere plays over them like a laugh, they are of the essence of the sad old joke. They are almost as charming from other places as they are from their own balconies, and share fully in that universal privilege of Venetian objects which consists of being both the picture and the point of view. This double character, which is particularly strong in the Grand Canal, adds a difficulty to any control of one's notes. The Grand Canal may be practically, as in impression, the cushioned balcony of a high and well-loved palace — the memory of irresistible evenings, of the sociable elbow, of endless linger- ing and looking ; or it may evoke the restlessness of a fresh curi- osity, of methodical inquiry, in a gondola piled with references. There are no references, I ought to mention, in the present re- marks, which sacrifice to accident, not to completeness. A rhap- sody of Venice is always in order, but I think the catalogues are finished. I should not attempt to write here the names of all the palaces, even if the number of those I find myself able to remember in the immense array were less insignificant. There are many I delight in that I don't know, or at least don't keep, [47] ITALIAN HOURS apart. Then there are the bad reasons for preference that are better than the good, and all the sweet bribery of association and recollection. These things, as one stands on the Salute steps, are so many delicate fingers to pick straight out of the row a dear little featureless house which, with its pale green shutters, looks straight across at the great door and through the very key- hole, as it were, of the church, and which I need n't call by a name — a pleasant American name — that every one in Venice, these many years, has had on grateful lips. It is the very friend- liest house in all the wide world, and it has, as it deserves to have, the most beautiful position. It is a real porto di mare, as the gon- doliers say — a port within a port ; it sees everything that comes and goes, and takes it all in with practised eyes. Not a tint or a hint of the immense iridescence is lost upon it, and there are days of exquisite colour on which it may fancy itself the heart of the wonderful prism. We wave to it from the Salute steps, which we must decidedly leave if we wish to get on, a grateful hand across the water, and turn into the big white church of Longhena — an empty shaft beneath a perfunctory dome — where an American family and a German party, huddled in a corner upon a pair of benches, are gazing, with a conscientious- ness worthy of a better cause, at nothing in particular. For there is nothing particular in this cold and conventional temple to gaze at save the great Tintoretto of the sacristy, to which we quickly pay our respects, and which we are glad to have for ten minutes to ourselves. The picture, though full of beauty, is not the finest of the master's ; but it serves again as [48] THE GRAND CANAL well as another to transport — there is no other word — those of his lovers for whom, in far-away days when Venice was an early rapture, this strange and mystifying painter was almost the su- preme revelation. The plastic arts may have less to say to us than in the hungry years of youth, and the celebrated picture in general be more of a blank; but more than the others any fine Tintoret still carries us back, calling up not only the rich par- ticular vision but the freshness of the old wonder. Many things come and go, but this great artist remains for us in Venice a part of the company of the mind. The others are there in their obvious glory, but he is the only one for whom the imagination, in our expressive modern phrase, sits up. "The Marriage in Cana," at the Salute, has all his characteristic and fascinating unexpectedness — the sacrifice of the figure of our Lord, who is reduced to the mere final point of a clever perspective, and the free, joyous presentation of all the other elements of the feast. Why, in spite of this queer one-sidedness, does the picture give us no impression of a lack of what the critics call reverence ? For no other reason that I can think of than because it happens to be the work of its author, in whose very mistakes there is a sin- gular wisdom. Mr. Ruskin has spoken with sufficient eloquence of the serious loveliness of the row of heads of the women on the right, who talk to each other as they sit at the foreshortened banquet. There could be no better example of the roving inde- pendence of the painter's vision, a real spirit of adventure for which his subject was always a cluster of accidents; not an obvious order, but a sort of peopled and agitated chapter of life, [49] ITALIAN HOURS in which the figures are submissive pictorial notes. These notes are all there in their beauty and heterogeneity, and if the abun- dance is of a kind to make the principle of selection seem in com- parison timid, yet the sense of "composition" in the spectator — if it happen to exist — reaches out to ^the painter in peculiar sympathy. Dull must be the spirit of the worker tormented in any field of art with that particular question who is not moved to recognise in the eternal problem the high fellowship of Tin- toretto. If the long reach from this point to the deplorable iron bridge which discharges the pedestrian at the Academy — or, more comprehensively, to the painted and gilded Gothic of the noble Palazzo Foscari — is too much of a curve to be seen at any one point as a whole, it represents the better the arched neck, as it were, of the undulating serpent of which the Canalazzo has the likeness. We pass a dozen historic houses, we note in our passage a hundred component "bits," with the baffled sketcher's sense, and with what would doubtless be, save for our intensely Vene- tian fatalism, the baffled ^sketcher's temper. It is the early pal- aces, of course, and also, to be fair, some of the late, if we could take them one by one, that give the Canal the best of its grand air. The fairest are often cheek-by-jowl with the foulest, and there are few, alas, so fair as to have been completely protected by their beaijty. The ages and the generations have worked their will on them, and the wind and the weather have had much to say ; but disfigured and dishonoured as they are, with the bruises of their ma,rbles and the patience of their ruin, there is nothing [50] THE GRAND CANAL like them in the world, and the long succession of their faded, conscious faces makes of the quiet waterway they overhang a promenade historique of which the lesson, however often we read it, gives, in the depth of its interest, an incomparable dignity to Venice. We read it in the Romanesque arches, crooked to-day in their very curves, of the early middle-age, in the exquisite individual Gothic of the splendid time, and in the cornices and columns of a decadence almost as proud. These things at pre- sent are almost equally touching in their good faith; they have each in their degree so effectually parted with their pride. They have lived on as they could and lasted as they might, and we hold them to no account of their infirmities, for even those of them whose blank eyes to-day meet criticism with most sub- mission are far less vulgar than the uses we have mainly managed to put them to. We have botched them and patched them and covered them with sordid signs ; we have restored and improved them with a merciless taste, and the best of them we have made over to the pedlars. Some of the most striking objects in the finest vistas at present are the huge advertisements of the curi- osity-shops. The antiquity-mongers in Venice have all the courage of their opinion, and it is easy to see how well they know they can con- found you with an unanswerable question. What is the whole place but a curiosity-shop, and what are you here for yourself but to pick up odds and ends ? " We pick them up for you," say these honest Jews, whose prices are marked in dollars, " and who shall blame us if, the flowers being pretty well plucked, [51] ITALIAN HOURS we add an artificial rose or two to the composition of the bou- quet ?" They take care, in a word, that there be plenty of relics, and their establishments are huge and active. They administer the antidote to pedantry, and you can complain of them only if you never cross their thresholds. If you take this step you are lost, for you have parted with the correctness of your attitude. Venice becomes frankly from such a moment the big depressing dazzling joke in which after all our sense of her contradictions sinks to rest — the grimace of an over-strained philosophy. It 's rather a comfort, for the curiosity-shops are amusing. You have bad moments indeed as you stand in their halls of humbug and, in the intervals of haggling, hear through the high windows the soft plash of the sea on the old water-steps, for you think with anger of the noble homes that are laid waste in such scenes, of the delicate lives that must have been, that might still be, led there. You reconstruct the admirable house according to your own needs; leaning on a back balcony, you drop your eyes into one of the little green gardens with which, for the most part, such estab- lishments are exasperatingly blessed, and end by feeling it a shame that you yourself are not in possession. (I take for granted, of course, that as you go and come you are, in imagination, perpetually lodging yourself and setting up your gods; for if this innocent pastime, this borrowing of the mind, be not your favourite sport there is a flaw in the appeal that Venice makes to you.) There may be happy cases in which your envy is tem- pered, or perhaps I should rather say intensified, by real par- ticipation. If you have had the good fortune to enjoy the hos- [52] THE GRAND CANAL pitality of an old Venetian home and to lead your life a little in the painted chambers that still echo with one of the historic names, you have entered by the shortest step into the inner spirit of the place. If it did n't savour of treachery to private kindness I should like to speak frankly of one of these delightful, even though alienated, structures, to refer to it as a splendid example of the old palatial type. But I can only do so in passing, with a hundred precautions, and, lifting the curtain at the edge, drop a commemorative word on the success with which, in this particularly happy instance, the cosmopolite habit, the modern sympathy, the intelligent, flexible attitude, the latest fruit of time, adjust themselves to the great gilded, relinquished shell and try to fill it out. A Venetian palace that has not too grossly suffered and that is not overwhelming by its mass makes almost any life graceful that may be led in it. With cultivated and gener- ous contemporary ways it reveals a pre-established harmony. As you live in it day after day its beauty and its interest sink more deeply into your spirit ; it has its moods and its hours and its mystic voices and its shifting expressions. If in the absence of its masters you have happened to have it to yourself for twenty- four hours you will never forget the charm of its haunted still- ness, late on the summer afternoon for instance^ when the call of playing children comes in behind from the campo, nor the way the old ghosts seemed to pass on tip-toe on the marble floors. It gives you practically the essence of the matter that we are considering, for beneath the high balconies Venice comes and goes, and the particular stretch you command contains all the [53] ITALIAN HOURS characteristics. Everything has its turn, from the heavy barges of merchandise, pushed by long poles and the patient shoulder, to the floating pavilions of the great serenades, and you may study at your leisure the admirable Venetian arts of managing a boat and organising a spectacle. Of the beautiful free stroke with which the gondola, especially when there are two oars, is impelled, you never, in the Venetian scene, grow weary; it is always in the picture, and the large profiled action that lets the standing rowers throw themselves forward to a constant recov- ery has the double value of being, at the fag-end of greatness, the only energetic note. The people from the hotels are always afloat, and, at the hotel pace, the solitary gondolier (like the sol- itary horseman of the old-fashioned novel) is, I confess, a some- what melancholy figure. Perched on his poop without a mate, he re-enacts perpetually, in high relief, with his toes turned out, the comedy of his odd and charming movement. He always has a little the look of an absent-minded nursery-maid pushing her small charges in a perambulator. But why should I risk too free a comparison, where this picturesque and amiable class are concerned ? I delight in their sun-burnt complexions and their childish dialect; I know them only by their merits, and I am grossly prejudiced in their favour. They are interesting and touching, and alike in their virtues and their defects human nature is simplified as with a big effect- ive brush. Affecting above all is their dependence on the stranger, the whimsical stranger who swims out of their ken, yet whom Providence sometimes restores. The best of them at any rate [54 ] . THE GRAND CANAL are in their line great anists. On the swarming feast-days, on the strange feast-night of the Redentore, their steering is a miracle of ease. The master-hands, the celebrities and winners of prizes — you may see them on the private gondolas in spotless white, with brilliant sashes and ribbons, and often with very handsome persons — take the right of way with a pardonable insolence. They penetrate the crush of boats with an authority of their own. The crush of boats, the universal sociable bumping and squeezing, is great when, on the summer nights, the ladies shriek with alarm, the city pays the fiddlers, and the illuminated barges, scattering music and song, lead a long train down the Canal. The barges used to be rowed in rhythmic strokes, but now they are towed by the steamer. The coloured lamps, the vocalists before the hotels, are not to my sense the greatest seduction of Venice ; but it woul^ be an uncandid sketch of the Canalazzo that should n't touch them with indulgence. Taking one nuisance with another, they are probably the prettiest in the world, and if they have in general more magic for the new arrival than for the old Venice-lover, they in any case, at their best, keep up the immemorial tradition. The Venetians have had from the beginning of time the pride of their processions and spectacles, and it 's a wonder how with empty pockets they still make a clever show. The Carnival is dead, but these are the scraps of its Inheritance. Vauxhall on the water is of course more Vauxhall than ever, with the good fortune of home-made music and of a mirror that reduplicates and multiplies. The feast of the Redeemer — the great popular feast of the year — is a [55] ITALIAN HOURS wonderful Venetian Vauxhall. All Venice on this occasion takes to the boats for the night and loads them with lamps and provisions. Wedged together in a mass it sups and sings; every boat is a floating arbour, a private cafe-concert. Of all Christian com- memorations it is the most ingenuously and harmlessly pagan. Toward morning the passengers repair to the Lido, where, as the sun rises, they plunge, still sociably, into the sea. The night of the Redentore has been described, but it would be interest- ing to have an account, from the domestic point of view, of its usual morrow. It is mainly an affair of the Giudecca, however, which is bridged over from the Zattere to the great church. The pontoons are laid together during the day — it is all done with extraordinary celerity and art — and the bridge is pro- longed across the Canalazzo (to Santa Maria Zobenigo), which is my only warrant for glancing at the occasion. We glance at it from our palace windows; lengthening our necks a little, as we look up toward the Salute, we see all Venice, on the July afternoon, so serried as to move slowly, pour across the tem- porary footway. It is a flock of very good children, and the bridged Canal is their toy. All Venice on such occasions is gentle and friendly; not even all Venice pushes any one into the water. But from the same high windows we catch without any stretch- ing of the neck a still more indispensable note in the picture, a famous pretender eating the bread of bitterness. This repast is served in the open air, on a neat little terrace, by attendants in livery, and there is no indiscretion in our seeing that the [56] THE GRAND CANAL pretender dines. Ever since the table d'hote in "Candide" Ven- ice has been the refuge of monarchs in want of thrones — she would n't know herself without her rois en exil. The exile is agreeable and soothing, the gondola lets them down gently. Its movement is an anodyne, its silence a philtre, and little by little it rocks all ambitions to sleep. The proscript has plenty of leisure to write his proclamations and even his memoirs, and I believe he has organs in which they are published; but the only noise he makes in the world is the harmless splash of his oars. He comes and goes along the Canalazzo, and he might be much worse employed. He is but one of the interesting objects it presents, however, and I am by no means sure that he is the most striking. He has a rival, if not in the iron bridge, which, alas, is within our range, at least — to take an immedi- ate example — in the Montecuculi Palace. Far-descended and weary, but beautiful in its crooked old age, with its lovely pro- portions, its delicate round arches, its carvings and its disks of marble, is the haunted Montecuculi. Those who have a kind- ness for Venetian gossip like to remember that it was once for a few months the property of Robert Browning, who, however, never lived in it, and who died in the splendid Rezzonico, the residence of his son and a wonderful cosmopolite "document," which, as it presents itself, in an admirable position, but a short way farther down the Canal, we can almost see, in spite of the curve, from the window at which we stand. This great seven- teenth century pile, throwing itself upon the water with a peculiar florid assurance, a certain upward toss of its cornice which gives [57] ITALIAN HOURS it the air of a rearing sea-horse, decorates immensely — and within, as well as without — the wide angle that it commands. There is a more formal greatness in the high square Gothic Foscari, just below it, one of the noblest creations of the fifteenth century, a masterpiece of symmetry and majesty. Dedicated to-day to official uses — it is the property of the State — it looks conscious of the consideration it enjoys, and is one of the few great houses within our range whose old age strikes us as robust and painless. It is visibly "kept up"; perhaps it is kept up too much; perhaps I am wrong in thinking so well of it. These doubts and fears course rapidly through my mind — I am easily their victim when it is a question of architecture — as they are apt to do to-day, in Italy, almost an3fwhere, in the presence of the beautiful, of the desecrated or the neglected. We feel at such moments as if the eye of Mr. Ruskin were upon us ; we grow nervous and lose our confidence. This makes me inevitably, in talking of Venice, seek a pusillanimous safety in the trivial and the obvious. I am on firm ground in rejoicing in the little garden directly opposite our windows — it is another proof that they really show us everything — and in feeling that the gardens of Venice would deserve a page to themselves. They are infi- nitely more numerous than the arriving stranger can suppose ; they nestle with a charm all their own in the complications of most back-views. Some of them are exquisite, many are large, and even the scrappiest have an artful understanding, in the interest of colour, with the waterways that edge their foundations. On the small canals, in the hunt for amusement, they are the [58 ] THE GRAND CANAL prettiest surprises of all. The tangle of plants and flowers crowds over the battered walls, the greenness makes an arrangement with the rosy sordid brick. Of all the reflected and liquefied things in Venice, and the number of these is countless, I think the lapping water loves them most. They are numerous on the Canalazzo, but wherever they occur they give a brush to the picture and in particular, it is easy to guess, give a sweetness to the house. Then the elements are complete — the trio of air and water and of things that grow. Venice without them would be too much a matter of the tides and the stones. Even the little trellises of the traghetti count charmingly as reminders, amid so much artifice, of the woodland nature of man. The vine-leaves, trained on horizontal poles, make a roof of chequered shade for the gondoliers and ferrymen, who doze there according to oppor- tunity, or chatter or hail the approaching "fare." There is no "hum" in Venice, so that their voices travel far; they enter your windows and mingle even with your dreams. I beg the reader to believe that if I had time to go into everything, I would go into the traghetti, which have their manners and their morals, and which used to have their piety. This piety was always a madonnina, the protectress of the passage — a quaint figure of the Virgin with the red spark of a lamp at her feet. The lamps appear for the most part to have gone out, and the images doubt- less have been gold for bric-a-brac. The ferrymen, for aught I know, are converted to Nihilism — a faith consistent happily with a good stroke of business. One of the figures has been left, however — the Madonnetta which gives its name to a traghetto [59] ITALIAN HOURS near the Rialto. But this sweet survivor is a carven stone inserted ages ago in the corner of an old palace and doubtless difficult of removal. Pazienza, the day will come when so marketable a relic will also be extracted from its socket and purchased by the devouring American. I leave that expression, on second thought, standing; but I repent of it when I remember that it is a devouring American — a lady long resident in Venice and whose kindnesses all Venetians, as well as her country-people, know, who has rekindled some of the extinguished tapers, setting up especially the big brave Gothic shrine, of painted and gilded wood, which, on the top of its stout polo, sheds its influence on the place of passage opposite the Salute. If I may not go into those of the palaces this devious discourse has left behind, much less may I enter the great galleries of the Academy, which rears its blank wall, surmounted by the lion of St. Mark, well within sight of the windows at which we are still lingering. This wondrous temple of Venetian art — for all it promises little from without — overhangs, in a manner, the Grand Canal, but if we were so much as to cross its threshold we should wander beyond recall. It contains, in some of the most magni- ficent halls — where the ceilings have all the glory with which the imagination of Venice alone could over-arch a room — some of the noblest pictures in the world ; and whether or not we go back to them on any particular occasion for another look, it is always a comfort to know that they are there, as the sense of them on the spot is a part of the furniture of the mind — the sense of them close at hand, behind every wall and under every cover, [60] THE GRAND CANAL like the inevitable reverse of a medal, of the side exposed to the air that reflects, intensifies, completes the scene. In other words, as it was the inevitable destiny of Venice to be painted, and painted with passion, so the wide world of picture becomes, as we live there, and however much we go about our affairs, the constant habitation of our thoughts. The truth is, we are in it so uninterruptedly, at home and abroad, that there is scarcely a pressure upon us to seek it in one place more than in another. Choose your standpoint at random and trust the picture to come to you. This is manifestly why I have not, I find myself con- scious, said more about the features of the Canalazzo which oc- cupy the reach between the Salute and the position we have so obstinately taken up. It is still there before us, however, and the delightful little Palazzo Dario, intimately familiar to English and American travellers, picks itself out in the foreshortened brightness. The Dario is covered with the loveliest little marble plates and sculptured circles; it is made up of exquisite pieces — as if there had been only enough to make it small — so that it looks, in its extreme antiquity, a good deal like a house of cards that hold together by a tenure it would be fatal to touch. An old Venetian house dies hard indeed, and I should add that this deli- cate thing, with submission in every feature, continues to resist the contact of generations of lodgers. It is let out in floors (it used to be let as a whole) and in how many eager hands — for it is in great requisition — under how many fleeting dispensations have we not known and loved it ? People are always writing in advance to secure it, as they are to secure the Jenkins's gon- [6i] ITALIAN HOURS dolier, and as the gondola passes we see strange faces at the windows — though it's ten to one we recognise them — and the millionth artist coming forth with his traps at the water-gate. The poor little patient Dario is one of the most flourishing booths at the fair. The faces at the window look out at the great Sansovino — the splendid pile that is now occupied by the Prefect. I feel decidedly that I don't object as I ought to the palaces of the six- teenth and seventeenth centuries. Their pretensions impose upon me, and the imagination peoples them more freely than it can people the interiors of the prime. Was not moreover this master- piece of Sansovino once occupied by the Venetian post-office, and thereby intimately connected with an ineffaceable first impres- sion of the author of these remarks ? He had arrived, wonder- ing, palpitating, twenty-three years ago, after nightfall, and, the first thing on the morrow, had repaired to the post-office for his letters. They had been waiting a long time and were full of delayed interest, and he returned with them to the gondola and floated slowly down the Canal. The mixture, the rapture, the wonderful temple of the poste restante, the beautiful strangeness, all humanised by good news — the memory of this abides with him still, so that there always proceeds frorn the splendid water- front I speak of a certain secret appeal, something that seems to have been uttered first in the sonorous chambers of youth. Of course this association falls to the ground — or rather splashes into the water — if I am the victim of a confusion. Was the edifice in question twenty-three years ago the post-office, which [6? j THE GRAND CANAL has occupied since, for many a day, very much humbler quarters ? I am afraid to take the proper steps for finding out, lest I should learn that during these years I have misdirected my emotion. A better reason for the sentiment, at any rate, is that such a great house has surely, in the high beauty of its tiers, a refinement of its own. They make one think of colosseums and aqueducts and bridges, and they constitute doubtless, in Venice, the most par- donable specimen of the imitative. I have even a timid kindness for the huge Pesaro, far down the Canal, whose main reproach, more even than the coarseness of its forms, is its swaggering size, its want of consideration for the general picture, which the early examples so reverently respect. The Pesaro is as far out of the frame as a modern hotel, and the Cornaro, close to it, oversteps almost equally the modesty of art. One more thing they and their kindred do, I must add, for which, unfortunately, we can patronise them less. They make even the most elaborate mate- rial civilisation of the present day seem woefully shrunken and bourgeois, for they simply — I allude to the biggest palaces — can't be lived in as they were intended to be. The modern tenant may take in all the magazines, but he bends not the bow of Achilles. He occupies the place, but he does n't fill it, and he has guests from the neighbouring inns with ulsters and Baede- kers. We are far at the Pesaro, by the way, from our attaching window, and we take advantage of it to go in rather a melan- choly mood to the end. The long straight vista from the Fos- cari to the Rialto, the great middle stretch of the Canal, contains, as the phrase is, a hundred objects of interest, but it contains [63] ITALIAN HOURS most the bright oddity of its general Deluge air. In all these cen- turies it has never got over its resemblance to a flooded city; for some reason or other it is the only part of Venice in which the houses look as if the waters had overtaken them. Everywhere else they reckon with them — have chosen them ; here alone the lapping seaway seems to confess itself an accident. There are persons who hold this long, gay, shabby, spotty perspective, in which, with its immense field of confused reflec- tion, the houses have infinite variety, the dullest expanse in Ven- ice. It was not dull, we imagine, for Lord Byron, who lived in the midmost of the three Mocenigo palaces, where the writing- table is still shown at which he gave the rein to his passions. For other observers it is sufficiently enlivened by so delightful a creation as the Palazzo Loredan, once a masterpiece and at present the Municipio, not to speak of a variety of other immemorial bits whose beauty still has a degree of freshness. Some of the most touching relics of early Venice are here — for it was here she precariously clustered — peeping out of a submersion more pitiless than the sea. As we approach the Rialto indeed the pic- ture falls off and a comparative commonness suffuses it. There is a wide paved walk on either side of the Canal, on which the waterman — and who in Venice is not a waterman ? — is prone to seek repose. I speak of the summer days — it is the sum- mer Venice that is the visible Venice. The big tarry barges are drawn up at the fondamenta, and the bare-legged boatmen, in faded blue cotton, lie asleep on the hot stones. If there were no colour anywhere else there would be enough in their tanned [64] PALAZZO MONCENIGO, VENICE. THE GRAND CANAL personalities. Half the low doorways open into the warm interior of waterside drinking-shops, and here and there, on the quay, beneath the bush that overhangs the door, there are rickety tables and chairs. Where in Venice is there not the amusement of character and of detail ? The tone in this part is very vivid, and is largely that of the brown plebeian faces looking out of the patchy miscellaneous houses — the faces of fat undressed women and of other simple folk who are not aware that they enjoy, from balconies once doubtless patrician, a view the knowing ones of the earth come thousands of miles to envy them. The effect is enhanced by the tattered clothes hung to dry in the windows, by the sun-faded rags that flutter from the polished balustrades — these are ivory-smooth with time ; and the whole scene profits by the general law that renders decadence and ruin in Venice more brilliant than any prosperity. Decay is in this extraordinary place golden in tint and misery couleur de rose. The gondolas of the correct people are unmitigated sable, but the poor market-boats from the islands are kaleidoscopic. The Bridge of the Rialto is a name to conjure with, but, hon- estly speaking, it is scarcely the gem of the composition. There are of course two ways of taking it— from the water or from the upper passage, where its small shops and booths abound in Vene- tian character ; but it mainly counts as a feature of the Canal when seen from the gondola or even from the awful vaporetto. The great curve of its single arch is much to be commended, espe- cially when, coming from the direction of the railway-station, you see it frame with its sharp compass-line the perfect picture, the [65] ITALIAN HOURS reach of the Canal on the other side. But the backs of the httle shops make from the water a graceless collective hump, and the inside view is the diverting one. The big arch of the bridge — like the arches of all the bridges — is the waterman's friend in wet weather. The gondolas, when it rains, huddle beside the peopled barges, and the young ladies from the hotels, vaguely fidgeting, complain of the communication of insect life. Here indeed is a little of everything, and the jewellers of this cele- brated precinct — they have their immemorial row — make al- most as fine a show as the fruiterers. It is a universal market, and a fine place to study Venetian types. The produce of the islands is discharged there, and the fishmongers announce their presence. All one's senses indeed are vigorously attacked; the whole place is violently hot and bright, all odorous and noisy. The churning of the screw of the vaporetto mingles with the other sounds — not indeed that this offensive note is confined to one part of the Canal. But just here the little piers of the resented steamer are particularly near together, and it seems somehow to be always kicking up the water. As we go further down we see it stopping exactly beneath the glorious windows of the Ca' d' Oro. It has chosen its position well, and who shall gainsay it for hav- ing put itself under the protection of the most romantic facade in Europe ? The companionship of these objects is a symbol; it expresses supremely the present and the future of Venice. Per- fect, in its prime, was the marble Ca' d' Oro, with the noble re- cesses of its loggie, but even then it probably never "met a want," like the successful vaporetto. If, however, we are not to go into [66 ] THE GRAND CANAL the Museo Civico — the old Museo Correr, which rears a staring renovated front far down on the left, near the station, so also we must keep out of the great vexed question of steam on the Ca- nalazzo, just as a while since we prudently kept out of the Acca- demia. These are expensive and complicated excursions. It is obvious that if the vaporetti have contributed to the ruin of the gondoliers, already hard pressed by fate, and to that of the pal- aces, whose foundations their waves undermine, and that if they have robbed the Grand Canal of the supreme distinction of its tranquillity, so on the other hand they have placed "rapid tran- sit," in the New York phrase, in everybody's reach, and enabled everybody — save indeed those who would n't for the world — to rush about Venice as furiously as people rush about New York. The suitability of this consummation need n't be pointed out. Even we ourselves, in the irresistible contagion, are going so fast now that we have only time to note in how clever and costly a fashion the Museo Civico, the old Fondaco dei Turchi, has been reconstructed and restored. It is a glare of white marble without, and a series of showy majestic halls within, where a thousand curious mementos and relics of old Venice are gathered and classified. Of its miscellaneous treasures I fear I may per- haps frivolously prefer the series of its remarkable living Longhis, an illustration of manners more copious than the celebrated Car- paccio, the two ladies with their little animals and their long sticks. Wonderful indeed to-day are the museums of Italy, where the renovations and the belle ordonnance speak of funds appar- ently unlimited, in spite of the fact that the numerous custo- [67] ITALIAN HOURS dians frankly look starved. What is the pecuniary source of all this civic magnificence — it is shown in a hundred other ways — and how do the Italian cities manage to acquit themselves of expenses that would be formidable to communities richer and doubtless less aesthetic ? Who pays the bills for the expressive statues alone, the general exuberance of sculpture, with which every piazzetta of almost every village is patriotically decorated ? Let us not seek an answer to the puzzling question, but observe instead that we are passing the mouth of the populous Canareggio, next widest of the waterways, where the race of Shylock abides, and at the corner of which the big colourless church of San Gere- mia stands gracefully enough on guard. The Canareggio, with its wide lateral footways and humpbacked bridges, makes on the feast of St. John an admirable noisy, tawdry theatre for one of the prettiest and the most infantile of the Venetian processions. The rest of the course is a reduced magnificence, in spite of interesting bits, of the battered pomp of the Pesaro and the Cornaro, of the recurrent memories of royalty in exile which cluster about the Palazzo Vendramin Calergi, once the residence of the Comte de Chambord and still that of his half-brother, in spite too of the big Papadopoli gardens, opposite the station, the largest private grounds in Venice, but of which Venice in general mainly gets the benefit in the usual form of irrepressible green- ery climbing over walls and nodding at water. The rococo church of the Scalzi is here, all marble and malachite, all a cold, hard glitter and a costly, curly ugliness, and here too, opposite, on the top of its high steps, is San Simeone Profeta, I won't say [68 J THE GRAND CANAL immortalised, but unblushingly misrepresented, by the perfidious Canaletto. I shall not stay to unravel the mystery of this pro- saic painter's malpractices ; he falsified without fancy, and as he apparently transposed at will the objects he reproduced, one is never sure of the particular view that may have constituted his subject. It would look exactly like such and such a place if al- most everything were not different. San Simeone Prof eta appears to hang there upon the wall ; but it is on the wrong side of the Canal and the other elements quite fail to correspond. One's con- fusion is the greater because one does n't know that everything may not really have changed, even beyond all probability — though it 's only in America that churches cross the street or the river — and the mixture of the recognisable and the diff^erent makes the ambiguity maddening, all the more that the painter is almost as attaching as he is bad. Thanks at any rate to the white church, domed and porticoed, on the top of its steps, the traveller emerging for the first time upon the terrace of the rail- way-station seems to have a Canaletto before him. He speedily discovers indeed even in the presence of this scene of the final accents of the Canalazzo — there is a charm in the old pink warehouses on the hot fondamenta — that he has something much better. He looks up and down at the gathered gondolas ; he has his surprise after all, his little first Venetian thrill ; and as the terrace of the station ushers in these things we shall say no harm of it, though it is not lovely. It is the beginning of his experience, but it is the end of the Grand Canal. 1892. VENICE: AN EARLY IMPRESSION VENICE: AN EARLY IMPRESSION HERE would be much to say about that golden chain of historic cities which stretches from Milan to Venice, in which the very names — Brescia, Verona, Man- tua, Padua — are an ornament to one's phrase ; but I should have to draw upon recollections now three years old and to make my short story a long one. Of Ve- rona and Venice only have I recent impressions, and even to these must I do hasty justice. I came into Venice, just as I had done before, toward the end of a summer's day, when the shad- ows begin to lengthen and the light to glow, and found that the attendant sensations bore repetition remarkably well. There was the same last intolerable delay at Mestre, just before your first glimpse of the lagoon confirms the already distinct sea-smell which has added speed to the precursive flight of your imagina- tion ; then the liquid level, edged afar off by its band of undis- criminated domes and spires, soon distinguished and proclaimed, however, as excited and contentious heads multiply at the win- dows of the train ; then your long rumble on the immense white railway-bridge, which, in spite of the invidious contrast drawn, and very properly, by Mr. Ruskin between the old and the new [73] ITALIAN HOURS approach, does truly, in a manner, shine across the green lap of the lagoon like a mighty causeway of marble ; then the plunge into the station, which would be exactly similar to every other plunge save for one little fact — that the keynote of the great medley of voices borne back from the exit is not "Cab, sir!" but "Barca, signore!" I do not mean, however, to follow the traveller through every phase of his initiation, at the risk of stamping poor Venice be- yond repair as the supreme bugbear of literature; though for my own part I hold that to a fine healthy romantic appetite the subject can't be too diffusely treated. Meeting in the Piazza on the evening of my arrival a young American painter who told me that he had been spending the summer just where I found him, I could have assaulted him for very envy. He was paint- ing forsooth the interior of St. Mark's. To be a young American painter unperplexed by the mocking, elusive soul of things and satisfied with their wholesome light-bathed surface and shape; keen of eye ; fond of colour, of sea and sky and an3^hing that may chance between them; of old lace and old brocade and old furniture (even when made to order); of time-mellowed harmonies on nameless canvases and happy contours in cheap old engravings; to spend one's mornings in still, productive analysis of the clustered shadows of the Basilica, one's after- noons anywhere, in church or campo, on canal or lagoon, and one's evenings in star-light gossip at Florian's, feeling the sea- breeze throb languidly between the two great pillars of the Piazzetta and over the low black domes of the church — this, [74] VENICE: AN EARLY IMPRESSION I consider, is to be as happy as is consistent with the preserva- tion of reason. The mere use of one's eyes in Venice is happiness enough, and generous observers find it hard to keep an account of their profits in this hne. Everything the attention touches holds it, keeps playing with it — thanks to some inscrutable flattery of the atmosphere. Your brown-skinned, white-shirted gondolier, twisting himself in the light, seems to you, as you lie at contem- plation beneath your awning, a perpetual symbol of Venetian "effect." The light here is in fact a mighty magician and, with all respect to Titian, Veronese and Tintoret, the greatest artist of them all. You should see in places the material with which it deals — slimy brick, marble battered and befouled, rags, dirt, decay. Sea and sky seem to meet half-way, to blend their tones into a soft iridescence, a lustrous compound of wave and cloud and a hundred nameless local reflections, and then to fling the clear tissue against every object of vision. You may see these elements at work everywhere, but to see them in their intensity you should choose the finest day in the month and have your- self rowed far away across the lagoon to Torcello. Without making this excursion you can hardly pretend to know Venice or to sympathise with that longing for pure radiance which ani- mated her great colourists. It is a perfect bath of light, and I could n't get rid of a fancy that we were cleaving the upper atmosphere on some hurrying cloud-skiff. At Torcello there is nothing but the light to see — nothing at least but a sort of bloom- ing sand-bar intersected by a single narrow creek which does [75] ITALIAN HOURS duty as a canal and occupied by a meagre cluster of huts, the dwellings apparently of market-gardeners and fishermen, and by a ruinous church of the eleventh century. It is impossible to imagine a more penetrating case of unheeded collapse. Tor- cello was the mother-city of Venice, and she lies there now, a mere mouldering vestige, like a group of weather-bleached pa- rental bones left impiously unburied. I stopped my gondola at the mouth of the shallow inlet and walked along the grass beside a hedge to the low-browed, crumbling cathedral. The charm of certain vacant grassy spaces, in Italy, overfrowned by masses of brickwork that are honeycombed by the suns of centuries, is something that I hereby renounce once for all the attempt to express; but you may be sure that whenever I mention such a spot enchantment lurks in it. A delicious stillness covered the little campo at Torcello; I remember none so subtly audible save that of the Roman Cam- pagna. There was no life but the visible tremor of the brilliant air and the cries of half-a-dozen young children who dogged our steps and clamoured for coppers. These children, by the way, were the handsomest little brats in the world, and each was fur- nished with a pair of eyes that could only have signified the pro- test of nature against the meanness of fortune. They were very nearly as naked as savages, and their little bellies protruded like those of infant cannibals in the illustrations of books of travel ; but as they scampered and sprawled in the soft, thick grass, grin- ning like suddenly-translated cherubs and showing their hungry little teeth, they suggested forcibly that the best assurance of [76 ] VENICE: AN EARLY IMPRESSION happiness in this world is to be found in the maximum of inno- cence and the minimum of wealth. One small urchin — framed, if ever a child was, to be the joy of an aristocratic mamma — was the most expressively beautiful creature I had ever looked upon. He had a smile to make Correggio sigh in his grave ; and yet here he was running wild among the sea-stunted bushes, on the lonely margin of a decaying world, in prelude to how blank or to how dark a destiny ? Verily nature is still at odds with pro- priety ; though indeed if they ever really pull together I fear na- ture will quite lose her distinction. An infant citizen of our own republic, straight-haired, pale-eyed and freckled, duly darned and catechised, marching into a New England schoolhouse, is an object often seen and soon forgotten; but I think I shall always remember with infinite tender conjecture, as the years roll by, this little unlettered Eros of the Adriatic strand. Yet all youth- ful things at Torcello were not cheerful, for the poor lad who brought us the key of the cathedral was shaking with an ague, and his melancholy presence seemed to point the moral of forsaken nave and choir. The church, admirably primitive and curious, reminded me of the two or three oldest churches of Rome — St. Clement and St. Agnes. The interior is rich in grimly mystical mosaics of the twelfth century and the patchwork of precious fragments in the pavement not inferior to that of St. Mark's. But the terribly distinct Apostles are ranged against their dead gold backgrounds as stiffly as grenadiers presenting arms — in- tensely personal sentinels of a personal Deity. Their stony stare seems to wait for ever vainly for some visible revival of primitive in] ITALIAN HOURS orthodoxy, and one may well wonder whether it finds much beguilement in idly-gazing troops of Western heretics — pas- sionless even in their heresy. I had been curious to see whether in the galleries and temples of Venice I should be disposed to transpose my old estimates — to burn what I had adored and adore what I had burned. It is a sad truth that one can stand in the Ducal Palace for the first time but once, with the deliciously ponderous sense of that par- ticular half-hour's being an era in one's mental history; but I had the satisfaction of finding at least — a great comfort in a short stay — that none of my early memories were likely to change places and that I could take up my admirations where I had left them. I still found Carpaccio delightful, Veronese magnificent, Titian supremely beautiful and Tintoret scarce to be appraised. I repaired immediately to the little church of San Cassano, which contains the smaller of Tintoret's two great Crucifixions; and when I had looked at it a while I drew a long breath and felt I could now face any other picture in Venice with proper self- possession. It seemed to me I had advanced to the uttermost limit of painting ; that beyond this another art — inspired poetry — begins, and that Bellini, Veronese, Giorgione, and Titian, all join- ing hands and straining every muscle of their genius, reach for- ward not so far but that they leave a visible space in which Tin- toret alone is master. I well remember the exaltations to which he lifted me when first I learned to know him; but the glow of that comparatively youthful amazement is dead, and with it, I fear, that confident vivacity of phrase of which, in trying to utter [78] VENICE: AN EARLY IMPRESSION my impressions, I felt less the magniloquence than the impo- tence. In his power there are many weak spots, mysterious lapses and fitful intermissions ; but when the list of his faults is complete he still remains to me the most interesting of painters. His repu- tation rests chiefly on a more superficial sort of merit — his energy, his unsurpassed productivity, his being, as Theophile Gautier says, le roi des fougueux. These qualities are immense, but the great source of his impressiveness is that his indefatigable hand never drew a line that was not, as one may say, a moral line. No painter ever had such breadth and such depth ; and even Titian, beside him, scarce figures as more than a great decorative artist. Mr. Ruskin, whose eloquence in dealing with the great Vene- tians sometimes outruns his discretion, is fond of speaking even of Veronese as a painter of deep spiritual intentions. This, it seems to me, is pushing matters too far, and the author of "The Rape of Europa " is, pictorially speaking, no greater casuist than any other genius of supreme good taste. Titian was assuredly a mighty poet, but Tintoret — well, Tintoret was almost a prophet. Before his greatest works you are conscious of a sudden evapora- tion of old doubts and dilemmas, and the eternal problem of the conflict between idealism and realism dies the most natural of deaths. In his genius the problem is practically solved ; the al- ternatives are so harmoniously interfused that I defy the keenest critic to say where one begins and the other ends. The home- liest prose melts into the most ethereal poetry — the literal and the imaginative fairly confound their identity. This, however, is vague praise. Tintoret's great merit, to my [79] ITALIAN HOURS mind, was his unequalled distinctness of vision. When once he had conceived the germ of a scene it defined itself to his imagi- nation with an intensity, an amplitude, an individuality of ex- pression, which makes one's observation of his pictures seem less an operation of the mind than a kind of supplementary experi- ence of life. Veronese and Titian are content with a much looser specification, as their treatment of any subject that the author of the Crucifixion at San Cassano has also treated abundantly proves. There are few more suggestive contrasts than that between the absence of a total character at all commensurate with its scat- tered variety and brilliancy in Veronese's "Marriage of Cana," at the Louvre, and the poignant, almost startling, complete- ness of Tintoret's illustration of the theme at the Salute church. To compare his "Presentation of the Virgin," at the Madonna deir Orto, with Titian's at the Academy, or his "Annuncia- tion" with Titian's close at hand, is to measure the essential difference between observation and imagination. One has cer- tainly not said all that there is to say for Titian when one has called him an observer. // y mettait du sien, and I use the term to designate roughly the artist whose apprehension, infinitely deep and strong when applied to the single figure or to easily balanced groups, spends itself vainly on great dramatic combina- tions — or rather leaves them ungauged. It was the whole scene that Tintoret seemed to have beheld in a flash of inspiration intense enough to stamp it ineffaceably on his perception; and it was the whole scene, complete, peculiar, individual, unprece- dented, that he committed to canvas with all the vehemence of [80] VENICE: AN EARLY IMPRESSION his talent. Compare his "Last Supper," at San Giorgio — its long, diagonally placed table, its dusky spaciousness, its scat- tered lamp-light and halo-light, its startled, gesticulating fig- ures, its richly realistic foreground — with the customary formal, almost mathematical rendering of the subject, in which impres- siveness seems to have been sought in elimination rather than comprehension. You get from Tintoret's work the impression that he felt, pictorially, the great, beautiful, terrible spectacle of human life very much as Shakespeare felt it poetically — with a heart that never ceased to beat a passionate accompaniment to every stroke of his brush. Thanks to this fact his works are signally grave, and their almost universal and rapidly increas- ing decay does n't relieve their gloom. Nothing indeed can well be sadder than the great collection of Tintorets at San Rocco. Incurable blackness is settling fast upon all of them, and they frown at you across the sombre splendour of their great cham- bers like gaunt twilight phantoms of pictures. To our children's children Tintoret, as things are going, can be hardly more than a name ; and such of them as shall miss the tragic beauty, already so dimmed and stained, of the great "Bearing of the Cross" in that temple of his spirit will live and die without knowing the largest eloquence of art. If you wish to add the last touch of solemnity to the place recall as vividly as possible while you linger at San Rocco the painter's singularly interesting portrait of him- self, at the Louvre. The old man looks out of the canvas from beneath a brow as sad as a sunless twilight, with just such a stoical hopelessness as you might fancy him to wear if he stood [8i ] ITALIAN HOURS at your side gazing at his rotting canvases. It is n't whimsical to read it as the face of a man who felt that he had given the world more than the world was likely to repay. Indeed before every pic- ture of Tintoret you may remember this tremendous portrait with profit. On one side the power, the passion, the illusion of his art ; on the other the mortal fatigue of his spirit. The world's know- ledge of him is so small that the portrait throws a doubly pre- cious light on his personality ; and when we wonder vainly what manner of man he was, and what were his purpose, his faith and his method, we may find forcible assurance there that they were at any rate his life — one of the most intellectually passionate ever led. Verona, which was my last Italian stopping-place, is in any conditions a delightfully interesting city ; but the kindness of my own memory of it is deepened by a subsequent ten days' experi- ence of Germany. I rose one morning at Verona, and went to bed at night at Botzen ! The statement needs no comment, and the two places, though but fifty miles apart, are as painfully dissimi- lar as their names. I had prepared myself for your delectation with a copious tirade on German manners, German scenery, German art and the German stage — on the lights and shadows of Innsbrtlck, Munich, Nuremberg and Heidelberg; but just as I was about to put pen to paper I glanced into a little volume on these very topics lately published by that famous novelist and moralist, M. Ernest Feydeau, the fruit of a summer's ob- servation at Homburg. This work produced a reaction- and if I chose to follow M. Feydeau's own example when he wishes to • [82 ] VENICE: AN EARLY IMPRESSION qualify his approbation I might call his treatise by any vile name known to the speech of man. But I content myself with pronoun- cing it superficial. I then reflect that my own opportunities for seeing and judging were extremely limited, and I suppress my tirade, lest some more enlightened critic should come and hang me with the same rope. Its sum and substance was to have been that — superficially — Germany is ugly ; that Munich is a night- mare, Heidelberg a disappointment (in spite of its charming castle) and even Nuremberg not a joy for ever. But comparisons are odious, and if Munich is ugly Verona is beautiful enough. You may laugh at my logic, but will probably assent to my meaning. I carried away from Verona a precious mental picture upon which I cast an introspective glance whenever between Botzen and Strassburg the oppression of external circumstance became pain- ful. It was a lovely August afternoon in the Roman arena — a ruin in which repair and restoration have been so watchfully and plausibly practised that it seems all of one harmonious anti- quity. The vast stony oval rose high against the sky in a single clear, continuous line, broken here and there only by strolling and reclining loungers. The massive tiers inclined in solid monot- ony to the central circle, in which a small open-air theatre was in active operation. A small quarter of the great slope of masonry facing the stage was roped off into an auditorium, in which the narrow level space between the foot-lights and the lowest step figured as the pit. Foot-lights are a figure of speech, for the per- formance was going on in the broad glow of the afternoon, with a delightful and apparently by no means misplaced confidence [ 83 ] ITALIAN HOURS ih the good-will of the spectators. What the piece was that was deemed so superbly able to shift for itself I know not — very possibly the same drama that I remember seeing advertised during my former visit to Verona ; nothing less than La Tremenda Giustizia di Dio. If titles are worth anything this product of the melodramatist's art might surely stand upon its own legs. Along the tiers above the little group of regular spectators was gathered a free-list of unauthorised observers, who, although beyond ear-shot, must have been enabled by the generous breadth of Italian gesture to follow the tangled thread of the piece. It was all deliciously Italian — the mixture of old life and new, the mountebank's booth (it was hardly more) grafted on the an- tique circus, the dominant presence of a mighty architecture, the loungers and idlers beneath the kindly sky and upon the sun- warmed stones. I never felt more keenly the difference between the background to life in very old and very new civilisations. There are other things in Verona to make it a liberal education to be born there, though that it is one for the contemporary Veronese I don't pretend to say. The Tombs of the Scaligers, with their soaring pinnacles, their high-poised canopies, their exquisite refinement and concentration of the Gothic idea, I can't profess, even after much worshipful gazing, to have fully comprehended and enjoyed. They seemed to me full of deep architectural meanings, such as must drop gently into the mind one by one, after infinite tranquil contemplation. But even to the hurried and preoccupied traveller the solemn little chapel- yard in the city's heart, in which they stand girdled by their [84 ] THE AMPHITHliATRE, VERONA. VENICE: AN EARLY IMPRESSION great swaying curtain of linked and twisted iron, is one of the most impressive spots in Italy. Nowhere else is such a wealth of artistic achievement crowded into so narrow a space ; nowhere else are the daily comings and goings of men blessed by the presence of manlier art. Verona is rich furthermore in beautiful churches — several with beautiful names: San Fermo, Santa Anastasia, San Zenone. This last is a structure of high antiquity and of the most impressive loveliness. The nave terminates in a double choir, that is a sub-choir or crypt into which you de- scend and where you wander among primitive columns whose variously grotesque capitals rise hardly higher than your head, and an upper choral plane reached by broad stairways of the bravest effect. I shall never forget the impression of majestic chastity that I received from the great nave of the building on my former visit. I then decided to my satisfaction that every church is from the devotional point of view a solecism that has not something of a similar absolute felicity of proportion; for strictly formal beauty seems best to express our conception of spiritual beauty. The nobly serious character of San Zenone is deepened by its single picture — a masterpiece of the most seri- ous of painters, the severe and exquisite Mantegna. 1872 TWO OLD HOUSES AND THREE YOUNG WOMEN TWO OLD HOUSES AND THREE YOUNG WOMEN i|HERE are times and places that come back yet again, but that, when the brood- ing tourist puts out his hand to them, meet it a httle slowly, or even seem to recede a step, as if in sHght fear of some liberty he may take. Surely they should know by this time that he is capable of taking none. He has his own way — he makes it all right. It now becomes just a part of the charming solicitation that it presents precisely a problem — that of giving the particular thing as much as possible without at the same time giving it, as we say, away. There are considerations, pro- prieties, a necessary indirectness — he must use, in short, a little art. No necessity, however, more than this, makes him warm to his work, and thus it is that, after all, he hangs his three pictures. The evening that was to give me the first of them was by no means the first occasion of my asking myself if that inveterate "style" of which we talk so much be absolutely conditioned — [89] ITALIAN HOURS in dear old Venice and elsewhere — on decrepitude. Is it the style that has brought about the decrepitude, or the decrepitude that has, as it were, intensified and consecrated the style ? There is an ambiguity about it all that constantly haunts and beguiles. Dear old Venice has lost her complexion, her figure, her repu- tation, her self-respect ; and yet, with it all, has so puzzlingly not lost a shred of her distinction. Perhaps indeed the case is simpler than it seems, for the poetry of misfortune is familiar to us all, whereas, in spite of a stroke here and there of some happy justice that charms, we scarce find ourselves anywhere ar- rested by the poetry of a run of luck. The misfortune of Ven- ice being, accordingly, at every point, what we most touch, feel and see, we end by assuming it to be of the essence of her dig- nity; a consequence, we become aware, by the way, sufficiently discouraging to the general application or pretension of style, and all the more that, to make the final felicity deep, the original greatness must have been something tremendous. If it be the ruins that are noble we have known plenty that were not, and moreover there are degrees and varieties: certain monuments, solid survivals, hold up their heads and decline to ask for a grain of your pity. Well, one knows of course when to keep one's pity to oneself; yet one clings, even in the face of the colder stare, to one's prized Venetian privilege of making the sense of doom and decay a part of every impression. Cheerful work, it may be said of course; and it is doubtless only in Venice that you gain more by such a trick than you lose. What was most beautiful is gone ; what was next most beautiful is, thank [90] TWO OLD HOUSES goodness, going — that, I think, is the monstrous description of the better part of your thought. Is it really your fault if the place makes you want so desperately to read history into every- thing ? You do that wherever you turn and wherever you look, and you do it, I should say, most of all at night. It comes to you there with longer knowledge, and with all deference to what flushes and shimmers, that the night is the real time. It perhaps even would n't take much to make you award the palm to the nights of winter. This is certainly true for the form of progression that is most characteristic, for every question of departure and arri- val by gondola. The little closed cabin of this perfect vehicle, the movement, the darkness and the plash, the indistinguishable swerves and twists, all the things you don't see and all the things you do feel — each dim recognition and obscure arrest is a possible throb of your sense of being floated to your doom, even when the truth is simply and sociably that you are going out to tea. Nowhere else is anything as innocent so mysterious, nor anything as mysterious so pleasantly deterrent to protest. These are the moments when you are most daringly Venetian, most content to leave cheap trippers and other aliens the high light of the mid- lagoon and the pursuit of pink and gold. The splendid day is good enough for them ; what is best for you is to stop at last, as you are now stopping, among clustered pali and softly-shifting poops and prows, at a great flight of water-steps that play their admirable part in the general effect of a great entrance. The high doors stand open from them to the paved chamber of a [91 J ITALIAN HOURS basement tremendbusly tall and not vulgarly lighted, from which, in turn, mounts the slow stone staircase that draws you further on. The great point is, that if you are worthy of this impression at all, there is n't a single item of it of which the association is n't noble. Hold to it fast that there is no other such dignity of arri- val as arrival by water. Hold to it that to float and slacken and gently bump, to creep out of the low, dark felze and make the few guided movements and find the strong crooked and offered arm, and then, beneath lighted palace-windows, pass up the few damp steps on the precautionary carpet — hold to it that these things constitute a preparation of which the only defect is that it may sometimes perhaps really prepare too much. It 's so stately that what can come after ? — it 's so good in itself that what, upstairs, as we comparative vulgarians say, can be better ? Hold to it, at any rate, that if a lady, in especial, scrambles out of a carriage, tumbles out of a cab, flops out of a tram-car, and hurtles, projectile-like, out of a "lightning-elevator," she alights from the Venetian conveyance as Cleopatra may have stepped from her barge. , Upstairs — whatever may be yet in store for her — her entrance shall still advantageously enjoy the support most op- posed to the "momentum" acquired. The beauty of the matter has been in the absence of all momentum — elsewhere so scien- tifically applied to us, from behind, by the terrible life of our day — and in the fact that, as the elements of slowness, the feli- cities of deliberation, doubtless thus all hang together, the last of calculable dangers is to enter a great Venetian room with a rush. [92] TWO OLD HOUSES Not the least happy note, therefore, of the picture I am trying to frame is that there was absolutely no rushing; not only in the sense of a scramble over marble floors, but, by reason of some- thing dissuasive and distributive in the very air of the place, a suggestion, under the fine old ceilings and among types of face and figure abounding in the unexpected, that here were many things to consider. Perhaps the simplest rendering of a scene into the depths of which there are good grounds of discretion for not sinking would be just this emphasis on the value of the unex- pected for such occasions — with due qualification, naturally, of its degree. Unexpectedness pure and simple, it is needless to say, may easily endanger any social gathering, and I hasten to add moreover that the figures and faces I speak of were probably not in the least unexpected to each other. The stage they occupied was a stage of variety — Venice has ever been a garden of strange social flowers. It is only as reflected in the consciousness of the visitor from afar — brooding tourist even call him, or sharp-eyed bird on the branch — that I attempt to give you the little drama ; beginning with the felicity that most appealed to him, the visible, unmistakable fact that he was the only representative of his class. The whole of the rest of the business was but what he saw and felt and fancied — what he was to remember and what he was to forget. Through it all, I may say distinctly, he clung to his great Venetian clue — the explanation of everything by the his- toric idea. It was a high historic house, with such a quantity of recorded past twinkling in the multitudinous candles that one grasped at the idea of something waning and displaced, and might [93] ITALIAN HOURS even fondly and secretly nurse the conceit that what one was having was just the very last. Was n't it certainly, for instance, no mere illusion that there is no appreciable future left for such manners — an urbanity so comprehensive, a form so transmitted, as those of such a hostess and such a host ? The future is for a different conception of the-graceful altogether — so far as it's for a conception of the graceful at all. Into that computation I shall not attempt to enter; but these representative products of an antique culture, at least, and one of which the secret seems more likely than not to be lost, were not common, nor indeed was any one else — in the circle to which the picture most insisted on restricting itself. Neither, on the other hand, was any one either very beautiful or very fresh: which was again, exactly, a precious "value" on an occasion that was to shine most, to the imagination, by the complexity of its references. Such old, old women with such old, old jewels ; such ugly, ugly ones with such handsome, becoming names; such battered, fatigued gentlemen with such inscrutable decorations ; such an absence of youth, for the most part, in either sex — of the pink and white, the "bud" of new worlds ; such a general personal air, in fine, of being the worse for a good deal of wear in various old ones. It was not a soci- ety — that was clear — in which little girls and boys set the tune ; and there was that about it all that might well have cast a shadow on the path of even the most successful little girl. Yet also — let me not be rudely inexact — it was in honour of youth and freshness that we had all been convened. The fiancailles [94 J TWO OLD HOUSES of the last — unless it were the last but one — unmarried: daugh- ter of the house had just been brought to a proper climax ; the contract had been signed, the betrothal rounded off — I'm not sure that the civil marriage had n't, that day, taken place. The occasion then had in fact the most charming of heroines and the most ingenuous of heroes, a young man, the latter, all happily suffused with a fair Austrian blush. The young lady had had, besides other more or less shining recent ancestors, a very famous paternal grandmother, who had played a great part in the polit- ical history of her time and whose portrait, in the taste and dress of 1830, was conspicuous in one of the rooms. The grand- daughter of this celebrity, of royal race, was strikingly like her and, by a fortunate stroke, had been habited, combed, curled in a manner exactly to reproduce the portrait. These things were charming and amusing, as indeed were several other things besides. The great Venetian beauty of our period was there, and nature had equipped the great Venetian beauty for her part with the properest sense of the suitable, or in any case with a splendid generosity — since on the ideally suitable character of so brave a human symbol who shall have the last word ? This responsible agent was at all events the beauty in the world about whom probably, most, the absence of question (an absence never wholly propitious) would a little smugly and monotonously flourish : the one thing wanting to the interest she inspired was thus the possibility of ever discussing it. There were plenty of suggestive subjects round about, on the other hand, as to which the exchange of ideas would by no means necessarily have [95 J ITALIAN HOURS dropped. You profit to the full at such times by all the old voices, echoes, images — by that element of the history of Venice which represents all Europe as having at one time and another revelled or rested, asked for pleasure or for patience there ; which gives you the place supremely as the refuge of endless strange secrets, broken fortunes and wounded hearts. II There had been, on lines of further or different speculation, a young Englishman to luncheon, and the young Englishman had proved "sympathetic" ; so that when it was a question after- wards of some of the more hidden treasures, the browner depths of the old churches, the case became one for mutual guidance and gratitude — for a small afternoon tour and the wait of a pair of friends in the warm little campi, at locked doors for which the nearest urchin had scurried off to fetch the keeper of the key. There are few brown depths to-day into which the light of the hotels does n't shine, and few hidden treasures about which pages enough, doubtless, have n't already been printed : my business, accordingly, let me hasten to say, is not now with the fond renewal of any discovery — at least in the order of im- pressions most usual. Your discovery may be, for that matter, renewed every week; the only essential is the good luck — which a fair amount of practice has. taught you to count upon — of not finding, for the particular occasion, other discoverers in the field. [96] TWO OLD HOUSES Then, in the quiet corner, with the closed door — then in the presence of the picture and of your companion's sensible emo- tion — not only the original happy moment, but everything else, is renewed. Yet once again it can all come back. The old custode, shuffling about in the dimness, jerks away, to make sure of his tip, the old curtain that is n't much more modern than the wonderful work itself. He does his best to create light where light can never be; but you have your practised groping gaze, and in guiding the young eyes of your less confident associate, moreover, you feel you possess the treasure. These are the re- fined pleasures that Venice has still to give, these odd happy passages of communication and response. But the point of my reminiscence is that there were other communications that day, as there were certainly other responses. I have forgotten exactly what it was we were looking for — without much success — when we met the three Sisters. Nothing requires more care, as a long knowledge of Venice works in, than not to lose the useful faculty of getting lost. I had so suc- cessfully done my best to preserve it that I could at that moment conscientiously profess an absence of any suspicion of where we might be. It proved enough that, wherever we were, we were where the three sisters found us. This was on a little bridge near a big campo, and a part of the charm of the matter was the theory that it was very much out of the way. They took us promptly in hand — they were only walking over to San Marco to match some coloured wool for the manufacture of such belated cushions as still bloom with purple and green in the long [97] ITALIAN HOURS leisures of old palaces; and that mild errand could easily open a parenthesis. The obscure church we had feebly imagined we were looking for proved, if I am not mistaken, that of the sisters* parish ; as to which I have but a confused recollection of a large grey void and of admiring for the first time a fine work of art of which I have now quite lost the identity. This was the effect of the charming beneficence of the three sisters, who presently were to give our adventure a turn in the emotion of which every- thing that had preceded seemed as nothing. It actually strikes me even as a little dim to have been told by them, as we all fared together, that a certain low, wide house, in a small square as to which I found myself without particular association, had been in the far-off time the residence of George Sand. And yet this was a fact that, though I could then only feel it must be for another day, would in a different connection have set me richly reconstructing. Madame Sand's famous Venetian year has been of late im- mensely in the air — a tub of soiled linen which the muse of history, rolling her sleeves well up, has not even yet quite ceased energetically and publicly to wash. The house in question must have been the house to which the wonderful lady betook her- self when, in 1834, after the dramatic exit of Alfred de Musset, she enjoyed that remarkable period of rest and refreshment with the so long silent, the but recently rediscovered, reported, extinguished, Doctor Pagello. As an old Sandist — not exactly indeed of the premiere heure, but of the fine high noon and golden afternoon of the great career — I had been, though I [98 ] TWO OLD HOUSES confess too inactively, curious as to a few points in the topo- graphy of the eminent adventure to which I here allude; but had never got beyond the little public fact, in itself always a bit of a thrill to the Sandist, that the present Hotel Danieli had been the scene of its first remarkable stages. I am not sure indeed that the curiosity I speak of has not at last, in my breast, yielded to another form of wonderment — truly to the rather rueful question of why we have so continued to concern ourselves, and why the fond observer of the footprints of genius is likely so to continue, with a body of discussion, neither in itself and in its day, nor in its preserved and attested records, at all positively edifying. The answer to such an inquiry would doubtless reward patience, but I fear we can now glance at its possibilities only long enough to say that interesting persons — so they be of a sufficiently approved and established interest — render in some degree interesting whatever happens to them, and give it an importance even when very little else (as in the case I refer to) may have operated to give it a dignity. Which is where I leave the issue of further identifications. For the three sisters, in the kindest way in the world, had asked us if we already knew their sequestered home and whether, in case we did n't, we should be at all amused to see it. My own acquaintance with them, though not of recent origin, had hitherto lacked this enhancement, at which we both now grasped with the full instinct, indescribable enough, of what it was likely to give. But how, for that matter, either, can I find the right expression of what was to remain with us of this episode ? It is the fault [99] ITALIAN HOURS of the sad-eyed old witch of Venice that she so easily puts more into things that can pass under the common names that do for them elsewhere. Too much for a rough sketch was to be seen and felt in the home of the three sisters, and in the delightful and slightly pathetic deviation of their doing us so simply and freely the honours of it. What was most immediately marked was their resigned cosmopolite state, the effacement of old con- ventional lines by foreign contact and example; by the action, too, of causes full of a special interest, but not to be empha- sised perhaps — granted indeed they be named at all — with- out a certain sadness of sympathy. If "style," in Venice, sits among ruins, let us always lighten our tread when we pay her a visit. Our steps were in fact, I am happy to think, almost soft enough for a death-chamber as we stood in the big, vague sala of the three sisters, spectators of their simplified state and their beautiful blighted rooms, the memories, the portraits, the shrunken relics of nine Doges. If I wanted a first chapter it was here made to my hand; the painter of life and manners, as he glanced about, could only sigh — as he so frequently has to — over the vision of so much more truth than he can use. What on earth is the need to "invent," in the midst of tragedy and comedy that never cease ? Why, with the subject itself, all round, so inimitable, condemn the picture to the silliness of trying not to be aware of it ? The charming lonely girls, carrying so simply their great name and fallen fortunes, the despoiled decaduta house, the unfailing Italian grace, the space so out of scale with [ 100 ] TWO OLD HOUSES actual needs, the absence of books, the presence of ennui, the sense of the length of the hours and the shortness of everything else — all this was a matter not only for a second chapter and a third, but for a whole volume, a denoument and a sequel. This time, unmistakably, it was the last — Wordsworth's stately "shade of that which once was great"; and it was almost as if our distinguished young friends had consented to pass away slowly in order to treat us to the vision. Ends are only ends in truth, for the painter of pictures, when they are more or less conscious and prolonged. One of the sisters had been to London, whence she had brought back the impression of having seen at the British Museum a room exclusively filled with books and documents devoted to the commemoration of her family. She must also then have encountered at the National Gallery the exquisite specimen of an early Venetian master in which one of her ancestors, then head of the State, kneels with so sweet a dignity before the Virgin and Child. She was perhaps old enough, none the less, to have seen this precious work taken down from the wall of the room in which we sat and — on terms so far too easy — carried away for ever ; and not too young, at all events, to have been present, now and then, when her candid elders, enlightened too late as to what their sacrifice might really have done for them, looked at each other with the pale hush of the irreparable. We let ourselves note that these were matters to put a great deal of old, old history into sweet young Venetian faces. ITALIAN HOURS III In Italy, if we come to that, this particular appearance is far from being only in the streets, where we are apt most to observe it — in countenances caught as we pass and in the objects marked by the guide-books with their respective stellar allowances. It is behind the walls of the houses that old, old history is thick and that the multiplied stars of Baedeker might often best find their application. The feast of St. John the Baptist is the feast of the year in Florence, and it seemed to me on that night that I could have scattered about me a handful of these signs. I had the pleasure of spending a couple of hours on a signal high terrace that overlooks the Arno, as well as in the galleries that open out to it, where I met more than ever the pleasant curious question of the disparity between the old conditions and the new man- ners. Make our manners, we moderns, as good as we can, there is still no getting over it that they are not good enough for many of the great places. This was one of those scenes, and its greatness came out to the full into the hot Florentine evening, in which the pink and golden fires of the pyrotechnics arranged on Ponte Carraja — the occasion of our assembly — lighted up the large issue. The "good people" beneath were a huge, hot, gentle, happy family; the fireworks on the bridge, kindling river as well as sky, were delicate and charming ; the terrace connected the two wings that give bravery to the front of the palace, and the close-hung pictures in the rooms, open in a long series, [ 102 ] TWO OLD HOUSES offered to a lover of quiet perambulation an alternative hard to resist. Wherever he stood — on the broad loggia, in the cluster of company, among bland ejaculations and liquefied ices, or in the presence of the mixed masters that led him from wall to wall — such a seeker for the spirit of each occasion could only turn it over that in the first place this was an intenser, finer little Florence than ever, and that in the second the testimony was again wonderful to former fashions and ideas. What did they do, in the other time, the time of so much smaller a society, smaller and fewer fortunes, more taste perhaps as to some particulars, but fewer tastes, at any rate, and fewer habits and wants — what did they do with chambers so multitudinous and so vast ? Put their "state" at its highest — and we know of many ways in which it must have broken down — how did they live in them without the aid of variety ? How did they, in minor communities in which every one knew every one, and every one's impression and effect had been long, as we say, discounted, find represen- tation and emulation sufficiently amusing ? Much of the charm of thinking of it, however, is doubtless that we are not able to say. This leaves us with the conviction that does them most honour: the old generations built and arranged greatly for the simple reason that they liked it, and they could bore themselves — to say nothing of each other, when it came to that — better in noble conditions than in mean ones. It was not, I must add, of the far-away Florentine age that I most thought, but of periods more recent and of which the sound [ 103 ] ITALIAN HOURS and beautiful house more directly spoke. If one had always been homesick for the Amo-side of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, here was a chance, and a better one than ever, to taste again of the cup. Many of the pictures — there was a charming quarter of an hour when I had them to myself — were bad enough to have passed for good in those delightful years. Shades of Grand-Dukes encompassed me — Dukes of the pleasant later sort who were n't really grand. There was still the sense of hav- ing come too late — yet not too late, after all, for this glimpse and this dream. My business was to people the place — its own business had never been to save us the trouble of understanding it. And then the deepest spell of all was perhaps that -just here I was supremely out of the way of the so terribly actual Floren- tine question. This, as all the world knows, is a batde-ground, to-day, in many journals, with all Italy practically pulling on one side and all England, America and Germany pulling on the other: I speak of course of the more or less articulate opinion. The "improvement," the rectification of Florence is in the air, and the problem of the particular ways in which, given such desperately delicate cases, these matters should be understood. The little treasure-city is, if there ever was one, a delicate case — more delicate perhaps than any other in the world save that of our taking on ourselves to persuade the Italians that they may n't do as they like with their own. They so absolutely may that I profess I see no happy issue from the fight. It will take more tact than our combined tactful genius may at all probably muster to convince them that their own is, by an ingenious logic, much [ 104 ] TWO OLD HOUSES rather ours. It will take more subtlety still to muster for them that truly dazzling show of examples from which they may learn that what in general is "ours" shall appear to them as a rule a sacrifice to beauty and a triumph of taste. The situation, to the truly analytic mind, offers in short, to perfection, all the elements of despair ; and I am afraid that if I hung back, at the Corsini palace, to woo illusions and invoke the irrelevant, it was because I could think, in the conditions, of no better way to meet the acute responsibility of the critic than just to shirk it. 1899. GASA ALVISI NVITED to "introduce" certain pages of cordial and faithful reminiscence from another hand,' in which a frankly pre- dominant presence seems to live again, I undertook that office with an interest inevitably somewhat sad — so passed and gone to-day is so much of the life sug- gested. Those who fortunately knew Mrs. Bronson will read into her notes still more of it — more of her subject, more of herself too, and of many things — than she gives, and some may well even feel tempted to do for her what she has done here for her distinguished friend. In Venice, during a long period, for many pilgrims, Mrs. Arthur Bronson, originally of New York, was, so far as society, hospitality, a charming personal welcome were concerned, almost in sole pos- session ; she had become there, with time, quite the prime repre- sentative of these private amenities which the Anglo-Saxon abroad is apt to miss just in proportion as the place visited is publicly wonderful, and in which he therefore finds a value twice as great as at home. Mrs. Bronson really earned in this way the gratitude of mingled generations and races. She sat for twenty years at ' " Browning in Venice," being Recollections of the late Katharine De Kay Bronson, with a Prefatory Note by H. J. (^Cornhill Magazine, YehtMary, 1902). [ 109 ] ITALIAN HOURS the wide mouth, as it were, of the Grand Canal, holding out her hand, with endless good-nature, patience, charity, to all decently accredited petitioners, the incessant troop of those either be- wilderedly making or fondly renewing acquaintance with the dazzling city. Casa Alvisi is directly opposite the high, broad-based florid church of S. Maria della Salute — so directly that from the bal- cony over the water-entrance your eye, crossing the canal, seems to find the key-hole of the great door right in a line with it ; and there was something in this position that for the time made all Venice-lovers think of the genial padrona as thus levying in the most convenient way the toll of curiosity and sympathy. Every one passed, every one was seen to pass, and few were those not seen to stop and to return. The most generous of hostesses died a year ago at Florence ; her house knows her no more — it had ceased to do so for some time before her death; and the long, pleased procession — the charmed arrivals, the happy sojourns at anchor, the reluctant departures that made Ca' Alvisi, as was currently said, a social porto di mare — is, for remembrance and regret, already a possession of ghosts ; so that, on the spot, at present, the attention ruefully averts itself from the dear litde old faded but once familiarly bright fapade, overtaken at last by the comparatively vulgar uses that are doing their best to "paint out" in Venice, right and left, by staring signs and other vul- garities, the immemorial note of distinction. The house, in a city of palaces, was small, but the tenant clung to her perfect, her inclusive position — the one right place that gave her a better [no J CASA ALVISI, VENICE, CASA ALVISI command, as it were, than a better house obtained by a harder compromise; not being fond, moreover, of spacious halls and massive treasures, but of compact and familiar rooms, in which her remarkable accumulation of minute and delicate Venetian objects could show. She adored — in the way of the Venetian, to which all her taste addressed itself — the small, the domestic and the exquisite ; so that she would have given a Tintoretto or two, I think, without difficulty, for a cabinet of tiny gilded glasses or a dinner-service of the right old silver. The general receptacle of these multiplied treasures played at any rate, through the years, the part of a friendly private-box at the constant operatic show, a box at the best point of the best tier, with the cushioned ledge of its front raking the whole scene and with its withdrawing rooms behind for more detached con- versation ; for easy — when not indeed slightly difficult — poly- glot talk, artful bibite, artful cigarettes too, straight from the hand of the hostess, who could do all that belonged to a hostess, place people in relation and keep them so, take up and put down the topic, cause delicate tobacco and little gilded glasses to cir- culate, without ever leaving her sofa-cushions or intermitting her good-nature. She exercised in these conditions, with never a block, as we say in London, in the traffic, with never an admission, an acceptance of the least social complication, her positive genius for easy interest, easy sympathy, easy friendship. It was as if, at last, she had taken the human race at large, quite irrespective of geography, for her neighbours, with neighbourly relations as a matter of course. These things, on her part, had at all events the [ III ] ITALIAN HOURS greater appearance of ease from their having found to their purpose — and as if the very air of Venice produced them — a cluster of forms so light and immediate, so pre-established by picturesque custom. The old bright tradition, the wonderful Venetian legend had appealed to her from the first, closing round her house and her well-plashed water-steps, where the waiting gondolas were thick, quite as if, actually, the ghost of the defunct Carnival — since I have spoken of ghosts — still played some haunting part. Let me add, at the same time, that Mrs. Bronson's social facility, which was really her great refuge from importunity, a defence with serious thought and serious feeling quietly cher- ished behind it, had its discriminations as well as its inveteracies, and that the most marked of all these, perhaps, was her attach- ment to Robert Browning. Nothing in all her beneficent life had probably made her happier than to have found herself able to minister, each year, with the returning autumn, to his pleasure and comfort. Attached to Ca' Alvisi, on the land side, is a some- what melancholy old section of a Giustiniani palace, which she had annexed to her own premises mainly for the purpose of plac- ing it, in comfortable guise, at the service of her friends. She liked, as she professed, when they were the real thing, to have them under her hand; and here succeeded each other, through the years, the company of the privileged and the more closely domesticated, who liked, harmlessly, to distinguish between themselves and outsiders. Among visitors partaking of this pleasant provision Mr. Browning was of course easily first. But I must leave her own pen to show him as her best years knew [ 112 J CASA ALVISI him. The point was, meanwhile, that if her charity was great even for the outsider, this was by reason of the inner essence of it — her perfect tenderness for Venice, which she always recog- nised as a Unk. That was the true principle of fusion, the key to communication. She communicated in proportion — little or much, measuring it as she felt people more responsive or less so ; and she expressed herself, or in other words her full affection for the place, only to those who had most of the same sentiment. The rich and interesting form in which she found it in Browning may well be imagined — together with the quite independent quantity of the genial at large that she also found ; but I am not sure that his favour was not primarily based on his paid trib- ute of such things as "Two in a Gondola" and "A Toccata of Galuppi." He had more ineffaceably than any one recorded his initiation from of old. She was thus, all round, supremely faithful ; yet it was perhaps after all with the very small folk, those to the manner born, that she made the easiest terms. She loved, she had from the first enthusiastically adopted, the engaging Venetian people, whose virtues she found touching and their infirmities but such as appeal mainly to the sense of humour and the love of anecdote ; and she befriended and admired, she studied and spoiled them. There must have been a multitude of whom it would scarce be too much to say that her long residence among them was their settled golden age. When I consider that they have lost her now I fairly wonder to what shifts they have been put and how long they may not have to wait for such another messenger of Providence. She [ 113] ITALIAN HOURS cultivated their dialect, she renewed their boats, she piously re- lighted — at the top of the tide-washed pali of traghetto or lagoon — the neglected lamp of the tutelary Madonnetta ; she took cog- nisance of the wives, the children, the accidents, the troubles, as to which she became, perceptibly, the most prompt, the estab- lished remedy. On lines where the amusement was happily less one-sided she put together in dialect many short comedies, dra- matic proverbs, which, with one of her drawing-rooms perma- nently arranged as a charming diminutive theatre, she caused to be performed by the young persons of her circle — often, when the case lent itself, by the wonderful small offspring of humbler friends, children of the Venetian lower class, whose aptitude, teachability, drollery, were her constant delight. It was certainly true that an impression of Venice as humanly sweet might easily found itself on the frankness and quickness and amiability of these little people. They were at least so much to the good ; for the phi- losophy of their patroness was as Venetian as everything else ; helping her to accept experience without bitterness and to remain fresh, even in the fatigue which finally overtook her, for pleasant surprises and proved sincerities. She was herself sincere to the last for the place of her predilection ; inasmuch as though she had arranged herself, in the later time — and largely for the love of "Pippa Passes" — an alternative refuge at Asolo, she absented herself from Venice with continuity only under coercion of illness. At Asolo, periodically, the link with Browning was more con- firmed than weakened, and there, in old Venetian territory, and with the invasion of visitors comparatively checked, her prefer- [ "4 J CASA ALVISI entially small house became again a setting for the pleasure of talk and the sense of Italy. It contained again its own small treasures, all in the pleasant key of the homelier Venetian spirit. The plain beneath it stretched away like a purple sea from the lower cliffs of the hills, and the white campanili of the villages, as one was perpetually saying, showed on the expanse like scat- tered sails of ships. The rumbling carriage, the old-time, rattling, red-velveted carriage of provincial, rural Italy, delightful and quaint, did the office of the gondola ; to Bassano, to Treviso, to high-walled Castelfranco, all pink and gold, the home of the great Giorgione. Here also memories cluster ; but it is in Venice again that her vanished presence is most felt, for there, in the real, or certainly the finer, the more sifted Cosmopolis, it falls into its place among the others evoked, those of the past seekers of poetry and dispensers of romance. It is a fact that almost every one in- teresting, appealing, melancholy, memorable, odd, seems at one time or another, after many days and much life, to have gravitated to Venice by a happy instinct, settling in it and treating it, cherish- ing it, as a sort of repository of consolations ; all of which to-day, for the conscious mind, is mixed with its air and constitutes its unwritten history. The deposed, the defeated, the disenchanted, the wounded, or even only the bored, have seemed to find there something that no other place could give. But such people came for themselves, as we seem to see them — only with the egotism of their grievances and the vanity of their hopes. Mrs. Bron- son's case was beautifully different — she had come altogether for others. FROM CHAMBERY TO MILAN FROM GHAMBERY TO MILAN |OUR truly sentimental tourist vvill never take it from any occasion that there is absolutely nothing for him, and it was at Chambery — but four hours from Ge- neva — that I accepted the situation and decided there might be mysterious de- lights in entering Italy by a whizz through an eight-mile tunnel, even as a bullet through the bore of a gun. I found my reward in the Savoyard landscape, which greets you betimes with the smile of anticipa- tion. If it is not so Italian as Italy it is at least more Italian than anything but Italy — more Italian, too, I should think, than can seem natural and proper to the swarming red-legged soldiery who so publicly proclaim it of the empire of M. Thiers. The light and the complexion of things had to my eyes not a little of that mollified depth last loved by them rather further on. It was simply perhaps that the weather was hot and the mountains drowsing in that iridescent haze that I have seen nearer home than at Chambery. But the vegetation, assuredly, had an all but Transalpine twist and curl, and the classic wayside tangle of corn and vines left nothing to be desired in the line of careless grace. Chambery as a town, however, constitutes no foretaste [ 119 ] ITALIAN HOURS of the monumental cities. There is shabbiness and shabbiness, the fond critic of such things will tell you; and that of the ancient capital of Savoy lacks style. I found a better pastime, however, than strolling through the dark dull streets in quest of effects that were not forthcoming. The first urchin you meet will show you the way to Les Charmettes and the Maison Jean- Jacques. A very pleasant way it becomes as soon as it leaves the town — a winding, climbing by-road, bordered with such a tall and sturdy hedge as to give it the air of an English lane — if you can fancy an English lane introducing you to the haunts of a Madame de Warens. The house that formerly sheltered this lady's singular menage stands on a hillside above the road, which a rapid path connects with the little grass-grown terrace before it. It is a small shabby, homely dwelling, with a certain reputable solidity, however, and more of internal spaciousness than of outside promise. The place is shown by an elderly competent dame who points out the very few surviving objects which you may touch with the reflection — complacent in whatsoever degree suits you — that they have known the familiarity of Rousseau's hand. It was presumably a meagrely-appointed house, and I wondered that on such scanty features so much expression should linger. But the structure has an ancient ponderosity, and the dust of the eighteenth century seems to lie on its worm-eaten floors, to cling to the faded old papiers a ramages on the walls and to lodge in the crevices of the brown wooden ceilings. Madame de Warens's bed remains, with the narrow couch of Jean-Jacques as well, his [ 120 ] FROM CHAMBfiRY TO MILAN little warped and cracked yellow spinet, and a battered, turnip- shaped silver timepiece, engraved with its master's name — its primitive tick as extinct as his passionate heart-beats. It cost me, I confess, a somewhat pitying acceleration of my own to see this intimately personal relic of the genius loci — for it had dwelt in his waistcoat-pocket, than which there is hardly a mate- rial point in space nearer to a man's consciousness — tossed so irreverently upon the table on which you deposit your fee, beside the dog's-eared visitors' record or livre de cuisine recently de- nounced by Madame George Sand. In fact the place generally, in so far as some faint ghostly presence of its famous inmates seems to linger there, is by no means exhilarating. Coppet and Ferney tell, if not of pure happiness, at least of prosperity and honour, wealth and success. But Les Charmettes is haunted by ghosts unclean and forlorn. The place tells of poverty, perver- sity, distress. A good deal of clever modern talent in France has been employed in touching up the episode of which it was the scene and tricking it out in idyllic love-knots. But as I stood on the charming terrace I have mentioned — a little jewel of a ter- race, with grassy flags and a mossy parapet, and an admirable view of great swelling violet hills — stood there reminded how much sweeter Nature is than man, the story looked rather wan and unlovely beneath these literary decorations, and I could pay it no livelier homage than is implied in perfect pity. Hero and heroine have become too much creatures of history to take up attitudes as part of any poetry. But, not to mor lise too sternly for a tourist between trains, I should add that, as an illustration, [ 121 ] ITALIAN HOURS to be inserted mentally in the text of the "Confessions," a glimpse of Les Charmettes is pleasant enough. It completes the rare charm of good autobiography to behold with one's eyes the faded and battered background of the story ; and Rousseau's narrative is so incomparably vivid and forcible that the sordid little house at Chambery seems of a hardly deeper shade of reality than so many other passages of his projected truth. If I spent an hour at Les Charmettes, fumbling thus help- lessly with the past, I recognised on the morrow how strongly the Mont Cenis Tunnel smells of the time to come. As I passed along the Saint-Gothard highway a couple of months since, I perceived, half up the Swiss ascent, a group of navvies at work in a gorge beneath the road. They had laid bare a broad sur- face of granite and had punched in the centre of it a round black cavity, of about the dimensions, as it seemed to me, of a soup- plate. This was to attain its perfect development some eight years hence. The Mont Cenis may therefore be held to have set a fashion which will be followed till the highest Himalaya is but the ornamental apex or snow-capped gable-tip of some resounding fuliginous corridor. The tunnel differs but in length from other tunnels ; you spend half an hour in it. But you whirl out into the blest peninsula, and as you look back seem to see the mighty mass shrug its shoulders over the line, the mere turn of a dreaming giant in his sleep. The tunnel is certainly not a poetic object, but there is no perfection without its beauty; and as you measure the long rugged outline of the pyramid of which it forms the base you accept it as the perfection of a short cut. Twenty-four hours [ 122 ] FROM CHAMBERY TO MILAN from Paris to Turin is speed for the times — speed which may content us, at any rate, until expansive Berlin has succeeded in placing itself at thirty-six from Milan. To enter Turin then of a lovely August afternoon was to find a city of arcades, of pink and yellow stucco, of innumerable cafes, of blue-legged officers, of ladies draped in the North-Ital- ian mantilla. An old friend of Italy coming back to her finds an easy waking for dormant memories. Every object is a reminder and every reminder a thrill. Half an hour after my arrival, as I stood at my window, which overhung the great square, I found the scene, within and without, a rough epitome of every pleasure and every impression I had formerly gathered from Italy: the balcony and the Venetian-blind, the cool floor of speckled con- crete, the lavish delusions of frescoed wall and ceiling, the broad divan framed for the noonday siesta, the massive mediaeval Cas- tello in mid-piazza, with its shabby rear and its pompous Pal- ladian front, the brick campaniles beyond, the milder, yellower light, the range of colour, the suggestion of sound. Later, beneath the arcades, I found many an old acquaintance : beautiful offi- cers, resplendent, slow-strolling, contemplative of female beauty ; civil and peaceful dandies, hardly less gorgeous, with that reli- gious faith in moustache and shirt-front which distinguishes the belle jeunesse of Italy; ladies with heads artfully shawled in Span- ish-looking lace, but with too little art — or too much nature at least — in the region of the bodice ; well-conditioned young abbati with neatly drawn stockings. These indeed are not ob- jects of first-rate interest, and with such Turin is rather meagrely [ 123 1 ITALIAN HOURS furnished. It has no architecture, no churches, no monuments, no romantic street-scenery. It has the great votive temple of the Superga, which stands on a high hilltop above the city, gazing across at Monte Rosa and lifting its own fine dome against the sky with no contemptible art. But when you have seen the Superga from the quay beside the Po, a skein of a few yellow threads in August, despite its frequent habit of rising high and running wild, and said to yourself that in architecture position is half the battle, you have nothing left to visit but the Museum of pictures. The Turin Gallery, which is large and well arranged, is the fortunate owner of three or four masterpieces: a couple of magnificent Vandycks and a couple of Paul Veroneses ; the latter a Queen of Sheba and a Feast of the House of Levi — the usual splendid combination of brocades, grandees and marble colon- nades dividing those skies de turquoise malade to which Theophile Gautier is fond of alluding. The Veroneses are fine, but with Venice in prospect the traveller feels at liberty to keep his best attention in reserve. If, however, he has the proper relish for Vandyck, let him linger long and fondly here; for that admira- tion will never be more potently stirred than by the adorable group of the three little royal highnesses, sons and the daugh- ter of Charles I. All the purity of childhood is here, and all its soft solidity of structure, rounded tenderly beneath the spangled satin and contrasted charmingly with the pompous rigidity. Clad respectively in crimson, white and blue, these small scions stand up in their ruffs and fardingales in dimpled serenity, squaring their infantine stomachers at the spectator with an innocence, [ 124 J FROM CHAMBfiRY TO MILAN a dignity, a delightful grotesqueness, which make the picture a thing of close truth as well as of fine decorum. You might kiss their hands, but you certainly would think twice before pinch- ing their cheeks — provocative as they are of this tribute of admi- ration — and would altogether lack presumption to lift them off the ground or the higher level or dais on which they stand so sturdily planted by right of birth. There is something inimitable in the paternal gallantry with which the painter has touched off the young lady. She was a princess, yet she was a baby, and he has contrived, we let ourselves fancy, to interweave an intimation that she was a creature whom, in her teens, the lucklessly smitten — even as he was prematurely — must vainly sigh for. Though the work is a masterpiece of execution its merits under this head may be emulated, at a distance ; the lovely modulations of col- our in the three contrasted and harmonised little satin petticoats, the solidity of the little heads, in spite of all their prettiness, the happy, unexaggerated squareness and maturity of pose, are, sev- erally, points to study, to imitate, and to reproduce with profit. But the taste of such a consummate thing is its great secret as well as its great merit — a taste which seems one of the lost instincts of mankind. Go and enjoy this supreme expression of Vandyck's fine sense, and admit that never was a politer pro- duction. Milan speaks to us of a burden of felt life of which Turin is innocent, but in its general aspect still lingers a northern reserve which makes the place rather perhaps the last of the prose capi- tals than the first of the poetic. The long Austrian occupation [125] ITALIAN HOURS perhaps did something to Germanise its physiognomy; though indeed this is an indifferent explanation when one remembers how well, temperamentally speaking, Italy held her own in Vene- tia. Milan, at any rate, if not bristling with the aesthetic impulse, opens to us frankly enough the thick volume of her past. Of that volume the Cathedral is the fairest and fullest page — a struc- ture not supremely interesting, not logical, not even, to some minds, commandingly beautiful, but grandly curious and superbly rich. I hope, for my own part, never to grow too particular to admire it. If it had no other distinction it would still have that of im- pressive, immeasurable achievement. As I strolled beside its vast indented base one evening, and felt it, above me, rear its grey mysteries into the starlight while the restless human tide on which I floated rose no higher than the first few layers of street-soiled marble, I was tempted to believe that beauty in great architec- ture is almost a secondary merit, and that the main pointns mass — such mass as may make it a supreme embodiment of vigorous effort. Viewed in this way a great building is the greatest con- ceivable work of art. More than any other it represents difficul- ties mastered, resources combined, labour, courage and patience. And there are people who tell us that art has nothing to do with morality! Little enough, doubtless, when it is concerned, even ever so little, in painting the roof of Milan Cathedral within to represent carved stone-work. Of this famous roof every one has heard — how good it is, how bad, how perfect a delusion, how transparent an artifice. It is the first thing your cicerone shows you on entering the church. The occasionally accommodating [ 126 J THE SIMPLON GATE, MILAN. FROM CHAMBfiRY TO MILAN art-lover may accept it philosophically, I think; for the interior, though admirably effective as a whole, has no great sublimity, nor even purity, of pitch. It is splendidly vast and dim ; the altar- lamps twinkle afar through the incense-thickened air like fog- lights at sea, and the great columns rise straight to the roof, which hardly curves to meet them, with the girth and altitude of oaks of a thousand years; but there is little refinement of design — few of those felicities of proportion which the eye caresses, when it finds them, very much as the memory retains and repeats some happy lines of poetry or some haunting musical phrase. Con- sistently brave, none the less, is the result produced, and nothing braver than a certain exhibition that I privately enjoyed of the relics of St. Charles Borromeus. This holy man lies at his eter- nal rest in a small but gorgeous sepulchral chapel, beneath the boundless pavement and before the high altar ; and for the mod- est sum of five francs you may have his shrivelled mortality unveiled and gaze at it with whatever reserves occur to you. The Catholic Church never renounces a chance of the sublime for fear of a chance of the ridiculous — especially when the chance of the sublime may be the very excellent chance of five francs. The performance in question, of which the good San Carlo paid in the first instance the cost, was impressive certainly, but as a monstrous matter or a grim comedy may still be. The little sacristan, having secured his audience, whipped on a white tunic over his frock, lighted a couple of extra candles and proceeded to remove from above the altar, by means of a crank, a sort of sliding shutter, just as you may see a shop-boy do of a morning [ 127 ] ITALIAN HOURS at his master's window. In this case too a large sheet of plate- glass was uncovered, and to form an idea of the etalage you must imagine that a jeweller, for reasons of his own, has struck an un- natural partnership with an undertaker. The black mummified corpse of the saint is stretched out in a glass coffin, clad in his mouldering canonicals, mitred, crosiered and gloved, glittering with votive jewels. It is an extraordinary mixture of death and life; the desiccated clay, the ashen rags, the hideous little black mask and skull, and the living, glowing, twinkling splendour of diamonds, emeralds and sapphires. The collection is really fine, and many great historic names are attached to the different offerings. Whatever may be the better opinion as to the future of the Church, I can't help thinking she will make a figure in the world so long as she retains this great fund of precious "proper- ties," this prodigious capital decoratively invested and scintillat- ing throughout Christendom at effectively-scattered points. You see I am forced to agree after all, in spite of the sliding shutter and the profane swagger of the sacristan, that a certain pastoral majesty saved the situation, or at least made irony gape. Yet it was from a natural desire to breathe a sweeter air that I imme- diately afterwards undertook the interminable climb to the roof of the cathedral. This is another world of wonders, and one which enjoys due renown, every square inch of wall on the wind- ing stairways being bescribbled with a traveller's name. There is a great glare from the far-stretching slopes of marble, a con- fusion (like the masts of a navy or the spears of an army) of image-capped pinnacles, biting the impalpable blue, and, better [ 128 J FROM CHAMBERY TO MILAN than either, the goodliest view of level Lombardy sleeping in its rich transalpine light and resembling, with its white-walled dwell- ings and the spires on its horizon, a vast green sea spotted with ships. After two months of Switzerland the Lombard plain is a rich rest to the eye, and the yellow, liquid, free-flowing light — as if on favoured Italy the vessels of heaven were more widely opened — had for mine a charm which made me think of a great opaque mountain as a blasphemous invasion of the atmospheric spaces. I have mentioned the cathedral first, but the prime treasure of Milan at the present hour is the beautiful, tragical Leonardo. The cathedral is good for another thousand years, but we ask whether our children will find in the most majestic and most luckless of frescoes much more than the shadow of a shadow. Its fame has been for a century or two that, as one may say, of an illustrious invalid whom people visit to see how he lasts, with leave-taking sighs and almost death-bed or tiptoe precautions. The picture needs not another scar or stain, now, to be the sad- dest work of art in the world ; and battered, defaced, ruined as it is, it remains one of the greatest. We may really compare its anguish of decay to the slow conscious ebb of life in a human organism. The production of the prodigy was a breath from the infinite, and the painter's conception not immeasurably less complex than the scheme, say, of his own mortal constitution. There has been much talk lately of the irony of fate, but I sus- pect fate was never more ironical than when she led the most scientific, the most calculating of all painters to spend fifteen [ 129 ] ITALIAN HOURS long years in building his goodly house upon the sand. And yet, after all, may not the playing of that trick represent but a deeper wisdom, since if the thing enjoyed the immortal health and bloom of a first-rate Titian we should have lost one of the most pertinent lessons in the history of art? We know it as hearsay, but here is the plain proof, that there is no limit to the amount of "stuff" an artist may put into his work. Every painter ought once in his life to stand before the Cenacolo and decipher its moral. ^ Mix with your colours and mess on your palette every particle of the very substance of your soul, and this lest per- chance your "prepared surface" shall play you a trick! Then, and then only, it will fight to the last — it will resist even in death. Raphael was a happier genius; you look at his lovely "Marriage of the Virgin" at the Brera, beautiful as some first deep smile of conscious inspiration, but to feel that he foresaw no complaint against fate, and that he knew the world he wanted to know and charmed it into never giving him away. But I have left no space to speak of the Brera, nor of that paradise of book- worms with an eye for their background — if such creatures exist — the Ambrosian Library ; nor of that mighty basilica of St. Ambrose, with its spacious atrium and its crudely solemn mosaics, in which it is surely your own fault if you don't forget Dr. Strauss and M. Renan and worship as grimly as a Christian of the ninth century. It is part of the sordid prose of the Mont Cenis road that, unlike those fine old unimproved passes, the Sirhplon, the Spliigen and — yet awhile longer — the Saint-Gothard, it denies you a [ 130 ] FROM CHAMBIERY TO MILAN glimpse of that paradise adorned by the four lakes even as that of uncommented Scripture by the rivers of Eden. I made, how- ever, an excursion to the Lake of Como, which, though brief, lasted long enough to suggest to me that I too was a hero of romance with leisure for a love-affair, and not a hurrying tourist with a Bradshaw in his pocket. The Lake of Como has figured largely in novels of "immoral" tendency — being commonly the spot to which inflamed young gentlemen invite the wives of other gentlemen to fly with them and ignore the restrictions of public opinion. But even the Lake of Como has been revised and im- proved ; the fondest prejudices yield to time ; it gives one some- how a sense of an aspiringly high tone. I should pay a poor compliment at least to the swarming inmates of the hotels which now alternate attractively by the water-side with villas old and new were I to read the appearances more cynically. But if it is lost to florid fiction it still presents its blue bosom to most other refined uses, and the unsophisticated tourist, the American at least, may do any amount of private romancing there. The pretty hotel at Cadenabbia offers him, for instance, in the most elegant and assured form, the so often precarious adventure of what he calls at home summer board. It is all so unreal, so ficti- tious, so elegant and idle, so framed to undermine a rigid sense of the chief end of man not being to float for ever in an ornamental boat, beneath an awning tasselled like a circus-horse, impelled by an affable Giovanni or Antonio from one stately stretch of lake-laved villa steps to another, that departure seems as harsh and unnatural as the dream-dispelling note of some punctual ITALIAN HOURS voice at your bedside on a dusky winter morning. Yet I won- dered, for my own part, where I had seen it all before — the pink- walled villas gleaming through their shrubberies of orange and oleander, the mountains shimmering in the hazy light like so many breasts of doves, the constant presence of the melodious Italian voice. Where indeed but at the Opera when the man- ager has been more than usually regardless of expense ? Here in the foreground was the palace of the nefarious barytone, with its banqueting-hall opening as freely on the stage as a railway buffet on the platform; beyond, the delightful back scene, with its operatic gamut of colouring ; in the middle the scarlet-sashed barcaiuoli, grouped like a chorus, hat in hand, awaiting the conductor's signal. It was better even than being in a novel — this being, this fairly wallowing, in a libretto. THE OLD SAINT-GOTHARD LEAVES FROM A NOTE-BOOK THE OLD SAINT-GOTHARD LEAVES FROM A NOTE-BOOK iJERNE, September, 1873. — In Berne again, some eleven weeks after having left it in July. I have never been in Switzerland so late, and I came hither innocently suppos- ing the last Cook's tourist to have paid out his last coupon and departed. But I was lucky, it seems, to discover an empty cot in an attic and a very tight place at a table d'hote. People are all flocking out of Switzerland, as in July they were flocking in, and the main channels of egress are terribly choked. I have been here several days, watching them come and go ; it is like the march-past of an army. It gives one, for an occasional change from darker thoughts, a lively impres- sion of the numbers of people now living, and above all now moving, at extreme ease in the world. Here is little Switzerland disgorging its tens of thousands of honest folk, chiefly English, and rarely, to judge by their faces and talk, children of light in any eminent degree ; for whom snow-peaks and glaciers and passes and lakes and chalets and sunsets and a caf^ complet, "including honey," as the coupon says, have become prime [135] ITALIAN HOURS necessities for six weeks every year. It's not so long ago that lords and nabobs monopolised these pleasures; but nowadays a month's tour in Switzerland is no more a jeu de prince than a Sunday excursion. To watch this huge Anglo-Saxon wave ebb- ing through Berne suggests, no doubt most fallaciously, that the common lot of mankind is n't after all so very hard and that the masses have reached a high standard of comfort. The view of the Oberland chain, as you see it from the garden of the hotel, really butters one's bread most handsomely ; and here are I don't know how many hundred Cook's tourists a day looking at it through the smoke of their pipes. Is it really the "masses," how- ever, that I see every day at the table d'hote ? They have rather too few h's to the dozen, but their good-nature is great. Some people complain that they "vulgarise" Switzerland; but as far as I am concerned I freely give it up to them and offer them a personal welcome and take a peculiar satisfaction in seeing them here. Switzerland is a "show country" — I am more and more struck with the bearings of that truth; and its use in the world is to reassure persons of a benevolient imagination when they begin to wish for the drudging millions a greater supply of elevating amusement. Here is amusement for a thousand years, and as elevating certainly as mountains three miles high can make it. I expect to live to see the summit of Monte Rosa heated by steam-tubes and adorned with a hotel setting three tables d'hote a day. I have been walking about the arcades, which used to bestow a grateful shade in July, but which seem rather dusky and chilly [ 136] THE CLOCK TOWER, BERNE. THE OLD SAINT-GOTHARD in these shortening autumn days. I am struck with the way the EngUsh always speak of them — with a shudder, as gloomy, as dirty, as evil-smelling, as suffocating, as freezing, as anything and everything but admirably picturesque. I take us Americans for the only people who, in travelling, judge things on the first impulse — when we do judge them at all — not from the stand- point of simple comfort. Most of us, strolling forth into these bustling basements, are, I imagine, too much amused, too much diverted from the sense of an alienable right to public ease, to be conscious of heat or cold, of thick air, or even of the universal smell of strong charcuterie. If the visible romantic were banished from the face of the earth I am sure the idea of it would still survive in some typical American heart. . . . Lucerne, September. — Berne, I find, has been filling with tourists at the expense of Lucerne, which I have been having almost to myself. There are six people at the table d'hote ; the excellent dinner denotes on the part of the chef the easy leisure in which true artists love to work. The waiters have nothing to do but lounge about the hall and chink in their pockets the fees of the past season. The day has been lovely in itself, and per- vaded, to my sense, by the gentle glow of a natural satisfaction at my finding myself again on the threshold of Italy. I am lodged en prince, in a room with a balcony hanging over the lake — a balcony on which I spent a long time this morning at dawn, thanking the mountain-tops, from the depths of a landscape- lover's heart, for their promise of superbly fair weather. There were a great many mountain-tops to thank, for the crags and [ 137 ] ITALIAN HOURS peaks and pinnacles tumbled away, through the morning mist in an endless confusion of grandeur. I have been all day in better humour with Lucerne than ever before — a forecast reflection of Italian moods. If Switzerland, as I wrote the other day, is so furiously a show-place. Lucerne is certainly one of the biggest booths at the fair. The little quay, under the trees, squeezed in between the decks of the steamboats and the doors of the hotels, is a terrible medley of Saxon dialects — a jumble of pilgrims in all the phases of devotion, equipped with book and staff, alpen- stock and Baedeker. There are so many hotels and trinket-shops, so many omnibuses and steamers, so many Saint-Gothard vet- turini, so many ragged urchins poking photographs, minerals and Lucernese English at you, that you feel as if lake and moun- tains themselves, in all their loveliness, were but a part of the "enterprise" of landlords and pedlars, and half expect to see the Righi and Pilatus and the fine weather figure as items on your hotel-bill between the bougie and the siphon. Nature her- self assists you to this conceit; there is something so operatic and suggestive of footlights and scene-shifters in the view on which Lucerne looks out. You are one of five thousand — fifty thousand — "acconunodated" spectators; you have taken your season-ticket and there is a responsible impresario somewhere behind the scenes. There is such a luxury of beauty in the pros- pect — such a redundancy of composition and effect — so many more peaks and pinnacles than are needed to make one heart happy or regale the vision of one quiet observer, that you finally accept the little Babel on the quay and the looming masses in the [138 ] THE OLD SAINT-GOTHARD clouds as equal parts of a perfect system, and feel as if the moun- tains had been waiting so many ages for the hotels to come and balance the colossal group, that they show a right, after all, to have them big and numerous. The scene-shifters have been at work all day long, composing and discomposing the beautiful background of the prospect — massing the clouds and scatter- ing the light, effacing and reviving, making play with their won- derful machinery of mist and haze. The mountains rise, one behind the other, in an enchanting gradation of distances and of melting blues and greys ; you think each successive tone the loveliest and haziest possible till you see another loom dimly behind it. I could n't enjoy even The Swiss Times, over my break- fast, till I had marched forth to the office of the Saint-Gothard service of coaches and demanded the banquette for to-morrow. The one place at the disposal of the office was taken, but I might possibly m entendre with the conductor for his own seat — the conductor being generally visible, in the intervals of business, at the post-office. To the post-office, after breakfast, I repaired, over the fine new bridge which now spans the green Reuss and gives such a woeful air of country-cousinship to the crooked old wooden structure which did sole service when I was here four years ago. The old bridge is covered with a running hood of shingles and adorned with a series of very quaint and vivid little paintings of the " Dance of Death," quite in the Holbein manner ; the new sends up a painful glare from its white limestone, and is ornamented with candelabra in a meretricious imitation of plati- num. As an almost professional cherisher of the quaint I ought [ 139 ] ITALIAN HOURS to have chosen to return at least by the dark and narrow way; but mark how luxury unmans us. I was already demoralised. I crossed the threshold of the timbered portal, took a few steps, and retreated. It smelt badly! So I marched back, counting the lamps in their fine falsity. But the other, the crooked and covered way, smelt very badly indeed ; and no good American is without a fund of accumulated sensibility to the odour of stale tiniber. Meanwhile I had spent an hour in the great yard of the post- office, waiting for my conductor to turn up and seeing the yellow malles-postes pushed to and fro. At last, being told my man was at my service, I was brought to speech of a huge, jovial, bearded, delightful Italian, clad in the blue coat and waistcoat, with close, round silver buttons, which are a heritage of the old postilions. No, it was not he ; it was a friend of his ; and finally the friend was produced, en costume de ville, but equally jovial, and Italian enough — a brave Lucernese, who had spent half of his life between Bellinzona and Camerlata. For ten francs this worthy man's perch behind the luggage was made mine as far as Bellinzona, and we separated with reciprocal wishes for good weather on the morrow. To-morrow is so manifestly deter- mined to be as fine as any other 30th of September since the weather became on this planet a topic of conversation that I have had nothing to do but stroll about Lucerne, staring, loafing and vaguely intent on regarding the fact that, whatever happens, my place is paid to Milan. I loafed into the immense new Hotel National and read the New York Tribune on a blue satin divan; after which I was rather surprised, on coming out, to find myself [ 140 ] THE OLD SAINT-GOTHARD staring at a green Swiss lake and not at the Broadway omnibuses. The Hotel National is adorned with a perfectly appointed Broad- way bar — one of the "prohibited" ones seeking hospitality in foreign lands after the manner of an old-fashioned French or Italian refugee. Milan, October. — My journey hither was such a pleasant piece of traveller's luck that I feel a delicacy for taking it to pieces to see what it was made of. Do what we will, however, there re- mains in all deeply agreeable impressions a charming something we can't analyse. I found it agreeable even, given the rest of my case, to turn out of bed, at Lucerne, by four o'clock, into the chilly autumn darkness. The thick-starred sky was cloudless, and there was as yet no flush of dawn; but the lake was wrapped in a ghostly white mist which crept halfway up the mountains and made them look as if they too had been lying down for the night and were casting away the vaporous tissues of their bedclothes. Into this fantastic fog the little steamer went creaking away, and I hung about the deck with the two or three travellers who had known better than to believe it would save them francs or mid- night sighs — over those debts you "pay with your person" — to go and wait for the diligence at the Poste at Fliielen, or yet at the Guillaume Tell. The dawn came sailing up over the moun- tain-tops, flushed but unperturbed, and blew out the little stars and then the big ones, as a thrifty matron after a party blows out her candles and lamps; the mist went melting and wandering away into the duskier hollows and recesses of the mountains, and the summits defined their profiles against the cool soft light. [141] ITALIAN HOURS At Fliielen, before the landing, the big yellow coaches were actively making themselves bigger, and piling up boxes and bags on their roofs in a way to turn nervous people's thoughts to the sharp corners of the downward twists of the great road. I climbed into my own banquette, and stood eating peaches — half-a-dozen women were hawking them about under the horses' legs — with an air of security that might have been offensive to the people scrambling and protesting below between coupe and interieur. They were all English and all had false alarms about the claim of somebody else to their place, the place for which they produced their ticket, with a declaration in three or four different tongues of the inalienable right to it given them by the expendi- ture of British gold. They were all serenely confuted by the stout, purple-faced, many-buttoned conductors, patted on the backs, assured that their bath-tubs had every advantage of position on the top, and stowed away according to their dues. When once one has fairly started on a journey and has but to go and go by the impetus received, it is surprising what entertainment one finds in very small things. We surrender to the gaping traveller's mood, which surely is n't the unwisest the heart knows. I don't envy people, at any rate, who have outlived or outworn the simple sweetness of feeling settled to go somewhere with bag and um- brella. If we are settled on the top of a coach, and the " some- where " contains an element of the new and strange, the case is at its best. In this matter wise people are content to become chil- dren again. We don't turn about on our knees to look out of the omnibus-window, but we indulge in very much the same round- [ 142 ] THE OLD SAINT-GOTHARD eyed contemplation of accessible objects. Responsibility is left at home or at the worst packed away in the valise, relegated to quite another part of the diligence with the clean shirts and the writing-case, I sucked in the gladness of gaping, for this occasion, with the somewhat acrid juice of my indifferent peaches ; it made me think them very good. This was the first of a series of kindly services it rendered me. It made me agree next, as we started, that the gentleman at the booking-office at Lucerne had but played a harmless joke when he told me the regular seat in the banquette was taken. No one appeared to claim it; so the conductor and I reversed positions, and I found him quite as conversible as the usual Anglo-Saxon. He was trolling snatches of melody and showing his great yellow teeth in a jovial grin all the way to Bellinzona — and this in face of the sombre fact that the Saint-Gothard tunnel is scrap- ing away into the mountain, all the while, under his nose, and numbering the days of the many-buttoned brotherhood. But he hopes, for long service's sake, to be taken into the employ of the railway; he at least is no cherisher of quaintness and has no ro- mantic perversity. I found the railway coming on, however, in a manner very shocking to mine. About an hour short of Ander- matt they have pierced a huge black cavity in the mountain, around which has grown up a swarming, digging, hammering, smoke-compelling colony. There are great barracks, with tall chimneys, down in the gorge that bristled the other day but with natural graces, and a wonderful increase of wine-shops in the little village of Goschenen above. Along the breast of the moun- [143] ITALIAN HOURS tain, beside the road, come wandering several miles of very hand- some iron pipes, of a stupendous girth — a conduit for the water- power with which some of the machinery is worked. It lies at its mighty length among the rocks like an immense black serpent, and serves, as a mere detail, to give one the measure of the cen- tral enterprise. When at the end of our long day's journey, well down in warm Italy, we came upon the other aperture of the tun- nel, I could but uncap with a grim reverence. Truly Nature is great, but she seems to me to stand in very much the shoes of my poor friend the conductor. She is being superseded at her strong- est points, successively, and nothing remains but for her to take humble service with her master. If she can hear herself think amid that din of blasting and hammering she must be reckoning up the years to elapse before the cleverest of Ober-Ingenieurs decides that mountains are mere obstructive matter and has the Jungfrau melted down and the residuum carried away in bal- loons and dumped upon another planet. The Devil's Bridge, with the same failing apparently as the good Homer, was decidedly nodding. The volume of water in the torrent was shrunken, and I missed the thunderous uproar and far-leaping spray that have kept up a miniature tempest in the neighbourhood on my other passages. It suddenly occurs to me that the fault is not in the good Homer's inspiration, but simply in the big black pipes above-mentioned. They dip into the rush- ing stream higher up, presumably, and pervert its fine frenzy to their prosaic uses. There could hardly be a more vivid reminder of the standing quarrel between use and beauty, and of the hard [ 144 ] THE OLD SAINT-GOTHARD time poor beauty is having. I looked wistfully, as we rattled into dreary Andermatt, at the great white zigzags of the Oberalp road, which climbed away to the left. Even on one's way to Italy one may spare a throb of desire for the beautiful vision of the castled Grisons. Dear to me the memory of my day's drive last summer through that long blue avenue of mountains, to queer little mouldering Ilanz, visited before supper in the ghostly dusk. At Andermatt a sign over a little black doorway flanked by two dung- hills seemed to me tolerably comical: Mineraux, Quadrupedes, Oiseaux, CEufs, Tableaux Antiques. We bundled in to dinner and the American gentleman in the banquette made the acquaint- ance of the Irish lady in the coupe, who talked of the weather as foine and wore a Persian scarf twisted about her head. At the other end of the table sat an Englishman, out of the interieur, who bore an extraordinary resemblance to the portraits of Ed- ward VI's and Mary's reigns. He was a walking, a convincing Holbein, The impression was of value to a cherisher of quaint- ness, and he must have wondered — not knowing me for such a character — why I stared at him. It was n't him I was staring at, but some handsome Seymour or Dudley or Digby with a ruff and a round cap and plume. • From Andermatt, through its high, cold, sunny valley, we passed into rugged little Hospenthal, and then up the last stages of the ascent. From here the road was all new to me. Among the sum- mits of the various Alpine passes there is little to choose. You wind and double slowly into keener cold and deeper stillness; you put on your overcoat and turn up the collar ; you count the [ 145 ] ITALIAN HOURS nestling snow-patches and then you cease to count them; you pause, as you trudge before the lumbering coach, and Usten to the last-heard cow-bell tinkling away below you in kindlier herbage. The sky was tremendously blue, and the little stunted bushes on the snow-streaked slopes were all dyed with autumnal purples and crimsons. It was a great display of colour. Purple and crimson too, though not so fine, were the faces thrust out at us from the greasy little double casements of a barrack beside the road, where the horses paused before the last pull. There was one little girl in particular, beginning to lisser her hair, as civilisation approached, in a manner not to be described, with her poor little blue-black hands. At the summit are the two usual grim little stone taverns, the steel-blue tarn, the snow-white peaks, the pause in the cold sunshine. Then we begin to rattle down with two horses. In five minutes we are swinging along the famous zigzags. Engineer, driver, horses — it's very hand- somely done by all of them. The road curves and curls and twists and plunges like the tail of a kite ; sitting perched in the banquette, you see it making below you and in mid-air certain bold gyrations which bring you as near as possible, short of the actual experience, to the philosophy of that immortal Irishman who wished that his fall from the house-top would only last. But the zigzags last no more than Paddy's fall, and in due time we were all coming to our senses over cafe au lait in the little inn at Faido. After Faido the valley, plunging deeper, began to take thick afternoon shadows from the hills, and at Airolo we were fairly in the twilight. But the pink and yellow houses shim- [146] THE OLD SAINT-GOTHARD mered through the gentle gloom, and Italy began in broken sylla- bles to whisper that she was at hand. For the rest of the way to Bellinzona her voice was muffled in the grey of evening, and I was half vexed to lose the charming sight of the changing vege- tation. But only half vexed, for the moon was climbing all the while nearer the edge of the crags that overshadowed us, and a thin magical light came trickling down into the winding, murmur- ing gorges. It was a most enchanting business. The chestnut-trees loomed up with double their daylight stature ; the vines began to swing their low festoons like nets to trip up the fairies. At last the ruined towers of Bellinzona stood gleaming in the moonshine, and we rattled into the great post-yard. It was eleven o'clock and I had risen at four ; moonshine apart I was n't sorry. All that was very well ; but the drive next day from Bellinzona to Como is to my mind what gives its supreme beauty to this great pass. One can't describe the beauty of the Italian lakes, nor would one try if one could ; the floweriest rhetoric can recall it only as a picture on a fireboard recalls a Claude. But it lay spread before me for a whole perfect day: in the long gleam of the Major, from whose head the diligence swerves away and begins to climb the bosky hills that divide it from Lugano ; in the shimmering, melting azure of the southern slopes and masses; in the luxu- rious tangle of nature and the familiar amenity of man ; in the lawn-like inclinations, where the great grouped chestnuts make so cool a shadow in so warm a light ; in the rusty vineyards, the littered cornfields and the tawdry wayside shrines. But most of all it's the deep yellow light that enchants you and tells you where [147] ITALIAN HOURS you are. See it come filtering down through a vine-covered trellis on the red handkerchief with which a ragged contadina has bound her hair, and all the magic of Italy, to the eye, makes an aureole about the poor girl's head. Look at a brown-breasted reaper eating his chunk of black bread under a spreading chest- nut ; nowhere is shadow so charming, nowhere is colour so charged, nowhere has accident such grace. The whole drive to Lugano was one long loveliness, and the town itself is admirably Italian. There was a great unlading of the coach, during which I wan- dered under certain brown old arcades and bought for six sous, from a young woman in a gold necklace, a hatful of peaches and figs. When I came back I found the young man holding open the door of the second diligence, which had lately come up, and beck- oning to me with a despairing smile. The young man, I must note, was the most amiable of Ticinese; though he wore no buttons he was attached to the diligence in some amateurish capacity, and had an eye to the mail-bags and other valuables in the boot. I grumbled at Berne over the want of soft curves in the Swiss temperament; but the children of the tangled Tessin are cast in the Italian mould. My friend had as many quips and cranks as a Neapolitan ; we walked together for an hour under the chest- nuts, while the coach was plodding up from Bellinzona, and he never stopped singing till we reached a little wine-house where he got his mouth full of bread and cheese. I looked into his open door, a la Sterne, and saw the young woman sitting rigid and grim, staring over his head and with a great pile of bread and butter in her lap. He had only informed her most politely that [ 148] THE OLD SAINT-GOTHARD she was to be transferred to another diligence and must do him the favour to descend ; but she evidently knew of but one way for a respectable young insulary of her sex to receive the politeness of a foreign adventurer guilty of an eye betraying latent pleasantry. Heaven only knew what he was saying! I told her, and she gathered up her parcels and emerged. A part of the day's great pleasure perhaps was my grave sense of being an instrument in the hands of the powers toward the safe consignment of this young woman and her boxes. When once you have really bent to the helpless you are caught; there is no such steel trap, and it holds you fast. My rather grim Abigail was a neophyte in for- eign travel, though doubtless cunning enough at her trade, which I inferred to be that of making up those prodigious chignons worn mainly by English ladies. Her mistress had gone on a mule over the mountains to Cadenabbia, and she herself was coming up with the wardrobe, two big boxes and a bath-tub. I had played my part, under the powers, at Bellinzona, and had interposed between the poor girl's frightened English and the dreadful Ti- cinese French of the functionaries in the post-yard. At the custom- house on the Italian frontier I was of peculiar service; there was a kind of fateful fascination in it. The wardrobe was volu- minous; I exchanged a paternal glance with my charge as the douanier plunged his brown fists into it. Who was the lady at Cadenabbia ? What was she to me or I to her ? She would n't know, when she rustled down to dinner next day, that it was I who had guided the frail skiflf of her public basis of vanity to port. So unseen but not unfelt do we cross each other's orbits. The [ 149 ] ITALIAN HOURS skiff however may have foundered that evening in sight of land. I disengaged the young woman from among her fellow-travellers and placed her boxes on a hand-cart in the picturesque streets of Como, within a stone's throw of that lovely striped and toned cathedral which has the fagade of cameo medallions. I could only make the facchino swear to take her to the steamboat. He too was a jovial dog, but I hope he was polite with precautions. 1873- ITALY REVISITED ITALY REVISITED I mkiL b^. WAITED in Paris until after the elec- tions 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. [ 153] ITALIAN HOURS 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 encourage- ments 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 comfort- ably 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 rip- ping 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 [ 154] ITALY REVISITED uniforms of all the Italian officials who stand loafing about and watching the northern invaders scramble back into marching order. Wearing an administrative uniform does n'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 Mo- dane you slide straight downhill into the Italy of your desire; from which point the road edges, after the grand manner, along those great precipices that stand shoulder to shoulder, in a prodigious perpendicular file, till they finally admit you to a distant glimpse of the ancient capital of Piedmont. Turin is no city of a name to conjure with, and I pay an extrav- agant tribute to subjective emotion in speaking of it as ancient. But if the place is less bravely peninsular than Florence and Rome, at least it is more in the scenic tradition than New York and Paris; and while I paced the great arcades and looked at the fourth-rate shop windows I did n'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 [ 155 ] ITALIAN HOURS 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 com- ings 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 domicili- ary mass. In northern cities there are beautiful houses, pictur- esque and curious houses; sculptured gables that hang over the street, charming bay-windows, hooded doorways, elegant pro- portions, 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 cor- nices — impart by contrast a humble and bourgeois expression to interiors founded on the sacrifice of the whole to the part, and [ 156] H AT .ft i-S^^ ■ ■ ■ ., UNDER THE ARCADES, TURIN. ITALY REVISITED 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. 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 vul- garity there of thie 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 fre- quent perplexity to the observer of actual Italian life. The flower of "great" art in these latter years ceased to bloom very power- fully 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 sculp- ture, and on issuing from the door that has admitted you to the [ ^57 ] ITALIAN HOURS 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 vio- lent 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 had n't been many hours in the country before that truth as- sailed me ; and I may add that, the first irritation past, I found [ 158] ITALY REVISITED 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 solu- ble 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 Piff eraro." It is in this attitude and with these conventional accessories that the world has hitherto seen fit to represent young Italy, and one does n'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 MoUe, 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 evi- dently 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 [ 159 J ITALIAN HOURS 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 mercan- tile country; though I suppose it loved not its ledgers less, but its frescoes and altar-pieces more. Scattered through this para- dise regained of trade — this country of a thousand ports — we see a large number of beautiful buildings in which an endle.ss series of dusky pictures are darkening, dampening, fading, fail- ing, 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 thou- sand 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 [ i6o] ITALY REVISITED 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 pictur- esque 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. ITALIAN HOURS 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, climb- ing, 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 pri- vate 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 en- tered — the basement alone would have contained a dozen Amer- ican caravansaries. I met an American gentleman in the vesti- bule 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 [162] ITALY REVISITED specimen of Genoese architecture generally ; so far as I observed there were few houses perceptibly smaller than this Titanic tav- ern. I lunched in a dusky ballroom whose ceiling was vaulted, frescoed and gilded with the fatal facility of a couple of cen- turies ago, and which looked out upon another ancient house- front, 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 popula- tion 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 visi- ble and reproducible "effect," I mean — for the love of which one revisits Italy. It offered itself indeed in a variety of col- ours, 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 low- life. 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 in- numerable 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 [163] ITALIAN HOURS Mediterranean. Down about the basements, in the close crepus- cular 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 had n'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 con- sists 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 two- pence, 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 [ 164] ITALY REVISITED the fine quality of the ItaHan 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 had n'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 chest- nuts 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 rhanner 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 [ 165 1 ITALIAN HOURS of life for which I just now commended the Italians. I was turning back under the old gateway when the young man over- took 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 pre- sently acknowledged himself a brooding young radical and com- munist, 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 [ 166] ITALY REVISITED 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 door- ways. 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 wonder- ful painted and gilded chambers, in which foreshortened fres- coes 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. ITALIAN HOURS 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 instruc- tion 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 innumer- able 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-west- ern newness which distinguishes all the creations of the young Italian State, Nor did I find any great compensation in an im- mense 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 [ i68 ] ITALY REVISITED 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 (ac- cording 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 some- times 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 charm- ing ; the bosky grey-green hills close it in, and on either side of the entrance, perched on a bold headland, a wonderful old crum- bling 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 [ 169] ITALIAN HOURS 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 bat- tered walls and a loggia of several arches opening to a little ter- race 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 na- ture, 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 sym- pathetic, as they have it here, than that perfect autumn after- noon ; 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. ITALY REVISITED 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 fel- low-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 pav- ing-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, [171 ] ITALIAN HOURS 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 were n'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 win- dow (telling of the height and breadth of the rooms within) ; the [ 172 ] ROMAN GATEWAY, RIMINI. ITALY REVISITED 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. 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, con- tented life it seemed, with rojnantic beauty as a part of its daily texture ! — the sunny terrace, with its tangled podere beneath it ; [ 173 ] ITALIAN HOURS 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 quiet- ness, the quietness was mostly but that of the intent act. A beau- tiful occupation in that beautiful position, what could possibly be better ? That is what I spoke just now of envying — a way of life that does n'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 contempla- tions 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 need n'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 sit- ting on low parapets, in intervals of flower-topped wall, and look- ing 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 [174] ITALY REVISITED 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 impres- sion 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 massive- ness are a satire on their present fate. They were n't built with such a thickness of wall and depth of embrasure, such a solid- ity of staircase and superfluity of stone, simply to afford an eco- nomical 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 man- ners, that threw a tinge of melancholy over the general prospect; certain it is that, having always found this note as of a myriad [ 175] ITALIAN HOURS 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. 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 con- cerned — as the mere stock-in-trade of an impecunious but thrifty people. It is this spiritual solitude, this conscious dis- connection 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, [ 176] ITALY REVISITED I made haste to enter and purchase these amusing little books, some passages of which I remembered formerly to have read. I could n'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 some- thing more than is set down in the bond, and we must thank it for its generosity; and when it stops producing them or car- ing 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 [ 177 J ITALIAN HOURS way of taking such things, and the sensitive stranger who has been walking about for a week with his mind full of the sweet- ness and suggestiveness of a hundred Florentine places may feel at last in looking into Mr. Ruskin's little tracts that, discord for discord, there is n'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 dese- crations. For my own part, I believe there are few things in this line that the new Italian spirit is n't capable of, and not many indeed that we are n'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 grow- ing into an old Italy again will continue to take her elbow-room wherever she may find it. 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 [ 178 ] '!■'■ '■■''I'VW^lMg 1 f m -'*S_^ R; .-„., -S^.i-^t; ^,' SANTA MARIA NOVELLA, FLORENCE. ITALY REVISITED company I was to go and look at Giotto's beautiful frescoes in the cloister of the church. My friend was a long time coming, so that I had an hour with Mr. Ruskin, whom I called just now a light litterateur because in these little Mornings in Florence he is for ever making his readers laugh. I remembered of course where I was, and in spite of my latent hilarity felt I had rarely got such a snubbing. I had really been enjoying the good old city of Florence, but I now learned from Mr. Ruskin that this was a scandalous waste of charity. I should have gone about with an imprecation on my lips, I should have worn a face three yards long. I had taken great pleasure in certain frescoes by Ghirlandaio in the choir of that very church; but it appeared from one of the little books that these frescoes were as naught. I had much admired Santa Croce and had thought the Duomo a very noble affair; but I had now the most positive assurance I knew nothing about them. After a while, if it was only ill-humour that was needed for doing honour to the city of the Medici, I felt that I had risen to a proper level ; only now it was Mr. Ruskin himself I had lost patience with, not the stupid Brunel- leschi, not the vulgar Ghirlandaio. Indeed I lost patience alto- gether, 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 my- self in repenting of having done so. [ 179 ] ITALIAN HOURS 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 pic- tures 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 out- line 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." Tou can never see it. This seemed to my friend insuf- ferable, 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 [ i8o] ITALY REVISITED 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 inci- dental 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 a way, 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 talk- ing about art. You can say nothing worse about him than that." Which is perfectly true. Art is the one corner of human life [i8i ] ITALIAN HOURS 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 repre- sentational impulse. In other connections our impulses are condi- tioned and embarrassed; we are allowed to have only so many as are consistent with those of our neighbours; with their con- venience 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 unim- portant 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 respon- sibilities 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. [ 182 J ITALY REVISITED There can be no greater want of tact in dealing with those things with which men attempt to ornament life than to be per- petually 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. Differ- ences 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 feli- cities 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 por- tico, it will be remembered, is entirely composed of glass; a [ 183] ITALIAN HOURS 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 inter- vals of the casements. It is projected upon the numerous pic- tures 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 pro- vided, 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 fre- quent 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 [ 184 1 ITALY REVISITED 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 wan- ders through the houses of Florence and is supported by the little goldsmiths' booths on the Ponte Vecchio. In the rich insuf- ficient light of these beautiful rooms, where, to look at the pic- tures, 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 Lo- renzo di Credi are the clearest, the sweetest and best of all paint- ers ; 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 could n'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 — be- cause more than many other places it savours of old Florence. More for instance, in reality, than the Bargello, though the Bar- gello makes great pretensions. Beautiful and masterful though [ 185] ITALIAN HOURS the Bargello is, it smells too strongly of restoration, and, much of old Italy as still lurks in its furbished and renovated cham- bers, 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 Tus- can 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 re- freshed 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 sculp- ture, most of the pieces of which have come from suppressed reli- gious 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 did n't stop, as you probably could n'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 [ i86] ITALY REVISITED 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 con- temporary manners. But that it would really have the gross- ness to hang about is a fact over which, as he records it, an in- veterate, 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 sum- mit of an extraordinary hill, you have time to forget the puffing indiscretion while you wind upwards to the city-gate. The posi- tion 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 crum- bling ramparts, is a meanly arranged and, as Italian cities go, not [ 187 J ITALIAN HOURS particularly impressive little town. I spent a beautiful Sunday there and took in the charming church. I gave it my best atten- tion, 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 theo- logical frescoes of Luca Signorelli, though I have seen composi- tions of this general order that appealed to me more. Charac- teristically 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 fig- ure — more expressive of movement than most of the creations of this pictorial peace-maker — of Christ in judgment. Yet the inteirest of the cathedral of Orvieto is mainly not the visible re- sult, 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.' 1877. ' Charles Eliot Norton, Notes of Travel and Study in Italy. A ROMAN HOLIDAY A ROMAN HOLIDAY T is certainly sweet to be merry at the right moment; but the right moment hardly seems to me the ten days of the Roman Carnival. It was my rather cyni- cal suspicion perhaps that they would n't keep to my imagination the brilliant pro- mise of legend ; but I have been justified by the event and have been decidedly less conscious of the festal influences of the season than of the inalien,able gravity of the place. There was a time when the Car- nival was a serious matter — that is a heartily joyous one ; but, thanks to the seven-league boots the kingdom of Italy has lately donned for the march of progress in quite other directions, the fashion of public revelry has fallen woefully out of step. The state of mind and manners under which the Carnival was kept in generous good faith I doubt if an American can exactly con- ceive : he can only say to himself that for a month in the year there must have been things — things considerably of humilia- tion — it was comfortable to forget. But now that Italy is made the Carnival is unmade ; and we are not especially tempted to envy the attitude of a population who have lost their relish for play and not yet acquired to any striking extent an enthusiasm [ 191 ] ITALIAN HOURS for work. The spectacle on the Corso has seemed to me, on the whole, an illustration of that great breach with the past of which Catholic Christendom felt the somewhat muffled shock in September, 1870. A traveller acquainted with the fully papal Rome, coming back any time during the past winter, must have immediately noticed that something momentous had happened — something hostile to the elements of picture and colour and "style." My first warning was that ten minutes after my arrival I found myself face to face with a newspaper stand. The im- possibility in the other days of having anything in the journalistic line but the Osservatore Romano and the Voce della Verita used to seem to me much connected with the extraordinary leisure of thought and stillness of mind to which the place admitted you. But now the slender piping of the Voice of Truth is stifled by the raucous note of eventide vendors of the Capitale, the Liberia and the Fanfulla ; and Rome reading unexpurgated news is an- other Rome indeed. For every subscriber to the Liberia there may well be an antique masker and reveller less. As striking a sign of the new regime is the extraordinary increase of popula- tion. The Corso was always a well-filled street, but now it 's a perpetual crush. I never cease to wonder where the new-comers are lodged, and how such spotless flowers of fashion as the gen- tlemen who stare at the carriages can bloom in the atmosphere of those camere mobiliate of which I have had glimpses. This, however, is their own question, and bravely enough they meet it. They proclaimed somehow, to the first freshness of my won- der, as I say, that by force of numbers Rome had been secu- [ 192 ] A ROMAN HOLIDAY larised. An Italian dandy is a figure visually to reckon with, but these goodly throngs of them scarce offered compensation for the absent monsignori, treading the streets in their purple stock- ings and followed by the solemn servants who returned on their behalf the bows of the meaner sort; for the mourning gear of the cardinals' coaches that formerly glittered with scarlet and swung with the weight of the footmen clinging behind ; for the certainty that you'll not, by the best of traveller's luck, meet the Pope sitting deep in the shadow of his great chariot with uplifted fingers like some inaccessible idol in his shrine. You may meet the King indeed, who is as ugly, as imposingly ugly, as some idols, though not so inaccessible. The other day as I passed the Quirinal he drove up in a low carriage with a single attend- ant ; and a group of men and women who had been waiting near the gate rushed at him with a number of folded papers. The carriage slackened pace and he pocketed their offerings with a business-like air — that of a good-natured man accepting hand- bills at a street-corner. Here was a monarch at his palace gate receiving petitions from his subjects — being adjured to right their wrongs. The scene ought to have thrilled me, but some- how it had no more intensity than a woodcut in an illustrated newspaper. Homely I should call it at most; admirably so, cer- tainly, for there were lately few sovereigns standing, I believe, with whom their people enjoyed these filial hand-to-hand rela- tions. The King this year, however, has had as little to do with the Carnival as the Pope, and the innkeepers and Americans have marked it for their own. [ 193 ] ITALIAN HOURS It was advertised to begin at half-past two o'clock of a cer- tain Saturday, and punctually at the stroke of the hour, from my room across a wide court, I heard a sudden multiplication of sounds and confusion of tongues in the Corso. I was writing to a friend for whom I cared more than for any mere romp ; but as the minutes elapsed and the hubbub deepened curiosity got the better of affection, and I remembered that I was really within eye-shot of an affair the fame of which had ministered to the day- dreams of my infancy. I used to have a scrap-book with a coloured print of the starting of the bedizened wild horses, and the use of a library rich in keepsakes and annuals with a frontispiece commonly of a masked lady in a balcony, the heroine of a delight- ful tale further on. Agitated by these tender memories I de- scended into the street ; but I confess I looked in vain for a masked lady who might serve as a frontispiece, in vain for any object whatever that might adorn a tale. Masked and muffled ladies there were in abundance; but their masks were of ugly wire, perfectly resembling the little covers placed upon strong cheese in German hotels, and their drapery was a shabby water-proof with the hood pulled over their chignons. They were armed with great tin scoops or funnels, with which they solemnly shov- elled lime and flour out of bushel-baskets and down on the heads of the people in the street. They were packed into bal- conies all the way along the straight vista of the Corso, in which their calcareous shower maintained a dense, gritty, unpalatable fog. The crowd was compact in the street, and the Americans in it were tossing back confetti out of great satchels hung round [ 194 3 A ROMAN HOLIDAY their necks. It was quite the "you're another" sort of repartee, and less seasoned than I had hoped with the airy mockery tra- dition hangs about this festival. The scene was striking, in a word ; but somehow not as I had dreamed of its being. I stood regardful, I suppose, but with a peculiarly tempting blankness of visage, for in a moment I received half a bushel of flour on my too-philosophic head. Decidedly it was an ignoble form of humour. I shook my ears like an emergent diver, and had a sudden vision of how still and sunny and solemn, how peculiarly and undisturbedly themselves, how secure from any intrusion less sympathetic than one's own, certain outlying parts of Rome must just then be. The Carnival had received its death- blow in my imagination; and it has been ever since but a thin and dusky ghost of pleasure that has flitted at intervals in and out of my consciousness. I turned my back accordingly on the Corso and wandered away to the grass-grown quarters delightfully free even from the possibility of a fellow-countryman. And so having set myself an example I have been keeping Carnival by strolling perversely along the silent circumference of Rome. I have doubtless lost a great deal. The Princess Margaret has occupied a balcony opposite the open space which leads into Via Condotti and, I believe, like the discreet princess she is, has dealt in no missiles but bonbons, bouquets and white doves. I would have waited half an hour any day to see the Princess Margaret hold a dove on her forefinger ; but I never chanced to notice any preparation for that effect. And yet do what you will you can't really elude [195] ITALIAN HOURS the Carnival. As the days elapse it filters down into the manners of the common people, and before the week is over the very beg- gars at the church-doors seem to have gone to the expense of a domino. When you meet these specimens of dingy drollery caper- ing about in dusky back-streets at all hours of the day and night, meet them flitting out of black doorways between the greasy groups that cluster about Roman thresholds, you feel that a love of "pranks," the more vivid the better, must from far back have been implanted in the Roman temperament with a strong hand. An unsophisticated American is wonderstruck at the number of persons, of every age and various conditions, whom it costs nothing in the nature of an ingenuous blush to walk up and down the streets in the costume of a theatrical supernumer- ary. Fathers of families do it at the head of an admiring progeni- ture; aunts and uncles and grandmothers do it; all the family does it, with varying splendour but with the same good con- science. "A pack of babies!" the doubtless too self-conscious alien pronounces it for its pains, and tries to imagine himself strutting along Broadway in a battered tin helmet and a pair of yellow tights. Our vices are certainly different ; it takes those of the innocent sort to be so ridiculous. A self-consciousness lapsing so easily, in fine, strikes me as so near a relation to amenity, urbanity and general gracefulness that, for myself, I should be sorry to lay a tax on it, lest these other commodities should also cease to come to market. I was rewarded, when I had turned away with my ears full of flour, by a glimpse of an intenser life than the dingy foolery [ 196] A ROMAN HOLIDAY of the Corso. I walked down by the back streets to the steps mounting to the Capitol — that long inclined plane, rather, broken at every two paces, which is the unfailing disappointment, I believe, of tourists primed for retrospective raptures. Certainly the Capitol seen from this side isn't commanding. The hill is so low, the ascent so narrow, Michael Angelo's architecture in the quadrangle at the top so meagre, the whole place somehow so much more of a mole-hill than a mountain, that for the first ten minutes of your standing there Roman history seems sud- denly to have sunk through a trap-door. It emerges however on the other side, in the Forum ; and here meanwhile, if you get no sense of the sublime, you get gradually a sense of exquisite com- position. Nowhere in Rome is more colour, more charm, more sport for the eye. The mild incline, during the winter months, is always covered with lounging sun-seekers, and especially with those more constantly obvious members of the Roman popula- tion — beggars, soldiers, monks and tourists. The beggars and peasants lie kicking their heels along that grandest of loafing- places the great steps of the Ara Coeli. The dwarfish look of the Capitol is intensified, I think, by the neighbourhood of this huge blank staircase, mouldering away in disuse, the weeds thick in its crevices, and climbing to the rudely solemn fapade of the church. The sunshine glares on this great unfinished wall only to light up its featureless despair, its expression of conscious, irremedi- able incompleteness. Sometimes, massing its rusty screen against the deep blue sky, with the little cross and the sculptured porch casting a clear-cut shadow on the bricks, it seems to have even [ 197 ] ITALIAN HOURS more than a Roman desolation, it confusedly suggests Spain and Africa — lands with no latent risorgimenti, with absolutely nothing but a fatal past. The legendary wolf of Rome has lately been accommodated with a little artificial grotto, among the cacti and the palms, in the fantastic triangular garden squeezed between the steps of the church and the ascent to the Capitol, where she holds a perpetual levee and "draws" apparently as powerfully as the Pope himself. Above, in the piazzetta before the stuccoed palace which rises so jauntily on a basement of thrice its magnitude, are more loungers and knitters in the sun, seated round the massively inscribed base of the statue of Mar- cus Aurelius. Hawthorne has perfectly expressed the attitude of this admirable figure in saying that it extends its arm with "a command which is in itself a benediction." I doubt if any statue of king or captain in the public places of the world has more to commend it to the general heart. Irrecoverable simpli- city — residing so in irrecoverable Style — has no sturdier repre- sentative. Here is an impression that the sculptors of the last three hundred years have been laboriously trying to reproduce ; but contrasted with this mild old monarch their prancing horse- men suggest a succession of riding-masters taking out young ladies' schools. The admirably human character of the figure survives the rusty decomposition of the bronze and the slight "debasement" of the art; and one may call it singular that in the capital of Christendom the portrait most suggestive of a Christian conscience is that of a pagan emperor. You recover in some degree your stifled hopes of sublimity as [ 198 J A ROMAN HOLIDAY you pass beyond the palace and take your choice of either curv- ing slope to descend into the Forum. Then you see that the little stuccoed edifice is but a modern excrescence on the mighty cliff of a primitive construction, whose great squares of porous tufa, as they underlie each other, seem to resolve themselves back into the colossal cohesion of unhewn rock. There are prodi- gious strangenesses in the union of this airy and comparatively fresh-faced superstructure and these deep-plunging, hoary foun- dations; and few things in Rome are more entertaining to the eye than to measure the long plumb-line which drops from the inhabited windows of the palace, with their little over-peeping balconies, their muslin curtains and their bird-cages, down to the rugged constructional work of the Republic. In the Forum proper the sublime is eclipsed again, though the late extension of the excavations gives a chance for it. Nothing in Rome helps your fancy to a more vigorous back- ward flight than to lounge on a sunny day over the railing which guards the great central researches. It "says" more things to you than you can repeat to see the past, the ancient world, as you stand there, bodily turned up with the spade and transformed from an immaterial, inaccessible fact of time into a matter of soils and surfaces. The pleasure is the same — in kind — as what you enjoy of Pompeii, and the pain the same. It was n't here, however, that I found my compensation for forfeiting the spectacle on the Corso, but in a little church at the end of the narrow byway which diverges up the Palatine from just beside the Arch of Titus. This byway leads you between high walls, [ 199 ] ITALIAN HOURS then takes a bend and introduces you to a long row of rusty, dusty little pictures of the stations of the cross. Beyond these stands a small church with a front so modest that you hardly recognise it till you see the leather curtain. I never see a leather curtain without lifting it; it is sure to cover a constituted scene of' some sort — good, bad or indifferent. The scene this time was meagre — whitewash and tarnished candlesticks and mouldy muslin flowers being its principal features. I should n't have remained if I had n't been struck with the attitude of the sin- gle worshipper — a young priest kneeling before one of the side- altars, who, as I entered, lifted his head and gave me a sidelong look so charged with the languor of devotion that he immediately became an object of interest. He was visiting each of the altars in turn and kissing the balustrade beneath them. He was alone in the church, and indeed in the whole region. There were no beggars even at the door; they were plying their trade on the skirts of the Carnival. In the entirely deserted place he alone knelt for religion, and as I sat respectfully by it seemed to me I could hear in the perfect silence the far-away uproar of the maskers. It was my late impression of these frivolous people, I suppose, joined with the extraordinary gravity of the young priest's face — his pious fatigue, his droning prayer and his iso- lation — that gave me just then and there a supreme vision of the religious passion, its privations and resignations and exhaus- tions and its terribly small share of amusement. He was young and strong and evidently of not too refined a fibre to enjoy the Carnival; but, planted there with his face pale with fasting [ 200 ] A ROMAN HOLIDAY and his knees stiff with praying, he seemed so stern a satire on it and on the crazy thousands who were preferring it to his way, that I half expected to see some heavenly portent out of a monastic legend come down and confirm his choice. Yet I confess that though I was n't enamoured of the Carnival myself, his seemed a grim preference and this forswearing of the world a terrible game — a gaining one only if your zeal never falters ; a hard fight when it does. In such an hour, to a stout young fellow like the hero of my anecdote, the smell of incense must seem horribly stale and the muslin flowers and gilt candlesticks to figure no great bribe. And it would n't have helped him much to think that not so very far away, just beyond the Forum, in the Corso, there was sport for the million, and for nothing. I doubt on the other hand whether my young priest had thought of this. He had made himself a temple out of the very elements of his innocence, and his prayers followed each other too fast for the tempter to slip in a whisper. And so, as I say, I found a solider fact of human nature than the love of coriandoli. One of course never passes the Colosseum without paying it one's respects — without going in under one of the hundred por- tals and crossing the long oval and sitting down a while, gener- ally at the foot of the cross in the centre. I always feel, as I do so, as if I were seated in the depths of some Alpine valley. The upper portions of the side toward the Esquiline look as remote and lonely as an Alpine ridge, and you raise your eyes to their rugged sky-line, drinking in the sun and silvered by the blue air, with much the same feeling with which you would take in a grey [ 201 ] ITALIAN HOURS cliff on which an eagle might lodge. This roughly mountainous quality of the great ruin is its chief interest; beauty of detail has pretty well vanished, especially since the high-growing wild- flowers have been plucked away by the new government, whose functionaries, surely, at certain points of their task, must have felt as if they shared the dreadful trade of those who gather samphire. Even if you are on your way to the Lateran you won't grudge the twenty minutes it will take you, on leaving the Colosseum, to turn away under the Arch of Constantine, whose noble battered bas-reliefs, with the chain of tragic statues — fettered, drooping barbarians — round its summit, I assume you to have profoundly admired, toward the piazzetta of the church of San Giovanni e Paolo, on the slope of Caelian. No spot in Rome can show a cluster of more charming accidents. The ancient brick apse of the church peeps down into the trees of the little wooded walk before the neighbouring church of San Gregorio, intensely venerable beneath its excessive modernisation ; and a series of heavy brick buttresses, flying across to an opposite wall, overarches the short, steep, paved passage which leads into the small square. This is flanked on one side by the long medi- aeval portico of the church of the two saints, sustained by eight time-blackened columns of granite and marble. On another rise the great scarce-windowed walls of a Passionist convent, and on the third the portals of a grand villa, whose tall porter, with his cockade and silver-topped staff, standing sublime behind his grating, seems a kind of mundane St. Peter, I suppose, to the beggars who sit at the church door or lie in the sun along the [ 202 ] A ROMAN HOLIDAY farther slope which leads to the gate of the convent. The place always seems to me the perfection of an out-of-the-way corner — a place you would think twice before telling people about, lest you should find them there the next time you were to go. It is such a group of objects, singly and in their happy combina- tion, as one must come to Rome to find at one's house door; but what makes it peculiarly a picture is the beautiful dark red cam- panile of the church, which stands embedded in the mass of the convent. It begins, as so many things in Rome begin, with a stout foundation of antique travertine, and rises high, in del- icately quaint mediaeval brickwork — little tiers and. apertures sustained on miniature columns and adorned with small cracked slabs of green and yellow marble, inserted almost at random. When there are three or four brown-breasted contadini sleeping in the sun before the convent doors, and a departing monk lead- ing his shadow down over them, I think you will not find any- thing in Rome more sketchahle. If you stop, however, to observe everything worthy of your water-colours you will never reach St. John Lateran. My busi- ness was much less with the interior of that vast and empty, that cold clean temple, which I have never found peculiarly interest- ing, than with certain charming features of its surrounding pre- cinct — the crooked old court beside it, which admits you to the Baptistery and to a delightful rear-view of the queer architectural odds and ends that may in Rome compose a florid ecclesiastical ' fafade. There are more of these, a stranger jumble of chance detail, of lurking recesses and wanton projections and inexplic- [ 203 ] ITALIAN HOURS able windows, than I have memory or phrase for; but the gem of the collection is the oddly perched peaked turret, with its yellow travertine welded upon the rusty brickwork, which was not meant to be suspected, and the brickwork retreating beneath and leaving it in the odd position of a tower under which you may see the sky. As to the great front of the church overlook- ing the Porta San Giovanni, you are not admitted behind the scenes; the term is quite in keeping, for the architecture has a vastly theatrical air. It is extremely imposing — that of St. Peter's alone is more so ; and when from far off on the Campagna you see the colossal images of the mitred saints along the top standing distinct against the sky, you forget their coarse construction and their inflated draperies. The view from the great space which stretches from the church steps to the city wall is the very prince of views. Just beside you, beyond the great alcove of mosaic, is the Scala Santa, the marble staircase which (says the legend) Christ descended under the weight of Pilate's judgment, and which all Christians must for ever ascend on their knees ; before you is the city gate which opens upon the Via Appia Nuova, the long gaunt file of arches of the Claudian aqueduct, their jagged ridge stretching away like the vertebral column of some monstrous mouldering skeleton, and upon the blooming brown and purple flats and dells of the Campagna and the glowing blue of the Alban Mountains, spotted with their white, high-nestling towns; while to your left is the great grassy space, lined with dwarfish mulberry- trees, which stretches across to the damp little sister-basilica of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme. During a former visit to Rome I [ 204 ] THE FACADE OF ST. JOHN LATERAN, ROME. A ROMAN HOLIDAY lost my heart to this idle tract,' and wasted much time in sitting on the steps of the church and watching certain white-cowled friars who were sure to be passing there for the delight of my eyes. There are fewer friars now, and there are a great many of the king's recruits, who inhabit the ex-conventual barracks adjoining Santa Croce and are led forward to practise their goose-step on the sunny turf. Here too the poor old cardinals who are no longer to be seen on the Pincio descend from their mourning-coaches and relax their venerable knees. These members alone still testify to the traditional splendour of the princes of the Church ; for as they advance the lifted black petticoat reveals a flash of scarlet stockings and makes you groan at the victory of civilisation over colour. If St. John Lateran disappoints you internally, you have an easy compensation in pacing the long lane which connects it with Santa Maria Maggiore and entering the singularly perfect nave of that most delightful of churches. The first day of my stay in Rome under the old dispensation I spent in wandering at random through the city, with accident for my valet-de-place. It served me to perfection and introduced me to the best things ; among others to an immediate happy relation with Santa Maria Maggiore. First impressions, memorable impressions, are generally irre- coverable ; they often leave one the wiser, but they rarely return in the same form. I remember, of my coming uninformed and unprepared into the place of worship and of curiosity that I have named, only that I sat for half an hour on the edge of the base of ' Utterly overbuilt and gone — 1909. [ 205 ] ITALIAN HOURS one of the marble columns of the beautiful nave and enjoyed a perfect revel of — what shall I call it ? — taste, intelligence, fancy, perceptive emotion? The place proved so endlessly suggestive that perception became a throbbing confusion of images, and I departed with a sense of knowing a good deal that is not set down in Murray. I have seated myself more than once again at the base of the same column ; but you live your life only once, the parts as well as the whole. The obvious charm of the church is the ele- gant grandeur of the nave — its perfect shapeliness and its rich simplicity, its long double row of white marble columns and its high flat roof, embossed with intricate gildings and mouldings. It opens into a choir of an extraordinary splendour of effect, which I recommend you to look out for of a fine afternoon. At such a time the glowing western light, entering the high windows of the tribune, kindles the scattered masses of colour into sombre bright- ness, scintillates on the great solemn mosaic of the vault, touches the porphyry columns of the superb baldachino with ruby lights, and buries its shining shafts in the deep-toned shadows that hang about frescoes and sculptures and mouldings. The deeper charm even than in such things, however, is the social or historic note or tone or atmosphere of the church — I fumble, you see, for my right expression ; the sense it gives you, in common with most of the Ro- man churches, and more than any of them, of having been prayed in for several centuries by an endlessly curious and complex society. It takes no great attention to let it come to you that the authority of Italian Catholicism has lapsed not a little in these days ; not less also perhaps than to feel that, as they stand, these deserted temples [206 ] A ROMAN HOLIDAY were the fruit of a society leavened through and through by ec- clesiastical manners, and that they formed for ages the constant background of the human drama. They are, as one may say, the churchiest churches in Europe — the fullest of gathered mem- ories, of the experience of their office. There 's not a figure one has read of in old-world annals that is n't to be imagined on proper occasion kneeling before the lamp-decked Confession beneath the altar of Santa Maria Maggiore. One sees after all, however, even among the most palpable realities, very much what the play of one's imagination projects there ; and I present my remarks simply as a reminder that one's constant excursions into these places are not the least interesting episodes of one's walks in Rome. I had meant to give a simple illustration of the church-habit, so to speak, but I have given it at such a length as leaves scant space to touch on the innumerable topics brushed by the pen that begins to take Roman notes. It is by the aimless flanerie which leaves you free to follow capriciously every hint of entertainment that you get to know Rome. The greater part of the life about you goes on in the streets ; and for an observer fresh from a country in which town scenery is at the least monotonous incident and character and picture seem to abound. I become conscious with compunction, let me hasten to add, that I have launched myself thus on the subject of Roman churches and Roman walks with- out so much as a preliminary allusion to St. Peter's. One is apt to proceed thither on rainy days with intentions of exercise — to put the case only at that — and to carry these out body and [207 ] ITALIAN HOURS mind. Taken as a walk not less than as a church, St. Peter's of course reigns alone. Even for the profane "constitutional" it serves where the Boulevards, where Piccadilly and Broadway, fall short, and if it did n't offer to our use the grandest area in the world it would still offer the most diverting. Few great works of art last longer to the curiosity, to the perpetually transcended attention. You think you have taken the whole thing in, but it expands, it rises sublime again, and leaves your measure itself poor. You never let the ponderous leather curtain bang down behind you — your weak lift of a scant edge of whose padded vastness resembles the liberty taken in folding back the parch- ment corner of some mighty folio page — without feeling all former visits to have been but missed attempts at apprehension and the actual to achieve your first real possession. The conven- tional question is ever as to whether one has n't been "disap- pointed in the size," but a few honest folk here and there, I hope, will never cease to say no. The place struck me from the first as the hugest thing conceivable — a real exaltation of one's idea of space ; so that one's entrance, even from the great empty square which either glares beneath the deep blue sky or makes of the cool far-cast shadow of the immense front something that resembles a big slate-coloured country on a map, seems not so much a going in somewhere as a going out. The mere man of pleasure in quest of new sensations might well not know where to better his encounter there of the sublime shock that brings him, within the threshold, to an immediate gasping pause. There are days when the vast nave looks mysteriously vaster than on [ 208 J A ROMAN HOLIDAY others and the gorgeous baldachino a longer journey beyond the far-spreading tessellated plain of the pavement, and when the light has yet a quality which lets things loom their largest, while the scattered figures — I mean the human, for there are plenty of others — mark happily the scale of items and parts. Then you have only to stroll and stroll and gaze and gaze ; to watch the glorious altar-canopy lift its bronze architecture, its colossal embroidered contortions, like a temple within a temple, and feel yourself, at the bottom of the abysmal shaft of the dome, dwindle to a crawling dot. Much of the constituted beauty resides in the fact that it is all general beauty, that you are appealed to by no specific de- tails, or that these at least, practically never importunate, are as taken for granted as the lieutenants and captains are taken for granted in a great standing army — among whom indeed indi- vidual aspects may figure here the rather shifting range of deco- rative dignity in which details, when observed, often prove poor (though never not massive and substantially precious) and some- times prove ridiculous. The sculptures, with the sole exception of Michael Angelo's ineffable "Pieta," which lurks obscurely in a side-chapel — this indeed to my sense the rarest artistic com- bination of the greatest things the hand of man has produced — are either bad or indifferent ; and the universal incrustation of marble, though sumptuous enough, has a less brilliant effect than much later work of the same sort, that for instance of St. Paul's without the Walls. The supreme beauty is the splen- didly sustained simplicity of the whole. The thing represents [ 209 ] ITALIAN HOURS a prodigious imagination extraordinarily strained, yet strained, at its happiest pitch, without breaking. Its happiest pitch I say, because this is the only creation of its strenuous author in presence of which you are in presence of serenity. You may invoke the idea of ease at St. Peter's without a sense of sacrilege — which you can hardly do, if you are at all spiritually nervous, in Westminster Abbey or Notre Dame. The vast enclosed clear- ness has much to do with the idea. There are no shadows to speak of, no marked effects of shade ; only effects of light innum- erable — points at which this element seems to mass itself in airy density and scatter itself in enchanting gradations and cadences. It performs the office of gloom or of mystery in Gothic churches ; hangs like a rolling mist along the giMed vault of the nave, melts into bright interfusion the mosaic scintillations of the dome, clings and clusters and lingers, animates the whole huge and otherwise empty shell. A good Catholic, I suppose, is the same Catholic any- where, before the grandest as well as the humblest altars ; but to a visitor not formally enrolled St. Peter's speaks less of aspiration than of full and convenient assurance. The soul infinitely ex- pands there, if one will, but all on its quite human level. It mar- vels at the reach of our dream and the immensity of our resources. To be so impressed and put in our place, we say, is to be suffi- ciently "saved" ; we can't be more than that in heaven itself; and what specifically celestial beauty such a show or such a substitute may lack it makes up for in certainty and tangibility. And yet if one's hours on the scene are not actually spent in praying, the spirit seeks it again as for the finer comfort, for the blessing, [ 210 ] w s o OS u H U 0. ui b. O H P < Z O J O u H H A ROMAN HOLIDAY exactly, of its example, its protection and its exclusion. When you are weary of the swarming democracy of your fellow-tourists, of the unremunerative aspects of human nature on Corso and Pincio, of the oppressively frequent combination of coronets on carriage panels and stupid faces in carriages, of addled brains and lacquered boots, of ruin and dirt and decay, of priests and beggars and takers of advantage, of the myriad tokens of a halting civilisation, the image of the great temple depresses the balance of your doubts, seems to rise above even the highest tide of vulgarity and make you still believe in the heroic will and the heroic act. It 's a relief, in other words, to feel that there 's nothing but a cab- fare between your pessimism and one of the greatest of human achievements. This might serve as a Lenten peroration to these remarks of mine which have strayed so woefully from their jovial text, save that I ought fairly to confess that my last impression of the Carni- val was altogether Carnivalesque. The merry-making of Shrove Tuesday had life and felicity ; the dead letter of tradition broke out into nature and grace. I pocketed my scepticism and spent a long afternoon on the Corso. Almost every one was a masker, but you had no need to conform ; the pelting rain of confetti effect- ually disguised you. I can't say I found it all very exhilarating ; but here and there I noticed a brighter episode — a capering clown inflamed with contagious jollity, some finer humourist forming a circle every thirty yards to crow at his indefatigable sallies. One clever performer so especially pleased me that I should have been glad to catch a glimpse of the natural man. You imagined for [211 ] ITALIAN HOURS him that he was taking a prodigious intellectual holiday and that his gaiety was in inverse ratio to his daily mood. Dressed as a needy scholar, in an ancient evening-coat and with a rusty black hat and gloves fantastically patched, he carried a little volume carefully under his arm. His humours were in excellent taste, his whole manner the perfection of genteel comedy. The crowd seemed to relish him vastly, and he at once commanded a glee- fully attentive audience. Many of his sallies I lost ; those I caught were excellent. His trick was often to begin by taking some one urbanely and caressingly by the chin and complimenting him on the intelligenza della sua fisionomia. I kept near him as long as I could ; for he struck me as a real ironic artist, cherishing a dis- interested, and yet at the same time a motived and a moral, pas- sion for the grotesque. I should have liked, however — if indeed I should n't have feared — to see him the next morning, or when he unmasked that night over his hard-earned supper in a smoky trattoria. As the evening went on the crowd thickened and became a motley press of shouting, pushing, scrambling, everything but squabbling, revellers. The rain of missiles ceased at dusk, but the universal deposit of chalk and flour was trampled into a cloud made lurid by flaring pyramids of the gas-lamps that replaced for the occasion the stingy Roman luminaries. Early in the evening came off the classic exhibition of the moccoletti, which I but half saw, like a languid reporter resigned beforehand to be cashiered for want of enterprise. From the mouth of a side-street, over a thousand heads, I caught a huge slow-moving illuminated car, from which blue-lights and rockets and Roman candles were in [ 212 J A ROMAN HOLIDAY course of discharge, meeting all in a dim fuliginous glare far above the house-tops. It was like a glimpse of some public orgy in ancient Babylon. In the small hours of the morning, walking homeward from a private entertainment, I found Ash Wednesday still kept at bay. The Corso, flaring with light, smelt like a circus. Every one was taking friendly liberties with every one else and using up the dregs of his festive energy in convulsive hootings and gymnastics. Here and there certain indefatigable spirits, clad all in red after the manner of devils and leaping furiously about with torches, were supposed to affright you. But they shared the uni- versal geniality and bequeathed me no midnight fears as a pre- text for keeping Lent, the carnevale dei preti, as I read in that profanely radical sheet the Capitale. Of this too I have been having glimpses. Going lately into Santa Francesca Romana, the picturesque church near the Temple of Peace, I found a feast for the eyes — a dim crimson-toned light through curtained windows, a great festoon of tapers round the altar, a bulging girdle of lamps before the sunken shrine beneath, and a dozen white-robed Dominicans scattered in the happiest composition on the pavement. It was better than the moccoletti. 1873- ROMAN RIDES ROMAN RIDES SHALL always remember the first I took : out of the Porta del Popolo, to where the Ponte MoUe, whose single arch sustains a weight of historic tradition, compels the sallow Tiber to flow between its four great-mannered ecclesiastical statues, over the crest of the hill and along the old posting-road to Florence. It was mild midwinter, the season peculiarly of colour on the Roman Cam- pagna ; and the light was full of that mellow purple glow, that tempered intensity, which haunts the after-visions of those who have known Rome like the memory of some supremely irrespon- sible pleasure. An hour away I pulled up and at the edge of a meadow gazed away for some time into remoter distances. Then and there, it seemed to me, I measured the deep delight of know- ing the Campagna. But I saw more things in it than I can easily tell. The country rolled away around me into slopes and dells of long-drawn grace, chequered with purple and blue and bloom- ing brown. The lights and shadows were at play on the Sabine Mountains — an alternation of tones so exquisite as to be con- veyed only by some fantastic comparison to sapphire and amber. In the foreground a contadino in his cloak and peaked hat jogged [ 217 ] ITALIAN HOURS solitary on his ass; and here and there in the distance, among blue undulations, some white village, some grey tower, helped deliciously to make the picture the typical "Italian landscape" of old-fashioned art. It was so bright and yet so sad, so still and yet so charged, to the supersensuous ear, with the murmur of an extinguished life, that you could only say it was intensely and adorably strange, could only impute to the whole overarched scene an unsurpassed secret for bringing tears of appreciation to no matter how ignorant — archaeologically ignorant — eyes. To ride once, in these conditions, is of course to ride again and to allot to the Campagna a generous share of the time one spends in Rome. It is a pleasure that doubles one's horizon, and one can scarcely say whether it enlarges or limits one's impression of the city proper. It certainly makes St. Peter's seem a trifle smaller and blunts the edge of one's curiosity in the Forum. It must be the effect of the experience, at all extended, that when you think of Rome afterwards you will think still respectfully and regretfully enough of the Vatican and the Pincio, the streets and the picture- making street life ; but will even more wonder, with an irrepressible contraction of the heart, when again you shall feel yourself bound- ing over the flower-smothered turf, or pass from one framed pic- ture to another beside the open arches of the crumbling aqueducts. You look back at the City so often from some grassy hill-top — hugely compact within its walls, with St. Peter's overtopping all things and yet seeming small, and the vast girdle of marsh and meadow receding on all sides to the mountains and the sea — that [218 J ROMAN RIDES you come to remember it at last as hardly more than a respectable parenthesis in a great sweep of generalisation. Within the walls, on the other hand, you think of your intended ride as the most romantic of all your possibilities ; of the Campagna generally as an illimitable experience. One's rides certainly give Rome an inordinate scope for the reflective — by which I suppose I mean after all the aesthetic and the "esoteric" — life. To dwell in a city which, much as you grumble at it, is after all very fairly a modern city; with crowds and shops and theatres and cafes and balls and receptions and dinner-parties, and all the modern con- fusion of social pleasures and pains ; to have at your door the good and evil of it all ; and yet to be able in half an hour to gallop away and leave it a hundred miles, a hundred years, behind, and to look at the tufted broom glowing on a lonely tower-top in the still blue air, and the pale pink asphodels trembling none the less for the stillness, and the shaggy-legged shepherds leaning on their sticks in motionless brotherhood with the heaps of ruin, and the scram- bling goats and staggering little kids treading out wild desert smells from the top of hollow-sounding mounds ; and then to come back through one of the great gates and a couple of hours later find yourself in the "world," dressed, introduced, entertained, inquiring, talking about " Middlemarch " to a young English lady or listening to Neapolitan songs from a gentleman in a very low-cut shirt — all this is to lead in a manner a double life and to gather from the hurrying hours more impressions than a mind of modest capacity quite knows how to dispose of I touched lately upon this theme with a friend who, I fancied, [ 219 ] ITALIAN HOURS would understand me, and who immediately assured me that he had just spent a day that this mingled diversity of sensation made to the days one spends elsewhere what an uhcommonly good novel may be to the daily paper. "There was an air of idleness about it, if you will," he said, "and it was certainly pleasant enough to have been wrong. Perhaps, being after all unused to long stretches of dissipation, this was why I had a half-feeling that I was reading an odd chapter in the history of a person very much more of a heros de roman than myself." Then he proceeded to relate how he had taken a long ride with a lady whom he extremely admired. "We turned off from the Tor di Quinto Road to that castellated farm-house you know of — once a Ghibelline fortress — whither Claude Lorraine used to come to paint pictures of which the sur- rounding landscape is still so artistically, so compositionally, sug- gestive. We went into the inner court, a cloister almost, with the carven capitals of its loggia columns, and looked at a handsome child swinging shyly against the half-opened door of a room whose impenetrable shadow, behind her, made her, as it were, a sketch in bituminous water-colours. We talked with the farmer, a hand- some, pale, fever-tainted fellow with a well-to-do air that did n't in the least deter his affability from a turn compatible with the acceptance of small coin ; and then we galloped away and away over the meadows which stretch with hardly a break to Veii. The day was strangely delicious, with a cool grey sky and just a touch of moisture in the air stirred by our rapid motion. The Cam- pagna, in the colourless even light, was more solemn and roman- tic than ever ; and a ragged shepherd, driving a meagre straggling [ 220 ] ROMAN RIDES flock, whom we stopped to ask our way of, was a perfect type of pastoral, weather-beaten misery. He was precisely the shepherd for the foreground of a scratchy etching. There were faint odours of spring in the air, and the grass here and there was streaked with great patches of daisies ; but it was spring with a foreknowledge of autumn, a day to be enjoyed with a substrain of sadness, the fore- boding of regret, a day somehow to make one feel as if one had seen and felt a great deal — quite, as I say, like a heros de roman. Touching such characters, it was the illustrious Pelham, I think, who, on being asked if he rode, replied that he left those violent exercises to the ladies. But under such a sky, in such an air, over acres of daisied turf, a long, long gallop is certainly a supersubtle joy. The elastic bound of your horse is the poetry of motion ; and if you are so happy as to add to it not the prose of companionship riding comes almost to affect you as a spiritual exercise. My gal- lop, at any rate," said my friend, "threw me into a mood which gave an extraordinary zest to the rest of the day." He was to go to a dinner-party at a villa on the edge of Rome, and Madam X , who was also going, called for him in her carriage. "It was a long drive," he went on, "through the Forum, past the Colosseum, She told me a long story about a most interesting person. Toward the end my eyes caught through the carriage window a slab of rugged sculptures. We were passing under the Arch of Constantine. In the hall pavement of the villa is a rare antique mosaic — one of the largest and most perfect ; the ladies on their way to the draw- ing-room trail over it the flounces of Worth. We drove home late, and there's my day." [ 221 ] ITALIAN HOURS On your exit from most of the gates of Rome you have generally half-an-hour's progress through winding lanes, many of which are hardly less charming than the open meadows. On foot the walls and high hedges would vex you and spoil your walk ; but in the saddle you generally overtop them, to an endless peopling of the minor vision. Yet a Roman wall in the springtime is for that matter almost as interesting as anything it conceals. Crumbling grain by grain, coloured and mottled to a hundred tones by sun and storm, with its rugged structure of brick extruding through its coarse complexion of peeling stucco, its creeping lacework of wandering ivy starred with miniature violets, and its wild fringe of stouter flowers against the sky — it is as little as possible a blank partition; it is practically a luxury of landscape. At the moment at which I write, in mid-April, all the ledges and cor- nices are wreathed with flaming poppies, nodding there as if they knew so well what faded greys and yellows are an off^set to their scarlet. But the best point in a dilapidated enclosing surface of vineyard or villa is of course the gateway, lifting its great arch of cheap rococo scroll-work, its balls and shields and mossy dish- covers — as they always perversely figure to me — and flanked with its dusky cypresses. I never pass one without taking out my mental sketch-book and jotting it down as a vignette in the in- substantial record of my ride. They are as sad and dreary as if they led to the moated grange where Mariana waited in despera- tion for something to happen ; and it 's easy to take the usual in- scription over the porch as a recommendation to those who enter to renounce all hope of anything but a glass of more or lessagree- [ 222 ] ROMAN RIDES ably acrid vino romano. For what you chiefly see over the walls and at the end of the straight short avenue of rusty cypresses are the appurtenances of a vigna ^- a couple of acres of little upright sticks blackening in the sun, and a vast sallow-faced, scantily windowed mansion, whose expression denotes little of the life of the mind beyond what goes to the driving of a hard bargain over the tasted hogsheads. If Mariana is there she certainly has no pile of old magazines to beguile her leisure. The life of the mind, if the term be in any application here not ridiculous, appears to any asker of curious questions, as he wanders about Rome, the very thinnest deposit of the past. Within the rococo gateway, which itself has a vaguely aesthetic self-consciousness, at the end of the cypress walk, you will probably see a mythological group in rusty marble — a Cupid and Psyche, a Venus and Paris, an Apollo and Daphne — the relic of an age when a Roman pro- prietor thought it fine to patronise the arts. But I imagine you are safe in supposing it to constitute the only allusion savouring of culture that has been made on the premises for three or four generations. There is a franker cheerfulness — though certainly a proper amount of that forlornness which lurks about every object to which the Campagna forms a background — in the primitive little taverns where, on the homeward stretch, in the waning light, you are often glad to rein up and demand a bottle of their best. Their best and their worst are indeed the same, though with a shifting price, and plain vino bianco or vino rosso (rarely both) is the sole article of refreshment in which they deal. There is a ragged bush [ 223 ] ITALIAN HOURS over the door, and within, under a dusky vault, on crooked cob- ble-stones, sit half-a-dozen contadini in their indigo jackets and goatskin breeches and with their elbows on the table. There is generally a rabble of infantile beggars at the door, pretty enough in their dusty rags, with their fine eyes and intense Italian smile, to make you forget your private vow of doing your individual best to make these people, whom you like so much, unlearn their old vices. Was Porta Pia bombarded three years ago that Peppino should still grow up to whine for a copper ? But the Italian shells had no direct message for Peppino's stomach — and you are going to a dinner-party at a villa. So Peppino " points " an instant for the copper in the dust and grows up a Roman beggar. The whole little place represents the most primitive form of hostelry ; but along any of the roads leading out of the city you may find es- tablishments of a higher type, with Garibaldi, superbly mounted and foreshortened, painted on the wall, or a lady in a low-necked dress opening a fictive lattice with irresistible hospitality, and a yard with the classic vine-wreathed arbour casting thin shadows upon benches and tables draped and cushioned with the white dust from which the highways from the gates borrow most of their local colour. None the less, I say, you avoid the highroads, and, if you are a person of taste, don't grumble at the occasional need of following the walls of the city. City walls, to a properly con- stituted American, can never be an object of indifference ; and it is emphatically " no end of a sensation " to pace in the shadow of this massive cincture of Rome. I have found myself, as I skirted its base, talking of trivial things, but never without a sudden re- [ 224 ] ROMAN RIDES flection on the deplorable impermanence of first impressions. A twelvemonth ago the raw plank fences of a Boston suburb, in- scribed with the virtues of healing drugs, bristled along my hori- zon : now I glance with idle eyes at a compacted antiquity in which a more learned sense may read portentous dates and signs — Servius, Aurelius, Honorius. But even to idle eyes the prodigious, the continuous thing bristles with eloquent passages. In some places, where the huge brickwork is black with time and certain strange square towers look down at you with still blue eyes, the Roman sky peering through lidless loopholes, and there is nothing but white dust in the road and solitude in the air, I might take myself for a wandering Tartar touching on the confines of the Celestial Empire. The wall of China must have very much such a gaunt robustness. The colour of the Roman ramparts is every- where fine, and their rugged patchwork has been subdued by time and weather into a mellow harmony that the brush only asks to catch up. On the northern side of the city, behind the \iatican, St. Peter's and the Trastevere, I have seen them glowing in the late afternoon with the tones of ancient bronze and rusty gold. Here at various points they are embossed with the Papal insignia, the tiara with its flying bands and crossed keys ; to the high style of which the grace that attaches to almost any lost cause — even if not quite the "tender" grace of a day that is dead — consider- ably adds a style. With the dome of St. Peter's resting on their cornice and the hugely clustered architecture of the Vatican rising from them as from a terrace, they seem indeed the valid bulwark of an ecclesiastical city. Vain bulwark, alas ! sighs the sentimental [ 225 ] ITALIAN HOURS tourist, fresh from the meagre entertainment of this latter Holy- Week, But he may find monumental consolation in this neigh- bourhood at a source where, as I pass, I never fail to apply for it. At half-an-hour's walk beyond Porta San Pancrazio, beneath the wall of the Villa Doria, is a delightfully pompous ecclesi- astical gateway of the seventeenth century, erected by Paul V to commemorate his restoration of the aqueducts through which the stream bearing his name flows towards the fine florid portico protecting its clear-sheeted outgush on the crest of the Janiculan. It arches across the road in the most ornamental manner of the period, and one can hardly pause before it without seeming to assist at a ten minutes' revival of old Italy — without feeling as if one were in a cocked hat and sword and were coming up to Rome, in another mood than Luther's, with a letter of recom- mendation to the mistress of a cardinal. The Campagna diff^ers greatly on the two sides of the Tiber ; and it is haf d to say which, for the rider, has the greater charm. The half-dozen rides you may take from Porta San Giovanni possess the perfection of traditional Roman interest and lead you through a far-strewn wilderness of ruins — a scattered maze of tombs and towers and nameless fragments of antique masonry. The land- scape here has two great features ; close before you on one side is the long, gentle swell of the Alban Hills, deeply, fantastically blue in most weathers, and marbled with the vague white masses of their scattered towns and villas. It would be difficult to draw the hard figure to a softer curve than that with which the heights sweep from Albano to the plain; this a perfect example of the [ 226 ] ROMAN RIDES classic beauty of line in the Italian landscape — that beauty which, when it fills the background of a picture, makes us look in the foreground for a broken column couched upon flowers and a shepherd piping to dancing nymphs. At your side, constantly, you have the broken line of the Claudian Aqueduct, carrying its broad arches far away into the plain. The meadows along which it lies are not the smoothest in the world for a gallop, but there is no pleasure greater than to wander near it. It stands knee-deep in the flower-strewn grass, and its rugged piers are hung with ivy as the columns of a church are draped for a festa. Every archway is a picture, massively framed, of the distance beyond — of the snow-tipped Sabines and lonely Soracte. As the spring advances the whole Campagna smiles and waves with flowers ; but I think they are nowhere more rank and lovely than in the shifting shadow of the aqueducts, where they mufl3e the feet of the columns and smother the half-dozen brooks which wander in and out like silver meshes between the legs of a file of giants. They make a niche for themselves too in every crevice and tremble on the vault of the empty conduits. The ivy hereabouts in the springtime is peculiarly brilliant and delicate; and though it cloaks and muffles these Roman fragments far less closely than the castles and abbeys of England it hangs with the light elegance of all Italian vegeta- tion. It is partly doubtless because their mighty outlines are still unsoftened that the aqueducts are so impressive. They seem the very source of the solitude in which they stand ; they look like architectural spectres and loom through the light mists of their grassy desert, as you recede along the line, with the same insub- [ 227 ] ITALIAN HOURS stantial vastness as if they rose out of Egyptian sands. It is a great neighbourhood of ruins, many of which, it must be confessed, you have applauded in many an album. But station a peasant with sheepskin coat and bandaged legs in the shadow of a tomb or tower best known to drawing-room art, and scatter a dozen goats on the mound above him', and the picture has a charm which has not yet been sketched away. The other quarter of the Campagna has wider fields and smoother turf and perhaps a greater number of delightful rides ; the earth is sounder, and there are fewer pitfalls and ditches. The land for the most part lies higher and catches more wind, and the grass is here and there for great stretches as smooth and level as a carpet. You have no Alban Mountains before you, but you have in the distance the waving ridge of the nearer Apennines, and west of them, along the course of the Tiber, the long seaward level of deep-coloured fields, deepening as they recede to the blue and purple of the sea itself. Beyond them, of a very clear day, you may see the glitter of the Mediterranean. These are the occasions perhaps to remember most fondly, for they lead you to enchanting nooks, and the landscape has details of the highest refinement. Indeed when my sense reverts to the lingering impressions of so blest a time, it seems a fool's errand to have attempted to express them, and a waste of words to do more than recommend the reader to go cit5^wards at twilight of the end of March, making for Porta Cavalleggieri, and note what he sees. At this hour the Campagna is to the last point its melancholy self, and I remember roadside " effects " of a strange and intense suggestiveness. Certain mean, [228 ] ROMAN RIDES mouldering villas behind grass-grown courts have an indefinably sinister look; there was one in especial of which it was impossible not to argue that a despairing creature must have once committed suicide there, behind bolted door and barred window, and that no one has since had the pluck to go in and see why he never came out. Every wayside mark of manners, of history, every stamp of the past in the country about Rome, touches my sense to a thrill, and I may thus exaggerate the appeal of very common things. This is the more likely because the appeal seems ever to rise out of heaven knows what depths of ancient trouble. To delight in the aspects of sentient ruin might appear a heartless pastime, and the pleasure, I confess, shows the note of perversity. The sombre and the hard are as common an influence from southern things as the soft and the bright, I think ; sadness rarely fails to assault a north- ern observer when he misses what he takes for comfort. Beauty is no compensation for the loss, only making it more poignant. Enough beauty of climate hangs over these Roman cottages and farm-houses — beauty of light, of atmosphere and of vegetation ; but their charm for the maker-out of the stories in things is the way the golden air shows off their desolation. Man lives more with Nature in Italy than in New or than in Old England; she does more work for him and gives him more holidays than in our short-summered climes, and his home is therefore much more bare of devices for helping him to do without her, forget her and for- give her. These reflections are perhaps the source of the character you find in a moss-coated stone stairway climbing outside of a wall ; in a queer inner court, befouled with rubbish and drearily [ 229 ] ITALIAN HOURS bare of convenience ; in an ancient quaintly carven well, worked with infinite labour from an overhanging window; in an arbour of time-twisted vines under which you may sit with your feet in the dirt and remember as a dim fable that there are races for which the type of domestic allurement is the parlour hearth-rug. For reasons apparent or otherwise these things amuse me beyond ex- pression, and I am never weary of staring into gateways, of linger- ing by dreary, shabby, half-barbaric farm-yards, of feasting a foolish gaze on sun-cracked plaster and unctuous indoor shadows. I must n't forget, however, that it 's not for wayside effects that one rides away behind St. Peter's, but for the strong sense of wandering over boundless space, of seeing great classic lines of landscape, of watching them dispose themselves into pictures so full of " style " that you can think of no painter who deserves to have you admit that they suggest him — hardly knowing whether it is better pleasure to gallop far and drink deep of air and grassy distance and the whole delicious opportunity, or to walk and pause and linger, and try and grasp some ineffaceable memory of sky and colour and outline. Your pace can hardly help falling into a contemplative measure at the time, everjrwhere so wonder- ful, but in Rome so persuasively divine, when the winter begins palpably to soften and quicken. Far out on the Campagna, early in February, you feel the first vague earthly emanations, which in a few- weeks come wandering into the heart of the city and throbbing through the close, dark streets. Springtime in Rome is an immensely poetic affair ; but you must stand often far out in the ancient waste, between grass and sky, to measure its deep, [ 230 J ROMAN RIDES full, steadily accelerated rhythm. The winter has an incontestable beauty, and is pre-eminently the time of colour — the time when it is no affectation, but homely verity, to talk about the "purple" tone of the atmosphere. As February comes and goes your purple is streaked with green and the rich, dark bloom of the distance be- gins to lose its intensity. But your loss is made up by other gains ; none more precious than that inestimable gain to the ear — the disembodied voice of the lark. It comes with the early flowers, the white narcissus and the cyclamen, the half-buried violets and the pale anemones, and makes the whole atmosphere ring like a vault of tinkling glass. You never see the source of the sound, and are utterly unable to localise his note, which seems to come from everj^where at once, to be some hundred-throated voice of the air. Sometimes you fancy you just catch him, a mere vague spot against the blue, an intenser throb in the universal pulsation of light. As the weeks go on the flowers multiply and the deep blues and purples of the hills, turning to azure and violet, creep higher toward the narrowing snow-line of the Sabines. The temperature rises, the first hour of your ride you feel the heat, but you beguile it with brushing the hawthorn-blossoms as you pass along the hedges, and catching at the wild rose and honeysuckle ; and when you get into the meadows there is stir enough in the air to lighten the dead weight of the sun. The Roman air, however, is not a tonic medicine, and it seldom suffers exercise to be all exhilarating. It has always seemed to me indeed part of the charm of the latter that your keenest consciousness is haunted with a vague languor. Occasionally when the sirocco blows that sensation becomes strange [231 ] ITALIAN HOURS and exquisite. Then, under the grey sky, before the dim distances which the south-wind mostly brings with it, you seem to ride forth into a world from which all hope has departed and in which, in spite of the flowers that make your horse's footfalls soundless, nothing is left save some queer probability that your imagination is unable to measure, but from which it hardly shrinks. This quality in the Roman element may now and then "relax" you almost to ecstasy ; but a season of sirocco would be an overdose of morbid pleasure. You may at any rate best feel the peculiar beauty of the Campagna on those mild days of winter when the mere quality and temper of the sunshine suffice to move the land- scape to joy, and you pause on the brown grass in the sunny still- ness and, by listening long enough, almost fancy you hear the shrill of the midsummer cricket. It is detail and ornament that vary from month to month, from week to week even, and make your returns to the same places a constant feast of unexpectedness ; but the great essential features of the prospect preserve throughout the year the same impressive serenity. Soracte, be it January or May, rises from its blue horizon like an island from the sea and with an elegance of contour which no mood of the year can deepen or diminish. You know it well ; you have seen it often in the mel- low backgrounds of Claude ; and it has such an irresistibly classic, academic air that while you look at it you begin to take your sad- dle for a faded old arm-chair in a palace gallery. A month's rides in different directions will show you a dozen prime Claudes. After I had seen them all I went piously to the Doria gallery to refresh my memory of its two famous specimens and to enjoy to the ut- [232 ] ROMAN RIDES most their delightful air of reference to something that had become a part of my personal experience. Delightful it certainly is to feel the common element in one's own sensibility and those of a genius whom that element has helped to do great things. Claude must have haunted the very places of one's personal preference and adjusted their divine undulations to his splendid scheme of ro- mance, his view of the poetry of life. He was familiar with aspects in which there was n't a single uncompromising line. I saw a few days ago a small finished sketch from his hand, in the posses- sion of an American artist, which was almost startling in its clear reflection of forms unaltered by the two centuries that have dimmed and cracked the paint and canvas. This unbroken continuity of the impressions I have tried to indicate is an excellent example of the intellectual background of all enjoyment in Rome. It effectually prevents pleasure from becoming vulgar, for your sensation rarely begins and ends with itself; it reverberates — it recalls, commemorates, resuscitates something else. At least half the. merit of everything you enjoy must be that it suits you absolutely ; but the larger half here is generally that it has suited some one else and that you can never flatter yourself you have discovered it. It has been addressed to some use a million miles out of your range, and has had great adventures before ever condescending to please you. It was in admission of this truth that my discriminating friend who showed me the Claudes found it impossible to designate a certain delight- ful region which you enter at the end of an hour's riding from Porta Cavalleggieri as anything but Arcadia. The exquisite cor- [ 233 1 ITALIAN HOURS respondence of the term in this case ahogether revived its faded bloom ; here veritably the oaten pipe must have stirred the windless air and the satyrs have laughed among the brookside reeds. Three or four long grassy dells stretch away in a chain between low hills over which delicate trees are so discreetly scattered that each one is a resting place for a shepherd. The elements of the scene are simple enough, but the composition has extraordinary refinement. By one of those happy chances which keep observation in Italy always in her best humour a shepherd had thrown himself down under one of the trees in the very attitude of Meliboeus. He had been washing his feet, I suppose, in the neighbouring brook, and had found it pleasant afterwards to roll his short breeches well up on his thighs. Lying thus in the shade, on his elbow, with his naked legs stretched out on the turf and his soft peaked hat over his long hair crushed back like the veritable bonnet of Arcady, he was exactly the figure of the background of this happy valley. The poor fellow, lying there in rustic weariness and ignorance, little fancied that he was a symbol of old-world meanings to new-world eyes. Such eyes may find as great a store of picturesque meanings in the cork-woods of Monte Mario, tenderly loved of all equestrians. These are less severely pastoral than our Arcadia, and you might more properly lodge there a damosel of Ariosto than a nymph of Theocritus. Among them is strewn a lovely wilderness of flowers and shrubs, and the whole place has such a charming woodland air, that, casting about me the other day for a compliment, I de- clared that it reminded me of New Hampshire. My compliment [ 234 J ROMAN RIDES had a double edge, and I had no sooner uttered it than I smiled — or sighed — to perceive in all the undiscriminated botany about me the wealth of detail, the idle elegance and grace of Italy alone, the natural stamp of the land which has the singular privilege of making one love her unsanctified beauty all but as well as those features of one's own country toward which nature's small allowance doubles that of one's own affection. For this effect of casting a spell no rides have more value than those you take in Villa Doria or Villa Borghese ; or don't take, possibly, if you pre- fer to reserve these particular regions — the latter in especial — for your walking hours. People do ride, however, in both villas, which deserve honourable mention in this regard. Villa Doria, with its noble site, its splendid views, its great groups of stone- pines, so clustered and yet so individual, its lawns and flowers and fountains, its altogether princely disposition, is a place where one may pace, well mounted, of a brilliant day, with an agreeable sense of its being rather a more elegant pastime to balance in one's stirrups than to trudge on even the smoothest gravel. But at Villa Borghese the walkers have the best of it ; for they are free of those adorable outlying corners and bosky byways which the rumble of barouches never reaches. In March the place becomes a perfect epitome of the spring. You cease to care much for the melancholy greenness of the disfeatured statues which has been your chief winter's intimation of verdure; and before you are quite conscious of the tender streaks and patches in the great quaint grassy arena round which the Propaganda students, in their long skirts, wan- der slowly, like dusky seraphs revolving the gossip of Paradise, [ 235 ] ITALIAN HOURS you spy the brave little violets uncapping their azure brows be- neath the high-stemmed pines. One's walks here would take us too far, and one's pauses detain us too long, when in the quiet parts under the wall one comes across a group of charming small school-boys in full-dress suits and white cravats, shouting over their play in clear Italian, while a grave young priest, beneath a tree, watches them over the top of his book. It sounds like no- thing, but the force behind it and the frame round it, the setting, the air, the chord struck, make it a hundred wonderful things. 1873- ROMAN NEIGHBOURHOODS ROMAN NEIGHBOURHOODS MADE a note after my first stroll at Al- bano to the effect that I had been talking of the " picturesque " all my life, but that now for a change I beheld it. I had been looking all winter across the Campagna at the free-flowing outline of the Alban Mount, with its half-dozen towns shining on its purple side even as vague sun-spots in the shadow of a cloud, and thinking it simply an agreeable incident in the varied background of Rome. But now that during the last few days I have been treating it as a foreground, have been suffering St. Peter's to play the part of a small mountain on the horizon, with the Campagna swimming mistily through the am- biguous lights and shadows of the interval, I find the interest as great as in the best of the by-play of Rome. The walk I speak of was just out of the village, to the south, toward the neighbour- ing town of L' Ariccia, neighbouring these twenty years, since the Pope (the late Pope, I was on the point of calling him) threw his superb viaduct across the deep ravine which divides it from Albano. At the risk of seeming to fantasticate I confess that the Pope's having built the viaduct — in this very recent antiquity — made me linger there in a pensive posture and marvel at the march [ 239 ] ITALIAN HOURS of history and at Pius the Ninth's beginning already to profit by the sentimental allowances we make to vanished powers. An ardent nero then would have had his own way with me and ob- tained a frank admission that the Pope was indeed a father to his people. Far down into the charming valley which slopes out of the ancestral woods of the Chigis into the level Campagna winds the steep stone-paved road at the bottom of which, in the good old days, tourists in no great hurry saw the mules and oxen tackled to their carriage for the opposite ascent. And indeed even an impatient tourist might have been content to lounge back in his jolting chaise and look out at the mouldy foundations of the little city plunging into the verdurous flank of the gorge. Questioned, as a cherisher of quaintness, as to the best "bit " hereabouts, I should certainly name the way in which the crumbling black houses of these ponderous villages plant their weary feet on the flowery edges of all the steepest chasms. Before you enter one of them you invariably find yourself lingering outside its pretentious old gateway to see it clutched and stitched to the stony hillside by this rank embroidery of the wildest and bravest things that grow. Just at this moment nothing is prettier than the contrast between their dusky ruggedness and the tender, the yellow and pink and violet fringe of that mantle. All this you may observe from the viaduct at the Ariccia ; but you must wander below to feel the full force of the eloquence of our imaginary papalino. The pillars and arches of pale grey peperino arise in huge tiers with a magnificent spring and solidity. The older Romans built no better; and the work has a deceptive air of being one of their sturdy bequests [ 240 ] ROMAN NEIGHBOURHOODS which help one to drop another sigh over the antecedents the Italians of to-day are so eager to repudiate. Will those they give their descendants be as good ? At the Ariccia, in any case, I found a little square with a couple of mossy fountains, occupied on one side by a vast dusky-faced Palazzo Chigi and on the other by a goodly church with an im- posing dome. The dome, within, covers the whole edifice and is adorned with some extremely elegant stucco-work of the seven- teenth century. It gave a great value to this fine old decoration that preparations were going forward for a local festival and that the village carpenter was hanging certain mouldy strips of crim- son damask against the piers of the vaults. The damask might have been of the seventeenth century too, and a group of peas- ant-women were seeing it unfurled with evident awe. I regarded it myself with interest — it seemed so the tattered remnant of a fashion that had gone out for ever. I thought again of the poor disinherited Pope, wondering whether, when such venerable frippery will no longer bear the carpenter's nails, any more will be provided. It was hard to fancy anything but shreds and patches in that musty tabernacle. Wherever you go in Italy you receive some such intimation as this of the shrunken proportions of Catholicism, and every church I have glanced into on my walks hereabouts has given me an almost pitying sense of it. One finds one's self at last — without fatuity, I hope — feeling sorry for the solitude of the remaining faithful. It 's as if the churches had been made so for the world, in its social sense, and the world had so irrevocably moved away. They are in size out of all modern pro- [24il ITALIAN HOURS portion to the local needs, and the only thing at all alive in the melancholy waste they collectively form is the smell of stale incense. There are pictures on all the altars by respectable third- rate painters; pictures which I suppose once were ordered and paid for and criticised by worshippers who united taste with piety. At Genzano, beyond the Ariccia, rises on the grey village street a pompous Renaissance temple whose imposing nave and aisles would contain the population of a capital. But where is the taste of the Ariccia and Genzano ? Where are the choice spirits for whom Antonio Raggi modelled the garlands of his dome and a hundred clever craftsmen imitated Guido and Caravaggio ? Here and there, from the pavement, as you pass, a dusky crone inter- lards her devotions with more profane importunities, or a grizzled peasant on rusty-jointed knees, tilted forward with his elbows on a bench, reveals the dimensions of the patch in his blue breeches. But where is the connecting link between Guido and Caravaggio and those poor souls for whom an undoubted original is only a something behind a row of candlesticks, of no very clear meaning save that you must bow to it ? You find a vague mem- ory of it at best in the useless grandeurs about you, and you seem to be looking at a structure of which the stubborn earth- scented foundations alone remain, with the carved and painted shell that bends above them, while the central substance has utterly crumbled away. I shall seem to have adopted a more meditative pace than befits a brisk constitutional if I say that I also fell a-thinking before the shabby facade of the old Chigi Palace. But it seemed somehow [ 242 ] ROMAN NEIGHBOURHOODS in its grey forlornness to respond to the sadly superannuated ex- pression of the opposite church ; and indeed in any condition what self-respecting cherisher of quaintness can forbear to do a little romancing in the shadow of a provincial palazzo ? On the face of the matter, I know, there is often no very salient peg to hang a romance on. A sort of dusky blankness invests the establishment, which has often a rather imbecile old age. But a hundred brood- ing secrets lurk in this inexpressive mask, and the Chigi Palace did duty for me in the suggestive twilight as the most haunted of houses. Its basement walls sloped outward like the beginning of a pyramid, and its lower windows were covered with massive iron cages. Within the doorway, across the court, I saw the pale glimmer of flowers on a terrace, and I made much, for the effect of the roof, of a great covered loggia or belvedere with a dozen window-panes missing or mended with paper. Nothing gives one a stronger impression of old manners than an ancestral palace towering in this haughty fashion over a shabby little town; you hardly stretch a point when you call it an impression of feudalism. The scene may pass for feudal to American eyes, for which a hundred windows on a facade mean nothing more exclusive than a hotel kept (at the most invidious) on the European plan. The mouldy grey houses on the steep crooked street, with their black cavernous archways pervaded by bad smells, by the braying of asses and by human intonations hardly more musical, the haggard and tattered peasantry staring at you with hungry-heavy eyes, the brutish-looking monks (there are still enough to point a moral), the soldiers, the mounted constables, the dirt, the dreariness, the [243 ] ITALIAN HOURS misery, and the dark over-grown palace frowning over it all from barred window and guarded gateway — what more than all this do we dimly descry in a mental image of the dark ages ? For all his desire to keep the peace with the vivid image of things if it be only vivid enough, the votary of this ideal may well occasionally turn over such values with the wonder of what one takes them as paying for. They pay sometimes for such sorry " facts of life. " At Genzano, out of the very midst of the village squalor, rises the Palazzo Cesarini, separated from its gardens by a dirty lane. Between peasant and prince the contact is unbroken, and one would suppose Italian good-nature sorely taxed by their mutual allowances ; that the prince in especial must cultivate a firm im- pervious shell. There are no comfortable townsfolk about him to remind him of the blessings of a happy mediocrity of fortune. When he looks out of his window he sees a battered old peasant against a sunny wall sawing off his dinner from a hunch of black bread. I must confess, however, that "feudal" as it amused me to find the little piazza of the Ariccia, it appeared to threaten in no manner an exasperated rising. On the contrary, the afternoon being cool, many of the villagers were contentedly muffled in those ancient cloaks, lined with green baize, which, when tossed over the shoulder and surmounted with a peaked hat, form one of the few lingering remnants of "costume" in Italy; others were tossing wooden balls light-heartedly enough on the grass outside the town. The egress on this side is under a great stone archway thrown out from the palace and surmounted with the family arms. [ 244 1 ROMAN NEIGHBOURHOODS Nothing could better confirm your theory that the townsfolk are groaning serfs. The road leads away through the woods, like many of the roads hereabouts, among trees less remarkable for their size than for their picturesque contortions and posturings. The woods, at the moment at which I write, are full of the raw green light of early spring, a jour vastly becoming to the various complexions of the wild flowers that cover the waysides. I have never seen these untended parterres in such lovely exuberance; the sturdiest pedestrian becomes a lingering idler if he allows them to catch his eye. The pale purple cyclamen, with its hood thrown back, stands up in masses as dense as tulip-beds; and here and there in the duskier places great sheets of forget-me-not seem to exhale a faint blue mist. These are the commonest plants ; there are dozens more I know no name for — a rich profusion in especial of a beautiful five-petalled flower whose white texture is pencilled with hair-strokes certain fair copyists I know of would have to hold their breath to imitate. An Italian oak has neither the girth nor the height of its English brothers, but it contrives in propor- tion to be perhaps even more effective. It crooks its back and twists its arms and clinches its hundred fists with the queerest extravagance, and wrinkles its bark into strange rugosities from which its first scattered sprouts of yellow green seem to break out like a morbid fungus. But the tree which has the greatest charm to northern eyes is the cold grey-green ilex, whose clear crepus- cular shade drops against a Roman sun a veil impenetrable, yet not oppressive. The ilex has even less colour than the cypress, but it is much less funereal, and a landscape in which it is frequent [245 1 ITALIAN HOURS may still be said to smile faintly, though by no means to laugh. It abounds in old Italian gardens, where the boughs are trimmed and interlocked into vaulted corridors in which, from point to point, as in the niches of some dimly frescoed hall, you see mil- dewed busts stare at you with a solemnity which the even grey light makes strangely intense. A humbler relative of the ilex, though it does better things than help broken-nosed emperors to look dig- nified, is the olive, which covers many of the neighbouring hill- sides with its little smoky puffs of foliage. A stroke of composition I never weary of is that long blue stretch of the Campagna which makes a high horizon and rests on this vaporous base of olive- tops. A reporter intent upon a simile might liken it to the ocean seen above the smoke of watch-fires kindled on the strand. To do perfect justice to the wood-walk away from the Ariccia I ought to touch upon the birds that were singing vespers as I passed. But the reader would find my rhapsody as poor entertain- ment as the programme of a concert he had been unable to attend. I have no more learning about bird-music than would help me to guess that a dull dissyllabic refrain in the heart of the wood came from the cuckoo ; and when at moments I heard a twitter of fuller tone, with a more suggestive modulation, I could only hope it was the nightingale. I have listened for the nightingale more than once in places so charming that his song would have seemed but the articulate expression of their beauty, and have never heard much beyond a provoking snatch or two — a prelude that came to nothing. In spite of a natural grudge, however, I generously be- lieve him a great artist or at least a great genius — a creature who [246 J ROMAN NEIGHBOURHOODS despises any prompting short of absolute inspiration. For the rich, the muhitudinous melody around me seemed but the offering to my ear of the prodigal spirit of tradition. The wood was ringing with sound because it was twilight, spring and Italy. It was also because of these good things and various others besides that I rehshed so keenly my visit to the Capuchin convent upon which I emerged after half-an-hour in the wood. It stands above the town on the slope of the Alban Mount, and its wild garden climbs away behind it and extends its melancholy influence. Before it is a small stiff avenue of trimmed live-oaks which conducts you to a grotesque little shrine beneath the staircase ascending to the church. Just here, if you are apt to grow timorous at twilight, you may take a very pretty fright ; for as you draw near you catch be- hind the grating of the shrine the startling semblance of a gaunt and livid monk. A sickly lamplight plays down upon his face, and he stares at you from cavernous eyes with a dreadful air of death in life. Horror of horrors, you murmur, is this a Capuchin pen- ance ? You discover of course in a moment that it is only a Capu- chin joke, that the monk is a pious dummy and his spectral visage a matter of the paint-brush. You resent his intrusion on the sur- rounding loveliness ; and as you proceed to demand entertainment at their convent you pronounce the Capuchins very foolish fellows. This declaration, as I made it, was supported by the conduct of the simple brother who opened the door of the cloister in obedience to my knock and, on learning my errand, demurred about admit- ting me at so late an hour. If I would return on the morrow morning he 'd be most happy. He broke into a blank grin when [247 1 ITALIAN HOURS I assured him that this was the very hour of my desire and that the garish morning light would do no justice to the view. These were mysteries beyond his ken, and it was only his good-nature (of which he had plenty) and not his imagination that was moved. So that when, passing through the narrow cloister and out upon the grassy terrace, I saw another cowled brother standing with folded hands profiled against the sky, in admirable harmony with the scene, I questioned his knowing the uses for which he is still most precious. This, however, was surely too much to ask of him, and it was cause enough for gratitude that, though he was there before me, he was not a fellow-tourist with an opera-glass slung over his shoulder. There was support to my idea of the convent in the expiring light, for the scene was in its way unsurpassable. Directly below the terrace lay the deep-set circle of the Alban Lake, shining softly through the light mists of evening. This beautiful pool — it is hardly more — occupies the crater of a prehistoric volcano, a perfect cup, shaped and smelted by furnace-fires. The rim of the cup, rising high and densely wooded round the placid stone-blue water, has a sort of natural artificiality. The sweep and contour of the long circle aire admirable ; never was a lake so charmingly lodged. It is said to be of extraordinary depth ; and though stone-blue water seems at first a very innocent substitute for boiling lava, it has a sinister look which betrays its dangerous antecedents. The winds never reach it and its surface is never ruffled; but its deep-bosomed placidity seems to cover guilty secrets, and you fancy it in communication with the capricious and treacherous forces of nature. Its very colour is of a joyless [248 ] ROMAN NEIGHBOURHOODS beauty, a blue as cold and opaque as a solidified sheet of lava. Streaked and wrinkled by a mysterious motion of its own, it affects the very type of a legendary pool, and I could easily have believed that I had only to sit long enough into the evening to see the ghosts of classic nymphs and naiads cleave its sullen flood and beckon me with irresistible arms. Is it because its shores are haunted with these vague Pagan influences that two convents have risen there to purge the atmosphere ? From the Capuchin terrace you look across at the grey Franciscan monastery of Palazzuola, which is not less romantic certainly than the most obstinate myth it may have exorcised. The Capuchin garden is a wild tangle of great trees and shrubs and clinging, trembling vines which in these hard days are left to take care of themselves ; a weedy garden, if there ever was one, but none the less charm- ing for that, in the deepening dusk, with its steep grassy vistas struggling away into impenetrable shadow. I braved the shadow for the sake of climbing upon certain little flat-roofed crumbling pavilions that rise from the corners of the further wall and give you a wider and lovelier view of lake and hills and sky. I have perhaps justified to the reader the mild proposition with which I started — convinced him, that is, that Albano is worth a walk. It may be a different walk each day, moreover, and not resemble its predecessors save by its keeping in the shade. " Gal- leries " the roads are prettily called, and with the justice that they are vaulted and draped overhead and hung with an immense succession of pictures. As you follow the few miles from Genzano to Frascati you have perpetual views of the Campagna framed by [ 249 ] ITALIAN HOURS clusters of trees ; the vast iridescent expanse of which completes the charm and comfort of your verdurous dusk. I compared it just how to the sea, and with a good deal of truth, for it has the same incalculable lights and shades, the same confusion of glitter and gloom. But I have seen it at moments — chiefly in the misty twilight — when it resembled less the waste of waters than some- thing more portentous, the land itself in fatal dissolution. I could believe the fields to be dimly surging and tossing and melting away into quicksands, and that one's very last chance of an im- pression was taking place. A view, however, which has the merit of being really as interesting as it seems, is that of the Lake of Nemi; which the enterprising traveller hastens to compare with its sister sheet of Albano. Comparison in this case is particularly odious, for in order to prefer one lake to the other you have to discover faults where there are none. Nemi is a smaller circle, but lies in a deeper cup, and if with no grey Franciscan pile to guard its woody shores, at least, in the same position, the little high- perched black town to which it gives its name and which looks across at Genzano on the opposite shore as Palazzuola regards Castel Gandolfo. The walk from the Ariccia to Genzano is charm- ing, most of all when it reaches a certain grassy piazza from which three public avenues stretch away under a double row of stunted and twisted elms. The Duke Cesarini has a villa at Genzano — I mentioned it just now — whose gardens overhang the lake ; but he has also a porter in a faded rakish-looking livery who shakes his head at your proffered franc unless you can reinforce it with a permit countersigned at Rome. For this annoying complication [ 250 ] ROMAN NEIGHBOURHOODS of dignities he is justly to be denounced ; but I forgive him for the sake of that ancestor who in the seventeenth century planted this shady walk. Never was a prettier approach to a town than by these low-roofed light-chequered corridors. Their only defect is that they prepare you for a town of rather more rustic coquetry than Genzano exhibits. It has quite the usual allowance, the com- mon cynicism, of accepted decay, and looks dismally as if its best families had all fallen into penury together and lost the means of keeping anything better than donkeys in their great dark, vaulted basements and mending their broken window-panes with anything better than paper. It was on the occasion of this drear Genzano that I had a difference of opinion with a friend who maintained that there was nothing in the same line so pretty in Europe as a pretty New England village. The proposition seemed to a cherisher of quaintness on the face of it inacceptable ; but calmly considered it has a measure of truth. I am not fond of chalk-white painted planks, certainly; I vastly prefer the dusky tones of ancient stucco and peperino ; but I succumb on occa- sion to the charms of a vine-shaded porch, of tulips and dahlias glowing in the shade of high-arching elms, of heavy-scented lilacs bending over a white paling to brush your cheek. "I prefer Siena to Lowell," said my friend; "but I prefer Farmington to such a thing as this." In fact an Italian village is simply a miniature Italian city, and its various parts imply a town of fifty times the size. At Genzano are neither dahlias nor lilacs, and no odours but foul ones. Flowers and other graces are all confined to the high-walled precincts of Duke Cesarini, to [251 J ITALIAN HOURS which you must obtain admission twenty miles away. The houses on the other hand would generally lodge a New England cot- tage, porch and garden and high-arching ehns included, in one of their cavernous basements. These vast grey dwellings are all of a fashion denoting more generous social needs than any they serve nowadays. They speak of better days and of a fabulous time when Italy was either not shabby or could at least "carry off" her shabbiness. For what follies are they doing penance ? Through what melancholy stages have their fortunes ebbed ? You ask these questions as you choose the shady side of the long blank street and watch the hot sun glare upon the dust-coloured walls and pause before the fetid gloom of open doors. I should like to spare a word for mouldy little Nemi, perched upon a cliff high above the lake, at the opposite side ; but after all, when I had climbed up into it from the water-side, passing beneath a great arch which I suppose once topped a gateway, and counted its twenty or thirty apparent inhabitants peeping at me from black doorways, and looked at the old round tower at whose base the village clusters, and declared that it was all queer, queer, desper- ately queer, I had said all that is worth saying about it. Nemi has a much better appreciation of its lovely position than Genzano, where your only view of the lake is from a dunghill behind one of the houses. At the foot of the round tower is an overhanging ter- race, from which you may feast your eyes on the only freshness they find in these dusky human hives — the blooming seam, as one may call it, of strong wild flowers which binds the crumbling walls to the face of the cliff. Of Rocca di Papa I must say as little. [ 252 ] ROMAN NEIGHBOURHOODS It consorted generally with the bravery of its name ; but the- only object I made a note of as I passed through it on my way to Monte Cavo, which rises directly above it, was a little black house with a tablet in its face setting forth that Massimo d' Azeglio had dwelt there. The story of his sojourn is not the least attaching episode in his delightful Ricordi. From the summit of Monte Cavo is a prodigious view, which you may enjoy with whatever good-nature is left you by the reflection that the modern Passionist convent occupying this admirable site was erected by the Cardinal of York (grandson of James II) on the demolished ruins of an immemo- rial temple of Jupiter: the last fooHsh act of a foolish race. For me I confess this folly spoiled the convent, and the convent all but spoiled the view ; for I kept thinking how fine it would have been to emerge upon the old pillars and sculptures from the lava pavement of the Via Triumphalis, which wanders grass-grown and untrodden through the woods. A convent, however, which nothing spoils is that of Palazzuola, to which I paid my respects on 'this same occasion. It rises on a lower spur of Monte Cavo, on the edge, as we have seen, of the Alban Lake, and though it occupies a classic site, that of early Alba Longa, it displaced nothing more precious than memories and legends so dim that the antiquarians are still quarrelling about them. It has a meagre little church and the usual sham Perugino with a couple of tinsel crowns for the Madonna and the Infant inserted into the canvas ; and it has also a musty old room hung about with faded portraits and charts and queer ecclesiastical knick-knacks, which borrowed a mysterious interest from the sudden assurance of the simple [253 ] ITALIAN HOURS Franciscan brother who accompanied me that it was the room of the Son of the King of Portugal. But my peculiar pleasure was the Httle thick-shaded garden which adjoins the convent and commands from its massive artificial foundations an enchanting view of the lake. Part of it is laid out in cabbages and lettuce, over which a rubicund brother, with his frock tucked up, was bending with a solicitude which he interrupted to remove his skull- cap and greet me with the unsophisticated sweet-humoured smile that every now and then in Italy does so much to make you forget the ambiguities of monachism. The rest is occupied by cypresses and other funereal umbrage, making a dank circle round an old cracked fountain black with water-moss. The parapet of the terrace is furnished with good stone seats where you may lean on your elbows to gaze away a sunny half-hour and, feeling the gen- eral charm of the scene, declare that the best mission of such a country in the world has been simply to produce, in the way of prospect and picture, these masterpieces of mildness. Mild here as a dream the whole attained effect, mild as resignation, mild as one's thoughts of another life. Such a session was n't surely an experience of the irritable flesh ; it was the deep degustation, on a summer's day, of something immortally expressed by a man of genius. From Albano you may take your way through several ancient little cities to Frascati, a rival centre of villeggiatura, the road fol- lowing the hillside for a long morning's walk and passing through alternations of denser and clearer shade — the dark vaulted alleys of ilex and the brilliant corridors of fresh-sprouting oak. The [ 254 ] CASTEL GANDOLFO. ROMAN NEIGHBOURHOODS Campagna is beneath you continually, with the sea beyond Ostia re- ceiving the silver arrows of the sun upon its chased and burnished shield, and mighty Rome, to the north, lying at no great length in the idle immensity around it. The highway passes below Castel Gandolfo, which stands perched on an eminence behind a couple of gateways surmounted with the Papal tiara and twisted cordon ; and I have more than once chosen the roundabout road for the sake of passing beneath these pompous insignia. Castel Gandolfo is indeed an ecclesiastical village and under the peculiar protection of the Popes, whose huge summer-palace rises in the midst of it like a rural Vatican. In speaking of the road to Fras- cati I necessarily revert to my first impressions, gathered on the oc- casion of the feast of the Annunziata, which falls on the 25th of March and is celebrated by a peasants' fair. As Murray strongly recommends you to visit this spectacle, at which you are promised a brilliant exhibition of all the costumes of modern Latium, I took an early train to Frascati and measured, in company with a pro- digious stream of humble pedestrians, the half-hour's interval to Grotta Ferrata, where the fair is held. The road winds along the hillside, among the silver-sprinkled olives and through a charming wood where the ivy seemed tacked upon the oaks by women's fingers and the birds were singing to the late anemones. It was covered with a very jolly crowd of vulgar pleasure-takers, and the only creatures not in a state of manifest hilarity were the pitiful little overladen, overbeaten donkeys (who surely deserve a chap- ter to themselves in any description of these neighbourhoods) and the horrible beggars who were thrusting their sores and stumps [255] ITALIAN HOURS at you from under every tree. Every one was shouting, singing, scrambling, making light of dust and distance and filling the air with that childlike jollity which the blessed Italian temperament never goes roundabout to conceal. There is no crowd surely at once so jovial and so gentle as an Italian crowd, and I doubt if in any other country the tightly packed third-class car in which I went out from Rome would have introduced me to so much smiling and so little swearing. Grotta Ferrata is a very dirty litde village, with a number of raw new houses baking on the hot hill- side and nothing to charm the fond gazer but its situation and its old fortified abbey. After pushing about among the shabby little booths and declining a number of fabulous bargains in tinware, shoes and pork, I was glad to retire to a comparatively uninvaded corner of the abbey and divert myself with the view. This grey ecclesiastical stronghold is a thoroughly scenic aflfair, hanging over the hillside on plunging foundations which bury themselves among the dense olives. It has massive round towers at the corners and a grass-grown moat, enclosing a church and a monastery. The fore-court, within the abbatial gateway, now serves as the public square of the village and in fair-time of course witnesses the best of the fun. The best of the fun was to be found in certain great vaults and cellars of the abbey, where wine was in free flow from gigantic hogsheads. At the exit of these trickling grottos shady trellises of bamboo and gathered twigs had been improvised, and under them a grand guzzling proceeded. All of which was so in the fine old style that I was roughly reminded of the wedding- feast of Gamacho. The banquet was far less substantial of course, [256] ROMAN NEIGHBOURHOODS but it had a note as of immemorial manners that could n't fail to suggest romantic analogies to a pilgrim from the land of no cooks. There was a feast of reason close at hand, however, and I was careful to visit the famous frescoes of Domenichino in the adjoin- ing church. It sounds rather brutal perhaps to say that, when I came back into the clamorous little piazza, the sight of the peasants swilling down their sour wine appealed to me more than the mas- terpieces — Murray calls them so — of the famous Bolognese. It amounts after all to saying that I prefer Teniers to Domenichino ; which I am willing to let pass for the truth. The scene under the rickety trellises was the more suggestive of Teniers that there were no costumes to make it too Italian. Murray's attractive statement on this point was, like many of his statements, much truer twenty years ago than to-day. Costume is gone or fast going; I saw among the women not a single crimson bodice and not a couple of classic head-cloths. The poorer sort, dressed in vulgar rags of no fashion and colour, and the smarter ones in calico gowns and printed shawls of the vilest modern fabric, had honoured their dusky tresses but with rich applications of grease. The men are still in jackets and breeches, and, with their slouched and pointed hats and open-breasted shirts and rattling leather leggings, may remind one sufficiently of the Italian peasant as he figured in the woodcuts familiar to our infancy. After coming out of the church I found a delightful nook — a queer little terrace before a more retired and tranquil drinking-shop — where I called for a bottle of wine to help me to guess why I "drew the line" at Domenichino. [257 ] ITALIAN HOURS This little terrace was a capricious excrescence at the end of the piazza, itself simply a greater terrace; and one reached it, picturesquely, by ascending a short inclined plane of grass-grown cobble-stones and passing across a little dusky kitchen through whose narrow windows the light of the mighty landscape beyond touched up old earthen pots. The terrace was oblong and so narrow that it held but a single small table, placed lengthwise; yet nothing could be pleasanter than to place one's bottle on the polished parapet. Here you seemed by the time you had emptied it to be swinging forward into immensity — hanging poised above the Campagna. A beautiful gorge with a twinkling stream wandered down the hill far below you, beyond which Marino and Castel Gandolfo peeped above the trees. In front you could count the towers of Rome and the tombs of the Appian Way. I don't know that I came to any very distinct conclusion about Domenichino; but it was perhaps because the view was perfection that he struck me as more than ever mediocrity. And yet I don't think it was one's bottle of wine, either, that made one after all maudlin about him; it was the sense of the foolishly usurped in his tenure of fame, of the derisive in his ever having been put forward. To say so indeed savours of flogging a dead horse, but it is surely an unkind stroke of fate for him that Murray assures ten thousand Britons every winter in the most emphatic manner that his Communion of St. Jerome is the " second finest picture in the world. If this were so one would certainly here in Rome, where such institutions are convenient, retire into the very nearest convent; with such a world one would have a standing [258] ROMAN NEIGHBOURHOODS quarrel. And yet this sport of destiny is an interesting case, in default of being an interesting painter, and I would take a mod- erate walk, in most moods, to see one of his pictures. He is so supremely good an example of effort detached from inspiration and school-merit divorced from spontaneity, that one of his fine frigid performances ought to hang in a conspicuous place in every academy of design. Few things of the sort contain more urgent les- sons or point a more precious moral ; and I would have the head- master in the drawing-school take each ingenuous pupil by the hand and lead him up to the Triumph of David or the Chase of Diana or the red-nosed Persian Sibyl and make him some such little speech as the following: "This great picture, my son, was hung here to show you how you must never paint; to give you a perfect specimen of what in its boundless generosity the provi- dence of nature created for our fuller knowledge — an artist whose development was a negation. The great thing in art is charm, and the great thing in charm is spontaneity. Domenichino, having talent, is here and there an excellent model — he was devoted, conscientious, observant, industrious ; but now that we 've seen pretty well what can simply be learned do its best, these things help him little with us, because his imagination was cold. It loved nothing, it lost itself in nothing, its efforts never gave it the heart- ache. It went about trying this and that, concocting cold pictures after cold receipts, dealing in the second-hand, in the ready-made, and putting into its performances a little of everything but itself. When you see so many things in a composition you might suppose that among them all some charm might be born ; yet they're really [ 259 ] ITALIAN HOURS but the hundred mouths through which you may hear the unhappy thing murmur 'I'm dead!' It's by the simplest thing it has that a picture lives — by its temper. Look at all the great talents, Domenichino as well as at Titian ; but think less of dogma than of plain nature, and I can almost promise you that yours will re- main true." This is very little to what the aesthetic sage I have imagined might say ; and we are after all unwilling to let our last verdict be an unkind one on any great bequest of human effort. The faded frescoes in the chapel at Grotta Ferrata leave us a memory the more of man's effort to dream beautifully ; and they thus mingle harmoniously enough with our multifold impressions of Italy, where dreams and realities have both kept such pace and so strangely diverged. It was absurd — that was the truth — to be critical at all among the appealing old Italianisms round me and to treat the poor exploded Bolognese more harshly than, when I walked back to Frascati, I treated the charming old water- works of the Villa Aldobrandini. I confound these various pro- ducts of antiquated art in a genial absolution, and should like especially to tell how fine it was to watch this prodigious fountain come tumbling down its channel of mouldy rock-work, through its magnificent vista of ilex, to the fantastic old hemicycle where a dozen tritons and naiads sit posturing to receive it. The sky above the ilexes was incredibly blue and the ilexes themselves incredibly black ; and to see the young white moon peeping above the trees you could easily have fancied it was midnight. I should like furthermore to expatiate on Villa Mondragone, the most grandly impressive hereabouts, of all such domestic monuments. The [ 260 ] ROMAN NEIGHBOURHOODS great Casino in the midst is as big as the Vatican, which it strik- ingly resembles, and it stands perched on a terrace as vast as the parvise of St. Peter's, looking straight away over black cypress- tops into the shining vastness of the Campagna. Everything somehow seemed immense and solemn; there was nothing small but certain little nestling blue shadows on the Sabine Mountains, to which the terrace seems to carry you wonderfully near. The place has been for some time lost to private uses, since it figures fantastically in a novel of George Sand — La Daniella — and now, in quite another way, as a Jesuit college for boys. The after- noon was perfect, and as it waned it filled the dark alleys with a wonderful golden haze. Into this came leaping and shouting a herd of little collegians with a couple of long-skirted Jesuits striding at their heels. We all know — I make the point for my antithesis — the monstrous practices of these people ; yet as I watched the group I verily believe I declared that if I had a little son he should go to Mondragone and receive their crooked teach- ings for the sake of the other memories, the avenues of cypress and ilex, the view of the Campagna, the atmosphere of antiquity. But doubtless when a sense of "mere character,'' shameless incomparable character, has brought one to this it is time one should pause. THE AFTER-SEASON IN ROME THE AFTER-SEASON IN ROME NE may at the blest end of May say with- out injustice to anybody that the state of mind of many a forestiero in Rome is one of intense impatience for the moment when all other forestieri shall have taken them- selves off. One may confess to this state of mind and be no misanthrope. The place has passed so completely for the winter months into the hands of the barbarians that that estima- ble character the passionate pilgrim finds it constantly harder to keep his passion clear. He has a rueful sense of impressions per- verted and adulterated; the all-venerable visage disconcerts us by a vain eagerness to see itself mirrored in English, American, German eyes. It is n't simply that you are never first or never alone at the classic or historic spots where you have dreamt of persuading the shy genius loci into confidential utterance ; it is n't simply that St. Peter's, the Vatican, the Palatine, are for ever ringing with the false note of the languages without style : it is the general oppressive feeling that the city of the soul has become for the time a monstrous mixture of watering-place and curiosity- shop and that its most ardent life is that of the tourists who haggle over false intaglios and yawn through palaces and temples. But [265] ITALIAN HOURS you are told of a happy time when these abuses begin to pass away, when Rome becomes Rome again and you may have her all to yourself. "You may like her more or less now," I was assured at the height of the season; "but you must wait till the month of May, when she '11 give you all she has, to love her. Then the foreigners, or the. excess of them, are gone ; the galleries and ruins are empty, and the place," said my informant, who was a happy Frenchman of the Academic de France, "renatt a elle- meme." Indeed I was haunted all winter by an irresistible pre- vision of what Rome must be in declared spring. Certain charm- ing places seemed to murmur: "Ah, this is nothing! Come back at the right weeks and see the sky above us almost black with its excess of blue, and the new grass already deep, but still vivid, and the white roses tumble in odorous spray and the warm radiant air distil gold for the smelting-pot that the genius loci then dips his brush into before making play with it, in his inimitable way, for the general effect of complexion," A month ago I spent a week in the country, and on my return, the first time I approached the Corso, became conscious of a change. Something delightful had happened, to which at first I could n't give a name, but which presently shone out as the fact that there were but half as many people present and that these were chiefly the natural or the naturalised. We had been docked of half our irrelevance, our motley excess, and now physically, morally, aesthetically there was elbow-room. In the afternoon I went to the Pincio, and the Pincio was almost dull. The band was playing to a dozen ladies who lay in landaus poising their lace- [ 266 ] THE AFTER-SEASON IN ROME fringed parasols; but they had scarce more than a light-gloved dandy apiece hanging over their carriage doors. By the parapet to the great terrace that sweeps the city stood but three or four interlopers looking at the sunset and with their Baedekers only just showing in their pockets — the sunsets not being down among the tariffed articles in these precious volumes. I went so far as to hope for them that, like myself, they were, under every precau- tion, taking some amorous intellectual liberty with the scene. Practically I violate thus the instinct of monopoly, since it's a shame not to publish that Rome in May is indeed exquisitely worth your patience. I have just been so gratified at finding myself in undisturbed possession for a couple of hours of the Museum of the Lateran that I can afford to be magnanimous. It's almost as if the old all-papal paradise had come back. The weather for a month has been perfect, the sky an extravagance of blue, the air lively enough, the nights cool, nippingly cool, and the whole ancient greyness lighted with an irresistible smile. Rome, which in some moods, especially to new-comers, seems a place of almost sinister gloom, has an occasional art, as one knows her better, of brushing away care by the grand gesture with which some splendid impatient mourning matron — just the Niobe of Nations, surviving, emerging and looking about her again — might pull off and cast aside an oppression of muffling crape. This admirable power still temperamentally to react and take notice lurks in all her darkness and dirt and decay — a something more careless and hopeless than our thrifty northern cheer, and yet more genial and urbane than the Parisian spirit of [ 267 J ITALIAN HOURS blague. The collective Roman nature is a healthy and hearty one, and you feel it abroad in the streets even when the sirocco blows and the medium of life seems to proceed more or less from the mouth of a furnace. But who shall analyse even the simplest Roman impression ? It is compounded of so many things, it says so much, it involves so much, it so quickens the intelligence and so flatters the heart, that before we fairly grasp the case the ima- gination has marked it for her own and exposed us to a perilous likelihood of talking nonsense about it. The smile of Rome, as I have called it, and its insidious mes- sage to those who incline to ramble irresponsibly and take things as they come, is ushered in with the first breath of spring, and then grows and grows with the advancing season till it wraps the whole place in its tenfold charm. As the process develops you can do few better things than go often to Villa Borghese and sit on the grass — on a stout bit of drapery — and watch its exquisite stages. It has a frankness and a sweetness beyond any relenting of our clumsy climates even when ours leave off their damnable faces and begin. Nature departs from every reserve with a confidence that leaves one at a loss where, as it were, to look — leaves one, as I say, nothing to do but to lay one's head among the anemones at the base of a high-stemmed pine and gaze up crestward and sky- ward along its slanting silvery column. You may watch the whole business from a dozen of these choice standpoints and have a dif- ferent villa for it every day in the week. The Doria, the Ludovisi, the Medici, the Albani, the Wolkonski, the Chigi, the Mellini, the Massimo — there are more of them, with all their sights [ 268 ] THE AFTER-SEASON IN ROME and sounds and odours and memories, than you have senses for. But I prefer none of them to the Borghese, which is free to all the world at all times and yet never crowded ; for when the whirl of carriages is great in the middle regions you may find a hundred untrodden spots and silent corners, tenanted at the worst by a group of those long-skirted young Propagandists who stalk about with solemn angularity, each with a book under his arm, like silhouettes from a mediaeval missal, and "compose" so extremely well with the still more processional cypresses and with stretches of golden-russet wall overtopped by ultramarine. And yet if the Borghese is good the Medici is strangely charming, and you may stand in the little belvedere which rises with such surpassing oddity out of the dusky heart of the Boschetto at the latter estab- lishment — a miniature presentation of the wood of the Sleep- ing Beauty — and look across at the Ludovisi pines lifting their crooked parasols into a sky of what a painter would call the most morbid blue, and declare that the place where they grow is the most delightful in the world. Villa Ludovisi has been all winter the residence of the lady familiarly known in Roman society as "Rosina," Victor Emmanuel's morganatic wife, the only famil- iarity, it would seem, that she allows, for the grounds were rig- idly closed, to the inconsolable regret of old Roman sojourners. Just as the nightingales began to sing, however, the quasi-august padrona departed, and the public, with certain restrictions, have been admitted to hear them. The place takes, where it lies, a princely ease, and there could be no better example of the expan- sive tendencies of ancient privilege than the fact that its whole [ 269 ] ITALIAN HOURS vast extent is contained by the city walls. It has in this respect 'very much the same enviable air of having got up early that marks the great intramural demesne of Magdalen College at Oxford. The stern old ramparts of Rome form the outer enclosure of the villa, and hence a series of "striking scenic effects" which it would be unscrupulous flattery to say you can imagine. The grounds are laid out in the formal last-century manner; but nowhere do the straight black cypresses lead off the gaze into vistas of a melancholy more charged with associations — poetic, romantic, historic; nowhere are there grander, smoother walls of laurel and myrtle. I recently spent an afternoon hour at the little Protestant ceme- tery close to St. Paul's Gate, where the ancient and the modern world are insidiously contrasted. They make between them one of the solemn places of Rome — although indeed when funereal things are so interfused it seems ungrateful to call them sad. Here is a mixture of tears and smiles, of stones and flowers, of mourning cypresses and radiant sky, which gives us the impression of our looking back at death from the brighter side of the grave. The cemetery nestles in an angle of the city wall, and the older graves are sheltered by a mass of ancient brickwork, through whose narrow loopholes you peep at the wide purple of the Campagna. Shelley's grave is here, buried in roses — a happy grave every way for the very type and figure of the Poet. Nothing could be more impenetrably tranquil than this little corner in the bend of the protecting rampart, where a cluster of modern ashes is held tenderly in the rugged hand of the Past. The past is tremendously [ 270 ] THE AFTER-SEASON IN ROME embodied in the hoary pyramid of Caius Cestius, which rises hard by, half within the wall and half without, cutting solidly into the solid blue of the sky and casting its pagan shadow upon the grass of English graves — that of Keats, among them — with an effect of poetic justice. It is a wonderful confusion of mortality and a grim enough admonition of our helpless promiscuity in the crucible of time. But the most touching element of all is the appeal of the pious English inscriptions among all these Roman memories ; touching because of their universal expression of that trouble within trouble, misfortune in a foreign land. Something special stirs the heart through the fine Scriptural language in which everything is recorded. The echoes of massive Latinity with which the atmosphere is charged suggest nothing more majestic and monumental. I may seem unduly to refine, but the injunction to the reader in the monument to Miss Bathurst, drowned in the Tiber in 1824, " If thou art young and lovely, build not thereon, for she who lies beneath thy feet in death was the loveliest flower ever cropt in its bloom," affects us irresistibly as a case for tears on the spot. The whole elaborate inscription indeed says some- thing over and beyond all it does say. The English have the repu- tation of being the most reticent people in the world, and as there is no smoke without fire I suppose they have done something to deserve it ; yet who can say that one does n't constantly meet the most startling examples of the insular faculty to "gush" ? In this instance the mother of the deceased takes the public into her confidence with surprising frankness and omits no detail, seiz- ing the opportunity to mention by the way that she had already [ 271 ] ITALIAN HOURS lost her husband by a most mysterious visitation. The appeal to one's attention and the confidence in it are withal most mov- ing. The whole record has an old-fashioned gentility that makes its frankness tragic. You seem to hear the garrulity of passion- ate grief. To be choosing these positive commonplaces of the Roman tone for a theme when there are matters of modern moment going on may seem none the less to require an apology. But I make no claim to your special correspondent's faculty for getting an "inside" view of things, and I have hardly more than a pictorial impression of the Pope's illness and of the discussion of the Law of the Convents. Indeed I am afraid to speak of the Pope's illness at all, lest I should say something egregiously heartless about it, recalling too forcibly that unnatural husband who was heard to wish that his wife would "either" get well ! He had his reasons, and Roman tourists have theirs in the shape of a vague longing for something spectacular at St. Peter's. If it takes the sacrifice of somebody to produce it let somebody then be sacrificed. Meanwhile we have been having a glimpse of the spectacular side of the Religious Corporations Bill. Hearing one morning a great hubbub in the Corso I stepped forth upon my balcony. A couple of hundred men were strolling slowly down the street with their hands in their pockets, shouting in unison " Abbasso il ministero !" and huzzaing in chorus. Just beneath my window they stopped and began to murmur "Al Quirinale, al Quirinale!" The crowd surged a moment gently and then drifted to the Quirinal, where it scuffled harmlessly with half-a-dozen of the king's soldiers. It [ 272 ] THE AFTER-SEASON IN ROME ought to have been impressive, for what was it, strictly, unless the seeds of revolution ? But its carriage was too gentle and its cries too musical to send the most timorous tourist to packing his trunk. As I began with saying: in Rome, in May, everything has an amiable side, even popular uprisings. FROM A ROMAN NOTE-BOOK FROM A ROMAN NOTE-BOOK ECEMBER 28, 1872. — In Rome again for the last three days — that second visit which, when the first is n't followed by a fatal illness in Florence, the story goes that one is doomed to pay. I did n't drink of the Fountain of Trevi on the eve of departure the other time; but I feel as if I had drunk of the Tiber itself. Neverthe- less as I drove from the station in the evening I wondered what I should think of it at this first glimpse had n't I already known it. All manner of evil perhaps. Paris, as I passed along the Boule- vards three evenings before to take the train, was swarming and glittering as befits a great capital. Here, in the black, narrow, crooked, empty streets, I saw nothing I would fain regard as eternal. But there were new gas-lamps round the spouting Triton in Piazza Barberini and a newspaper stall on the corner of the Condotti and the Corso — salient signs of the emancipated state. An hour later I walked up to Via Gregoriana by Piazza di Spagna. It was all silent and deserted, and the great flight of steps looked surprisingly small. Everything seemed meagre, dusky, provincial. Could Rome after all rezWybe a world-city ? That queer old rococo garden gateway at the top of the Gregoriana stirred a dormant [ 277 J ITALIAN HOURS memory ; it awoke into a consciousness of the delicious mildness of the air, and very soon, in a little crimson drawing-room, I was reconciled and re-initiated, . . . Everything is dear (in the way of lodgings), but it hardly matters, as everything is taken and some one else paying for it. I must make up my mind to a bare perch. But it seems poorly perverse here to aspire to an "interior" or to be conscious of the economic side of life. The aesthetic is so intense that you feel you should live on the taste of it, should extract the nutritive essence of the atmosphere. For positively it 's such an atmosphere ! The weather is perfect, the sky as blue as the most exploded tradition fames it, the whole air glowing and throbbing with lovely colour. . . . The glitter of Paris is now all gaslight. And oh the monotonous miles of rain-washed asphalte ! December ^oth. — I have had nothing to do with the "cere- monies." In fact I believe there have hardly been any — no mid- night mass at the Sistine chapel, no silver trumpets at St. Peter's. Everything is remorselessly clipped and curtailed — the Vatican in deepest mourning. But I saw it in its superbest scarlet in '69. ... I went yesterday with L. to the Colonna gardens — an adventure that would have reconverted me to Rome if the thing were n't already done. It's a rare old place — rising in mouldy bosky terraces and mossy stairways and winding walks from the back of the palace to the top of the Quirinal. It's the grand style of gardening, and resembles the present natural manner as a chapter of Johnsonian rhetoric resembles a piece of clever con- temporary journalism. But it's a better style in horticulture than in literature ; I prefer one of the long-drawn blue-green Colonna [278 J FROM A ROMAN NOTE-BOOK vistas, with a maimed and mossy-coated garden goddess at the end, to the finest possible quotation from a last-century classic. Perhaps the best thing there is the old orangery with its trees in fantastic terra-cotta tubs. The late afternoon light was gilding the monstrous jars and suspending golden chequers among the golden-fruited leaves. Or perhaps the best thing is the broad terrace with its mossy balustrade and its benches; also its view of the great naked Torre di Nerone (I think), which might look stupid if the rosy brickwork did n't take such a colour in the blue air. Delightful, at any rate, to stroll and talk there in the afternoon sunshine. January 2nd, 1873. — Two or three drives with A. — one to St. Paul's without the Walls and back by a couple of old churches on the Aventine. I was freshly struck with the rare distinction of the little Protestant cemetery at the Gate, lying in the shadow of the black sepulchral Pyramid and the thick-growing black cypresses. Bathed in the clear Roman light the place is heart- breaking for what it asks you — in such a world as this — to re- nounce. If it should "make one in love with death to lie there," that's only if death should be conscious. As the case stands, the weight of a tremendous past presses upon the flowery sod, and the sleeper's mortality feels the contact of all the mortality with which the brilliant air is tainted. . . . The restored Basilica is incredibly splendid. It seems a last pompous effort of formal Catholicism, and there are few more striking emblems of later Rome — the Rome foredoomed to see Victor Emmanuel in the Quirinal, the Rome of abortive councils and unheeded anathemas. It rises [ 279 ] ITALIAN HOURS there, gorgeous and useless, on its miasmatic site, with an air of conscious bravado — a florid advertisement of the superabun- dance of faith. Within it 's magnificent, and its magnificence has no shabby spots — a rare thing in Rome. Marble and mosaic, alabaster and malachite, lapis and porphyry, incrust it from pave- ment to cornice and flash back their polished lights at each other with such a splendour of effect that you seem to stand at the heart of some immense prismatic crystal. One has to come to Italy to know marbles and love them. I remember the fascination of the first great show of them I met in Venice — at the Scalzi and Gesuiti. Colour has in no other form so cool and unfading a purity and lustre. Softness of tone and hardness of substance — is n't that the sum of the artist's desire ? G., with his beautiful ca- ressing, open-lipped Roman utterance, so easy to understand and, to my ear, so finely suggestive of genuine Latin, not our horrible Anglo-Saxon and Protestant kind, urged upon us the charms of a return by the Aventine and the sight of a couple of old churches. The best is Santa Sabina, a very fine old structure of the fifth century, mouldering in its dusky solitude and consuming its own antiquity. What a massive heritage Christianity and Catholicism are leaving here! What a substantial fact, in all its decay, this memorial Christian temple outliving its uses among the sunny gardens and vineyards! It has a noble nave, filled with a stale smell which (like that of the onion) brought tears to my eyes, and bordered with twenty-four fluted marble columns of Pagan origin. The crudely primitive little mosaics along the entablature are extremely curious, A Dominican monk, still young, who showed [280] FROM A ROMAN NOTE-BOOK us the church, seemed a creature generated from its musty shadows and odours. His physiognomy was wonderfully de I'emploi, and his voice, most agreeable, had the strangest jaded humility. His lugubrious salute and sanctimonious impersonal appropriation of my departing franc would have been a master-touch on the stage. While we were still in the church a bell rang that he had to go and answer, and as he came back and approached us along the nave he made with his white gown and hood and his cadaverous face, against the dark church background, one of those pictures which, thank the Muses, have not yet been reformed out of Italy. It was the exact illustration, for insertion in a text, of heaven knows how many old romantic and conventional literary Italianisms — plays, poems, mysteries of Udolpho. We got back into the carriage and talked of profane things and went home to dinner — drifting recklessly, it seemed to me, from aesthetic luxury to social. On the 3 ist we went to the musical vesper-service at the Gesu — hitherto done so splendidly before the Pope and the cardinals. The manner of it was eloquent of change — no Pope, no cardi- nals, and indifferent music ; but a great mise-en-scene nevertheless. The church is gorgeous ; late Renaissance, of great proportions, and full, like so many others, but in a pre-eminent degree, of seven- teenth and eighteenth century Romanism. It does n't impress the imagination, but richly feeds the curiosity, by which I mean one's sense of the curious ; suggests no legends, but innumerable anecdotes a la Stendhal. There is a vast dome, filled with a florid concave fresco of tumbling foreshortened angels, and all over the ceilings and cornices a wonderful outlay of dusky gildings and [281] ITALIAN HOURS mouldings. There are various Bernini saints and seraphs in stucco-sculpture, astride of the tablets and door-tops, backing against their rusty machinery of coppery nimbi and egg-shaped cloudlets. Marble, damask and tapers in gorgeous profusion. The high altar a great screen of twinkling chandeliers. The choir perched in a little loft high up in the right transept, like a balcony in a side-scene at the opera, and indulging in surprising roulades and flourishes. . . . Near me sat a handsome, opulent-looking nun — possibly an abbess or prioress of noble lineage. Can a holy woman of such a complexion listen to a fine operatic bary- tone in a sumptuous temple and receive none but ascetic impres- sions ? What a cross-fire of influences does Catholicism provide ! January ^h. — A drive with A. out of Porta San Giovanni and along Via Appia Nuova. More and more beautiful as you get well away from the walls and the great view opens out before you — the rolling green-brown dell^ and flats of the Campagna, the long, disjointed arcade of the aqueducts, the deep-shadowed blue of the Alban Hills, touched into pale lights by their scattered towns. We stopped at the ruined basilica of San Stefano, an affair of the fifth century, rather meaningless without a learned companion. But the perfect little sepulchral chambers of the Pancratii, disinterred beneath the church, tell their own tale — in their hardly dimmed frescoes, their beautiful sculptured coffin and great sepulchral slab. Better still the tomb of the Valerii adjoining it — a single chamber with an arched roof, covered with stucco mouldings perfectly intact, exquisite figures and arabesques as sharp and delicate as if the plasterer's scaffold had just been [282] FROM A ROMAN NOTE-BOOK taken from under them. Strange enough to think of th6se things — so many of them as there are — surviving their immemorial eclipse in this perfect shape and coming up like long-lost divers from the sea of time. January i6th. — A delightful walk last Sunday with F. to Monte Mario. We drove to Porta Angelica, the little gate hidden behind the right wing of Bernini's colonnade, and strolled thence up the winding road to the Villa Mellini, where one of the greasy peasants huddled under the wall in the sun admits you for half a franc into the finest old ilex-walk in Italy. It is all vaulted grey-green shade with blue Campagna stretches in the interstices. The day was perfect ; the still sunshine, as we sat at the twisted base of the old trees, seemed to have the drowsy hum of mid- summer — with that charm of Italian vegetation that comes to us as its confession of having scenically served, to weariness at last, for some pastoral these many centuries a classic. In a certain cheapness and thinness of substance — as compared with the English stoutness, never left athirst — it reminds me of our own, and it is relatively dry enough and pale enough to explain the contempt of many unimaginative Britons. But it has an idle abun- dance and wantonness, a romantic shabbiness and dishevelment. At the Villa Mellini is the famous lonely pine which "tells" so in the landscape from other points, bought off from the axe by (I believe) Sir George Beaumont, commemorated in a like connec- tion in Wordsworth's great sonnet. He at least was not an un- imaginative Briton. As you stand under it, its far-away shallow dome, supported on a single column almost white enough to be [283 ] ITALIAN HOURS marble, seems to dwell in the dizziest depths of the blue. Its pale grey-blue boughs and its silvery stem make a wonderful harmony with the ambient air. The Villa Mellini is full of the elder Italy of one's imagination — the Italy of Boccaccio and Ariosto. There are twenty places where the Florentine story-tellers might have sat round on the grass. Outside the villa walls, beneath the over- crowding orange-boughs, straggled old Italy as well — but not in Boccaccio's velvet : a row of ragged and livid contadini, some simply stupid in their squalor, but some downright brigands of romance, or of reality, with matted locks and terribly sullen eyes. A couple of days later I walked for old acquaintance' sake over to San Onofrio on the Janiculan. The approach is one of the dirtiest adventures in Rome, and though the view is fine from the little terrace, the church and convent are of a meagre and musty pattern. Yet here — almost like pearls in a dunghill — are hidden mementos of two of the most exquisite of Italian minds. Torquato Tasso spent the last months of his life here, and you may visit his room and various warped and faded relics. The most interesting is a cast of his face taken after death — looking, like all such casts, almost more than mortally gallant and distinguished. But who should look all ideally so if not he ? In a little shabby, chilly corridor adjoining is a fresco of Leonardo, a Virgin and Child with the donatorio. It is very small, simple and faded, but it has all the artist's magic, that mocking, illusive refinement and hint of a vague arriere-pensee which mark every stroke of Leonardo's brush. Is it the perfection of irony or the perfection of tenderness ? What does he mean, what does he [284] FROM A ROMAN NOTE-BOOK affirm, what does he deny ? Magic would n't be magic, nor the author of such things stand so absolutely alone, if we were ready with an explanation. As I glanced from the picture to the poor stupid little red-faced brother at my side I wondered if the thing might n't pass for an elegant epigram on monasticism. Cer- tainly, at any rate, there is more intellect in it than under all the monkish tonsures it has seen coming and going these three hun- dred years. January 2 1st. — The last three or four days I have regularly spent a couple of hours from noon baking myself in the sun of the Pincio to get rid of a cold. The weather perfect and the crowd (especially to-day) amazing. Such a staring, lounging, dandified, amiable crowd ! Who does the vulgar stay-at-home work of Rome ? All the grandees and half the foreigners are there in their car- riages, the bourgeoisie on foot staring at them and the beggars lining all the approaches. The great difference between public places in America and Europe is in the number of unoccupied people of every age and condition sitting about early and late on benches and gazing at you, from your hat to your boots, as you pass. Europe is certainly the continent of the practised stare. The ladies on the Pincio have to run the gauntlet ; but they seem to do so complacently enough. The European woman is brought up to the sense of having a definite part in the way of manners or manner to play in public. To lie back in a barouche alone, bal- ancing a parasol and seeming to ignore the extremely immediate gaze of two serried ranks of male creatures on each side of her path, save here and there to recognise one of them with an im- [285] ITALIAN HOURS perceptible nod, is one of her daily duties. The number of young men here who, like the ccenobites of old, lead the purely con- templative life is enormous. They muster in especial force on the Pincio, but the Corso all day is thronged with them. They are well-dressed, good-humoured, good-looking, polite; but they seem never to do a harder stroke of work than to stroll from the Piazza Colonna to the Hotel de Rome or vice versa. Some of them don't even stroll, but stand leaning by the hour against the doorways, sucking the knobs of their canes, feeling their back hair and settling their shirt-cuffs. At my cafe in the morning sev- eral stroll in already (at nine o'clock) in light, in "evening" gloves. But they order nothing, turn on their heels, glance at the mirrors and stroll out again. When it rains they herd under the portes-cocheres and in the smaller cafes. . , . Yesterday Prince Humbert's little primogenito was on the Pincio in an open landau with his governess. He's a sturdy blond little man and the image of the King. They had stopped to listen to the music, and the crowd was planted about the carriage-wheels, staring and criticis- ing under the child's snub little nose. It appeared bold cynical curiosity, without the slightest manifestation of "loyalty," and it gave me a singular sense of the vulgarisation of Rome under the new regime. When the Pope drove abroad it was a solemn spectacle ; even if you neither kneeled nor uncovered you were irresistibly impressed. But the Pope never stopped to listen to opera tunes, and he had no little popelings, under the charge of superior nurse-maids, whom you might take liberties with. The family at the Quirinal make something of a merit, I believe, of [286 J FROM A ROMAN NOTE-BOOK their modest and inexpensive way of life. The merit is great; yet, representationally, what a change for the worse from an order which proclaimed stateliness a part of its essence ! The divinity that doth hedge a king must be pretty well on the wane. But how many more fine old traditions will the extremely sentimental traveller miss in the Italians over whom that little jostled prince in the landau will have come into his kinghood ? . . . The Pincio continues to beguile; it's a great resource. I am for ever being reminded of the "aesthetic luxury," as I called it above, of living in Rome. To be able to choose of an afternoon for a lounge (respectfully speaking) between St. Peter's and the high precinct you approach by the gate just beyond Villa Medici — counting nothing else — is a proof that if in Rome you may suffer from ennui, at least your ennui has a throbbing soul in it. It is some- thing to say for the Pincio that you don't always choose St. Peter's. Sometimes I lose patience with its parade of eternal idleness, but at others this very idleness is balm to one's conscience. Life on just these terms seems so easy, so monotonously sweet, that you feel it would be unwise, would be really unsafe, to change. The Roman air is charged with an elixir, the Roman cup sea- soned with some insidious drop, of which the action is fatally, yet none the less agreeably, "lowering." January 26th. — With S. to the Villa Medici — perhaps on the whole the most enchanting place in Rome. The part of the garden called the Boschetto has an incredible, impossible charm ; an upper terrace, behind locked gates, covered with a little dusky forest of evergreen oaks. Such a dim light as of a fabled, haunted [287] ITALIAN HOURS place, such a soft suffusion of tender grey-green tones, such a com- pany of gnarled and twisted little miniature trunks — dwarfs playing with each other at being giants — and such a shower of golden sparkles drifting in from the vivid west ! At the end of the wood is a steep, circular mound, up which the short trees scramble amain, with a long mossy staircase climbing up to a belvedere. This staircase, rising suddenly out of the leafy dusk to you don't see where, is delightfully fantastic. You expect to see an old wo- man in a crimson petticoat and with a distaff come hobbling down and turn into a fairy and offer you three wishes. I should name for my own first wish that one did n't have to be a Frenchman to come and live and dream and work at the Academic de France. Can there be for a while a happier destiny than that of a young artist conscious of talent and of no errand but to educate, polish and perfect it, transplanted to these sacred shades ? One has fancied Plato's Academy — his gleaming colonnades, his bloom- ing gardens and Athenian sky; but was it as good as this one, where Monsieur Hebert does the Platonic ? The blessing in Rome is not that this or that or the other isolated object is so very unsur- passable; but that the general air so contributes to interest, to impressions that are not as any other impressions anywhere in the world. And from this general air the Villa Medici has distilled an essence of its own — walled it in and made it delightfully private. The great facade on the gardens is like an enormous rococo clock-face all incrusted with images and arabesques and tablets. What mornings and afternoons one might spend there, brush in hand, unpreoccupied, untormented, pensioned, satisfied — either [288 ] FROM A ROMAN NOTE-BOOK persuading one's self that one would be "doing something" in consequence or not caring if one should n't be. At a later date — middle of March. — A ride with S. W. out of the Porta Pia to the meadows beyond the Ponte Nomentana — close to the site of Phaon's villa where Nero in hiding had him- self stabbed. It all spoke as things here only speak, touching more chords than one can now really know or say. For these are predestined memories and the stuff that regrets are made of; the mild divine efflorescence of spring, the wonderful landscape, the talk suspended for another gallop. . . . Returning, we dis- mounted at the gate of the Villa Medici and walked through the twilight of the vaguely perfumed, bird-haunted alleys to H.'s studio, hidden in the wood like a cottage in a fairy tale. I spent there a charming half-hour in the fading light, looking at the pictures while my companion discoursed of her errand. The studio is small and more like a little salon ; the painting refined, imaginative, somewhat morbid, full of consummate French ability. A portrait, idealised and ethereahsed, but a likeness of Mme. de — - (from last year's Salon) in white satin, quantities of lace, a coronet, diamonds and pearls ; a striking combination of brilliant silvery tones. A "Femme Sauvage," a naked dusky girl in a wood, with a wonderfully clever pair of shy, passionate eyes. The author is different enough from any of the numerous Ameri- can artists. They may be producers, but he 's a product as well — a product of influences of a sort of which we have as yet no general command. One of them is his charmed lapse of life in that unprofessional-looking little studio, with his enchanted [289] ITALIAN HOURS wood on one side and the plunging wall of Rome on the other. January s^th. — A drive the other day with a friend to Villa Madama, on the side of Monte Mario ; a place like a page out of one of Browning's richest evocations of this clime and civilisa- tion. Wondrous in its haunting melancholy, it might have in- spired half "The Ring and the Book" at a stroke. What a grim commentary on history such a scene — what an irony of the past ! The road up to it through the outer enclosure is almost impassable with mud and stones. At the end, on a terrace, rises the once elegant Casino, with hardly a whole pane of glass in its fagade, reduced to its sallow stucco and degraded ornaments. The front away from Rome has in the basement a great loggia, now walled in from the weather, preceded by a grassy belittered platform with an immense sweeping view of the Campagna ; the sad-looking, more than sad-looking, evil-looking, Tiber beneath (the colour of gold, the sentimentalists say, the colour of mustard, the realists) ; a great vague stretch beyond, of various complexions and uses ; and on the horizon the ever-iridescent mountains. The place has become the shabbiest farm-house, with muddy water in the old pieces d'eau and dunghills on the old parterres. The "feature" is the contents of the loggia : a vaulted roof and walls decorated by Giulio Romano ; exquisite stucco-work and still brilliant fres- coes; arabesques and figurini, nymphs and fauns, animals and flowers — gracefully lavish designs of every sort. Much of the colour — especially the blues — still almost vivid, and all the work wonderfully ingenious, elegant and charming. Apartments I 290 ] FROM A ROMAN NOTE-BOOK so decorated can have been meant only for the recreation of people greater than any we know, people for whom life was impudent ease and success. Margaret Farnese was the lady of the house, but where she trailed her cloth of gold the chickens now scamper between your legs over rotten straw. It is all inex- pressibly dreary. A stupid peasant scratching his head, a couple of critical Americans picking their steps, the walls tattered and befouled breast-high, dampness and decay striking in on your heart, and the scene overbowed by these heavenly frescoes, moul- dering there in their airy artistry ! It 's poignant ; it provokes tears ; it tells so of the waste of effort. Something human seems to pant beneath the grey pall of time and to implore you to rescue it, to pity it, to stand by it somehow. But you leave it to its lingering death without compunction, almost with pleasure; for the place seems vaguely crime-haunted — paying at least the penalty of some hard immorality. The end of a Renaissance pleasure-house. Endless for the didactic observer the moral, abysmal for the story- seeker the tale. February izth. — Yesterday to the Villa Albani. Over-formal and (as my companion says) too much like a tea-garden; but with beautiful stairs and splendid geometrical lines of immense box-hedge, intersected with high pedestals supporting little an- tique busts. The light to-day magnificent ; the Alban Hills of an intenser broken purple than I had yet seen them — their white towns blooming upon it like vague projected lights. It was like a piece of very modern painting, and a good example of how Nature has at times a sort of mannerism which ought to make us careful [ 291 J ITALIAN HOURS how we condemn out of hand the more refined and affected artists. The collection of marbles in the Casino (Winckelmann's) admirable and to be seen again. The famous Antinous crowned with lotus a strangely beautiful and impressive thing. The "Greek manner," on the showing of something now and again encountered here, moves one to feel that even for purely romantic and imaginative effects it surpasses any since invented. If there be not imagination, even in our comparatively modern sense of the word, in the baleful beauty of that perfect young profile there is none in "Hamlet" or in "Lycidas." There is five hundred times as much as in "The Transfiguration." With this at any rate to point to it's not for sculpture not professedly to pro- duce any emotion producible by painting. There are numbers of small and delicate fragments of bas-reliefs of exquisite grace, and a huge piece (two combatants — one, on horseback, beating down another — murder made eternal and beautiful) attributed to the Parthenon and certainly as grandly impressive as anything in the Elgin marbles. S. W. suggested again the Roman villas as a " sub- ject." Excellent if one could find a feast of facts a la Stendhal. A lot of vague ecstatic descriptions and anecdotes would n't at all pay. There have been too many already. Enough facts are re- corded, I suppose ; one should discover them and soak in them for a twelvemonth. And yet a Roman villa, in spite of statues, ideas and atmosphere, affects me as of a scanter human and social portee, a shorter, thinner reverberation, than an old English country-house, round which experience seems piled so thick. But this perhaps is either hair-splitting or "racial" prejudice. [ 292 ] ENTRANCE TO THi; VA ITCAN, ROME. FROM A ROMAN NOTE-BOOK March gth. — The Vatican is still deadly cold; a couple of hours there yesterday with R. W. E. Yet he, illustrious and enviable man, fresh from the East, had no overcoat and wanted none. Perfect bliss, I think, would be to live in Rome without thinking of overcoats. The Vatican seems very familiar, but strangely smaller than of old. I never lost the sense before of con- fusing vastness. Sancta simplicitas ! All my old friends however stand there in undimmed radiance, keeping most of them their old pledges. I am perhaps more struck now with the enormous amount of padding — the number of third-rate, fourth-rate things that weary the eye desirous to approach freshly the twenty and thirty best. In spite of the padding there are dozens of treasures that one passes regretfully ; but the impression of the whole place is the great thing — the feeling that through these solemn vistas flows the source of an incalculable part of our present conception of Beauty. April loth. — Last night, in the rain, to the Teatro Valle to see a comedy of Goldoni in Venetian dialect — "I Quattro Rus- tighi." I could but half follow it ; enough, however, to be sure that, for all its humanity of irony, it was n't so good as Moliere. The acting was capital — broad, free and natural ; the play of talk easier even than life itself; but, like all the Italian acting I have seen, it was wanting in finesse, that shade of the shade by which, and by which alone, one really knows art. I contrasted the affair with the evening in December last that I walked over (also in the rain) to the Odeon and saw the "Plaideurs" and the "Malade Imaginaire." There, too, was hardly more than a handful of [ 293 ] ITALIAN HOURS spectators ; but what rich, ripe, fully representational and above all intellectual comedy, and what polished, educated playing! These Venetians in particular, however, have a marvellous entrain of their own ; they seem even less than the French to recite. In some of the women — ugly, with red hands and shabby dresses — an extraordinary gift of natural utterance, of seeming to invent joyously as they go. Later. — Last evening in H.'s box at the Apollo to hear Ernesto Rossi in "Othello." He shares supremacy with Salvini in Italian tragedy. Beautiful great theatre with boxes you can walk about in; brilliant audience. The Princess Margaret was there — I have never been to the theatre that she was not — and a number of other princesses in neighbouring boxes. G. G. came in and instructed us that they were the M., the L., the P., &c. Rossi is both very bad and very fine ; bad where anything like taste and discretion is required, but "all there," and more than there, in violent passion. The last act reduced too much, however, to mere exhibitional sensibility. The interesting thing to me was to ob- serve the Italian conception of the part — to see how crude it was, how little it expressed the hero's moral side, his depth, his dignity — anything more than his being a creature terrible in mere tan- trums. The great point was his seizing lago's head and whacking it half-a-dozen times on the floor, and then flinging him twenty yards away. It was wonderfully done, but in the doing of it and in the evident relish for it in the house there was I scarce knew what force of easy and thereby rather cheap expression. April zyth. — A morning with L. B. at Villa Ludovisi, which [ 294 1 FROM A ROMAN NOTE-BOOK we agreed that we should n't soon forget. The villa now belongs to the King, who has lodged his morganatic wife there. There is nothing so blissfully right in Rome, nothing more consummately consecrated to style. The grounds and gardens are immense, and the great rusty-red city wall stretches away behind them and makes the burden of the seven hills seem vast without making them seem small. There is everything — dusky avenues trimmed by the clippings of centuries, groves and dells and glades and glowing pastures and reedy fountains and great flowering mead- ows studded with enormous slanting pines. The day was deli- cious, the trees all one melody, the whole place a revelation of what Italy and hereditary pomp can do together. Nothing could be more in the grand manner than this garden view of the city ramparts, lifting their fantastic battlements above the trees and flowers. They are all tapestried with vines and made to serve as sunny fruit-walls — grim old defence as they once were; now giving nothing but a splendid buttressed privacy. The sculptures in the little Casino are few, but there are two great ones — the beautiful sitting Mars and the head of the great Juno, the latter thrust into a corner behind a shutter. These things it 's almost impossible to praise ; we can only mark them well and keep them clear, as we insist on silence to hear great music. ... If I don't praise Guercino's Aurora in the greater Casino, it's for another reason ; this is certainly a very muddy masterpiece. It figures on the ceiling of a small low hall ; the painting is coarse and the ceil- ing too near. Besides, it's unfair to pass straight from the Greek mythology to the Bolognese. We were left to roam at will through [295 J ITALIAN HOURS the house ; the custode shut us in and went to walk in the park. The apartments were all open, and I had an opportunity to re- construct, from its milieu at least, the character of a morganatic queen. I saw nothing to indicate that it was not amiable; but I should have thought more highly of the lady's discrimination if she had had the Juno removed from behind her shutter. In such a house, girdled about with such a park, methinks I could be amiable — and perhaps discriminating too. The Ludovisi Casino is small, but the perfection of the life of ease might surely be led there. There are English houses enough in wondrous parks, but they expose you to too many small needs and observances — to say nothing of a red-faced butler dropping his h's. You are oppressed with the detail of accommodation. Here the billiard- table is old-fashioned, perhaps a trifle crooked; but you have Guercino above your head, and Guercino, after all, is almost as good as Guido. The rooms, I noticed, all pleased by their shape, by a lovely proportion, by a mass of delicate ornamentation on the high concave ceilings. One might live over again in them some deliciously benighted life of a forgotten type — with graceful old sale, and immensely thick walls, and a winding stone staircase, and a view from the loggia at the top ; a view of twisted parasol- pines balanced, high above a wooden horizon, against a sky of faded sapphire. May lyth. — It was wonderful yesterday at St. John Lateran. The spring now has turned to perfect summer ; there are cascades of verdure over all the walls ; the early flowers are a fading mem- ory, and the new grass knee-deep in the Villa Borghese. The [296 ] FROM A ROMAN NOTE-BOOK winter aspect of the region about the Lateran is one of the best things in Rome ; the sunshine is nowhere so golden and the lean shadows nowhere so purple as on the long grassy walk to Santa Croce. But yesterday I seemed to see nothing but green and blue. The expanse before Santa Croce was vivid green ; the Campagna rolled away in great green billows, which seemed to break high about the gaunt aqueducts; and the Alban Hills, which in Jan- uary and February keep shifting and melting along the whole scale of azure, were almost monotonously fresh, and had lost some of their finer modelling. But the sky was ultramarine and every- thing radiant with light and warmth — warmth which a soft steady breeze kept from excess. I strolled some time about the church, which has a grand air enough, though I don't seize the point of view of Miss , who told me the other day how vastly finer she thought it than St. Peter's. But on Miss 's lips this seemed a very pretty paradox. The choir and transepts have a sombre splendour, and I like the old vaulted passage with its slabs and monuments behind the choir. The charm of charms at St. John Lateran is the admirable twelfth-century cloister, which was never more charming than yesterday. The shrubs and flowers about the ancient well were blooming away in the intense light, and the twisted pillars and chiselled capitals of the perfect little colonnade seemed to enclose them like the sculptured rim of a precious vase. Standing out among the flowers you may look up and see a section of the summit of the great facade of the church. The robed and mitred apostles, bleached and rain-washed by the ages, rose into the blue air like huge snow figures. I spent at the incorporated [ 297 J ITALIAN HOURS museum a subsequent hour of fond vague attention, having it quite to myself. It is rather scantily stocked, but the great cool halls open out impressively one after the other, and the wide spaces between the statues seem to suggest at first that each is a masterpiece. I was in the loving mood of one's last days in Rome, and when I had nothing else to admire I admired the magnificent thickness of the embrasures of the doors and windows. If there were no objects of interest at all in the Lateran the palace would be worth walking through every now and then, to keep up one's idea of solid architecture. I went over to the Seala Santa, where was no one but a very shabby priest sitting like a ticket-taker at the door. But he let me pass, and I ascended one of the profane lateral stairways and treated myself to a glimpse of the Sanctum Sanctorum. Its threshold is crossed but once or twice a year, I believe, by three or four of the most exalted divines, but you may look into it freely enough through a couple of gilded lattices. It is very sombre and splendid, and conveys the impression of a very holy place. And yet somehow it suggested irreverent thoughts; it had 'to my fancy — perhaps on account of the lattice — an Oriental, a Mahometan note. I expected every moment to see a sultana appear in a silver veil and silken trousers and sit down on the crimson carpet. Farewell, packing, the sharp pang of going. One would like to be able after five months in Rome to sum up for tribute and homage, one's experience, one's gains, the whole adventure of one's sensibility. But one has really vibrated too much — the addition of so many items is n't easy. What is simply clear is the [298 ] FROM A ROMAN NOTE-BOOK sense of an acquired passion for the place and of an incalculable number of gathered impressions. Many of these have been in- tense and momentous, but one has trodden on the other — there are always the big fish that swallow up the little — and one can hardly say what has become of them. They store themselves noiselessly away, I suppose, in the dim but safe places of mem- ory and "taste," and we live in a quiet faith that they will emerge into vivid relief if life or art should demand them. As for the passion we need n't perhaps trouble ourselves about that. Fifty swallowed palmfuls of the Fountain of Trevi could n't make us more ardently sure that we shall at any cost come back. 1873- A FEW OTHER ROMAN NEIGHBOURHOODS A FEW OTHER ROMAN NEIGHBOURHOODS ii'