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CITIES 
 
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CITIES 
 
 BY 
 
 ARTHUR SYMONS 
 
 / 
 1919 
 
 LONDON y TORONTO 
 J. M. DENT £j? SONS, LTD. 
 NEW YORK : E. P. BUTTON y CO. 
 
FirrI Publithtd in 1903. 
 Reprinted. 1^0^, 1919. 
 
TO MADAME LA COMTESSE DE 
 LA TOUR 
 
 As you know, and, I sometimes think, regret, I am 
 one^of those for whom the visible world exists, 
 very actively ; and, for me, cities are like people, 
 with souls and temperaments of their own, and it 
 has always been one of my chief pleasures to 
 associate with the souls and temperaments congenial 
 to me among cities. And as love, or, it may be, 
 hate, can alone reveal soul to soul, among human 
 beings, so, it seems to me, the soul qf a city will 
 reveal itself only to those who love, or, perhaps, 
 hate it, with a far-sighted emotion. I have come 
 upon many cities which have left me indifferent, 
 perhaps through some accident in my way of 
 approach; at any rate, they had nothing to say to 
 me : Madrid, for instance, and Vienna, and St 
 Petersburg, and Berlin. It would be impossible for 
 me to write about these cities : I should have 
 nothing to say. But certain other cities, Rome, 
 Venice, Seville, how I have loved them, what a 
 delight it was to me merely to be alive, and living 
 in them; and what a delight it is to me to think of 
 them, to imagine myself in their streets and on their 
 
vi DEDICATION ' 
 
 waters ! Moscow, Naples, how I have hated them, 
 how I have suffered in them, merely because I was 
 there; and how clearly I see them still, with that 
 sharp memory of discomfort ! It seems to me that 
 all these cities have given up to me at least some- 
 thing of their souls, like the people I have loved 
 and hated on my way through the world. At least 
 they have given me what they had to give me, like 
 the people : my part of their souls. For we can see 
 or receive, in people or things, only our own part of 
 them : the vision rising in our own eyes, the passion 
 rising in our own hearts. 
 
 This is not saying that I have not tried to do 
 more than write a kind of subjective diary, in which 
 the city should be an excuse for my own sensations. 
 I have put myself as little as possible into these 
 pages ; I have tried to draw confidences out of the 
 stones that I have trodden but a few weeks or a 
 few months, out of the faces that I have seen in 
 passing, out of the days of sunshine that have after 
 all warmed a stranger. I have respected the sight 
 of my eyes and the judgment of my senses, and I 
 have tried to evoke my cities in these pages exactly 
 as they appeared to me to be in themselves. It is 
 part of my constant challenge to myself, in every- 
 thing I write, to be content with nothing short of 
 that vraie verite which one imagines to exist 
 
DEDICATION vii 
 
 somewhere on this side of ultimate attainment. It 
 is so much easier to put oneself into things than to 
 persuade things to give up their own secrets ; and I 
 like to aim at this difficult kind of truth. 
 
 What is truth ? you will say : yes, the old 
 question, which no one has ever answered. I am 
 only explaining my intentions. 
 
 ARTHUR SYMONS. 
 
 Chateau de Chameane, 
 PuY DE D6me, August 1903. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 I. Rome 
 II. Venice 
 
 III. Naples 
 
 IV. Seville 
 V. Prague 
 
 VI. Moscow 
 VII. Budapest, Belgrade, and Sofia 
 VIII. Constantinople 
 
 I 
 
 59 
 
 89 
 107 
 131 
 15s 
 187 
 211 
 
ROME 
 
ROME 
 
 I 
 
 The last sunset of the year had been stormy ; the 
 
 whole sky, as I saw it from the Pincio, blazed like 
 
 a conflagration; fire caught the farthest roofs of 
 
 Rome, and seemed to sear the edges and outskirts 
 
 of the city, like a great flame coming down from 
 
 heaven. This flame burnt with an unslackening 
 
 ardency long after the sun had gone down below 
 
 the horizon; then the darkness began to creep 
 
 about it, and it grew sombre, drooping into purple, 
 
 withering into brown, dwindling into a dull violet, 
 
 and f|X)m that wandering into a fainter and fainter 
 
 greyness, until the roofs, jutting like abrupt shadows 
 
 into the night, seemed to go up like smoke all round 
 
 the city, as if the great fire were smouldering out. 
 
 Darkness came on rapidly, there was no moon, and 
 
 as I stood, just before midnight, by the side of the 
 
 Forum, under the shadow of the Arch of Septimius 
 
 Severus, I seemed at first to be standing at the edge 
 
 of a great black abyss. Gradually, as I looked down, 
 
 I became aware of a sort of rocky sea, a dark sea of 
 
 white and slender rocks, which, as I watched them, 
 
 seemed to heighten into the night. Near the 
 
 triumphal arch I could distinguish the eight "smooth 
 
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 columns of the Temple of Saturn; there, on the 
 other side oFthis gulf, was the Palatine; and but 
 a little to my left, though unseen, the Arch of 
 Titus, and the Colosseum. In those imperishable 
 ruins, which are still, after more than twenty 
 centuries, the true Rome, the Rome which really 
 exists, I saw the only human immortality which 
 I had ever visibly seen. The twelve strokes of 
 midnight, coming from the Christian churches on 
 all sides, sounded faintly, as if they did but reckon 
 the time of years, not of centuries. It was Pagan 
 Rome that lasted, and Pagan Rome means humanity, 
 working regardless of itself, and with the world at 
 its feet, as a quarry to build from. This Rome, 
 even in ruins, bows the mind before its strength, its 
 purpose, its inflexible success. I had come to Rome, 
 thinking that it was as the city of the Popes that 
 I should see the Eternal City. I was filled only with 
 a sense of the power of "things earthly, the eternity 
 of an art wholly the work of men's hands, as I turned 
 away from the Forum, in those first moments of the 
 new year. I looked back : the Arch of Septimius 
 Severus stood up, white and gigantic, blotting out 
 the sky. 
 
 The soul of Rome, as one gradually realises it, 
 first, I think, and not least intimately, from the 
 Aurelian Wall, then from the Colosseum, the Pan- 
 theon, the Forum, the Stadium, airi then piece by 
 piece, from the Vatican, the Diocletian, the Capi- 
 toline galleries of sculpture, is a very positive soul, 
 
ROME 
 
 all of one piece, so to speak, in which it is useless 
 to search for delicate shades, the mystery of sugges- 
 tion, a meaning other than the meaning which, in a 
 profound enough sense, is on the surface. All these 
 walls, columns, triumphal arches, the facade of the 
 Pantheon, haye nothing to tell us beyond what they 
 were meant to tell ; and they were meant to answer 
 certain very definite purposes, and to do their work 
 splendidly indeed, but without caprice. This sim- 
 plicity of purpose is what makes Roman architecture 
 so much more satisfying than even fine Renaissance 
 architecture ; and there is little fine Renaissance 
 work in Rome : the Cancellaria, a palace or two. 
 In architecture, more perhaps than in any other 
 art, nothing is so easily comprehended, so immediate 
 in its appeal to the instinct, as that greatest art, 
 which is classic. Think for a moment of St Peter's, 
 while you stand before the outer wall of the 
 Colosseum. That shell of rough stone-work, from 
 which every trace of ornamentation is gone, gives, 
 even at first sight, a sense of satisfaction, because 
 of the easy way in which those perfectly natural 
 proportions answer to the unconscious logic of the 
 eye, notwithstanding the immensity of the scale on 
 which they are carried out ; while St Peter's leaves 
 you bedazed, wondering, inquiring, as before a pro- 
 blem of which you have not the key. For beauty 
 of detail, for the charm which is not the mathematical 
 charm of proportion, the moral charm of strength, 
 the material charm of grandeur, do not come to 
 
6 CITIES 
 
 Rome. You will find no detail neglected, for all 
 detail is part of a whole ; but you will find no detail 
 over which the workman has grown amorous, into 
 which he has put something of his soul, over and 
 above the work of his hands. 
 
 To the Roman mind, as I have come to realise it 
 
 for myself, after a winter in Rome spent in tryiilg 
 
 to make my general notion of these things particular, 
 
 the world about one was always a very real, very 
 
 desirable thing, quite enough for one's whole needs 
 
 in a life which was at once a brief flutter of that 
 
 winged thing, "animula, vagula, blandula," and also 
 
 a moment which it was possible to perpetuate, by 
 
 the work pi one's hands, or the hands of slaves, 
 
 working to order. In a world which seemed to lie 
 
 at their feet, conquered, the sense of power, which 
 
 the Romans had in so actual a degree, sharpened 
 
 their desire to appropriate all the resources of what 
 
 lay there before them, to enjoy its whole beauty, 
 
 and to leave behind them, by their own eifort, the 
 
 assurance of what they had so vividly enjoyed. 
 
 That monument of the baker, outside the Porta 
 
 Maggiore, made to imitate the homely utensils of 
 
 his trade, and still telling us that Marcus Vergilius 
 
 Erysaces, who lies under those stones, sold his bread 
 
 in the city, seems to me a significant indication of 
 
 this resolute hold on the earth, on the day's work 
 
 and this resolution to perpetuate it. It is the 
 
 more significant, because for the most part a mere 
 
 citizen in Rome must have counted for very little. 
 
ROME 7 
 
 As the world was for Rome, so Rome was for 
 the State, and the State, after all, was for the 
 Caesars. 
 
 And so it is that we find the one really satisfying work 
 in sculpture left by the Romans to be the Antinous, 
 repeated over and over again, in an almost mechanical 
 carrying out of the will of Hadrian, but coming, at 
 its best, to a kind of perfection. Antinous is the 
 smile of the eternity of youtji, and the smile is a 
 little sad, for all its gracious acceptance of the 
 sunlight. It is sad with youth's sensitive conscious- 
 ness of the first cold breath of wind which comes to 
 trouble that sunlight ; a wistfulness which is the 
 wistfulness of animals, and in which the soul and 
 its regrets have no part. Perfect bodily sensitive- 
 ness ; the joy and sadness which are implicit in 
 mere human breathing ; a simplicity of sensation 
 which comes at once into the delightful kingdom of 
 things, which we are so painful in our search for, 
 and thus attains a sort of complexity, or its equivalent, 
 without knowing it ; life taken on its own terms, and 
 without preference of moment to moment : it is all 
 this that I find in the grave, and smiling, and 
 unthinking, and pensive head of Antinous, in thai 
 day-dream of youth, just conscious enough of its own 
 felicity for so much the more heightened an enjoy- 
 ment of that passing moment. 
 
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 II 
 
 Looking at Antinous, or at a young Roman model 
 who lies on those spectacular steps of the Trinita de' 
 Monti to-day, you realise that the Romans were born 
 without a soul, and that in all these centuries of 
 Christendom they have never acquired one. It has 
 been the "genius of the Catholic religion, whose 
 temporal seat, so appropriately, has always been at 
 Rome, to divine and to respond to this tempera- 
 mental tendency of the people who have given it 
 power. At Rome it is natural to found empires; 
 the seven hills await them. Religion never could 
 be mystical at Rome ; it must have its part in the 
 world, with all the power of the world, and all the 
 world's hold on temporal felicity, and it is by an 
 appeal to after all largely the Pagan sentiment in 
 life and thought that the Popes have been able to 
 succeed the Csesars. Never was any "mystical city 
 of God " so solidly based on the stable powers of the 
 earth. Church has succeeded temple, and you find 
 the church superincumbent, quite literally, as in 
 San Clemente, stratum above stratum, the chapel of 
 Mithra under the apse of the Christian basilica ; or, 
 as in San Lorenzo fuori le Mura, where church after 
 church, built over and into one another, is supported 
 by columns, crowded with friezes, set together with- 
 out design or srder, out of ancient temples or palaces. 
 Just as the theatre, dancing, music, were a part or 
 
ROME 
 
 appendage of the State religion, so the Church has 
 taken to itself all that is finest in spectacle, all that 
 is rarest in singing. Those perfumed and golden 
 gifts of the three old Magi to the young Christ, 
 the gift of the world and its delicacies, were not 
 given in vain. All the churches in Rome are full of 
 incense and gold. 
 
 To see St Peter's is to realise all that is strongest, 
 most Roman, nothing that is subtle or spiritual, in the 
 power of the Church. This vast building, the largest 
 church in the world, imposes itself upon you, where- 
 ever you are in Rome ; you see the dome from the 
 Alban or the Sabine hills, from which the whole city 
 seems dwindled to a white shadow upon a green 
 plain. Before it lies all Rome, behind it the vague 
 desolation of fruitless fields, ruinous houses, a 
 mouldering wall, a few ragged trees. I climbed 
 one evening, about sunset, on a day when the sky 
 itself had the desolation of brooding storms, to the 
 strip of narrow, untrodden ground behind it, which 
 rises from the Via Scaccia, going down on the other 
 side to the Via della Zecca. It stood there hiding 
 the whole city and half the sky, a vast grey bulk ; 
 now and again the moon, looking through a rift in 
 the clouds, touched the leaden roof with a finger of 
 light; the cypresses, seeming to lean against the 
 white walls at the base, turned blacker, a few gas 
 lamps shone about it like gold candles about the 
 high altar ; and gradually, as I watched, light aTter 
 light sprang up out of the deep streets and pre- 
 
lo CITIES 
 
 cipitous houses, the hills grew darker and more 
 vague, and the solid mass itself, now a looming 
 greyness, seemed to float like a great shadow into 
 the depths of the night. And always, by day, 
 looked at from within or without, it Is by its 
 immensity, its spectacular qualities, that it is im- 
 pressive. To walk across the floor is like taking 
 a journey; voices chanting in a side chapel can 
 only just be heard from the opposite aisle; and, 
 looking at the four piers which support the dome, 
 one remembers that the church of San Carlino' alle 
 Quattro Fontane, by no means a small church, is 
 exactly the size of one of those four piers. Every- 
 thing, the whole decoration, in order that it may be 
 in proportion to the scale of the building, is ex- 
 aggerated, and almost no detail bears an intimate 
 examination, or can give one a separate sensation of 
 pleasure; for the few lovely things, like Michel- 
 angelo's Pieta, are lost in little chapels, where they 
 exist ■ quietly, in their corners, like a fiAe, silent 
 criticism of all this display, these florid Popes and 
 angels, this noisy architectural rhetoric. And St 
 Peter's, impressing you, as it certainly does, with 
 its tremendous size, strength, wealth, and the tire- 
 less, enduring power which has called it into being, 
 holds you at a distance, with the true ecclesiastical 
 frigidity. You learn here how to distinguish be- 
 tween what is emotional and what is properly 
 ecclesiastical in the Catholic Church. St Peter's is 
 entirely positive, dogmatic, the assertion of the 
 
ROME 1 1 
 
 si^)remacy of the Church over the world ; never 
 mystic, as in one of those dim Spanish cathedrals, 
 that of Barcelona, for instance ; nor yet fantastic, 
 full of strange, precious wonders of the world, 
 brought from far off, as in St Mark's. It is florid, 
 spectacular, but never profane; suggesting, as it 
 does, what is the strength, and what are also the 
 metaphysical limitations of the Church, it never 
 suggests, as St Mark's does, the human curiosities 
 which may become a strange vice, as easily as a 
 singular virtue. Nor is it, like St Mark's, in the 
 midst of the city, where the heart of the city beats, 
 where one sees a homely crowd wandering in and 
 out all day long, looking in on the way home from 
 market, as one might look in for a moment at a 
 friend's house. 
 
 High Mass at St Peter's, as I saw it on Christmas 
 Day, said by Cardinal RampoUa, was an impressive 
 ceremony, indeed, but it was said mainly to a crowd 
 of curious strangers. The large, rigid figure in the 
 red robes and the gold mitre, who sat there under 
 his golden vestments, lifting a white gloved hand on 
 whose third finger shone the emerald ring set with 
 diamonds, performed the sacred functions with a 
 dignity which was a little weary, and in the priest's 
 expressionless way, with that air of fixed meditation 
 (as of a continual commerce with heaven) which is 
 the Church's manner of expressing disapproval of 
 the world. Where I seemed to see a real devotion 
 was in the peasants from the Campagna, who passed 
 
i^ CITIES 
 
 with their rough cloaks rolled round them, and 
 kissed St Peter's foot devoutly, leaning their fore- 
 heads against it; the women carefully rubbing the 
 toe with their handkerchiefs before kissing it. I 
 saw the same deep feeling in a fifteenth-century 
 church into which I went that afternoon, S. Agostino, 
 a church famed for its devotion. A whole wall was 
 covered with little gilt-framed votive offerings, silver 
 hearts, and pious vows, and in front of them many 
 poor old women sat and knelt, praying with closed 
 eyes ; others lifted their children to kiss the foot 
 of Sansovino's patrician Virgin, the compassionate 
 Madonna del Parto. I found a different, but per- 
 haps not less sincere company of worshippers, in 
 San Luigi dei Francesi, before that screen of candles, 
 like burning gold, gold light rising flamelike out of 
 gilt candlesticks, which enshrined for their devotion 
 the unseen presence of the Sacrament. But at the 
 midnight Mass in the same church, which was 
 attended by a special permission, I was once more 
 in that atmosphere of positive, unspiritual things 
 which I had breathed in St Peter's, and which 
 seemed to me so typical of Rome. The church 
 was filled to its farthest corner by a brilliant 
 crowd ; the music, played by organ, harp, and 
 strings, and sung by somewhat uncertain voices, 
 was florid and brilliant ; and far off, at the golden 
 end of the church, white against the gold light, 
 seven rows of candles rising like an arch of pure 
 gold, the priests moved through the sacred ritual. 
 
ROME 13 
 
 Near me were some Italians, two of them women 
 of the finest aristocratic type, with faces carved like 
 cameos, a touch of cruelty in their dark, vivid, 
 reticent dignity ; and these faces, looking on as at 
 a show, and prepared to look away the moment it 
 was no longer amusing, seemed to bring all the 
 strength of the world's hold on one into the per- 
 fumed atmosphere of the place. Looking, as I 
 could not but look, at these beautiful Pagan feces, 
 perfect as Roman medals, I felt that they were Rome, 
 and that Rome was at least sure of this world, what- 
 ever her admiratioii, her curiosity, her possible dreams, 
 of another. 
 
 Ill 
 
 " The grandeur that was Rome " : that phrase of 
 Poe's sums up perfectly the impression which Rome, 
 even now, makes upon the observer. The secret 
 of what is most impressive there is the choice 
 (miraculous, we are led to suppose, and can well 
 believe) of its site. A city built upon seven hills, 
 hills which have arranged themselves, naturally, with 
 such an art of impressive composition, can have no 
 rival among the cities of the world in its appeal to 
 the sense of material grandeur. That the Senate 
 should throne itself upon the Capitol, that the 
 palaces of the Ctesars should have been on the 
 Palatine or the Esquiline, was an almost incalculable 
 
14 CITIES 
 
 aid to the pomp of State. St Peter's, seen in the 
 sky from all Rome, thrones Catholicism on a similar 
 eminence. Everything in Rome impresses by its 
 height, by an amplitude of adjusted proportions, 
 which is far more than the mere equivalent of vast 
 spaces covered, as in London, invisible for its very 
 size. The pride of looking down, the pride of 
 having something to look up to, are alike satisfied 
 for the Romans, by what nature and art have done 
 for Rome. 
 
 This Roman grandeur began by being colossally 
 
 simple. I find all the grandeur of Rome in 
 
 even so late a work as the Aurelian Wall, and 
 
 that is nothing but a bare, brown, precipitous line 
 
 of masonry, patched with the mendings of all the 
 
 ages. The Colosseum, the Pantheon, for all their 
 
 original splendour of decoration, still exist with such 
 
 potency, now that they are reduced to the bare 
 
 elements of their construction, because the simplicity 
 
 of that construction was the primary concern of 
 
 Vespasian and Titus, of Agrippa and Hadrian, in 
 
 building them. Effect is aimed at, and the effect 
 
 is always that of impressing by size ; but the effect 
 
 is sought legitimately, with the finest materials, 
 
 their most natural, however sumptuous, arrangement 
 
 and that Roman way of going straight to an end, 
 
 like their roads, though at the cost of an army of 
 
 men, a treasury of gold. In the work of the Middle 
 
 Ages, of the Renaissance, of the seventeenth century, 
 
 we find the same effect aimed at, but with a sumptu- 
 
ROME 15 
 
 ousness not duly subordinated, and turning frequently 
 (as in the extravagances of the typical Bernini) into 
 colossal bad taste. Yet still, to this moment, Rome 
 is the most pompous, the most magnificent, of 
 Western cities. Was there eiser a more imposing 
 public square than that vast, florid Piazza del 
 Popolo, by which, before the days of the railway, 
 strangers entered Rome ; almost nowhere entirely 
 commendable in detail, but with what an art of 
 eflfect in its remote corners, into which no crowd 
 can stretch, its three long, straight, narrow vistas 
 into the city, its terraced and columned heights, its 
 great gateway ? The square in which St Peter's 
 stands, with that colonnade which Bernini set up 
 in his one moment of genius ; the dark, irregular, 
 .half-concealed palace of the Vatican holding on to 
 a corner of the great church ; the square itself, with 
 its obelisk, the two fountains, the stones worn by 
 all the pilgrims of the world ; no other square 
 makes quite the same appeal to one, or suggests 
 so much of the world's history. And how im- 
 pressive, certainly how sumptuous, are all these 
 immense, never quite architecturally satisfying 
 churches, heaped against the sky at the corner 
 of every square, dignifying the poverty of even 
 the humblest streets, leaving, like San Paolo fuori 
 le Mura, infinite riches run to waste in the un- 
 populated Campagna! You can scarcely walk for 
 five minutes in any direction without coming on 
 something, perhaps incongruous where it is, like 
 
i6 CITIES 
 
 the eleven Corinthian columns of Hadrian's Temple 
 
 of Neptune, forty feet high, now filled up with 
 
 modem brickwork, and made into the Exchange ; 
 
 something absolutely startling, something vast and 
 
 sudden, it may be only the Trevi Fountain, it may 
 
 be the Theatre of Marcellus, the Capitol itself. 
 
 And the appropriate decor of life^ awaits every 
 
 occasion, ready set; for what occasion is there in 
 
 life which was not anticipated and prepared for, 
 
 with learned, foreseeing taste, centuries ago, in 
 
 those times when Rome had perfected the arts of 
 
 life as now only the Eastern races ever dream of 
 
 perfecting them ? Think, in the baths of Caracalla 
 
 or of Diocletian, among' the trees and ruins of the 
 
 Palatine ; or, with less of the historic effort, in the 
 
 gardens of the Villa Albani, with their alleys of 
 
 shaven box, carved into niches for statues; of the 
 
 Villa Borghese, with their avenues of ilex, their 
 
 grassy amphitheatre ; of the Villa Doria-Pamphili, 
 
 which is like an English park, laid out by a French 
 
 gardener; in the Bosco of the Villa Medici, wild 
 
 and delicate, with its staircase going up between 
 
 the trees to the sky ; think what a decor lies before 
 
 one, gone to waste, or at least wasted, for a life of 
 
 the most triumphant pleasure! To live in Rome 
 
 is to understand all the coloured and spectacular 
 
 vices of the Csesars, all the elaborate sins of the 
 
 Renaissance. Occasions so great as these have 
 
 gone, but the possibilities remain, awaiting only 
 
 their opportunity. 
 
ROME 17 
 
 IV 
 
 Rome is a sea in which many worlds have gone 
 down, and its very pavement is all in waves ; so that 
 to drive through these narrow streets, and across 
 these broad squares, in which there is no footway 
 over which a wheel may not drive,-is like rocking in 
 a boat on slightly uneasy water. The soil every- 
 where heaves over still buried ruins, which may 
 hold (who knows?) another Apoxyomenos. And, 
 as no other great city in the world is, the whole of 
 Rome is one vast museum, in which the very 
 galleries, palaces, churches, which contain the finest 
 of its treasures, are themselves but single items in 
 that museum which is Rome. And what gives to 
 all this precisely its special charm, and also its special 
 value to the student, is that Rome is still a living city, 
 the capital of a nation, and with an actual life of its 
 own, which, often enough, can be seen in its direct 
 descent from antiquity. The Roman people have 
 always had a sense of the continuity of their national 
 life, of their Uteral part in the .inheritance of their 
 ancestors. One sees it, sometimes with a quaint 
 grotesqueness, in the simple-minded way in which, 
 just as they Christianised Pagan temples, so they have 
 always taken to themselves and turned to their own 
 uses the monuments of all the ages : Pasquino, Mar- 
 forio, Madama Lucrezia, the Bocca della Verita ; the 
 religion of one age becoming the mouthpiece for the 
 
1 8 CITIES 
 
 satire or criticism of the next, as the Pagan gods in 
 exile, in the Christian Middle Ages, became demons, 
 haunting the souls of men with their perilous beauty. 
 One sees it, at the present day, in that singular 
 deification of Vittorio Emanuele, which is really an 
 apotheosis, after the manner of the apotheoses of 
 the Roman emperors ; and quite after their ruthless 
 manner is that waste of thousands of pounds in the 
 destruction of certain old streets, which were beau- 
 tiful, for the proper view of an equestrian statue, 
 which will be hideous. And then, in the actual 
 museums, the palace of the Vatican, the palace of 
 the Conservatori, the baths of Diocletian, what a 
 prepared atmosphere one finds, and how much more 
 at home in these courts, frescoed halls, papal 
 summer-houses, Carthusian cloisters, is all this white, 
 chosen humanity of statues, which, if they "remem- 
 ber their august abodes," must certainly pine less for 
 Greece, which they left so early, than any other 
 marble beings in the world. Since I have been in 
 Rome I have realised, for myself, many things about 
 Greek art, which not all the study of sculpture in 
 London, Paris, and Berlin had taught me; and I 
 have been able to see it, not only as the greatest 
 the most " classic " art of the world, but as the most 
 living, responsive, intimately delightful. And this is 
 certainly because I have seen it where it could be 
 seen more like something in its natural place, less 
 like something on show, than anywhere out of 
 Greece. 
 
ROME 19 
 
 And in painting, too, one has the opportunity of 
 making certain not unsimilar discoveries. Rome is 
 not rich in easel-pictures, nor yet in altar-pieces, but 
 it is only in Rome that it is possible to realise, to the 
 full extent of their gifts and limitations, the pictorial 
 genius of Michelangelo, of Raphael, and of Pin- 
 turicchio. Michelangelo in the decoration of the 
 Sistine Chapel, Raphael in the decoration of the 
 Stanze and Logge, Pinturicchio in the decoration of 
 the Appartamento Borgia, of the Vatican, is seen 
 working as the painter loves to work, in the one 
 really satisfying way in which he can work, archi- 
 tecturally, for the adornment of a given space, which 
 is part of the essential life of a building. And so 
 these frescoes, as no picture in a museum could ever 
 be, are an actual part of Rome, precisely as much a 
 part of it as the Vatican itself. 
 
 In the Sistine Chapel there are admirable paint- 
 ings by Botticelli, by Signorelli, by Perugino, but 
 one can see nothing there but Michelangelo. 
 And the emotion of first seeing this immense world 
 created by Michelangelo seized me with a de- 
 lighted awe, such as 1 could imagine to have stirred 
 in the soul of Adam when he awoke and beheld 
 the world. Other things are beautiful, exquisite, 
 subtle, but these seem to contain all beautiful and 
 exquisite and subtle things, and to disregard them. 
 In the passion of this overwhelming life which burns 
 through every line, there is for once the creating 
 joy of the artist, flawless, unimpaired, unchecked, 
 
20 CITIES 
 
 fulfilling its desire as not even the Greeks have 
 done ; for desire, in them, was restrained by a sense 
 of delicate harmony, to which it was the triumphant 
 self-sacrifice of their art to conform. Here we have 
 no sense of even so much of mortal concession to 
 the demands of immortality ; but the unbounded 
 spirit seems to revel in the absoluteness of its free- 
 dom. Here, at last, here indeed for the first time, 
 is all that can be meant by -sublimity ; a sublimity 
 which attains its pre-eminence through no sacrifice 
 of other qualities ; a sublimity which (let us say it 
 frankly) is amusing. I find the magnificent and ex- 
 treme life of these figures as touching, intimate, and 
 direct in its appeal, as the most vivid and gracious 
 realism of any easel-pictore ; God, the Father and 
 the Son, the Virgin, the men and women of the Old 
 Testament, the Sibyls, the risen dead of the Last 
 Judgment, all these tremendous symbols of whatever 
 has been divined by the spirit or sought out by the 
 wisdom of the ages, crowd upon one with the 
 palpable, irresistible nearness of the people who 
 throng one in one's passage through the actual 
 world. It seemed to me then, it still seems to me 
 strange that I should have felt it, but never before 
 had I felt so much at home among paintings, so 
 little of a mere spectator. One seems to be of the 
 ,same vivid and eternal world as these joyous and 
 meditative beings, joyous and meditative even in 
 hell, where the rapture of their torment broods in 
 eyes and limbs with the same energy as the rapture 
 
ROME 21 
 
 of God in creation, of the woman in disobedience, or 
 of Isaiah in vision. They are close to one, I think, 
 partly because they are so far away ; because no 
 subtlety in the eyes or lips, no delicacy in the fold 
 of garments, none of the curious and discoverable 
 ways by which art imitates and beautifies nature, 
 can distract one from the immediate impress of such 
 passionate and obsessing life. Art ceases to approach 
 one indirectly, through this sense or that, through 
 colour, or suggested motion,^ or some fancied outlook 
 of the soul ; it comes straight to one, boldly, seizing 
 one at once by that instinct of immediate recognition, 
 by which, except here, only perhaps the direct works 
 of God have ever approached and revealed themselves 
 to the soul of man. 
 
 Now turn to Raphael. Here, on the contrary, 
 we have art so obvious in its concealment of art 
 that it becomes the idol of the crowd, and ceases 
 to interest the more curious dreamer before pictures. 
 Ra{)hael is the instinctively triumphant perfection of 
 the ideal of the average man; he is what scarcely 
 the greatest of painters can be, and what only 
 mediocre painters have desired to be. Here is the 
 simplicity of what is called inspiration : the ease of 
 doing, better than any one else, what the greater 
 number would like, better than anything else, to do. 
 And he is miraculous ; yet a miracle which just fails 
 to interest one; because, I think, he is essentially 
 exterior, and his pictures a dream of the hand, 
 rather than a dream of the soul. Even that 
 
22 CITIES 
 
 peace which he can convey with so delicate a 
 power, seems to me rather the slumber than the 
 ecstasy of peace. His Madonnas have no foresight 
 in their eyes of the seven swords with which the 
 divine child is to pierce their breasts. His gracious 
 saints have never, before they attained sanctity, 
 suffered all the enlightening ardours of sin. His 
 martyrs have no memory, either of death, by which 
 , they have passed, or of heaven, to which they have 
 come. All the persons of his pictures live, some- 
 what unthinkingly, in the moment which their 
 • gesture perpetuates; they have but that gesture. 
 We see eternity in the moment of fierce meditation 
 which Michelangelo calls up before us, as it 
 thought in the brows and hands were about to 
 relax or resolve itself into some other of the un- 
 accountable moods of so elemental a being. In the 
 painful, intense face of a Velasquez we see the 
 passionate frailties, the morbid, minute hatreds^of a 
 long race of just such suifering and reticent beings. 
 And in the smile which wan3ers, lurking in the 
 imperfcieptible corner of lip oi" eyelid, across the 
 faces of Leonardo, we see the enigma of whatever 
 is most secret, alluring, inexplicable, in the mysterious 
 charm of human beauty ; that look which seems to 
 remember, ' and is perhaps only a forgetfulness. 
 But the people of Raphael live in the content of 
 that one gracious moment in which they lift their 
 hands in prayer or benediction, or open their un- 
 troubled eyes to that moment's sunlight. 
 
ROME ' 23 
 
 The art of Pinturicchio, which can now, since the 
 opening of the Appartamento Borgia in the Vatican, 
 be studied more completely at Rome than even at 
 Siena, is another, a more primitive, but not less 
 individual art. Those frescoes, simply as decora- 
 tions, are as beautiful as any decorations that were 
 ever done; and they are at once an arabesque, in 
 which everything seems to exist simply in order 
 that it may be a moment's beautiful colour ion a 
 wall, and a piece of homely realism, in which every 
 figure seems to be a portrait, and every animal, tree, 
 and jewel to be painted for its own sake. • There 
 is not a little naivete in the design, a technique 
 in which there is none of the confident sureness 
 of hand of either Raphael or Michelangelo, but a 
 certain hesitation, an almost timid recourse to such 
 expedients as the use of stucco in relief, and even 
 of painted wood, glued upon the flat surface to 
 represent a tower or a gateway. But you feel 
 that the man has something to say, that, to be 
 more accurate, he sees pictures ; and that this 
 simple and sumptuous and real and imaginary 
 world, which he has called into being in order that 
 it may remind us of the world about us, and be 
 more beautiful, and so be a delight to the eyes 
 and a repose to the soul, is not only an unsurpassed 
 piece of decoration, but the revelation of a tempera- 
 ment to which beauty was perhaps more beautiful 
 for its own sake than to any other painter. Pin- 
 turicchio loves the world, animals, trees, human 
 
24 CITIES 
 
 faces, the elegance of men and women in courtly, 
 coloured ' dresses, youth with its simple pride of 
 existence, kings for their gold and purple robes, 
 saints for the divine calm of their eyelids and the* 
 plaintive grace of their slim hands, all the world's 
 beauty as it comes up like the flower of the grass, 
 and especially that beauty which takes no thought 
 of itself; and he loves it with so simple and humble 
 and absorbing a love that he paints it just as he 
 sees it, almost without thinking of his own share in 
 the work. That is why this select and coloured 
 world of his, in which there is no passionate or 
 visionary life, as in Michelangelo, nor that com- 
 posed and conscious presence in time and space of 
 the people of Raphael, lives with such simplicity, as 
 if filled with a calm and joyous sense of its own 
 beauty. To live under the decorations of Michel- 
 angelo would be as ^exhausting as to live in a 
 world in which every person was a person of 
 genius. To live amongst the decorations of 
 Raphael would be to live amongst people of too 
 placid, too amiable disposition, and too limited 
 intelligence; it would become a weariness. But 
 one need never cease to live happily ^ongst the 
 men and women whom Pinturicchio saw walking 
 in beautiful robes, that were never woven so finely 
 by hands, in meadows of gold flowers, that never 
 grew out of the brown earth, always finding 
 heaven, a heaven of chrysoprase and chalcedony, 
 at a turn of the way, and without surprise; for 
 
ROME 25 
 
 these and their abode have the beauty that we 
 desire to find in the world, in what is most homely, 
 obvious, and frequent in it, the beauty that is there, 
 if we could see it, and the beauty that for the most 
 part we do not see, because we are too sophisticated, 
 too conscious of ourselves, and because we discover 
 too thoughtful a consciousness of themselves in 
 natural things. 
 
 To realise the greatness of Rome, it is not enough 
 to have seen the Colosseum, St Peter's, the churches, 
 palaces, ruins, squares, fountains, and gardens; you 
 may have seen all these, and yet not have seen the 
 most beautiful possession of Rome : the Campagna. 
 Seen from the Alban hills, Rome is a mere cluster 
 of white houses in a desert, a desert as variable in 
 colour as the sky. Lost in that wilderness, a speck 
 between that wilderness and the sky, it seems a 
 mere accident in a visible infinity. And now re- 
 member that this vast Campagna is simply the 
 pleasure park of Rome ; that it is left thpre, 
 feverous and unproductive, the loveliest of ruins, 
 in order that Rome may have the pride of possess- 
 ing it ; and think if any city in the world possesses 
 so costly and magnificent a luxury. 
 
 It is one of the many delicate surprises of Rome 
 to come suddenly, at the end of a street which had 
 seemed lost in the entanglements of the city, upon 
 
26 CITIES 
 
 a glimpse of the Campagna or the hills. And those 
 hills, rising up from the plain to the sky, their soft 
 lines, under certain weather, indistinguishable from 
 either, opalescent, changing colour as the wind 
 scatters or heaps the clouds, as sunlight or scirocco 
 passes over them, have something of the untiring charm, 
 the infinite variety, of the sea. Drive a little way into 
 the Campagna, and you might be on the Pampas, or 
 in the desert which is about the ruins of Thebes. 
 An almost audible silence descends upon you, m 
 which the world seems asleep. A shepherd leans 
 motionless upon his staff; the sheep move drowsily 
 about him ; and you hear the tinkle of the bell. 
 
 To see Tivoli, loud and white with waterfalls, a 
 little grey town set upon grey and cloven rocks, 
 fringed with the silvery green of olive trees ;^ to see 
 any one of the castelH^ one would willingly cross a 
 whole country; and they lie, Frascati, Albano, 
 Genzano, Marino, Ariccia, Rocca di Papa, at the 
 very gates of Rome, within the compass of one 
 day's drive. These castelli are all fantastic and 
 improbable ; white, huddled, perched like flights of 
 white birds that have settled there; hanging over 
 volcanic chasms that have burst into lakes, fertilised 
 into vines and olives ; wild trees, their grey trunks 
 leaning this way and that, seeming to race up and 
 down the hillside, like armies meeting in battle; 
 each castello with its own rococo villas, like incrusta- 
 tions upon the rock; each castello set on its own hill, 
 as if it had drawn up the ladder after having climbed 
 
ROME 27 
 
 there : a little tity of refuge from the perils of the 
 plain. They hold the Alban Lake between them, and 
 Lake Nemi, which sleeps with the deepest sleep of 
 any lake I have ever seen, in the most restful arms 
 of land. And each has its own aspect. Frascati, 
 as one turns in and out of its streets, opening suddenly 
 on vague glimpses, as if cut by the sides of a frame, 
 is like a seaside village ; and one cannot help imagining 
 the wash of waves, instead of the grassy plain of the 
 Campagna, at the end of those coiling streets. 
 -Rocca di Papa is like an eagle's nest, perched high 
 on the mountain, with its shady square in front of 
 the little church where you hear old women praying 
 aloud. Marino has an air of the country, with its 
 fierce men, its somewhat bold, handsome women, its 
 thronging children. Ariccia hangs picturesquely 
 against the very side of the hill, jutting out into space. 
 Each has its variety of primitive life, of rococo archi- 
 tecture, of running water, of trees, of volcanic rock, 
 of lake scenery. And for those who care greatly for 
 the delicate shading of colours as they change over a 
 sensitive landscape, to look from these heights is to 
 look down, from dawn till sunset, upon a pjiradise of 
 the daintiest colours in the world, m that jewelled 
 desert which lies about Rome. 
 
 But the Campagna is most wonderful, most itself, 
 at sunset ; and sunset in Rome should be seen from 
 the Via Appia, as I saw it during a memorable drive in 
 mid-winter. Looking back from the mound beyond 
 the Casal Rotondo, Rome seemed far off, dwindled by 
 
28 CITIES 
 
 distance, all its towers and domes and' roofs white, 
 set in the hollow of the hills. Nearer to me, Frascati, 
 a white sparkle upon the dark Alban hills ; between, 
 along the sky, the Apennines, their snow lying 
 caressingly against the clouds ; and below, all around 
 me, the desert of the Campagna, the long grey line of 
 the aqueducts seeming to impress itself, with a certain 
 insistency, upon the otherwise timeless waste of the 
 great plain. A church bell sounded faintly, like the 
 sound of a cow-bell, from a little white church on the 
 Via Appia Nuova ; the air was still, clear, cold, with 
 a marvellous serenity in its soft brightness ; and as I 
 looked across the Campagna, going out desolately 
 towards the sea, I could just distinguish a light 
 shining along the line of dark tree;? at the edge of 
 the horizon. Hearing a slow creaking of wheels, I 
 looked down, and saw in a road two lounging oxen 
 drawing a load of silvery ilex boughs. Two peasants 
 went by, lounging like the oxen, in their long-haired 
 garments of undressed skins; shepherds who had 
 come down from the Apennines for the winter, with 
 their flocks and herds, and had encamped upon the 
 plain, in the little conical huts which rise out of it 
 so strangely. Sunset . was beginning, and, as we 
 drove back along the Via Appia, the clouds which 
 had obscured the sun cleared away, and the sky 
 seemed to be washed with colours which were at 
 once fiery and watery ; greens of an inexpressibly 
 luminous delicacy, paler and softer than any grass 
 or leaf that ever grew, but with the ardour in them 
 
ROME 29 
 
 of growing things ; pinks that were like the inner 
 petals of rose-leaves, flushing on the horizon to a 
 fierce golden red, which burned in the tops of^ the 
 trees like a conflagration, and at the edges floating 
 away into paler and paler gold, and from that into 
 the green of moonlit water, and from that into a blue 
 which*- was the colour of shallow water, under very 
 faint sunlight, a blue which deepened overhead into 
 the vast outstretched dome of the sky. The air 
 grew chill, with that intense cold which seems to 
 come down out of the sky upon Rome for an hour 
 after sunset. We drove back, along the straight 
 road, between the ruined tombs which had once 
 stood at the gates of the villas of Romans, and 
 which stand now, in their ruins, seeming to look, as the 
 Romans loved to look, on the road which was the 
 world's highway ; that long road leading into the 
 Eternal City (upon which, indeed, the ends of the 
 earth are still visibly come) out of the vague world. 
 In so beautiful a desolation, at which the soul shivers 
 away into that loneliness which is the soul's ecstasy 
 before eternal things, I said to myself that here, if any- 
 where upon earth, God and man had worked together 
 to show at one glimpse all the glory of the world. 
 
 VI 
 
 Perhaps my most agreeable recollection of a 
 winter spent in Rome is the recollection of in- 
 
30 CITIES 
 
 numerable drives, with a friend in the Roman Cam- 
 pagna and about the Castelli Romani. The Gomte 
 de B., after a lifetime of disinterested travelling, 
 in which he has trained his eyes to a perfect sus- 
 ceptibility, and his judgment to a perfect impartiality, 
 in the noting and comparison of so much of the 
 world's scenery, has come finally to a deliberate 
 preference of this scenery about Rome as the most 
 beautiful in the world, a deliberate choice of it as 
 the scenery most appropriate, at all events, to the 
 demands of his own temperament, the requirements 
 of his own meditations. And it is through his 
 eyes, certainly, that I first learned to see the Cam- 
 pagna, whi6h, like all profound beauty, does not 
 reveal itself to all, with the insolent challenge of 
 Alps, the feminine seductiveness of meadow-lands; 
 and I cannot evoke for myself the spectacle of the 
 Roman landscape without seeing in its midst so 
 difficult, so constant, so learned a lover of it ; for 
 this strange, attractive figure, the traveller, the 
 student of race, the, student of history, with his 
 courtly violence, his resolute pieties, his humorous 
 prejudices softening the rigour of a singular spiritual 
 equanimity, his reticent, self-absorbed, and yet 
 gracious and affectionate temperament, has come to 
 seem to me himself an inevitable figure in that 
 landscape. 
 
 The beauty of the Campagna is a soft, gradual, 
 changing beauty, whose extreme delicacy is made 
 out of the action upon one another of savage and 
 
ROME 31 
 
 poisonous forces. The line of the Alban mountains, 
 against the clear sky, is the most harmonious line 
 of mountains that I have ever seen ; but its pathetic 
 grace, in which there is almost the appeal of music, 
 comes to it from the tumultuous caprice of volcanic 
 fires. The great plain, which, seen from the hills, 
 is like a gently undulating sea, covered with soft 
 and variable tints as the sunlight wanders across it, 
 is a desert of lava, barren soil, and lank herbage, 
 discoloured grass and the far from " tufted " 
 asphodel. The malaria which always lurks there 
 has thinned and withered and bent the few 
 shepherds and herdsmen who are its only inhabi- 
 tants. Its silence is the silence of desolation. It 
 is ridged with broken aqueducts, strewn with the 
 fragments of the tombs and villas of Romans. 
 Before Rome was, it was Latium, the birthplace of 
 the Latin people. It hides under it the Catacombs 
 of the Christians. All the changes of the earth 
 and of the world have passed over it, ruining it 
 with elaborate cruelty ; and they have only added 
 subtlety to its natural beauty, and memories to that 
 beauty of association which is a part of the spirit 
 of places. 
 
 But the charm of the Campagna depends also, 
 more than most landscapes, on weather, on the hour 
 at which one sees it ; and it has different aspects, 
 seems to reveal to one a diiferent secret, as one 
 approaches it from this gate or that. Our drive 
 was usually timed to end with sunset, and sunset 
 
32 CITIES 
 
 is the most surprising and illusive hour at which to 
 see the Campagna. I remember the first sunset 
 I ever saw there. We had driven around the 
 deserted outer side of the Aurelian Wall, between 
 the canne, rustling loudly, rattling against one an- 
 other, in the rising tramontana, and the tall brown 
 wall, in which the stones are of every age and 
 recall every ruler of Rome. The air was cold and 
 bright, and as we came near the Porta San Paolo, 
 sunset was beginning to streak a pale sky with faint 
 bands of rose and green, against which I saw the 
 cypresses of Shelley's graveyard and the Pyramid 
 of Cestius. The sky flushed, moment by moment, 
 with brighter and brighter, yet always delicate, 
 colour, a faint rose which reddened to fire, splashing 
 with sidelong jets of flame the pallid green which 
 brightened miraculously to a watery colour as green 
 as grass, yet as luminous as moonlight. Green 
 melted into gold, red into the faintest of rose, as 
 if an inner heat burned them, and every colour was 
 reflected in diminishing shades, above and below, 
 upon the - sky itself. And this light in the sky 
 seemed to reflect itself, as in a mirror, all over the 
 Campagna, which changed sensitively as every 
 colour changed' in the sky. In a time of scirocco, 
 when I have seen the vapour rolling in from the 
 hills, the whole plain has seemed to wither into an 
 ashen greyness; at noon, under steady sunlight, it 
 has shimmered with gold; at night, when I have 
 climbed a high wooded bank which lies outside 
 
ROME 33 
 
 the Porta del Popolo, I have seen it lying under its 
 network of silver mist, the Tiber hurrying through 
 it, curved like a crescent. And always, closing 
 in the plain as with a magic circle, there has been 
 the soft line of the Alban hills, the sharper indenta- 
 tions of the Sabine hills, and beyond, the snow upon 
 the Apennines. 
 
 The beauty of the little hill-towns which rise out 
 of the Campagna, like rocks rising out of the sea, 
 , has really the character of a kind of inland sea-coast, 
 in which the houses themselves take a precipitous 
 and rocky air, clinging, as they do at Ariccia, to a 
 scant foothold over a gulf, or, at Rocca di Papa, to 
 the bare side of the mountain ; and they have, along 
 with this shy and withdrawn savagery of aspect, to 
 which the quite recent legends of brigandage add 
 a certain confirmation, something almost artificial in 
 their exquisite poise, their spectacular appropriate- 
 ness of detail, the happy accidents of their grouping, 
 and the rococo adornment of their villas, built for 
 Popes and prihces. It is by- their artificiality that 
 they seem to attach themselves to Rome, by that 
 side of them which is delicate and ornate ; their 
 ruggedness, the freshness of their mountain air, the 
 colour in the rough cheeks of their peasants, the 
 flavour of their wine and flowers, are all their own, 
 and have nothing in common with anything Roman. 
 Only Tivoli seems to me in a sense Roman, one of 
 the great things of Rome, on the same natural scale 
 as the great buildings there ; what is artificial in 
 
34 CITIES 
 
 its waterfalls and gorges and the terraced Villa 
 d'Este being done consummately, and with a com- 
 plete harmony of adaptation. 
 
 And, like the Campagna, these castelli have their 
 secrets, which are not quite ready to reveal them- 
 selves to every comer. At Frascati, for instance, 
 even the Villa Aldobrandini is, in a sense, one of 
 the show-villas ; that villa which, if you read closely 
 enougl} in Pater's " Marius," you will find described 
 as the house of a certain "aristocratic poet who 
 loved every sort of superiorities," where Marius 
 meets Apuleius. " Whereupon," we are told, " the 
 numerous cascades of the precipitous garden of the 
 villa, framed in the doorway of the hall, f^ll into a 
 harmless picture, in its place among the pictures 
 within, and hardly more real thaipthey." Yes, even 
 there I do not find the intimacy, the penetrating 
 strangeness, of the neglected gardens of the Villa 
 Falconieri, higher vip on the other side of the climb- 
 ing roadway, entered by a gate flowered through by 
 the whole body of an immense, twisted, very ancient 
 tree, which has been allowed so fantastic a whim 
 of growth. There is a little lake on a plateau at 
 the highest point of those gardens, which I shall 
 remember even if I forget Lake Nemi. itself, and 
 that " mirror of Diana " is the most purely beautiful 
 lake I have ever seen. This space of dark water 
 is closed^ in on three sides by tall, motionless 
 cypresses, their solemn green, menacing enough in 
 itself, reflected like great cubes of ^ blackness, point- 
 
ROME ^s 
 
 ing downwards at the sky. The waters are always 
 dark, even in full sunlight ; they have' always that 
 weight upon them of the funereal trees which stand 
 between them and the sun; and through the 
 cypresses you can see Rome, far away, beyond the 
 gardens, the stacked vines, the olive-trees, and the 
 indefinite wilderness, set there like a heap of white 
 stones. I scarcely know what it is that this un- 
 accountable scene awaits ; but it seems to wait. 
 Disillusioned lovers might walk there, chill even on 
 a day of sun, seeing their past perhaps in that 
 distant glimpse of Rome, their future in those 
 cypress-shadowed depths, and their present in the 
 narrow strip of brown earth between those two 
 infinitudes. 
 
 Scenery so liberal as this scenery of the Roman 
 Campagna lends itself, on their own terms, to many 
 minds. By whatever side human things and the 
 history of the world interest you, on that side chiefly 
 will you feel the attraction of the Campagna. To 
 the friend, in whose company I frequented it, ijt 
 was a mirror of very definite thoughts, memories, 
 speculations, with which the history and religion of 
 Rome had to do. Here, he would remind me, at 
 that bend of the Tiber, Cleopatra's barge passed, 
 rowing hard for Egypt ; there, at the cross-roads on 
 the Via Appia, Christ appeared to St Peter, where 
 the httle church still asks the question, "Domine, 
 quo vadis ? " Here, on the Via Ostense, a small 
 chapel marks the spot where St Peter and St Paul 
 
36 CITIES 
 
 took leave of one another before each went to his 
 martyrdom; farther on, at the Tre Fontane, »where 
 the Trappists' friends, the birds, sing among avenues 
 of eucalyptus, St Paul was beheaded. To my 
 /riend every stone had its precise memory, its legend 
 or record. And that, certainly, is the most fruitful 
 way of seeing the Campagna, though, indeed, one 
 ignorant or heedless of these things might still come 
 to prefer this to all other scenery, for its own sake, 
 for its mere natural sensitiveness to one's moods and 
 the sunlight. 
 
 vn 
 
 We love cities for their gracious weather, as we 
 love persons for their amiable dispositions; and 
 Rome, even in winter, shows frequently a marvellous 
 equanimity of temper. I have had, in December 
 and January, weeks of uninterrupted sunshine, in 
 which every day's promenade ended naturally, as it 
 should, with sunset. And that perilous shiver of 
 cold which comes over city and Camp^na in the 
 hour after sunset gives just that astringent touch 
 which is needed for the completion of all merely 
 pleasant beauty. But happiness in Rome, certainly, 
 comes and goes with the wind and the sunshine! 
 Withdraw the sun, and Rome is like a face from 
 which the smile has faded ; change the wind, and 
 one's own disposition changes with it. Driving one 
 day in the Campagna, outside the Porta Furba, I 
 
ROME 37 
 
 saw the scirocco. The hills above Frascati were a 
 little dimmed with clouds ; gradually a vast, white, 
 rolling mist came violently up out of the sky beyond 
 the hills ; soft, stealthy, pendulous, undulating, irre- 
 sistible, it came coiling rapidly onward, as if a poison- 
 ous life had taken shape and came serpentlike upon 
 Rome. Under a chill rain these narrow streets, 
 with their wrinkled stones in which the rain gathers, 
 become desolate in an instant ; and indoors, in these 
 houses without fires, without chimneys, life becomes 
 intolerable. Living, as one is apt to do here, on 
 one's sensations, how can any happiness be possible 
 in the absence of just what makes the happiness of 
 the sensations : gracious weather, the mere liberty 
 to feel without discomfort? By one's fireside in 
 London a storm of winter rain matters httle enough. 
 But what does everything else in the world matter 
 here in a downpour of rain in winter ? 
 
 And these people, one feels, are made for happi- 
 ness, for the easy acceptance of things as they come. 
 There is a terrible poverty in Rome, of which the 
 beggars who await you at every street corner are 
 but too genuine a sign. The first gesture learnt by 
 the children of poor people in Rome is to hold 
 out their hands for alms ; they begin when they are 
 so young that they can only totter, and they are 
 still holding out their hands for alms when they can 
 only totter because they are so old. Yet another 
 sign of it I find in the 3000 cabmen of Rome, sitting 
 hungrily on their boxes, in their worm-eaten fur 
 
38 CITIES 
 
 coats, too lazy to do anything but sit there holding 
 out their whips to solicit every passer, and unable 
 to make a decent living even in a place so frequented 
 by strangers and a place where every one drives. 
 But even here, in these beggars and cabmen, is there 
 not a certain participation, at all events, in that open- 
 air life which is the felicity of Rome? " Abbiamo 
 pazienza," say the poor people, and sit in the sun. 
 
 To poor and rich alike, the whole of every part 
 of the open air of Rome is a personal property. 
 People stand in the streets as if in their own 
 drawing-rooms ; and" in the Corso, especially at that 
 hour of the afternoon when the thickest flow of 
 carriages has passed, they stretch from side to side, 
 forming into groups outside the Caife Aragno and 
 on both sides of the Piazza Colonna. But, if they 
 can, they drive : Italians hate walking. This gives 
 them a respect for anything on wheels, so that Rome 
 is represented by its carriages, as Venice is repre- 
 sented by its gondolas. They have even saintly 
 warrant for it; for San Filippo Neri, one of their 
 patron saints, and himself a typical Roman, set it" 
 down among his instructions to the faithful that, as 
 a concession to the weakness of the flesh, it was 
 permitted to keep a carriage. And the Romans have 
 taken him so precisely at his word that they will live 
 on macaroni and five soldi's worth of wine in order 
 to keep a carrozza. Cardinals, again, are not 
 allowed to walk in the streets ; they must drive in 
 a closed carriage. So it is that Rome, more than 
 
ROME 39 
 
 any other city in which driving is a luxury rather 
 than a necessity, is the city where one drives. The 
 constant passing of carriages, in streets where two 
 can scarcely pass abreast and where there is no foot- 
 path, procures one, indeed, one of the few disagree- 
 able sensations of Rome : the sensation, whenever 
 one walks, of a wheel about to descend on one's 
 heel. 
 
 In the long, narrow, thronged Corso the press of 
 carriages, as they go to and return from the Pincio, 
 is so great that walking becomes difficult. But, 
 all the same, I find that conventional drive along 
 the Corso, through the Piazza del Popolo, up the 
 winding terraces of the Pincio, the equivalent (and 
 how much more than the equivalent !) of Hyde Park 
 or the Bois de Boulogne, one of the most tolerable 
 of all conventional drives. What I find specially 
 charmihg is its universality, its equality. You will 
 see the queen in her carriage with the red livery ; 
 the nobility, the rich bourgeois, the shopkeepers, all 
 with their families; nurse-maids, women without 
 hats, young clerks anc^ young princes, passing and 
 repassing, side by side, all seeming to be entirely 
 contented with themselves, the fine air, the music, 
 the marvellous view over Rome, in which the colours 
 begin to group towards sunset. On those picturesque 
 heights, high over the city j under those evergreen 
 oaks by which the Romans delude themselves into 
 thinking it is never winter ; in sight of St Peter's in 
 the sky, and all Rome, its roofs and domes, below ; 
 
40 CITIES 
 
 without thought, but idly satisfied with the sunlight, 
 with the band that plays to them their positive, un- 
 shaded, soulless Italian music, Verdi or Mascagni, 
 they pass and repass, proud of being Romans, even 
 if "they do not take the trouble to so much as glance 
 at the daily miracle of Rome. 
 
 VIII 
 
 The carnival, which this year, for perhaps the first 
 time in ten years, was really a carnival, is simply the 
 personification of Roman idleness, and a gaiety which 
 is a sort of tradition. I begin to see now the mean- 
 ing of those idle people, dinnerless, and with shining 
 boots and many rings, who stand in the Corso in 
 front of the CaiFe Aragno. To wear coloured 
 dresses, to put on masks, to run in the streets all 
 day a^d to dance all night, to chatter irresponsibly, 
 to throw jokes and confetti about the air, and to 
 forget that one is poor, that life has its to-morrow 
 and has had its yesterday : this is happiness to the 
 Romans, and their abandonment to it is contagious. 
 It is very long since anything has given me so 
 inspiriting and reckless a sense of the joy of life as 
 the sight of these ardent smiling faces, in which 
 • mirth is never vulgar, but as natural as speech ; and 
 I find the mask, making all men humorously akin, 
 the oijy form in which the idea of democracy is not 
 intolerable. What a coloured whirl, in which all 
 
X 
 
 ROME , 41 
 
 Rome seemed to become a kaleidoscope ! Every- 
 where a flight of white frilled things, Pierrots, 
 Pulcinellas, darting, alighting, along a flowery way, 
 like white birds; flowers by day and lights by night; 
 the cars, the moccoletti ; with, at night, the pathos of 
 streets strewn with floWers and confetti, the smell 
 of trodden flowers, the feast ended. On the after- 
 noon of Mercoledi Grasso I began to make my way 
 along the Corso at three, and I did not reach the 
 Piazza del Popolo until half-past four. And that 
 difficult way along the street, its windows all aflower , 
 with faces, a soft rain of coloured paper raindrops, 
 the sharp hail of confetti falling all the way, flowers 
 flying above one's head, settling on one's hat, tapping 
 against one's cheek, was a lesson in the ^ Italian 
 temperament, its Southern capacity for simple en- 
 joyment, for the true folly, that abandonment to the 
 moment's whim in which there is none of the 
 Northern brutality. Civilisation has sunk deeper 
 into these people, in whom civility is a tradition; it 
 has penetrated to the roots ; and in this character, 
 so positive, so unshaded, from which the energy has 
 dwindled away, but not the simplicity, the charming 
 and graceful naturalness, there is the same super- 
 ficial, yet in its way sufiicient, quality as in the fine 
 finish of these faces, equally finished in the peasant 
 and in the noble. 
 
42 CITIES 
 
 IX 
 
 Northern beauty, however fine may be the line of 
 its contour, is never, for good or evil, a mere beauty 
 of the body, a thing beginning with itself and ending 
 in itself : it contains always a suggestion ; it is 
 haunted by a soul ; it leaves for its completion some- 
 thing to the imagination. But in the beauty of 
 Roman women there is no trace of spiritual beauty, 
 none of the softness of charm; it is the calm, 
 assured, unquestioning beauty of the flesh. These 
 are faces which should be seen always in pure out- 
 line, for they are without melting curves, delicate 
 and variable shades, or any of that suggestion which 
 comes from anything but their own definite qualities, 
 as they are in themselves. The faces of Roman 
 women of the upper classes are cold, hard, finished 
 and impenetrable as cameos. In a face which is at 
 all beautiful you will not find a line which is not 
 perfect, and this elegance and sureness of hrie goes 
 with that complexion which is the finest of all com- 
 plexions, pure ivory, and which carries with it the 
 promise of a temperament in which there is all 
 the subtlety of fire. The distinction between the 
 properly aristocratic and the strictly plebeian face is, 
 I think, less marked in Rome than in any city. 
 Almost all Roman women have regular faces, the 
 profile clearly cut and in a straight line ; black hair, 
 often witb deep tones of blue in it, and sometimes 
 
ROME 43 
 
 curling crisply; dark eyes, often of a fine uniform 
 brown, large, steady, profound, with that unmeaning 
 profundity which means race, and which one sees in 
 the Jewess, the gipsy. They have a truly Roman 
 dignity, and beneath that the true fire, without 
 which dignity is but the comely shroud of a corpse ; 
 and though there is not a trace in them of the soft, 
 smiling, catlike air of the women of Venice, and not 
 much of the vivid, hardy, uncaring provocativeness 
 of the women of Naples, they are content to let you 
 see in them that reasonable nearness to the animal 
 which no Italian woman is ashamed to acknowledge* 
 They have often a certain massiveness of build, 
 which makes a child look like a young woman, and 
 a young woman like a matron; but, for Italians, 
 they are tall, and though one sees none of the trim 
 Neapolitan waists, it is but rarely that one sees, even 
 among the market-women bringing in their baskets 
 on their heads, those square and lumpish figures 
 which roll so comfortably through Venice. 
 
 The day on which to see the Roman populace 
 most easily, most significantly, is the day of San 
 Stefano, at that popular saint's church on the 
 Caslian. The circular walls are covered with 
 fifteenth-century paintings of martyrdoms, naive 
 saints, bold in colour and distressing in attitude, 
 suffering all the tortures of pagan ingenuity. From 
 early morning till late in the afternoon an incessant 
 stream of people, mostly young people, out of all 
 the alleys of Rome and from all the hills of the 
 
44 CITIES 
 
 Carapagna, surges in and out of the narrow doorway, 
 where one is almost carried off one's feet in the 
 difEcuh passage. Outside, where there are lines of 
 booths covered with sweets and toys, fruits and 
 cakes, the lane has the aspect of a fair. Inside, 
 there is a service going on in the choir, but few pay 
 much heed to it ; they have come to see the show, 
 and they make the round of all the martyrdoms. 
 The women, almost all bareheaded, stop at the door, 
 in the very press of the crowd, to pull out the folded 
 handkerchief and throw it over their heads, catching 
 the ends between their teeth. And face after face, 
 as I watched them pass me, was absolutely beautiful ; 
 now a Raphael Madonna, now a Roman goddess; 
 adorable young people in whom beauty was a tradi- 
 tion. Some of them had complexions like wax, 
 others were as brown as mahogany ; all alike had 
 that finished regularity of feature to which the 
 ardency or mildness of the eyes was but one detail 
 the more in a perfectly harmonious picture. And 
 these beautiful creatures, at once placid and vivid, 
 were unconscious of their beauty, with the uncon- 
 sciousness of animals ; and they swarmed there like 
 animals, with a heartless and innocent delight in the 
 brutal details of those painted scenes of torture, in 
 which they saw their ancestors torturing their an- 
 cestors. As they nudged one another, their eyes 
 glistening, and pointed to the saint who was being 
 boiled in a cauldron, the saint whose flesh was being 
 flayed off in long rolls, the female saint whose breasts 
 
ROME 45 
 
 were being cut oiFwith a long knife, I seemed to see 
 the true Roman mob as it had been of old, as it will 
 always be. It was just such people as these, with 
 their strong nerves, their indiiFerence in the matter 
 of human life, who used to fill the Colosseum, as 
 simply as these filled the martyrs' church of San 
 Stefano Rotondo, when the martyrs themselves were 
 being thrown to the lions. 
 
 X 
 
 In a city laid out for the delight of the eyes it is 
 natural that much of the most intimate charm of the 
 city should linger in its villas and gardens, and there 
 is nothing which gives so much the sensation of that 
 mournful, yet not too mournful, atmosphere of partly 
 faded splendour which is the atmosphere of Rome as 
 the gardens of the Villa Mattei. Around are broken 
 walls rising brown and jagged against the sky, the 
 walls of the baths of Caracalla ; a desolate strip of 
 country on the edge of the city ; and beyond, seen 
 from the terraces lined with the dead bluish- 
 green of cactus, the Alban hills. All the garden 
 walks, where not even the cypresses are funereal 
 nor the sunlight itself gay, breathe an exquisite 
 melancholy, the most delicate and seductive breath 
 of decay. There are wandering terraces, slim vistas, 
 an entanglement of green and wayward life, winding 
 in and out of brown defaced walls fringed with ivy, 
 
46 CITIES 
 
 and about white and broken statues shining from 
 under this green cloak of leaves ; everywhere sur- 
 prising turns of ways among the trees curving out' 
 here and there, as if instinctively, into a circle about 
 a fountain, where broad leaves shadow the heads of 
 gods or emperors in stone. And everywhere there 
 is the cool sound of water, which rises in the fountains, 
 and drips under water-plants in a grotto ; and every- 
 where, ,as one follows the winding paths, a white 
 hand stetches out from among the darkness of ivy, 
 at some turn of the way, and one seems to catch the 
 escaping flutter of white drapery among the leaves. 
 You will sometimes see the shy figure of an old car- 
 dinal taking his walk there ; and if you follow him, 
 you will come upon a broad alley of ilexes, lined with 
 broken statues, broken friezes, and arched over by 
 fantastically twisted branches", brown and interlaced, 
 on which the blue-gray leaves hang delicately like 
 lace ; an alley leading to what must once have been 
 a sarcophagus, covered, on the side by which you 
 approach it, with white carved figures. On the 
 other side you find yourself in a little trellised circle, 
 from which, as through a window suddenly opened, 
 you see the Alban hills ; there is a rustic wooden 
 seat against the stone of the sarcophagus, on which, 
 roughly carved, two lions meet and seem to shake 
 hands ; and above is written : " Qui San Filippo Neri 
 discorreva coi suoi discepoli delle cose di Dio." 
 
 Just as I love the gardens of the Villa Mattei, so, 
 for much the same reason, I love certain old churches 
 
ROME 47 
 
 and cloisters, which, hidden away in quiet corners, 
 exhale, like a faint perfume, a sense of peace and of 
 desolation in so singular a union. I am never tired 
 of the Pace, the Church of Peace, which nestles 
 against the Anima, the Church of the Soul, in a poor 
 central part of the city. And it ia not for the Sibyls 
 of Raphael, admirable in grace of invention as they 
 are, that I go to it, but partly for the frescoes of 
 Baldassare Peruzzi,on the opposite wall, their stength, 
 their gracious severity, their profound purity, and 
 partly for something in the narrow compass, the 
 dim colours, of the church itself, which seems to 
 make it, not in name only, the Church of Peace. 
 And in the midst of the Trastevere, with its high 
 mouldering walls, its desolate open spaces, its yellow 
 tortuous alleys, and half-fallen houses laid open 
 against the road, one comes upon certain churches 
 each of which has its own appeal. There is San 
 Crisogono, Madame Gervaisais' church, big, rect- 
 angular, railed off from the world, with its vast dim 
 emptiness, very restful as I have seen it at Vespers, 
 mostly in shadow, a broad band of light showing, at 
 one end, the white-robed priests, the dark shawls of 
 old women, the children running to and fro over the 
 floor, while one hears the pathetic little organ now 
 before and now behind the voices which sing quavering 
 responses. There is the basilica of Santa Maria in 
 Trastevere, with its precious mosaics, standing aside 
 from the yellow emptiness of the square. There is 
 the church which had been the house of St Cecilia, 
 
48 CITIES 
 
 in which you see the white plaintive marble figure 
 of the martyr lying under the altar, in a delicate 
 attitude, as if in sleep, with that ineffectual gash along 
 the slim neck; the monastery with its little upper 
 room in which St Francis of Assisi had lived, and 
 where the old, half-blind, simple-minded monk shows 
 you the famous portrait and the fragments of the 
 saint's clothing. There is the monastery of San 
 Cosimato, now an almshouse for old people, with its 
 adorable unknown Pinturicchio, its august carved 
 tombs underfoot, its mouldering cloister, in which 
 precious marbles lie about like refuse ; its ragged 
 garden, which has grown green over one knows not 
 what wealth of buried treasures ; linen hanging to 
 dry, old men and women moving slowly with bent 
 backs : all this pathetic casual mingling of ruined 
 magnificence and the decrepit old age of people living 
 on charity, how expressive of Rome it is, and how 
 curiously it completes one's sense of that desolation 
 which is, as Shelley found it, " a delicate thing " ! 
 
 And in all these rich churches in the midst of 
 very poor people, all with at least their bit of 
 precious marble, their fresco, their one fine picture, 
 there is something which appeals to yet another 
 sentiment ; for, opening as they desire the gates of 
 heaven to the poor, do they not certainly open the 
 gates of that heaven on earth which is art ? When 
 I go into one of these churches and see how poor or 
 humble or distressed people have come into them 
 for the relief of rest, and when, as I sit there, 
 
ROME 49 
 
 certainly with no devout thoughts, I feel the gradual 
 descent all around me of an atmosphere of repose, 
 which seems to shut one off, as with invisible wings, 
 from the agitations of the world, the busy trivialities 
 of one's own mind, all the little, active hindrances to 
 one's own possession of one's self, I realise how well 
 the Catholic Church has understood the needs of 
 that humanity to which she has set herself to 
 minister, and how medicinal a place she must always 
 have in the world's course, if no longer as a tonic, 
 still as the most soothing, the most necessary, of 
 narcotics. 
 
 XI 
 
 There are certain hours, there is something in 
 the aspect of certain places, churches, or gardens, in 
 which it seems to me that Bernini has interpreted 
 more of the soul of Rome than we are apt or anxious 
 to suppose. All that is florid, not quite sincere, un- 
 fairly spectacular, in the aspect of the city is summed 
 up for me in the four Doctors of the Church, in 
 black and white marble, who lean around the chair 
 of Peter in St Peter's, and in the ten loose-limbed 
 angels (done after Bernini's designs) who balance 
 themselves against an unfelt wind on the balustrades 
 of the Ponte Sant' Angelo. What is more subtle in 
 this same not quite sincere auning after efiect comes 
 out in the languid St Sebastian, in the church of 
 that name on the way to the Catacombs, his white 
 
50 CITIES 
 
 marble flesh pierced by gilt arrows, lying elegantly 
 in his violent death ; about which, indeed, the 
 modern custodians of the church have set a whole 
 array of painted card-board dolls, a very rag-fair. 
 But subtler still, more intimately expressive of that 
 part of the religious sentiment which must inevitably, 
 in so ecclesiastical a city, come to complete, on the 
 world's side, whatever is profane, sensuous, artificial, 
 in the idea of devotion to the immaculate Virgin, is 
 the Santa Teresa in the Church of S. Maria della 
 Vittoria. The saint, who has the fine hands of a 
 patrician lady, lies in an attitude of sharp, luxurious, 
 almost active abandonment, the most sensual attitude 
 I have ever seen in stone ; her eyes are upturned, 
 under their heavy lids, to where a stream of golden 
 rays falls upon her, a new Danae, while a young and 
 smiling angel stands above her, about to pierce her 
 heart with the arrow of divine love. 
 
 But if there are certain moods in which Bernini 
 and his Rome seem to one the true Rome, there are 
 others in which a deeper simplicity seems to indicate 
 what is, after all, deeper in the heart of the city, as 
 in some charming piece of unconscious poetry (super- 
 stition, if you like to call it so), such as the benediction 
 of horses on the day of San Antonio Thaumaturge. 
 I love all superstitions, for I have never yet found 
 one which did not come out of something which was 
 once pure poetry. They are the people's heritage 
 of poetry, and to believe them is to" have, at all 
 events, something of the mood, the mental attitude, 
 
ROME - 51 
 
 to which alone poetry can appeal. I spent some 
 time on the steps of the Church of San Eusebio on 
 that day of the benediction of horses, and I re- 
 member one very rough and wild-looking countryman 
 and his son, who drove up in a little homely cart, a 
 foal trotting by the side of the mare. The man got 
 down and waited, looking up anxiously, his cap in 
 his hand, until the priest came out with his card of 
 printed Latin and his gilt sprinkler, and blessed the 
 horses in the name of the Father and the Son and 
 the Holy Ghost ; then the c6untryman put oh his 
 cap with satisfaction, got into his cart, and drove off, 
 not knowing that he had been unconsciously living a 
 piece of poetry. 
 
 On another day, about Christmas, I saw the 
 Presepe in that church of the Aracceli (its altar 
 indeed near heaven) which has throned itself higher 
 even than the Capitol, upon which it looks down 
 from above its ladderlike steps, on which, if you see 
 them from below, people seem to be gliding down a 
 celestial staircase without moving their feet as they 
 pass frqm stair to stair. The lighted manger, as I 
 entered the dim church, was shown suddenly as the 
 shding-doors were drawn back ; and a priest, going 
 up into the midst of the painted dolls, took the 
 Bambino, a chubby red infant made of coarsely 
 daubed wood, his robes all golden and bejewelled, 
 out of his mother's arms, and carried him through 
 the church to the vestry, where he was held in front 
 of the altar to have his foot kissed. Women and 
 
52 CITIES 
 
 children crowded about him, smiling and pleased, 
 seeing what was droll, and at the same time the 
 poetry of the symbol. There I saw another side of 
 the religious element in Rome, the Christ of simple 
 women, of little children, as that sprinkling of the 
 horses had been the religion, centred in his beasts, 
 of the peasant, and the Bernini saint, in her ecstasy 
 of abandonment to the divine love, the patroness of 
 Roman boudoirs. 
 
 XII 
 
 In a toy-shop in the Via Nazionale there is on 
 one side a life-sized waxen clown dressed in red, who 
 winks his eyes, and taps with his hand on the 
 window ; on the other side is a little waxen clown, 
 seated, dressed in green, who holds on his lap a pig 
 with a napkin round its neck. He holds a piece 
 of meat in his hand, and the pig looks at it and puts 
 out its tongue. Then the clown shrugs his shoulders, 
 taps on the ground with one foot, and again holds 
 out the piece of meat to the pig, who licks it with 
 his tongue, when the clown again draws back the 
 piece of meat, shrugs his shoulders, and taps his foot 
 again. There never was anything more ingenious of 
 its kind, and everyone whojasses the window stops 
 in front of the two clowns and the pig. It seems to 
 me that in this puerile mechanical ingenuity I see 
 modern Rome as the Romans would like to make it, 
 as they have made it whenever they have had the 
 
ROME 
 
 S3 
 
 chance. That Rome should be a living city rather 
 than a museum of antiquities is one of its special 
 charms ; and thus it is that Rome, in which all the 
 ages are at home and jostle one another, is, more 
 than any other city, a world in miniature. But 
 Rome adapts itself less than most cities to all the 
 unsightly economies and hurried facilities of modern 
 progress. The Italian of to-day, the Italian in whose 
 hands is the civic power, has resolved that his capital, 
 which he knows to be the most historically interest- 
 ing capital in the world, shall compete with all the 
 young, pushing, commercial capitals on their own 
 lines, which fortunately it can never do. He has 
 set electric trams running past Trajan's Forum, and 
 through narrow and crowded streets where they are 
 an absolute danger. A little while ago he planned' 
 to surround the Forum with a gilt railing, but he 
 had not the money to do it. He has put a hideous 
 iron bridge across the Tiber close to the Ponte Sant' 
 Angelo. He has built a gas-manufactory in the very 
 midst of ancient Rome, and poisoned the air all 
 round. He has cut down the secular cypresses of 
 the Villa Ludovisi, and, indeed, all the trees he could 
 lay his axe upon. But he has propped up every 
 falling stone, and every stone is falling, of the house 
 of the Anguillaras in the Trastevere, because Count 
 Anguillara was the enemy of a Pope. 
 
 Modern Roman feeling, which, since the events of 
 1870, has been somewhat assertively patriotic, has 
 certainly little sympathy for the Church. Has it, or 
 
54 CITIES 
 
 has it not, left the hearts of the people, remaining 
 but as a tradition a bowing of the head before the 
 passing of God,, a lifting of the hat before the passing 
 of death? Are the priests, after all, making the 
 laws of a city which is in the hands of the enemy ? 
 At all events, the Church is still able very im- 
 pressively to disregard what may be only a temporary 
 alienation. Walking one day from the Via Sistina 
 towards the Villa Medici, along that gracious height 
 which overlooks all Rome, and thinking of the very 
 temporal grandeur of what lay there before me, I 
 saw a young priest walking rapidly to and fro on the 
 flat roof of a house, his eyes fixed on his breviary, 
 never raising them to consider the splendour of the 
 city. He seemed to me to typify the serene, un- 
 thinking, and, because immaterial, invincible power 
 of the Church, throned there over what she does 
 not always even trouble to understand, so certain is 
 she that k power founded on faith is the master 
 of material things, and must always remain, even 
 in secret, even unacknowledged, even against men's 
 will, their master 
 
 XIII 
 
 What is subtlest in Rome must always reveal 
 itself to strangers, and not to the Romans ; for the 
 modern Roman is given over to the desire and 
 admiration of material things, and what is subtlest 
 in Rome appeals to the soul, perhaps I should say. 
 
ROME s5 
 
 rather, to the mind. Since I have lived in Rome I 
 have come to find both London and Paris, in them- 
 selves, a little provincial; for I find them occupied 
 with less eternal things, or with less of the immediate 
 message of eternal things speaking in them, than 
 this liberating Rome. Rome, properly apprehended 
 (and to apprehend it properly it needs only that you 
 are not without a certain intelligence, and that you 
 remain passive to your impressions), seems to shut 
 one in, as with its own walls, upon the greatest 
 moments that have been in the world; upon the 
 greatest moments of art, of history, of religion, of 
 humanity. It is not merely that they are there ; 
 you cannot escape them. Every road does not lead 
 to Rome, but every road in Rome leads to eternity. 
 It is quietly prodigal of itself, like the air about one, 
 which is part of one's- breath. In this large Rome 
 one has room for one's self; within these walls one 
 is shut in from others, and from what in one's self is 
 the reflection of their image ; one's energies are not 
 torn into little ineffectual pieces, as they are in the 
 rapid drawing this way and that of the daily life of 
 all pther great cities. One has time to discover 
 that while there are many interesting and even 
 intoxicating things in the world, there are very few 
 things of primary importance. It is like the opening 
 of a great door. This opening of a door, in front 
 of which one has passed constantly without even 
 seeing that it was shut, is the moment for which 
 every other moment in life was but an unconscious 
 
S6 CITIES 
 
 waiting; every moment which follows will re- 
 member it. For the most part this door is but 
 opened and then shut suddenly, before our eyes 
 have become well accustomed to the unfamiliar 
 light in whidi we discern, it may be, familiar objects. 
 It is not often that the door is held steadily open as 
 long as we choose to look through it. But that is 
 what happens in Rome. 
 
 In London I am too close to a multitude of in- 
 teresting trifles, of attractive people, of opportunities 
 for the satisfaction of every desire. To will and to 
 receive are, in London, simultaneous. Daily life is 
 too importunate in thrusting upon me whatever for 
 an idle or perverse or estimable moment I have 
 hankered after. There are too many people, too 
 many books, too many museums, too many theatres'; 
 the spectacle of this feverish, unslackening life is 
 too absorbing. I cannot escape the newspapers; 
 for even if I do not read them, there is always some 
 one to tell me what they have been saying of 
 my own or my friend's last book. I cannot help 
 sometimes asking myself what will be the immediate, 
 urban effect of something which I have written; 
 and it is a little humiliating to find one's self in so 
 trivial a mental attitude, which it would be difficult 
 to preserve in front of the Pantheon or of the 
 Colosseum. And, above all, I have not time to five. 
 Life scatters into waves all over the rocks, falling 
 back broken and dispersed into the seething trouble 
 of the ocean. Yesterday is to-day, and to-day to- 
 
ROME 57 
 
 morrow, before I have been alone with ruyself for an 
 hour. That canopy of smoke which London has 
 set up between itself and the sky imprisons me, day 
 by day, with the debris of each day. I forget that 
 anything else exists. 
 
 In Paris, frankly, I am too much at home, too 
 happy ; I require too little ; life is too easy, and 
 answers too readily to the demands of the senses. 
 And Paris, which frees me from one conventionality, 
 imposes upon me another. Because the flesh is an 
 honourable part of the human constitution, and liberty 
 an honourable prerogative of the citizen, it does not 
 follow that a permissible exemption should become 
 a precept, a very prejudice. And that is just the 
 provinciality of that bright, youthful, inspiriting, and 
 seductive Paris which I love so much, and in which 
 I find it, after all, more nearly possible to be myself 
 than in London ; for Paris is not merely the city of 
 the senses, but the city of ideas, the ideas of pure 
 reason. 
 
 But Rome has freed me from both these 
 tyrannies, the tyranny of the senses and of the ideas 
 of pure reason. It neither absorbs me too much in 
 material things nor forces me into too rapid mental 
 conclusions. So much of the world's history lies 
 about here, in these stones, like a part of nature, 
 and with so far more significant a meaning than in 
 the mere picturesque heaping of natural forces. 
 Empires have lived and died here; the great 
 spiritual empire of the Western world still has its 
 
58 CITIES 
 
 seat upon the seven hills ; here are all the kingdoms 
 of art; and is it possible to find anywhere a more 
 intimate message than in these voices, in this 
 eloquent Roman silence ? 
 
 Winter, 1896. 
 
VENICE 
 
VENICE 
 
 I 
 
 Coming in the train from Milan, we seemed, for 
 the last ten minutes, to be rushing straight into 
 the sea. On each side was water, nothing but 
 water, stretching out vaguely under the pale evening 
 light; and, at first there was not a sign of land 
 ahead. Then a wavering line, with dark ships, 
 and thin shafts of rigging, came out against the 
 horizon, like the first glimpse of an island; the 
 line broadened, lights began to leap, one after 
 another, out of the darkness, and a great ware- 
 house, glowing like a furnace, grew up solidly 
 out of the water. We were in Venice. 
 
 I had never been in Venice before, and in the 
 excitement of the moment I resolved that I would 
 find my way to St Mark's on foot, through the 
 labyrinth of streets and bridges, in which I did not 
 even know whether to turn to the right or to the 
 left, for I had lost my guide-book in changing 
 trains at Bale. It seemed to me amusing to trust 
 myself to the attraction of the centre, and I set 
 out confidently, following as far as I could the main 
 stream of people. I walked fast, plunging deeper 
 and deeper into unknown ways, which were like 
 
62 » CITIES 
 
 nothing I had ever seen, turning now to right, now 
 to left, crossing the bridges, with their long, low 
 comfortable steps, seeing the black flash of a 
 gondola round a sudden corner, under me, and down 
 the vanishing waterway between tall houses with 
 carved balconies and stone steps rising out of the 
 water; turning down narrow alleys, where two 
 people could only just walk abreast, alleys which 
 broadened all at once into great empty squares, 
 a rococo church in one corner, a fifteenth-century 
 palace in another, then a wider alley, in which 
 bright crowds were buying and selling out of 
 brilliantly coloured shops, women in vivid shawls, 
 walking superbly, men in beautiful rags lounging 
 against the wall and lying in doorways;- then 
 another grey square, a glimpse, in the opening 
 between two houses, of gondolas lying in the water, 
 between the tall stakes of a ferry; and then again 
 the narrow and dim alleys. I went on and on, 
 turning back, trying another alley, and still the 
 endless alleys seemed to reach out before me, and 
 the bright crowds grew thinner and thinner : end- 
 less ! and was I really going farther and farther 
 away ? I began to wonder, and I turned back, half 
 way up a narrow street, and asked the way to the 
 Piazza. Straight on, they told me, up that very 
 street, a few steps; and all at once, going a few 
 steps beyond the point at which I had turned back, 
 I found myself suddenly free of all that coil of 
 entangling alleys, which had seemed to be tighten- 
 
VENICE 63 
 
 ing about me like a snake ; I came out into a great 
 space, seeing for the first time a clear breadth of 
 sky, and there, against the sky, was St Mark's. 
 . I was glad to see Venice for the first time by 
 night, and to come into it in just this casual fashion. 
 A place has almost the shyness of a person, with 
 strangers ; and its secret is not to be surprised by 
 a too direct interrogation. A guide-book is 2 
 necessary evil ; but it is not when I have had a 
 guide-book in my hand that I have received my 
 lasting impressions. I have spent weeks in the 
 churches of Venice, climbing upon ladders, and 
 propping myself against altars, and lying on my 
 back on benches, to look at pictures; and I have 
 learnt many things about Tintoretto, and Bellini, 
 and Carpaccio, and Tiepolo, which I could have 
 learnt in no other way. But what I have learnt 
 about Venice, Venice as a person, has come to me 
 more or less unconsciously, from living on the 
 Zattere, where I could see the masts of ships and 
 the black hulls of barges, whenever I looked out 
 of my windows on the canal of the Giudecca ; from 
 sitting night after night outside a cafe in the 
 Piazza, listening to the military band, watching 
 people pass, thinking of nothing, only singularly 
 content to be there; from strolling night after 
 night down to the promontory of the Dogana, and 
 looking into the darkness of the water, watching 
 a man catching fish in a net like a shrimping net, 
 while the sound of the mandolins and of the 
 
64 CITIES 
 
 voices of singers who sat in lantern-lighted gondolas 
 outside the windows of the hotels on the Grand 
 Canal came to me in a double chorus, crossing one 
 another in a strange, not inharmonious confusion 
 of tunes; and especially from the Lido, that long, 
 narrow bank between the lagoon and the Adriatic, 
 to whose seaward side I went so often, merely 
 to be there, on the sand beyond the bathing-huts, 
 watching the quietude of the sea. On the horizon 
 there would be a long, tall line of fishing-boats, 
 their red sails flashing against the pearl grey of 
 the sky like the painted wings of great moths, 
 spread for flight ; as you gazed at them, they 
 seemed to stand there motionless; then, as you 
 looked away for a moment and looked back again, 
 one of them would have vanished suddenly, as if 
 it had gone down into the sea. And the water, 
 which rippled so gently against the sand at my 
 feet, had something of the gentleness of colour 
 of that water which wanders about the shores of 
 Ireland. It shone, and seemed to grow whiter and 
 whiter, as it stretched out towards the horizon, 
 where the fishing-boats stood up in their long, 
 tall line against the sky; it had the delicacy, the 
 quietude of the lagoon, with, in those bright sails, 
 the beckoning of a possible escape from the 
 monotony of too exauisiie things. 
 
VENICE 6s 
 
 II 
 
 Venice has been sentimentalised by the German 
 and by the young lady of all nations. Lovers have 
 found its moonlight and its water more expressive 
 than the moonlight and the water of any other shore. 
 Byron, Musset, Wagner, Browning, have lived and 
 died there. It has been painted by every painter. 
 It has become a phrase, almost as meaningless as 
 Arcadia.' And indeed it is difficult to think of 
 Venice as being quite a real place, its streets of 
 water as being exactly real streets, its gondolas as 
 being no more than the equivalent of hansoms, its * 
 union of those elsewhere opposed sentiments of the 
 sea, the canal, the island, walled and, towered land, 
 as being quite in the natural order of things. I had 
 had my dreams of Venice, but nothing I had dreamed 
 was quite as impossible as what I found. That first 
 night, as I looked at the miraculous, many-coloured 
 fagade of St Mark's, the pale, faintly-tinged marble 
 of the Doge's Palace, I seemed, after all, not to have 
 left London, but to be still at the Alhambra, watch- 
 ing a marvellous ballet, and, as it pleases me to 
 be, in the very midst of it, among the glittering 
 "properties," knocking at every step against some 
 fragment of delicately unreal scenery, losing none of 
 the illusion by being so close to its framework. The 
 Doge's Palace Jooked exactly hke beautifully painted 
 canvas, as if it were stretched on frames, and ready 
 
66 CITIES 
 
 to be shunted into the wings for a fresh " set " to 
 come forward. Yes, it is difficult to believe in Venice, 
 most of all when one is in Venice. 
 
 I do not ■ understand why any one paints Venice, 
 and yet every one who paints, paints Venice. But to 
 do so is to forget that it is itself a picture, a finished, 
 conscious work of art. You cannot improve the 
 picture as it is, you can add nothing, you need 
 arrange nothing. Everything has been done, awaits 
 you, enchants you, paralyses you ; the artistic effect 
 of things as they are is already complete : it leaves, 
 or should leave you, if you have artistic intentions 
 upon it, helpless. Mere existence, at Venice, be- 
 comes at once romantic and spectacular : it is like 
 living in a room without a blind, in the full sunlight. 
 A realist, in Venice, would become a romantic, by 
 mere faithfulness to what he saw before him. People 
 are always saying in Venice, " What a picture that 
 would make ! " but the things of which people say 
 that are just the things in which nature, time, art, 
 and chance have already made pictures, have already 
 done all that the artist should be left to do for him- 
 self : they remain for the photographer. The only 
 chance, it seems to me, for the artist in Venice is to 
 realise frankly, that, in this water which seems to 
 exist in order that it may set off the delicacy and 
 slimness and fine decoration of architecture which 
 on land would appear to have lost the key of its 
 harmony, in this architecture which seems to have 
 grown up out of the water in order that it may be 
 
VENICE 67 
 
 a flower on the surface of the water, he is painting 
 the scenery of a masque or ballet. 
 
 And yet, after all, but perhaps it will only deepen 
 your impression of that unreality which is Venice, 
 the masque or ballet, you will soon find, is over. 
 The scenery is still there, the lights have been left 
 on ; only the actors, the dancers, are gone. That is 
 one elemetit of the melancholy, which is an element 
 in the charm of Venice ; but a certain sadiTess is 
 inherent in the very sound and colour of still water, 
 and a little of the melancholy which we now feel 
 must always have been a background of shadow, 
 even at the most splendid moment of the masque. 
 Now, when art and commerce, the Doges and the 
 galleys, have alike drifted into the past ; when the 
 great squares are too large for the largest crowds 
 that are ever to be found in them, and the great 
 palaces, too large for their owfters, are passing into 
 the hands of Jews and Americans ; when the tracery 
 of Renaissance windows looks out between broken 
 glass and roughly fixed boards, and the balustrades 
 of balconies moulder and wear away under the 
 dripping of clothes hung over them to dry ; when 
 this city of carnivals and masked balls, Goldoni's, 
 Longhi's, is asleep by midnight, it may well seem 
 as if silence and desolation have descended on it like 
 a cloud. Why is it then that the melancholy of 
 Venice is the most exquisite melancholy in the 
 world ? It is l^iecause that melancholy is no nearer 
 to one's heart than the melancholy in the face of a 
 
68 CITIES 
 
 portrait. It is the tender and gracious sadness of 
 that beautiful woman who leans her face upon her 
 hands in a famous picture in the Accademia. The 
 feast is over, the wine still flushes the glass on the 
 table, the little negro strikes his lute, she listens to 
 the song, her husband sits beside her, proudly : 
 something not in the world, a vague thought, a 
 memory, a forgetfulness, has possessed her for the 
 moment, setting those pensive lines about her lips, 
 which have just smiled, and which will smile again 
 when she has lifted her eyelids. 
 
 Ill 
 
 All Venice is a piece of superb, barbaric patch- 
 Work, in which the East and the West have an 
 equal share. The lion of St Mark's,, his head and 
 shoulders in one piece, his hind-quarters in another, 
 is a symbol of the construction of Venice, just as 
 the bronze horses, which have seen the downfall of 
 Nero, the splendours of Constantinople, and, at 
 Paris, the First Empire, are a symbol of its history. 
 Venice is as near to the East as it is to Italy ; you 
 are reminded of the East at every step ; yet, after 
 all, its interest is precisely that it is not Eastern, 
 that it is really of the West, and that it has given a 
 new touch of the fantastic to the fantasy which we 
 call Oriental, an arrangement of lines and colours 
 which, in its own country, has a certain air of being 
 
VENICE 69 
 
 at home, but which, out of its country, frankly 
 admits itself barbaric, a bastard. 
 
 In the thirteenth century there was a law which 
 obliged every Venetian merchant, coming back from 
 a voyage, to bring with him something for the 
 adornment of the basilica. Thus it is that St Mark's 
 has come to be one vast mosaic, in which every 
 piece of marble is itself a precious thing, perhaps 
 brought from the other end of the world, and a kind 
 of votive offering. The church is like an immense 
 jewel, a piece of goldsmith's work, in which the 
 exquisite and the fantastic are carried to so rare a 
 beauty, in their elaborate mingling, as to attain 
 almost to a perfection in spite of themselves. Unlike 
 other great churches, the beauty of St Mark's is not 
 so much structural as in ornament, ornament which 
 seems, indeed, to become a part of its very substance. 
 It is not for its proportions, for the actual science 
 in stone of a Palladio or a Sansovino, that it comes 
 to be, in a sense, the most beautiful church in the 
 world, but because it has the changing colours of an 
 opal, and the soft outlines of a living thing. It 
 takes the reflection of every cloud, and, in certain 
 lights, flushes into a rose, whitens to a lily. You 
 enter, and your feet are upon a pavement which 
 stretches away in coloiu-ed waves like a sea; over 
 your head is a sky of pure gold, a jewelled sky, in 
 which the colours and the patterns are the history 
 of the whole world. The gold, when the light 
 strikes it, glitters in one part like rock-crystal, in 
 
70 . CITIES 
 
 another like gilt chain armour. Rosy lights play 
 upon ir, and the very vault dies away in soft fire. 
 
 Yet St Mark's has nothing of the spiritual mysti- 
 cism of a Gothic cathedral, any more than it has 
 the purely ecclesiastical atmosphere of St Peter's. 
 It is half temple, half mosque ; it has the severity of 
 an early Christian church, overlaid by the barbaric 
 splendours of the East ; and its splendours, too, are 
 hieratic, in a strange and fantastic hierarchy which 
 seems to partake of all the religions, the beginnings 
 of Christianity seen visibly building themselves up 
 out of the ruins of Paganism ; and the rites of the 
 Greek Church or of the Catholic would be equally 
 in place. It is a church which is also the world, a 
 little world into which everything enters ; where 
 everything that has human beauty, or curiosity, or 
 value, is not too beautiful or valuable, and could in 
 no way be unsuited, for the divine use. And St 
 Mark's has room, still, for all the world and all the 
 churches. Tourists walk about carrying red guide- 
 books, and listening to the chatter of guides; old 
 people, with handkerchiefs over their heads, twisted 
 like turbans, kneel with clasped hands and uncon- 
 scious eyes; the High Mass goes on'in the choir, 
 invisibly, behind the great barrier, through which 
 there comes the sound of voices chanting ; and, in a 
 sidfe chapel, an old priest says his Mass to a few 
 devout persons. And nothing seems out of place, the 
 devout persons, the priests, the tourists, the largest 
 onyx in the world, over the pulpit, the profane 
 
VENICE 
 
 sumptuousness of African marble, the '^ajestical 
 roof fretted with golden fire " ; for here, as every- 
 where in Venice, all contradictions seem able to exist 
 side by side, in some fantastic, not quite explicable, 
 unity of their own. 
 
 IV 
 
 High Mass at St Mark's, as I have seen it at 
 Easter and at the feast of St Mark, is somewhat less 
 magnificent a ceremony than in most churches ; fcs 
 the elevation and seclusion of the choir permit ' the 
 sight of the holy mysteries only to the few who can 
 find room inside the screen, or in one of the side 
 chapels, or in the galleries. The galleries, indeed, 
 give much the best point of view. Looking down 
 from that height, you see the priests move through 
 their appointed courses, the vestments, the incense 
 mounting on the wings of the music, among the 
 voices ; and the great crowd crawling over the 
 pavement, with a continual motion, from the church 
 to the Piazza, from the Piazza to the church, settling 
 down, now and again, into solid groups, like the 
 pigeons outside. And indeed the aspect of the 
 church is very similar to the aspect of the Piazza. 
 It has the same air of space and leisure ; it can be 
 thronged, yet never appears to be full, and it has the 
 same air of belonging to the people. On a festa 
 everybody comes in, as naturally as everybody walks 
 up and down the Piazza ; there is the same bright 
 
72 CITIES 
 
 crowd, face for face, shawl for shawl. It is not an 
 instinct of devotion ; it is habit, and the attraction 
 of the centre. In Venice all roads lead to the 
 Piazza, and the Piazza is but the courtyard of St 
 Mark's. 
 
 The Piazza di San Marco always gives one an 
 impression of space ; yet, put into Trafalgar Square, 
 how much room it would leave over ! The buildings 
 on three sides of it, though of different dates, and 
 of very different interest as architecture (part-of the 
 south side being the Library of Sansovino, the finest 
 public building in Italy), are all perfectly regular, 
 and, at a general view uniform; yet there is no 
 sense of monotony, but rather of a distinguished 
 precision, which, in its rich severity, is somehow more 
 various than, variety itself. And the Piazza, with 
 its arcade of shops and cafes, though it is in one 
 sense the Rue de Rivoli of Venice, the resort of 
 every foreigner, is still, as it always has been, the 
 resort of the people, and of all the people. The 
 Englishman or the German, though he takes his ice 
 at Florian's, or his cof^e at the Quadri, like a native, 
 is, after all, only an outside spectator of the really 
 Venetian way of taking one's leisure. The first 
 time I came into the Piazza, on an afternoon when 
 the band was playing, I saw what seemed to me 
 either a wedding or a funeral. A procession was 
 slowly making its way along, a procession which 
 seemed interminable ; and, on coming nearer, I found 
 that in effect it never ended, for the line returned 
 
VENICE 73 
 
 upon itself like the winding line of a farandole, and 
 while those nearer to the Procuratie Vecchie were 
 always coming from the direction of St Mark's, those 
 farther out were always going towards it. The 
 order was rarely broken, and the incredible slowiiess 
 of the step was never quickened. It was the public 
 promenade, in which only the costumes have changed, 
 century after century ; not the faces, nor the step, 
 nor the drawling line returning upon itself, in which 
 all Venice, shawled, bare-headed, bourgeois, aristo- 
 cratic, and the carabinieri, imposing, ornamental 
 creatures who seem for once in their place, in such a 
 procession, take the air together. Another leisur- 
 able crowd darkens the terrasse of the cafes, spread- 
 ing far out into the Piazza from under the arcades ; 
 and around the bandstand in the middle there is yet 
 another crowd, standing attentively, while the band 
 plays the eternal Verdi, the eternal Ponchielli ; and 
 about them, wings wide in the sunlight, the pigeons 
 come swooping down, each with his little pink feet 
 poised delicately, close together, separating just as 
 they touch the ground. At night the same 
 promenade goes on : but the pigeons are sleeping, 
 among the carved angels and beside the bronze 
 horses of the basilica. Under the gaslight and the^ 
 clear, dark blue of a sky which seems stretched like 
 the silk of a velarium, the winding line is denser than 
 ever. Little groups are clustered in every corner, 
 on every step, on the pedestals of the flagstaves, on 
 the marble slabs of St Mark's, between the porphyry 
 
74 CITIES 
 
 columns, on the marble bench in fnont • of the 
 Loggetta. At ten the crowd begins to melt away ; 
 by eleven, only Florian's and the Quadri have still 
 their gay, chattering disputants, little set by little 
 set, each in its own room, or on the chairs outside 
 it. But there are still lingerers about the flagstaves, 
 before the Loggetta, and in the doorways and arches 
 of St Mark's ; bare-headed women and children, half 
 asleep, their bright shawls drawn round them, loung- 
 ing so beautifully, in such coloured outline, and with 
 such a visible sense of repose. 
 
 The main thoroughfare of Venice, the street of 
 shops, which leads from the Piazza everywhere, is 
 the Merceria, which you enter under the clock- 
 tower, on which the two bronze gentlemen strike 
 the hour with their hammers. After many windings 
 it broadens out, just before reaching the Rialto, 
 into the Campo San Salvatore, and from that on- 
 wards to the Campo San Bartolommeo. From Good 
 Friday to Easter Monday there is a sort of little 
 fair here, and stalls are set up under the church 
 of San Salvatore, and all around the little railing 
 within which stands Goldoni's statue. He stands 
 there, looking down on the people as if he saw 
 in them one of his comedies ; firmly planted, wearing 
 his court dress, with an air, and with an intensely 
 
VENICE 75 
 
 self-satisfied smile of amused interest on his face. 
 If he could only turn his head, he would look 
 right up the steep, broad stairs of the Rialto, 
 which lie there to the right, bright with moving 
 crowds of colour, winding up and down on each 
 side of the central line of stalls, between the shops, 
 hung with long coloured stripes. He stands there, 
 looking down on the people. All around are tall 
 grey houses, with shutters of green and pale blue ; 
 one house, in a corner, has shutters of an intense 
 blue, which seems to soak up and cast back all 
 the sunlight. The stalls are but a few boards, 
 hastily set up on trestles; they are hung with 
 bright rows of stockings, necklaces, toys, heaped 
 with sweets, and shirts, and shawls ; some of them 
 are old book-stalls, piled with Worthless books in 
 all languages, mostly in calf, together with numerous 
 little works of gallantry and devotion, all in paper ; 
 there is a Fonografico Excelsior, and there are 
 glittering copper thfngs, pots and pans, lying all 
 over the ground ; and there is a pentagonal kiosque 
 of unpainted wood, with little flags flying, and paper 
 placards stuck across it, at which two women in 
 striped blouses, aided by a man, are serving out 
 endless tiny cups of coffee, at a halfpenny a cup. 
 The cry of "Acqua!"is heard at every moment, 
 and the water-carriers pass, with their framework 
 of glasses and their covered copper pans of water. 
 The men, who stand or sit by the stalls, are all 
 smoking. Sometimes they take the cigar from 
 
76 CITIES 
 
 their mouths to shout their wares, but for the 
 most part they seem indifferent to purchasers; 
 especially one old and dirty Jew, with long hair 
 and a long beard, who puffs placidly at his pipe 
 as he watches the stall of cheap kerchiefs to which 
 no customer ever comes. I noticed particularly a 
 group of five old women, with turbaned heads and 
 a century of wrinkles, and another group of eleven 
 facchini and beggars, some of whom were very 
 old men, with tattered, yet still dignified cloaks,, 
 huge brigandish hats, their bright red stockings 
 showing like an ornament through the gaps in their 
 boots. They were terribly dirty; but in Venice, 
 where everything has its own way of becoming 
 beautiful, dirt, at the right distance, gives a fine 
 tone to an old face, like those faces that we see in 
 the sketches of Michelangelo, wrinkled like a 
 withered apple, tanned to a sombre red, and set 
 in the shadow" of long grey hair and bSard. Dirt, 
 on such a face, a kind of weather-stain, has that 
 dignity which dirt, in England,' gives to an old- 
 ruin. Here the old ruin is the beggar-man, and 
 he is not less picturesque, not less dignified, than 
 any castle in England. 
 
 VI 
 
 A part of Venice that I like, not because it is 
 attractive in itself, but because it is so unlike the 
 show Venice and so like a fishing village, with its 
 
VENICE 77 
 
 smell of the sea and ships, is the Via Garibaldi, 
 which runs from Veneta Marina past the Public 
 Gardens. It is a broad thoroughfare, which I can 
 look up and down for some distance, a rare thing 
 in Venice ; and I have often sat here, intently idle, 
 watching every one who passes me. All that is 
 humbler, more truly indigenous, in Venice, seems 
 to pass, at one time or another, along that highway 
 between the two main branches of the lagoon, the 
 shore which looks towards San Giorgio, the Riva, 
 and the shore which looks towards Murano, the 
 Fondamenta Nuova. Sailors are always passing, 
 and fisl^rmen, with their heavy heelless shoes, and 
 fine ruddy-brown knitted stockings, ribbed in 
 circular coils, which they wear like top boots ; 
 the faces here are bronzed to a deeper tone of 
 red than in any other quarter except the Giudecca. 
 Sometimes a company of soldiers comes marching 
 past, in their dark blue great-coats and helmets, 
 their drab trousers and gaiters ; they walk 
 briskly, with the swinging gait of the Italian 
 soldier. 
 
 The houses are old, and mostly white, with green 
 and brown shutters which have faded from the 
 crudeness of their original colours, to become a soft 
 lilac, a delicate chocolate. There are a few booths 
 in the middle of the road, under the little starved 
 trees, laid out for the most part with clothes, skirts 
 and handkerchiefs, and fruit ; the two necessities of 
 existence here, bright-coloured things to wear, and 
 
78 CITIES 
 
 fruit to eat. K facchino is lying flat on his face, 
 asleep, on one of the polished marble benches, his 
 vivid blue trousers glittering in the heat of the sun ; 
 zxvo\h.&x facchino leans against a tree, smoking ; men, 
 women, and children are lying along the walk, 
 basking in the sunlight ; some of the children are 
 bare-footed, for the people about here are a little 
 more sordid in their poverty than in most parts of 
 Venice, though without that air of depression which 
 I have noticed in the Canareggio quarter. Two 
 little red-shawled children are sitting on a seat 
 opposite to me, counting their treasures ; groups of 
 small people, carrying just slightly smaller babies, 
 are resting against the entrance to the gardens. I 
 hear at every moment the slip-slop of heelless shoes 
 dragging their way along the pavement, and catch a 
 glimpse of the heels of briUiant stockings, red, 
 striped, white, occasionally a fine, ecclesiastical 
 purple ; now a whole flock of greenish yellow 
 shawls passes, then, by itself, a bright green shawl, 
 a grey, a blue* an amber ; and scarcely two of all 
 these coloured things are alike : the street flickers 
 with colour, in the hot sunshine. Italian women 
 are never at rest in their shawls, they are always 
 unwinding them, resettling their folds, shifting them 
 from head to shoulders, and back again, slipping out 
 a ringed hand to sketch a whole series of gestures. 
 And they are never in a hurry. They come and 
 go, stop, form into groups, talk leisurely, and then 
 go on their way, almost, I like to think, with the 
 
VENICE 79 
 
 mechanical movement of a herd of cows, with the 
 same deep sense of repose, of animal contentment, 
 which comes of living in the sun. 
 
 VII 
 
 Venetian women are rarely pretty, often charm- 
 ing, generally handsome. And all of them, without 
 exception, walk splendidly, not taking little mincing 
 feminine steps, but with a fine, grave stride, due 
 partly to the fact that they are accustomed to wear 
 heelless slippers, which oblige them to plant the feet 
 firmly, and the whole foot at once, without a chance 
 of tripping upon the toes or pounding upon the 
 heels, as women who wear tight boots are able, and 
 only too apt, to do ; they walk with almost the same 
 action as if they were bare-footed, and almost as 
 well. And they use the whole body in walking, 
 not with the undulatory motion of Spanish women, 
 but with a movement of the whole back and 
 shoulders, in the exact swing of the stride. Vene- 
 tian women do, however, remind one in many ways 
 of Spanish women, in their way of doing the hair, 
 of wearing the mantilla, for instance ; the Moorish 
 element, which is their bond of union, coming out 
 so naturally in Venice, where one finds, quite as a 
 matter of course, an Antico Cajfe dei Mori, where a 
 cigarette is still known as a spagnoletto, where the 
 dialect touches Spanish at all points. The types of 
 
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 Venetian women vary in every quarter : the women 
 of the Castello have quite a different look from the 
 women of the Dorsoduro. In a seaport town there 
 is always a certain intermixture of races, and Venice, 
 with the different layers of its different occupations 
 and conquests, is variable to a greater degree than- 
 most seaports. Remembering that nearness which 
 Venice has always had to the East, it is not alto- 
 gether surprising to find among the Venetian types, 
 and not least frequently, one which is almost Japanese. 
 They are singularly charming, these small, dark, 
 cat-like creatures, with theii- small black eyes, vivid 
 as the eyes of a wild animal, their little noses, 
 prettily curved in at the tip, ' their mouths, with 
 thick, finely curved lips, their hair, too, sometimes 
 drawn back in the Japatiese manner. And they 
 have that look of cat-like comfort and good-humour, 
 which is also a Japanese^ habit. Then there are 
 many Jews here, and in the Jewish women you find 
 often the finest type of Jewish beauty, in which 
 the racial characteristics stop short just at the 
 perfect moment. You find, too, but only now and 
 again, the vivid swarthiness of the gipsy, with the 
 gipsy's shining black hair, as black and polished as 
 ebony, plaited and coiled tightly round the back of 
 the head. 
 
 Then there are many quite blonde women. The 
 Venetian red does not, indeed, exist, if it ever did, 
 in nature ; the recipes for its production may still be 
 read : a painful process, in which you sat in the full 
 
VENICE 8 1 
 
 heat of the sun, with your face covered, and your 
 hair laid out around you to get soaked and coloured 
 with sunlight. The women nowadays feel that the 
 colour is not worth the headache. But they add to 
 nature in one matter with extraordinary persistence : 
 they powder their faces, slightly on week-days, and 
 thickly on festas, rarely with much art, with, rather, 
 an ingenuous obviousness which, so far as my 
 observation goes, is unique. Even quite young 
 girls use poudre de riz, without the slighest necessity 
 for its use ; possibly, for one reason, because they 
 think it bad for the complexion to wash the face 
 much, and powder saves a good deal of washing. 
 It gives a charming air of sophistication to people 
 who are not too civilised to be frankly human, who 
 are in most things so natural and who are so happily 
 wanting in those "little ways" which we call, by 
 way of reproach, feminine. But they are full of 
 fantastic contradictions, powdering their faces, which 
 are nice, and leaving their figures, which are some- 
 times inclined to broaden unreasonably to take care 
 of themselves, without the aid or the direction of 
 stays. And there is something elaborately artificial 
 in the way many of them have of doing their hair, 
 in little kiss-curls, composed in all manner of diiferent 
 ways ; in little rows of cork-screws, or harebells 
 tinkling along the forehead; or in trails down 
 the side of the cheeks, as in Carpaccio's great 
 picture of the "Courtesans." There is some- 
 thing, in their whole aspect, slightly self-conscious, 
 
 F 
 
82 CITIES 
 
 charmingly so, indeed; a smorfia which gives a 
 curious, ambiguous, at once asking and denying 
 complaisance to their lips and eyes, as if they refused 
 nothing without a full knowledge of what they were 
 refusing. Women and girls, even children, dress 
 exactly alike; and there is nothing more comical, 
 more charming, than the little people of twelve who 
 look like twenty; brilliant, fascinating little people, 
 at once very childish and very mature, with their 
 hair coiled at the back like their elders, their skirts 
 down to their heels, their shawls too long for them, 
 dangling to the ground, but worn with an air of 
 infinite importance and self-sufficiency. And the 
 colours of all these women, the elegant oUves, the 
 delicate blondes, the sombre browns, are thrown out 
 so admirably, so finely adorned, by the vivid colours 
 of shawls, and dresses and stockings, which would 
 be gaudy elsewhere, but which here, in the heat 
 and glitter of such an atmosphere, are always in 
 place, never immoderate. They are all part of the 
 picture, the great genre picture whith is Venice. 
 
 VIII 
 
 Spectacular as all Venice is, there is nothing in all 
 Venice more spectacular than the gondola. It is 
 always difficult for me to realise that a gondola is 
 not a living thing. It responds so delicately to a 
 touch, the turn of a muscle ; is so exquisitely 
 
VENICE 83 
 
 sympathetic, so vivid in its pride of motion, so gentle 
 and courteous with an adversary. And just as a 
 perfect rider becomes one body with his horse, 
 realising actually the fable of the centaur, so the 
 gondolier and the gondola seem to flow into a single, 
 human rhythm. Nor is the gondola an easy 
 creature to master. To poise yourself on the edge 
 of the stern, and row forward, using only half a 
 rowlock, and to shoot round corner after corner, 
 from a narrow canal into a narrower, without so 
 much as grazing the prow of the gondola which 
 meets you : that requires, at every moment, the 
 swift and certain address of the polo-player guiding 
 his pony through a crashing melee. 1 never quite 
 knew whether it was more delightful to lie in a 
 gondola and watch the land from the water, or to 
 watch the gondola from land From land, perhaps, 
 at night, when something slim and dark glides by, 
 the two rowers moving in silhouette, with the 
 fantastic bowing motion of the little figures at the 
 Chat Noir ; or, again at night, when you hear a 
 strong voice singing, and a coloured line floats down 
 the canal, the singing boat in the midst, paper 
 lanterns tossing a variable light over the man who 
 stands at the prow, and the women with hooded 
 heads, smiling, who play an accompaniment on 
 mandolins. But from the water, certainly, if it is 
 your good luck to see a great serenata, such as the 
 one I saw when the King of Italy and the Emperor 
 of Germany played that httle masque of Kings at 
 
84 CITIES 
 
 Venice. The galleggiante, with its five thousand 
 lights, a great floating dome of crystals, started from 
 the Rialto ; from the midst of the lights came music, 
 Wagner and Rossini, Berlioz and the vivid, rattling, 
 never quite sincere, Marcia Reale ; and the luminous 
 house of sound floated slowly, almost imperceptibly, 
 down the Grand Canal, a black cluster of gondolas 
 before it and beside it and behind it, packed so tightly 
 together that you could have walked across them, 
 from shore to shore. From my gondola, in the 
 midst of all these black hulls and bristling steel 
 prows, through the forest of oars, upright in the 
 water, between the towering figures of the gon- 
 doliers bending against their oars, over the heads of 
 the mass of people heaped together on this solid, 
 moving, changing floor of boats, I could see a yet 
 greater crowd on every point of the shore, on the 
 steps of the Salute, along the line of the Dogana, 
 on every landing-stage, at every window, high up on 
 the roofs. Bengal lights burned steadily, flash- 
 lights darted across the sky, with their crude, 
 sudden illumination ; rockets went up, paper lanterns 
 swayed and smoked ; and as we floated slowly, imper- 
 ceptibly down, it seemed as if the palaces on each side 
 of us were afloat too, drifting past us, to the sound of 
 music, through a night brilliant with strange fires. 
 
 What struck me then, as I found myself in the 
 midst of this jostling, tightly packed crowd, every 
 gondolier in violent action, shouting in that hoarse, 
 abrupt, stomachic voice which goes so well with the 
 
VENICE 85 
 
 unconsonated Venetian dialect, was that not a single 
 one of them lost his temper, though each was doing 
 his best to outwit the other, and get his gondola a little 
 nearer to the music ; and I reflected how much the 
 situation would have tried the temper of a London 
 cabman. Their language, like their gestures, was 
 but decorative. The gondolier in Venice is as fine 
 to look at as his gondola ; he has colour, too, in the 
 ruddy dye of his face, the infinite variety of his amber 
 shirts and blue trousers and scarlet sashes ; and if 
 you really know him, he is one of the most charming 
 of people. It is by no means knowing the gondoliers 
 to have known them only as a master who hires a 
 man, and gets him at the lowest bidding. Living 
 on the Zattere, near which so many of them live, I 
 have had the chance of seeing them as they are 
 among themselves ; I have played boccie with them in 
 the bowling-alley under the trellised vines, from 
 which the first drops of sap were beginning to drip ; 
 I have sat with them in the tavern parlour, beside the 
 great chimney-corner, un^er the burnished pots and 
 pans, watching them play a mysterious game with 
 fantastic cards. And I have always felt myself to be 
 in the company of gentlemen. 
 
 IX 
 
 Goldoni, in his memoirs, tells us that the Venetians 
 sang all day long, " the shopkeepers laying out their 
 
86 CITIES 
 
 wares, the workmen coming home from work, the 
 gondoliers waiting for their masters " ; and he adds : 
 "Gaiety is at the root ^ of the national character, and 
 jesting is at the root of the Venetian language." 
 The day is past when the gondoliers sang Tasso, and 
 the shopkeepers do not sing now ; but they stand at 
 the doors of their shops and smoke, and, like every- 
 one ' else in Venice, take things comfortably. // 
 dolce far niente is a sensation which can scarcely 
 be realised more completely than in Venice ; and with 
 such a sky, such water, and such streets, who would 
 look for" a bustling race of business people, like the 
 Milanese ? In Venice no one will work very hard 
 for the sake of " getting on " : why should he .■■ I 
 never saw poor people who seemed so happy, and 
 who were really so comfortable in their poverty, as 
 the very poorest people here. The softness of the 
 climate, the little on which the comforts of life 
 depend, permit poverty, even beggary, to remain 
 dignified. Simply to lie in the sun, to have just 
 enough to eat, and plenty of cheap xigars to smoke : 
 a poor man demands little more than that, and it 
 is rare indeed that he does not get so much. Time 
 scarcely exists in Venice; it certainly does not 
 exist for the idle poor. They hanker after no 
 luxuries ; for, in Venice, merely to live is a luxury. 
 Think of a city where bread and wine, fruit and, 
 flowers, are the -chief things hawked about the 
 streets! Wherever you go you hear the cry of 
 " Acqua ! " you see a basket heaped up with 
 
VENICE 87 
 
 brilliant flowers, and not far off some one is lying 
 asleep, a facchino in vivid blue, one wooden shoe 
 under his head for a pillow, stretched at full length 
 in any nook of shade. More even than in Rome, 
 scarcely less, and far more agreeably, than in Naples, 
 the whole place belongs to the people. The beggar 
 who curls up asleep on your doorstep has an equal 
 right with your own, and, so far as the doorstep is 
 concerned, a greater; for you do not require it 
 to sleep on, and he does. And there is scarcely 
 an inch of Venice where he cannot lie down and 
 go to sleep whenever he likes. Streets where a 
 horse or cart is unknown are so surprisingly clean, 
 comfortable, and leisurely; they are made to be 
 loitered in, lain upon, and for every man to have 
 his way with. The moral of "The Sick King in 
 Bokhara," 
 
 " That, though we take what we desire, 
 We must not snatch it eagerly," 
 
 needs no enforcement in Venice. Every one takes 
 what he wants ; but he takes " it gently, gracefully, 
 as a matter of course. Your cigars belong to your 
 gondolier as much as to yourself; and^ if he has 
 two oranges, one of them is yours. 
 
 The Venetians have but few amusements. There 
 are four theatres, and these are only open 
 for a few months out of the year, and supported 
 only by strolling companies ; there is a theatre 
 of marionettes open still more rarely; and that is 
 all. Once upon a time there was a cafe-chantant, 
 
88 CITIES 
 
 with a little company from Vienna: Annie Vivanti 
 has sung there ; but it has dwindled almost out 
 of existence; and there is not a music-hall or 
 a public dancing-hall in the whole city. No doubt 
 this is partly because the people are so poor that 
 they cannot pay for even the cheapest amusements, 
 but is It not, also, because they do not require 
 them, finding sufficient pleasure in things as they 
 are, in the mere quiet gaiety of daily life, the fact 
 of living always in the midst of a decor de theatre^ 
 of which they are themselves acting the drama? 
 That animal content which comes over one in 
 Venice, taking away the desire of action and the 
 need of excitement which way-lay the mind and 
 the senses under less perfect skies, makes it just "" 
 as possible to be happy without running after 
 amusement, as the simplicity of the conditions of 
 life makes it possible for the poor man to live on 
 polenta and a little fruit. There is something 
 drowsy in the air of Venice, as there is something 
 a little sleepy in the eyes of the Venetians. Is 
 not life, to those wha live there always, as it is 
 to those who come and go in it for pleasure, a 
 kind of day-dream? 
 
 Spring, 1894 and 1897. 
 
NAPLES 
 
NAPLES 
 I 
 
 I HAVE rarely entered a strange city without a certain 
 apprehension ; but no city ever filled me with such 
 terror as Naples. Those long streets of tall, mean 
 houses, from which narrow alleys climbed the hill, 
 and descended to the harbour, in row after row of 
 meaner and not less tall houses, all with their little 
 iron balconies, over which clothes and linen draggled, 
 all with their crowded, squalid, patched, and coloured 
 throngs of restless life ; the cracking of whips, the 
 clatter of wheels and of horses' hoofs on the uneven 
 stones ; the thud of the cow-bell, the sharper tinkle 
 of the goat-bell, as the creatures wander about the 
 streets or wait at the doors of houses ; the rattling 
 of bootblacks' brushes, the petulant whine of beggars, 
 the whole buzz of that humming, half-obliterated 
 NeapoHtan, with its punctuation of gestures; the 
 rush and hustling of those side-walks, after the 
 ample and courteous leisure of Rome; something 
 sordid in the very trees on the sea-front, second- 
 rate in the aspect of the carriages that passed, and 
 of the people who sat in them ; the bare feet, rags, 
 rainbow-coloured dirt, sprawling and spawning poverty 
 of Santa Lucia, and not of Santa Lucia alone ; the 
 
 91 
 
92^ CITIES 
 
 odour of the city ; and then the indiscoverable length 
 and extent of it, the ways that seemed to lead in 
 whatever direction I wanted to go, and then ended 
 suddenly, or turned aside in another direction ; the 
 darkness up the hill, and the uncertainty of all those 
 new, as yet unknown, roads : that, as I turned away 
 from the sea, when night began to come down upon 
 it, mounted to my head like some horrible fume, 
 enveloping me with disgust, possessing me with 
 terror. I have got a little accustomed to it now, 
 I know my way through those streets, which are, 
 after all, simple enough in their arrangement ; I have 
 come to see certain advantages, even, in the turning 
 of all this dirt and poverty out into the sun ; I find 
 it a touching tribute to cleanliness that every other 
 poor person whom you see is hunting for his own or 
 his neighbour's vermin ;, but, all the same, I think my 
 first impression is likely to last. 
 
 I do not think that the Neapolitans are more vicious 
 or intend to be more objectionable than other people, 
 but they are poor, naturally untidy ; they live in the 
 street because there is sun and air in the street, and 
 it does not occur to them that there is anything in 
 human nature to hide. They have an absolute, an 
 almost ingenuous, lack of civilisation, and after seeing 
 the Neapolitans I have more respect for civilisation. 
 I am not convinced that the whole of the pavement 
 belongs to the dirtiest part of the people who walk 
 on it, and that these have exactly the right to encamp 
 with their wives and families in the way of one's feet. 
 
NAPLES 93 
 
 and to perform quite the whole of their toilet before 
 one's eyes. For these people, whom you see in 
 Santa Lucia and the Strada del Porto and along the 
 whole of the quays, are as shameless as animals : 
 look into their faces, and you will see in their great, 
 dark eyes the unintelligent regard of animals. Old 
 age and infancy are here more horrible than any- 
 where else ; that beginning and ending of human 
 life in helplessness and physical dishonour are here 
 emphasised with all the cruelty of which nature, 
 left to herself, is capable. A Christian ascetic, 
 wishing to meditate on the disgust of the flesh, 
 might well visit these quays. There he will see 
 the flaccid yellowness of old women, like the skin 
 of a rotten apple ; wrinkles eaten in with grime, until 
 they broaden into ruts ; feet and ankles that have 
 been caked and roasted and soaked into iridescent 
 reds, smoky violets, shot purples ; the horror of 
 decayed eyes, deformed limbs, hair crawling with 
 lice ; and about these dishonoured bodies flutters a 
 medley of blackened and yellowing linen, tattered 
 trousers without buttons, tattered dresses without 
 strings, torn shawls, still loud in colouf, but purple 
 where they had been red, and lavender where they 
 had been blue. And all this malodorous medley is 
 a-swarm, hoarse voices crying, hands in continual 
 movement, the clatter of heelless shoes on the pave- 
 ment, the splash of emptied vessels, laughter, the 
 harsh notes of a song, rising out of their midst hke 
 the bubble of steam escaping out of a boiling pot. 
 
94 CITIES 
 
 II 
 
 Naples varies in aspect according as you see it 
 from above or below, from the side which looks 
 towards Vesuvius, the side which looks towards 
 Capri, the side which merges into Posillipo ; and 
 no generalisation can express the effect of this pre- 
 cipitous and straggling town, under the shadow of 
 the burning mountain, and itself crawling up and 
 down' the sides of volcanic hills, set in a half-circle 
 against the curve of the bay. Looking froih Capodi- 
 monte you would say that it nestled among green 
 trees ; looking from the sea-front you would say that 
 it was built out of the sheer rock. And its colour 
 varies like its contour. Rain warmed by sunshine 
 brings out the finest colours, and shows you the roofs 
 and railed and windowed walls in their most effective 
 groupings, house piled above house, like rock piled 
 above rock, green foliage seeming to grow out of 
 their crevices. There never was a town which 
 seemed to have been so little made, to have grown 
 so entirely according to its own whim, and with so 
 little regard to any consideration but the crowding 
 of houses into every available inch of ground, street 
 intersecting street, and salite^ scale^ rampe rising out 
 of these intersections wherever an unfilled corner 
 could, be found. Looking down on the ^ide streets 
 of Chiaia and Toledo is like looking down the clefts 
 in a rock, the crevices of a mountain side ; looking up 
 
NAPLES 95 
 
 them, to the glimpses of the hill above, is like looking 
 up from the bottom of a gorge. And whenever you 
 climb, by stairways or winding terraces, to a certain 
 height, you see on the east the double ridge of 
 Vesuvius, smoke coiling into clouds above the crater, 
 its sides, in clear weather, spotted white with houses, 
 in dull weather an indistinguishable mass of violet or 
 purple, like the colour of thunder-clouds; on the 
 south, the bay, in which Capri and the ridged coast 
 of Sorrento appear and disappear with every change 
 of weather, like the stains in stone, or a picture 
 which the magic-lantern flashes upon and away from 
 the sheet. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Naples has ceased to be merely horrible to me, a 
 boiling pot ; it has become a witches' cauldron. I 
 begin to be fascinated by those streets which are 
 corridors, with their violent shadows, their obscure 
 exuberance of life ; those strange glimpses, as I 
 climb at night through terrace after terrace of sordid 
 streets, the houses open to view, the one large room 
 lit with the smoking oil-lamp, the figures bending 
 over it, the white beds set side by side, from one of 
 which you see already the nightcapped head of the 
 grandmother, or a child's tumbled black hair ; vague 
 figures still leaning into the darkness , from their 
 balconies, now and then the sudden descent of a 
 basket at the end of a string, the sound of a man- 
 
96 CITIES 
 
 dolin or piano organ, a song, or the rattle of feet on 
 the floor ; for the most part silence, or a low chatter 
 which does not reach me. Lights shineout suddenly 
 from curtained windows, doors open and shut, you 
 hear the bolts drawn. And all kinds of strange 
 archways, passages, steps leading up or down, in- 
 definite turnings, perplex one at every step. There 
 is a crucifix which I pass every night ; it is only a 
 crucifix painted upon wood, but it is set up in a 
 shrine like the gable of a house, there are five oil- 
 lamps about it, which cast singular lights on the 
 suffering figure, hanging there, as if on a Calvary, at 
 the side of the pavement, with fresh flowers at its 
 feet. That, too, seems to me like something not 
 quite natural, a part of the same sorcery which has 
 piled all these rocky ways and set up these cavernous 
 houses. No, there never was a town so troubling, 
 so disquieting, so incalculable as Naples, with its 
 heavenly bay lying out in front for strangers to gaze 
 at, and all this gross, contentedly animal Ufe huddled 
 away in its midst, like some shameful secret. 
 
 -IV 
 
 Wherever I go in Naples, in_ the streets, the 
 theatres, the churches, the cafe's, 1 see the same 
 uncouth violence of life, the same ferment of un- 
 civilisation. Occasionally, when two Neapolitans 
 meet in the street, they kiss one another with a 
 loud kiss; for the most part they do not shake 
 
NAPLES 97 
 
 hands, they do not nod, they do not lift their hats ; 
 they stare fixedly, with an expression which I took 
 to mean violent aversion until I came to find it indi- 
 cated extreme friendship. Watching from a little 
 distance a group of men at a cafe table, you cannot 
 tell whether they are or are not having a serious 
 altercation. When a Neapolitan gesticulates he 
 does it with all his fingers and the whole of his 
 face ; when he does not gesticulate, he is rigid. All 
 that is best, certainly, but all that is most typical in 
 the Neapolitan seems to me to be summed up in the 
 writer who more than any other has given in litera- 
 ture the whole savour of Naples. Matilde Serao 
 makes on one the impression of a good-humoured 
 gnome. Full of strength, sincerity, emotion, full of 
 an irresistible charm of humanity, she is so short and 
 stout as to be almost square ; her head, too, with its 
 low forehead, is square ; and she sits humped up, 
 with her head between her shoulders, all compressed 
 vivacity, which is ready to burst forth at any moment 
 in a flood of energetic, humorously empfiatic words, 
 to which her leaping gestures v^ith her short fat 
 fingers, in front of her nose, of her grimacing eyes, 
 of her cheeks wrinkled with laughter, add a further 
 and a yet more grotesque emphasis. 
 
 I heard the " Cavalleria Rusticana " one night at 
 the San Carlo theatre, and, though the character of 
 •the music is properly Sicilian, it seemed to me to 
 have a good deal in it of the people among whom it 
 is so popular. This crackling music, a fire which 
 
98 ' CITIES 
 
 crackles out, has an acute, feverish, quite Southern 
 sentimentality, the sentimentality of the mandolin 
 and the knife. Kindling, certainly, while you listen 
 to it, it is wiped out, as a sponge wipes out figures 
 on a slate, with the first breath of air you draw out- 
 side. And the true, canaille, Neapolitan music, the 
 Piedigrotta songs and the rest, which you hear all 
 day long, shouted, whistled, played on piano-organs, 
 on mandolins, in the streets, in the restaurants, in 
 the cafes-chantants, have they not the very odour, of 
 the streets in them ? The songs are often enough 
 obscene, as popular songs often enough are, and to 
 hear Emilia Persico or Maldacea sing them, with a 
 knowing vivacity, an abominable languor, is to.realise 
 all that they are capable of in the way of significant 
 expression. But in the tunes themselves, with their 
 heady notes,'*their pauses and rushes, their careful 
 uncertainties of rhythm, their almost Spanish effects 
 of monotony, there is something at once greasy and 
 fiery, an acrid vulgarity which stings the senses, 
 revolting and depraving, with a kind of intoxication 
 like the intoxication of cheap wine. * 
 
 At Easter the Neapolitans mourn for the death 
 of Jesus Christ as the Greeks mourned for the death 
 of Adonis. It is a sacred play to them, in which 
 they take the same turbulent, and, for the moment, 
 absorbing interest, as in an opera at San Carlo, or a 
 melodrama at the Mercadante. On Good Friday, 
 during the "Tre Ore" of the Passion, I went into 
 the popular central church of Santa Trinita Maggiore. 
 
NAPLES 99 
 
 Between the high altar and the pulpit, where a 
 queer, black figure in his cornered hat preached 
 with a sounding voice and the gestures of a puppet, 
 there was a rough platform, draped with blue cloth, 
 on which was an orchestra of black-coated gentlemen 
 and some singers, who sang with high Mascagni 
 voices. The people, coming in continuously by 
 twos and threes, rushed about the church as if it 
 were the market-place, precipitately, greeting their 
 friends with httle sharp hisses of recognition, turning 
 about in their chairs, chattering in whispers, waving 
 their hands to one another, standing and arranging 
 one another's hats. Never have I seen such bustling, 
 restless, disorderly churches, or people so un- 
 civilised in their devotions. During the "three 
 hours" the church was packed in all its corners, 
 people sitting on the altar-steps, and on the altars, 
 perched in and around all the confessionals ; the men 
 piled their hats into the empty holy-water basins, 
 the women who had come without hats did not cover 
 their heads with handkerchiefs ; during the sermon 
 all listened attentively, as to a really absorbing play. 
 On the day before Holy Thursday, there had been 
 the celebration of the Santo Sepolcro. The doors 
 of the churches wer^ draped in black, the high 
 altar was covered with black cloth, and on a black 
 cloth before the high altar the crucifix was laid out, 
 as if in a tomb. Some of the Christs were small, of 
 dark metal, almost indistinguishable from a little 
 distance ; others were large, made of painted wood, 
 
loo CITIES 
 
 with smears of red paint for the five wounds ; and a 
 crowd came and went all day long, mostly women, 
 and these women knelt and kissed the five wounds, 
 almost prostrating themselves on the floor. There 
 was something grotesque, familiar, amorous, extra- 
 vagant, in this unending procession of women, rich 
 and poor, young and old, all, one after another, 
 dropping on their knees, leaning over the sacred 
 body, whose passion was shown to them with so 
 visible a significance ; something, I cannot tell what, 
 barbaric, infantile, sensuous, in the sight and sound 
 of all those devout and eager kisses, which they 
 gave with a passionate solemnity, as to a lover. 
 
 Outside Naples, between Vesuvius and the sea, 
 half-buried and half-recovered from the earth, the 
 ghastly suburb of Pompeii repeats, like a remote 
 echo, the very note of Naples. Pompeii, though 
 you will find it large enough when you follow all 
 the intersections of its abrupt, crossing ways, re- 
 mains in the memory hke a toy city, or a cabinet in 
 a museum. And, as one walks in these streets, in 
 which noise or silence is alike oppressive, interrupt- 
 ing, it is possible to persuade oneself that one is 
 merely visiting a museum, looking at curiosities. In 
 so frightful a step back of nearly twenty centuries 
 the mind reels, clutching at that somewhat pacifying 
 
NAPLES loi 
 
 thought, for at least its momentary relief. And 
 then, all at once, turning aside into an empty street 
 from the guide and the visitors, you are seized, and, 
 as it were, imprisoned within the terror of this 
 image of the immortality of death, before which all 
 the legends of hell become credible, seeing how 
 hard it is to escape, even by death, out of the bond- 
 age of even a material indestructibility. Here are 
 the bodies of men and women, moulded for ever in 
 the gesture of their last moment, and these rigid, 
 earthly corpses are as vivid in their interrupted life 
 as the wet corpses lying on the slabs of the Morgue, 
 the suicide of yesterday. These hastily set up walls 
 might have been built last year, and the rut of the 
 waggon-wheels in the solid pavement of lava is like 
 a wheel-mark left overnight in the dry mud of a 
 country road. The brothel and the temple are here, 
 side by side, and here, only just cleansed from its 
 burial, is a villa, its walls still bright with paint, still 
 eloquent with frescoes, the little bronze and marble 
 images still smiling about the fountains and flower- 
 beds of the central garden ; a pot, the yellow rust 
 of lava corroding it, set over the fire which went out 
 suddenly on that twenty-fourth of August, a.d. 79. 
 Feeling the stone and mortar of these jerry-built 
 walls, noting the conventional glibness of these 
 graceful decorative paintings, realising, by the very 
 signs of its "pleasant sins," that here, after all, was 
 but the Brighton of its day, you seem, by the con- 
 sciousness of all that is trivial, temporary, accidental 
 
102 CITIES 
 
 in it, to be brought closer to that so strangely 
 capricious survival of ancient death. And then, 
 going out into the road, in the first step beyond the 
 hedge, in the lirst breath of relief at the sight of 
 the little station, the two hotels for visitors, the 
 quiet fields in which men are digging, fruitful fields 
 stretching out to the roots of the mountains all 
 around, Vesuvius smoking placidly above, this un- 
 bearable sense of the nearness of life suspended so 
 many years ago drops back suddenly, and again it is 
 as if it had never been, and again you have persuaded 
 yourself that this is after all only a show in a 
 museum, a collection of curiosities, a toy city which 
 had never really had anything too intimate to do 
 with humanity. 
 
 VI 
 
 There is in Naples the image of a world, which 
 adds a new world to one's contemplation, not less 
 vivid and swarming than those streets; and that 
 world of the Aquarium seems as real, as natural, in 
 all its fantastic, extravagant, and enigmatical life, as 
 the life of human beings. It is, indeed, first by its 
 humanity that it strikes us, by the strange irony of 
 the likeness which one sees in these scaled, pulpy, 
 and many tentacled creatures of the sea, in the very 
 expression of their eyes and bodies, and also in the 
 whole manner of their occupations among the rocks 
 and their neighbours, with the faces and the doings 
 
NAPLES 103 
 
 qf men. There is not a human vice or absurdity 
 which I have not seemed to see in these drowsy, and 
 irritable, and rapacious, and surly, and pre-occupied 
 creatures, their whole lives spent in catching flies 
 (with what an elaborate mechanism of means to that 
 end !) in coiling and uncoiling an army of suckers to 
 the very obliteration, almost, of the centre of their 
 being ; in fanning themselves, with soft, unresting 
 wings, forwards and backwards, forwards and back- 
 wards, for ever, neither turning nor ceasing for a 
 moment. Some have the aspect of eternal age, as 
 others have the curse of eternal activity. In the 
 great, sullen, flat creatures with their purple bodies, 
 their bull-dog jaws, their heavy eyes, I see the gross 
 bourgeois, as he is everywhere in the world ; it 
 seems that he inhabits the water as he inhabits the 
 earth, and with the same authority. Is there not a 
 heavy coquetry in the motions of a certain kind of 
 eel, the very effervescence of bumptious youth in 
 the little fishes with fins which look like arms 
 akimbo, the very parody of our aspirations in the 
 diaphanous, delicately coloured creatures, edged 
 with lavender, who have puffed all their life into 
 their heads, which for ever pant and strain upwards 
 like balloons, as if trying to free themselves of the 
 little tangle of body still left to them ? Then, too, 
 there is a fantasy more terrible than any nightmare, 
 a soft, seductively coloured, deceptive, strangling 
 life in these clinging, and absorbing, and stealthy 
 apparitions of the sea, which come and go in the 
 
I04 CITIES 
 
 water with the sudden and soft violence of the 
 water itself. 
 
 Coming up out of the twilight, where I have 
 been gazing into the glass boxes filled with water, 
 wondering at these uneasy miracles of the sense of 
 touch, I find myself replunged into the bustle of 
 Naples, for the concert has begun in the Villa, and 
 people are walking to -and fro under the trees, and 
 sitting on the chairs about the. band-stand, listening 
 to the harsh din of those brass instruments playing 
 their noisy, military, Italian music The garden of" 
 the Villa Nazionale lies for a mile along the sea 
 front, from the Largo della Vittoria almost to the 
 beginning of Posillipo, and you can stand under the 
 curdling blossoms of the Judas trees, and still see the 
 blue water shining under the afternoon sun or the 
 tossing of the little waves when the wind begins to 
 blow them grey. On the afternoon when I had 
 visited the Aquarium, clouds began to climb over 
 the top of the hill, catching stormy colours and then 
 turning leaden; and presently the concert came 
 abruptly to an end, as the rain poured with a 
 straight, steady violence, scattering the people 
 hither and thither into the little wooden cafes 
 under the thin branches of trees, under the droop- 
 ing hoods of cabs, and behind the flapping curtains 
 of trams. I sat in one of the cafes and watched 
 the hurry of people unprepared for anything but 
 sunshine ; the blind rush through the puddles, the 
 shelterless lingering under dripping trees, the half- 
 
NAPLES 105 
 
 desperate, half-hoping glances upward at the grey- 
 sky, which might be blue again at any moment, or 
 perhaps not for an hour's time. All the brightness, 
 the unconsidering gaiety, of Naples had gone out 
 like a candle in the wind ; life seemed to come 
 angrily to a pause, in this sudden hostility of nature. 
 Presently I heard the twanging of a string : two 
 men with mandolin and fiddle were standing in the 
 doorway, and a woman began to sing one of the 
 Piedigrotta songs. A man carrying a cloth-covered 
 box came in, took oflF his cap, and went smilingly, 
 persistently, from table to table with his tortoise- 
 shell combs, his corals, and his brooches of lava. 
 Outside the window crouched a dark, handsome, 
 half-witted beggar-girl, with her red handkerchief 
 over her head, her white teeth shining in a smile ; 
 she held out her little brown hand, beckoning for 
 alms ; and standing there, bare-footed in the rain, 
 seemed to bring back the Neapolitan accent to 
 Naples. 
 
 Spring, 1897. 
 
SEVILLE 
 
SEVILLE 
 
 1 
 
 Seville, more than any city I have ever seen, is 
 the city of pleasure. It is not languid with pleasure, 
 hke Venice, nor flushed with hurrying after pleasure, 
 like Budapest ; but it has the constant brightness, 
 blitheness, and animation of a city in which pleasure 
 is the chief end of existence, and an end easily 
 attained, by simple means within every one's reach. 
 It has sunshine, flowers, an expressive river, orange- 
 groves, palm trees, broad walks leading straight into 
 the country, beautiful, ancient buildings in its midst, 
 shining white houses, patios and flat roofs and vast 
 windows, everything that calls one into the open air, 
 and brings light and air to one, and thus gives men 
 the main part of their chances of natural felicity. 
 And it has the theatres, cafes, shops, of a real city, 
 it is not provincial, as Valencia is ; it is concentrated, 
 and yet filled to the brim; it has completely 
 mastered ifs own resources. Life is everywhere ; 
 there are no melancholy gaps, vacant spaces, in 
 which a ruinous old age has its own way desolately, 
 as in most really picturesque cities; as in Venice, 
 for instance, which it resembles in so many points. 
 It has room for itself, and it is not too large for 
 
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 itself. And in living gaily, and in the present, it is 
 carrying on a tradition : it is the city of Don Juan, 
 the city of Figaro. 
 
 I am coming, more and more, to measure the 
 charm of cities, at all events their desirability for 
 living in, by the standard of their parks, public 
 gardens, and free spaces where one can be pleasantly 
 unoccupied in the open air. I want the town, not the 
 country, but I want the town to give me the illusion 
 of the coutitry, as well as its own characteristic 
 qualities. Rome itself, without its villas, even Rome, 
 would not be Rome ; and Seville, which is so vividly 
 a towff, and with s,o many of a town's good qualities, 
 has the most felicitous parks, gardens, and promenades 
 (with that one great exception) that I have ever 
 found in a city. Gardens follow the riverside, park 
 after park, and_ every afternoon Seville walks and ■ 
 drives and sits along that broad road leading so 
 straight into the open country, really a Paseo de las 
 Delicias, a road of trees and sunlight. Turn to the 
 right or to the left, and you are in a quiet shadow, 
 under lanes of orange trees and alleys of acacias. 
 Th'ere are palms and there is water, and there are 
 little quaint seats everywhere ; paths wind in and 
 out, roses are growing in mid-winter, they are pick- 
 ing the oranges as they ripen from green to gold, 
 and carrying them in the panniers of donkeys, and 
 pouring them in bright showers on the ground, and 
 doing them up into boxes. Great merchant vessels 
 lie against the riverside, unloading their cargoes ; and 
 
SEVILLE 1 1 1 
 
 across the park, on the other side of a wall, drums 
 are beating, bugles blowing, and the green meadow- 
 grass is blue and red -with soldiers. In the park, girls 
 pass wrapped in their shawls, with roses in their 
 hair, grave and laughing; an old gardener, in his 
 worn coat with red facings, passes slowly, leaning on 
 his stick. You can sit here for hours, in a warm 
 quiet, and with a few dry leaves drifting about your 
 feet, to remind you that it is winter. 
 
 Seville is not a winter city, and during those months 
 it seems to wait, remembering and expectant, in an 
 acquiescence in which only a short and not uneasy 
 sleep divides summer from spring. To the northern 
 stranger, its days of sunshine and blue sky seem to 
 make winter hardly more than a name. Sun and 
 air, on these perfect winter afternoons, have that rare 
 quality which produces what I sheuld like to call a 
 kind of active languor. The sharpening of a breath, 
 and it would become chill; the deepening of the 
 sunshine, and it would become oppressive. And 
 just this difficult equilibrium, as it seems, of the 
 forces of summer and winter, adds a zest to one's 
 contentment, a kind of thankfulness which one does 
 not find it needful to feel in the time of summer. 
 How delightful to sit, perfectly warm, under a tree 
 whose leaves are scattered about the ground, yellow 
 with winter; to watch the bare branches, among 
 these always green palms and orange trees, re- 
 membering winter in the North. 
 
 But to enjoy sympathetically all that Seville, eveti 
 
112 CITIES 
 
 in winter, can be to its own people, it is not enough 
 to go to the parks and the Paseo ; one must go, on ' 
 a fine Sunday afternoon, to the railway line which 
 stretches onwards from the Barqueta, along the 
 riverside, but in the opposite direction. The line is 
 black with people, at one hour going, at another 
 hour returning, an unending stream which broadens 
 and scatters on both sides, along the brown herbage 
 by the river, and over the green spaces on the 
 landward side. At intervals there is a little venta, 
 there are bowling-alleys, swings, barrel-organs, • 
 concertinas, the sound of castanets, people dancing, 
 the clapping of hands, the cries of the vendors of 
 water, shell-fish, and chestnuts, donkeys passing 
 with whole families on their backs, families camping 
 and picnicing on the grass, and everywhere chairs, 
 chairs on the grass, two sitting on each chair, in a 
 circle about the dancers, as they dance in couples, 
 alternately ; chairs and tables and glasses of manzanilla 
 about the ventas; and always the slow movement 
 of people passing, quietly happy, in a sort of grave 
 enjoyment, which one sees in their faces when 
 they dance. Here is the true pueblo, the working- 
 people, cigarreras^' gipsies, all Triana and the 
 Macarena; and could people amuse themselves 
 more simply or more quietly, with a more en- 
 joyable decorum? As they turn homewards, in 
 another long black line, the sun is setting; a 
 . melancholy splendour burns down slowly upon the 
 thin trees across the water, staining the water with 
 
SEVILLE 113 
 
 faint reflections, and touching the dreary, colourless 
 shrubs along the river-side with delicate autumn 
 colours, as sunset ends the day of the people. 
 
 II 
 
 There are seven hundred streets in Seville, and 
 there is hardly a street which has not some personal 
 character of its own, or which does not add one 
 more line to the elaborate arabesque of the city. 
 One of my favourite aspects, for it is an aspect from 
 which Seville looks most Eastern, is at just that 
 point of the Paseo de Catalina de Rivera where it is 
 joined by the Calle San Fernando. One sees, the 
 battlemented outer wall of the Alcazar, with its low, 
 square towers, the Giralda, the brown turrets of 
 two or three churches, and then nothing but white 
 walls and brown roofs, with a few bare branches 
 rising here and there delicately against the sky, 
 between the sharp, irregular lines of the houses, all 
 outlined in bright white. One can fancy a whole 
 Kremlin or Hradiin clustered inside that low, 
 white, battlemented wall ; outside which the dreary 
 Paseo, and the dim green of the Prado San 
 Sebastian, seem to" be already the country. 
 
 And it is from this point too, as one turns home- 
 ward from the river-side, that evening seems to come 
 on most delicately : those sunsets of blue and rose 
 and gold, as the sun goes down across the 
 
 H 
 
114 -CITIES 
 
 Guadalquivir, and that rosy flush which encircles all 
 Seville after the sun has gone down, as if the city 
 lay in the hollow of a great shell, tinged with rose 
 at the edges. It is at just this hour that Triana 
 looks its best, heaped somewhat irregularly on 
 the other bank, in a long, white and pink line, above 
 the brown slime ; and from the Triana bridge, always 
 crowded with lean, beaten horses, dragging too 
 heavy loads, and lines of white donkeys with panniers, 
 nodding their jingling heads, as they wander along 
 by themselves, one sees the whole river, and the 
 Moorish Tower of Gold, and the crowded masts, 
 changing colour as the light, changes moment 
 by moment. • 
 
 The' streets of Seville are narrow, for shade in 
 the summer and warmth in the winter, and many 
 of them, like the central Calle Sierpes, with its 
 shops, and clubs, and cafes, a street of windows, 
 are closed to wheels. Every house has its balconies, 
 and the older ones their barred windows on the 
 ground floor; and every house has its patio, that 
 divine invention of the Moors, meant, certainly, for 
 a summer city, and meant, as one sees it in Morocco, 
 for houses without windows, in which all the light 
 comes from the open roof above an inner court. 
 The Spaniards have both patios and windows, for 
 summer and winter, in their wise, characteristic 
 passion for light. All the doors, leading to the 
 patio, are of open iron-work, no two doors alike, 
 in their surprisingly varied, and often exquisite, 
 
SEVILLE 
 
 115 
 
 arabesques of pattern. This throwing open of one's 
 house to the street, yet with an iron door, always 
 closed, setting a boundary to the feet if not to the 
 eyes, seems to me again characteristic of these 
 natural, not self-conscious people, who seem often 
 so careless of their own dignity and liberty, and 
 are so well able to preserve them. 
 
 Seville lights up for a feast-day as a face lights 
 up with a smile. The night before the great feast 
 of the Immaculate Conception, I went into the 
 streets to find the whole place transformed, glittering. 
 Crimson or white and blue cloths were thrown over 
 balconies, rows of lamps and candles burned above 
 them, and between the lights eager faces leaned 
 over, looking down at the eager faces looking up 
 at them. The public squares were brilliant with 
 light, and the whole place became suddenly filled 
 with people, passing to and fro in the Sierpes, and 
 along the streets of shops, which I hardly recognised, 
 so brilliantly lighted were all the windows. The 
 transformation seemed to have been done in a 
 minute, and here was the true Seville, idle, eager, 
 brilliant, moving gaily, making the most of the 
 world on the Church's terms of felicity for the 
 other world. 
 
 And yet this, if the true Seville, is not all 
 Seville, and I found another, silent, almost deserted 
 city, which fascinated me almost more than this 
 living and moving one, whenever I wandered about 
 at night, in streets that sank to sleep so early, 
 
ii6 CITIES 
 
 and seemed so mysteriously quiescent, under the 
 bright sky and the stars. •Night passed rarely 
 without my coming out of some narrow street 
 upon the vast Plaza del Triunfo, which holds the 
 Cathedral, its Pagan counterpart, the Giralda, the 
 Alcazar, and the Lonja. The tall tower of the 
 Giralda was always the first thing" I saw, rising up, 
 like the embodied forces of the delicate powers 
 of the world, by the side of the Christian Cathedral. 
 Seen from the proper distance, it is like a filigree 
 casket that one could lift in the hand, as -^anta 
 Justa and Santa Rufina lift it, in Murillo's picture ; 
 looking up from close underneath it, it is like a 
 great wall hiding the stars. And the Moors have 
 done needlework on a wall as solid as a Roman 
 wall ; far finer work than that bastard splendour 
 of the Alcazar, with its flickering lights, and 
 illuminations like illuminations on parchment. 
 
 Looking back at the Giralda and the Cathedral 
 from the gateway of the Patio de las Banderas, 
 one sees perhaps the finest sight in Spain. The 
 Giralda stands motionless, and a little aloof; but 
 by its side the vast, embattled magnificence of the 
 Cathedral seems to change in every aspect, full 
 of multiform life, ordered to a wonderfully expres- 
 sive variety, throwing out new shoots in every 
 direction, hke a tree which grows into a forest in 
 some tropical country, or like a city grouping itself 
 about a citadel. It is full of the romantic spirit, 
 the oriental touch freeing it from any of the too 
 
SEVILLE 117 
 
 heavy solemnity of the Middle Ages, and suiting 
 it to a Southern sky. Above all, it has infinitely 
 varied movement : yes, as it seems to lean slightly 
 from the perpendicular, all this vivid mass might 
 be actually about to move, to sail away like a great 
 ship, with all its masts and spread sails and corded 
 rigging. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Much of what is most characteristic in the men 
 of Seville may be studied in the cafes, which are 
 filled every evening with crowds of unoccupied 
 persons, who in every other country would be 
 literally of the working class, but who here seem 
 to have endless leisure. They are rough-looking, 
 obviously poor, they talk, drink coffee, buy news- 
 papers and lottery tickets, and they are all smoking. 
 They fill rows of tables with little companies of 
 friends ; they are roughly good-humoured, affection- 
 ately friendly with one another ; and their conversa- 
 tion echoes under the low ceiling with a deafening 
 buzz. The typical Andalusian, as one sees him 
 here, is a type quite new to me, and a type singu- 
 larly individual. He is clean shaved, he wears a 
 felt hat with a broad flat brim, generally drab or 
 light grey, clothes often of the same colour, and 
 generally a very short coat, ending where a waist- 
 coat ends, and very tight trousers; over all is a 
 voluminous black cloak lined at the edges with 
 
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 crimson velvet. He is generally of medium height, 
 and he has very distinct features, somewhat large, 
 especially the nose ; a face in which every line 
 has emphasis, a straight, thin, narrow face, a face 
 without curves. The general expression is one of 
 inflexibility, the eyes fixed, the mouth tight; and 
 this fixity of expression is accentuated by the ar- 
 rangement of the hair, cut very short, and shaved 
 around the temples, so as to make a sharp line 
 above the ear, and a point in the middle of the 
 forehead. The complexion is dull olive, andin old 
 age it becomes a formidable mass of wrinkles ; by 
 which, indeed, many of these old men with their 
 clean-shaved cheeks, bright eyes, and short jackets, 
 are alone to be distinguished from their sons or 
 grandsons. There is much calm strength in the 
 Andalusian face, a dignity which is half defiant, 
 and which leaves room for humour, coming slowly 
 up through the eyes, the mouth still more slowly 
 lengthening into a smile; room also for honest 
 friendliness, for a very inquiring interest in things, 
 and very decided personal preferences about them. 
 Often the face runs all to humour, and the man 
 resembles a comic actor. But always there is the 
 same earnestness in whatever mood, the same self- 
 absorption; and, talkative as these people are, 
 they can sit side by side, silent, as if in brooding 
 meditation, with more naturalness than the people 
 of any other race. 
 
 The Andalusian is seen at his finest in the bull 
 
SEVILLE ■ 119 
 
 fighter, the idol of Seville, whom one sees at every 
 moment, walking in the streets, sitting in his club, 
 driving in his motor car, or behind his jingling team 
 of horses, dressed in the tight majo costume, with 
 his pig-tail drawn up and dissimulated on the top 
 of his head, his frilled shirt with great diamond 
 studs, his collar clasped by gold or diamond fasten- 
 ings, diamond rings glittering on his well-shaped 
 fingers. I once sat opposite one of the most 
 famous toreros at a table-d'hote dinner, and, as I 
 contrasted him with the heavy, middle-class people 
 who sat around, I was more than ever impressed by 
 the distinction, the physical good-breeding, some- 
 thing almost of an intellectual clearness and shape- 
 liness, which come from a perfect bodily equipoise, 
 a hand and eye trained to faultless precision. 
 
 The women of Seville are not often beautiful, 
 but one of the most beautiful women I have ever 
 seen was a woman of Seville whom I watched for an 
 hour in the Cafe America. She had all that was 
 typical of the Spaniard, and more ; expression, the 
 equivalent of a soul, eyes which were not merely 
 fine, but variable as opals, with twenty several 
 delights in a minute. She was small, very white, 
 with just that delicate hint of modelling in the 
 cheeks which goes so well with pallor j she had 
 two yellow roses in her black hair, at the side of 
 the topmost coil, and a yellow shawl about her 
 throat. One wished that she might always be 
 happy. 
 
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 More often the women are comfortable, witty, 
 bright and dark, guapa, rather than beautiful; 
 almost always with superb hair, hair which is like 
 the mane or tail of an Arab horse, and always with 
 tiny feet, on which they^walk after a special, careful 
 way of their own, setting down the whole foot at 
 each step, level from heel to toe, and not rising on 
 it. In Seville, more than anywhere else^ one sees 
 the Spanish woman already mature in the child, and 
 nothing impressed me more than these brilliant, " 
 fascinating little people, at once natural and con- 
 scious, with all the gestures of grown women, their 
 way of walking, their shawls, and, in their faces, 
 all that is finest in the Sevillana, a charm, seductive- 
 ness, a sort of caressing atmosphere, and not merely 
 bright, hard eyes, clean-cut faces, animation, which 
 are to be seen everywhere in Spain. They have 
 indeed that slightly preoccupied air which Spanish 
 children affect, and which deepens, in some of the 
 women, into a kind of tragic melancholy. Pass 
 through the Macarena quarter in the evening, 
 and you will see not the least characteristic type 
 of the women of Seville : strange, sulky, fatal 
 creatures, standing in doorways, with flowers in the 
 hair, and mysterious, angry eyes; Flamencas, with 
 long, ugly, tragic, unforgettable faces, seeming to 
 remember an ancestral unhappiness. 
 
 There is a quality which gives a certain finish 
 to Spanish women, and which is unique in them. 
 It is a sort of smiling irony, which seems to pene- 
 
SEVILLE 121 
 
 trate the whole nature : the attitude of one who 
 is aware of things, not unsatisfied with them, 
 decided in her own point of view, intelligent enough 
 to be tolerant of the point of view of others, with- 
 out coquetry or self-consciousness ; in fact, a small, 
 complete nature, in which nothing is left vague or 
 uneasy. It is a disposition such as this which goes 
 to make life happy, and it is enough to have watched 
 the gay, smiling, contented old women to realise 
 that life is happy to most women in Spain. Look 
 in all these faces, and you will see that they express 
 something very definite, and that they express 
 everything, while Northern faces have so much in 
 them that is suggestion, or, as it seems to the 
 Spaniard, mere indefiniteness. The Southern nature, 
 for its material felicity, has retained the Pagan, 
 classic ideals ; the Northern has accepted the unquiet, 
 dreaming soul of the Middle Ages. 
 
 But in Spanish women, along with much childish- 
 ness and much simplicity, there is often all the 
 subtlety of the flesh,, that kind of secondary spiritual 
 subtlety which comes from exquisitely responsive 
 senses. This kind of delicacy in women often stands 
 in the place of many virtues, of knowledge, of in- 
 tellect ; and, in its way, it supplies what is lacking in 
 them, giving them as much refinement as knowledge 
 or the virtues would have done, and itself forming a 
 very profound kind of intelligence. I recognise it in 
 the mournful pallor, and that long, immobile gaze, 
 which seems to touch one's flesh, hke a slow caress ; 
 
122 CITIES 
 
 that cold ardour, which is the utmost refinement of 
 fire. And these white people carry themselves like 
 idols. Singularly different is that other Spanish kind 
 of animality, where life burns in the lips, and darkens 
 the cheeks as if with the sun, and bubbles in the 
 eyes, the whole body warm with a somewhat general, 
 somewhat over-ready heat. It is enough to have heard 
 the laughter of these vivid creatures. It is the most 
 delicious laughter in the world ,■ it breaks out like a 
 song from a bird; it is sudden, gay, irresponsible, 
 the laughter of a moment, and yet coming straight 
 from the deep unconsciousness of life. The Spanish 
 woman is a child, but a mature Spanish child, know- 
 ing much ; and in the average woman of Seville, in 
 her gaiety, humour, passion, there is more than usual 
 of the childlike quality. Their faces are full of sun 
 and shadow, often with a rich colour between 
 Eastern and Western, and with the languor and 
 keenness of both races ; with something intoxicating 
 in the quality of their charm, like the scent of spring 
 in their orange groves. They have the magnetism 
 of vivid animal fife, with a sharp appeal to the sensa- 
 tions, as of a beauty too full of the sap of hfe to be 
 merely passive. Their bodies are so full of energy 
 that they have invented for themselves a new kind 
 of dance, which should tire them into repose ; they 
 live so actively to their finger-tips that their fingers 
 have made their own share in the dance, in the 
 purely Spanish accoriipaniment of the castanets. A 
 dance is indicated in a mere shuffle of the feet, a 
 
SEVILLE 
 
 123 
 
 snapping of the fingers, a clapping of hands, a bend 
 of the body, whenever a woman of Seville stands or 
 walks, at the door of her house, pausing in the 
 street, or walking, wrapped in many shawls, in the 
 parks ; and the dance is as closely a part of the 
 women of Seville as their shawls, the flowers in their 
 hair, or the supplementary fingers of the fan. 
 
 IV 
 
 A significant quality of the Andalusians is the 
 profound seriousness which they retain, even when 
 they abandon themselves to the most violent emotions. 
 It is the true sensuality, the only way of getting the 
 utmost out of one's sensations, as gaiety, or a facile 
 voluptuousness, never can. The Spanish nature is 
 sombre and humorous, ready to be startled into 
 vivid Hfe by any strong appeal : love, hate, cruelty, 
 the dance, the bull-fight, whatever is elemental, or 
 touches the elemental passions. Seeing Seville as I 
 did, in winter, I could not see the people under their 
 strongest, most characteristic intoxication, the bull- 
 fight ; but I had the opportunity, whenever I went 
 into the street, and saw a horse dragging a burden, 
 of seeing how natural to themts that cruelty which 
 is a large part of the attraction of bull-fighting. 
 And their delight in violent sensatiqps, sensations 
 which seem to others not quite natural, partly per- 
 verse, partly cruel, as in the typical emotion of the 
 
124 CITIES 
 
 bull-fight, is seen at Seville in the " cuerpo de baile 
 infantil" which dances at the Cafe Suizo. These 
 children of ten or eleven, who dance till midnight, 
 learned in all the contortions of the gipsy dances, 
 which they dance with a queer kind of innocence, all 
 the more thorough in its partly unconscious method, 
 and who run about in front, sitting on men's knees 
 in their tawdry finery, smiling out of their little 
 painted faces with an excited weariness ; is there not 
 a cruelty to them, also, in the surely perverse senti- 
 ment which requires their aid in one's own amuse- 
 ment? I shall never forget one particular dance of 
 two children, one of the most expressive gipsy 
 dances, danced in trailing dresses, inside which, as 
 inside some fantastic, close prison or cage, they 
 hopped and leaped and writhed, like puppets or 
 living tops, to the stupefying rattle" of castanets ; 
 parodying the acts of physical desire, the coquetry 
 of the animal, with an innocent knowingness, as if it 
 were the most amusing, the most exciting of games. 
 One of them was a little, sallow, thin creature, with 
 narrow eyes and an immense mouth, drawn almost 
 painfully into a too eager smile ; a grimacing, Chinese, 
 mask of a child, almost in tears with nervous excite^ 
 raent, quivering all over with the energy of the 
 dance. I went to see them, indeed, frequently, as 
 I should have gone to see the bull-fights, and with 
 the same mental reservation. They reminded me of 
 the horses. 
 
 All Spanish dancing, and especially the dancing of 
 
SEVILLE 125 
 
 the gipsies, in which it is seen in its most character- 
 istic development, has a sexual origin, and expresses, 
 as Eastern dancing • does, but less crudely, the 
 pantomime of physical love. In the typical gipsy 
 dance, as I saw it danced by a beautiful Gitana at 
 Seville, there is something of mere gaminerie and 
 something of the devil ; the automatic tramp-tramp 
 of the children and the lascivious pantomime of a 
 very learned art of love. Thus it has all the excite- 
 ment of something spontaneous and studied, of vice 
 and a kind of naughty innocence, of the thoughtless 
 gaiety of youth as well as the knowing humour of 
 experience. For it is a dance full of humour, fuller 
 of humour than of passion ; passion indeed it mimics 
 on the purely animal side, and with a sort of cold- 
 ness even in its frenzy. It is capable of infinite 
 variations ; it is a drama, but a drama improvised 
 on a given theme ; and it might go on indefinitely, 
 for it is conditioned only by the pantomime, which we 
 know to have wide limits. A motion more or less, 
 and it becomes obscene or innocent ; it is always on 
 a doubtful verge, and thus gains its extraordinary 
 fascination. I held my breath as I watched the gipsy 
 in the Seville dancing-hall ; I felt myself swaying un- 
 consciously to the rhythm of her body, of her 
 beckoning hands, of the glittering smile that came 
 and went in her eyes. I seemed to be drawn into a 
 shining whirlpool, in which I turned, turned, hearing 
 the buzz of the water settling over my head. The 
 guitar buzzed, buzzed, in a prancing rhythm, the 
 
126 CITIES 
 
 gipsy coiled about the floor, in her trailing dress, 
 never so much as showing her ankles, with a rapidity 
 concentrated upon itself j her hands beckoned, 
 reached out, clutched delicately, lived to their finger- 
 tips; her body straightened, bent, the knees bent 
 and straightened, the heels beat on the floor, carrying 
 her backwards and round ; the toes pointed, paused, 
 pointed, and the body drooped or rose into immobility, 
 a smiling, significant pause of the whole body. Then 
 the motion became again more vivid, more restrained, 
 as if teased by some unseen limits, as if turning upon 
 itself in the vain desire of escape, as if caught in its 
 own toils; more feverish, more fatal, the humour 
 turning painful, with the pain of achieved desire ; 
 more eapest, more eager, with the languor in which 
 desire dies triumphant. 
 
 A less elaborate, less perverse kind of dancing is 
 to be seen in the cafes, in little pantomimic ballets, 
 imitated from French models, but done with a Spanish 
 simplicity of emphasis. There is, in such things, a 
 frank, devil-may-care indecency, part of a boisterous 
 hilarity, which has all the air of an accident^ improvis- 
 ation, as indeed it often is ; and this hilarity is tossed 
 to and fro from stage to audience and from audience to 
 stage, as if a crowd of lively people had become a 
 little merry at the corner of a street. The Spanish 
 (look at their comic papers) are so explicit ! It is 
 not cold, or calculated, like that other, more signifi- 
 cant, kind of dancing ; it is done with youth and 
 delighted energy, and as among friends, and by 
 
SEVILLE 127 
 
 people to whom a certain explicit kind of coarseness 
 is natural. 
 
 V 
 
 Seville is not a religious city, as Valencia is ; but 
 it has woven the ceremonies of religion into its life, 
 into its amusements, with a minuteness of adaptation 
 certainly unparalleled. Nowhere as in Spain does 
 one so realise the sacred drama of the Mass. The 
 costumes, the processions, the dim lighting, the 
 spectacular arrangement of the churches and 
 ceremonies, the religious attitude of the people, 
 kneeling on the bare stones, the penitent aspect of 
 their black dresses and mantillas, intermingled with 
 the bright peasant colours which seem to bring the 
 poor people so intimately into association with the 
 mysteries of religion : all this has its part in giving 
 the Church its dramatic pre-eminence. And in 
 Seville the ceremonies of the Church are carried out 
 with more detail, more spectacular appeal, than any- 
 where else in Spain, that is to say, more than 
 anywhere in the world. All Europe flocks to see 
 the celebrations of Holy Week, which must have 
 come down unchanged from the Middle Ages ; a 
 piece of immense mediseval childishness, which 
 still suits the humour of Seville perfectly. And it 
 is not only in Holy Week that one may see the 
 most characteristic of all these ceremonies, the 
 sacred dances in the Cathedral, but also at the great 
 
128 CITIES 
 
 feast of the Immaculate Conception, which is 
 pecuharly a Sevillan feast. 
 
 On that day, the 8th December, I attended Mass 
 in the Cathedral. The gold and silver plate had 
 been laid out by the side of the altar, crimson 
 drapings covered the walls, the priests wore their 
 " terno celeste," blue and gold vestments ; the Seises, 
 who were to dance later on, were there in their blue- 
 and-white costume of the time of Philip III. ; the 
 acolytes wore gilt mitres, and carried silver-topped 
 staves and blue canopies. There was a procession 
 through the church, the Archbishop and the Alcaldia 
 walking in state, to the sound of sad voices and 
 hautboys, and amidst clouds of rolling white incense, 
 and between rows of women dressed in black, with 
 black mantillas over their heads. The Mass itself, 
 with its elaborate ritual, was sung to the very 
 Spanish music of Eslava: and the Dean's sermon, 
 with its flowery eloquence, flowers out of the 
 Apocalypse and out of the fields of ".la Tierra 
 de Maria Santisima," was not less typically Spanish. 
 At five o'clock I returned to the Cathedral to see 
 the dance, of the Seises. There was but little 
 light except about the altar, which blazed with 
 candles; suddenly a curtain was drawn aside, and 
 the sixteen boys, in their blue and white costume, 
 holding plumed hats in their hands, came forward 
 and knelt before the altar. The priests, who had 
 been chanting, came up from the choir, the boys 
 rose, and formed in two eights, facing each other, 
 
SEVILLE 129 
 
 in front of the altar, and the priests knelt in a 
 semi-circle around them. Then an unseen orchestra 
 began to play, and the boys put on their hats, and 
 began to sing the coplas in honour of the Virgin : 
 
 " O mi, O mi amada 
 Immaculada ! " 
 
 as they sang, to a dance-measure. After they had 
 sung the coplas they began to dance, still singing. 
 It was a kind of solemn minuet, the feet never 
 taken from the ground, a minuet of delicate stepping 
 and intricate movement, in which a central square 
 would form, divide, a whole line passing through the 
 opposite line, the outer ends then repeating one 
 another's movements while the others formed and 
 divided again in the middle. The first movement 
 was very slow, the second faster, ending with a 
 pirouette ; then came two movements without 
 singing, but with the accompaniment of castanets, 
 the first movement again very slow, the second a 
 quick rattle of the castanets, like the rolling of 
 kettle-drums, but done without raising the hands 
 above the level of the elbows. Then the whole 
 thing was repeated from the beginning, the boys 
 flourished off their hats, dropped on their knees 
 before the altar, and went quickly out. One or two 
 verses were chanted, the Archbishop gave his bene- 
 diction, and the ceremony was over. 
 
 And, yes, I found it perfectly dignified, perfectly 
 religious, without a suspicion of levity or indecorum. 
 This consecration of the dance, this turning of a 
 
130 CITIES 
 
 possible vice into a means of devotion, this bringing 
 of the people's art, the people's passion, which in 
 Seville is dancing, into the church, finding it a place 
 there, is precisely one of those acts of divine worldly 
 wisdom which the Church has so often practised in 
 her conquest of the world. And it is a quite logical 
 development of that very elaborate pantomime, using 
 the word in all seriousness, which the ceremonies of 
 the Church really are, since all have their symbolical 
 meaning, which they express by their gestures. 
 Already we find in them every art but one : poetry, 
 the very substance of the liturgy, oratory, music, 
 both of voices and instruments, sculpture, painting, 
 all the decorative arts, costume, perfume, every art 
 lending its service ; and now at last dancing finds its 
 natural place ' there, in the one city of the world 
 where its presence is most perfectly in keeping. 
 
 Winter, 1898. 
 
PRAGUE 
 
PRAGUE 
 
 I 
 
 Wooded and watery Bohemia, though indeed no 
 longer on the sea-coast, might well have seemed to 
 Shakespeare, if he had really seen it, the place for a 
 tragical pastoral. Coming from Bayreuth to Prague, 
 one finds oneself, as soon as one has got well beyond 
 Karlsbad, in a totally new country. The very sky is 
 new, and I have seen an orange light of fire, break- 
 ing through barred clouds like a vision of the gate 
 of the Venusberg, which added a new experience to 
 my knowledge of sunsets. And the country is at 
 once wide-reaching and mountainous, rising into pine- 
 woods above quiet rivers, and widening out into green 
 and brown plains, hedgeless, with, here and there a 
 corn-field, a flock of geese herded by a small boy, a 
 few goats, a few cows. All along the line, people 
 are bathing in the rivers, or lying with naked feet 
 among the grass, A boatman tows himself across, 
 reaching up to a rope above his head, as he stands 
 in his flat oblong boat, square at each end. The 
 scenery is wild and yet gentle, with many delicate 
 shades of green, fading into hills in which the mist 
 turns the pine-woods purple. And Prague itself, 
 seen from the Vysehrad, once the acropolis of the 
 
134 CITIES 
 
 city, and now a melancholy waste of grass and crawl- 
 ing roads and modern fortifications, seems little more 
 than an accidental growth among green fields and 
 tree-covered hillsides, a wide land of woods and 
 meadows and streams. Seen from the Hrad^in, the 
 Kremlin of Prague, it is a city of pointed spires, green 
 domes, and red, many-gabled roofs, through which 
 the Moldau wanders, carrying its five bridges ; and 
 it climbs the hill like Naples rising to Capodimonte. 
 All Prague is red and green, and part of its charm 
 for one, not only as one looks down upon it, seeing 
 the freshness of the green among the red, comes 
 from its homely, delightful way of filling up vacant 
 spaces with grass and trees, as in the vast Karlovo 
 Namesti, the only city square I know which is 
 almost a park, laid out with smooth grass and cool 
 trees and flower-beds planted in patterns, and yet an 
 actual city square, closed in by civic buildings, with 
 its fourteenth-century tower by the side of what was 
 once a Rathhaus out *of whose windows Ziika had 
 flung councillors. And the green is everywhere, 
 spreading outward from the fortifications, high above 
 the city, where the children play on the grass, spots 
 of bright colour, and piling itself mountainously up 
 the Nebozizek, and softening the river with shadows, 
 and flowering out of the river in green islands. 
 
 The Moldau, which cuts Prague in two, is broad 
 and swift, golden under sunlight, as it hurries under 
 its five bridges, between the green banks and the 
 quay. Long rafts of floating timber, on which men 
 
PRAGUE 135 
 
 run to and. fro with tall poles, pass slowly, hurrying 
 as they shoot the weir. Boats cross from side to 
 side, and one sees the slow, crossing gesture of men 
 with long-handled scoops, dredging in a barge. A 
 man stands on a heap of stones, in the very middle 
 of the weir, fishing. Half-naked figures, or figures 
 in bathing-gowns, move to and fro on the big brown 
 floating baths, or swing out on a trapeze over the 
 water. A sound of music comes from one of the 
 green islands, where people are sitting at cafe tables 
 under the trees. People drowse on the benches 
 by the side of the river. 
 
 Warm, full of repose, heavy with happy sleep, at 
 midday, at night the riverside becomes mysterious, 
 a romance. The water silvers ; with its islands, 
 from which lights glimmer, it might be a lake, but 
 for the thunder of the weir, which comes to you as 
 you walk under the trees, or go out on a kind of 
 platform beside a dusty mill, from which you see 
 the water rushing violently towards the great wooden 
 stakes by the bridge. Lights move on the opposite 
 shore, ^t the foot of what seems a vast mountain, 
 dimly outlined. The bridge, at first invisible, a 
 detached line of lights, comes out gradually, as your 
 eyes accustom themselves to the night-mist, in the 
 palest of grey, like the ghost of a bridge. Beyond 
 and above, the HradSin emerges in the same ghostly 
 outline, a long grey line against the sky, out of 
 which the cathedral spire points upward. It is a 
 view which seems to have been composed, almost 
 
136 CITIES 
 
 too full of the romantic elements to be quite natural; 
 and it has something of whatever is strange, placid, 
 and savagfe m the character of the Bohemians. 
 
 II 
 
 The real centre of Prague is the Karlfiv Most, or 
 Karl Bridge, which crosses the Moldau on eight 
 out of its sixteen ai-ches. Begun in the fourteenth 
 century, with its fifteenth-century tower and its mainly 
 eighteenth-century statues, it may remind one at first 
 sight of the Ponte Sant' Angelo at Rome ; but Bernini 
 in his most fantastic mood never conceived anything so 
 fantastic as these thirty stone and bronze figures of 
 saints, martyrs, doctors of the Church, Our Saviour, 
 and the suffering souls in purgatory. There is a 
 crucifix erected with money mulcted, from a Jew in 
 1 606, in which the gilded bronze is washed and 
 dusted and weather-stained into a ruddy and veined 
 warmth. St John Nepomuc, the patron-saint of 
 Prague, is in dark bronze, with the five stars around 
 his halo, like five spikes of gold ; and near by is the 
 marble slab marking the spot where he was flung 
 over the bridge, a tiny' bronze image representing 
 him floating, with his crown of stars, down the river. 
 For the most part, the saints are in rough-hewn 
 stone, based at times with faintly outlined reliefs, 
 bearing strange inscriptions, such as that which com- 
 memorates St John Nepomuc, who "conquered 
 
PRAGUE 137 
 
 devils and turned 8000 Saracens and 2500 Jews to 
 the Christian faith," the Jews and the Saracens being 
 shown on their way to that pious moment. The 
 strangest of all these monuments is a vast and rocky 
 mass, surmounted by the figures of several saints, 
 and opening in the midst to show three hollow and 
 piteous figures in purgatory, ^lifting their chained 
 hands towards the doorway, guarded on one side by 
 a snarling dog, on the other by a gigantic Bohemian 
 in uniform, with a fat stomach, endless moustaches, 
 and a long sword hanging from his military cloak, 
 as if to impress upon the minds of Bohemians that 
 hell, for them at all events, was entirely Bohemian. 
 There is a certain savagery in the whole aspect and 
 record of this bridge, in its way of indicating the 
 place where spiked heads rotted for ten years, the 
 place where a j ust man was flung into the water by 
 a tyrant, in the vindictive insistence on the fact that 
 a reviling Jew's money had been taken to set up the 
 crucifix. It is an always fierce and militant religion 
 which has fixed these landmarks, a religion always 
 armed against enemies, or suffering death at their 
 hands. There is none of that rest which remains to 
 the people of God in these large and active figures, 
 who had laboured and suffered ; as there is none of 
 that rest which is beauty, here or elsewhere, in the 
 endeavours after art of the Bohemians. 
 
 Visiting the older part of the Hradcin, one is im- 
 pressed by an air of naked strength, of walls built 
 only for defence, of a kind of contempt for decora- 
 
138 CITIES 
 
 tion ; everywhere is bare stone, hard wood ; the 
 Council Chamber has a brick floor, leather-covered 
 tables, a wooden stool for the Archbishop, a 
 dungeon-like room for the secretary. And in the 
 Cathedral, the metropolitan church of St Vitus, 
 the memorial statues are of men in armour, as if 
 every one buried there had died by violence and 
 in the act of fighting. In the barbaric Vaclavska 
 Kaple, or Wenzel Chapel, the saint's helmet and 
 coat of mail are preserved in a niche behind the 
 altar. His statue, by Vischer of Niirnberg, stands 
 in armour in a corner of this sombre place, where 
 the faded frescoes are half outlined and half over- 
 laid by smooth, unshaped masses of amethyst, 
 chrysoprase, malachite, porphyry, set into the damp 
 walls without pattern or design, blotching the 
 rotting colours with crude heapings of precious 
 stones. The Svato-T;fnsk;f-Chram, or Teyn Church, 
 has_also its men in armour carved upon stone tomb- 
 stones; Tycho Brahe among them, holding his globe 
 and compass, not far from the burial vault of the 
 Wallensteins. 
 
 And in almost all its architecture Prague shows 
 this over-emphatic, unassthetic spirit. The Teyn 
 Church, especially at night, rises with a really 
 original romantic effect against the sky, out of the 
 clustering roofs surrounding it ; the Cathedral has 
 its fine Gothic choir; here and there is a tower, 
 impressive by its solidity. And it must be re- 
 membered how much has been swept away in 
 
PRAGUE 139 
 
 fanatical wars ; how little leisure for the cultiva- 
 tion of the arts has been left at any time to so 
 disturbed a people. But wherever you go in 
 Prague, you will find a bastard kind of architecture, 
 Renaissance crossed with Slavonic, which has little 
 sense of design and no sense of decoration, except 
 the overlaying of a plain surface with protruding 
 figures. The PraJna Brana, or Powder Gate, 
 bristles with coats of arms, set there for historic, 
 not for artistic reasons, and roughly carved figures, 
 standing out from the surface of the walls without 
 symmetry or design ; there are rococo palaces and 
 housesv decorated with meaningless stucco ornament 
 and with monstrous caryatides supporting nothing, 
 vast griflins or heraldic eagles, like excrescences 
 upon the rock ; over one doorway is the legend 
 of St Julian, with the miraculous stag; at street 
 corners, in little niches, are painted Christs, dripping 
 with blood, like the horrible seated figure in the 
 Teyn Church. And the taste of the people runs all 
 to angles. Every square is surrounded by lines of 
 houses of irregular height, set irregularly; when a 
 square is sub-divided, it is inset with a triangle ; 
 every corner is turned so as to make as many angles 
 as possible. The pavement is mosaicked into squares 
 and triangles, and these angles are carried into the 
 sky. Spires bristle up from every church, and at 
 the corners of every tower, and these spires, pointed, 
 wedge-shaped, with an occasional bulbous dome, 
 like the domes of Moscow, are set with a family of 
 
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 little spires growing out of them at alternate angles. 
 They are seen, a mere suggestion, on the twelfth- 
 century church of St George, in the Hradciff; 
 gradually the cluster of spires develops, century by 
 century, until we come to the fifteenth century west 
 fa9ade of the Teyn Church and the corner towers of 
 the Powder Gate. This detail, the only invention 
 in architecture of the Bohemians, is typical of the 
 people, so alive to the utility of straight lines, 
 the emphasis of sharp angles, so insensitive to the 
 gradual beauty of the curve, the more delicate 
 harmonies of proportion. There is something, in 
 their way of building, fierce, violent, unrestrained, 
 like the savagery of their fighting, of their fighting 
 songs, of their fighting music. " All ye warriors of 
 God," says the Taborite war-song of "tiika, " strike 
 and kill, spare none ! " " Woe to you, Huss ! " 
 retorts a CathoHc song. An'd nothing is more 
 curious than to contrast this fiery spirit, showing 
 itself in energy of line and angularity of outline, 
 with the gentleness, the soft colour, the placidity 
 of the wide green spaces within the city, and the 
 vast green plains and hillsides in whose midst the 
 city has entrenched itself. , 
 
 III 
 
 The Bohemians have produced nothing beautiful 
 in any of the plastic arts ; but in literature, for the 
 
PRAGUE 141 
 
 most part given up to histories of piety and savagery, 
 they have produced one book of genius, in whose 
 hardness, quaintness, crudity, and vigorous, unbeauti- 
 ful detail, I find all the characteristic qualities of the 
 race, illuminated, here only, by that light which is 
 imagination. The full title of the book is: "The 
 Labyrinth of the World and the Paradise of the 
 Heart ; that is, a book that clearly shows that this 
 world and all matters concerning it are jiothing but 
 confusion and giddiness, pain and toil, deceit and 
 falsehood, misery and anxiety, and lastly, disgust of 
 all things and despair; but he who remains in his 
 own dwelling within his heart, opening it to the 
 Lord God alone, will obtain true and full peace of 
 mind and joy." It was written in 1623, at the age 
 of thirty-one, by John Amos Komensky, better 
 known as Comenius, who, later in life, wrote largely 
 on education, and hais been remembered, outside his 
 own country, as an educational authority, and no 
 more. But Komensky was something more than 
 this, and his one imaginative work, written, as the 
 title indicates, from a religious conviction (he was 
 a pastor of the " Bohemian Brethren "), is a 
 kind of "Pilgrim's Progress," with something of 
 "Gulliver's Travels" in it as well, and it may be 
 compared, as a piece of literature, with both these 
 "criticisms of life." It was written almost at the 
 same time as the " Pilgrim's Progress," and Count 
 Liitzow, who has translated it into English with 
 great skill and accuracy, has shown good judgment 
 
142 CITIES 
 
 in rendering it into an English for the most part as 
 homely as Bunyan's. 
 
 Like Rabelais, but with less intentional extrava- 
 gance, Komensky will use ten synonyms for one 
 statement ; he writes all in verbs and nouns, which 
 hammer on our ears with the clatter of the fighting 
 peasants' flails. " When I inclined my ears, every- 
 thing was full of knocking, stamping, scrubbing, 
 whispering and screaming," he tells us, in his fii-st 
 impression of the world; and, of the ignorant 
 physicians : " Then they immediately cooked, stewed, 
 roasted, broiled, cauterised, cooled, burnt, hacked, 
 sawed, pricked, sewed together, bound up, greased, 
 hardened, softened, wrapped up, poured out 
 medicines." He calls mean things by their names, 
 and catches at whatever words wiU render his 
 meaning most nakedly. He writes in squares and 
 chequers, in a style like the pavement of Prague. 
 But, in him, the stern Bohemian piety turns to a 
 strange kind of spiritual insight, for which it is his 
 genius to have found an appropriate form. 
 
 Komensky's mind was a kind of mechanical intelli- 
 gence, moving with hard precision, allegorising by 
 rule, with a shrewdness a little sharpened by a kind 
 of abstract malice. He builds up his allegory by a 
 process of reasoning, coming after the poets and 
 makers of metaphors, and using for his own purpose 
 what remains over when the poetry has cooled. 
 Poetry may often be truth concentrated into a meta- 
 phor ; Komensky takes hold of the metaphor, and 
 
PRAGUE 143 
 
 resolves it to its original essence of truth ; as when 
 he sees Death shooting arrows, and, looking closer, 
 perceives that Death has nothing but a bow, and 
 that each man fashions his own arrow. Here, as 
 always, imagination comes to him through logic, 
 through a literal, matter-of-fact unravelling of ideas 
 or figures, taken at their word. When he first 
 considers the vanity of the world's works, this i§ 
 how he sees it : " Some, indeed, collected sweepings 
 and divided them amongst themselves ; some hurried 
 here and there with timber and stones, or dragged 
 them up with a windlass, and, then dropped them; 
 some dug up earth, and conveyed it from place to 
 place; the others occupied themselves with little 
 bells, looking-glasses, alembics, rattles, and other 
 playthings ; others also played with their own 
 shadow, measuring and pursuing it and catching at 
 it ; and all this so vigorously that many groaned and 
 sweated, and some, indeed, also injured themselves." 
 It is like one watching the swarming of insects, 
 mocking their labours by the mere enumeration of 
 them, emptying his human contempt on them for 
 busying themselves with ends not his own, measuring 
 their doings by the standard of his own mind. There 
 is a fine intellectual callousness in it, a cold » cruelty 
 of logic which is almost a more fundamental criticism 
 of life than Swift's lacerating satire. One sees that 
 Swift is in a rage, and one allows for the exaggera- 
 tion and partiality of one who is in a rage. But 
 Komensky is neither in a rage nor does he seem to 
 
144 ' CITIES 
 
 be touched with pity, nor yet to laugh at the follies 
 which he sees. He is as chilled as Plotinus on his 
 stone ; he seems to be but a vast pair of eyes and 
 . ears, sucking in appearances, and transmuting them 
 coldly into observations. The irony, and the con- 
 demning force of the truth, come in as if by accident ; 
 the philosophy lies all in the framework, like a rigid 
 thing of mere hard measurement. 
 
 The lesson which Komensky has for us, the 
 lesson of all disinterested searchers in the world, is 
 this : " I have seen and beheld and understood that 
 I -myself am nothing, understand nothing, possess 
 nothing,; neither do others; it is but a vain con- 
 ceit." On the way he has seen Fame: "It befell 
 that one arrived claiming immortality, who, asked 
 what deed worthy of immortal memory he had done, 
 replied that he had destroyed the most glorious 
 thing in the world of which he knew." He has 
 seen the great of the earth, seated on high and 
 toppling seats, on the very edge of a great height, 
 where they might be seen by all who are below: 
 " the higher a seat was, the easier it was to shake 
 it." The rich sit chained in darkness, counting and 
 kissing the links of their chains, which they think 
 to be of pure gold. Lovers stand in front of a gate 
 called betrothment : " In front of it there was a wide 
 square in which crowds of people of both sexes 
 walked about, and each one looked into the eyes of 
 the other ; and not only this, but they also looked 
 at one another's ears, nose, teeth, neck, tongue, 
 
PRAGUE 145 
 
 liands, feet, and other limbs ; also did each measure 
 the other — how tall, how broad, how stout, or how 
 slender he was." The newsmen blow their whistles 
 in the street, and men rejoice or lament according to 
 the cheerful or mournful sound of the whistle. The 
 rhetoricians keep school : " where, behold, many 
 stood holding brushes, and they discussed as to how 
 words either written or spoken into the air could 
 be coloured green, red, black, white, or whatever 
 colour a man might wish." The poets are seen to 
 be " a troup of agile young men who were weighing 
 syllables on balances, and measuring them by the 
 span, rejoicing meanwhile, and skipping round 
 them." The natural philosophers are trying to crack 
 the nuts of the tree of nature : " some, indeed, 
 stared till their eyes pained them, and gnawed till 
 they broke their teeth." The pilgrim inquires after 
 the men of learning, and finds them fighting with 
 "reeds and quills, which they loaded with powder 
 that had been dissolved in water " ; unlike other 
 fighters, these do not even spare the dead, but still 
 hack at their bodies. The books, out of which 
 they get their learning, are found to be so many 
 gallipots in a chemist's shop, containing " remedies 
 against the ailments of the mind," which the most 
 part cram until they are sick. Merchants trading 
 hj land and by sea are seen at their hard and perilous 
 business ; and it is in the description of a storm at 
 sea that we find the most vivid and sustained piece 
 of writing in the book. 
 
 K 
 
146 CITIES 
 
 " The Labyrinth of the World " ends with a cry 
 of despair: " O God, God, God !- God, if thou art 
 a God, have mercy on wretched me ! " But 
 Komensky has not finished ; we turn the page and 
 are in "The Paradise of the Heart." The satirist, 
 the observer, the contemner of worldly things, has 
 given place to the Christian, the mystic, the Quietist. 
 A voice is heard saying : " Return I return whence 
 thou camest to the house of the heart, and then 
 close the doors behind thee." A little light comes 
 in through the cracked and dusty windows, and 
 then brighter and brighter light, and a transforming 
 energy which cleanses everything in the house, and 
 presently the presence of God himself, as guest and 
 then as bridegroom, and an inner illumination in 
 which all that has been seen awry is seen in its true 
 order. The pilgrim learns how he may live in the 
 world without living as the world lives, realising now 
 "that the world is not so heavy that it may not be 
 endured, nor so valuable that its loss need be re- 
 gretted." 
 
 IV 
 
 There is one corner of Prague which has kept 
 more than any other its medieval aspect, combining 
 in itself many of the contrasts of this contradictory 
 city; the Jewish quarter, which lies between the 
 Staromestke Namesti and the river. The synagogue, 
 built in the twelfth century, outside like a monstrous 
 
PRAGUE 147 
 
 dwelling, Inside like a dungeon, made in the image 
 of a wizard's cell, with its low roof and heavy walls 
 black with age, pierced with narrow windows, its 
 railed-oif space in the centre, in which a chair and 
 desk seem to await a scribe, its narrow seats, each 
 with its little desk, its tail candelabras and mean 
 candlesticks, in some of which a candle is guttering 
 out, its banner of the time of Ferdinand III., its 
 suspended cloth or robe, hung with bells like the 
 robe of the High Priest, its strange ornaments of 
 wood and copper, as of some idolatry to which 
 graven images had never lent grace, concentrates 
 in itself all the horror of the Ghetto. And the 
 Ghetto swarms about it in a medley of narrow 
 streets and broad empty spaces, a pestilent circle 
 of evil smells and half-naked children, and slatternly 
 Jews and Jewesses, in the midst of shops of old 
 boots and old clothes, and old houses with coats 
 of arms over their doors ^nd broken ornaments on 
 their walls. Out of the midst of this confusion a 
 short street leads to the old burial-ground, hidden 
 behind its high, enclosing wall. This graveyard 
 in the midst of the city, in which no graves have 
 been dug for more than a hundred years, carries 
 back the mind^ as one walks among its alleys and 
 garden-plots of tombs, to an unknown antiquity. 
 The tombstones are crowded and pressed together, 
 rows of them overlap the same grave, and they 
 huddle together, in a forced companionship, leaning 
 ■♦his way and that, battered and chipped, with worn 
 
CITIES 
 
 lettering and broken ornaments. Most have in- 
 scriptions in Hebrew, with symbohcal records of 
 tribe or name, a fish for Fischer, a stag for Hirsch, 
 two hands for the tribe of Aaron. Some are family 
 tombs, in which the broken lid of a sarcophagus 
 shows a glimpse of bones among the casual heapings 
 of time. Some are famous'tombs, such as that of 
 Rabbi Loewe, the friend of Tycho Brahe, a tall 
 slab, crowned ■v^ith a cone, and still heaped with 
 little stones on every ledge, after the Jewish fashion 
 of commemorating the dead. But now all cling 
 together in a sad equality. The trees have grown 
 familiar with the tombs, turning grey and green 
 together, as they share the same weather, age after 
 age. One tree has bent over and riveted itself 
 upon the edge of a gravestone, which it presses 
 down into the earth under its weight. The alders 
 are shrivelled and twisted, with but little foliage, 
 as they cover the tombs with a hand's-breadth of 
 melancholy shade. The lichen creeps up their 
 trunks, which are cracked and dry. Weeds and 
 thorns grow abouL their roots, the grass is every- 
 where, with bare patches here and there of black 
 earth, close about the tombstones. 
 
 The sky was turning towards sunset as I wandered 
 about the alleys under the trees, and the last pale 
 rays of the sun filtered through the , leaves and 
 gave a sadder light to the broken edges of grey 
 stone. Now and then a blackbird crossed between 
 the tombs and the sunlight. Towards the farther 
 
PRAGUE 149 
 
 end, where the graves are fewer and the trees grow 
 more freely, children were playing on the grass. 
 It seemed to me as if one were seeing all the graves 
 of all the people who had ever died. These tombs, 
 as no others had ever done, seemed to sum up the 
 real meaning of our memory of the dead, the real 
 way in which they crowd together, dwindling 
 miserably, as time carries them further and further 
 away from the general memory. They were inex- 
 pressibly human, these poor gravestones, on so few 
 of which had any people now living come to put 
 the pious stones of remembrance. 
 
 Prague in summer has the aspect of a Southern, 
 rather than of a Northern city, for the people are 
 out of doors all day long, walking in the streets 
 for the mere pleasure of walking in them, and 
 sitting under the trees on the islands in the river 
 and in the gardens of many cafes and in the parks 
 which lead into the country in every direction. 
 They bring their • books and their work with them, 
 they bring little paper packets of sweets, and there 
 is generally a band playing as they sit at tables 
 drinking their " white coffee " or their beer. 
 Bohemian music has a kind of fiery monotony, its 
 polka beat marked with all the emphasis of cease^ 
 less cymbals, in an orchestra arranged after a some- 
 
I50 CITIES 
 
 what savage fashion of its own. Popular music, 
 and the characteristically Bohemian music of Dvorak 
 and Smetana, has a singular mixture of barbarism, 
 of something windy and savage, and of a kind of 
 conventionality. There is no passion in it, but a 
 sort of primitive folk-rhythm, full of surprises to the 
 Western ear, with sudden spirals of the flutes and 
 hautboys, leaps and clashes of the cymbals, envelop- 
 ing outbursts of the brass. The people are for the 
 most part quiet and good-humoured people, in whom 
 it is curious to trace the mixture of Slavonic and 
 German blood. The pure German type, which 
 begins to lessen at Karlsbad, is hardly to be seen at 
 Prague ; the faces are more nervous, with sharper 
 eyes, the figures are slimmer, less shapeless. They 
 are often very blonde,- at times very dark, and there 
 is something a little wild, even in the soft beauty of 
 blonde women, a fiery sweetness, a certain strange- 
 ness as of unfamiliar hghts amid the shadows of still 
 water ; a little of the soft, unconscious savagery of 
 the animals man has tamed, but which have never 
 quite forgotten the forest. But they are not 
 perilous, like the Hungarians ; sly, sometimes, but 
 simple. Children and young girls are often delicious, 
 with their white skin and pale gold hair, which in 
 some lights takes a faint shade of green, like the 
 hair of a certain portrait by Palma Vecchio, known 
 as the portrait of his daughter, in the gallery at 
 Vienna. The children of poor people go bare- 
 footed, sometimes the women; in the country, 
 
PRAGUE 151 
 
 women and children alike, a habit which is but one 
 among many likenesses to the habits of the Irish 
 peasant. Sometimes, under the invariable handker- 
 chief which they wear about their heads, one sees 
 flat, broad face* which suggest the Calmuck; like 
 all women who do the work of men in the open 
 air, they are old women at twenty. And the 
 poorer people are for the most part a little 
 slatternly, without natural taste in dressing ; true 
 peasants, peasants of the North, who have none 
 of the elegance of the Southern peasant. And 
 all these people have, in their faces, in their de- 
 meanour, something of the seriousness of people 
 in Protestant countries ; Catholics as they have 
 been for three hundred years, they seem to have 
 not yet outlived the Protestant temperament ; seem 
 still, and only not through an accident in images 
 which has really happened, to be honouring Huss 
 when they worship St John Nepomuc. 
 
 VI 
 
 Prague is a city of contrasts, and it is not to be 
 understood until one has seen the Pfikopy as well as 
 the Hradcin, the modern Vaclavske Nam^sti, as well 
 as the ancient arcades |ibout the Starom^stke 
 NamSsti, and has realised that all these contrasts are 
 so many parts of a single national life, and that they 
 are, after all, only the more visible half of that 
 
152 CITIES 
 
 "slata Praha," that "golden Prague," which the 
 Bohemian sees, not only with his eyes, but with his 
 memory. The older parts of the town give one a 
 strange sensation of being still in the Middle Ages, 
 and they are sombre, at moments menacing, as one 
 comes upon great archways leading into narrow 
 alleys, or opening into vaulted inner rooms, or great 
 courtyards. Twisting lanes lead from street to 
 street, restaurants or cafes show a glimmering light 
 at the end of a long passage plunged in darkness ; 
 wherever one passes one gets fantastic glimpses 
 under arcades and archways, people moving across 
 roughly paved squares, by a flickering light, or 
 turning down a narrow passage under a low door- 
 way. There is a modern Prague which is growing 
 up in the image of Vienna, with tall characterless 
 houses, and modish shops, and it is indeed to be 
 feared that this new Prague will gradually over- 
 .grow all that i? left of the old city. But at 
 present the contrast can still be enjoyed without 
 more than an agreeable sense of incongruity, as 
 one passes, at the turn of a street, from the some- 
 what melancholy slumber of an old palace, into an 
 atmosphere of life and bustle, as of a contented 
 town-life going steadily on. 
 
 And this life of to-day, which has at last become 
 national, passionately national, so that the names of 
 the streets are no longer to be seen in German, and 
 the (Sech theatre would hesitate to perform an opera 
 of Wagner, because he was a German, and riots can 
 
PRAGUE 153 
 
 break out in a German theatre, and actresses be 
 fought over in the streets because they act in 
 German ; this new outbreak of national life is fed 
 upon memories. The Bohemian still sees a phantom 
 city, behind this city in which electric trams take 
 him to the foot of the VySehrad, a city more real to 
 him than even what remains of his national monu- 
 . ments. His memory is a memory of martyrs, of 
 executions, of the savageries of religion and of 
 political conflict. Catholics against Protestants, 
 Germans against techs ; he remembers, as he passes 
 the place where the Bethelem Chapel of Huss once 
 stood, the burning of Huss at Constance ; he re- 
 members the flails and pitchforks of Zizka, he 
 remembers Wallenstein, Radetzky. Here, outside 
 the Rathhaus, were the executions of the 2 1 st June, 
 1 62 1, after the battle of the White Mountain, in 
 which Protestantism died. Here, on the Staromlstka 
 V^z, the tower which he passes under when he 
 crosses the river, the twenty-seven heads were left 
 rotting for ten years. He is not taken over the 
 castle without being shown the window from which 
 the three councillors were flung in 1 6 1 8, an act of 
 " defenestration," as it has been called by Count 
 Liitzow, the historian of Bohemia, which brought 
 about the Thirty Years' War. War after war has 
 devastated Prague, spoiling it of much that was 
 finest and most characteristic in its buildings ; but to 
 the Bohemian no stone that has been violently cast 
 down is forgotten. Prague is still the epitome of 
 
154 CITIES 
 
 the history of his country ; he sees it as a man sees 
 the woman whom he loves^ with her first beauty, and 
 he loves it as a man loves a woman, more for what 
 she has suffered. 
 
 Summer, 1897 and 1899. 
 
MOSCOW 
 
MOSCOW 
 
 I 
 
 The road to Moscow, if you enter Russia at the 
 Polish frontier, lies for nearly a thousand miles 
 through the midst of a great desert, which has at 
 once the vast, level extent and the delicately 
 changing colour of the sea; with a sense of lone- 
 liness almost as absolute as that of the sea, to the 
 voyager in a ship. Resembling, at moments, the 
 Roman Campagna, these steppes have their own 
 very personal kind of beauty, in which the monotony 
 of their apparent endlessness is after all only that 
 monotony which is an element of all fine style, 
 in nature as well as in art. Looking out of the 
 windows of the train, as it goes slowly on, day 
 and night, you see on both sides an interminable 
 plain of short grass, unbroken by hedges ; at 
 intervals a forest, a plantation, or a few pines or 
 birches ; here and there a little wooden hut in the 
 midst of a pine-wood, like the cabin of some Thoreau ; 
 here and there a thatched village, with sunflowers 
 before its doors, or a small town, with blue and gold 
 domes ; and, between house and house, profound 
 loneliness, not a human being, not an animal, not 
 a breath of smoke, visible. Everywhere the land- 
 
158 CITIES 
 
 scape makes pictures, but not in the manner of most 
 landscapes ; delicate pictures, full of rest, and of still 
 trees, with perhaps a single human figure, faintly 
 indicated, such as Corot painted ; with something 
 of his favourite colouring, something also of his 
 charm of composition, for once absolutely natural in 
 nature. Where, at times, a cornfield would rise up, 
 brown and gold, out of the green, plain, a few men 
 and women reaping, it was with a noble gesture, 
 reminding one of attitude as it is refined and preserved 
 for us in pictures, that a woman, perhaps, would 
 pause, the sickle curved for a moment above her 
 head. Finely monotonous, sensitive, full of subdued 
 colour, with all the charm of natural refinement 
 in what is for the most part uncultivated, unspoilt, 
 not yet turned to useful ends by - the impatient 
 absorption of civilisation, this sea of land, flowing 
 gradually up to the vague outskirts of Moscow, 
 prepared me, in my slow journey through it, for a 
 not too sudden entrance upon the bewilderments of 
 the city. 
 
 Of Moscow itself not much was visible from the 
 train, and I went, like all the world, to that 
 traditional enimence, Vorobievy Gory, the Sparrow 
 Hills, where the terrace of a restaurant marks the 
 place from which Napoleon and his army came sud- 
 denly within sight of Moscow. Seen at sunset, 
 across deep woods and wide green fields, through 
 which the Moskva curved gently, as if embracing it, 
 the city seemed to lie stretched at full length. A 
 
MOSCOW 159 
 
 trail of black smoke from a factory, and a column of 
 brownish smoke going up from a fire, darkened a 
 space of clear sky above the glittering of innumerable 
 white spires and turrets, which shone with a bright- 
 ness far beyond that of the golden and many- 
 coloured domes which glowed between them. The 
 twisted lines of the Kremlin stood out sharply above 
 their battlements, the white outer wall seeming to 
 rise out of the river; beyond, pinnacled roofs 
 wandered indefinitely, their colours, and the colours 
 of many walls, repeating the exact greens of the 
 fields which lay about theta, as if a fierce sun had 
 flashed up an actual reflection upon them. Gradually 
 the light faded out, until the city looked like a long, 
 dim, thin line, ridging the plain. Coming back in 
 the dark, on the little steamer, to drift over those 
 bright, visibly^rippling waters, between the lights 
 and deep wooded shadows of the banks, was at one 
 mometit almost Uke being on the Venetian lagoons, 
 at another, like being on an Irish lake. Just before 
 landing, as we came into the midst of the city, I saw 
 the modern, not very interesting Church of the 
 Saviour for once effective, rising hugely into the sky, 
 as if carved solidly out of grey cloud. 
 
 II 
 
 Charming, for all its strangeness, when seen at 
 night, or from a distance, Moscow is without charm, 
 
i6o CITIES 
 
 in spite of its strangeness, when seen clearly and by 
 day. Built, like Rome, on seven hills, it radiates 
 outwards, circle beyond circle, from the central 
 height of the Kremlin ; the old, or " Chinese town," 
 heaped within its white wall, cut off sharply from 
 the " white town " of shops and public buildings and 
 large houses, which dwindles into the first ring of 
 dusty boulevards ; and from this the " earthen 
 town" stretches to the outer ring of boulevards; 
 and then the suburbs begin, vague, interminable, 
 and seeming, long before they have reached the 
 ramparts which close in the thirty-six miles of the 
 city's circumference, to have passed into the open 
 country. Like everything in Russia, it is by its size 
 that it first impresses you. Vast, vaguely defined, so 
 casual in its division of time, of day and nigh-t, of 
 the hours in the day, full of heavy leisure, un- 
 occupied space, this city, next to the largest city in 
 Europe, has much of the aspect of some extraordinary 
 village, which has sprung up, and widened gradually, 
 about a citadel. Its seven hills have done something 
 to leave more than usual of the open air about it, in 
 wide, windless spaces, brooded over by the wings of 
 innumerable pigeons. Everywhere are vast, unpaved 
 squares, surrounded by a rope of twisted wire, 
 stretched from post to post, or by temporary 
 wooden railings, propped up at vague intervals. 
 Cross the river by the bridge which lies between 
 the Kremlin and the church of the Saviour, and you 
 will see, between weir and weir, ducks floating on 
 
MOSCOW i6i 
 
 the water, a ferry-boat waiting to take people over, 
 red figures paddling by the banks, or wading across 
 with tucked up trousers or petticoats ; clothes being 
 beaten on a row of planks which stretch from the 
 dusty shore to the queer little sailing boats moored 
 in mid-stream. Everywhere you will find village 
 scenes, the tree's and water and width, the fields 
 even, of the real country. And the life of the 
 people, the arrangement of the houses, have the 
 characteristics of village life: these houses, often 
 only one storey high, rarely higher than two storeys, 
 built often of wood, like -log-huts, and with a 
 wooden palisade in front of their strip of garden, or 
 wide, dusty court, in which one hears the flutter of 
 fowls and the gabble of white turkeys. Outside, 
 on the irregular pavement, village carts jolt by, an 
 unending procession, with a sound like the sound of 
 an army marching; the cabs, labouring slowly at 
 full speed, are like the primitive vehicles of old- 
 fashioned folk in the country. The markets, which 
 on so many days of the week cover with stalls, and 
 stacked carts, and heaped baskets, the vacant squares 
 and open spaces of boulevards, are like village 
 markets; and the people themselves, with their red 
 shirts and top-boots, have the air of people who till 
 the soil. 
 
 But of the repose, the freshness, which we 
 associate with life in villages, there is nothing. 
 Deafening in summer, with its streets and squares 
 paved irregularly with cobbles, and surging up 
 
1 62 CITIES 
 
 and down in waves and hollows, over which the 
 wheels go rocking and clattering all day long; 
 silent in winter, when the sledges glide over the 
 white and even snow ; there is always the oppres- 
 sion of noise or of silence, some not quite natural 
 suspense of nature. At Moscow everything is in 
 extremes ; the weather halves the year between 
 the two burdens of sun and ice, and the whole 
 aspect of the city is one of preparation for those 
 extremes. The iron-boaad pavements slope down 
 gradually to the street, in order to assist the toiler 
 through snow in passing from one level to another ; 
 gutters run across the pavement at every water-pipe 
 to make natural channels for the water ; the costume, 
 even in summer, of the likhatchi drivers is an 
 immense padded overcoat, falling like a petticoat to 
 the feet, and swathing the body as if it enclosed a 
 Falstaft; the top-boots, worn even in summer by 
 three-fourths of the ■ population, suggest the heavy 
 walking of the winter. And in nothing are these 
 extremes more emphatic than in the colours which 
 clash against each other everywhere in the streets, 
 colours which absorb and fatigue the eye, leaving it 
 without a cool shadow to rest upon. 
 
 In Russia everything is large and everything is 
 loud. In the vast village of Moscow the buildings 
 are all bulk broad, not high, because there is 
 so much space to cover. The public squares, 
 unpaved and surrounded by a little rim of cobbles, 
 are as big as meadows. The arcades and p"kssages, 
 
MOSCOW 163 
 
 with their cellars below, their shops above, their 
 glass roofs, are so enormous that they could hold 
 the Passage des Panoramas, and the Burlington 
 Arcade, and the galleries at Milan, without filling 
 more than a corner of them. Colours shriek and 
 flame ; the Muscovite eye sees only by emphasis 
 and by contrast; red is completed either by another 
 red or by a bright blue. There are no shades, no 
 reticences, no modulations. The restaurants are 
 filled with the din of vast mechanical organs, with 
 drums and cymbals ; a great bell clashes against a 
 chain on all the trams, to clear the road ; the music 
 which one hears is a ferocity of brass. The masons 
 who build the houses build in top-boots, red shirts, 
 and pink trousers ; the houses are painted red or 
 green or blue ; the churches are like the temples of 
 savage idols, tortured into every unnatural shape and 
 coloured every glaring colour. Bare feet, osier- 
 sandals, and legs swathed in rags, pass to and fro 
 among the top-boots of the middle classes, the 
 patent leather boots of the upper classes, like the 
 inner savagery of a race still so near barbarism, 
 made evident in that survival of the foot-gear of 
 primitive races. 
 
 Nothing in Moscow is quite like anytjiing one has 
 seen anywhere else ; and no two houses, all of 
 which are so unlike the houses in any other country, 
 are quite like one another. Their roofs are almost 
 invariably painted green, and the water-pipes make a 
 sort of green edging round the house-front. Bui 
 
1 64 CITIES 
 
 the colours of the houses are endless : green, pink, 
 blue, brown, red, chocolate, lilac, black even, rarely 
 two of the same colour side by side, and rarely two 
 of so much as the same general shape. Every shop 
 has its walls painted over with rude pictures of the 
 goods to be found inside; the draper has his row 
 of clothed dummies, the hatter his pyramid of hats, 
 the greengrocer his vegetables, the wine-seller his 
 many-coloured bottles. Fruit-stalls meet one every- 
 where, and from the flower-like bouquet of fruits 
 under their cool awnings there is a constant, shift- 
 ing glow, the yellows and reds of apples, the 
 purple of plums, the green and yellow of melons, 
 and the crisp, black-spotted pink of melons sliced. 
 And in these coloured streets, which in summer 
 flame with the dry heat of a furnace, walk a multi- 
 tude of coloured figures, brighter than the peasants 
 of a comic opera; and the colours of their shirts 
 and petticoats and handkerchiefs and bodices flame 
 against the sunlight. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Set in such a frame, itself at all points so strange 
 in shape and colour, the Kremlin and the churches, 
 with their glittering domes, on which the sym- 
 bolical Russian cross has made a footstool of the 
 crescent, are but the last in a series of shocks with 
 which this inexhaustible city greets one. All 
 Moscow is distorted by eccentricity ; the hand of 
 
MOSCOW 165 
 
 a madman is visibly upon it. Not only the un- 
 fortunate architect, but, I doubt not, the incalculable 
 brain of Ivan the Terrible, gave its insane- dis- 
 cordancy to the churchy of Vassily Blajenny; and 
 that church, with its vegetable nightmare, its frantic 
 falseness, its rapt disequilibrium, as of a dancing 
 dervish whirled at last into fixity, is but the extreme 
 symbol of all that attempts to be elaborate or or- 
 nate in Moscow. The Kremlin is like the evocation 
 of an Arabian sorcerer, called up out of the mists 
 and snows of the North ; and the bells hung in 
 these pagan, pagoda-like belfries seem to swing 
 there in a last paradox, as if to drive away the very 
 demons that have fixed them in mid-air. The 
 church of Vassily Blajenny, in which few styles of 
 architecture are not seen in some calculated or 
 unconscious parody, is like the work of a xhild 
 playing with coloured squares and cubes and 
 triangles; its originality is that of a caricature; 
 nowhere does it approach beauty, except in the 
 corner porches to the doors, and in a certain con- 
 ventional pattern, Turkish in design, which runs 
 round a portion of the base. False windows are 
 set to break the order of any surface left plain; 
 not a line is allowed to flow, but every line must 
 be tortured, broken as if on the wheel. The 
 domes, of copper and painted lead and three-cornered 
 tiles, are made to suggest the distortion of natural, 
 growing things, pine-apples, pears, lemons, arti- 
 chokes ; they bristle with knobs, they bulge into 
 
1 66 CITIES 
 
 excrescences; twisting upwards into a knot, for 
 the most part in coils of alternate colours. The 
 whole structure is a series of additions, and every 
 addition is a fresh start, carried out without relation 
 to any other portion; with an actual care, indeed, 
 that there may be no repetition, no balance, of 
 window or gable or dome or platform or turret. 
 Within, there is a Hke confusion of little chapels, 
 eleven in number, their walls cut into brief lengths, 
 set at odd angles, painted in bright gold, and 
 covered with the pictures of saints; a narrow 
 passage, like the secret passage in a Gothic castle, 
 leads from chapel to chapel, running round the 
 outer edge of the building; so narrow that you 
 can only just walk in it, so low that the roof is 
 almost upon your head ;.and these walls are painted 
 in heavy lines and patterns of green and red, with 
 squares and knobs rou^ening the surface. The 
 chapels, you would think, were themselves low, till, 
 looking up, you see a shaft rising to a great height, 
 from which a large painted face, seeming to le^n 
 over from the midst of the dome, looks down at you 
 with outspread hands. 
 
 Russian architectiu-e, the architecture which has 
 set up for the worship of God these monstrous 
 shrines, which might seem to have been built for 
 Vishnu and Krishna, has its origin, certainly, in the 
 East ; but it has preserved only the eccentricity of 
 the East, without its symmetry, its obedience to its 
 own laws. The art of the East is like Eastern 
 
MOSCOW 167 
 
 music, obeying laws to which our eyes and our ears 
 have no response. But it has its origin in real 
 nature closely observed and deliberately conven- 
 tionalised ; while Russian architecture, -which seems 
 to proceed from an imaginary assumption to an 
 impossible conclusion, has no standard of beauty 
 to which its caprices of line can appeal, but presents 
 itself rather as a wildly inhuman grotesque, without 
 root in nature or limitation in art. All the violence 
 of the yellow, Mongolian East is in these temples, 
 which break out into bulbs, and flower into gigantic 
 fruits and vegetables of copper and tiles and carved 
 stone; which are full of crawling and wriggling 
 lines, of a kind of cruelty in form; in which the 
 gold of the sun, the green of the earth's grass, and 
 a blue which is to the blue of the sky what hell is 
 to heaven, mock and deform the visible world in a 
 kind of infernal parody. When, even, these lines 
 run into finer shapes, and these colours melt into 
 more delicate harmonies, they are still too full of 
 mere curiosity, too odd, to be really beautiful. 
 Ornament is heaped up with the profusion of the 
 barbarian, to whom wealth means display ; colour- 
 must decorate colour in one unending series, as 
 sauce sharpens sauce in Russian cookery ; line must 
 envelop line until arabesque has become entangle- 
 ment ; height and breadth must alike extend them- 
 selves, for their own sake, and not for the emphasis 
 which they may give, the elaboration they may 
 permit, to a great central idea. Structure is but 
 
1 68 CITIES 
 
 a series of accretions, whose aim is to be unex- 
 pected. 
 
 Yet, abandoning oneself to their fantasy, what 
 pictures these domed and turreted walls, these 
 zigzags of sharp colour, make against the sky, 
 glowing with heat, dashing off the rays of the sun 
 as from many shields and helmets, coming up like 
 strange growths from among the trees, pointing into 
 the sky with lifted hands and outspread fingers ! 
 There are certain old Burmese-looking towers on 
 ^ the walls of the Kremlin where the green of the 
 spires is made by an incrustation of small green tiles, 
 shaped like leaves, and with slightly crinkled edges : 
 one might fancy almost an actual coating of leaves. 
 The crenellated outer walls of the Kremlin, with 
 their winglike and open battlements, with' just room 
 enough to fall through in the space between wing 
 and wing, might hold all the Arabian Nights in their 
 midst; and their many gates, which might have 
 been built by Crusaders who had come from among 
 the Saracens, seem to await strange pilgrims, who 
 have crossed the green desert in cavalcades, with 
 their horses and mules laden with treasures. 
 Moscow, indeed, seems to have been consciously 
 arranged for atmospheric effects by some cunning 
 artist in stage scenery. Against certain dull skies, 
 seen even in summer, the gaudy blue of domes 
 softens to a real fineness of tint ; and how effectively 
 that blue must be set off by the leaden skies of 
 winter, thick with snow ! From the Krasnai'a Square 
 
MOSCOW 169 
 
 at night the little dingy row of trees settles like 
 hanging foliage upon the red wall of the Kremlin, 
 draping its unshaded brightness with a veil of 
 delicate green. Green roofs and walls, against the 
 soft green sky which sometimes hangs over Moscow 
 after sunset, harmonise daintily ; and on certain 
 late afternoons I have admired the new, lowered 
 colour of white towers, turret above turret, their 
 angles outlined with green, which in that light looks 
 like green moss on an old ruin, or upon actual 
 crumbling rock. 
 
 IV 
 
 The worship of painted images, on which so much 
 emphasis is laid by tjie Russian Church, has led, in 
 the adornment of their churches, to a heightening 
 of that natural Russian tendency to add detail to 
 detail, without assimilation, and without spacing. 
 The older churches are filled with paintings of 
 saints, and Scriptural and legendary scenes, set side 
 by side with no more than a thin gold frame between 
 them; all on gold backgrounds, all in inissal 
 painters' colours ; most in the same traditional 
 enlargement of life-size, and with the same vague 
 sense of reality. They have nothing of the fine, 
 primitive angularity of Byzantine work, which they 
 seem to imitate ; they are at once cold and in- 
 correct ; without either scattering or convergence of 
 colour, wholly without design ; and they fill every 
 
I70 
 
 CITIES 
 
 inch of wall, and every corner and circle of the 
 ceiling, climbing up into the domes out of the cellar- 
 like narrowness of small chapels. About this 
 childish plastering of pictures upon the walls, a 
 multitude of gilded pillars, shrines, tombs, relics, 
 banners, slabs, balustrades, and the glittering doors 
 of the iconostase itself, build up a house of gold, 
 which weighs upon one Hke a burden. The priests, 
 with their long hair and Christ-like presence, 
 wearing heavy vestments of blue and red velvet 
 and gold-embroidered stuff (in which one sees the 
 hieratic significance of the blue of the domes) pass 
 through the concealing door from the presence of 
 the people to the presence of God, the door which, 
 at the most sacred moment, shuts them in upon that 
 presence ; and a choir of sad, deep Russian voices, 
 the voices of young men, chants antiphonally and in 
 chorus, weaving, in a sort of instrumental piece in 
 which the voices are the instruments, a heavy veil 
 of music, which trembles like a curtain before the 
 shrine. 
 
 And it is in another house of gold, heaped with 
 all the coloured things of the world, that the Russian 
 has set his earthly rulers. The Palace of the 
 Kremlin is the most sumptuous, the most spacious, 
 of royal palaces ; and its Treasury is one vast, 
 visible symbol of all that is barbaric and conquering 
 in the power of Russia. Thrones and dominions, 
 principalities and powers, all the nations of the 
 earth are seen bringing tribute, and their tribute 
 
MOSCOW 171 
 
 is heaped there like the spoils of a victorious army. 
 Here are crowns, globes, sceptres, constelkted with 
 jewels, which flash fire from one to another as the 
 light outlines their fantastic and elaborate patterns : 
 the crown of Siberia, the crown of Kazan, the 
 crown of Astrakhan. Here is the carved ivory 
 throne of the last Emperor of Constantinople ; the 
 throne of Boris Godounov, the gift of a Shah of 
 Persia, in which every inch of framework is covered 
 witlj slabs of solid gold, and the gold is thickly 
 inlaid with turquoises and garnets, pearls and rubies ; 
 the throne of Ivan the Terrible, the gift of another 
 Shah of Persia, incrusted with 9000 precious stones, 
 bordered with turquoises, framed on front and 
 sides with worked silver, on which elephants walk 
 and hares run, in the midst of silver meadows and 
 forests, wrought so delicately that they seem to be 
 embroidered. It is the East which one sees heaped 
 here, in this orgy of jewels and gold, heaped like 
 toys of which children do not know the value. 
 It is the East in tribute, becoming the master of 
 those who have come near enough to take its 
 treasures; and one sees Russia taking them bar- 
 barously, greedy of coloured baubles, insatiable, 
 gorging itself with pomp and brilliance, which the 
 wiser Persians had known how to subordinate, com- 
 posing them into harmonies of their own. 
 
 And, in the very heart of this royal palace, after 
 you have passed through its vast azure and gold 
 spaces, in which the pomp of to-day can be so 
 
172 CITIES 
 
 effective, you find also that cruelty, insanity, dis- 
 tortion, which flaunt themselves in the church of 
 Vassily Blajenny. In the Terem, the seventeenth- 
 century belvedere, with its five storeys built one 
 out of another, the roofs are low, the ceilings 
 vaulted and squared into odd angles; walls and 
 ceilings are painted in red, blue, green, and gold, 
 and a network of broad lines, twisted into all kinds 
 of arabesques, coils about doors and walls and 
 corners, and swarms across the ceilings; not an 
 inch of surface is left plain, colour seems to be 
 embroidered upon colour, all is ornament, and bright 
 ornament, like the web of an Eastern carpet; the 
 barred windows are of painted glass, and the sun- 
 light sets their colours moving on the floor like 
 living patterns. Little low room opens out of little 
 low room, the red out of the blue, and the green 
 out of the red ; here, under an obscure ceiling of 
 painted saints, the patriarchs have assembled ; here, 
 generations of emperors have slept. To be in one 
 of these hot and many-coloured rooms is like being 
 shut into the heart of a great tulip. Only fantastic 
 and barbarous thoughts could reign here ; life lived 
 here could but be unreal, as if all the cobwebs of 
 one's brain had externalised themselves, arching 
 overhead and draping the four walls with a tissue 
 of such stuflF as dreams are made of. And it could 
 easily seem as if unhuman faces grinned from among 
 the iron trellis of doors, as if ropes and chains 
 twisted themselves about doorways and ceilings, 
 
MOSCOW 173 
 
 as if the floor crawled with strange scales, and the 
 windows broke into living flames, and every wall 
 burned inwards. The brain, driven in upon itself 
 from such sombre bewilderments imprisoning it, 
 could but find itself at home in some kind of 
 tyrannical folly, perhaps in actual madness. 
 
 V 
 
 To live in Moscow is to undergo the most inter- 
 esting, the most absorbing fatigue, without escape 
 from the ceaseless energy of colour, the ceaseless 
 appeal of novelty. Mere existence there is a 
 constant strain on the attention, in which shock 
 after shock bewilders the eyes, hurrying the mind 
 from point to point of restless wonder, of unsatis- 
 fying admiration. To the dweller in Western 
 cities, where an old, slow civilisation has had time 
 to cover many stones with moss, bringing leisure 
 into men's minds, and the quiet of ancient things 
 about their houses, Moscow has all the barbarism 
 of a civilisation which is but two centuries old. 
 It is a barbarism, certainly, that has seized many 
 of the delightful things which other nations have 
 left for its fresh instinct to lay a new value upon. 
 The Russians have all the luxuries of civilised 
 barbarians ; their cookery and their baths are the 
 most elaborate in the world. The saying that 
 Russia is rotten before it is ripe has but little 
 
174 CITIES 
 
 significance at Moscow, though its meaning may 
 perhaps be divined at St Petersburg, where we , 
 find a great, uninteresting, modern city, hastening 
 to compete on their own terms with capitals that 
 have grown slowly, and losing, certainly, all that 
 gives its character to Moscow. More significant, 
 though not meaning precisely what it is generally 
 taken to mean, is that other saying : " Scratch the 
 Russian, and you find the Tatar." It is in no 
 savage or violent sense that the Russian is still a 
 civilised barbarian, but in a sense certainly more 
 profound. 
 
 Walking in the streets of Moscow, your first 
 impression is of something extraordinarily primitive. 
 The carts which pass you are like the earliest carts 
 of which you have seen pictures ; by the side of 
 quite modern trams run little omnibuses, shaped 
 like the coaches in the museum at St Petersburg ; 
 the yokes of the horses are made of an immense 
 hoop of painted wood, unvarying in shape, varying 
 only in colour. A man passes silently with a wire- 
 covered basket on his head, in which he offers 
 live fowls ^for sale ; a workman passes, carrying a 
 wooden spade, and you will notice that his legs 
 are swathed in rags, his feet covered with sandals 
 of osier. Look through the window of a shop, 
 a bank, and you will see that the reckoning is being 
 done with Chinese counters. The very animals, 
 the dogs and cats, are different from ours. The 
 dogs, certainly, are nearer to their wild cousin the 
 
MOSCOW 175 
 
 wolf, and gambol with a sort of fierce awkwardness ; 
 while the vast cats walk and lie like tigers. And 
 the peasants or labourers whom you see in the 
 streets, in their red and purple and mauve shirts, 
 with their shaggy beards and tawny hair, cut 
 neither short nor long, in a straight line all round, 
 parted in the middle, and standing out wildly on 
 either side; these large-limbed people, with their 
 boyish, frank, good-humoured, but untamed faces, 
 have the faces of beings for whom civilisation does 
 not exist. The Russian peasant is still the Scythian, 
 his ancestor. In the Kertch room of the Hermitage 
 at St Petersburg, in that admirable collection of 
 Greek remains dating from the fourth and fifth 
 centuries before Christ, there is a beautiful silver 
 vase, with griffins, geese, reeds, and conventional 
 arabesque on its sides ; near it are gold ornaments, 
 thin plaques of gold, worn on dresses, and a smaller 
 gilt vase. On these you see the Scythians, riding 
 on horseback, sword in hand ; standing back to 
 back with drawn bow, embracing over a drinking- 
 horn, pulUng out a tooth and bandaging the foot 
 of a companion; with, on the Nicopolis vase, a 
 whole series of the episodes of horse-taming. 
 These Scythian faces are precisely the faces that 
 you will see in the Russian peasant of to-day, grave, 
 serious, kindly, with a sort of homely dignity ; and, 
 precisely as in the Russian peasant of to-^day, you 
 will see, in these lively representations of his 
 ancestor, two thousand years ago, the long shirt. 
 
176 CITIES 
 
 girt at the waist, and falling half-way to the knees, 
 loose trousers, often tucked into a kind of top- 
 boots ; the thick beard, the long hair combed over 
 the forehead. 
 
 To see the Muscovite, that is to say the typical 
 Russian, as he really is, observe him on Sunday, 
 and observe him from morning to evening. Sunday 
 in Moscow is a sort of village feast. The shops 
 are shut, but the street markets (beside which the 
 Good Friday fair at the Rialto would seem but 
 pale) are ablaze with buyers ind sellers, all in their 
 best clothes; the women looking like big babies 
 in their high-waisted dresses, bright in colour, 
 shapeless in form. All the morning the bells sound 
 overhead, in their loud, muffled buzz, as of a cloud 
 of bronze insects hovering over the city ; and the 
 churches are full of devout worshippers, who kiss 
 the sacred ikons, cross themselves in the elaborate 
 manner of the Russian ritual, kneel, and bow till 
 their foreheads touch the ground. As the day 
 goes on an irresponsible animation seems to be in - 
 the air; the traktirs are full of tea-drinkers, and 
 by evening vodka has taken the place of tea. The 
 great mechanical organs in the traktirs roll out 
 their set of tunes, voices are heard, joining in the 
 music ; and outside the streets are full of gay noise, 
 a song, a quarrel, the slipping of heavy boots over 
 the uncertain pavement ; a sort of drunkenness with- 
 out brutality, a drunkenness which is in the natural 
 course of things, at the natural end of the feast. 
 
MOSCOW 177 
 
 The Russian has two devotions : his religion, 
 which is at once an abasement before God and the 
 Tsar, those two omnipotences being more or less 
 identical to him ; and his eating and drinking, to 
 which the actual rigours of his climate lend so much 
 importance, and about which he has elaborated a 
 sort of ritual. Between these two devotions very 
 much of his time is taken up. He cannot walk for 
 five minutes along any frequented street without 
 coming upon a church, an ikon, some holy image, a 
 street chapel, an archway under which a sacred lamp 
 burns ; and before each of these he must take off 
 his hat, pause, cross himself three times, and make 
 at least two genuflections. His eating and drinking 
 make scarcely less demands upon him. Meals have 
 no definitely fixed hours ; tea (the too seductive tchdi 
 s limon, tea with lemon) is always waiting. And it is 
 with the solemnity of an act of religion that he is 
 served by the sacristan-like doorkeeper in black and the 
 hieratic waiters in white ; silent, attentive ministrants, 
 who incline before him as they hand him his soup or 
 his wine, or collect "the coppers which he has left for 
 them on the plate. 
 
 Religion, in the unspoilt Russian, the Russian of 
 Moscow or the villages, is not merely an attendance 
 upon strict forms, but a profound sentiment, which 
 in him is the sentiment of duty. It is the simplicity, 
 the completeness, with which he obeys the idea of 
 duty, that has caused officialism and Nihilism, with 
 all the cruelties and disasters and ignorant heroisms 
 
 M 
 
178 CITIES 
 
 which are properly the disease of his over-scrupulous 
 conscience. You see it in his grave, patient, sensitive 
 face, in which the soul seems always to look out on 
 some pathetic inquiry. In the faces of railway 
 porters and of barefooted peasants who have thronged 
 the railway stations in remote quarters of Russia, I 
 have seen the making of martyrs and fanatics. And 
 they have the gentleness of those who suffer, whom 
 nature has made for suffering, with a strength which 
 for the most part is without brutality. 
 
 And I think I never saw people so friendly with 
 one another, except perhaps in Spain ; it has become 
 more than mere friendliness, an earnest helpfulness, 
 which has stamped its6lf upon the very faces of the 
 people. And, after all one has heard of Russian 
 brutality, it is interesting to note for oneself the 
 signs of gentleness which are to be found not only 
 in these grave, bearded, patient faces, but in many 
 little, unexpected ways. One hardly thinks of Russia 
 without thinking of the knout. Well, the Russian 
 cabmen drive without whips, using only the end of 
 their reins, and the reins finish in a mere bunch of 
 ribbons. 
 
 When the Russian is cruel, he is cruel just as the 
 barbarian always is, because he is indifferent to pain, 
 his own or another's. He does not spare, because he 
 would not complain. And he has the Mohammedan's 
 readiness to sacrifice everything for a cause ; for 
 him that spiritual and temporal power which is 
 his religion, and which has taken far deeper root ip 
 
JVIOSCOW 179- 
 
 him than any mere sentiment, essentially a modern 
 one, of tolerance or of sympathy with suffering. In 
 the Roumiantsof Museum at Moscow there is the cage 
 in which Emihan Pougatchef was imprisoned ; it is 
 a cage only very slightly higher and wider than the 
 height and size of an average man ; it has chains for 
 fastening hand and foot together, so that the man 
 can only stand upright, without even moving, inside 
 the iron bars of his portable prison. But Pougatchef 
 was a religious revolter, and to spare one who had 
 taken up arms against religion would have been to 
 spare a dangerous enemy of God. 
 
 The word which I should use to represent the 
 main impression made on me by the average Russian, 
 the soldier, the railway-porter, the labourer, is upright- 
 ness ; and it seems to me to contrast very favourably 
 with a quality perhaps equally strong which is to be 
 seen in the face and the bearing of the average 
 German. To the German, discipline and obedience 
 are painful duties ; he appreciates them and he ac- 
 quires them, but he becomes something of an auto- 
 maton in the process. To the Russian they are the 
 duty which is its own reward, a sort of religion, 
 which it is a delight to fulfil. 
 
 The Russian has a genius for self-sacrifice ; self- 
 sacrifice has made him a martyr and a conspirator ; it 
 has given him strength and weakness. He can resign 
 himself to Anything, and resignation can just as easily 
 be heroism or mere apathy. The heroic side of it 
 we all know ; the- other, at times comic, side, may be 
 
i8o CITIES 
 
 seen any day in the streets of Moscow by watching 
 a cabman who has been paid too small a fare. He 
 does not explode into anger, like a cabman in any 
 other part of the world; he does not contest the 
 matter, he does not even remonstrate : he looks at 
 the money in his open hand with a woebegone ex- 
 pression, closes his hand upon it in a gesture of weak 
 despair, and seems to say, " Well, it has happened 
 to me again I " Endurance and indifference, apathy 
 and resignation, are perhaps the natural qualities 
 called out in the Russian by his struggle with the 
 elements; heat is his enemy in summer, cold his 
 enemy in winter. Stirred up by outside influences, 
 he sometimes fancies that his rulers are also his 
 enemies ; and then he can but devote himself blindly 
 to the species of new religion which has possessed 
 itself of his capacity for worship. 
 
 But if we would see what is really at the root of 
 the national character, the actual nature of the 
 peasant, it is not even in Moscow that it must be 
 sought, but in such a place as Sergievo, and on such 
 an occasion as the annual pilgrimage to the Troitsa 
 Monastery, on the day of the Assumption. The 
 monastery, bulbous and angular, with its red walls 
 and gold and green domes and spires, is set on the 
 triangular point of a small hill; all about it are 
 bright-coloured sheds and shops and booths, and 
 little village houses of painted wood ; a village fair 
 was going on, in honour of the pilgrimage, and a 
 stream of men and women in bright clothes wandered 
 
MOSCOW i8i 
 
 up and down all the roads incessantly, and gathered 
 in groups about the tea-shops and the booths of the 
 fair. Inside the monastery walls, in the churches 
 and along all the paths, this immense, quiet, ugly 
 crowd wandered on, or waited patiently at gateways. 
 It was made up for the most part of women, and 
 these women were all old, or looked old, and they 
 were all ugly, and all shapeless, dressed in a patch- 
 work of bright colours, their skirts looped up about 
 their red and wrinkled legs, bare to the knee, or 
 above their osier shoes bound about with cords. 
 They were shapeless and uncouth, with bodies that 
 seemed as if they had never known even the animal 
 joys of Ufe ; but there was none of the dirt, disease, 
 and violence of a French or Italian pilgrimage, of 
 Lourdes or Casalbordino. They were clean and 
 sturdy, and they passed slowly, leaning on their 
 staves, or waiting two and two in long lines, to 
 enter the church and kiss the relics, with a dogged 
 patience, without noise, or talking, or laughter; 
 with a fixed sense-'of the duty to be done, then of 
 the need of rest, and then of the long journey home. 
 They went in order into the large room by the 
 refectory, took their bread and salt, which they ate 
 in the refectory, and then sat down, like great grown- 
 up school children, at long wooden tables, in the 
 open air, where the monks served them with bread 
 and soup. Then they flung themselves down on the 
 ground wherever they happened to find a little free 
 space, and slept heavily. They lay there with their 
 
1 82 CITIES 
 
 heads on their bundles, themselves like big bundles of 
 rags ; some of them lay in the graveyard, upon the 
 graves and the turf, like a dead army, waiting to be 
 buried. And in all this there was no fervour, no 
 excitement, a perfectly contained emotion, a dogged 
 doing of something which they had set out to do. 
 They had come from, all parts of Russia, walking all 
 the way, and they had come simply to kiss the 
 relics, and then to go home again, because it was 
 their duty. "They were all good-humoured, cheer- 
 ful, contented ; they accepted discomfort as they 
 accepted poverty, labour, their bodies which had 
 never known happiness or beauty. Contentment 
 in them was strength, but it had in it also some- 
 thing lamentable. Here, in this placid and vigorous 
 herd of animals, were women who had never dis- 
 covered that women could be beautiful, human 
 beings who had never discovered that life could be 
 a desirable thing in itself 
 
 VI 
 
 The summer of 1897, they told me in Moscow, 
 was the hottest summer known there for thirty- 
 seven years. I have never suffered so much from heat 
 in any country of Europe ; and Russia, certainly, in 
 spite of the tempestuous skies, rain, and icy winds 
 of St Petersburg, will remain in my mind as a 
 synonym for much that I have imagined of the 
 
MOSCOW 183 
 
 tropics. And Moscow is almost without shadow, 
 open to all the oppressions of the sky. Its parks, 
 the Sokolniky, for instance, miles on miles of woods, 
 through which long, dusty roads pierce like high- 
 roads, are without restful corners, are themselves an 
 oppression; you do not see people enjoying the 
 mere fact of being there, as people in Warsaw are 
 seen visibly enjoying the grace and repose of their 
 Watteau-like Saxe Garden ; Polish women, with 
 their pale faces and soft hair, their languid activity, 
 coming and going with so constant an appeal to one's 
 sense of delightful things. Here and there, indeed, 
 one finds a corner of the city in which, for a moment, 
 things fall into the attitudes of a picture; and one 
 such space of subdued colour I remember in the 
 Krasny Proud, a great pool near the laroslav Station. 
 It was dim grey when I saw it, under morning sun- 
 light, and at the farther edge it was bordered with 
 curdling green, which showed at that distance as a 
 line of delicate, clear green ; and the people passing 
 on the bank, their red shirts, the tints of bright 
 waggons, of wooden houses, were reflected in the 
 water. In this harmony, which composed itself 
 naturally, the carts and timber and houses and 
 people all seeming to exist only to be an eifect in 
 pale watery colours, I found almost every element of 
 the typical Russian landscape, as I had seen it on 
 my way to Moscow. 
 
 But Moscow's most elaborate escape from itself is, 
 to me at least, in the fortified convents, surrounded 
 
1 84 CITIES 
 
 with high walls, with embrasures and loop-holes for 
 cannon, warlike towers at every corner, in which 
 the monks and nuns used to hold their own against 
 robbers and Tatars : you still see the cannon, lying 
 rusty under the porches. The oldest - of these 
 convents is the Novospasky, far off in the east end 
 of Moscow, near the river and the timber yards. It 
 was built in the fifteenth century, it holds a bell- 
 tower and five churches within its walls, among the 
 trees and garden paths, and some of its mural 
 paintings are the most tolerable I have seen in 
 Moscow. But it was the smaller, more central 
 Strastnoi Convent which gave me the most delightful 
 sensation, as I found my way into it by chance, one 
 burning afternoon, as the bell was calling from the 
 pink church in the midst of the garden, inside the 
 high pink walls which enclose that little world. 
 The garden, full of trees and paths, was bordered 
 by white, one-storeyed houses, out of which nuns and 
 novices came stealing, in their black habits with 
 hanging sleeves, the veil tightened abound the chin, 
 under the tall, black, almost Saracen headdress. 
 Lay sisters were working in the garden-beds, carts 
 passed slowly along the narrow paths between the 
 trees, birds sang, grey cats moved quietly about, and 
 as I sat there, among these placid people, leaning 
 back against a tree, with a shadow of sunny leaves 
 above my head, Moscow, its noise and heat, seemed 
 shut off as by a veil of quiet, the deep buzz of the 
 bell overhead being but like the sound which is 
 
MOSCOW 185 
 
 nearest to silence in a summer forest; and the 
 
 world seemed once more a place of possible rest, in 
 
 which it was not needful to hurry through the 
 sunshine. 
 
 Summer, 1897. 
 
BUDAPEST, BELGRADE, AND' 
 SOFIA 
 
BUDAPEST, BELGRADE, AND SOFIA 
 
 I 
 
 " BUDAPEST 
 
 In Budapest there is nothing but what the people 
 and a natural brightness in the air make of it. Here 
 things are what they seem ; atmosphere is every- 
 thing, and the atmosphere is almost one of illusion. 
 Budapest lives, with a speed that thrusts itself, not 
 unattractively, upon one at every moment. Think 
 of your first impressions of the place and they will 
 be all of one kind : the porter who snatches your 
 luggage from you, runs at full speed, and dives 
 under the horses' heads ; the electric trams that 
 dash through the streets, the swift two-horse cabs ; 
 the bite of paprika in the food ; the unusual glitter 
 and pungency of the brass bands, and the gipsy 
 fiddlers with their fiddles and bodies alive all over. 
 The people with their sombre, fiery, and regular 
 faces have the look of sleepy animals about to 
 spring. Go into a cafe and, as you sit at your 
 table, you will see every eye turned quietly, fixedly, 
 upon you, with an insistence in which there is no 
 insolence. Coming from Austria, you seem, since 
 you have left Vienna, to have crossed more than a 
 
 189 
 
iQo CITIES 
 
 frontier. You are in another world, in which people 
 live with a more vivid and a quite incalculable life : 
 the East has begun. 
 
 The main streets of Budapest are broad Austrian 
 streets, tall and showy ; biit they open at every 
 moment into long, winding, narrow streets, which 
 again open through side passages into squares, sur- 
 rounded by galleries ; shops and inns are hidden 
 away there, waggons and bales of goods stand in 
 the midst ; and the inner life of the city seems to 
 withdraw itself into these obscure comers. To the 
 stranger, Budapest hardly exists beyond the Ferencz- 
 Josef Rampart along the river, which has at all hours 
 an operatic air, as of something hastily got up for 
 your pleasure, and with immense success. Well- 
 dressed people walk to and fro upon this cheerful 
 boulevard, with its trees, cafes, and flags; little 
 trams run smoothly along it between you and the 
 water, with a continual, not unpleasant, agitation ; 
 steamers pass on the river. At sunset every point 
 of the abrupt hill opposite is detailed in sharp 
 silhouette against a glowing sky, out of which the 
 colour is about to fade ; the whole uninteresting 
 outline of the palace, seen under this illumination, 
 becomes beautiful. Lights begin to star the two 
 hills, the hill of the citadel and the hill of the 
 palace, sparkling out of the darkness like glow- 
 worms ; lights come out along the bridge and 
 strike the water like gold swords. Some charm 
 is in the air, and a scarcely definable sense of 
 
BUDAPEST 191 
 
 pleasure, which makes one glad to be there. One 
 has been suddenly released from the broad spaces, 
 empty heights, and tiring movement of Vienna, in 
 which, to the stranger, there is only the mechanical 
 part of gaiety and only the pretentious part of 
 seriousness. Here, in Budapest, it is delightful 
 to be a stranger ; it is as if a door had been 
 thrown open, and one found oneself at home with 
 bright strangenesses. Idleness becomes active ; there 
 is no need for thought, and no inclination to think 
 beyond the passing moment. 
 
 Only a few steps away from this very self- 
 conscious, very civihsed, though singularly foreign 
 life and movement, you will find another, stranger, 
 more primitive centre of life. The fruit market 
 along the quay, at the end of the town, gave me the 
 first sensation of an opulent natural force of the 
 earth, which one looks for under these less temperate 
 skies. Heaped all over the ground, in piles and 
 pyramids, overflowing from vast baskets, brimming 
 over the sides of carts, multitudes of plums, grapes, 
 peaches, apples, pears, melons, with some fiery- 
 coloured vegetables, glowed in the sunlight. They 
 were all monstrous in size, and they seemed to be 
 squandered idly by some spendthrift prodigality of 
 nature. Among these abnormal fruits, peasants, 
 dressed in many different costumes, cried and shouted 
 in a tangle of dialects. There were women with 
 hooped petticoats swaying about their prodigious 
 legs, and above their small feet with no ankles ; 
 
[92 CITIES 
 
 there were men in sheepskin coats, and baggy 
 trousers, and Astrakhan caps; and the air jangled 
 with harsh sounds, and quivered with crude colours, 
 as they moved to and fro, unlading their carts and 
 carrying their heavy baskets and chaffering in un- 
 intelligible tongues. 
 
 People go to Budapest, and rightly, to hear the 
 gipsy music, as it x:an be heard only in Hungary ; 
 but I was curious to hear the music which was to be 
 heard in the theatres, and to see a little acting and 
 dancing. "A Kereszt jeleben," or" The Sign of 
 the Cross," was being given at one of the theatres, 
 but I preferred the programme at ,the Opera: 
 " Bajazzok," or " I Pagliacci," and a ballet called 
 "Szerelmi Kaland," or "Histoire d' Amour." The 
 orchestra at the opera was not good, and the 
 Hungarian language does not seem to set itself easily 
 to music. Some of the singers were content with 
 shouting hoarsely, as they acted with a kind of 
 stilted savagery. And the acting was something like 
 Spanish acting, all jerks and snaps ; with, at times, 
 a quaint suggestion of the Japanese, but without- 
 their genius for being animals. The ballet was 
 much better done ; it was done lightly, with pleasant 
 humour, with a delicious sense of gaiety. The 
 corps de ballet was younger and prettier than it 
 usually is on the continent, and the girls danced as 
 if it were natural to them to dance, with their hands 
 and arms as well as with their feet. It was a ballet- 
 fantaisie, and the style seemed to suit the plaT^e and 
 
BUDAPEST 193 
 
 the people. I have not often seen a chahut done 
 with such spirit, or with so natural an extravagance. 
 I remember, when I was in Budapest before, see- 
 ing a ballet in which there was a certain amount of 
 local colour ; it was, I think, the ballet called 
 "Csardas." The true local colour in music, how- 
 ever, has to be sought in the cafes, or wherever 
 gipsies play Hungarian music. The Hungarian 
 gipsies are the most naturally musical people in the 
 world. Music is their instinctive means of expres- 
 sion ; they do not learn it, it comes to them of itself 
 Go into a roadside tent in Hungary, and you will see 
 a little boy of four stretched naked upon the ground, 
 holding a violin in his arms and drawing his bow 
 across it, trying to make it speak. The leader of a 
 band is usually able to read from note ; the others 
 follow his lead, picking up a whole composition with 
 astonishing rapidity. It is true that they play like 
 men who have never been trained, gaining something 
 in naivete and abandon for what they lose in 
 mechanical precision. The gipsies hold their violin 
 in almost every position but the normal one : against 
 the middle of the chest, on the shoulder near the 
 ear, on the knee. Their fingering is elementary; 
 they use the bow sometimes as a hammer, sometimes 
 as a whip ; they pluck at the strings with all their 
 fingers at once, as if they would tear the heart out 
 of the tormented fiddle. And, indeed, it is the heart 
 that cries and sobs, and is happy and exults, in the 
 joyful agonies of the csardas. The time varies, the 
 
 N 
 
194 CITIES 
 
 rhythm fantastically disguised by a prolonged vibra- 
 tion, as it were, of notes humming round a central 
 tone. In its keen intensity and profuse ornamenta- 
 tion, an arabesque of living flame, it is like nothing 
 else in music. And in this unique effect the national 
 instrument, the czimbalom, counts for much. The 
 czimbalom consists of a framework of wires fixed on 
 a sort of table. The wires are struck by flexible 
 quills, padded at the end, which are held one in e'ach 
 hand. The little soft hammers rise and fall, and flit 
 to and fro with' incredible swiftness, in a sort of 
 effervescence of sound. 
 
 In Budapest there is a gipsy band in every cafe, 
 and as you walk along the streets at night you will 
 hear at every moment the scrape of fiddles from be- 
 hind curtained and lighted windows. Gipsy bands 
 play in the hotels every evening, till after midnight ; 
 sometimes under the leadership of a cultivated artist, 
 like Berkes Bela, who has money of his own, and 
 is supposed to play for pleasure on his admirable 
 Stradivarius. The leader, standing with his back to his 
 men, and turning half round to them as he indicates 
 a sudden change of time, plays away with his whole 
 body ; he rises to the tips of his toes, bends, crouches 
 as if about to spring, sways as if in a great wind. 
 This music, I think, is after all scarcely music ; but 
 rather nerves, a suspense, a wheeling of wings around 
 a fixed point. In this mournfulness, this recoil and 
 return, there is a kind of spring and clutch ; a native 
 wiUness speaks in it, as it speaks in the eyes of these 
 
BUDAPEST 195 
 
 dark animals, with their look of wild beasts eying 
 their keepers. It is a crushed revolt, and it cries out 
 of a storm, and it abandons itself after the lament to 
 an orgy of dancing. It is tigerish, at once wild and 
 stealthy. And it draws everything into its own net. 
 Listen to the Hungarian as he translates the music 
 of other countries into his own half-oriental language. 
 The slangy American tunes assume a new character, 
 a certain lively brilliance, no longer vulgar. Even 
 English tunes forget to be common in their senti- 
 mentality, and become full of languorous tenderness, 
 into which a drop of fire has dripped.' Hungarian 
 gipsy music is a music full of surprises, always turn- 
 ing along unexpected ways ; the music of a race 
 whose roots are outside Europe. And in the play- 
 ing of the Hungarian gipsies there is the same finish, 
 the sa.me -finesse, as in their faces, so regular, and so 
 full of fire under a semblance of immobility. 
 
 II 
 
 BELGRADE 
 
 The sunset sky, against which I first saw Belgrade, 
 was like a crimson and orange and purple moth, barred 
 with colours as hard and clear as enamel. Belgrade 
 stood heaped white on its hill, all its windows on fire 
 with light ; a long white mound, set there in a semi- 
 circle above water and a great plain, with a point of 
 
196 CITIES 
 
 land running down into the water. Beyond the city, 
 as you enter Servia, there are valleys in which the 
 trees grow as thick as grass, bulrushes tufted with 
 white wool along the river-courses, great fields of 
 melons, with their dry stalks, and often a kind oi 
 English scenery, a monotony of tilled plenty. You 
 come upon cottages, surrounded by a hedge of plaited 
 wood ; villages, with square, brown-roofed huts, thp 
 roofs edged with white, set in the midst of trees ; a 
 little town, into which several villages seem to have 
 joined themselves, with its white square church with 
 a red dome. The soil is rich and varied, seeming to 
 yield itself willingly to cultivation. Delicate trees, 
 which I saw when they were yellow and fired with 
 autumn, grow everywhere in irregular clusters. The 
 green and brown plain spreads outwards, full of trees 
 and meadows, long lines and thick squares of trees 
 with meadows between, and a barrier of low hills all 
 round. Servia is a land of contrasts, and beyond 
 Stalatz, where the two Moravas meet, wooded gorges 
 begin, gradually turning to barer and barer rock. 
 The train cuts through the mountains and skirts the 
 bottom of ravines, tracing its line parallel with the 
 streams. Walls of grey granite go straight up into 
 the hard, blue sky, which you can just see above 
 their summits. Even here there is not the savagery 
 of Bulgaria, which the land resembles a little. The 
 great gorge between Nisch and Zarittrod, which may 
 be compared with the Dragoman Pass between Zari- 
 brod and Sofia, is far finer ; it is at once bolder and 
 
BELGRADE 197 
 
 more shapely, cut more finely by nature, and coloured 
 more sensitively. 
 
 Belgrade reminded me at one time of Moscow, at 
 another of some white Spanish city. The whole 
 place is made by the crossing of straight lines : I 
 never saw a curve. Few of the houses have more 
 than two storeys ; the streets are broad, mountain- 
 ously paved ; and when I came into it at night there 
 was a white nocturnal silence over everything. There 
 were few lights, few people passing; but by the 
 roadside I saw two gipsies crouching, their faces 
 almost black, the woman's splendid in profile. There 
 are trees in almost all the streets, avenues leading 
 into the open country all round; and, at evening, 
 just as the lights were lit, queer chattering birds 
 like crows began bustling and talking overhead in a 
 language that I have never heard before *among 
 birds. Oxen, with huge branching horns, move 
 slowly through the streets, drawing long, narrow 
 wooden carts ; or lie down to rest, as the men do at 
 midday, with their heads on the stones with which 
 they are paving the streets. The town is like a great 
 village, ready made ; and one can imagine it being 
 harnessed to those oxen, and carted bodily away, and 
 the flat, dreary country which lies all round relapsing 
 into its original dry barrenness. 
 
 Yet the place is thriving, and has been so for 
 some twenty years. It is full of merchants, who 
 come to buy plums and eggs and coal ; they rush 
 into the restaurant of the Grand Hotel for lunch, 
 
198 CITIES 
 
 eat hastily, and rush out again, much as men do 
 in the city. There are new streets, uninterestingly 
 new, among the older streets, not old enough to be 
 interesting. In the older streets you see the admir- 
 able peasant things, sheepskins, furs, white serge 
 coats and trousers, hanging at the windows and door- 
 ways of the shops in which they are made ; in the 
 newer streets the shops are filled with hideous, 
 cheap, modern finery. There is one excellent 
 bookshop, in which I saw French and English 
 books : Verlaine's " Choix de Poesies," Mallarme's 
 " Poesies," the French version of Nietzsche's " Also 
 sprach Zarathustra,"Mrs Meynell's "Ruskin." There 
 is a new theatre, which, when I was there, was lit up 
 for " Magda." Close by is a dingy and half-empty 
 cafe, in which a few women in music-hall dresses 
 sing music-hall songs ; and farther on a sad-faced 
 Damen-Capelle, playing stringed instruments. Few 
 people are in the streets after dark; only, at intervals, 
 one hears the slow creaking of the bullock-carts and 
 the clatter of wheels over the stony roads ; and, 
 overhead, the high-slung gas globes, at long dis- 
 tances from one another, start, splutter, go out, and 
 come to life again. 
 
 On the edge of the hill, looking over the plain, 
 the river, and Zimony is a dreary little park, "the 
 Kalemegdan, which comes out on a broad terrace 
 planted with thin and sickly trees, each with its 
 little circle of oarched flowers around the root. 
 Late at night tne park becomes mysterious, with 
 
BELGRADE 199 
 
 its few gas lamps, the thick darkness under the 
 trees, which creak slowly, the little turning fountain 
 glittering in a thin pattern in the air, the glimpse 
 down dim alleys, out of which I once saw two 
 peasants, dressed in red and brown and white 
 clothes, like two Giorgione figures, stroll slowly 
 from the darkness and back into the darkness. 
 People walk on the terrace just before sunset, 
 as the sun goes down across a wide, flat, dreary 
 plain, with many waters winding through it, 
 cutting sharp patterns in the soil, and broaden- 
 ing out almost to the aspect of a lake. Below, 
 to the left, are factories, roofs, and chimneys rising 
 out of the hill, and below that the wharf and the 
 small steamers. After the sun has set the river 
 grows colder and paler, and the short grass of the 
 plain turns to exactly the colour and texture of the 
 Infanta's green velvet dress in Velasquez's picture at 
 Vienna. On the right the river sweeps broadly 
 towards Zimony ; you see its spires against a sky 
 which reddens through trailing smoke ; and, in 
 those moments' effect, in that severe harmony of 
 light and smoke and water, a curious and doubtful 
 charm grows up out of the literal dreariness of things. 
 If it were not for the peasants and the gipsies 
 Belgrade would be a provincial capital and no 
 more; but the Servian gipsies are remarkable 
 even among gipsies, and the Servian peasants 
 are sometimes like savage chiefs, sometimes like 
 ancient Greeks, with their fine, dark, regular 
 
200 CITIES 
 
 faces, black eyes and hair, straight slim figures, 
 and wonderftil clothes. Their clothes are for the 
 most part white ; long white sack-like coats, and 
 white short sheepskin coats, with the soft fleece 
 inside, the untanned hide embroidered in cunning 
 lines and circles of black and red; large, loose, 
 baggy, white trousers pulled in at the ankle, heavily 
 embroidered stockings and belts, waistcoats of em- 
 broidered leather, Astrakhan caps formed into conical 
 points, and shoes of white leather, made like sandals. 
 The women are not often so handsome ; the peasants 
 wear embroidered leather coats like the men, and 
 embroidered heavy skirts and stockings ; but the 
 townswomen wear short coats of black velvet and 
 black satin, with hanging sleeves and gold edges ; 
 their hair is plaited round a tight red skull cap, 
 which shows through the hair, and, below, ribbons 
 are drawn across like fillets, and these are hung 
 with trinkets and fastened with great gold pins. 
 The "better classes" dress hideously, as near the 
 Paris fashions as they can, and may be seen walking 
 in the streets, accompanied by their maids in the 
 admirable native costume. The peasant women 
 carry long staves with several notches, which they 
 put over their shoulders, and on .which they sling 
 cans and baskets. You will see three young girls, 
 thus loaded, each with a different coloured handker- 
 chief over her head, each with her red embroidered 
 skirt looped gracefully on either side, showing a 
 white embroidered petticoat, embroidered stockings, 
 
BELGRADE 201 
 
 and soft padded shoes. As I look out of the window 
 of the hotel I see four old women with yellow hand- 
 kerchiefs and red skirts, one with a brilliant apron of 
 red and yellow, who have laid down their burdens 
 and are sitting on the ground at the corner of the 
 httle square. Men are repaying the square in a 
 slow, primitive fashion 7 the bullock-carts come and 
 go with loads of stones, and stand outside the front 
 door of the hotel as if they were in their own village. 
 But it is in the market that one is best able to 
 study the peasants and the gipsies. The market is 
 held on some open ground under the trees, not far 
 from the theatre ; and the whole ground is piled up 
 with fruits and vegetables of all colours, of vast 
 sizes, and in profuse abundance. Women and girls 
 stand gravely beside their coloured heaps, not seeming 
 to care if they are bought or not, but chaffering 
 eagerly over every sale. They stand there, in twos 
 and threes, bundled up in their multitudes of skirts 
 and vests, with their hands folded over their 
 stomachs; young and old hardly at first sight dis- 
 tinguishable ; all with their great gilt buckles at the 
 waist, their necklaces of glass beads, their many 
 rings, their kerchiefed heads, often hung with coins 
 and flowers and green leaves. Fine savage old men 
 in tatters wander about the outskirts of the market, 
 all brown wrinkles; I saw one who seemed as if 
 dressed in armour, for his leather jerkin had gone 
 hard and black with age, and clasped him like a 
 gorget. Some of the women have lovely and quite 
 
202 CITIES 
 
 regular faces, and delicately cut mouths and noses, 
 level I black eyelids and sullen eyes high up under 
 them. But the gipsies ! I had seen one old 
 woman, an animal worn to subtlety, with the cunning 
 of her race in all her wrinkles, trudging through the 
 streets with a kind of hostile gravity; But here it 
 was the children who fascinated me. There were 
 three little girls, with exactly the skin of Hindus, 
 and exactly the same delicately shaped face, and 
 lustrous eyes, and long dark eyelashes; and they 
 followed me through the market, begging in strange 
 tongues, little cat-like creatures full of humour, 
 vivacity, and bright instinctive intelligence. As we 
 came to one end of the market, they ran up to a 
 young girl of about fifteen, who stood leaning against 
 a pump. She was slender, with a thin, perfectly 
 shaped face, the nose rather arched, the eyes large, 
 black, lustrous, under her black eyelids ; thick masses 
 of black hair ran across her forehead, under the 
 scarlet kerchief. She leaned there, haughty, magnetic, 
 indifferent ; a swift animal, like a strung bow, bring- 
 ing all the East with her, and a shy wildness which 
 is the gipsy's only. 
 
 Ill 
 SOFIA 
 
 The soil of Bulgaria is a dry and barren soil, 
 coloured for the most part a sickly pink, and mixed 
 
SOFIA 203 
 
 with rocks, rising into irregular hills, on which there 
 is sometimes a scanty growth of small trees. Some- 
 times the colour of the soil turns to faded lavender ; 
 lavender rocks lie about in great splinters. It is a 
 harsh unnatural latid, cursed with barrenness. Dry- 
 water - courses have moulded their beds at the 
 bottom of scooped-out gorges ; th'ere are long flat 
 spaces of dreary sand and stone; everywhere un- 
 lovely outlines, sombre colours, a desperate and 
 lonely wildness. In one of the gorges, through 
 which runs a tiny trickle of water, you will see 
 sheep, black and white, by hundreds, which have 
 come down from the uplands to drink, or some 
 buffaloes coming rapidly down a steep path, or a 
 company of gipsies who have made their camp there, 
 and are lighting a fire in a hollow of the rocks. 
 Beyond Sofia the land changes ; there is a continual 
 interchange of luxurian«e and savagery, in the 
 sharpest contrasts I have ever seen. The hills are 
 cut abruptly into rough shapes blotting out the 
 sky ; here and there you see a few buffaloes, a flock 
 of sheep with their shepherd, inside a circle of 
 thorns ; or a man casting seed out of a bag into 
 brown furrows, or a man in a sheepskin coat riding 
 down a steep road. There are hills covered deep 
 with trees, then bare hills again, the vast rocks, dry 
 earth, and cavernous ravines of the Dragoman Pass. 
 Sofia is like a town set down in the midst of a 
 great desert. Wandering out on every side, one 
 comes first to a kind of village, and then to a desert. 
 
204 CITIES 
 
 dusty endings not without a desolate charm. Hills 
 rim the plain in which the town with its trees lies 
 like a somewhat dreary oasis. The plain is wide 
 and barren, with a few trees and a few red-roofed 
 cottages ; beyond, the great hills, cut into soft, dark, 
 rugged cliffs and curves, spreading up nakedly out 
 of the plain into the sky. From the higher ground 
 you see the whole plain with the town in its midst. 
 Low, flat houses, with only here and there a dome 
 or turret, but intersected by many tall and straight 
 trees, lie tightly pressed together; the walls are 
 painted red, green, and white, and a wooden paling 
 seeips to run round the whole long and narrow mass. 
 As one takes the first step outside this paling, it is 
 as if a gate had shut suddenly behind one, shutting 
 in the town. Telegraph wires stretch across the 
 plain, but the buffalo carts come down from the 
 hills, and the pack horses trudge up towards them, 
 and the peasants sit on the ground, resting by the 
 way, and the black and white geese cackle among 
 the sedge, and there is always dust blowing and a 
 rustling of wind among the weedy grasses. 
 
 There is something dry, hot, and fierce in this 
 place, which is at once ordinary, sordid, and almost 
 startling. It is a place at once violent and sullen, in 
 which everything is dusty and dingy and half-used 
 or half-finished. Stones and building materials lie 
 strewn in the streets, houses are being made and 
 houses are falling into ruins; everything is crude, 
 sordid, with a crudity and sordidness which are half- 
 
SOFIA 
 
 205 
 
 western and half-eastern, and made out of the worst 
 elements of both. The houses are for the most part 
 such houses as one might see in any small town in 
 any country, but at a corner of the main street there 
 is a mosque, and around the mosque something like 
 a village fair. Wooden booths are set up at each 
 side of the street, wooden palings surround empty 
 spaces or open upon cafes in which trees grow, or 
 upon one-storey houses, or upon a little wooden 
 theatre. Money-changers, with their glass cases of 
 gold and silver coins, and coin-earripgs, and rings, 
 outside their shop windows, suggest already the 
 sarafs of Constantinople. At upper windows above 
 the shops you see men working sewing-machines ; 
 at the edge of the pavement little dark boot-blacksj 
 Kurds, sit with their wooden blocks before them. 
 Men pass selling water, grapes, and nuts ; a woman 
 passes, and then another, carrying a huge dark green 
 melon in her arms, solemnly, like a royal orb. Men 
 stand about at the street corners in rags of all colours, 
 sewn together in all fashions ; there is something 
 sordid and savage in these brutal faces, these huddled 
 figures, this slouching-gait, in this boisterous language 
 with its jerks and splutters, in the barbarous clash of 
 costumes, in all this idleness, suspicion, this mingling 
 of elements that do not unite, this hostility of races, 
 seen in the mere coming and going of the people ; 
 together with an odd sense of provinciality, as you 
 meet processions with bands, carrying coloured flags, 
 like friendly societies in England, and walking through 
 
2o6 CITIES 
 
 the streets in step, singing solemn tunes like hymn- 
 tunes. 
 
 On Sunday, Sofia takes on something preposter- 
 ously like the aspect of an English Sunday. The 
 shops are shut, the people put on their best clothes, 
 and lounge in the streets, or sit on the rustic wooden 
 benches in the park (the one restful place in Sofia, 
 with its quaint acacias, its tiny fountain, its wholly 
 natural and unspoilt aspect), or walk out to the Boris 
 Gardens, a mile beyond the town. As I fell into 
 the steady and unending procession of people, one 
 Sunday which was also a national fete, it seemed to 
 me that the town had emptied itself, as a Spanish 
 town empties itself on the day of a bullfight. Men 
 and women of all classes walked slowly and steadily 
 along side by side, in a kind of orderly jumble. I 
 watched the peasants, and found them less attractive 
 than the peasants of Servia, both in themselves and 
 in their costume. They are tall and strong, but they 
 have something common, sullen, and slouching, which 
 is not in the Servians, and they do not dress so well, 
 though they dress distinctively and with effect. The 
 costume of the women is crude, with its black and 
 orange, its reds and gold, its narrow black petticoat 
 covered with a bright apron, its sequins about the 
 neck, its red handkerchief wrapped round the head 
 and twisted into the plaits of hair falling down the 
 back. The men wear white serge trousers, not so 
 baggy as in Servia, braided slightly in black, a white 
 shirt embroidered in red or bound with black braid, 
 
SOFIA 
 
 207 
 
 a black or brown jacket coming to the waist, with a 
 sort of flap falling over behind, and a brown or black 
 round fur cap ; a red sash wound about the waist, 
 and often, outside, one of the sheepskin coats which 
 I had seen in Servia. Side by side with the peas- 
 ants there were Turks wearing the fez, indistinguish- 
 able people of indistinguishable nationalities, and 
 very commonplace townsfolk, who presently took 
 part in the most childish sports I have ever seen, or 
 stood in excited rings watching them, or danced in 
 circles, with clasped hands and hopping feet, like 
 English soldiers in camp. 
 
 At night Sofia returns to itself, or to what is more 
 dubious and unfamiliar in itself. Sounds of music 
 and voices come from behind doors and curtained 
 windows ; doors swing open upon a glimpse of 
 strangely dressed musicians on a platform, a woman 
 standing singing, peasants sitting or moving about 
 the room. In the main street there is an open-air 
 cafe, with little tables under the trees, and lights 
 swung across from tree to tree. Ten or twelve men 
 sit on a raised and covered platform in dhe comer, 
 dressed in white trousers and dark-blue embroidered 
 coats and white embroidered shirts ; the leader plays 
 on a flute, and the others on fiddles, a 'cello, a 
 double-bass, a cornet, a big drum, cymbals, and 
 some instruments which seem like children's toys. 
 These, I discovered, were used for producing imita- 
 tive effects, when the orchestra did its best to 
 reproduce the sounds of a railway-train or a fire- 
 
2o8 CITIES 
 
 engine : the noise and rattle always ended in some- 
 thing very like a hymn. It was the music of people 
 not naturally musical, and without any restraining 
 education in music. 
 
 I went away from the cafd discontentedly, and, 
 turning out of the main street, I heard a lugubrious 
 sound, half cry and half shriek, with, a mutta-ing of 
 dull and shrill instruments, coming from behind a 
 wooden paling. I went in and sat down at a table 
 under the trees. Short grimy posts, hardly higher 
 than my head, standing like dirty dwarfs among the 
 acacias, held up big oil lamps made after the pattern 
 of the gas lamps in the streets of London ; at the 
 end of the courtyard there was an open window in a 
 trellised wall, through which a serving man handed 
 out beer and coffee to the waiters. Opposite to the 
 entrance there was a covered platform, as in the 
 other cafe. In front were four girls dressed in 
 gaudy Turkish costume, seated on chairs, with one 
 or two men and women in plain clothes at their side. 
 Behind were the musicians, who plucked at stringed 
 instruments with their fingers or with a kind of brass 
 thimble, beat on a tambourine and a little drum, and 
 blew into a long flute. The aspect of the stage 
 reminded me of Spain, and recalled the " Chinitas " 
 at Malaga ; and the music and dancing had a distinct 
 kinship with Spanish music and dancing. What I 
 saw and heard was partly Turkish and partly 
 Hungarian ; there was the csardas, and there was 
 the danse du ventre. And there were also those 
 
SOFIA 209 
 
 interminable, piercing, disturbing Eastern songs 
 which have so much in them of the Malaguena. 
 The danse du ventre, done by a Greek in a kind 
 of uniform covered with gold lace, and wearing a 
 long ivory-handled sword, and by an Armenian girl 
 in a white vest and green trousers, was the most 
 elaborate pantomime of sex that I have ever seen ; 
 it made a kind of art of obscenity. It is the same 
 drama as the drama of Spanish dancing, but it is 
 more explicit, and it is done as if it were something 
 amusing, a game, and not, as with the Spaniard, a 
 struggle, an irresistible appeal, an agony. In that 
 dance I realised the whole difference between the 
 consciousness of the East and what seems to us 
 most like the Eastern point of view among Western 
 nations. A kind of mongrel East was visibly upon 
 me, and I felt that it would be only one more step 
 to Constantinople. 
 
 And yet that one step, I realised, would mean 
 everything. What is so disquieting in Sofia is that 
 it lies between two civilisations, and that it is a kind 
 of rag-heap for the refuse of both. The main street 
 of Sofia is the most horrible street in Europe. You 
 see first of all mere European frippery, tin pots and 
 pans, scraps of leather, shoes and slippers hanging 
 from nails in front of shops, gimcracks in china, 
 knives, "fancy articles," none personal to the place; 
 rows of secondrhand books and pamphlets, mostly in 
 Russian (I saw "Anna Karenina," TourgueniefTs 
 "Faust," Gorki's "Tchelkache," a life of Shake- 
 
2IO CITIES 
 
 speare and of Benjamin Franklin), and along with them,~ 
 strung upon upright boards by strings, cheap photo- 
 graphs of actresses, Cavalieri, or Cleo de Merode, 
 and sentimental German photographs ; then stalls of 
 fruit, powdered thick with dust, dust-covered loaves 
 of bread, which looked like great stones, crescents 
 of sausages, coloured greenish red, trays and dishes 
 of hot messes cooked over little ovens in the road ; 
 but above all meat : carcasses stripped of the hide, 
 with their tails still hanging, the horns and hide 
 lying outside in the gutter ; beasts hacked in two, 
 from which joints are being cut ; everywhere yellow 
 meat hanging from chains ; all smells and all colours, 
 as of the refuse of a slaughter-house. Men pass you 
 on the pavement carrying the bodies of dead beasts 
 upon their shoulders ; you see a huddle of blood- 
 stained hides in a cart standing beside the pave- 
 ment ; ducks and chickens 'squeak and flutter as 
 they writhe head downwards under men's arms. 
 And there is a continual coming and going of 
 peasants in ragged and coloured clothes, women 
 and girls with negress-like faces, wearing Turkish 
 trousers under a sort of apron, half-naked gipsy 
 children darting hither and thither, merchants, 
 casual Europeans, in bowlers and overcoats; and, 
 all the time, the rattle of the electric trams in the 
 street as '^they pass to and fro, with their mockery 
 of progress, through this city of dust and rags. 
 
 Autumn, 1902. 
 
CONSTANTINOPLE 
 
CONSTANTINQPLE 
 I 
 
 Water, camels, sand, then broader water, boats, 
 a little station, with a veiled woman standing in a 
 doorway ; then more water and sandy grass, a few 
 trees, then waste land, a long line of bullocks 
 ploughing; then, between the railway and the 
 water, a cluster of coloured houses, mostly of wood ; 
 then trees, more waste land, a little bay, with hills 
 beyond ; then fields, more clusters of mean houses, 
 ploughed land, and water; at last, the wall, with 
 its gaps and towers ; a graveyard, gardens ; then, 
 between roofs and walls, the long curve of Con- 
 stantinople. A dense smell, dogs, houses, then an 
 actual seashore, with men wading bare-legged in 
 the water, and boats coming in laden with melons ; 
 then streets of houses, with fragments of turreted 
 walls, two birds on every turret; side-streets, 
 cutting deeply between two lines of low red 
 roofs ; faces of many colours, strange clothes ; 
 then, over the roofs, but close, the water, 
 houses, domes, minarets of the city, in a flash, 
 veiled suddenly by the walls of the station, fastened 
 about one. 
 
 ai3 
 
214 CITIES 
 
 II 
 
 At the end of my first day in Constantinople I 
 find myself bewildered, as if I have lost my way 
 in my own brain. I seem to have been blown 
 through a whirlwind, out of which I can clutch 
 nothing tangible. I recall the drive from the 
 station, near midday, through dense, moving, red- 
 capped crowds, an angry mob, as it seemed, surging 
 about one, each going his own way, heedlessly and 
 violently. I tried to catch every detail, as it changed 
 before me ; to fix my attention and my memory 
 upon a fluid spectacle. The timbers of the bridge 
 creaked and pitched under me ; these unintelligible 
 figures came towards me, passed, went on their 
 way; and beyond them, on both sides of me, lay 
 the water, a knotted forest of masts along the quays, 
 from which caiques glided outwards ; in front, tier 
 above tier, Galata, the tower, the new town Pera. 
 Walking back iji the afternoon, down unpaved 
 cataracts of streets, across the torrent of the bridge, 
 I found myself again in Stamboul. I remember 
 lifting a chain to pass under one of the gateways 
 into the Bazaar, the negro woman wrapped in a 
 bright green mantle who squatted there, only her 
 black face' visible, the droning voice of a beggar 
 reciting the Koran ; and then the narrow lanes, 
 hung with frippery, the dirty mountainous paths 
 under painted arches, crossing one another in a 
 
CONSTANTINOPLE 215 
 
 jungle of gaudy hedges. Then I can remember 
 only a confused mingling of hamals, bent double 
 under mountainous weights'; the tall black hats 
 and black cassocks of Armenian priests, the plaited 
 turbans of Arabs, the thin black crape over the 
 feces of veiled women, hooded in dominoes; and, 
 everywhere, the dogs, lying in the roads and on 
 the pavements, meek, sickly creatures, like poor 
 relations, only asking not to be trodden on. 
 
 To walk, in Constantinople, is like a fierce and 
 active struggle. One should look at once before, 
 behind, and underneath one's feet ; before, behind, 
 and underneath one's feet some danger or disgust 
 is always threatening. I never walked up the steep 
 road which leads from the bridge to Pera without 
 the feeling that I was fighting my way through a 
 hostile city. A horn blows furiously, and a black 
 man runs up the hill, clearing the way before the 
 dashing and struggling horses of the tram. At 
 the same moment a cab drives at full speed down 
 the hill, and the horses set their feet on the 
 pavement. In front of you a man balances slices 
 of offal on a long pole across his shoulder; they 
 dangle before and behind; he swings cheerfully 
 with his burden through the crowd. A Kurd 
 stooping under a weight higher than himself follows 
 step by step behind you. Your feet slip in slushy 
 mud, and catch on the cobbles or in the gaps of 
 the road. A dog with a red wound behind his 
 ear, and a long strip of mangy skin on his back 
 
2i6 CITIES 
 
 lies asleep in the middle of the ' pavement. You 
 step into the road to avoid the dogs and the hamals, 
 and wheels and horses are upon you. You step 
 back into the midst of the dogs and the hamals; 
 as you stand aside for a moment, a beggar with 
 a handless arm rounded into a stump, a woman with 
 her face eaten away in the cavity of the hood 
 which she draws back before you, appears suddenly, 
 filling what had seemed the only alley of escape. 
 The sun soaks down into the narrow street, the 
 smell of the mud rises up into your nostrils, mingled 
 with those unknown smells which, in Constantinople, 
 seem to ooze upwards out of the ground and steam 
 outwards from every door and window, and pour 
 out of every alley, and rise like a cloud out of the 
 breath and sweat and foulness of the people. 
 
 Cross either of the bridges, and you must look 
 not less carefully to your feet. The old bridge 
 hangs by a thread ; it was broken in two, and has 
 never been mended, only patched; in the middle, 
 where it is some inches narrower, an iron-plated 
 barge supports it. It sways, creaks, catches your 
 feet, seems at every moment about to fall abroad 
 into the water, which you see through the holes in 
 its planks. The railing is held together by iron 
 wire,^the ends of the beams hang out ragged and 
 broken over the water. The Grand Pont is more 
 solidly based, but it is made of rough planks set 
 together in irregular lengths and at uneven levels, 
 nailed roughly, the nails standing up out of the 
 
CONSTANTINOPLE 217 
 
 planks. It is always in course of making ; planks 
 lie about in the road, waiting for use ; men are 
 working above great gaps, through which you see 
 the wat^r. As wheels rattle over it, the planks 
 leap up under your feet ; you can scarcely set foot 
 on a plank that is not quivering. On each side is 
 a narrow side-walk, slightly raised, and clamped at 
 the edge with iron. A cross current drives at you 
 as you walk along it ; people are crowding up and 
 down from the steamboats of the Bosphorus and 
 the Golden Horn, which have their quays moored 
 to the right and left of the bridge. Wheels are 
 upon you from every side ; there is no rule of the 
 road ; every one fights his own way through for 
 himself. 
 
 The main street of Constantinople is the Grande 
 Rue de Pera. I went into it first at night ; there 
 were but few shops open, a few men sitting on 
 the chairs outside the cafes, a few passers. Heaps 
 of refuse lay in the gutters, dogs nosed into the 
 refuse, dogs lay asleep in. all the holes and jags of 
 the pavement. As I passed, a strange dog was 
 being led in leash through their midst, and a 
 howling began which was caught up and continued 
 along the street ; dog after dog got up slowly, and 
 began to bark; there was a dense, uninterrupted 
 noise, which I soon came to know as the unresting, 
 inarticulate voice of the city. 
 
 Earlier in the evening at the six o'clock pro- 
 menade, the Grande Rue de Pera is filled with 
 
2i8 CITIES 
 
 people. There are a few Turks sitting at the 
 cafes, tranquilly, with their cigarettes, watching 
 the passers ; poor men sit at the street corners, 
 sweating and idle ; hamals pass, staggering under 
 burdens, grape-sellers weighed down with deep 
 hampers of grapes; tawdry shops are open, with 
 dark young men lounging in the doorways ; the 
 red fez passes, with the distrustful, disdainful, 
 anxious eyes under it ; but for the most part, in 
 this crush and tangle of races, each elbowing the 
 other in the slime of the street, and against the 
 shoulder of the trotting tram-horse, it is the Euro- 
 pean that one sees, the Levantine, the Greek, the 
 Armenian, women and young girls, dark, with 
 profound eyes and empty faces, tightened into 
 their smart dresses, walking slowly, cynically, with 
 their free, hard, roving eyes; young girls with 
 superb hair and finely cut mouths and neat, small, " 
 firm figures; men with handsome, deceitful faces, 
 odiously regular and lustrous ; a slow, steady pass- 
 ing, uncomfortable and continuous. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Stamboul, seen from the old bridge at evening, 
 goes up like a mountain to the domes and lances 
 of the Suleimanie. It lies with its feet in the 
 water, like Venice; out of the water rise brown 
 masts and spars, with furled sails, the lines fitting 
 
CONSTANTINOPLE 219 
 
 Dgether into exquisite patterns ; and this great, 
 im, coloured mass, in which certain dull reds, 
 reys, and faint blues catch the eye, harmonises 
 ito a kind of various brown, like some rich, veined 
 /ood. It is set, like Rome, on seven hills, each 
 /ith its mosque, tower, or monumental ruin; at 
 leraglio Point it steps into the Sea of Marmora, 
 t the mouth of the Bosphorus, looking across at 
 Lsia ; it stands between water and water, with the 
 lea of Marmora at its back, and the Golden Horn 
 t its feet. Every conquest which has swept over 
 t has left a ruin or a monument on its heights, 
 lanta Sophia and the Mosque of Ahmed stand 
 where the Hippodrome once stood ; the Burnt 
 Column, its porphyry cracked and hooped and 
 darkened, stands, still upright, where Constantine 
 set it ; the broken aqueduct of Valens still stretches 
 across the city to Eyoub ; the Mosque of Suleiman 
 and the Mosque of Mahomet V. crown the two hills 
 wh.ere the two conquerors built them ; and you can 
 follow the -JEills on the same track which Con- 
 stantine followed, when he planned the city which 
 was to rule the East. 
 
 The streets of Stamboul climb and zigzag; to 
 walk in them is to crawl like a maggot in rotting 
 cheese. A tram runs along one winding road, dis- 
 tracting it with a little civilisation. Away from the 
 tram-line, and even along part of it, Stamboul is 
 Eastern; the Thousand and One Nights are not 
 yet over. The Bazaar lies in its midst, a centre of 
 
220 CITIES 
 
 leisurely and vehement life ; around the Bazaai 
 there are streets of shops, in which men live and 
 work according to their trades : I remember best 
 the street of the shoemakers and the street of the 
 workers in iron. Markets spread outwards and 
 downwards, and, level with the quays, there are 
 more populous streets of shops, in which men 
 make wooden and iron things for the ships, and 
 clothes for those who come and go in the ships ; 
 and there is always a quayside bustle, smell, and 
 filth ; fierce men shouldering along, and sore dogs, 
 and men with red scarves round their heads, sitting 
 on stools smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee out 
 of tiny cups. Through openings between the sheds 
 and houses you can see ships being loaded, mended, 
 and painted ; caiques wait to take passengers across, 
 and the passengers sit in the caiques with umbrellas 
 over their heads. 
 
 As you climb from either bridge, and turn this 
 way and that among side streets, you pass into 
 silence, and a disturbing emptiness of life. The 
 houses are all blind, the doors fast, the windows 
 grated over with wooden gratings, which reach two- 
 thirds up the window, above which an unwashed 
 blind hangs awry. The houses are made of un- 
 painted wood ; they are flat, or the second storey is 
 set cornerwise on the first ; and they are put 
 together like cupboards, often very neatly, some- 
 times, with a little carving around the panels of the 
 door. They are all made on much the same pattern. 
 
CONSTANTINOPLE 221 
 
 the door usually in the left-hand corner, the windows 
 set with studied irregularity, each square or oblong ; 
 they have the air of dolls' houses. No one seems 
 to go in or out, not a blind quivers, not a glimmer is 
 seen through the wooden grating ; rarely a sound 
 comes through. Life is hidden away there secretly ; 
 at watch, perhaps, behind the grating ; barred in, as 
 if into a convent or a prison. Close to them, around 
 a corner, or at their feet, Hfe boils and bubbles; 
 there is fierce colour, gesture, though little noise, 
 among people who walk and move gravely. As a 
 stranger passes, all eyes turn on him, with that 
 doubtful, not hostile,' but ready to be hostile look 
 which I have come to know so well. 
 
 With sunset all the life of Stamboul dies out 
 suddenly, like the light in the sky. I had been 
 standing in the great square of the Seraskierat, 
 watching the orange fire fade slowly at the end of a 
 narrow street, where it filled the little space of sky. 
 The light dwindled off the high Oriental gateway, 
 and the walls and domes and minarets of the 
 Bajazidie, the mosque of pigeons, darkened by its 
 cypresses. It was through a changed aspect of 
 things that I walked back, following the tram-line 
 which winds about, past the Burnt Column, and 
 the At-Meidan Square, and Santa Sophia, and 
 the Sublime Porte, and the outer walls of the 
 Old Serai, down to the tumultuous square by the 
 bridge. Dark came on rapidly, but I still saw the 
 glitter of the Sea of Marmora, down one or two 
 
222 CITIES 
 
 side streets, as if at the end of the street. Faint 
 gas lamps began to flicker feebly, showing one here 
 and there a gap in the road, a heap of refuse, a dog 
 with all its sores laid out across one's path. Carriages 
 passed at intervals, dashing from side to side of the 
 road with a clatter of hoofs and a rattling of wheels. 
 Many of the dogs rose slowly from the gutter and 
 began a fierce barking ; the uneasiness of the night 
 had come upon them. Light shone out of open - 
 windows and from behind closed blinds ; fierce, half- 
 seen figures passed rapidly; a few men still sat 
 on the little chairs in the road, where they had 
 been drinking coffee, and still sucked, like babies 
 with bottles, at the long tubes of their narghilehs. 
 Some of them were those patriarchal Turks of 
 the old school, with their long quilted coats of 
 gold or green, almost down to their heels. The 
 narrow eyes, half shut, turned sideways, in the 
 stealthy immobility of the face. Peasants passing 
 you, some of them with fine, unspoilt^ wild, 
 mountain faces, stared with a fierce faculty of 
 attention, a dart of eyes which bored into you, 
 screwing their way in with a child's eagerness. 
 They were hurrying homewards, and the streets 
 grew emptier until one came near the bridge, where 
 there was still some movement of men and horses and 
 carriages. As I crossed the bridge, on that diflicult 
 footing, the water was still darkened with boats. 
 The opposite shore was one long blaze of lights, 
 and the steep streets of Pera shone confusedly. 
 
CONSTANTINOPLE 223 
 
 IV 
 
 Water flows through the city, purifying it ; light 
 floods it, making it over again hourly. It lies 
 between the water and the sky, in a grgat, luxurious 
 abandonment to the light. Seen from the Bosphorus 
 at sunset, Stamboul rises like a great cloud, 
 silhouetted against pure gold, and no more sub- 
 stantial than a cloud; its edges are cut into a 
 pattern of domes and minarets and cypresses, above 
 luminous banks of cloud ; it hangs there, lifted and 
 burning, wholly a part of the sky. Around the 
 point of the Seraglio, there is pure sea, with sails 
 and islands ; on the right, naked from the sunset 
 the walls and square window-holes of Pera, rising 
 up solidly out of the land. , 
 
 Sunrise, as I see it from the height of Pera, 
 brings out all the colours of Stamboul, like water 
 washing over veined marble. The whole city," 
 washed by the light, whitens and reddens, every 
 window grows distinct, and the balcony of every 
 minaret. On the water the boats seem to crawl 
 over steel-blue oil. A few thin spires of smoke rise 
 slowly, forming into clouds of sombre fleece above 
 the minarets. The light seems to draw a curtain 
 back slowly over Kassim Pacha ; below, the cypresses 
 and half of the valley are still cold. 
 
 One morning, looking out before sunrise, I saw a 
 great burning orange moon in the sky. Below, 
 
224 CITIES 
 
 there was a white, woolly, and shining mist over the 
 water, through which I could at first see nothing. 
 The moon had cut a straight and glittering path 
 through the mist, and on this path of light I saw 
 a dark ship, every line of its rigging black and 
 distinct. Gradually, looking into the mist, I saw a 
 few faint shapes, first masts, and then, beyond, 
 houses and domes. The moonlight was over all 
 the valley, luminous with mist; out of which one 
 great tower rose like a lighthouse out of a fairy sea. 
 I turned away, and, coming back to the window a 
 few minutes later, it was day ; the moon still shone 
 in the sky, but the light was the cold light of early 
 morning, and in the east a long streak of rose crept 
 up behind the housetops. 
 
 Every morning I find a new aspect in the vrater 
 of the Golden Horn, and in the walls and domes and 
 minarets and cypresses of Stamboul, and along the 
 bare desert line of the horizon, and in the green 
 and brown of the valley and hillside, from Kassim 
 Pacha to the white sprinkled stones of the Jews' 
 cemetery and to the sky. The cypresses below my 
 windows, in the Little Field of the Dead, in whose 
 midst I am living, have their different textures, as 
 the light smooths them to velvet or sharpens the 
 points of their branches: 
 
 In the heat of the day, as 1 sit on a tomb in the 
 Little Field of the Dead, I watch the winding dusty 
 road, with its strings of horses and,doi\keys, carrying 
 burdens across their backs, roped together in long 
 
CONSTA^vJTINOPLE 225 
 
 tinkling lines ; men with burdens, who sit down 
 among the graves to smoke a cigarette ; veiled * 
 women, who pass shrouded from head to feet in 
 their feredjes, like the dominoes of some players in a 
 masquerade. Veiled women, their yashmaks half 
 lifted, are sitting on a patch of grass outside the 
 low wooden houses with grated windows, which seem 
 to grow, huddled, in a cleft of the hillside. Through 
 the tops of the cypresses I can catch a broken glitter 
 of water; beyond, a dome, and three minarets. 
 Sheep nibble at the short grass, a solemn company 
 of turkeys goes by, the dogs lie asleep with their 
 heads against the stones of the road. There is a 
 dense, windless heat ; not even the dust is alive 
 enough to move. 
 
 On a day of wind, crossing the bridge from 
 Stamboul about sunset, all is changed. The water, 
 darkened by the wind, heaves into little waves, 
 like the waves of the sea, and the bridge rocks 
 under one's feet. Sailing boats are anchored in 
 the harbour; as the steamers go out and come in, 
 the thick smoke from their funnels blackens the 
 air. I watch the barges, and their difficult passage 
 under the bridge, the mast lowered as they 
 pass under; farther out, the small boats rowing 
 hard against the tide, the rushing six-oared caiques, 
 the little leaning sails, the foam behind the steamers; 
 the whole unquiet water, clouded sky, and the pale 
 gold crescent above the minarets. Beyond the 
 bridge, there is a sudden peace, still water, motionless 
 
 P 
 
226 CITIES 
 
 shadows from the stacked masts against the shore ; 
 as I go on my way^ Pera, rising like a mountain. 
 
 At night, as I look fjom my windows over 
 Kassim Pacha, I never tire of that dull, soft 
 colouring, green and brown, in which the brown 
 of roofs and walls is hardly more than a shading 
 of the green of the trees. There is the lovely 
 curve of the hollow, with its small, square, flat' 
 houses of wood ; and above, a sharp line of blue- 
 black cypresses on the spine of the hill ; then the 
 long, desert plain, with its sandy road, shutting in 
 the horizon. Mists thicken over the valley, and 
 wipe out its colours before the lights begin to 
 glimmer out of it. Below, under my windows, 
 are the cypresses of the Little Field of the Dead, 
 vast, motionless, different every night. Last night 
 each stood clear, tall, apart ; to-night they huddle 
 together in the mist, and seem to shudder. 
 
 The sunset was, brief, and the water has grown 
 dull, like slate. Stamboul fades to a level mass of 
 smoky purple, out of which a few minarets rise 
 black against a grey sky with bands of orange fire. 
 Last night, after a golden sunset, a fog of rusty 
 iron came down, and hung poised over the jagged 
 level of the hill. The whole mass of Stamboul 
 was like black smoke ; the water dim grey, a little 
 flushed, and then like pure light, lucid, transparent, 
 every ship and every boat sharply outlined in black 
 on its surface; the boats seemed to crawl like 
 flies on a lighted pane. 
 
CONSTANTINOPLE 22' 
 
 In this fierce, amazing place, there is always rest 
 by the Sea of Marmora. I liked best to sit on the 
 shore at Yeni-Kapou, where small waves beat on 
 the rocks at my feet, and the masts rocked at anchor 
 close to the shore, or spread their sails against 
 the filmy mountains beyond the islands. The sea 
 glittered placidly along the curve of the decayed 
 port,' with its few small ships, and the longer curve 
 going on beyond the Seven Towers, and the 
 cypresses of Kadi-Keui stepping down into the 
 water. Behind, there was the railway, there were 
 a few houses, with great fragments of ruined walls, 
 the ancient sea-walls of the city. A little way 
 along, you came to another, more bustling, line of 
 seashore, almost like Italy ; boats bringing in timber, 
 the unloading, the weighing, the loading of donkeys ; 
 children, a crowd of dogs, a wooden cafe in the 
 sea. Beyond the railway lies the mosque of Little 
 Santa Sophia, the sixth-century church of St Sergius 
 and St Bacchus. Whitewash has done all it can 
 to disfigure the lovely interior of a church which 
 is built on the pattern of the church of St Vitale 
 in Ravenna. The mosaics are covered with roughly 
 painted arabesques, the beautiful capitals are white- 
 washed, but the frieze, with its Greek lettering, 
 remains; and the eye, when the mind has helped 
 it to see straight, in spite of the distorted focus of 
 
228 CITIES 
 
 mihrab and matting, can still recognise the perfect 
 balance, the lovely proportions, of the structure. 
 
 Climb through a few twisting streets, and you 
 come upon a mosque which I returned to again 
 and again, for the mere pleasure of being there: 
 the mosque of Mehmed Pacha, once the church 
 of St Anastasia. It is set in a nest of trees, on 
 the edge of the hillside ; square-towered doorways, 
 trailed over with vines, lead into a small square 
 court, with arcades of trefoil-shaped arches, a simple, 
 admirably designed fountain in the midst, covered 
 with a yide wooden roof; thin-leaved trees are 
 planted around three sides of the court. The 
 mosque is small and plain, with blue tiles on the 
 front, and arches of red and white marble. The 
 walls, on the side overlooking the sea, are covered 
 with ivy, the only ivy I saw in Constantinople. 
 Through the barred windows of the outer court 
 you see thick clusters of trees, with pigeons among 
 their branches, almost hiding the straight white 
 wall, and throwing a great black-green shadow on 
 the terrace beyond. There are a few old and 
 desolate graves among the grass. As I wandered 
 to and fro in the courtyard, one or two quiet men 
 came out of the doors under the arcades, looked 
 at me quietly, and turned Jback again without 
 curiosity. 
 
 There is rest by the Sea of Marmora, but 
 for the Moslem the one harbour of peace, where 
 he is wholly at home with himself, far from the 
 
CONSTANTINOPLE 229 
 
 mongrel crowds of Pera and Galata and Stamboul, is 
 the little, fierce, wind-swept suburb of Eyoub, con- 
 servatively alive among its graves. The Christian 
 is unwelcome there ; and why should he not be 
 unwelcome ? The mosque is the most sacred mosque 
 in Constantinople, one of the two mosques which 
 no Christian is allowed to enter ; and is there 
 anything unreasonable in this reticence ? It is his 
 association with other races, his struggle against 
 the alien forces in his midst, that degrades the 
 Turk ; he learns craft from the Jew and greed 
 from the Christian. In Eyoub he has drawn 
 himself aside, he lives the life of his forefathers; 
 and you find yourself instantly in another at^iosphere 
 as you land from the steamer at the last station on 
 the Golden Horn. Beyond the water, low hills 
 rise curved ; dark cypresses climb the hillside in 
 rigid lines ; near the shore, rising out of trees, are 
 the small white dome and the two minarets of the 
 mosque. The streets are broad, well paved, with 
 none of the dirt and slime of Constantinople; on 
 each side of the street are shops in which beads 
 and rosaries are sold, and you see, for once, really 
 appetising pancakes being made, clean bread and 
 clean fruit being sold. Men sit gravely in the 
 cafes and at the doors of the shops; there is no 
 noise, no bustle; every eye turns on you, without 
 approval, but, as you walk quietly through their 
 midst, without open hostility. The walls around 
 the mosque are pierced by barred windows, through 
 
230 CITIES 
 
 which you see bushy trees, and one huge plane-tree, 
 gaping as if from a wound. As I passed, the outer 
 doorway was being repainted, and the black lettering 
 above it was being carefully brightened. The inner 
 court, through which men and women were passing, 
 was well swept ; there was none of the dust which 
 lies thick about so many of the mosques ; I caught a 
 glimpsejof the doorway into the mosque" itself : the 
 unadorned white marble was spotlessly white. But 
 a little way beyond the mosque, a winding path 
 begins uphill among the tombs, a kind of stairway 
 with well-swept stairs, between the tombstones; 
 around manyof them are iron rails, freshly painted ; 
 even the tombs of women, with their flower-topped 
 heads, are sometimes railed round. From the hill top 
 you look down on the Sweet Waters of Europe, a 
 placid lagoon, with its dim water, and pale islands of 
 grasses, and barren shores. Farther to the right, 
 beyond the hill of graves and the mosque, lies the 
 whole curved course of the Golden Horn, with its 
 shores of houses and its many masts, shining under 
 the sunlight. Yet farther to the right are the 
 brown roofs and walls and grated windows of 
 Eyoub, set in masses of green trees, filling the 
 valley, and rising up another hill to the sky. The 
 cypresses around and below swayed in the wind, 
 which came coolingly about one. I sat for a long 
 time on the hill, loojcing down on this fierce, and, 
 as they call it, fanatical suburb, where I had ex- 
 pected to feel only a ^ease of peril and discomfort. 
 
CONSTANTINOPLE 231 
 
 Never had these enemies, the Turks, seemed to me 
 so sympathetic, so reasonable ; only, I could not 
 help feeling that some apology was needed for my 
 being there at all. 
 
 VI 
 
 I was standing on the bridge one morning, 
 looking down into the water, exquisitely blue, in 
 which the minnows darted like httle emerald snakes. 
 Caiques slid past, almost as swiftly as the minnows ; 
 boats with tall brown masts, all leaning one way, 
 stood in order against the quay; the sunlight 
 poured down softly, enveloping the land and water. 
 I was saying to myself in a kind of dreamy peace 
 and contentment: how beautiful! when, looking 
 down at my side, close to the parapet of the bridge, 
 almost between me and the water, I saw a little girl 
 lying on the ground; she had drawn up her skirt 
 and laid it across her legs, in order that she might 
 show a raw sore which ate into the flesh. 
 
 In that contrast all Constantinople is summed up ; 
 and it is that contrast, largely, which makes it so 
 disturbing, alluring, so violent and seductive at once 
 in its appeal. It is,' as the East is to the West, a 
 kaleidoscop'e ; but you must be prepared for the 
 sudden shaking of the colours, and it will be well if 
 you can look at the picture merely as a picture. 
 "Wherever you go you will hear the clank of a 
 sword ; an officer, a zaptie, passes you ; everywhere 
 
232 CITIES 
 
 there are soldiers prowling, and the soldier here is 
 the scum of the streets, with a ragged uniform as 
 his license to do as he pleases. There are soldiers 
 on guard at every street corner, and outside every 
 public building, in their sentry-boxes of rotten wood, 
 propped up on stones. The man who stops by 
 your side, as you look over the side of the bridge, 
 may be a spyj the merchant from whom you buy 
 in the Bazaar may be told by the police that he is 
 not to sell you books or manuscripts. If anything 
 happens, talk of it as little as you can. One day I 
 saw that a part of the parapet of the bridge had 
 gone ; a rope was tied across in its place ; and 
 people were looking curiously down into the water. 
 Next day the parapet was in its place again. I 
 asked what had happened. The parapet had given 
 way; fifteen or twenty people had gone over. 
 "Were they drowned? " I asked. I was told not to 
 inquire ; the bridge, it was known, wanted mending ; 
 no one would mend it ; an accident was a kind of 
 natural criticism : nothing must be said about it. 
 
 Almost every morning I pass the Sublime Porte. 
 It is a covered doorway of wood and stucco, with a 
 frieze of green lettering, to which the pigeons often 
 add a living frieze with their smooth bodies. Dust 
 and stones are heaped about the Sublime Porte ; 
 grass grows between the stones of the courtyard, 
 which rises inside like a mound, paved with cobbles. 
 A fortune-telling woman squats in an angle of the 
 pavement opposite, a negress, with her beads and 
 
CONSTANTINOPLE 23 
 
 charms laid out on a little carpet : the black fac 
 thrust forward out of a veil tightened about it. 
 
 One morning, not far from the Sublime Porte, 
 met a company of gip?ies. Pots and pans, beddinj 
 all their goods were piled on the backs of donkeys, 
 black chicken was tied on the top ; they led dogs i 
 leash, and all the dogs in the street were barkinj 
 There were several men, and two very handsora 
 women, one of them a straight-backed old cron 
 who walked royally. Two little children, as dar 
 as Hindus, in green and yellow Turkish trouser 
 ran behind. The company marched through th 
 street like an army in the midst of a hostile town. 
 
 Just afterwards, near Santa Sophia, I met tw 
 Kurds, with red handkerchiefs about their head 
 and red girdles, who dragged two big bears afte 
 them at the end of long ropes. They had Ion 
 poles in their hands, and two tambourines, on whic 
 they beat. The bears snuffled uneasily through th 
 midst of the dogs, turning nervously at every barl 
 They had none of that strange aloofness which 
 noticed in the three camels, roped together, whic 
 passed me the other day in one of the streets c 
 Pera. The dogs barked frantically around then 
 but the yellow beasts, with their craning necks an 
 flat snakes' heads, lounged on indifferently, pi^ttin 
 down their large soft-padded feet with a delicat 
 choice of the road. 
 
 And the dogs, who are in a sense the mastei 
 here, have their own homelessness in the city whk 
 
234 'CITIES 
 
 they have taken for themselves. They look at yoi 
 without recognition, they have no masters, and the 
 have fost the sense of human relationship. Kindnes 
 restores it to them; surprise quickens their grati 
 tude. For the most part they are left alone, ani 
 they have made laws for themselves, and taken u 
 their own quarters. They live hardly better tha; 
 the beggars ; they are diseased from birth ; an^ 
 they lie in the streets, as the beggars lie in th 
 streets, with all their sores, sometimes pitied a littk 
 foul, pitiable things. With night they waken int 
 some hideous uneasiness; and their howling, as i 
 comes up through a silence only broken by th 
 tapping of the bekje*^s iron staff, is like a sound c 
 loud wind or water far off, waxing and waning 
 continually going on, and » at times, as it come 
 across the water from Stamboul, like a soun^ 
 of strings, scraped and plucked savagely by a 
 orchestra of stringed instruments. 
 
 VII 
 
 Somewhat hidden, under the dust of the cit} 
 under the earth itself, or crumbling, a broken wal 
 a burnt column,' the arch of an aqueduct, there : 
 another older Constantinople, not quite at res 
 which looks out on this secret, tragic, spectacuh 
 city, the one real thing there. In the At-Meida 
 'there is a hollow pit, railed in with dusty ire 
 
CONSTANTINOPLE 23 
 
 railings; 5ust, shards, dry plants, fallen stones, 
 battered tin pail, lie at the bottom of the pit ; an 
 out of this refuse there rises a broken, headlei 
 column of green bronze, in which' three serpem 
 coil together, like living things. The head of on 
 of the serpents is to be seen in the Museum ; n 
 more than the upper jaw, with its flattened heac 
 ribbed eyes, and little deadly teeth, a thing c 
 exquisite horror. Like the coils, it is alive; an 
 the coils, swelling as they rise out of the pit, seei 
 to have stiiFened suddenly, keeping the outline c 
 their last palpitation. The bronze is delicatel 
 frayed; it is coloured as if in some natural vegt 
 table growth. On one side of the pit is the ston 
 obelisk of Constantine Poryphyrogenitus, strippe 
 of its sheath of gilded bronze; on the other sid 
 is the obelisk of rosy granite which Theodosiu 
 brought from Heliopolis : it has still that uncrease 
 childlike freshness of very aged Egyptian thingi 
 Each commemorates an empire which has come ani 
 passed, but the Serpent Column was old whe: 
 Constantine brought it from Delphi, and set i 
 up in the Hippodrome. It was cast from the spoil 
 of the Persians, after the victory of Platsea, am 
 the names of all the cities which had helped to wii 
 the victory were engraved on its coils : they are no 
 yet quite erased. The Christians took it to be ; 
 pagan demon, and a patriarch came by night an( 
 broke off two of its heads. The Mohammedan 
 took it to be a Christian idol, and broke off its thin 
 
2^6 CITIES 
 
 head. Indestructible, it still stands in its place, like 
 a hostile, watchful exile, outlasting many enemies. 
 
 Not far off, in the courtyard of a house in a 
 narrow street, there is a trap-door which lifts upon 
 a flight of stone steps, going down into a spacious 
 darkness, paved with water, out of which dim 
 columns rise and recede. By the light of a torch 
 made out of a bunch of tow, one distinguishes the 
 capitals of the columns, admirable in design, alter- 
 nately plain and carved. The columns are set 
 squarely, twelve feet apart; there are 336 columns; 
 they extend underground as far as Santa Sophia. 
 Built by Constantine in the sixth century, perhaps, 
 as we are told, for a cistern, but rather, as the 
 Turks call it, Yeri-Batan-Serai, a subterranean 
 palace in which the genii of the earth and of the 
 water under the earth might be royally at home, it 
 has a twofold silence, the silence of earthy darkness 
 and* the silence of immovable water. To go down 
 into it is like going down into an immeasurable 
 grave, into which all the glory of Byzantium had 
 gone down, living on there, in a ghastly hiding 
 away from life, with the persistence of indestructible 
 things. 
 
 Books have been written about the walls of Con- 
 stantinople, and, as in Rome, it is the walls that 
 still bring the past most solidly into the present. 
 Here, there is no beauty, as in the austere walls 
 of Rome; merely ruined greatness. On one side 
 they go crumbling into the sea, which has not yet 
 
CONSTANTINOPLE 237 
 
 picked their stones to pieces. As you drive round 
 them on the land, along an unpaved road full of 
 heaps and hollows, you see a long ragged line of 
 walls, broken by time, and now yet more desperately 
 cracking into decay since the earthquake of 1894; 
 about them, a space of desert land, with great trees 
 on the borders of deep ditches. The walls are 
 double, with a moat between wall and wall, bridged 
 at frequent intervals by square towers. You are 
 taken to see the little Golden Gate, a mere bricked- 
 up arch in a wall, but the gap, they say, through 
 which the Christians are to enter the city, when 
 they come back to take their own. From the top 
 of the Seven Towers, on which heads have rotted, 
 you can see the islands and the whole Sea of 
 Marmora. You climb through dungeons in whiqh 
 ambassadors have been imprisoned ; you look down 
 into the pit in which their heads have been thrown. 
 I saw the names of Venier and Alberti, ambassadors 
 of Venice, carved on the walls. Everywhere a 
 palace or a prison had stood, or an enemy had 
 entered victoriously, or a king had died defending 
 his city. All the history of the empire is written 
 in the walls, and can still be read there. 
 
 And, around them, the land suffers, scarred with 
 cruelties ; it is hot, thirsty, neglected ; it lies like 
 the dogs, its owh master, and left to decay. Dust 
 lies thick on all the roads, ancl the roads are all 
 rocks. Here and there are trees, sometimes ash- 
 trees, more often cypresses among the tombs. The 
 
238 CITIES 
 
 way is lined with cemeteries, with their slim stones, 
 embroidered with the decorative Turkish lettering, 
 under the men's turbans or the flower-knobs of the 
 women ; some stare gaudily, like Aztec idols. Near 
 the monastery of the miraculous fishes, there is a 
 mad-house, and, as I passed, grave, gentle creatures 
 sat on stone benches, one of them tracing words 
 with his staff in the dust ; they looked up sleepily, 
 the curiosity all gone out of their eyes. Inside, 
 through barred windows, I saw a violent face rise 
 up suddenly against the bars, out of the midst of 
 a room full of tumbled beds. An idiot boy begged 
 for pence in the road, and waved his cap at a passing 
 flock of sheep. 
 
 VIII 
 
 There are no gardens in Constantinople, few open 
 squares, few places set apart for rest ; there would 
 be few open squares and places set apart for rest, 
 but for the mosques. The mosque is to the Turk 
 this world and the next, equally. To the Turk 
 every foothold of the earth is sacred, or can become 
 so to his thought, by the mere reverent taking off" 
 of his shoes, and turning of his face to the east. 
 The hour of prayer finds him constantly prepared, 
 on whatever soil he may be. Thus his temples are 
 to him so much a part of the world, and of his daily 
 life ; he can sleep, transact business there ; he 
 requires no images of divine things ;' his rites are 
 
CONSTANTINOPLE 239 
 
 no more than an invocation of God, and a telling 
 over to God of his own names of power and mercy. 
 
 Courtyard within courtyard, the mosque itself is 
 a kind of inner court, or patio of heaven. Its archi- 
 tecture, the dome and minaret, suggests growing 
 things, the palm tree and the cypress ; and around 
 it, beyond its first court or harem^ is a great empty 
 space, planted around the outer rim with trees, and 
 surrounded by a stone wall chequered by long rows 
 of barred windows. Inside this wall, barbers hang 
 their brass basins on the trees, and men sit on cane- 
 bottomed chairs being shaved ; meat and fruit are 
 sold; sometimes there is a market, with stalls set 
 up all over the ground ; the Bajazidie has a living 
 pavement of pigeons, and the awnings, under which 
 the merchants of beads and fruits sit with their glass 
 trays," are covered deep with the droppings and 
 feathers of the multitude of birds. Outside the 
 wall, sometimes under roofs built against it, work 
 goes on : you hear the hammering of iron, or look 
 down on a narrow street of rag-shops. Inside, 
 though there is buying and selling, and men go 
 about their daily duties, there is always space for 
 r6st, and there is that religious thing, water. 
 
 If you stand in the courtyard of the Stileimanie, 
 just before the hour of prayer (you have but to 
 turn, and you can see the water, Galata, and 
 Scutari, in exquisite fragments) you will see men 
 coming in one by one, and going up to the washing 
 place against the wall. They take off their coats 
 
240 CITIES 
 
 and shoes, stand on the narrow foothold of stone 
 in front of the tap, and wash hands and feet and 
 head. The carter has tied his horse to a tree; 
 the soldiers stroll in barefoot in their shoes; the 
 many fez shine vividly against the straight white 
 wall. The muezzins are waiting on the minarets ; 
 they lean over their balconies ; then voice after 
 voice, in the wailing Eastern tone, cries the saluta- 
 tion, one voice striking through another. They 
 move round their balconies, cryfcg to north and 
 south and east and west. The men go in slowly 
 at all the doors, pushing aside the heavy curtain. 
 
 It is this mosque, which is set on the highest 
 hill, and seems to crown the city, that Turkish 
 poets have called "splendour" and "joy." And 
 indeed, seen from the outside, it is the most 
 beautiful mosque in Constantinople. Its admirable 
 proportions, its severe and ^elegant bulk, its whole 
 mass and height, stand out square and grey and 
 uprising against the blue of the sky ; a great grey 
 building, with its flat surfaces, like the walls of a 
 vast hous^, and great doorways, level with the wall, 
 squared round by barred windows, and the long 
 square lines of the harem^ four five-sided minarets 
 rising from its corners, with their elaborately carved 
 balconies, hung with little black lamps. 
 
 Nietzsche has said of Christian churches that 
 they are like caverns, with clammy odours, in which 
 the free soul cannot rise to its full height. The 
 mosque is spacious, empty for God and man, arched 
 
CONSTANTINOPLE 24,1 
 
 with a great dome, like the earth itself; and it is 
 open to all, a place where men may continue their 
 daily lives, in which adoration becomes a part of 
 the day's doings; and the birds make their home 
 there, and fly inland out of the windows under the 
 dome ; you hear the clatter of their wings, and see 
 their shadow on the floor as they pass. The interior 
 of Santa Sophia, disfigured as it is by paint, and 
 stripped of ornament, is like an airy house of prayer, 
 and, gradually, one comes to feel singularly at home 
 with its height and depth. The great dome floats 
 in the air, seeming scarcely to touch the half-domes 
 out of which it rises, and the effect of this hollowing 
 out of the air, so to speak, rather than of building 
 against it, gives one a singular impression : I never 
 felt so much inside anything, and yet so solidly 
 on the ground. This church of the divine wisdom 
 brings you serenity, not awe ; it liberates, does not 
 overwhelm. Its religious appeal is abstract, not in 
 the cold, reasoning way of Cologne Cathedral, but 
 in a universal way of its own. Any religion could 
 .worship the principle of wisdom within its walls, 
 which have needed no more than a few inches' 
 change of focus to pass from the Greek to the 
 Moslem faith. Its structure leaves it free for the 
 occupation of God himself, limiting him to no form 
 of his divine essence. 
 
 The interior of Santa Sophia is the most beautiful 
 interior in Constantinople, just as the exterior of 
 the Suleimanie is the most beautiful exterior. This 
 
 Q 
 
242 - CITIES 
 
 Byzantine church, which set the pattern to the 
 later builders of mosques, though it once contained 
 many beautiful things which have been taken away 
 from it, and though it has lost the better part of 
 the glory of its mosaics, crudely painted over by 
 the piety of the Turks, has lost, after all, little. 
 Its genius is the genius of structure ; what remains 
 of the decoration is no more than a delicate veiling 
 of that vast, rhythmical idea in stone. There is 
 still, though dimmed, the gold of the dome, which 
 glows as the sun enters by the little windows 
 around its base ; >vith, under the arches which 
 support the gallery, bits of gold sky, as in St 
 Mark's, but less marvellous; glimpses of bright 
 mosaic in small arches high up; the black marble 
 and mother-of-pearl under the upper arches of the 
 gallery ; the capitals and the carving above them, 
 like Valenciennes lace. There are the porphyry 
 columns from the Syrian Temple of the Sun, and 
 the slabs of marble let into the walls, like Japanese 
 pictures, each with its faint indication of form in 
 a single delicately shaded veining of colour. And 
 there are the few additions of the Turks : the 
 mihrab, the carved stone pulpit with its two banners, 
 the two dim and lovely carpets, on which Mahomet 
 is thought to have prayed, hung on the walls, the 
 four immense green discs of wood, on which a 
 fine artist in the writing of letters has painted in 
 gold the names of God and of his prophets. And, 
 in its corner, there is the invariable grandfather's 
 
CONSTANTINOPLE 243 
 
 clock, striking the Eastern hours, by which the 
 hours of prayer are regulated in all the mosques. 
 
 As the hour of prayer comes round, the nasal 
 voices of the young students who sway to and fro, 
 reciting the Koran, are silent ; men in the red fez, 
 carrying their shoes in their hands, steal in from all 
 sides, ranging themselves in rows along the strips of 
 matting which cover the floor ; a cry is heard from 
 the roof of the mastaba, a sort of flat roof on pillars, 
 on which the ulemas, or priests, are stationed ; there 
 is an intoning, very like the intoning in a Catholic 
 church, a salutation of God, repeated over and over 
 As one looks down from above, one sees row after 
 row of bare oT- stockinged feet, as the worshippers 
 sit cross-legged, holding their hands out, with the 
 palms turned upwards; then all rise to their feet, 
 then kneel, then touch the ground with their fore- 
 heads ; the sonorous voices, carried into echoing 
 heights by the vaults, curiously muted as the faces 
 bend over. There is a profound simplicity and 
 solemnity in this worship without elaborate rites, 
 this direct intercourse with God; in these formal, 
 conventional Eastern prostrations, the cry of the 
 muezzin from the minaret, the cry of the ulema 
 from the mastaba. 
 
 IX 
 
 The dervishes are the monks of the East. They 
 live apart, in tekkes or monasteries, and wear, a 
 
244 CITIES 
 
 singular monastic costume of their own. The 
 turning dervishes and the howling dervishes have 
 each their ceremonies, and these are really religious 
 ceremonies, not meant for the public at all, although 
 they are content to make a little money from the 
 visits of curious strangers. They have several 
 tekkes in Constantinople, and their ceremonies can 
 be attended at fixed hours on certain days of the 
 week. I saw the Mevlevi, or turning dervishes, at 
 the tekke of the Grande Rue de Pera, and the 
 Rufai, or howling dervishes, at Scutari in Asia. 
 
 The tekke of the Grande Rue de Pera is a little, 
 broken-down mosque in the corner of a dingy 
 courtyard. The inside is like the inside of a Paris 
 dancing-hall: in the middle there is a polished 
 wooden floor, and this is surrounded by a low rail, 
 with wooden pillars supporting a small gallery. 
 The people stand crowded together all round the 
 hall, on the outer side of the rail ; a few foreigners . 
 pay for seats in the gallery, and in their midst, but 
 shut oflF from them in a sort of central room, are 
 the musicians, who play on long reedy flutes, giving 
 a very soft note, and on two little drums, held in 
 men's laps, and beaten with tiny drumsticks. 
 Opposite the musicians, but on the lower floor, is 
 the mihrab, and the imaara, or prior, stands or sits 
 on a strip of carpet with his back to the mihrab. 
 The dervishes stand motionless around the inner 
 space, with bent heads and arms crossed; they 
 wear long cloaks, of dull colours, drab, green, and 
 
CONSTANTINOPLE 245 
 
 brown, and on their heads tall, earthy caps, like 
 elongated fez. The music plays continuously, and 
 one or two of the musicians sing in high-pitched 
 voices. The drums tap out the beat, and the flutes 
 breathe softly round the notes, while the voices 
 seem to come in irregularly, cutting through them, 
 or going against them, but always guided, like an 
 improvisation, by the inexorable beat. 
 
 At a signal from the music the dervishes began 
 to walk slowly round and round ; each, as he came 
 to the mihrab, paused, turned, and bowed low to 
 the dervish following him, who in turn bowed low 
 to him, took his place, turned, and repeated the 
 same action. The movements were slow, deliberate, 
 ceremonious. When all had revolved back into 
 their stations in the circle, the music changed, and 
 the dervishes dropped their cloaks, and stood 
 motionless for a moment in their long white gowns, 
 white drawers, and bare feet. Then, slowly, one 
 after another clasped his hands about his shoulders, 
 and began to turn. As he turned he seemed to 
 unwind himself, and his arms slowly straightened 
 out, and so remained, the palm of the right hand 
 turned up, the palm of the left hand turned down. 
 Soon all were turning, at diiferent rates of speed, 
 but in obedience to the fixed beat of the drums. 
 They turned at the outer edge of the floor, in a 
 circle, each turning from right to left ; and gradually, 
 but very slowly, the whole circle moved round the 
 floor. The gentle, sleepy music went on, and as 
 
246 CITIES 
 
 the white cloaks of the dervishes lifted and stood 
 out around them in the wind of the movement, it 
 seemed as if great white bells spun monotonously, 
 with a kind of low, hissing creak, as the bare heels 
 turned, sweating, on the floor. 
 
 The music quickened or slackened, and the 
 dervishes kept time, each at his own rate of speed. 
 There was a short, black-bearded man who whirled 
 like a teetotum ; another, a tall old man, with closed 
 eyes, turned with a slow and dreamy movement, as a 
 snake, standing on its tail, might curve itself pain- 
 fully and delicately round. There was a little boy 
 of about twelve, who turned with all a child's 
 seriousness ; few seemed to move mechanically, or 
 as if the movement had not some secret meaning. 
 Suddenly the music stopped, the dervishes went 
 back to their places, put on their cloaks, and sat 
 down on the floor; there was some chanting, a 
 prayer, and an old man stood up and recited some- 
 thing out of the Koran ; then the turning began 
 again, but for a much shorter space of time. At 
 the end, each dervish went up to the imaam, who 
 stood with his back to the mihrab, kissed his hand, 
 laid his head on his shoulder, as if kissing his cheek, 
 and then, passing on, grasped the hand of the 
 dervish next to him, laying his head for an instant 
 on his shoulder, and passing on, in a strange and 
 stealthy rhythm, always in circles and half-circles, 
 within the one continually turning circle which 
 moved round the floor. The whole ceremony was 
 
CONSTANTINOPLE 247 
 
 made out of the rhythm of circles, and was, I doubt 
 not, a ritual for the attainment of ecstasy by some 
 vertigo of the soul and the senses, which might 
 -well swoon into a kind of circling immobility. 
 
 In the ceremonies of the turning dervishes, there 
 is beauty, together with a gentle hallucination 
 which seems to draw one slowly into its own circle. 
 The ecstasy is that of an enveloping dream, into 
 which one sinks delightedly. But the ecstasy of 
 the howling dervishes is a form of delirium, by 
 which one may reach, first, imbecility, and 'then an 
 epileptic madness. I went over to Asia to see them, 
 across the Bosphorus, to the Asiatic suburb of 
 Constantinople. Scutari is built like an amphitheatre 
 on the slope of Mount Boulgourlou, a rocky and 
 dusty height from which you look down on the 
 Bosphorus, and ^n the Sea of Marmora, and on the 
 Black Sea. This almost wholly Oriental town is 
 fierce and primitive, with unpaved and precipitous 
 streets, which lead upward from the thronged and 
 tumultuous landing-place to the great cemetery on 
 the hill. The soil is sacred, and the tombs crowd 
 upon one another in the midst of a forest of 
 cypresses. Almost at its feet is the tekke of the 
 dervishes, a plain wooden building surrounded by a 
 courtyard. As one enters the courtyard there is a 
 smell of incense ; one catches a glimpse, through a 
 side-door, of men moving on some priestly business, 
 and, through an open window, of cofEns laid one 
 above another. Inside, it is a small, square hall; 
 
248 CITIES 
 
 the centre of the floor is railed round, and a low 
 platform stands in one corner, near the door by 
 which the dervishes go in and out. The ceiling, 
 with its wooden beams, is painted green, the balus- 
 trades and corner pillars are of unpainted wood, 
 but with touches of green paint ; the walls are green, 
 and the mihrab is a deeper green. The mihrab is 
 hung with knives and chains and with all manner of 
 instruments of torture, used by the dervishes when 
 they cut themselves in the frantic rites of the Bairam. 
 On each side an old flag of beautiful workmanship is 
 stretched out ; texts from the Koran, in gilt frames, 
 are hung upon the walls, and between them are 
 rows of tambourines of different sizes, set close 
 together. The floor is covered with mats, and, as I 
 entered, I saw the dervishes seated on them in a 
 long row, opposite the mihrab; a few priests sat 
 at right angles to them, in t^e middle of the floor ; 
 a gold inceflse-burner smoked at the feet of the 
 imaam, who sat in the curve of the mihrab. The 
 imaam was dressed in black ; he was small, with 
 delicate features, black hair and beard, profound eyes, 
 and exquisite hands. He sat there like an idol, waving 
 his hands slowly outwards and upwards and down- 
 wards, as if making hypnotic passes, and swaying 
 very gently. He chanted in a low clear voice, and 
 the chant was taken up by the priests in the 
 middle, and passed on to the row of dervishes, who 
 responded in a hoarse chorus as they swayed to and 
 fro with a steady motion. One of the priests had 
 
CONSTANTmOPLE 249 
 
 precisely the face of Rahelais, with brut?il, magnetis- 
 ing eyes, and a sardonic laughter grinning from his 
 mouth. 
 
 The swaying, and the guttural cry : "Allah hou ! 
 Allah hou ! " began slowly. The dervishes swayed 
 backwards and forwards, and then with a circular 
 and sidelong movement, and the force of the 
 movement increased gradually, and the voices 
 gradually deepened. At last they rose to their 
 feet, each man laid his hand on the shoulder of 
 his neighbour, and, thus linked into a flexible chain, 
 they swayed all together, and the force of the move- 
 ment and the energy of the deep cry increased and 
 quickened. There was a movement to the right, 
 then to the left, and a stamp of the bare heel, as 
 each man seemed to hurl his body as far as it would 
 go without losing foothold, and then hurl it bick 
 again with a kind of semi-circular swing of the hips. 
 The whole line swayed together, with exactly the, 
 same general movement, but, as with the turning 
 dervishes, each man had his own way of moving: 
 a pale, bull-necked young man worked violently, 
 painfully, with every muscle, and an old lean man 
 bent and doubled like a piece of indiarubber. The 
 swaying went on without a pause, and the dervishes 
 closed their eyes, and cried with hoarse beast-like 
 cries, and seemed to relapse into a fierce and stolid 
 dizziness, while the imaam, watching them with his 
 controlling eyes, and guiding them with his thrilling 
 yoice and delicate hands, moved to and fro, always 
 
250 CITIES 
 
 master of himself and of them, setting the rhythm 
 of the movement. 
 
 After the ceremony had gone on for some time, 
 a gigantic negro, seven feet high, came out of the 
 inner room, and took up his place in the midst of 
 the other dervishes. For a little while he could not 
 catch the rhythm ; then he found it, gave himself 
 up to it, and then came the most horrible thing I 
 have ever seen. The negro swayed with the whole 
 force of his huge bulk, battering the air with his 
 head, which he hurled this way and that way; 
 with every movement the head rolled round on his 
 shoulders, and as I stood behind him I saw a 
 convulsed face, with closed eyes and open mouth, 
 appear and disappear, a mass of bloodshot and 
 sweating blackness, with the glittering white of 
 the teeth and the pink of the inside of the mouth. 
 He howled like a" wild beast in agony, he gave 
 great gasps that seemed to shatter his body ; at 
 every moment I expected to see him roll over on 
 the floor in an epileptic fit. 
 
 Meanwhile the movement had grown quicker, 
 more rigid, more automatic; and the savage howl 
 of the chant had sunk into an almost inarticulate 
 " hou ! hou ! " A priest went along the line of 
 now almost unconscious swaying figures, and took 
 off" the outer cap from each man's head, leaving 
 a white linen skull-cap. A baby was brought in 
 and carried close under «the swaying heads, that 
 some healing might come to it from the breath 
 
CONSTANTINOPLE 251 
 
 and sweat of their hysteria. Men and children 
 lay down on the ground, and the imaam walked 
 on them, in soft yellow leather slippers, drawing 
 his feet along the body where it was sick, and 
 stooping and blowing on it, and laying his hand 
 on men's shoulders while he looked into their faces 
 and breathed on them. The imaam had the face 
 of a saint, with wise, profound, gentle, and imperious 
 eyes; and I am sure he believed in his power, his 
 mission. When he trod on men and children, 
 stooped over them, breathed- upon them, he seemed 
 to feel that a force was passing out of him into 
 them; and certainly he had the dervishes in his 
 hand, as if they were wild beasts, and he their 
 keeper. And there was a hardness under the 
 gentleness, which meant the controlling mind. He 
 led them, shared in the impulse which he had 
 evoked, but never abandoned himself to it. Are 
 these epileptics led by a true mystic ? , And have 
 they whirled and cried themselves into an ecstasy, 
 out of which, as the people think, there can come 
 messages, and a gift of healing ? 
 
 There is contagion in it, and the brain reels, and 
 the body is almost swept into the orgy. This 
 motion of swaying is the Eastern lullaby for the 
 senses; it is one of the gestures of meditation, 
 and the student sways as he recites the Koran. 
 In the howling dervishes I felt the ultimate, because 
 the most animal, the most irrational, the most insane, 
 form of Eastern ecstasy. Nothing I have ever seen 
 
252 CITIES 
 
 has given me such an impression of witchcraft. 
 One might have been in' Central Africa, or in 
 some Saturnalia of barbarians. Inhuman, savage, 
 incalculable, a frenzy and yet a part of religion, I 
 seemed to find in it the essence of this strange 
 place, in which the mind does not exist, in which 
 reason is forgotten, and the senses are petted like 
 slaves that have become masters, and have been 
 masters so long that the people have forgotten 
 that they were ever slaves. 
 
 X 
 
 The Sultan lives on the.outskirts of Constantinople, 
 in the modern Yildiz Kiosque, rather a great villa 
 than a palace; he lives there, as the Pope lives in 
 the Vatican, a sort of prisoner by choice. Once every 
 week, on Friday, he drives some three hundred yards 
 from his palace-gates to the door of the mosque of 
 Hamidie, attends prayers there, as official head of 
 the church, and then drives back again, in another 
 carriage. The first carriage is lined with blue satin, 
 ■ the second carriage is drawn by two white horses, 
 and the reins are laced with solid gold. Regiments of 
 soldiers line, the way, court oflScials in gold lace 
 surround the carriage, walking down the hill, when 
 the Sultan drives slowly, and running up the hill, 
 when he drives fast ; and the Sultan is seen by no 
 more than a handful of invited guests, in the 
 
CONSTANTINOPLE 253 
 
 Ambassadors' pavilion and on the terrace below. If 
 you are in the Ambassadors' pavilion, you are advised 
 not to lean out too noticeably from the windows ; if 
 you are on the terrace below, you are watched closely 
 by a bevy of agents in plain clothes, who, as the 
 Sultan is about to pass, step in front of you. When 
 the carriage reaches the door of the mosque, the 
 Grand Vizier gets out backwards, and the court 
 officials crowd up the steps after the Sultan, like a 
 body-guard. 
 
 The situation and the spectacle are alike worthy 
 of the Caesars, and there is about them the same 
 celestial irony. Not even in Rome was there a 
 finer stage for such a spectacle than this hill, from 
 which you look across roofs to the Bosphorus. 
 And the spectacle has a splendour almost wholly 
 barbaric; opulent, unchecked, with its unconscious 
 naivetes. I went early, not wishing to miss any 
 significant detail. After a little waiting, I saw a 
 stir begin far off, and then, around the hill, came 
 troopers on grey and white horses, carrying lances 
 with crimson pennons; after them, troopers^ on 
 brown horses; then infantry dressed in white; 
 then the Syrian guards in electric blue, with green 
 turbans rolled round their fez ; then more foot 
 soldiers, first in brown, then in dull blue. The 
 soldiers formed in line across all the avenues leading 
 to the mosque. A group of women with veiled 
 heads stood just beyond them, and, beyond these, 
 people moved to and fro. Suddenly the fine opened. 
 
254 CITIES 
 
 and there was a rush of tiny carts filled with sand, 
 .followed by men with spades, who emptied the 
 sand, and by men with brooms, who spread it 
 equably over the sloping ground from the gates 
 of the mosque to the gates of the palace. Mean- 
 while, cabs were driving up, and men in gold lace 
 got out of them, followed by servants carrying 
 Gladstone bags ; then a few priests, also followed 
 by servants carrying Gladstone bags. Black eunuchs, 
 dressed like clergymen, in frock-coats, went to and 
 fro, all immensely tall and thin, with pained and 
 hideous faces, and a shambling stride. An old 
 one-eyed man, nearly black-skinned, and black with 
 filth, in the green turban of the hadji, went about 
 with a blackened sheepskin water-bottle and a 
 brass bowl, and poured out water for the soldiers. 
 The soldiers had all taken their places, striding 
 up the hill with that singular step, like the step 
 of wild animals, the leg thrown forward sharply, 
 and set down on the toe, the knee doubling inwards 
 at ev^y step. They stood there, mass after mass 
 of barbaric colour, waiting expectantly. Presently 
 the Sultan's sons, children and young men, with 
 whitened faces, rode down the hill, and halted 
 their horses ; three closed carriages came slowly 
 out of the palace-gates ; as they passed, one caught 
 a glimpse, through the windows, of the silks and 
 satins of Paris gowns, of white gloves with rings 
 outside, of faces veiled to the eyes. The carriages 
 entered the gates of the mosque, turned a little 
 
CONSTANTINOPLE 255 
 
 aside, and the horses were unharnessed. Almost 
 at the last moment a butcher's cart dashed through 
 the midst of the soldiers, up the path prepared for 
 the Sultan, and in at the palace gates. No one 
 took any notice of it. 
 
 The clock struck, the muezzin cried from the 
 minaret ; there was a sound of bugles and a guttural 
 shout from the soldiers, as the Sultan appeared, 
 driving slowly. The Uraad Vizier, a very fat man, 
 sat with his back to the horses. One saw the 
 keen, dark, restless face of the Sultan, full of 
 brooding anxiety ; the fez, the frock-coat buttoned 
 to the chin, the dark grey military overcoat. With 
 his courtiers before him and behind him, he drove 
 at walking pace through the ranks of the soldiers, 
 a small, frail being, who sat cold and anxious in 
 the midst of all this magnificence of homage to his 
 supreme power. Afterwards, in the palace, as one 
 spoke with him through an interpreter, noticing 
 his attentive courtesy, his watchful scrutiny of the 
 faces before him, one saw perhaps the least to be 
 envied of the kings of the earth, in this small 
 dark stealthy man, with manners of frightened and 
 threatening gentleness, who stepped softly to and 
 fro, in his military overcoat, with his hand on his 
 sword. 
 
256 CITIES 
 
 XI 
 
 Women have no souls, say the Turks. Well, 
 Turkish women have none. The soul in them 
 sleeps, and without dreams. Their eyes are like 
 lustrous oil, and shine without individual fire. 
 Their eyes are like the conscious eyes of animals 
 that have been taught coquetry ; they have instinct 
 and artifice, and nothing between. They grow 
 sleek in captivity, and, not being wholly human, 
 they paint their faces and dye their nails and 
 their hair, that they may be more decorative than 
 humanity. Their faces have the precise, not quite 
 perfect, regularity of early painting and sculpture, 
 in which men trimmed nature, a little awkwardly. 
 The nose ^ is apt to be too long or too prominent, 
 the chin too thickened. The mind has done 
 nothing to model the lines of their faces finely ; the 
 lines are always in smooth curves, in which elegance 
 sleeps. Beauty, in them, is an exterior thing, into 
 which the individuality does not enter. They are as 
 they were made in the beginning ; they change only to 
 fatten and to fade ; they die children whom life has 
 taught nothing but the taste of sweet and bitter. 
 
 In a book of Arab love-poetry which I have been 
 reading in a French translation, I find that itr is 
 always for their languor that the poet of the East 
 praises the eyes of a woman. "Creature with 
 languid eyes," begins one poem; "her eyes slay 
 
CONSTANTINOPLE 257 
 
 by their lascivious weakness more surely than sharp 
 swords," says another; "in your glances there 
 floats an intoxicating languor which makes me 
 drunk," says another. There is something of this 
 quality in all the beautiful Turkish eyes that I have 
 seen ; often it is their only beauty, and to the Turk 
 that beauty is sufficient. It is asleep, and it is for 
 him to awaken it, and it is to awaken only for his 
 pleasure. 
 
 The Turk, man as well as woman, is still un- 
 awakened ; the mind, here, does not exist ; there is 
 -only the animal and its instinct. The people, their 
 cloistered women, and their homeless dogs in posses- 
 sion, are all alike creatures of instinct. They do 
 not reason ; they make arbitrary rules ; and then 
 fight or submit. Hence their massacres, and the too 
 hasty logic of them ; henqe that helpless complication 
 of their money, by which you have to buy change, 
 and cheat or he cheated every time. There is no 
 right or wrong side of the road ; every one tries to 
 push his own way through the crowd, regardless of 
 every one else, and unable to realise that a little 
 forbearance on the part of each would ease the way 
 of all. This is the blind side of fatalism, with its 
 otherwise finely tragic acceptance of things. The 
 dogs, like the people, are fatalists. I saw one day a 
 dog whose paw had been trodden on ; he barked in 
 protesting pain, and looked pathetically at the boy 
 who had hurt him : the boy lifted his heel signifi- 
 cantly, and the dog merely turned quietly away. 
 
258 CITIES 
 
 The Turk has no pity, and it is pity which 
 civilises. There is a speech in Mr Bridges' play, 
 "The Christian Captives," which says, more pre- 
 cisely than I can say it, just what one is conscious 
 of in the mental limitations oPthe Turk : 
 
 " Now I see 
 Nature hath vainly lavished on these Moors 
 Bravery and beauty and all gifts of pride ; 
 And left them barbarous for lack of thee, 
 Sweet Pity, of human sorrow born : 'tis thou 
 Dost raise man 'bove the brutes : 'tis thou dost make 
 His heart so singular, that he alone. 
 Himself commiserating, against heaven ,, 
 
 Pushes complaint, and finds within his heart 
 Room for all creatures, that like him are born 
 To suffer and perish." 
 
 The Turk has learnt neither wisdom nor revolt 
 through pity. He gives to the beggar, and he 
 lets the dog take, because it is a usage sanctioned 
 by his religion ; he fulfils it with a certain disdain. 
 Does he not treat the dog and the Christian with 
 the same not unkind contempt? He does not 
 willingly touch either. Against Heaven he pushes 
 no complaint, no matter what may befall him; he 
 has his formula: "It is as God wills." Ask him if 
 he expects fine weather to-morrow, he answers: 
 " Please God ; " and he will answer nothing else. 
 He refuses to admit connection between cause and 
 effect, as he refuses to acknowledge beauty except 
 as a part of antiquity. One day in Santa Sophia, 
 a ulema, who had been standing near me, watching 
 
CONSTANTINOPLE 259 
 
 me with a suspicion which gradually melted into 
 a kind of sympathy, as I sat on the floor looking 
 up at the dome and looking around at the walls, 
 said to me with a gesture of satisfaction, in the one 
 word which he could use to express his meaning : 
 " Antique ! " That word in Turkish, " eski," is 
 the most approving of all words : it means that a 
 thing is old, coming down from one's forefathers, 
 and therefore has come to be a synonym for what is 
 beautiful, in artistic matters. 
 
 XII 
 
 The attraction of the East for the West is after 
 all nostalgia ; it is as if, when we are awakened by 
 dreams, we remember that forgotten country out of 
 which we came. We came out of the East, and 
 we return to the East ; all our civilisation has been 
 but an attempt at forgetting, and, in spite of that 
 long attempt, we still remember. When we first 
 approach it, the East seems nothing more than one 
 great enigma, presented to us almost on the terrify- 
 ing terms of the Sphinx. We are on the threshold 
 of a mystery, a curtain trembles over some veiled 
 image, perhaps the image of wisdom. The grave 
 faces of worshippers look into our faces without 
 curiosity ; they come out into the light from behind 
 the veil and go about their daily business, and they 
 are as inscrutable to us as if really they were in 
 
26o CITIES 
 
 communion with a wisdom which we do not know. 
 Perhaps, after all, this secret with which they seem 
 to go about is no more than certain ordinary and 
 of necessity incommunicable thoughts. Here every- 
 thing is incommunicable ; there is a barrier between 
 us and them, as narrow perhaps and as real as the 
 barrier between Europe and Asia: you have only 
 to cross the Bosphorus. 
 
 The true East, one imagines, might come 
 ultimately to have its satisfaction for us, if only 
 in our admiration before a complete, finished thing 
 which we may not understand. In Constantinople, 
 we meet the East half-way ; it has all the finished 
 barbarism of the West in conflict with its own 
 fiercer elements. In that still hostile corner of. 
 Europe, the East still has to fight for foothold ; it 
 has never been let alone long enough to give itself 
 up to its own leisure. Left to himself, the Turk's 
 finest capacity is for an ironical repose, as he sits 
 aside while the world goes by. He has settled 
 now into a tragic, not satisfied, unstirred immobility ; 
 he desires no change, but things as they are do 
 not give him happiness. Under his acceptance of 
 them he has a few fierce ideas, held like swords. 
 Religion which becomes fanaticism ; fatalism which 
 becomes inertia; pride which becomes a mask for 
 ignorance, guide or station him. In his rejection 
 of the West he has not been able to keep the 
 West out of his city, and the West is beginning to 
 soak into his soul. 
 
CONSTANTINOPLE 261 
 
 To the stranger in Constantinople, this fierce and 
 enigmatical East, made fiercer and more enigmatical 
 by the West, comes with a kind of repulsion and 
 attraction at once. It hurts you, and then it 
 enchants you, and then as it enchants you more 
 it hurts you more, and you succumb to it, and 
 struggle against it, and are gripped by all its 
 tentacles ; and if you break away from it you 
 leave something of yourself behind with it. People 
 live there hating it and unable to leave it. Its 
 attraction is like the attraction of those women 
 whom it is impossible to live with or without ; and 
 what is subtlest in its power to attract is precisely 
 that sense of a revulsion turned violently back ' 
 upon itself. 
 
 Autumn, 1902. 
 
Portions of these chapters have appeared, at intervals 
 during the past eight or nine years, in the Fortnightly 
 Review, Harper's Magazine, the North American Review, 
 Cosmopolii, and the Saturday Review. 
 
Printed in Great Britain by 
 Richard Cuy & Sons, Limited, 
 brunswick st., stamford st., s.e. 1, 
 
 and BUNGAY, SUFFOLK.